How I Got Separated from the Love of My Life

        

 

"...I worked for these two clowns...one looked like Popeye and the one who sucker-punched my girlfriend looked like Ernest Hemmingway..."

 Here’s how I got separated from the love of my life, which turned out to be Miami.

          I was finished with my undergrad degree, but now it was time to decide what to do, work-wise. My degree in English sharpened my critical thinking skills to a fine edge and I was critically thinking there were no jobs out there.  I had a vague idea about wanting to teach in a women's prison eventually.

          But not yet.

          Enter Captain George from Islamorada. He was one of Jeanne’s oldest, best friends and years before he’d saved her from certain destruction by hauling her out of a bad spiral, teaching her to sail, enlisting her in the volunteer fire department and getting her out of the small town gossip machine that can grind up young dykes in little towns. He looked and talked a lot like Pop-Eye the Sailorman, cap, pipe and all.

         Now it was ten years later and he had a new job working for another captain in a tiny town in Burgaw, North Carolina. This other guy, Captain Jack, came back to the place where he grew up and was setting up a boatyard on the Cape Fear River.

         Jack was financing it with bales he smuggled on hollowed out sailboat hulls built at this very same boat yard, but we didn’t know that at first. I started to figure it out on our first payday when were handed bundles of cash wrapped in aluminum foil and doled out of an Igloo cooler.

            We’d gone up to Burgaw before graduation and I loved it. George had a beautiful woodworking shop on the first floor of this building he’d designed and constructed. From the outside it looked like a barn, but the inside was outfitted with a 2nd floor home that amazed me. Huge windows showcased the forest outside and the river flowed right by the back dock.

          I fell in love with North Carolina and when George offered us jobs, we talked it over and decided to go for it.

       Jeanne made it conditional. First, we’d need for it to be known that we weren’t doing any smuggling under any circumstances. We were there to build and work on sailboats, only. Next, we came as a set. They had to take us both even though I’d never been on a sailboat and hadn’t hammered anything since I was eleven.

       Jack, the boss, was burly and gravel-voiced and looked a little like Hemingway. The story gradually emerged that he’d spent his forties in a federal prison because he was caught off the Keys with a boatload of Jamaican marijuana. He’d kept quiet about the financers and after he was paroled, they bank-rolled him again.

        I never trusted him, and it turns out I was right not to.