My Father’s Drunken Boat

After two years of hard toil in workshop and on dry-dock, my father’s boat, a streamlined cabin cruiser, was finally christened.

He named it the Bel-Bar to evoke the dull toll of bell buoys and panoramic sand bars.

Mother pressed her lips and frowned when she saw the name so large on the gleaming stern; she knew he also meant a bar for drinking.

True enough: great coolers of bargain beer weighed down every sailing!

At first, going out on the boat was pure spree. We’d get up at half past five and put on nautical whites. Mother would pack a picnic, daddy would get his gear, and soon we’d be tramping the creaky decks and docks of Higgs Marina.

Oily water sloshed along the piers and silver killies streaked by everywhere you looked. Salt and gasoline: that was the smell of things.

It was always a thrill to putter off. In minutes we’d be at full speed, coursing underneath the Whitestone Bridge, borne up by the good Long Island Sound.

At Sands Point, in mid-Island, Daddy would drop anchor, then start reeling in the flounders and the eels. My mother brought a few in herself.

Me, I’d sunbathe on the cabin roof, and soon be stupefied and restless. I’d go back and forth, back and forth, studying the pails of edgy fish one minute, peeling my sunburn the next, whining to go home to comic books and Barbie.

By noontime, I’d be feeling seasick and we’d all be pretty sick of each other. The beer would be nearly gone. The arguments would start.

By mid-summer, my father was taking the Bel-Bar out alone.

At dawn his key would clack the lock. At dusk he’d be back, our own ancient mariner. “Here he comes,” my mother would say, mocking her mother’s brogue, “makin’ esses.”

Then he’d stand tipping in the kitchen, his eyes like blood, reeking of dead fish and rotgut.

The Bel-Bar sailed for only a few summers. Then she was in dry dock, on rickety stalks, right behind some canted wire fencing. My father drove there every Saturday to look.

He kept saying he would make her seaworthy again, but the Bel-Bar just kept rotting.

By the end of his life, she seemed to cave in on herself. Her paint was all crackles and blisters, and barnacles clung to her hull. She was a sad old sight.

After he died, I’d imagine pushing her back into the Sound with his body at the helm.

I could just see it: that crazy, wobbly cabin cruiser, veering and yawing, pitching and leaning, makin’ esses into the listing, bloodshot, vaporous horizon.