Born to Fish

by Tim Gallagher

  And then the fire in Greg began slowly diminishing, and he saw for the first time the gravity of the situation—how still Brian lay. He noticed, with horror, that Brian wasn’t breathing.

  From that point on, it was like an out-of-body experience for Greg as he mechanically went through the motions of dragging Brian by his jacket out to his pickup truck, opening the tailgate, and struggling to lift his limp body into the bed of the truck. He knew at some level what he had to do. As a fisherman, he was acutely aware of the tides and knew it was now high tide. He could picture it all in his mind: the Tomlinson Road bridge, five minutes away, with tidal water now flooding under it, which would start to recede within an hour, sucking anything in the estuary out to Long Island Sound. There a body might go days or weeks before showing up, perhaps miles away—or it might even be swept out to the Atlantic, never to be seen again.

  Greg pulled up and parked at the bridge a few minutes later. It was quiet, dark, and desolate there at three in the morning, with a chill in the air that sent a shudder through his body. He took a deep breath and tried to calm down. He could feel that this was a terrifying turning point in his life, and nothing would ever be the same again. He lit a cigarette and took a couple of deep drags, then tossed it away into the night. Stepping outside, he walked to the back of the truck—and suddenly Brian burst up from the truck bed and took a swing at Greg, like a ghastly nightmare brought to life. Horrified, Greg swung wildly and struck Brian in the head, knocking him out again.

  Abruptly, Greg changed direction. He drove to the farmhouse where Brian’s family lived and carried him up the stairs onto the front porch. He banged hard with his fist until the lights came on and Brian’s parents opened the door. Greg dragged Brian inside and laid him down on the kitchen floor.

  Brian’s mother was in shock. “What happened?” she asked.

  “We got into a fight.”

  “Who did you fight with?”

  Greg looked away. “With each other.” He walked out of the kitchen, went upstairs to Scott’s room, and turned on the light. Scott awoke from a deep sleep, blinking in the harsh light. He looked up at Greg, who stood before him, covered in blood.

  “I just had a fight with your brother,” said Greg. He looked down at the floor. “I think he might die.”

  Scott grimaced for an instant, then said, “Good. It was bound to happen sometime. I’m sure he had it coming.”

  Greg went home and, without bothering to clean up, crashed on top of his bed. But the grim aftermath of his fight with Brian did not end that night. The next morning, Verne and another friend, Charlie, were loading up the boat and getting ready to go fishing. Greg’s apartment was right on the water at Morris Cove, and Verne kept the boat they shared just on the other side of the seawall. Greg walked outside, shirtless, and stood on the seawall to talk to his friends and let them know he wouldn’t be going fishing with them. Verne and Charlie were amazed when they saw him.

  “What’s that huge lump on your stomach?” asked Verne. “And look at your hand.” Greg had a great bulge along the side of his abdomen, and his left hand was so ballooned up it looked like an inflated rubber glove. Greg shrugged. He knelt down and started washing his hand off in seawater.

  “You better go see a doctor,” said Verne.

  “I just sat there smoking a cigarette, watching them,” Greg told me. “I was a mess, blood all over me.”

  After his friends motored off in the boat, Greg took a shower and changed his clothes. He looked at his left hand again, and it had gotten even worse. He had deep gouges where Brian’s broken teeth had cut into his flesh as he punched him, and it was seriously inflamed, with red lines running up his arm. He decided not to wait any longer and drove himself to the emergency room. The doctor who examined him asked him what had happened. He looked very concerned when Greg told him.

  “If the infection spreads, you might lose your hand,” said the doctor. He admitted Greg to the hospital immediately and said he would need an antibiotic IV drip round the clock. What the doctor didn’t tell him was that the infection was so bad Greg might even lose his life. He had cellulitis, which can quickly progress to sepsis and move throughout a person’s body, leading to death in a matter of days.

  Fifteen minutes later, Greg was lying in a hospital bed with his swollen hand suspended above him. But Greg had another problem. His intake of drugs and alcohol was so great—he was putting away a liter of Jack Daniel’s and a least a gram of cocaine every day—he was in deep withdrawal. His craving was so bad he took his IV stand and wheeled it to the elevator, went downstairs, and walked out on Congress Avenue in his hospital gown, hoping to get some drugs and alcohol from someone, anyone. His doctor was just about to walk into the hospital when he spotted him.

  “What are you doing outside?” he asked. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  Greg told him honestly what he was up to, and the doctor took him back upstairs. He started feeling Greg’s swollen liver, then arranged for some lab tests. Greg’s liver was nearly the size of a football—three times larger than normal. The doctor added a sedative to the IV drip to help relieve the withdrawal symptoms.

  Greg remained in the hospital room recovering from the infection for the next seventeen days. When he was released from the hospital, his uncle drove him to rehab—at the strong urging of his doctor and his family—but he had to stop by his apartment on the way to pick up some clothes. As he walked inside, two of his friends were there, snorting lines of cocaine laid out on top of his television.

  “I didn’t have any desire to party at all,” said Greg. His uncle was outside in the driveway, waiting in his car for Greg. The two of them drove to the rehab facility where Greg would spend the next month.

  Brian recovered from the fight and ended up going to prison for seven years a short time later. Greg couldn’t help wondering what would happen when Brian was released. He had knocked out most of his teeth. He wondered what Brian would be thinking about while he was locked up. What if he spent his entire sentence remembering what Greg had done and planning his revenge? What if he was pumping iron every day, working to get in top shape, just living for the day when he could get out and kill him?

  Greg went to see Brian a day or two after his release from prison. Brian was lying on a chaise lounge in his family’s backyard, trying to soak up some sun. He was pale and huge, like some beached whale—nothing like the young stud he had been seven years earlier when Greg beat him nearly to death.

  Greg walked up to him as he lay there. Brian looked up, raising his hand over his eyes to shade them from the bright morning sunlight. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Well, I just want to say, if you want a piece of me, we should just get it over with right now,” said Greg. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder.”

  “Naw, fuck that,” said Brian. “I don’t care about that anymore.”

  And that was the end of it. Why did Brian decide not to go at it with Greg again? Had he become mellow with age? Maybe. But far more likely, he recognized that Greg had become even more dangerous than him, and their next fight would be to the death—and perhaps it just wasn’t worth it.

  But Greg will never forget that night or how fortunate it was the way it all turned out. He still feels sick when he thinks back on that moment as he sat in his truck, about to dump Brian off the bridge. “If I had thrown him off that bridge, my whole life would have changed instantly,” he said. “I would have been a murderer. You just don’t come back from something like that.”

  * * *

  Rock Bottom

  How do you know when you’ve hit rock bottom? What does it take to finally snap you to attention, like a bucket of ice water flung in your face, letting you know unequivocally that you must walk away from a lifetime of self-abuse and inebriation or your life will be over? For Greg Myerson, the moment finally came during a weeklong stay with friends at a rental house on Block Island.

  Although he had gone to
rehab for a month after his fight with Brian Jackson several years earlier, his heart wasn’t in it. He’d only agreed to it because his family told him if he didn’t stop abusing alcohol and drugs, they wouldn’t have anything more to do with him. But he loved to party, and he took it up again within weeks of finishing rehab. He could easily afford the drugs and alcohol with the money he earned as a union electrician.

  During the Fourth of July week in 2001, Greg and six friends split the $10,000 rental fee for a magnificent place. Valued at more than $5 million and owned by a wealthy doctor, it had eight rooms, most with their own fireplaces and bathrooms. Greg got the master bedroom, with its own private balcony and hot tub. The rental period went from Saturday afternoon until the following Saturday morning, and they were planning for the final night there, on Friday, to be the party to end all parties. They had brought cases of liquor, wine, and beer, as well as plenty of pot and cocaine.

  Greg and the others sharing the rental house were all journeyman union electricians and had been working for months at a power plant in Wallingford, Connecticut. They made excellent pay, but they were all being laid off as the project wound down.

  Greg was thirty-three years old that summer and had been abusing drugs and alcohol since at least the age of fourteen. Many nights he’d put away a quart or more of Tanqueray gin or Jim Beam. In the months leading up to his stay at Block Island, while he was working at the power plant, Greg was partying harder than ever. On the days he wasn’t fishing, he would often go straight from work to happy hour at a bar and still be drinking and dancing in his work clothes at 2:00 a.m. when the bar closed.

  Maybe it was only a matter of time before this lifestyle took a toll on him. He had begun having bouts of deep anxiety—debilitating panic attacks unlike anything he’d ever experienced. One afternoon they were so bad, he just lay on his bed trembling and starting to hyperventilate. He finally jumped into his pickup truck and drove to the boat dock, seeking release from the stress he was feeling. In his agitation he didn’t even check the fuel level or put any food or water on board.

  It was midafternoon and the weather was still pleasant as he untied the ropes holding the boat to the cleats on the dock. He climbed aboard, fired up the motor, and began backing out. Five minutes later, he had cleared the jetty and was heading eastward with no destination in mind. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He didn’t even look up later when he passed the Race or Block Island. Soon he felt the vast swells of the open ocean lifting his boat, pushing against it, but still he pushed on with the throttle forward, long after night fell, long after the last light visible on shore became a distant twinkle on the horizon and then blinked out. Sometime late in the night he ran out of fuel, then lay silently down in the bottom of the boat. The boat rocked quietly, occasionally slammed by a wave, but still he drifted seaward. Where would he end up? How long until his own light went out?

  He drifted endlessly in the dark without the boat’s green and red safety lights turned on. If any other vessel came blasting through in the steamer lanes they wouldn’t even see him. But he was alone in the dark and the silence of the vast ocean. He thought back on his life, remembering everything—the people he’d known; the fish he’d caught; the women he’d loved; and the wild parties—all that wasted life. And then he fell into a fitful slumber.

  Greg awoke the next day, sometime in the late morning, parched, sunburned, and hungry, the sun beating mercilessly down on him. Someone was shaking him, trying to rouse him. A commercial fisherman knelt over him, offering a drink of water as two of his shipmates tied a line from Greg’s boat to the tuna boat they worked on. Greg never told them what he was up to, and they didn’t ask. They towed him back to the closest port, in Rhode Island, then made their way back out to the open sea.

  A short time later, Greg went to a doctor who prescribed the anti-anxiety medication Xanax. He started carrying it with him all the time in the hip pocket of his jeans, always ready to pop one in his mouth, crunching it up with his teeth so it would act more quickly. (He had previously always carried a dime bag of cocaine in his pocket, so it would be ready if he needed a boost.) The Xanax didn’t solve his problem, but it eased it enough to let him go on with his routine.

  So Greg was feeling good as he drove onto the Block Island ferry in his pickup truck, full of fishing gear, coolers of beer, and bottles of whiskey, vodka, gin, and wine. He started inviting people on the ferry to come to his big party the following Friday, hoping to get the word out to as many people as possible. His friend Jeff was already motoring to Block Island in his fishing boat, and the two met shortly after Greg came ashore. It was Friday, and too early to get into the rental house, so they ended up sleeping on the beach that first night. Greg was really looking forward to fishing. Early July was a good time to find striped bass in the far eastern stretch of Long Island Sound around Block Island, where the sound meets the open Atlantic, and he eagerly awaited the chance to get out in the boat the next morning. Although Greg was a dedicated partier when the sun went down, in the morning he was all business and wanted to catch fish.

  “I was never someone who had to party all day,” said Greg. “But I liked to have fun at night. My whole life was like that. Until I was in my late twenties, most people didn’t even know that I partied.”

  Most of the week in Block Island was great. They went fishing every day and ate whatever they caught: fluke, striped bass, and more. Jeff, a diver, caught lobsters by the gunnysack-full every night, and they ate them for lunch, dinner—even breakfast, shredded into omelets. But the most spectacular catch of all was a magnificent striped bass Greg caught on a fly rod—almost by accident. He was standing on the jetty in front of the Spring House Hotel on the southeastern coast of Block Island, demonstrating to one of his friends the techniques of saltwater fly fishing. He was using a nine-weight saltwater fly rod, better for mid-sized fish, not huge stripers—and he had only a ten-pound tippet.

  In fly fishing, the angler uses a thicker, heavier, plastic-coated woven line called a fly line. It’s usually 70 to 100 feet long, and the weight of this line is what makes it possible to cast a virtually weightless fly long distances. We’ve all seen fly fisherman waving their rods back and forth like a magic wand, casting the fly line out behind them and forward again, finally dropping the fly gently down to the water. The way this works, the weight of the line as it’s thrown behind you in the back cast bends the rod back so that on the forecast, all the energy released as the rod straightens out throws the line forward powerfully yet gently, so the fly drifts down to land softly on the water. At the front end of the fly line is several feet of monofilament leader—which is much thinner and less visible than the fly line—and at the end of the leader is a gossamer-thin length of monofilament called the tippet, which is virtually invisible to the fish. The back end of the fly line, where it goes into the reel, is usually attached to 100 yards of braided Dacron line, used as a backing in case a fish makes a powerful run and spools out all the fly line.

  That morning, Greg was using an Epoxy Shiner fly, which floats on the surface and is designed to mimic a small, silvery baitfish. He cast it out into the surf and started stripping in line to impart a lifelike appearance to the fly. Then he paused and was pointing out some of the features of the fly reel to his friend, when suddenly whomp!—a massive explosion of water boiled up right where the fly had been, and the fight was on. The take was so fast and violent, the fish almost tore the fly rod out of Greg’s hand, but he instantly calmed down, his instincts for the hunt switching on in his mind.

  He knew it was a big fish, and he didn’t want to lose it, but in seconds it had already peeled out all of the fly line and was deep into the backing. He jumped down from the jetty and began running full speed along the beach in the direction the fish was traveling, trying his best not to let it spool out all his line and break off. It was a great challenge. He knew the big striper was far too heavy for a ten-pound tippet, but that was what he had to work with, and he was determin
ed to land this fish. His only hope was to slowly and carefully tire the fish out until he could pull it into the surf and get hold of it. In some ways, this was like the time he had chased the big buck up the mountain in Vermont in a snowstorm. There was no way he would quit. His entire being was in this fight. And it required all of his sensitivity as a fisherman: the feel for exactly how much tension to maintain on the line, when to let the fish run, and when to gently pull it toward him without ever using enough pressure to break the tippet.

  He worked slowly and methodically, reeling in line every time the fish was moving in his direction, and letting out line again when it pulled frantically away. Three times he reeled in all of the backing and was working with the fly line again, and three times the fish peeled it out again—one time coming dangerously close to stripping all the line from the reel. And the fish kept changing directions. Greg had to keep running up and down the shoreline, tripping and falling a couple of times as he followed the fish in its struggle to escape. It was both exhilarating and exhausting, and more than an hour later, when he finally saw the fish come rolling into the surf, Greg was staggering from the unrelenting exertion—and he didn’t have a net. With the last of his strength, he took a flying leap at the fish, like a football tackle, quickly getting hold of its lower jaw—but not before being poked by several of the spikes on the fish’s back. He dragged the fish up onto the wet sand, panting from the exertion and bleeding from being spiked. His friend just shook his head in amazement.

  “And that’s how you catch a striped bass with a fly rod!” Greg told him.

  The fish probably weighed well over forty pounds and might even have broken the world record for the largest striped bass ever caught with a fly rod. But back then, Greg had never even thought about trying to break records. He just loved to catch fish. They grilled the bass that evening, and it was plenty big enough to feed everyone and have leftovers.