[When did I start writing Stripah Love? I can’t remember specifically, but I think it was in the aftermath of leaving Chelsea Green, publisher of books for sustainable living. I was recently separated from my wife of 28 years, and actively caring for my 80+ year old mother. It was many years before the “Me, Too” movement, but almost every male executive I knew had a horror story to share about an unreasonable woman. Cracks were appearing in the glass ceiling, many of them caused by ladies wielding hammers. SB SM]
Sandy Beach’s Fishing Forecast for May
Stripers Return to Boston Harbor
This is what we’ve been waiting for. This is what we live for. The harsh winter and early spring are over, the stripers are returning to the harbor with a vengeance. Herring are finding their ways into all the area rivers—the Charles, the Neponset, Black’s Creek—and the bass are right behind them. Good fishing has been reported in Winthrop, Hingham Bay, the Charles River Locks, and the Amelia Earhart Dam. This coming week will see stripers appearing in good numbers and sizes in most places with structure. No big fish yet, but there’s a lot of fun to be had on light tackle. Just about any baitfish imitation will do.
Now’s a good time to take a day off from work to go chase them.
–Sandy Beach, from The Boston Globe
A quick trip to London. My Mother, My Lover….. is doing modestly well. Brits can’t understand the controversy. An ordinary man is engaged, overwhelmed, and eventually victimized by the women in his life. What’s the big deal? Artie is interviewed in Time Out Magazine. The interviewer asks him about camera angles and lighting choices. Artie fields them deftly, and feels that maybe he has turned the corner. When his plane lands, however, it is right in the middle of a shitstorm of tabloid reporters. Who was the real-life model for the lawyer? What did he have to say about Cameron Diaz saying she had been “tricked” into doing the movie? Had he heard about the viewer response to the 60 Minutes interview?
Artie lands at Logan International, gets his car from Central Parking, and plunges toward the cottage, stopping only to swap vehicles with Cuzzin. OK, he gulps one beer. He has worked out his strategy on the plane ride. First, make a place to sleep. Then, get the services—electricity, gas, and water—connected. Regroup. Buy tools and supplies. Restore the cottage to its simple summer glory as it exists in his memory. He thinks he can have everything done by Memorial Day. That gives him five weeks.
The same two kids are playing basketball. They regard him with trepidation. A stranger has come to town. His presence won’t be unnoticed in a small community like Indian Mound.
A pale green has infused the vegetation. The forsythia is brilliant, but needs to be trimmed. Spring has sprung.
“Trim forsythia. I’ll make that as #72 on the to-do list,” Artie tells himself.
Inside the cottage, his first goal is light. He unshutters the windows, then begins to drag rugs and furniture out onto the lawn. The air is dank and musty. The insects regard him with the same expressions as the kids on the street.
“Get used to it,” says Artie aloud. “There’s a new kid in town, and you’re going to have to make room, because he ain’t going away.”
After two hours, the shamble of the cottage has grown to become the shamble of the front yard. Each step backward is accompanied by two more steps backward. He unrolls a braided rug, and frees a family of mice who have nested with the material that used to be the rug’s center. Throw it in the truck. It looks like a trip to the landfill has moved up on the priority list.
Things break or don’t work. Little things like door latches and windows. Stopping to fix each one takes time. The tools he has to work with are rusted and ravaged by years of exposure to salt water and general neglect. Moreover, for most of his adult life Artie has lived in a world where other people have taken care of his basic survival needs. He is hopelessly deficient in basic life skills. He can manage a cast of thousands and bring a hundred million-dollar film in on time and on budget, but he doesn’t really understand how a window works.
His eyes betray him. The last time he spent time on Indian Mound he hadn’t needed glasses. Now they are essential every time he needs to band a nail or turn a screw. The glasses are on and off. He loops them into his shirt, sticks them in his pocket, places them a convenient flat surface. He spends half his time looking for his glasses. And it’s only a matter of time until he breaks them. Two steps back.
By lunchtime Artie has accumulated enough refuse in Cuzzin’s truck to warrant a trip to the dump. His spirits brighten. It’s a beautiful day, and he will accomplish something by getting rid of a truckload of moldy crap. Plus, it’s liberating to be driving a battered old truck. He stops at a sub sandwich shop and orders himself a large meatball with the works.
“Do you have a rest room?”
“Sorry, no.”
Oh, shit. I’m going to have to eat my sandwich with hands that have spent the morning in spiderwebs and mouse turds? Artie put on an expression of vulnerability and helplessness.
“Uh, well, you can come back here and use the utility sink.”
“Heh-heh-heh-heh,” smiles Artie to himself. Who’s the actor and who’s the director here?
Artie drives to a small turnoff just off Ocean Avenue where he can look out at the Bay and the islands of Boston Harbor. He used to know all their names. Let’s see, that one’s Peddocks, and that’s Rainsford or maybe Georges Island. There’s a Civil War fort there. And the little one is Hangman’s, and behind it is Long Island. He is proud that so many names come back to him.
Only a month ago he was a regular at Spago’s. Wolfgang Puck would come out to greet him whenever he went into his restaurant. At his favorite sushi joint they would bring him a plate of his custom creations (none of them even on the regular menu!) automatically. All he had to do was sit at his regular table. Enough people were turned onto his plate that you could now order “the Arthur Gordon Special.”
Damn, this is a good sub, thought Artie. He didn’t even mind that he was wearing the sandwich on his pants.
At the landfill he was stopped by a very fat man perched precariously on a plastic folding chair.
“Where’s your sticker?”
“I need a sticker? Looks like I don’t have one.”
“Resident of Quincy?”
“Yes, I am. I’ve got a summer cottage down—“
“Identification?”
“I’ve got identification, but it won’t show me as a resident of Quincy.”
“How about a tax bill?”
“Not with me.”
“A piece of mail addressed to you at your Quincy address?”
“No.”
“Any way to prove you’re a resident of Quincy?”
“Just my word.”
“Well, then, you’re shit out of luck.”
Artie blew out a sigh of frustration and reached for his wallet, extracting a twenty and waving out the driver’s side window. “Can’t I just pay a fee?”
This provoked the man to laboriously extract his mass from the chair and to lumble (a combination of lumber and waddle) to the truck.
“What do I look like to you?” he asked Artie. “A fat slob,” immediately came to mind, but Artie settled for the more diplomatic:
“A guy doing his job.”
“Very good,” said the man. “Excellent. And do you know what my job is? My job is to enforce the rules. The rules are very simple. To use the landfill you need to be a resident of Quincy and you need to purchase a sticker for a measly ten dollars to give you unlimited use of the dump and recycling center. If you don’t have a sticker, but you can prove you are a resident of Quincy, you can use the facilities for a fee of $5 per use. You have neither a sticker nor proof of residency, therefore, you can’t use the landfill.”
“Oh, come on,” protested Artie, “Just take the twenty and let me dump this stuff.”
“Do I look like a corrupt civil servant to you?”
Artie jammed the truck into reverse and tried to show his disgust by spinning up a cloud of dust with his exit. He muttered all the way to Cuzzin’s Bait & Tackle, where he amused his cousin immensely with his description of the encounter. When he finally stopped laughing, Cuzzin grabbed a fresh beer, turned the sign on the front window to “Closed.”
“Are we going back there?” You bet, said Cuzzin. Gonna talk some sense with this guy. “There’s two of us and one of him.”
Cuzzin takes the wheel and they retrace Artie’s route to the landfill. The truck stops next to the fat man perched on his plastic throne. “Hey, you fat wuss” growls Cuzzin. “I got a guy here who wants to rip off your head and take a shit in your neck.”
The man approached the truck with what Artie saw as uncontrolled menace. Cuzzin held his ground. As he reaches the vehicle he says, “Hey, Fuck Face.” The men tap fists.
“Howyadoin’, Knobby? This here’s my cousin Artie. He grew up with me on Indian Mound.”
“Howyadoin’, Artie?” said Knobby, the menace gone.
“Howyadoin’?” reflects Artie.
Cuzzin and Knobby exchange pleasantries about how ugly the other is, with various side comments about the other’s sexual inadequacy. Artie just soaks it all in. Finally, Cuzzin says, “So what do we have to do to get rid of this shit?”
“Just dump it in that pile over there,” says Knobby.
“Thanks, man.”
“No problem.”
“I’ll probably be bringing up more stuff,” says Artie. “Where do I get a sticker?”
“Ahh, don’t bother. So long as you’re haulin’ shit in Cuzzin’s truck I’ll wave you right through.”
They dump their load. On the way out, Knobby waves, “Nice meetin’ ya, Artie.”
“You’ve made a friend,” says Cuzzin.