Original Love. J.J. Murray

      her breathing as exhausted as her makeup.

      An old song creeps into my head,

      something about not paying the ferryman,

      and I find myself humming “Come Sail Away,”

      an even older song by Styx.

      The other people waiting seem like fallen leaves in the chilly air,

      like birds that flock to land, stretching arms out toward the bay.

      We are all helpless souls of the unburied,

      fluttering around these docks,

      so many bones in New York not yet laid to rest.

      God, my poetry is as depressed as I am.

      After buying a honey bun that I know has been aging gracelessly in the machine since August, I read the ferry regulations, the print looking fresh on a wall covered with old nautical charts and faded boating notices:

      In order to comply with United States Coast Guard regulations, the following baggage and freight procedures must be followed:

      Two (2) pieces of hand luggage is allowed, no charge. A Tariff will be imposed on all additional items. Shopping Carts & Luggage carriers—Min. charge $3.00. Luggage only is allowed in passenger areas. Loaded wagons (e.g., Radio Flyers) will not be accepted. Absolutely no bungee cords can be used. Freight must be handled on and off the ferry by crew.

      Due to quantity, size and weight of freight, limited space on board, weather conditions, loading and unloading time, and the safety and convenience of the passengers, the crew at times will limit the amount of freight carried on a trip.

      I don’t have much baggage (visible anyway), and I look at the few others waiting around me. A couple of briefcases and a few handbags. Our own thoughts will echo on this ferry. The last item—Smoking is not allowed on the docks or the ferry—makes me laugh, because as the ferry approaches, I see the captain in the fly bridge of the approaching ferry puffing a big cigar.

      After the crew tethers the burnt-orange ferry to the dock, the captain walks down the gangplank followed by a small group of people. Those waiting around me fade away like autumn shade, and I’m the only one left to take the next ferry.

      “I got a lot of freight to load,” the captain says to me, “so you might wanna reconsider what you’re bringing cuz we may have to shoehorn you in or find you a smaller boat to get across the marsh.”

      I look again at the laptop and carry-on. “I only have these.”

      He taps the laptop bag. “No bombs, knives, or box cutters in there, right?”

      “None.”

      The captain, a strong, detestably smelling old man with bloodred eyes and sweat-stained clothing, bellows orders to his crew as they herd crates and boxes into the boat. His hairy ears, bushy eyebrows, and thick gray goatee make him look every bit like a demon. I almost wish I had a penny to give him for the half thoughts in his jowly head. Better to keep my penny and my own thoughts under my tongue.

      Half an hour of stuffing and cramming later, a crew member searches my bag while I stand still. “Nine bucks,” he says.

      Waterway robbery, I think, but I pay him and drag my feet up the gangplank, mainly because I don’t really want to go to Cherry Grove, where I’m sure to stick out like a sore heterosexual.

      The captain tells me how lucky I am. “Normally I wouldn’t let you on, as full as we are,” he tells me. “Got just enough room for you. Otherwise you’d have to wait for my next run.”

      I walk into the passenger area and take my seat in front of plexiglas windows filmed with salt. I guess if I had tipped the crew member an extra five I might have actually gotten a clear view of the bay. Upon inspection, the windows seem to have a mazelike pattern on them, like a labyrinth leading to a blackened glob of bird droppings.

      Story of my life.

      The trip is uneventful, the stagnant, shadowy water of Great South Bay no more than ten to twelve feet deep, the boat groaning with its heavy load. It’s not exactly an ancient Greek adventure, and I hardly feel like an ancient hero anyway, a stale honey bun my only sustenance, a void in my head where a romantic comedy is supposed to be.

      And there’s really nothing funny about Great South Bay, the scene of one of the worst hurricanes of the twentieth century. It was so bad back in 1938 that they didn’t even have time to name the hurricane. The Captain was only thirteen and living in Montauk at the time.

      “There wasn’t any warning,” he told me once while we were caulking the longest seam in the wooden hull of the Argo. He called the entire awful job “paying the devil,” because we had to squat in the bilges for hours. Hence the title of my second book.

      “Nothing on the radio, Captain?” I was the only kid I’ve ever known who was not allowed to call his own father “Dad.” But it wasn’t so bad, and it seemed fitting on the Argo, where the Captain’s word was law.

      “Nope. I remember it was a Wednesday. Your grandpa was out with the other bay men dredging, while I was paying the devil on Old Man Mudge’s dredge. I’d come up for air every now and then because we used hot tar on the devil back then, and I saw the gulls acting funny on the shore.”

      “Funny?”

      “Like they were in a hot pan about to be cooked, jumping around like popcorn frying.”

      To this day, I check out birds when a storm is forecast. If they start “popping” off the ground, I find shelter in a hurry.

      “We had just had two weeks of rain, so the ground was soft. Gray skies as usual, seas not as heavy as the day before, wind from the north at first, then about noon it shifted to the east, and it started to rain to beat the band.”

      “Like a nor’easter.”

      “Yep. Only this nor’easter was tearing off roofs and popping power and phone lines left and right. I left that dredge in a hurry once it started rocking and rolling, and I immediately lost my way the rain was so thick, the wind whipping up to seventy knots.”

      “What did you do, Captain?”

      “At times I could see through that wall of rain, and what I saw…The sea was completely white, the air filled with sea foam, waves fifty feet and higher, fallen trees, dredges up on land, rolls of waves tearing past docks on their way in, sweeping those docks away on their way out. I headed up to the town to higher ground and rode that storm out for five hours in a hardware store. Lots of metal to dodge in a hardware store, let me tell you.

      “The storm ended by six, skies were completely clear by ten, but since we didn’t have any power, we didn’t know how bad it was till the next day.” He had paused and closed his eyes.

      “It was bad, huh.”

      “Worse. Most of the houses were damaged almost beyond repair, and your grandpa’s house ended up with five other houses in the pond. Must have been a hundred boats destroyed, some thirty of them blown a hundred yards inland. Dragnets, fish traps—gone. Your grandpa’s two boats—gone. The oysters and clams—gone. The sea just up and covered them with a million tons of sand. Wiped your grandpa and the other bay men completely out…”

      Grandpa lost his boats and his livelihood that day and later lost his mind from the grief—and the whiskey—leaving my father homeless at thirteen. And yet my father never cursed the sea that changed his life forever. He instead served in the U.S. Navy and sailed Long Island Sound every weekend of my life, even though he had lost most of the sight in his right eye by 1986. He could never get enough of the sea, even if he couldn’t see it. “There’s much to be learned from the sea,” he’d tell me. “When you’re sailing the blood of a giant, you never know which way he’ll bleed.”

      And now we’re in the same boat, I think to myself as the ferry docks near green-gray weeds swaying along the slimy shore of Fire Island.