by Jeff Bell
For starters, there’s the fact that, despite the proper name adorning its transom, Dad’s thirty-foot sloop was referred to in our family simply as The Boat: a convenience, perhaps, but also a subtle, deferential nod to its central role in our lives.
For so many years, you see, The Boat could best be described as my father’s shrine to perfection. From its meticulously stained woodwork to its ever-polished fiberglass hull, everything about The Boat—all thirty feet of it—was perfect. Of course, the same could be said about Dad’s various cars over the years, or his airplane or motorcycle or any of the other possessions he held so dear. But The Boat had always stood above the rest as the ultimate in perfection, and even the slightest compromises to that perfection had triggered huge family ordeals. I spent at least a full decade hating The Boat and everything it represented.
You should also know, though, that by the early 1990s this was ancient family history. By then, The Boat was resting mostly unused in her slip, still well maintained but hardly perfect, and Dad himself seemed to be loosening his grip on perfection. We were both adults now, trying to redefine a father-son relationship that had been awkward at best for years. In so many ways, The Boat was the perfect vehicle, and I couldn’t help seeing Dad’s repeated invitations to use it as subtle messages that things were different now.
I’m sure neither one of us could have understood just how different things were about to become.
At 1:15, three friends of ours arrive at Oyster Point for what we billed as a quick tour of the Bay. Matt and Linda are a couple Samantha met through her paralegal work. Josh is a college buddy of mine who lives in the City. None of them has any sailing experience, but I assure them that’s not an issue. I’ve been piloting boats, big and small, since I was barely tall enough to reach their tillers. An autumn day-sail like the one we’ve planned for today is routine.
Besides, I am meticulous, anal even, in my approach to boating, much as I am in my approach to everything I choose to take on. Sam calls this quality about me endearing; others, I’m guessing, find it obnoxious. Whatever the case, it’s why I’ve gone to great lengths to prep and supply the boat for this trip, like so many in the past, and why I’ve taken the time to think everything through. Everything, that is, except for what happens next.
A sputter.
That’s how it all starts, really—with a smoke-belching sputter, a mechanical cough of sorts, just seconds after I back The Boat and our crew out of the slip. I am sliding the two-way gear shift from reverse to forward, ready to swing the bow around as I’ve done a hundred times before. But something’s not right. All too soon that something becomes all too apparent. The engine is dead.
Shit. This has never happened before. I fumble with the controls and within a minute have the engine restarted. But it’s too late. The wind has already delivered us to the row of boats just across the narrow waterway.
“Get on the starboard side and fend off,” I holler like a madman to my crew of landlubbers, none of whom even knows the starboard side of a boat from its port.
Kenny, the guy in the slip next to ours, does his best to be helpful. “Throw the rudder all the way over,” he shouts.
Another guy appears out of nowhere on the deck of the cabin cruiser we are about to hit. He, too, is yelling suggestions. The sudden confusion in my head drowns them both out. I lose my bearings and, in a moment of panic, add throttle when I should be backing it off.
Grrrrrrrr. Our starboard aft scrapes the end of a dock, which creaks its defiance. Our starboard bow closes in on the cabin cruiser. For what must be seconds but feels like hours, a tangle of arms and legs fights to keep the two boats apart. Finally, we are clear of trouble. I shout a “Thank you” and “Sorry!” to the guy on the cabin cruiser, and we are on our way.
No harm, no foul—or so I’m convinced.
Embarrassed and shaking, I apologize to our guests. “Thank God we didn’t make any contact,” I mutter just loud enough for my own two ears, never intending for a second to throw the issue open for debate.
“I dunno,” Matt volunteers. “I think we may have bent the nose of that boat.”
With instinctive panic, I swing around to face Matt. “Which boat, the cabin cruiser?” I hear myself sounding defensive, but it’s only because I was right there in the cockpit the entire time, watching every second of our mishap unfold, and I sure hadn’t seen any hull-to-hull contact. “Bent the nose”—what does he mean by that? The growing knot in my gut reaches grapefruit size as I press Matt for details.
“Do you think we’ve done any permanent damage?”
“No, nothing like that,” he reassures me, explaining that he’d heard some creaking and just assumed we “temporarily bent that wood thing that sticks out from the bow.”
He is talking about a bowsprit, a pronounced feature I don’t remember that cabin cruiser having. As for the creaking, I’m convinced that had to have come from the dock; I heard it myself.
For three hours on the Bay, I go through the motions of playing captain to our guests, doing my best to be a gracious host and pointing out the highlights of our tour. When the conversation turns to Bay Area media, as it always seems to these days, I try to act the part of rising radio star. But I am distracted, lost deep inside myself, preoccupied with a voice in my head. It is Matt’s, repeating itself relentlessly: I think we may have bent the nose of that boat. I think we may have bent the nose of that boat. I think we may have bent the nose of that boat …
Back at the dock, Matt and Linda thank us for an enjoyable afternoon and then head for the parking lot along with Sam and Nicole. I waste no time grilling Josh, one-on-one, for his thoughts. He’d been right there next to Matt during all the confusion and he hadn’t seen or heard any signs of damage.
“If we made any contact at all,” he tells me, “it had to have been minimal.”
“Are you certain?”
“I’m certain.”
“But do you think—”
Josh holds up a hand as if to stop traffic.
“Relax,” he says. “Nothing happened. Honestly.”
The two of us walk over to the cabin cruiser and do our best to assess things. A large blue canvas deck-cover conceals the boat’s bow, but it isn’t hard to figure out that it has no bowsprit to bend. Matt had it all wrong. Without pulling back the cover, we look around for any obvious signs of damage. This is no easy task given the dilapidated state of the boat; it is a harbor derelict by any definition. Still, the bow appears to be in good shape, and Josh convinces me everything is fine.
As we’re about to leave, I notice a light on inside the cabin and knock to see if anyone is onboard. A disheveled guy about my age pokes his head out. I thank him for helping us at the dock this morning. He looks confused and says nothing, so I explain how our engine had died and how someone from his boat had helped fend us off.
“Must have been my partner,” he decides. “I’ll pass along your appreciation.”
I should tell him about the creaking Matt heard, spell out my concern that we may have damaged his bow. But this guy, with his eyebrows cocked high, is giving us a dismissive look that all but shouts, I don’t have time for this—I’ve got a woman, or dinner, or something important down here that I need to get back to, and quickly.
Now I am panicking. Should I pass along Matt’s theory, just in case? I decide to buy a second or two with some lame compliment regarding his boat, but given its current state of disrepair, I find myself cringing at my own words just as soon as they come out.
“This old piece of crap?” he throws back at me before I can even finish.
“Well, looks like you’re in the process of restoring it,” I try.
“Yeah, maybe one of these days. Hey, I’ll see you guys around.”
And then he is gone.
Josh laughs under his breath and whispers to me, “I guess he had something important to do.”
The two of us walk back to The Boat and polish out the small section of hull that had p
icked up some rubber residue from the dock. The sky is nearly dark as we say our good-byes.
I think we may have bent the nose of that boat. I think we may have bent the nose of that boat. I think we may have bent the nose of that boat. Nose of that boat. I think we may have … That boat. I think we may have bent …
It’s the middle of the night, and Matt’s voice is every bit as clear as it was live and in person hours ago. Like a looped audiotape, his words play over and over again in my head. The strangest part is that they aren’t doing so of their own accord; somehow I am hitting the Play button. Over and over and over again. And I can’t stop myself.
Ever since this afternoon I’ve been trying to shake the all-encompassing thought that I damaged the cabin cruiser and the even more disturbing notion that I’ll never know for sure exactly what happened. Clearly, Matt had heard something, but what? The uncertainty of all this is unbearable, especially in the silence of my pitch black bedroom. I need answers. I need to know what Matt was thinking. My only clues are the very words that he himself had chosen to use, so I keep playing them back in an inane effort to better understand them.
The exercise gets me nowhere, and before long I find myself switching mediums, from virtual audio to virtual video. Now, instead of listening to Matt’s words, I am watching the actual scene replay itself on the fuzzy screen inside my head. I can see myself fumbling with the controls. I can see the boat being blown across the way. Here’s when the starboard aft makes contact with the dock, and there’s the guy from the cabin cruiser. The critical scene is next, but damn it all, the shot is out of focus. For hours I replay the incident, looking for answers, but to no avail.
It must be two a.m. now and poor Sam looks even groggier than she did the last time I shook her awake fifteen minutes ago. I should let her go back to sleep, stop peppering her with questions about what she recalls from this afternoon. But I can’t. I need to know what happened with the boats. Frustrated, Sam again asks me why I need to know. Again I try but fail to explain, and meanwhile a déjà-vu sensation starts tugging at my consciousness. It was long ago. There was a mysterious voice. My mother and I were having this awkward conversation, the first of many like it that we’d have during my childhood.
The moment passes and I again focus on the present. I try to shift gears, think instead about my big future in radio. But I know whatever it is I’m feeling right now about that, it’s anything but cocky.
three
fast-forward 9 days
It’s a little after seven and just a minute into the Wednesday edition of KTVU-TV’s Mornings on Two program when I first realize something isn’t right.
Fifty feet from my desk in the sprawling Channel 2 newsroom, Frank Somerville and Laura Zimmerman are giving voice to the words that I, as their news writer, have fed them via the teleprompter scripts rolling just in front of their set. Serious and concerned, our two anchors are peering into Camera One, updating a much-talked-about shooting on a local commuter train—our lead story this morning, and one our executive producer, Rosemarie, has entrusted me to write.
The problem is, at this same moment, a chorus of groans is rising across the newsroom. I have, it would seem, screwed up the story.
Like a desperate lawyer in a courtroom, I shuffle through my notes, scrambling to piece together my blunder. As best I can figure, the groans had started when Laura—or was it Frank?—mentioned that the victim had died from his gunshot wounds. Hadn’t he?
Son of a bitch. It says right here in the wires that he’s in critical condition.
And now, I know, so am I.
Screw-ups are inevitable in live TV. This, however, is a big one, and I’m all but certain I’ll be hearing about—
“JEFF BELL. See me in the control room. Jeff!”
Rosemarie’s voice punches through the newsroom loudspeakers like a right hook to the face. My face. The crowd goes wild without a sound, the way coworkers do when they get to witness a good knockout blow from the boss. If there was any doubt before as to just what idiot was responsible for the morning’s egregious writing error, there isn’t any longer.
“This cannot happen,” Ro says, very matter-of-fact-like, as I pull up a chair next to her in the NASA-style control room that serves as command central for Channel 2’s newscasts. I know this is going to be awkward; the two of us have always had a great working relationship.
“I am so sorry—” I start to say.
Ro looks up from her computer screen briefly, just long enough for me to see the disappointment written all over her face.
“This is just so unlike you,” she says. “I guess I don’t understand how you could let it happen.”
I shake my head in mock bewilderment. I know damn well just how I’ve let it happen.
Two days later, Ro again summons me to the control room, again because I’ve managed to screw up another key story—this time giving a crucial newsmaker the wrong last name—and again I know exactly how I’ve managed to do it.
The problem is there’s no way I can share this explanation with my boss.
What am I going to say? “Well, uh, here’s the thing, Ro, as silly as this may sound, I, uh, I’m having some trouble concentrating because, well, because of these boats taking up all the space in my head.” No way would she or anyone else ever understand if I explained that, instead of playing back the raw news footage I’m supposed to be reviewing, I am playing back my own personal tapes, and without the aid of our state-of-the-art video machines.
I’ve been doing this playback thing, mentally re-creating the whole boat incident, almost nonstop since the mishap eleven days ago now. I do it in bed when I should be sleeping. I do it in the shower and while I’m shaving. And, although Ro is never going to hear this from me, I do it for eight hours a night at my computer terminal in the Channel 2 newsroom.
Play. Rewind. Play. Rewind.
The scariest part, and the thing I just don’t get, is that I simply cannot stop myself—not even after seeing how destructive the whole attention-sapping process is. Somehow, the doubt keeps driving me back for more, like an evil whispering voice reminding me that if I can’t figure it out now, I’ll have to spend the rest of my life wondering what happened. Are you really prepared to live like that, questioning forever whether the cabin cruiser might sink?
“And here’s the rest of it,” I’d have to tell Ro. “I’m just not getting any sleep. None.” The image playbacks, of course, have a lot to do with this. But there’s another factor, too. Instead of going home for naps after my overnight shifts, I am spending my mornings back at the marina, looking for any physical clues that my virtual tapes can’t provide.
For hours on end, I sit in my car in the marina parking lot, scoping out The Boat and the cabin cruiser, assessing their relative heights, the distance between them, and any and all other relevant measures. I take countless walks up and down the docks, trying to grasp just what had happened that fateful afternoon. I scour The Boat from its transom to its bow and back to its transom again, hunting for tangible signs of damage, for proof that Matt had been either right or wrong about our encounter. But most of all, I hide out below deck, just out of view of the rest of the harbor, staring off at the cabin cruiser berthed fifty feet across the waterway.
None of this feels right to me, especially when I find myself peering through binoculars at the cabin cruiser’s bow, combing it inch by inch—while pretending to check weather conditions on the horizon, just in case I am caught. This is not normal behavior. I realize this. But much as I can’t stop myself from replaying the looped images, I also can’t seem to keep myself from taking one more walk along the dock or stealing one more peek at the bow through my high-powered field glasses.
On my way home from Channel 2 each morning, I try to keep going straight when I approach the Oyster Point exit on southbound 101, try to keep the steering wheel from turning slightly to the right. But I can’t. I am no longer steering my own car or, for that matter, my own life. Fear and doubt
are driving me now. Back to the scene of the crime again and again.
With each successive visit, the marina becomes more of a prison. It’s almost as if I am doing time there, serving some kind of self-imposed sentence I don’t understand. I want to stay away from the harbor when I’m not there, and get away from it when I am, but somehow neither is an option. And so I keep going back, always for what I promise myself will be a quick visit, and always for what turns out to be the better part of the day.
Sometimes, when I’m hiding out below deck and staring off into space, my worst childhood boat memories seem to flood the cabin, sweeping me back in time. I can see myself, a ten-year-old kid, scrambling to help Dad anchor The Boat behind a small island in the Sacramento Delta. Mom and I are in an inflatable life raft, rowing like crazy to drop the anchor where Dad wants it to be. But we haven’t done it right, and Dad is shouting directions to do it again.
“Come on, goddammit, we haven’t got all day!”
The Boat is swinging like a kite in the wind, so the pressure is on me, along with Mom—who is now covered with river mud and bruised from the anchor—to figure things out quickly. We give it our best shot, then row as fast as we can back to The Boat, where we help Dad and my sister, Mandi, pull the slack out of the anchor line hand over hand. Finally we are set.
And then again, perhaps we are not.
“Goddammit, son of a bitch, motherfucking …” My father is barking out a string of obscenities, as he does when things aren’t going just as planned. The words are directed at no one in particular. Not Mom. Not Mandi. Not me. Just the world. Still, they are so charged, so full of venom, that each of us will do anything to fix whatever is wrong, to somehow find a way to make the words stop.
In this case, the anchor-line angles happen to be wrong. The buoy-bottle line still has too much slack in it.
