EASTERNER

I leave Kettle Cove, heading southwest beneath a cloudless sky. The sun is hovering over my shoulder. I’m on a port tack with a moderate easterly wind and rolling swells. I’m abreast Singing Beach when I see her heading my way. She’s flying a massive Genoa that conceals her entire deck and most of the mainsail. She’s heeled and showing little freeboard. A neat bow wake, sparkling like mother-of-pearl glistens as she slices the cerulean blue in the shadow of her sails. She is coming on fast.

She passes close by to port and my insignificant, twelve-foot fiberglass Aqua Cat flops in her wind-shadow and then is rocked by her wake. She’s sixty-six feet long and carries nearly 1900 feet of sail. I carry less than a hundred. There’s a big 12 US-18 on her mainsail. She is Easterner. The local papers call her the “belle of the ball.” She’s on a shakedown run, up from Marblehead, where she was born four years earlier. In a week or so, she’ll be in Newport where they say she’s sure to win the America’s Cup that eluded her in ’58.

It’s maybe a half hour later. I can’t tell exactly. I don’t carry a watch. She’s come about and is bearing down on me. I can see the foredeck crew manic at their grinders and the helmsman listing to starboard, perpendicular to her sloping deck. As they close, I see amusement in their faces. They’ve got me in their sights. They intend to roar past, rocking me silly. I’ve just opened a can of beer. I’m seventeen and had a hard time acquiring that brew. I don’t want to risk getting swamped — losing it.

Screw them. I trim my dinky sail, catch the breeze on a broad reach, my fastest heading, and lean out over the windward pontoon to keep that hull from flying. I take Easterner’s measure over my right shoulder. Maybe it’s my imagination, but the gap isn’t closing like it was. Maybe it’s not closing at all. We’re like this for a while. I’m drenched in spray. Sailing Aqua Cats you get wet.

Finally, I luff into the wind, breaking off. Easterner blows by. I get no wave of recognition as they head back to Marblehead. I’m too insignificant to acknowledge, and maybe they’re in denial that for a short while, I held them off. But now I know a cat can beat that boat — even single-handed and skippered by a kid with one hand on the mainsheet, his other around a beer and his bare foot working the tiller.

Back in Kettle Cove, I tell everyone. A cat can kick ass against a 12-Meter. I get condescending nods. A few weeks later, the results are in. Easterner fails to qualify for the Cup finals. She got trounced in every race. After that, there’s not much point in telling my story — until now — when multi-hulls are racing for the Cup.

GLEN

Glen knew better. “Always stow a throw-rope,” he’d caution when he was teaching river rescue. He made money at it, and knew what he was doing. But sometimes there’s a big difference between knowing and doing. Sometimes, you’ve got to give up the doing because you know. And that’s hard. Especially when you’re on vacation ten thousand miles from home and some little shit has stolen your throw-rope.

It was only after Glen unpacked his gear in the jungle campsite that he noticed it was gone — along with some other stuff: his river knife, first aid kit and a new quick-dry top guaranteed to wick and keep you warm in cold water. He cursed after he laid his stuff out on the tarp and saw what was missing. He fumbled and fumed, at first thinking he’d just misplaced it. But no, his buddy, Mike, was also missing some gear.

Thank god, Glen thought, somewhat relieved as he looked at the enticing river flowing past, that they didn’t steal his kayak, spray skirt or paddle. Though it was a bit late in the season there was still a lot of power in it. And he had confidence in Mike, a skilled Class 4 plus with rescue experience. Everything would be okay and when they got to the take-out, he’d replace the stolen equipment. He’d come for the rush and he meant to get it.

Just as they put in, he noticed clouds forming in the mountains behind them and heard the distant rumble of thunder. No problem, he told himself. We’ll beat any surge. As a precaution, he, as the more experienced of the two, decided he’d sweep. Mike would go first.

All went well during the morning run. They pulled up on a sandbar, ate lunch, waited for it to digest and then took off again. There were three major rapids to come, and only one of them involved a serious drop. They scouted it. “There’s an undercut rock. Eddies into that cave,” he pointed out. “Stay way left. Even if you don’t make it, you’ll flush right through.” He noticed that the water had gotten pushy, maybe from the rainstorm upriver, but said nothing about it, not wanting to cause undue concern.

Mike took off; plunged nose first, avoided the undercut, stayed left, dropped again and ended up in a calm emerald pool fifty yards below the rock. Glen watched it all, nodding before digging his paddle into the current.

Looking up from the pool, Mike saw him charge into the first drop. And that was all. After many minutes, he pulled his boat up on the river bank and walked back to check. He heard Glen yelling for help. He’d been swept right at the undercut, into the cave, and was trapped inside by a deceptively strong eddy. With the new rainwater,the temperature was plummeting. Glen was becoming hypothermic. He could have been saved if they had a throw rope.

MRS. GATES

Mrs. Gates was in her eighties. My grandmother, no spry youngster herself, once told me that Mrs. Gates was the widow of a Civil War veteran. Looking at her, you could believe it. She was bent over like a question mark. She wore white lace bonnets that covered the few thin strands of grey that lay across her scalp. Her prim dresses hung limp from shoulders as insubstantial as a wire coat hanger. But despite her infirmities, she was able to maintain a foul mood — and for good reason. The times had passed her by.

Her single family house— pristine white clapboard with louvered shutters, and Victorian ornamentation — was all that remained of what once was a gentile pastoral neighborhood. She kept an antique swing on her front porch, in perfect condition, though unused. An elderly black gardener maintained her yard three times a week, cutting lawns, trimming hedges, and planting colorful annuals along the home’s field-stone foundation.

On either side of Mrs. Gates, newer, odious buildings hemmed her in like overweight passengers on an airplane. We lived in one — a five unit monstrosity with non-code additions poking from every wall like the unruly erections teenagers get. Instead of clapboard, we had the latest in asbestos siding, saving us the inconvenience of slapping on paint every other year. Our front yard, where the locals pitched horseshoes, was a micro-dust bowl that blew her way. Out back, nettles, burrs and thorn bushes in various shades of shit brown, sprouted from the ruins of an old chicken coop, fouling her view. The Fitzpatricks, Clearys and McDougals shared a rundown three-decker on her other flank. They cursed in public, drank until you could smell their sour presence down the block and sometimes liked to shoot BB guns at passing birds, just for fun.

We played ball in the street — using ten-cent high bouncers and broomsticks, counting on Mrs. Gates’ picket fence to stop the long ball, for if one made it over, she’d be our bane. We’d never see it again. She’d rap on her window and wag a finger, making sure the black man got to it first. Whenever one of us dared to hop her fence, she’d call the cops, demanding that the miscreant be sent to reform school.

Finally, we fashioned a plan. We loosened a picket so you could slide it to one side, like a pendulum, crawl along the wall beneath her window where she couldn’t see us, retrieve our ball, and then retrace our route, replacing the picket. This did her annuals no favors. After a few months, the black man caught on. He reattached the picket using many larger nails. We were working on loosening another picket when Mrs. Gates died and her yard went to hell with the rest of the neighborhood.

Fifty years ago, when the time came for my bar mitzvah, I was not given the opportunity to spout off from the bimah at the local synagogue like my contemporaries. My mother held that religion was the opiate of the masses and, determined to maintain a drug-free household, she contrived something she called a “socialist bar mitzvah.” What she had in mind was to show me that, when push came to shove, the captains of industry were still willing to grind their iron heels into the sons and daughters of our original pioneers. And so she cooked up a road trip into lands where, by her accounts, there yet dwelt original American serfs. Read the rest of this entry »

Rabbi Moishe Hunter had habits one could count on. Every morning after spending precisely one hour on his treadmill and another quarter hour unwinding in a steaming shower, he’d wrestle a pair of blue jeans over his fifty-four inch girth, don tzitzits (fringes worn beneath an outer shirt, a religious reminder) and a white shirt, adjust his yarmulke to cover his bald spot and wrestle on a pair of pointy-toed western-style boots. At precisely eight forty-five, his staff would deliver a tray to his office holding a French press filled with very hot espresso, a plain croissant and the morning Times. When the weather was clear and warm —as it was on the very last of his mornings — he’d carry the tray to his balcony where he expected to be undisturbed until nine-thirty, while catching up on current events.

Witnesses claimed to have seen him leaning over the railing with his binoculars. They speculated that he must have been coveting the lush vineyards and pregnant orchards that had not yet succumbed to subdivision sprawl. At some point, he must have turned toward the casino’s new garage as a single shot struck him dead on in the forehead. No one admitted seeing or hearing anything amiss. His coffee was cold by the time they discovered him.

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHO KILLED THE RABBI, YOU’LL HAVE TO GO TO: http://www.jewishmag.com/126mag/story_pincus/story_pincus.htm

By Bidat Azitmay (2007)*

*Bidat Azitmay is the 109 year-old founder and grand master of Neoga (“What anti-matter is to matter, so Neoga is to Yoga.”) Azitmay’s world-famous philosophy can be summarized, and indeed has been summed up brilliantly by none other than himself as: “Live outside the moment.” Unlike Yoga, where practitioners merely pose themselves, Azitmay recommends that its practitioners go for the gold and X-pose themselves. This is an excerpt from his new autobiography: “What I Choose To Remember.” Read the rest of this entry »