Time Bandit (8 page)

My brothers and I started working on fishing boats when we were eight, and it could not have been too soon. I used to sit on the beach while Dad let me watch him sail out. I was mad about that. I wanted to work because I wanted to fish. Fishing is my oldest memory. I must have been two, and my brothers and I were aboard Dad’s fishing boat. We were out with him doing what we could do, which was not much, but it was fishing anyway. Andy was crying in a bunk, and I tried to get to him to comfort him. My dad was running the boat. I reached Andy’s bunk, and Dad told me, “I’m going to kill you if you don’t get away from there.” I could not see why he would not let me go over to Andy. But I did comfort him. After that, Dad kept me on land until I was eight. Out of the blue he told me one morning, “Come on, let’s go fishing.” That was my first working trip. As the bait boy I received one share of the catch, which meant $79 that my mother put in a savings account. I was suddenly rich beyond my imaginings. From then on, I worked for hours each day. If the fishing season was open, Andy and I fished. By the age of ten, I was working each summer with no time off. I did not know anything else. Dad said we were going fishing, and we loved it. We were like puppies. That was how fishing got in our blood. When we cut loose from Dad after we were teenagers, we looked around and we knew of nothing else with the same potential for fast money and such ample joy. Even at that tender age, we beat the older fishermen out on the fisheries. Our fish were bigger than their fish, and we caught more than they caught. That’s what life was about. We competed through and through. Fishing hooked me entirely.

If we could not fish at sea, as boys, we fished off the Spit. The Kachemak Bay was out our back door. We caught fish, made a fire in the rocks, and baked it. And what remained of our catch we sold to the fish market in Homer for $1 a crab and $5 a salmon. One time with Dad and Mom’s help we built a raft on the beach of scrap and driftwood. The finished craft weighed more than a battle tank. It sank to the bottom at the first launch. Dad felt sorry for us, I guess, because soon after he built us a hydroplane speedboat that looked sleek and dangerous, powered by two 50-horsepower Mercury engines. It was twelve feet long with a eighth-of-an-inch plywood hull. We drove with a recklessness that scared even him. He knew we would kill ourselves if we continued racing it, and he dug a hole with a backhoe and buried the boat. Even we understood why he did it. He told us, “I have given you boys every means at my disposal to kill yourselves, and you have failed.”

We did not think about luck when we went fishing. We thought of fishing as catching fish. One time, as usual, tourists were throwing lines into the waters off the Spit, frustrated when no fish were biting. Homer promotes itself as “the halibut fishing capital of the world,” and catching nothing does not conform to the ambitions of visitors who mob the Spit in the summers. Several men watched Andy and me throw a net into the water. They seemed to be amused by our boyish naïveté, I suppose. In no time, salmon filled our net. One guy slammed his pole down on the ground in disgust. Another time, we waited at midnight while visitors were combat fishing king salmon off the Spit in what we called “the fishing hole,” a specific pool where the salmon returned each year. The town of Homer had decided to open this fishery at midnight. Watching the fishermen was fun. The men took it too seriously. They threw large sharp hooks into the pool in the hopes of snagging one of the frenzied fish, which would bite at anything that entered the water. They jerked back the lines with such violence that the hooks flew out of the salmons’ mouths and planted themselves in the fishermen. The town fathers panicked over this carnage and from then on, stationed two ambulances at the ready by the pool. We threw a couple hooks, caught as many kings as we wanted, and walked off. The visitors hated us.

Boats were second nature to us. We learned to operate them starting with rowboats and skiffs and rafts. Older fishermen called us “skiff mice.” We hot-rodded them, sank them, crashed them, and bought and sold them. We could do to boats what we would never be allowed to do to cars. There were no laws on the water then. To run the outboard engines, we needed to sit on a bucket to see over the bow. People on shore could see only our heads over the gunwales. We looked like five little monkeys in yellow rain gear cruising along offshore. Later, as we graduated to more powerful outboard motors, we terrorized the Inlet. One time, we were racing kids in another skiff, and Andy turned sharply. The 25-horsepower Evinrude outboard engine flew off our boat and sank out of sight. The other boat came back and hit a wave so hard, their engine split the transom, and it too dropped to the bottom. We laughed our way in to port, paddling with an oar. Dad was not happy.

The intensity of our younger lives, with this hunger for the joy of living, inevitably reached a pinnacle that included a world of pain. Andy and I liked to jump cars and motorcycles. I do not know why. I do not know the why of most things I used to do. Once we jumped a car so high we would have landed on the front bumper if a friend named Phil, who weighed 300 pounds, had not provided ballast in the backseat. He hurt his back permanently, and that was the last time he jumped with us. It was also the last time that particular car jumped or did anything else.

Andy bought a Honda CR80 bike that he jumped going 60 mph. When he landed, the handlebars dropped around the gas tank, and by all rights his neck should have snapped. A full-face helmet—the only time I ever saw him wear it—saved him. A friend ran over to him lying on the ground and said, “Man! That’s the farthest I ever saw anyone jump in my life. Are you OK?” Andy was alive, but his spine was wrecked, and he could hardly walk. He had ruptured his spleen, hit his head, and broken ribs, and he was hallucinating when he picked himself off the ground. He could not breathe, and he said his life was flashing before his eyes. He saw sparks for days.

A few days later, I jumped off the
Frieda K
’s deck to the beach, which I thought was only five or so feet down from where I was standing. Maybe it was lower, but I was nineteen years old and thought of myself as immortal. Halfway down in midair I said to myself, “I should have landed by now.” I fell twenty-eight feet to the beach. When I hit, my chin thumped between my feet and rocks flew off my chin. I broke both my ankles and my wrist. Numb with pain, I drove myself to a party, got laid, and only then went home. I said, “Andy, man, I have to go to the hospital.” I do not know why I did not drive there myself, except I wanted to see how the pain went for a couple days on my own, like I did the time before, when my wrist was broken for a year, the bone became abscessed, and my body killed the bone. I just did not want to go to the hospital. Andy drove me to the emergency room. He was bent over like a little old man in pain and he dragged me along the corridor on my back by my one good arm. The nurses stared at us. “What the heck happened to you two?” they kept asking. They could not believe what they were seeing. The doctor told us, “You two just used up eight of your nine lives.”

When they released me from the hospital, I lived in a supermarket shopping cart for six weeks. My brothers cut a hole in the bottom so that I could go to the toilet, and they pushed me around. I could move the cart myself with a stick like an oar. It was a miserable time. We went to a Night Ranger rock concert, with me in the cart. I was in the mosh pit in the cart. The group’s guitarist, Brad Gillis, pointed at me from the stage and said, “Now
there’s
a fan.”

W
hen I was twelve, our mother Joan called it quits with Dad. Their divorce might have contributed to our recklessness. But she had tolerated his ways long enough. He understood her point but was not willing to change. She told us, “He was something else, your father. He was a good fisherman though.”

We moved with her like gypsies at first to Binghamton, New York, back to Homer, and then to Anchorage, and when she fell in love with Bob Phillips, who soon became our stepfather, we moved to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in the winters. Andy did not take well to the marriage news. We were riding in the station wagon when Bob and Mom told us about their plans. Andy jumped out the back window and ran up into the woods on the side of the road. It took a while for us to find him. To tell the truth, none of us took well to the news, and we reacted differently. My brother Dave started stuttering. With Andy, I developed an unspoken communication, like with an identical twin brother. Neal made himself scarcer. Michael, my next youngest brother, went into his own private world. We had only ourselves to depend on. We stuck together as brothers like never before.

In Idaho, Mom was religious and Bob was gentle. In Alaska, Dad was not religious; he was profane and he was rough. At home in Idaho, Mom would serve us dinner at the table; during summers in Alaska with Dad, we cooked steaks in the bow of the boat with a blowtorch. Bob tried to understand what we were going through. We were split between a mother and father who lived in two separate places and indeed, inhabited two different worlds. We had two homes and two sets of new parents, and we were uncertain which one loved us. In his way, Bob taught us to be men with solid, dependable natures that our father had never known even for himself. Bob was awesome. He had three of his own sons from a previous marriage, which made us a gang of eight boys in one house. Bob built a bike rack for ten bikes and nine motorcycles. In the house, we lived in a dormitory of bunk beds and dressers. Neighbors looked fretfully out their windows, terrified of what we planned next. We strung rope pulleys between trees. I swung from branch to branch in the tall trees like Tarzan. When we were not outside playing, we turned big appliance boxes into imaginary boats. We used our imaginations to the fullest. We were never bored. One time, when Mom came into the laundry room, we scattered but watched as she opened the dryer door. She jumped back and nearly had a heart attack. She let out a scream. And we were howling with laughter. Andy was going around and around in the dryer trying to break the family record of fifty-two spins without throwing up when he came out.

Outside in the winters, we picked the steepest hills to sled down and went skiing nearly every weekend.

One time, I told Bob, “Dad, I found a new trail. Follow me.”

He asked, “Am I going to get killed?”

I told him, “No, there’s just a little jump.”

He followed me, and at the jump he went up in the air past the ski lift coming up the hill and almost landed in the lift chair. He told me he thought I was crazy.

Mom kept us busy. At her insistence, we took turns cleaning up the bathrooms and our bedrooms. We had a big house, with four bathrooms, but eight teenage boys would have made a crowd in a barracks. With Mom’s approval, we raced soapbox cars that we made with our own hands. With Bob’s encouragement, we skied with skill and daring. One winter we built an ice skating rink. We water skied in the late spring and early fall, raced motorcycles on ten acres of woodland, and on rainy days, played foosball in the basement. Sometimes, we framed houses with Bob to keep us busy with hammers and nails. Bob let us have guns and taught us to shoot pheasants with bows and arrows, and for practice he threw Frisbees in the air as targets. After we became somewhat proficient with the bows, he took us hunting. I would not allow my brothers to kill the birds, even if they could hit them with their arrows. I brought along a cage and a net, like I was fishing for pheasants. To be honest, I never liked killing. Once I shot a seagull that died a terrible death. I felt real bad. It was sick of me to do that.

I do not hunt anymore. I figure the equation like this: A seagull bites, kicks, and scratches to get by on the Bering Sea, and some guy like me comes along with a gun and
blam
! target practice. That seagull had a right to live. Even killing machines like sharks have a right, although I am not sensitive to ants. I cannot kill an octopus. It looks at you with those pleading eyes. I feel bad about killing herring. They are looking at you, man. Like 500,000 herrings in a net mean a million eyeballs looking at me, begging me to let them go free. I feel guilty. Maybe my mortality is whispering to me. The closer I get to dying, the more respect I have for life.

Andy was smart and a faster reader. Mom never had to tell him to do his homework; I did mine in school. Somehow, in spite of my plans and my temperament, I got my diploma. At graduation, when I went up to receive my parchment, the whole class cheered, I guess because they were amazed.

We kept secrets from Mom and Bob, like that we jumped off a railroad bridge into a lake, until one day, Neal took pictures of us. Mom saw the photos and was shocked by the height of the bridge compared to us in midair between the span and the water. The biggest secret we kept was what we did, and did not do, at school. I learned that I needed to write the first excuse note of the year in my own handwriting; every succeeding note I could then write myself when I wanted to play hooky. The counterfeit notes passed muster with the school principal, who compared the handwriting. I learned math by recalculating the number of days of school I could miss without being expelled. I was playing hooky in my senior year the day of our class picture; my classmates put a mannequin where I would have sat in the bleachers. It was not that I hated classes. I did not see the point. I knew what I wanted to do with my life. Each summer living with Dad proved in dollars and cents that fishing could be my living. Those teenage summer earnings ruined any thought of education beyond high school. At seventeen, I spent ten months on the ocean and made $128,000 back in the early 1980s. I bought three pickup trucks—and quickly totaled two of them. I did not invest or save. I did not pay taxes. I bought no land. I blew the money in one year without a sigh. With more money to be earned the next season, riches would never run out. As teenagers my brothers and I earned $12,000 in one summer working for Dad on his boat
Bold Ruler—
and $8,000 was a normal earning for us in the summers in the 1970s. I bought motorcycles, stereos, four-wheelers, cars, skis, clothes, and every one of our hearts’ desires. I earned more than our teachers. I learned that money does not bring you happiness, but it buys you a new wet bike, and try not to smile when you are driving your wet bike! I had no sense of responsibility. I was going to fish my whole life. Why would I want a college education?