I’d have gone to sea. At twelve years old, I got an itch to head east as soon as I could. In bed I listened to news reports from the East Coast on a transistor radio. Imagining freighters on a Great Lakes I’d barely seen, I checked the nightly race results from Northfield Park near Cleveland, even though Lake Erie didn’t seem far enough east. Fiddling with the tuning switch between Midtown and a wider Manhattan, I followed every murder, the earplug tucked into my right ear. I dreamed of transport to Nassau County. Feeling a strong kinship with the Atlantic, I wrote the Merchant Marine Academy for application materials. When they arrived, I filled them out immediately, even though I was still years from finishing high school. I could see myself on the bridge of an oil tanker, negotiating the Suez.
The origins of this extended geography remain cryptic. In a grade school library, I found a scribbling in the margins of a biology textbook long past useful—an erotic drawing of a man with a mermaid in his lap. The image made me catch my breath—she looked just like our neighbors’ teen- aged daughter, just a year older than me. As an adolescent, I collected maps; my old man would bring them back from medical conventions in Boston and Montreal. I studied charts of the Atlantic, learned the depths of the Grand Banks and the North Sea as well as the subtleties of nautical codes. Alone at home, I’d stand in the backyard and signal the neighbors’ daughter, flags flapping in desperate, abrupt movements.
I finally announced the firm intention to go to sea one morning at the breakfast table when I was fourteen, a week-old powdered doughnut in my mouth.
“So, now you’re a sailor?” my old man asked.
He explained that I’d have to learn to sail the tall ships at the academy. For the following four weeks, he woke me at 3:30 a.m., whistling reveille through his teeth. In his bathrobe, he led me to the backyard and forced me into the trees. He had run ropes between the solider oaks and maples there. Shirtless and barefoot, I moved along his rope course. He sprayed me with the garden hose while he laughed. The rope burns were exquisite.
“Ahoy, seaman!” he said, soggy cigarette dangling from his lip. “I need you in the crow’s nest! Know them ropes! You hear your captain?”
I screamed my loyalty into the black 4:00 a.m. I fought for air as he aimed the cold spray at my face. Sometimes, I threw up. The nested squirrels were the only witnesses of my humiliation until the cops at the end of their graveyard shift showed up. Wakened from their boredom, they stood at the bottom of the tree, laughing with my old man, as they too shouted barely intelligible commands challenging my manhood and my proclivities for “regimental life.” He never let them handle the hose itself—a source of abiding disappointment for them, I remain sure.
Once in a while, I’d slip and tumble out of the trees. “Man overboard!” they’d laugh.
He’d lead them into the house and brew a pot of coffee, while I checked my wounds for scrapes or dislocations. As he went into the house, he’d holler over his shoulder, “Quarters inspection at 0450, sailor. Tell your lazy brother to get his ass up.”
For breakfast, he handed me a paper bag of hardtack.
My half-brother Randy’s only interest in my naval diversions was how they invited the use of fireworks. He gave me what he called “submarine training,” putting a trash can over my head while he set off M-80s and cherry bombs as close to the can as he dared. Next door, the neighbors’ daughter howled with laughter as she hopped on her trampoline.
“You’ve got to be able to stand the depth charges if you end up in a submarine,” he said, one of my old man’s cigarettes dangling from his lip. He’d light the bomb. “Fire in the hole …”
And boom.
Garin Cycholl’s recent work includes Country Musics 20/20, a collection of shorter poems (Locofo Press 2017), as well as the one-act play, “Ms. Liberty and Her Chastity Belt.”
