The Sea Purse

After the noon meeting Don gives me directions to the marina a ways south of town where Riordan is basing his operations from, saying I’m expected around 2 p.m. I offer him a ride but he says no, he prefers to stay out of cars altogether these days. He adds that he has a couple of errands to run first. His eyes with that distant look as he turns to fetch his bicycle, scanning patterns scarred in his eyes

—Look for an old bucket called the Sea Purse, he says, heaving onto his bike. You won’t miss it.

***

Driving down this old stretch of US-1, it’s all heat-blasted strip-malls and trailer parks and boarded-up souvenir shops, the vibrant developments soaking up all of the money, sun and attention on a narrow isthmus of sand between land- and sea-ward preterition. No matter: in time God will come in some wind or wave to scour those bright coins from the shore and deposit them with the rest into eternity’s fund. The afternoon warmish, low grey clouds scudding in from the southwest, everything wan and bleak, obscured from the sun.

I think about this short route I’m venturing out on as a pathway of heart, leading from my sad house by the sea to and through an AA meeting which valves the next world, on toward a harbor ahead which offers alternate doors of departure that may take me back to the world or drop me off its edges. Not much really to show on the proper map stowed in the glove compartment, just a quarter of an inch of thicker red ribbon far to the northeast of any real Florida action.

Other maps suggest different leys I follow here. A map showing early contact between Old and New worlds, I travel a blank inch toward Ft. Caroline, the abortive French mission near the mouth of the St. Johns which was attacked and taken over by the Spaniards in 1530. Do I head for first contact?

A similar map of the same period showing the placement of Indian tribes has me trespassing into the heart of Timucuan turf, piercing a flank which runs all the way down the coastal lowlands from Cape Canaveral to Georgia. What old estate is now being pierced as I drive south, beginning its slow gassy collapse in penumbra of grief?

And then there is the crude treasure map scrawled by Eduardo del Silvio somewhere along his westward flight of the 1640s, a maddened gaze over a guilty man’s shoulder at the grave of a bullion ship, back toward a hazy region which conforms to the broad confines of the coast between Jacksonville and Marco Island, a map too imprecise to be of any real help to a salvage team other than to point an cold pale dripping Finger in the same direction I drive in today, to a boat in a harbor whose captain and crew have found its hoary X down fifty fathoms of midwinter Atlantic sea. The guilty adventurer in us all, an ancient mariner shadowing the Bridegroom’s door with songs of plunder and ruin and gold for us all.

On a cosmological map of the Dogon of of Central Africa, the universe is depicted as an animal with a placenta-like head for heaven and legs symbolizing the reaches of earth. Surely the wreck of the Cadiz in the latter wreckage of my life is located somewhere between the balls and anus of that cosmic beast, the best and worst of God to be found in the world this afternoon as I drive toward what seems a next door of the dream.

***

As Dan assured me, it’s no trouble finding the Sea Purse readily enough. An 18-foot Custom Hull built back in the ‘50s with twin diesel engines, the boat sits ugly and heavy in the water amid the cocksure dazzle of pure white pleasure craft docked around it. It’s a dirty, old, blue-bottom tug, a working man’s bucket parked on Rodeo Drive. But it’s the only decent marina for miles, and this time of year the millionaire playboys and retirees are playing with other things.

As I walk up, several men are offloading crates to another guy on the dock, who stacks and wheels them on a handtruck to an SUV parked nearby.

-- Looking for Captain Riorden, I say.

They all pause. I can feel their tension. One of they guys on board wearing cutoff shorts and a sweatshirt sets his box against the rail and scans me.

—Your business.

—A friend of his named Scoles referred me here for work.

Another moment. All of them are checking me out. I’m big but not young anymore.

The guy shrugs and heft back up the box.

—Down the way three doors.

As I wedge past them I see how tired they are, wary too, almost jumpy, as if being ashore was the worst part of the gig for them. Later I find out that they’re all divers, pitching in with this stuff because of the schedule and lack of help.

I walk down the hall counting doors and turn into the third one. Riorden is sitting at a desk writing in a log. He’s about my age, deeply tanned, hair closely cropped and thinning out, burly, his forearms knotted like Popeye’s, an aging man’s slowly loosening paunch pressing up against the edge of the desk.

When he looks up his eyes bore into with some kin of the distance Dan’s gaze has -- a polar cobalt girded with grey steel.

—You Brendan?

—That’s right.

—What do you know about ships?

I tell him about my college days as a yacht steward and the the deep-sea fishing jaunts, panning out the embellishments I’d used over the years to impress women -- the silver plates and monster wahoo.

—I’ve got good sea legs and my dad taught me all of the hitches, I finish.

He grunts. —You’ll need those legs now. Winter salvage is a bitch but we don’t have any choice. If we don’t get this stuff up now before the area is crawling with other operators. How much did Scoles tell you?

I recount what I heard from Don and finish by telling Riorden that I’m free to work how ever many hours he needs me for.

—Can you ship out overnight?

—Sure.

—No one waiting for you at home.

—Just some lousy overfed cats.

He looks at me and then out the window where sea and sky are one unbroken grey measure.

—Start right now and you have a job. Pay is fifteen bucks and hour with a two percent share of the find. You’ll be helping with the sifting — tables where we wash off the silt and search for the goods — unloading and loading with Dan, inventorying supplies, et cetera. As you know we are moving into a very heightened stage of the salvage, so I need two hundred percent from each hand.

He pauses.

— We think we’re damn close but you can never be sure. There are always false leads. You can miss the whole thing by an inch or a mile. We may have to angle out and back. This could be over in a week or go on for months. Can you handle that?

—Where do I start?

***

Draw a map of this world. Here is the land and there is the sea. Here is the hole in the ground where my old heart is buried. There is the treasure shaped like an X of black sea. Here’s me in between on this churl of a boat. This quest is my future history’s but the prize belongs to its mysterious boon and harm. The sea will drink me like a booze I can’t figure out how to keel it. And what do I know anymore but surrender? What can I say anymore but “—heave ho” ...

Emissary

This morning, walking the beach to clear the loose mental cables of an hour’s sleep, I see a big shape a quarter mile down, half-lost in the mist of the winter’s morning. Turns out it’s a dead humpback whale, four thousand pounds of blubber and bone mashed ashore in some final contempt of the sea. Gulls whirl about, pecking at the flesh, delighted to finally to have acreage instead of crumbs. A gaggle of human onlookers keeps a ten paces back out of respect for a riotous stench, a sourmash of shit and fishrot and brine.

But what of those stilled graying eyes on either side of the head, seeing nothing anymore where we stand? Ahab enquired a sperm whale’s head after the rest of its body had been shorn of blubber and boiled down for oil; he wanted news of the hoary depths that head had harrowed, down in the immense blackness of his own heart. To me the head is just immensely sad, and the freight of the beast on this shore today is heartbreaking. So many whales beaching this year, starting up in New England in the feeding grounds, now picking up down South during the migration and breeding round. Someone from the NOAA fishery will be by to take samples, gathering data which might account for these suicidal ends -- viruses, illness, the presence of biotoxins, anything.

A message delivered by the lords of the sea, bottling up this whale on our shore. But for whose benefit? Those eyes aren’t searching us out, that’s for sure. Waves flutter uselessly along its flanks, tidal rhythms moot in moving this new barrier island. The morning surly in waking, the eastern cloudfronts refusing to delve the sun yet -- only a mottle confused light straining against steel. What do the elements care? We’ll get the stinking thing hauled off before it gets to be more of than a curious nuisance.

I stare for ten seconds more, hands jammed in the pockets of my windbreaker, and am surprised to feel so much love in me streaming out toward that ugly dead bulk. What is it? -- I’m welling with sacchyrine tenderness for this dead child of some far extra-species mother, so alone and bereft while the birds weave and dive bearing gobbets of its flesh in their beaks, while we superior ones shuffle like rubes at the carnival, straining for a peek at the real deal, annihilation at its nakedest. Seems my heart is breaking everywhere these days for animals of every specie and phylum—ghost crabs scurrying back from waves, pinkpurple man-o-wars on the sand, their tentacles like the scattered hair of pillaged virgins, sandpipers whose legs blur in motion as they run to and fro ... What fragile smallness to eke a living on the surface of cruel immensities ... Even Joe Leviathan here, poor thing, so far from kin and element and life itself ...

There’s an origin story told by Black Elk, the Oglala Sioux medicine man who was interviewed in 1948. These Sioux had migrated to the Plains around 1680 from the forests of the upper Mississippi. Surely the territories were as different as sea and shore. So its no wonder that their myths had to morph as well.

The story he told was this: Early one morning long ago, two Sioux braves carrying bow and arrows were hunt into new territory. They peer down from a hill down looking for game and see a faint figure walking toward them . Turns out it’s a beautiful maiden dressed in white buckskin and bearing a package on her back. One of the braves is enflamed with lust and speaks his desire to his partner. But the other rebukes him, saying this is obviously no mortal woman.

The woman stops and looks up at them and calls the first to come near. He does so, hurrying down from the hill, but when he reaches the maiden a cloud descends over them. When it lifts there the woman stands, but the man is reduced to a pile of bones through which swarm devouring snakes.

“Behold what you see!” The woman shouts to the other. “Now tell your people to prepare a large ceremonial lodge for my coming. I wish to announce something of great importance.”

So the guy hurries back to his tribe and speaks with the chief, who quickly has some tents torn down and reassembled into a ceremonial lodge. The woman appears and, lifting the package she has been carrying high in the air, says, “Behold this bundle and always love it! It is very sacred and you must treat it as such. No impure man should ever be allowed to see it: for within this bundle there is a very holy pipe. With this pipe you will, down the years to come, send your voices to Wakan Tanka, your Father and Grandfather.”

***

I walk on, leaving behind the dead whale’s emissary weight. It’s no bigger really than some of the other crypts sinking in my chest, caskets filled with bones old and older, slowly descending toward oblivions never to be bourned with a kiss. Eros marries Thanatos in the end, his burning arrow grazing the nipples of the sky only to plunge into the world’s inevitable lap, hissing out at it dives into the brine.

Of course I wanted to fuck her. Of course I made a myth of her. Of course I walk on here, on course for some third articulation or language, of big night music and its harrowing insides composed, no longer at war with the world, prodigal to its silent brooding wash down and down a shore which has yet to brighten. Maybe the whale is the bundle of that maid I must help raise from the sea’s bottom, a delved bit of gold still deep in a whale’s belly where it must remain, where I must re-frame my sentences.

Or maybe he’s the cloud which descends over my desire to write those very sentences, turning words into snakes which feast on blue lucence till all that remains are my bones.

I’m rowing toward the next voice, father Ahab, grandfather Noah. Stick it in your pipe and smoke it till that dead whale’s eyes see me here where it counts.

Sea canopy

My guitar fell down a well; something surfaced slowly in its place, stranger, deeper, more resonant, frightening and cold, older and yet prescient, wilder for suggesting a work that lay beyond anything I could reach on any sawhorse of need.

But something had to die. It’s only happenstance that it wasn’t my actual heart. That survived into the next rooms of the tale; call it luck if you will, but I choose to give credit the grace of a power I’ll never know or own. Drunk as I got in that last bad season, on any night I could have veered off the road into an oncoming car or careened into a tree. I was out in the zombie zone, drinking a slow rictus fizz beneath the moon, impeccable, already dead.

And those mornings of coming to with the sun shrieking madly through the tattered curtains of my dirty garage apartment, each brilliant beam an accusing finger, a sword ... How easy it would have been to open that guitar case at the bottom of my nights, climb into its plush blue interior, and close myself there. But I knew I’d only wake up come the next dying of the light and crawl out, emerging from black surf to prey once again up and down the night’s shore, desperate to slake an dry dead for warmth that I had failed to engender on my own. Too chicken to simply kill myself, I opted instead for a long suffocation of nights.

Strangely, the booze proved the whale’s belly which got me through. I kept at my nightly infernoes, drinking through a random motley of fern bars and rock clubs, topless joints and cheap-booze dives so deep in the downtown’s tarry districts of waste you feel forked into by devils beyond measure ... And there I stood, saddled up to the bar, my hair flawless, roostered, tossing back those bottomless shots, waiting, waiting for someone to smile, offering a throat’s pale bed with its red booze to gout and wash the hallows of my need. Waiting for Love in its wallowing brothels, settling for neon and near-nude pasties, handjobs and someone else’s blackout promises, all of those signatures of what a dim soul settles for in failing to write his own name.

And that was Avalon for those nights, strange harbor in the white acre of a bed’s surrendered flesh, drowning the fuse at last in its profanest sources ... And that was the dream. Usually I just shuffled out at closing time with the rest of the preterit, falling into a hell’s mouth of blackout roads to what I had made of a home. There were spinouts and flat tires, mysterious long scrapes in the car doors on either side, front and back fenders cracked from mystery impacts. One night driving home in a blackout I heard a tire go and I just kept driving, not having a spare in the truck and devoutly unwilling to stop and deal with the mess. A neighbor told me the next day she had woken up at 3:30 am hearing a godawaful scraping grinding screeching sound approaching and she looked out her bedroom window to see my car lurching slowly down the street, leaning to one corner where instead of a tire there was metal scraping along the asphalt throwing sparks everywhere. Another night all of the same net whiskey and beer landed me in a drunk tank’s greeny morgue. I came to at 5 a.m. and saw one guy passed out in his vomit at my feet and a second hunched in a corner with his arms tight around his chest, mumbling some words over and over.

In my end is my beginning. That started me sobering up. It was then I saw my drinking as rictus of a life that had died. I didn’t stay sober all the way, but I did keep surrendering, increasingly convinced that the big night music had distilled a fiction of power chords in my brain, a riptiding sound I had worshiped and vaulted as something I could somehow possess and squander and utterly lose.

A something else slowly began to waken along the edges of that dead giant. The perception or intimation of deeper and wilder contours. As the compulsion to wreak havoc faded, a tide unmistakably surged, lucent, strange for refusing to allow itself a name while demanding that I try to find one. Words became saddles for wavelike lines of ink washing margin to margin of the page, galloping mad toward the ends of a sayable world. Or something like that. The big night music in bigger articulation than I could ever have said with a guitar. Had I crossed a guitar-shaped bridge to enter some castle of song in some deeper region of the heart? That was the question I mined for years, reading and writing the inside harrows of a fallen berserker’s undying song.

It sounded that way for the next season, which lasted about ten seasonal rounds. All that ink, dark and measureless as the sea sighing 30 yards from this bed, all liquid vowel, impossible to speak. Such dead shapelessness out there with everything below, drowned, dancing, demiurgic. Two bells, maybe three. The sax player has given up the ghost for the night, thank God, and the arguing couple have warred down to a drone so low the breeze has hidden whatever they needed in its ever-long sighing. I drift on in this bed with an unseen starry canopy arching forever above, my bones like the ribs of a coracle, powerless, free at least to speak of nothing that matters ...

Big Night Music

Other dead-a.m. sounds push me further offshore from home. The couple next door are at it again, their voices warring timbres with registers of love and hate in blooded confusion. That damn sax player is hawking and splatting riffs which suggest long encrustation, a keel too rusty to cleanly part waters any more. Their New Year’s party still cruising along, a ship of fools under the wash of jackal moon.

My antilife, or -lives, indigo negatives of my loves. Of marriage I will say nothing here -- I can’t, not at this precipitous hour, where many other sober men and women have cried Aw Fuck It and wandered out. But I will comment on that time when I gave up playing music years ago, sold off my electric guitars, bartered my amp stack for track recording system I had meant to try spoken word over jazz, during that overheated summer in Orlando before I met Jan.

I was living in a small second-floor apartment on just off tiny Lake Cherokee on the near south side of town, trying to dry out over the months before the courts made me attend my first AA meeting. A summer of high-90’s swelt, puffs of midmorning cloud coalescing and building through the afternoon into towering ziggaurat of storm, thrashing the city streets with a whiteout of rain, every surface washed clean, remaining in the far early evening sky like black armadas, their bellies charged with naked leys of heat lightning, flashes which echoed on the black glass surface of Lake Cherokee like a congregation’s amen, the streets still humid, steam hovering about the temples of early night with vicious viscous lust ... And no booze I would drink, no deeper night I could turn to, not after all that had been lost ...

For it was a midzone season, surfacing and diving in different ways. The big night music was sinking away from me, my guitar’s sacred identity in loud pounding nights of stage-side frenzy in smoky bars reeking of beer and soppy lust dulled to profanes, a weight which deadened that guitar, made it fall too, hauling with it that deadended creature of abandonment to the louder nature of things I had become.

I was losing or forsaking an identity that had worked for ten years of my misspent youth, separating from me like flesh from bone, ripping away the bandolier of big night songs I worshiped and tried to write, each song a cruel and cunning high-caliber bullet fashioned to shatter ever armor that stands in the way of desire. How else shall I say it? The loss of the big night music felt like a great hand indifferently tearing from my neck the trophy necklace I had assembled, heavy with wolf canines and big-cat sabres and teeth ripped from the violated mouths of employers and cops, critical girlfriends and pissed-off fathers, all of whom barred the true doors to night with their worlds-puncturing No ...

Songs like wickedly sharp swords that had been killed a hundred times in the magma knots of the earth all the way down at its core,tempered till they gleamed with their own light, a self-shrill steel whose edge slashed the entire night’s course between ecstasy and doom ,,, Only rarely can a band at mid-set offer up the song which thunders and hooves all the way to our naked source, pent on a perilous and razor-precise road -- thin as a blade, sharp and hot as struck flint -- hammering all the way into the furious heart beating out, that hot palp of welcome which appoints a lucky night to bliss.

A killer song plunges right into the abyss to cleave love clean through, marrying desire’s ends by the cruellest of means, locating the Grail castle in the center of an unspeakably banal waste partying on past the last border of night, if only for one song, for one night, finding if for only one time in a life the full amplitude of the big night music’s pagan DNA coiled around tensioned strings and taut skins.

Of that welcome which shrieks at our extreme, that Other waiting just off the map at a Cape beyond the ends of the singable, drummable, howled-at-full volume world, well, you take a song to its Wagnerian extreme and it bloats, it can’t swim any longer at its chill depths, it lifts the beast gasping toward the ceiling of the brine cathedral in fatal, fin de siecle cool ... I dunno, maybe that big night music proved itself to high or deep a power for my talent and balls; my belief in my ability to stay aboard its perilous coracle faded after so many nights of getting upended and dumped in with the night’s brine, just another bit of flotsam to add to the trash tide. The edge grew fainter, harder to find, its ledge under my feet more unforgiving, keener, the falloff more precipitous.

Maybe I was just getting too old for that shit. As it happened I slowly lost interest; whatever fuse in me that leapt toward those sources spluttered and doused. No new songs came up from the well, and the playing grew sterile, going over the same old riffs, noodling where structures of futurity should have been rising. Bandmates moved in with girlfriends or got heavy into coke or shipped off for better gigs. One blew his brains out with a shotgun, and I hear another is waiting for his second liver transplant, his face horribly ballooned from the meds he takes trying to keep the first asshole’s liver working in his puke body.

Without out a cause the drinking just became a curse, an upside-down manifesto, bereft even of any excuse I believed ... And the bands played on, triumphant, mocking, the guitar players and singers casually picking off the barmaids and fresh-of-age pretties at closing time, leaving the rest of us to bite at the glass necks of our tallboys, eyes red and wild.

I still dutifully practiced every day for some months, but the insides of my power chords were fading like the surf of a shore growing indistinct in fog, droning faint and fainter. A year or two further was devoted and lost to this zombie state of dead songs animated by mere habit, the sense of duty to so much time devoted to something now lost. The licks like Latin disappearing from the tongue, a language or culture dying in my ear, drying on my hands. Eventually skill became useless, even criminal, and articulation moot.

Of course the big night music strolled on, finding a fresh tribe of young bucks pent on fame’s immolation, a fresh tide of sperm and sweat and driving hooves to lavish with dreams of infinite pussy and wholly squander come first light. The big night music didn’t even smile as it passed me over, its old news, spent wad, the outre, 80’s man boy who’s overdue for real work, doubtful and crabby where the song needed blue sass and hotsauce. My guitar stayed in its case for more than a day, then three, then a week then a month, popping back out on rare occasions when I flayed my fingertips playing the old war songs, like a geezer pulling his uniform out of a musty chest in the closet to count the ribbons and stars. And then it was gone. I haven’t picked it up for twenty years now.

Somewhere back then, as it was becoming clear that my nights of playing the big night music were over, I thought I heard a deeper voice in its place, up from a different zone of the heart. Whether it was father or son of that music, who knows, but I packed my guitar pick into the blue velour pocket of my guitar case and left it there, my fingers hungry for the heft of something else, which proved a pen. Cold steel in my hand as I write, the ink which spoors across the page up from squid-depths, an ichor close to those regions where I believed the sword of song was forged, where my guitar now floated ... did one birth the other? And what else was there to say, with that big night music now gone from the surface of my life?

Gone, but not lost. Almost thirty years after I stood on a stage in claptrap barroom in Spokane Washington roaring out Foreigner’s “Dirty White Boy” and “God Save the Queen” by the Sex Pistols, I found as I began to write that sound still roaring in my deep ear, casked in a chest down in Davy Jones’ rock ‘n’ roll locker at the bottom of the sea, atop a huge boulder thrown in the primordial sea by a Titan who trying to conk his mother the moon and missed.

That big night music sure has a huge backside to it, a monster riptide. Was that the end of the next years of writing -- trying to get it all down? Were the poems that flooded out the afterburn of all those song-ended downsweeps of the guitar, exult’s exile to silence, a ringing harrow in the bones ghostly in ambition and ghastly to remember, much less romance ... I’ll probably never lift a guitar again, but the feral raw wire of hot chops at full volume lords this abyss I here write through, a sea that has proved perilous close to the one pounding real shores of a night I can’t yet fall back to sleep in. My drowned guitar is both rudder and water-level of this boat of a bed on the bridge of the worlds; my ears still hear it rocking subliminally away, entranced, terrified, and I don’t know if that sound is behind or ahead, under or over all that I here say.

Loot for a Sand Barrow

I am walking along the beach with Brendan. We go at a pace somewhere between his and mine. I hold his hand but it is indeterminate, it has no warmth, no heft. In one way I am leading him and in another he is drifting me, like two currents of varying depths, or a rough interface of Arctic and Gulf streams.

I tell him about the ship I am about to board and the treasures I will find and bring back to him, old gold coins which he can store in the sand castles that line the shore far behind us. I tell him about emeralds from South America and jade from the Orient that I will pull from the sea right next to us and lay under his pillow for him to find when he wakes up.

I know I am desperately trying to buy his attention, hoping he will remain interested, curious, entranced enough by my tale and my promise if no longer by my life; sufficient, if not to keep his hand in mine when I wake, at least to return him to this shore the next night when I dream. Will settle for that. I will settle for anything.

I don’t look down at him, I can’t, the dream won’t allow me; it’s condition for finding him is that I have to trust that it is Brendan, my son, walking next to me silently, between the land and the sea. I imagine his face as that child’s pale sleepy visage I last saw five years ago in Jan’s Honda Civic dew-misted window -- no, not quite; i imagine the boy he would be now, longer and more angular, eager to lift from the breast to his father’s voice. Not that either.

I realize there is no imagining left either, that he has slipped too far into oblivion. I just know its there, like all of the land under the sea; it’s there between the grey indeterminate hour’s breeze and its surf, those soft bluegrey eyes taking in the same scene, translating the same dream into a mind passed over to the Other World.

Brendan had his mother’s eyes. Sometimes I looked at him and saw Jan staring back. Once when he sat on the beach building a sand castle he stared at me with the look in Jan’s eyes that night she held me so tightly in that beach hotel bed and begged me to come, to bring her the son he became ... Eyes staring right out of the sea’s vast antiquity, a uteral welcome home known in the fish depths of my DNA, 500 million years down my brainstem. Is he looking at me? Or ahead where we walk and will wake? Ashore at our lost home? Or out on the wild eternal waste of old tears?

I hate this. I must know. I flounder and thrash, swim madly up from the dream, break gasping at its surface in the raging black of a broken man’s night. What have I done, why must I know? This is far far worse, this brutal inchoate bloody raw now. Can I go back? Will he join me again on that beach tomorrow night when I dream?

I will surrender. I must. There is no other escape. I will pay the Devil for his safe passage home.

I lay there sweaty and wretched, cooling as the dream dries from my aging, too-long untouched skin, raw to the hard breeze coming through the rear window as it ratchets the eaves, grieving back down into the salt bitterness of the far surf crashing amens from a son’s sand-barrow grave.

The Pilot's Tale

I call Dan that night and tell him I’m in. He grunts and then says he’ll talk with the captain the next day, and that I should probably be ready to report to the dock around 6 a.m. the day after.

“I hope you’re not dreaming of getting a lot richer,” he says. “Most of these salvage operations end about where they started, over more empty seabed, after too many hours of very hard work. I just thought you could use a little employment.”

“I don’t. And I do,” I say, hoping that’s the truth. “I worked as a steward on yachts in the Keys between semesters of college twenty years ago, you know, serving up champagne in ice buckets on the deck for geezers with young mistresses, slopping up the vomit and come-stained sheets below decks when we got back to port. Not much to remember, but I found I had good sea-legs, and I got pretty good at scenting rough weather. Since then I’ve been out a few times deep-sea fishing. My dad was in the Navy and taught me a lot of the knots when I was earning badges for the Scouts.”

“That will do, I guess,” he says, somewhat distantly. He’s thinking ahead. Or back. “Nothing they’re doing above water on that ship that you can’t handle. Just try to remember who you are. And who it’s death for you to be anymore.”

“Yeah, I remember. But thanks for the reminder.”

A short silence. “Well, I guess I should give you some of the background.”

Here is the jist of what he told me, embellished with what I heard later, further dug up on the Internet, and thought about for long after. It’s a tale of old-school larceny, a deep strata of Florida’s bum history of getting pillaged and raped for booty which never can be kept in your hands.

***

In September 1623, a ship creeps off from a Spain-bound fleet in the Straits of Florida. The boat, a twenty-gun frigate named the Senora de Cadiz, is commandeered by a pilot named Eduardo del Silvia. His nickname de l’abysmo (“of the Abyss”) was not apparently for any prowess or bad luck over deep waters as for taking his fellow sailors on harrowing dockside nekyias, careening through a downward circuit of dives of increasingly ill-tempered repute, as if a night’s roustabout could encompass every circle in Dante’s Inferno.

A true sea wolf at heart, this Eduardo apparently was in Dutch with every interest that lay at cross purposes to Spanish crown, proving intelligence for the English, dealing in stolen trade with the Dutch. Apparently on this venture he planned to deliver the Cadiz to a Dutch privateer hiding up by what is now Fort Lauderdale, pulling off from the fleet as it heading round the tip of the Florida peninusla up into the Gulf Stream.

He contrived to have that ship, well-lardered but certainly not the biggest prize in the pack, to lag and then distance, signalling to the flagship that he was having trouble with the rudder. He knew the fleet was in a hurry to get into the Stream, it being the late already in the hurricane season; Spain was desperate for lucre at that time, depending heavily on fresh stores of gold to pay off the bankers who were financing their involvement in the Thirty Years’ War. So where a fleet commander in another season of empire might have been most patient, del Silvio was allowed to lag, in the hopes that the problem would be fixed on its own and the ship would catch up in due corse. Then as night fell del Silvio invisibly turned course and headed north, up along the Florida Coast. As it happened, the next day turned rough and rougher with an approaching hurricane, and the fleet barely escaped to the northeast while the Cadiz fought its way up to the coast seeking a sheltered cove. But there was none and the on September 6 the Cadiz got whacked by the maelstrom, mauled in every way short of shipwreck for two days. By the fortune of del Silvio’s evil sire they scaped but barely, their mainmast gone, rigging a futile mess, bilges swamped, the boat listing eight degrees to port. There was no sign of the Dutch pirate at the agreed trysting-place and del Silvio bid his men (furious now that they weren’t about to share in the profit of the trade) sail up the coast toward Amelia Island where he knew he would find British ships eager to deal. Two weeks after the first hurricane another struck, and on the night of Sept. 25, 1623, the Cadiz meet its Maker at last, split and sent spiralling down to salt doom here off the north Florida coast into 100 leagues of cold silt. Only two hands survived -- a female slave and del Silvio, found two days later clinging to a length of mizzen by the British sloop Defiance.

None of this is mentioned in the official report of the loss of the Cadiz by the Marquis of Caderita, admiral of the fleet that arrived back in Spain without further incident. He simply says that the Cadiz was lost from the fleet having rudder trouble and apparently was doomed by the first hurricane. All hands and, most importantly, its valuable freight, were assumed lost.

Captain del Silvia resurfaces twelve years later in Manila, ravaged by the pox and the final stages of alcoholism, relating his tale one dank sordid night to a British pilot who would later include it in his South Sea Tales of a British Merchantman (1662), a book that enjoyed brief genre popularity around London for the summer and then disappeared. A copy of the obok turned up at a Tampa antiquities fair in the 1980s, where it was bought by an archeologist on the faculty of the University of Florida. He didn’t get around to reading the book for a decade, finding it one summer afternoon deep down a pile next to his office bookcase as he was cleaning up.

In the tale, the author, George Boggs, comes across del Silvia in a Manila dive quite in keeping with del Silvia’s penchant for bottomfeeding haunts, where “a Terrible assortment of Thugs and Brigands tossed back Pots of ill-humoured Rum, yelling and laughing and swearing foul oaths in a Fumigous and Obscene din.” The only table with an empty seat is shared by del Siliva, apparently of too ill a repute even for this honkey tonk deep in Hell. Del Silvia cadges a few quaffs of rum and then starts raving about a great fortune that may be scattered yet on the shores of Florida, one million pesos of silver and gold bullion, six chests brimming with jewelry, including a heart built with 130 matched pearls, a 74-carat emerald ring, a pink coral rosary on a gold chain beaded with pearls ... and this native artifact that was too strange and beautiful to be destroyed even by the priests, a votive gold figure inlaid with emeralds and rubies, with eyes of pearl, a wide mouth filled with inserted shark’s teeth, breasts of round-carved obsitidan, holding a small jade scimitar over its head - not apparently Mayan, maybe it had made it over on the Pacific leg from the Orient, along with the three porcelain vases that were said to be as old as they were valued ... Boggs was bemused. “The man looked like the veritable Porter of Hell, his Face pocked and ruined, his mouth a toothless Hole, pronouncing Riches beyond Measure from Days long sundered and tossed beneath the Tides of Time.” As Boggs took his leave, scaping the jaws of hell, a fight broke out behind him and he heard del Silvia scream. He looked over his shoulder and saw the Spanish pilot crumpled back in his chair, his thoat slashed wide like a red mouth, pouring the last of his bad blood over his corpse.

The UF professor was definitely interested in the reference (taking up only a page in the book). Wrecks from the Spanish fleet had been successfully salvaged by Mel Fisher over the past twenty years, but it was known that many ships were still out there. He knew of a friend, a salvage boat operator, who had been looking for the Cadiz for the past five years, only far to the south where the offiical report had assumed it was lost. So one day he calls this friend down in Satellite Beach and says he’s come across something which suggests that the wreck of the Cadiz lies further north up the coast. The guy -- a Mike Riordan -- takes to the fresh treasure spoor like shark to chum, and agrees to take up the search on for a fee-upon-salvage basis with a shared percentage of the total haul.

That’s who is out there a half mile in the water east of my house, and tomorrow I will try to get aboard that boat and bend my back to the task of finding del Silvia’s stolen ghost fortune that has sprawled for centuries on the dark sea bed.

Deep Water Crow's Nest

I read from Moby Dick for most of the afternoon, sitting in the faded Adirondack chair on the back deck. The day remains overcast, indefinite, grey, the surf’s machinery toiling quietly, deep in the mills of the known day.

For obscure reasons, my reading these days takes me into deep waters. I travel with the Pequod into the mid-Pacific Ocean, the fat book in my lap oracular, singing to or from a conch deep in my ear. I don’t know if this spell has been brewed from all of the big books I’ve read over the year (among them Gravity’s Rainbow, Finnegans Wake, Shakepeare’s tragedies, the Odyssey and Beowulf, Goethe’s Faust, Conrad’s sea-tales, the Vitae Brendae and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridean, Faulkner’s verbal spells and Don DeLillo’s laser-sharp sentences), or simply the sum of so many cadences settled down the vast tonnage of turned pages, but I find myself getting increasingly lost in this reading, into big spaces that both terrify and excite me, stir me in ways that there doesn’t seem to be a precise name for, as if I were hearing gnostic scriptures being read out loud on the undersides of the page, written there by a hand that feels obliquely familiar and yet maddeningly black, black, black ...

Melville’s ocean sloshes and washes and tides in my ear, hearkening me to a road to everywhere, pregnant with abysms and shores ... There is a Door this wild and strange tribe of Authors open with their sentences, revealing not so much the world as its subterranean barrows, leading me down deeper hallways all lined with sea-mirrors, refractions of personal depth, shared intimacy, some profoundly resonant bass note racing shore to shore through the nation of verbal souls living and dead.

Dark and cold, brutal and wild: this is the general heft in the verbal undertow, thunderous with the gait of a Long Man in the tongue, ancient, cruel, irreproachable: How could anyone love such a song? Yet I do. Some deepest part in me sings back, thrilling to the sound of it, greeting it like the Cliffs of Moher shudder and scream something pent with orgasm and death as massive North Sea waves collide into them.

Melville thought he writing one book when he started Moby Dick, but it took off on him. Something leapt from his ambition to write a better sea-tale, rising from depths which apparently were revealed for the first time to him in the months which preceded and led through the writing of the book. He was doing some deep reading at the time, going through all of Shakespeare’s tragedies--enthralled with the poet’s “blackness” -- and, about the same time, read Hawthorne’s Mosses at an Old Manse, whose essential courage to peer into a “blackness of the darkness beyond.” Add to this stack Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was also on the list, giving Ahab the creator’s ambition to track down the monster he had raised, and the sea he voyaged the crew of the Pequod over become far, far deeper and wilder. He felt that was writing two books, for two audiences perhaps, the peanut gallery and the court of the ages; or perhaps it was the difference between the goings-on of the surface tale and the wild black wings married to the tale from far under, providing sail and rudder for a hoarier, more Biblical story than could ever be related in any safely-heated Nantucket inn. One book’s “unfathomable cravings [drank] his blood,” he reflected back after completing the novel; “the other only [demanded] his ink.”

Et tu, c’est moi. Have the years of deep readings gestated this hard, low, granitic voice in my wildest affections, wilder than any depth I could have reached in a bottle, a depth I was seeking in all of the wrong dives? Does Man Reading become a gospel of words? Of late, neuroscientists have been attaching electrodes to the heads of meditating Tibetan monks; the research indicates that areas of the brain were activated and channeled via the mediation, re-writing the neural trade-routes, overwriting instinctual ones with their more conscious others, so that sexual gratification becomes a greater sympathy, compassion. All of this defies the conventional neurscientific literature which states that chemistry affects mood, our mental ills curable through pharmaceuticals .... Does deep reading similarly morph the neural chemistry, amplifying or weighting the blue end of the verbal thalamus, making ever-more audible the voices of angels, changing the entire brain’s chorus, weighting it with a sea-warding boom?

If so, to what purpose? Is it an archetypal reflex, innate to the species, a dark drowned hall reaching back to the first articulations on the million-year savannah? I speak, therefore I am ... that’s what writers say ... But to what end now, with the whole nation of Authorship threatened by the rising tide of nonverbal media, its institutions fading, libraries succumbing to indifference and disuse, mandarin academics arguing Texts into specie of postmordern white noise ... The Book like a ship split on rocks of modernity, its contents scattered and lost on a shore where digital images cavort and scream and jism mute agons of futurity. Words are a booty no longer tenderable anywhere, readers having lost critical interest, turned to other media, their antennae blunted, no longer moved by plainchant, no longer patient or cohesive enough to read novels, write poems, peruse a lifetime of writing.

With the reality of the state of the Book is so dim and zeroing, am I so stirred by my reading by a grand jester, a mocking cruel voice? Is it the laughter of Death? In her novel Veronica, Mary Gaitskill wrote, “The more withered the reality, the more gigantic and tyrannical the dream.” Thus the big night music I hear in my ear, in precise alternation to the small day music of the known? Cormac McCarthy picks up the same thread in The Road: “When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up.”

That’s what this big stirring feels like in the deep end of my reading, a happiness bordering on doom. Does this grand voice herald its end, that coming day when the last words sink below the surface and disappear for good? Does it provide then comfort for the final walk over to the other side? Is that why I’m smiling so as I rouse from “The Honor and Glory of Whaling,” Melville sings of this deep singing’s tribe:

Nor do heroes, saints, demigods and prophets alone compose the whole roll of our order. Our grand master is till to be named, for like royal kings of old times, we find the headwaters of our fraternity in nothing short of the great gods themselves. That wonderful oriental story is now rehearsed from Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine Vishnoo himself for our Lord; — Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale.

When Bramha, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its periodic dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been indispensible to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became incarnate as a whale, and sending down to the uttermost depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whalemen, then? ever as a man rides a horse is called a horseman?

Ur-god, ur-poet, ur-song, ur-boat all voyaging from a text rescued from the bottom of the sea -- that’s where Melville found the ribs of his ship, before and after Ishmael opened his mouth. Down on the beach the day rolls on dull and lustreless, still freighted with the grey principalities of sky and sea, dutifully toiling and droning beneath flocks of breezes which stroll in, crossing the porch this way then that. Me in this saddle of a chair with Moby Dick as my horse, hanging on for dear life as the beast gallops and dives and breeches and blows. None of it relevant to the ship aways offshore wanton for real gold, or the young lovers walking down the beach in the dreamy postfuck uterals of awakening love, or the graves of my wife and son back in the interior, sailing silently on in their coffins while I remain here.

***

Whatever rouses deep in my reading, it has the dark proximity of dreams, and whatever it means or signifies, I will know it to the same futile extent I understand my dreams -- darkly. The deeper my nights fell into the bottle, the wilder my dreams, baroque technicolor rollercoaster rides through vampire cities under mountains, doing battle with chain-wielding skinheads and world-ending monsters to terrible to look at, much less name. Did such feral magnificence, soaked in cartoonish colors, calibrate an Other which was hue of my empty nights in reverse, those desaturated, zero-bandwidth grayshouldered immramas down to a forever not-empty enough whiskey glass? Like binaries, my dream and that reality, the former always at right angles to my zero, trumpeting an orchestral doom in each night’s looming wave.

But how can we know dreams, being Other than our knowledge, always the precinct of darkened minds, a substrate older than the Devonian Sea, glowing daily as the fuse by which all life is lamped and wardend and furthered? If dreams are what I can’t know, then how am I to ever understand them, position them with any utility? Jonah dreams of far shores in the belly of Leviathan, of serving girls pouring wine, their nipples huge and roseate pressing against gauzy blouses, their eyes like green seaglass afire with summer suns: And wakes in the excremental stench of the worst seas, pillowed by bowels lumpy with squid, the whole shittiness of creation ... Is not Jonah’s agony clarified and raised to its greatest intensity by his dream, as if the archangel Michael himself wielded its lysis, cleaving him at the precise center of his darkest sin? So we seem to believe, and thus Jonah repented, cried out for mercy, made his promise to Obey ... and woke from his nightmare on the soft shores of the world, never to dream of shore girls again.

Now that I live by the sea, it figures less visibly in my dreams. More the jaw-proscenium which swallows me, harrowing my way back to an interior I have lost, so that the surf breeze is Jan’s breath in my ear as I slowly wake in our bedroom, afraid to wake further, knowing if I do I will lose her, the way I once dreamed of clutching a thirteen thousand dollar bill tightly, tightly in my hand, waking with a corner of my sweat-stained pillow crunched uselessly there. Her breath sursurrating back to the liquid vowels of the sea, as impossible to hold onto as a fistful of sand. The ocean now is the Interior, my lost life fully the Other, and i dream of her belly, pale and warm and sweaty as my own presses against it, angling my hips and cock deeper into her as her hands squeeze and knead my asscheeks, and she begs me to come, to deliver our son unto her. Come, the waves sing in the vast disaster of first light, come; muting as I wake to the harsher sound of gone, gone, gone ...

Day now fading from the shore, immutably greyer and steelier and darker. The salvage ship rocking and toiling at roughly the same spot for the past few hours; they must have found the wreck. What the hell. What the hell. I need something more than too many words in this chair high up the mainmast of a vastly old ship. Wild and turgid and deeply resonant, yes, but what’s to echo down empty shores? Let Ishamel row on home, I pray. Let him get on to the next tale, even if he must board a savage coffin to get there ...