GrubStreet #4

Letters to those who helped define me.

To Ron:

            I remember exactly how the light reflected off the harbor surface as I rowed out to our boat. The light was brilliant, dazzling turquoise with frothing diamonds left in my wake. You were up, on the deck, and took the line without a word. Once I came aboard, and the kitten came out of her doghouse to greet me, we sat on the deckhouse. Reflexively you drew your lower lip in under your upper teeth. This was your “brace face”. Your hazel eyes were sad, but your bleached beard glistened in the tropical sun that was high above us that weekday morning. I should have been at work, building cabinets for the new hospital in Sunny Isle, a neighborhood smack in the middle of St. Croix. You should be leaving for work soon as a maintenance man at a local motel, one of your many cobbled together jobs.

            My fever kept me from going to work that morning. I’d spent the weekend talking my friend into leaving her Swiss boyfriend on the Chinese Junk, which he won in a poker game, and returning to D.C. where she had family and job prospects. Somehow over the course of convincing her to leave, my spirit moved onto a new path for itself.

            You had built most of the 48’ ferro-cement sailboat before I met you three years, on New Year’s Eve ‘79-80. We finished it together in a small cove in Harpswell, Maine. You worked at Bath Iron Works, fitting pipes on Navy Frigates. I worked for a hand-tools only cabinetmaker up river from Wiscasset. We’d sailed off into the sunset with two crewmembers, with the ambitions of circumnavigating the world in our boat, take pointers from the master sailors whose books we read on those long winter nights below deck with the wood stove going full tilt.

            We had sailed down the entire Eastern Seaboard; through the Cape Cod Canal, down Long Island Sound (and timing Hell’s Gate perfectly), off the Jersey Shore, into the mouth of the Chesapeake at Norfolk and finally down the Intracoastal Waterway, to avoid Hatteras and it’s deadly shoals, to Beaufort, North Carolina. There we learned celestial navigation from two South Africans, who were living aboard their homemade steel sailboat.

            When the wind was perfect for making our Easting, a term nautical meaning sailing straight East for a long spell to counter the prevailing winds and current before turning south to the Virgin Isles, we left with at least 10 other boats using the same strategy. By the next dawn, all were out of sight and by the end of the next day a slow building and long lasting hurricane was upon us. What should have been a 5-7 day trip, turned into just under two weeks in “blue water”, meaning out of sight of land.

            The hurricane and how it bonded us, is a story in itself to be told another time, but suffice it to say we entrusted each other with our lives and found each other sound and true. With waves 120’ tall and winds above 80 mph for 5 days in a row, and one of the two crew members out of service due to paralyzing fear (a DA from the Bronx who could handle brain-splattered walls but not Mother Nature on a tear), you learn your true nature and that of those on board.

            Arriving in St. Croix waterlogged and worn out, I blossomed in our new home base. We set a mooring in Christiansted Harbor and reunited with your high school friend who was now a successful dive and yacht operator. You taught me to dive, and his girlfriend gave me a job making sandals for tourists and local school kids. We started salvage diving due to our proximity to the barrier reef, our willingness to barter, and our skills in diving. You had been a professional underwater rigger in the Gulf of Mexico before returning home to Maine after Vietnam.

            Soon I started working in a woodshop in Gallows Bay, loved being able to row to work each day and swim off the boat each night to clear the sawdust out of my system. I read every book in the harbor and earned respect from my much older male workers.

            Living  in that harbor and on the I learned that the guy at the bar dressed like a Millionaire was most likely a con man and the guy dressed like a bum was probably the richest among us. My daily shopping at the open-air market, where all the women were Cruzan (native islanders, mostly of African and Arawak descent) was filled with a huge learning curve. When we first arrived I was charge tourist price. After I started working at the sandal shop, I started to be charged local non-native price. Finally, working at the woodshop with their brothers, fathers, uncles , and husbands was I charge native price. These women also taught me how to cook and clean all the fruits, vegetables, and shellfish.

You taught me how to clean and cook a conch. Not the pressure cooker, rubbery way of most non-natives, but the clean and succulent way. Take a welding hammer; count three rings down from the point and strike hard and straight. The conch will slide out whole and tender, making it sautéed with garlic, rice and hot peppers a meal fit for kings. Another invaluable lesson was how to catch a spiny lobster with a guitar string. You christened me “Madam Baazinski Tunafish”  (my family nickname being Baa) for my prowess free diving with a spear gun to 80 feet.

You struggled with work, being 13yrs older than me, and with more technical skills, and it should have been easier. I now realize, the goal of arriving here had been your dream for so many years, that the reality might not have met the fantasy.

            Unconsciously, I must have known this. For when I told you I was flying home and going to go to apply to college in Maine, you weren’t surprised. 

            “Baa, I always knew you would leave, I just didn’t know when,” were your exact words. They’d replay in my ears for the next thirty years.

We spent the next few days telling all our friends, my employer and family. We sailed out to Buck Island, a conservation island with an underwater marine park and short sail from the harbor with our friends. You gave me a gold cutter necklace, rigged like our sailboat Pinion, when I left in April. I turned 20 in July.

 I didn’t know I was leaving you and our relationship, when I left. I naively thought we could stand the test of distance, as we’d survived the test of a hurricane. I was wrong. I received a Dear Jane letter two months later and it emphasized that you hoped I would keep my loving and curious nature. You would come to me several times in Maine and New York over the next decade and ask me to sail away with you. But you never left St. Croix, until your dear mother developed cancer in Florida.  Having chosen college, too, being a nurse, you went to her aid.

We remained in touch over time, you met my husband and kids in Maine, I met your ex-wife in Tortola, and you came to celebrate my 50^th Birthday weeks after I asked for a divorce from my husband, again in Maine. I wanted you to know this simple truth: You are my touchstone, the one who has known me from my seed stage. I’d learned to follow my gut again, like I did when I first met you and knew I’d regret it if I didn’t sail off into the sunset with you instead of going to college at age of 17.

Last fall you moved from Florida with Marlene, your partner of several years with whom I’m a friend on Facebook, to the mountains of Colorado. I know if I called you and simply said, “Come”, you would with Marlene’s blessing. I would do so in kind. That is our lasting treasure.

                                                *          *          *

To Markos:

            The night we met in Specs’ Twelve Adler Museum Cafe on William Saroyan Place in North Beach at a Media Alliance (MA) party, I knew you were trouble. You were tall, dark and handsome with stories from around the world. I was hooked. Then you added that you were a Berkeley and Columbia J school grad who had recently returned from a stint with Newsweek opening up their Eastern European offices and I was a goner. It was the spring of 1991 and I’d been living in California for six months. You were that rarest of breeds: a SF native. You were born to Greek refugees, raised in the Mission, attended the Orthodox Church and Lowell high school (the premiere public school). Everywhere you went, you knew someone.

            Then we met at the MA party. I was considering starting my own literary agency, having been told by all the agents in SF, that I knew as much as they did and should start my own. I was working three jobs; night manager of a bed & breakfast in Half Moon Bay, sales clerk in the largest new and used bookstore in the city - Green Apple Books, and as a model for Roman Talent Agency (another long story- basically a picture of me taken by a well-known NYC photographer ended up being used in a national ad campaign in major magazines). I was in the mix to be the person to launch Levi’s Women’s Jeans campaign. But I wanted to work in publishing.

            “So are you a writer,” you asked with a huge Cheshire grin.

            “No, I’m an agent,” came out of my mouth, as I decided in that nanosecond it was true.

            “Perfect, I’m working on a book about terrorism in America with a public radio reporter. William Casey, the former Director of the CIA, has agreed to do the Foreword,” you said in a single breath.

            “Well we could set up a meeting later this week,” I suggested as I madly tried to figure out which days I’d be in the city and not be working two of my three jobs.

            “Peter (the radio journalist) and I will be working at Earwax (a sound production and recording studio) all week, pick a day to come by and we’ll interview you,” he suggested with a slight arch of his eyes and a slow smile, which I later would learn was a “closer” move of his.

            I picked a day and we agreed to meet then. So over the next 48 hours I had to establish a business. I made cards, changed the language of the Curtis Brown Ltd author/agent agreement in my possession, and rented a mailbox with a San Francisco address. I was still living in a house built as a speakeasy in Moss Beach, a surfer town half an hour south of the city. I would move to a studio in the city a few months later.

            The meeting went very well and lasted over an hour. Peter was still on the fence because he thought they might do better with an agent in NY, but you convinced him to go with me.

            Walking me to my car you asked, “Would you like to meet again.”

            I stopped half way across the street for split second, as I my heart and head collided with his words.

            “To discuss business?” I asked.

            “No to discuss anything else,” and those brown eyes made my core jolt awake.

            “Yes, I guess.”

            “How about we go for a hike in Muir Woods, since you’re new here. Come by my house on Saturday, in Sausalito and I’ll drive from there.”

            “Sounds good,” I said as you closed my car door and I put the key in the ignition.

            Somehow I’d just started a business, signed my first clients, and been asked on a date all in the course of an hour.

            That was how we were together: smooth operators in public while being totally connected with our minds and bodies in private. When we arrived at the same party separately, I’d feel you enter it before I saw you. When we were apart, I had detailed dreams of what you were doing, which later you would confirm with surprise. The surprise lessened as the frequency increased. It didn’t matter if you were in Pacific Heights or Moscow, my mind's eye found you in my dreams.

You told your friends I was prescient, and I think that they believed that to be a good trait in an agent. As to them, that’s all I ever was to you. Girlfriend was not a term you assigned to me, or I learned later, anyone. You weren’t monogamous, either. I don’t think it was the ballerina from NYC, but rather the interpreter from the UN, whose lighter I found in the cushions of the Sausalito house that you couldn’t omit from narrative of her visit. From there my heart began to break each time I saw you.

We succeeded with our professional relationship. I sold your book. Not the terrorism book (although had it sold, 9/11 may have been thwarted), but rather the book, Defying Gravity, about the making of the Newton PDA for Apple.  Jobs gave us full access, Doug shot (in)famous photos, and your journalist style sang. The Apple product, like the book on Terrorism, was ahead of its time and failed to reach a mass audience. The book, thank god, sold well.

The last book I sold for you ended our professional and private relationship for a while. You didn’t deliver the book that the Publisher in New York contracted you to write. When you delivered the manuscript to me, I thought it was a gag. It was supposed to be about the weird and wacky places that people go to on road trips around America. You with your outsider/insider duality were the perfect author. Instead you used the money to do you own personal road trip that barely passed the borders of California.

“I can’t send this book to NY,” I seethed into the phone.

“Why not? It’s narrative describing weird and unusual roadside attractions along icon American byways!”

“It doesn’t cover the entire country or meet the word count and it’s late!”

“Well send it to them anyway, I’m sure they’ll love it.”

“No they won’t. They’ll ask for their money back. Frankly, I won’t blame them.”

“So we’ll have to pay them back the advance?”

“No, you’ll have to pay them back to full advance, including my commission. I did my job. You didn’t.”

A very, very, very long silence.

“What do you mean, I have to pay back your commission?”

“I did my job. You didn’t. I earned my commission in selling your book and negotiating the contract. You’re in breach of contract for not writing the book as it was defined in the contract. I did my job. You didn’t.”

Again, a very long silence.

“Well I guess I’ll have to terminate our contract, over stylistic differences.”

Now it was my turn to pause. Stylistic differences, really? Our professional relationship had last 4 years and our private affair for one year, and this was how things were going to end?

“Alright, if you want to terminate me, I’ll have to inform the publisher and they will be contacting your directly. But I’d advise against that, as we both know intellectual property and media lawyers are expensive. We also know, I could resolve this with a few phone calls and emails. Assuming your agree to return the full advance.”

Here is where you paused for so long I began to wonder if you’d hung up and I’d missed it. My mind raced back to the dinner at your parent’s house in Woodside. The only night you invited me to a family dinner there with my mother, who was visiting from back east. Your father gave us a tour of the modest, yet productive, yard with every square inch of it planted with a four-season rotation of fruits and vegetables. Your mother made amazing Cretan pastries. It was that night that your father, who had been a truck driver and highway paver, gave me a “necking nob” so I could drive my car one-handed, since I’d broken my elbow (thus the reason for my mother’s visit). I now wish I’d taken it out of the car when I sold it a year later. It was that night your mother and I were in the kitchen alone.

 At one point she looked at me and said, “He loves you as much as he can love anyone.”

It took me off guard, as you are nothing, if not private. I sometimes thought it had to do with your journalism years in flak jackets on the frontlines and the code you adopted for protecting your sources. Now I think it may have more to do with being the oldest son and golden child in your family, and not wanting to defend that in anyway.

“Okay. I’ll pay back the full advance if it comes to that. But either way, our working relationship is over,” you said in a resigned yet defiant tone.

“Fine. I’ll contact New York and get back to you,” I said perceiving a white-hot metal spike going through my gut. I knew that you’d recede from my social Rolodex for a while. You were nothing if not a political animal. You could be as present or absent as terms required.

After it was known in the city that I was dating and engaged to the HardWired’s publisher, he began to show up at publishing parties and other mutually overlapping events. After I was married and had my first child I kept having a dream about you. You were sitting in your house in Cow Hollow, on giant, ornate throw pillows on the floor. There were Turkish lanterns hanging from above and your were making love to a woman I’d never met. It was your living room, but not the way I’d ever seen it. You were calling her name and I knew you were going to ask her to marry you. I woke up with a start and scribbled the name in my journal. Elena, Ellani, Illeni? My snapping on the light woke my husband and I told him the dream.

“Are you going to tell him?” he asked.

“I don’t think it’s happened yet,” I replied.

            A week later I received your mass email titled: A Surprise. I was the only one who guessed. We met at the Uta Lemper concert at Symphony Hall a few weeks later for a double date. As I approached you with her, I was startled by the striking resemblance to the woman in my dream. Three of us knew each other already so you made the introductions.

            “Karen, Peter, I’d like to you to meet Eleni,” and I left my body for a second.

            “Nice to meet you both,” she said extending her hand and looking at me, “I’ve heard so much about you.”

            I kept staring at her for a moment too long.

            “What is it?” you asked knowing of my dream.

            I looked to you to see if it was okay to mention it and you nodded.

            “Eleni, I had a dream about you, only your hair was to here,” I said putting my pointer finger to my shoulders.

            She looked startled, turned to you, and then to me replied, “I had it cut yesterday.”

            The two of you invited us to your five-day wedding in Istanbul. I still regret I couldn’t attend. Later you both invited us and we attended your 60’s themed Baby Shower in SoMa loft. You attended our Bon Voyage party when we sold our house in the Inner Sunset to move back east. 

            You’ve since lived in Hungary with Eleni as the US Ambassador, while you earned you PhD. I earned a MAT in Education. Back in San Francisco you’re working at the Hoover Institute while Eleni runs for Lt. Governor. We will remain political allies, and professional helpmates. I want to thank you for believing in me, so I could quit working those three jobs, seven days a week, after three years and just run my business.