The Dropout
I wondered how much his teeth cost.
I was whistling as my feet thumped the boards on the wooden dock. The morning sun was right in my eyes as I walked. I was going to wake Ernie up and take him for breakfast and some laughs.
A man with well fitted casual clothes you can’t buy at any army surplus, stepped out of a sailboat in front of me. He grinned a TV commercial bright toothy smile.
“You sound happy.” He said.
“Going home soon, going to see my kids and Grandkids.” I stopped and give him my hand.
“Brock.” He extended his white aristocratic hand. He could have been named Brandon, or a Conrad, or a Lance just as easily. But Brock fit the best.
I shielded my eyes from the morning sun as I examined Brock’s sailboat. 9 AM and even this early the sun reflecting off the canal stung my eyes. I looked at the boat’s black hull.
“Is your boat hot?”
“Brutal. Some nights we anchor out to get away from the heat and the mosquitoes. We spend the night on deck. It’s the only way to get sleep.”
“You don’t see too many black boats down here in the tropics.” I repeated what I had heard over and over after I painted my own boat dark blue.
Brock, stuck out like a zebra in a herd of pack-mules. Even the millionaires in the boatyard dressed like they were one step away from sleeping on a park bench. Not Brock.
His haircut wasn’t coiffed by any neighborhood trimmer, and his shoes didn’t come on sale at Wally World. Between his haircut and shoes, he was dressed in what his tailor must have figured was ‘roughing it.’
“You look good.” I know is was over familiar but I was in a happy mood and he seemed like he was the type of man that could laugh at himself.
“I’m the ‘before’ picture.”
Down the dock from where Brock and I sat talking was Henry. Henry looked like a bum. His uniform was slip-on tennis shoes that had never seen a tennis court, paint-spattered pants, and a matching $14 blue-jean shirt. Until you talked with Henry for a while and listened to his clipped New England accent you half expected him to hit you up for spare change.
Except Henry owned a private jet.
Brock invited me to sit with him on two old paint-splattered lawn chairs that faced his sailboat. Even though the sun was out it really wasn’t a very warm day for The Keys, but it was warm enough that we could sit on the boat-yard’s plastic chairs and talk. We talked in a slow and low manner matching the surroundings.
We struck up a friendship based on our shared experience of coming down the Mississippi River. He and his wife came from Chicago on their boat the last few weeks. My friend, Johnny Van Landeghem and I had paddled down the Mississippi in 1969.
Despite the 50-year gap between our trips, the Mississippi River moves but never changes. He wanted to talk. He wanted to talk about the reason he walked away from his former job. Like spilled milk on an inclined table, all his conversations seemed to come back to how and why he quit his job.
“We were bought out by one of the majors. They came in and started plucking the management for head-office jobs. We all sat around our offices like we were waiting to be asked to the prom.”
“The shit hit the fan when that consultant sat in the boardroom across from me and said, ‘Imagine if you strapped a rocket to your ass and you got that job that you always wanted. Visualize that you finally made it to the top of your field. Imagine what your day would be like. Take that pen and paper in front of you and describe in detail your typical day.’ So, I did.”
“I was going to see Ernie. Want to come along?”
He didn’t move.
“I was Vice President of Sales. Do you always interrupt?” He smiled, half-serious. “I wrote down a typical day as the Vice President of Sales of one of the worlds’ largest conglomerates. I’d get up at five AM, have a breakfast meeting at six AM with the psychopath.”
“Psychopath?” I was still trying to see passed Brock hoping Ernie would show and rescue me.
“The CEO, a real sweetheart. Every morning, eggs, bacon and degradation. He’d sit at the head of the table talking with food in his mouth, going over your numbers, just the numbers. And he’d judge you. Six, sometimes seven days a week. The guy had the soul of a viper.”
Brock shifted in his plastic chair.
“You ever seen that James Bond movie when all the gangsters sit around waiting for the head villain to press a button? Then one of them would drop into the tank of piranhas?”
I looked towards Ernie’s boat. ‘C’mon Ernie!’ I pleaded silently.
“That was breakfast. Nobody ever ate. Oh, they’d order, but they never ate. They’d push the eggs around the plate and stare at the tablecloth. They’d sit and wait to see who was next.”
“Like high school?”
“Yeah, come to think of it, a lot like high school.”
The hatch on his boat opened and a porcelain-skinned woman climbed out. I had an image of one of my daughter Jessica’s china dolls, the one that had jet black hair, a red silk kimono, white cold skin, and an unreadable expression. The woman placed her feet like a deer walking through an unfamiliar forest, carefully, tentatively.
Although the day was cool for Florida, she was dressed in shorts, as if the cold didn’t bother her. She climbed over the boat’s rail. It was obvious she was going somewhere. She gave me the barest smile, but she ignored him.
“Bring back a newspaper, honey.”
Her hand twitched. It was the only way in which she acknowledged Brock. She walked towards the gate and the line of shops beyond. The businessman silently watched her go.
“She’s not happy.’
“Looks like.”
The water in the canal was black syrup. From time to time, a wave from a passing crab-boat would slowly rock the line of boats tied to the dock. Then the rubber bumpers between the yachts and docks would fart and shudder against the old telephone-pole pilings they were bolted to.
I told him about my need to repair and fix something, even if Someday to him, was just a small boat.
“Both you and I have had, ah, events. Life changing events.”
Even though we talked about the painful reasons we were here, the more we talked the less I knew Brock. He was like a plastic onion. Peel away a layer of plastic, and there was another layer of plastic underneath, always another layer.
Initially he was talkative, gregarious, and seemed genuinely interested in my boat and my progress so far. But when he talked about Chicago, he was a Bears fan, in Miami, he said he was a rabid Dolphins fan. He was a Republican if you were a Republican, a Democrat with a Democrat. He stood where you stood.
“Where was I?”
“On pen and paper.” As I looked to where the porcelain woman had disappeared out the marina’s gate.
“Oh yeah. Well after that fun breakfast, I wrote that I’d have to spend the morning going over the sales budgets with the sales managers. Do the same thing to them, as what just happened to me. Shit flows downhill.”
“Did you talk finances all day?”
“Hmm, ‘til about noon. I wrote down that I’d give out the odd ‘attaboy’, but mostly I’d be handing out shit.”
“How did you know all this?”
“Because it was done to me. I spent years on the other side of the desk. Oh, once or twice I was invited to go to the board’s lunches.” He glanced to where his wife had disappeared.
“The only person who liked it when I got invited to those lunches was my wife. She thought it was a sign I was a ‘comer’”.
Brock’s eyes flicked again towards the marina’s gate then uneasily back towards me. One plastic layer had a hole in it. Brock continued:
“You know, I never got finished writing on that pad. The farthest I got was the word NOON. I wrote NOON and I started to shake. I thought about where my life had been, was going. At first, I really thought I had the flu. I wondered what I had eaten. I couldn’t get past that word, NOON.”
‘Try spelling your own name wrong.’ I remembered.
“I saw my future. And boy, did it suck. I stared at the word NOON, with that vulture looking on. He was like one of those old women that go to every funeral so they can soak up the emotions of the family crying.”
I was getting sorry I had stopped to talk to him. Brock continued, as if I could have stopped him.
“You could see, the psychologist almost hugged himself, rocking back and forth. He had this Dr. Mengele, kind of half-smile the whole time.”
“So?”
“Finally, he walked over to the desk, picks up my schedule and says that he’s not surprised. They get one or two reactions like mine every session. People like me who put their pens down, get up, and walk out.”
“Did you?”
“All I took from my office were some pictures. Twenty-five years, and all I took home fit into my pockets. Told my secretary that I was gone. Just like that, ‘I’m gone’”.
We stopped talking as a sailboat passed heading for the open waters of the Caribbean. The fat boat rode full and heavy like some well-fed swan. It wasn’t a very big sailboat, only about 32 feet, but as it ghosted by us could see that it was equipped with all the gear needed for being on the ocean a long, long time. The man at my side waved in greeting.
“Where to!?” Brock shouted.
In return the lean man at the boat’s wheel shouted back.
“The Windward’s! For starters! And then beyond!”
Brock’s eyes drank the boat out of sight. After a while he turned to me and with an almost reverent whisper repeated,
“And beyond”.
“Where’s the Windward’s?” I asked.
“As far as you can go.”
“Go?”
“Yeah, the next stop is South America.”
“Is that what you plan to do?”
“Yep”.
He stared across the marina through the forest of masts and started to speak softly. He wasn’t speaking to me.
“First we’re going to sail across the Stream to Bimini. Did you know there’s supposed to be an underwater road in Bimini? Going to snorkel along it.”
“You plan on sailing across that ninety miles to the Bahamas, then island hop all the way down?”
He was smiling at me. Really smiling.
“And then what?”
“Ask me in a year.”
“What’s your wife think?”
“She’s not happy. She’ll get over it. Once she gets a taste of adventure, the scenery, the good times. She’ll come around. You watch. If you and I run into each other in a couple of years, you’ll see.”
“My ex told me to wait.” I muttered. “Wait means no.”
“Exactly.” He near shouted.
“Be careful what you wish for.” I looked towards Ernie’s boat again.
“Sailing away was my dream. Mine, alone. I took navigation courses. I tried to repair an unfixable boat. I saved charts of places I’ll never sail to.” I looked at Brock. “I never talked to my wife about it. Not once.”
He sat back, a little.
“I didn’t share it. My dreams.” I really started to hate Brock.
“Oh, I know my wife.” Brock was looking at me, but he also looking down at me. “She‘ll want to go sailing just as much as I do.”
As he said those words I looked up. Coming towards us was his pale doll of a wife. She had a set look on her face as she marched towards us. In her white hand, still in its clear plastic wrap was a very large blue suitcase.
I nodded in her direction. As I rose from that lawn chair to leave him to his fate, I repeated his words:
“She’s not happy.” I hope the words didn’t sound as smug as I was feeling.
He stared at her, ignoring me.
The dropout and I had our talk just before I left for Canada. Shelly said that for a couple of weeks she only saw him hurrying back and forth across the marina once or twice. He always seemed to be in a rush. Where before he spoke to everybody, now he never spoke. Nobody saw his wife again.
When I left Florida for that welding job up north, I walked past the sleek black-hulled racing sailboat surrounded by all those fat white hulls. In the reflection of the water, there was a bright new red, white and blue sign:
FOR SALE BY OWNER
Rick Ranson 