Floaters Page 3

  What a time that was! A DC-10 was almost filled with only America’s Cup rooters when it landed back in San Diego on a Saturday afternoon. A parade of convertible cars was hastily formed and were driven with the Cup and the conquerors from the airport to the Broadway Pier, then back to the plane and on to New York to meet Ronald Reagan and two thousand yachting enthusiasts. The Keeper of the Cup nostalgically recalled it all: the pipers, the bands, the yacht club commodores, all waiting for them in New York.

  And he resented the yachting world for criticizing San Diego’s handling of the Cup. From 1851 to 1983 the Keepers of the Cup at the New York Yacht Club had never shown the Cup to anybody, yet the San Diego Yacht Club had shown it to the world. And he, an unpaid volunteer, just a dedicated club member, had lovingly protected that baroque twenty-seven-inch chunk of silver everywhere it went—and it had gone somewhere five hundred and thirty times in seven and a half years!

  And if the Kiwi challengers were successful? If he thought too much about losing the Cup forever, he believed he might weep—this man who’d not wept when he lost a father, a sister, and a mother, all within the brief span of years since he’d been named Keeper of the Cup.

  Even his mother had held her tongue and stopped her invidious comparisons after he’d returned from his second trip to England in May 1991. It was the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of Garrard, the Crown jewelers, whose silversmiths had fashioned the original cup from one hundred antique pieces of silver. Queen Victoria had ordered three of the “hundred guinea cups” from Garrard in 1851, but only the one remained.

  Margaret Thatcher had made a wonderful speech that day as she stood on the Garrard staircase. She spoke without notes and he’d gotten to shake her hand afterward. His mother, a diehard Anglophile who’d never missed an episode of Masterpiece Theatre, had peppered him with questions, and he’d said yes, it’s true that Denis Thatcher is very sweet but horribly henpecked. And that Denis (they were on a first-name basis, of course) had invited him to come over for the Chelsea flower show.

  Actually, he’d never met Mrs. Thatcher’s husband, but for once his mother had been forced to shut her mouth. For once, he had been more than mediocre.

  And the Cup never traveled as baggage. When it was packed in its protective crate, it weighed, along with its cart, one hundred and fifty pounds, and it rode beside him either in a first-class seat or in business class whenever they traveled abroad. The San Diego Yacht Club charged the requesting entity a fee of $1,000 a day, plus $125 a day for the Keeper of the Cup, plus airfare and per diem. Jaded international airline pilots who saw celebrities every day would actually leave the cockpit to come and chat with him and often asked to have their photos taken with the America’s Cup.

  The truth was, the rest of the sailing world was far more impressed than were citizens of the United States with this, the oldest sporting trophy on the planet. To them it represented history and tradition, things America had devalued. And it represented money, both old—typified by the New York Yacht Club—as well as new, typified by an upstart millionaire like Bill Koch and the irrepressible seagoing hustler, Dennis Conner.

  When the Keeper of the Cup rose to clear the breakfast dishes from the patio table, he was overwhelmingly sad and depressed. But later while shaving he got a churning in his gut. Not a wave exactly, more like an electric current. He was strangely anxious, almost frightened. His face felt hot. Flickers of an idea bombarded him.

  He willed the amorphous images back into a corner of his mind and began shaving more deliberately, busying himself with routine. He hadn’t liked that current.

  Concentrating on his well-boned but weather-lined face, he thought his brother-in-law might be able to do something about the wattles under his chin. But his eyelids? He wondered if laser surgery was all it was cracked up to be. He was pretty sure Bradley wouldn’t give him a dime’s worth of discount. Bradley was resentful that as Sheila’s widowed husband, he and their two grown children hadn’t gotten a share in her mother’s house, even though Bradley’s net worth was ten times greater than the value of the ramshackle family home in Point Loma.

  Then he paused to examine his pale hair, more the color of taffy than the silver he preferred. A yacht club dermatologist had told him that it would stop receding, but it hadn’t. The photos of himself covering the wall of his bedroom proved it. A picture of him showing the Cup to King Juan Carlos of Spain. Next to that a photo of him shaking hands with King Harald of Norway. Another with former King Constantine of Greece. And one of his favorites, when he definitely had more hair than now, with Princess Anne at the Royal Thames Yacht Club. She had been surprised that he was not the commodore of the San Diego Yacht Club, but he had informed Her Highness that the commodore was not fond of travel and that he, in a way, had a more exalted title—Keeper of the Cup.

  Then he felt it: fear! He tried to trim his neat graying mustache, but his hands began trembling. He put down the scissors, went into his mother’s old sewing room, now his study, and rummaged through folders of America’s Cup clippings and other material he’d collected. When he found what he was looking for he stopped breathing for a moment: a photo of the French boat after it had been dropped to the ground, its keel protruding right through the deck.

  It was like a slam of thunder over Point Loma. The fully formed idea surged like a wave crashing over him, washing away fear, leaving excitement roiling in its wake.

  —

  The lifeguards were cop wannabes who’d been given limited police powers in Mission Bay. That is, they could write tickets in their rescue boat, and they could help control the armada of boaters swarming the bay on weekends and holidays. The police officers who manned the Harbor Unit of the San Diego Police Department tolerated lifeguard antics, except on those occasions when an overzealous, unarmed lifeguard might opt to front-off some three-hundred-pound tweaker in a dirtbag boat he put into the water only about twice a year. In fact, a tweaker’s bay cruiser was more or less a floating pickup truck—with more water leaks and less gas mileage—that he could drive with his mitts full of beer cans. To brake, a tweaker just ran into another boat.

  Of course, most of those tweak monsters chose to bring along their old ladies and three or four kids they may or may not have fathered, as well as the pit bull that guarded their crystal meth on and off the water. And you could bet they’d have a broken-down pile of smoke-belching iron with two flat tires left illegally parked near the launching ramp. So when the cops would eventually have to come to a lifeguard’s rescue, they’d inherit a boatload of seagoing melanoma, and they’d end up dealing with the whole shebang, dog included.

  Cops referred to lifeguards as rad dudes who’d turned a summer job into a career. Whenever the police boat cruised by the red lifeguard boat anchored by the south jetty, the cops could expect to find a lifeguard kicking back and staring blissfully out to sea, uttering things like: “Land can be totally gnarled, but out there”—a wave of the hand—“out there, dude! It’s…cosmically metaphysical!”

  That would chase away the police patrol every time, leaving the lifeguard to gaze out metaphysically, waiting for the green flash that sometimes appeared when the sun dropped below the horizon.

  That’s how the cops wanted the lifeguards: gazing out to sea, not rampaging around Quivira Basin unnecessarily pissing off some tattooed biker on a rented Jet Ski. Or, worse yet, fronting-off the Asian gangbangers who hung out at South Cove, mad-dogging any rival gang that infringed on their turf. The cops called that part of Vacation Isle “Laos Beach.”

  Every cop could relate an incident of pulling lifeguard fat out of the fire when the water cowboys were out doing Clint Eastwood aqua-style. The lifeguards longed to carry guns, but if they ever got that kind of police power, the cops wanted body armor. Better to risk drowning in a flak jacket than to get accidentally blown away by an aging surfer who’d no doubt look at the dead cop he’d just ventilated and say, “Sorry, dude. That was totally uncool of me.”

  Or, as the
Harbor Patrol sergeant-in-charge put it: “Lifeguards should spend their lives facing west toward the ocean. Not east toward the parking lots.”

  That Saturday morning, April Fools’ Day, one of the lifeguards was impressing the bejesus out of a ride-along female citizen by whipping his boat into 180s on Fiesta Bay west of a tiny patch called Government Island, which housed the Lindbergh Field airport beacon. Of course, the lifeguard boats were not designed to do 180s, and ride-along citizens were not designed to stand perfectly balanced on the whitecapped waters of Mission Bay, so…

  When the Harbor Unit cop who’d photographed the secret French keel pulled the half-drowned ride-along from the foamy chop, he said to her, “That’s why we call the lifeguard boat The Ejaculator.”

  On warm afternoons there was a huge number of pleasure craft in the 4,600-acre aquatic park, including “personal watercraft” such as Jet Skis, Wet Bikes, Dynafoils, Wave-Runners, and Wave-Jammers. Most of the park, 2,500 acres in fact, was under water to a maximum depth of twenty feet. There were usually a hundred or so motor homes illegally parked around the bay, and because the parking lots are closed from 2:00 A.M. to 4:00 A.M., the motor homes had to move out during those hours, a small inconvenience compared to the free use of bayfront property, manicured lawns, and nice public bathrooms if you didn’t mind sharing them with the occasional rat-fucking transient.

  That afternoon the cops happened to cruise past the Aussie compound when AUS-31 was returning from a practice run on the ocean. The Aussies were down to one boat and stood little chance against the coldly efficient Kiwis. Three weeks earlier, during a race against New Zealand, oneAustralia had lost one of its two sloops, the first such sinking in the entire history of America’s Cup racing. The boat developed cracks on both sides of the hull aft of the mast, then jackknifed and sank in less than two minutes.

  When the ocean poured into the sloop, a crewman turned incredulously to another and said, “Big fella, are we sinking?” He answered his own silly question by jumping overboard, along with everyone else. The “sewer man” belowdecks who tended the sails was lucky to escape with his life.

  The Aussies waved a g’day at the police patrol boat, and one of the Aussie sailors, a massive grinder from Perth, yelled, “Buy you a Foster’s later!”

  The cops gave him a thumbs-up. They liked the gregarious, hard-drinking Aussies as much as they disliked the demanding French, who had recently squabbled with them over cars parking near their compound, where they’d set up their own little restaurant to avoid eating the disgusting local fare.

  “Most necessary zat we park here,” the Frog informed the cops. “Please to move ze toureests from ze street!”

  The cops told the Frenchman that the tourists were citizens of the country, not guests who were going home soon and therefore wouldn’t have to cope with people who annoyed and vexed them, people who bathed every day. Then the cops reminded the Frenchman that when it came to illegal parking they were world-class, parking their Citroëns on lawns, sidewalks, and driveways. Picnickers couldn’t leave an egg-salad sandwich unattended without a funny French car backing over it.

  After the Frog looked at the cops’ name tags, he realized that these were the same two who had demeaned the French before the world by photographing their keel. He threw up his hands in disgust and stormed off.

  The photographer’s name tag said FORTNEY. His partner’s said LEEDS. Each had been with the Harbor Unit for more than five years and neither wanted to work anywhere else, even though the unit was constantly threatened by budget cuts that might do away with the patrol altogether. In which case they’d have to return to regular dry-land patrol or, if they were lucky, to a plainclothes job somewhere. Fortney had twenty years in the police department and Leeds had nine.

  Their patrol-boat radio was on the Northern Division VHF police frequency, which they were supposed to monitor, but they usually got sick of listening to it and turned it off. All that scurrying around by landlocked cops who were slaves to radios? Not for them. They preferred to serve out their police careers in “Club Harbor Unit,” working the four-ten plan: four ten-hour days, three days off.

  The water cops couldn’t get weekends off like regular patrol officers, especially not in summer when pleasure craft swarmed Mission Bay shore to shore, but there were other compensations. One was that they had a day job, 9:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. They didn’t work at night because there was no boat traffic at night. At dusk, even in the open-speed area of Fiesta Bay, boaters had to slow down to five miles an hour, the same speed limit as in the channels and smaller passages all over the water park.

  The water cops thought their uniform alone was a plus. Instead of the regular tan SDPD wool blend, the Harbor Unit got to wear comfortable cotton khaki with an embroidered badge that wouldn’t rust in the salt spray. And nylon gun belts with a quick-detacher in case they fell overboard. And blue baseball caps, with blue jackets that doubled as flotation devices. They could even wear shorts, weather permitting. Nylon gun belts were issued after it was discovered that in just a few months on the bay, a leather Sam Browne would come to resemble an elephant’s ass.

  So far, Leeds hadn’t come up with an April Fool’s Day joke to play on his boss. Two years earlier he’d gone to the trouble of capturing a ground squirrel and putting it in the bottom drawer of the sergeant’s desk. Recapturing it after it scared the crap out of the guy had nearly destroyed the entire office.

  These days Leeds was preoccupied with politics rather than practical jokes. A hobnailed Republican, he’d dedicated himself to purging the nation of President Clinton, whom he called the dude with the world’s worst taste in babes. Anything could bring on a political diatribe. When they cruised past the Youth Camp area on Fiesta Island and a boozy bunch of teenagers playing volleyball on the beach flipped them off, Leeds said, “I wanna retire to a place where everyone waves at cops with all their fingers. It’s still not too late to turn the country around if the Republicans get the White House.”

  “Here we go again.” Fortney sighed.

  Leeds said, “Okay, okay,” meaning he wouldn’t get started on politics that irritated Fortney, a self-styled Libertarian who believed that all politicians were gasbags and that people who belonged to tongs and tribes were better led.

  To get Leeds off the subject Fortney pointed to an up-to-the-minute yupster standing on the bow of a 31-foot Chaparral with twin screws and a radar arch. The guy wore one of those banded-collar shirts with trendy sleeves down past his elbows, brand-new chambray shorts, and sockless Top-Siders. He was topped off by a Greg Norman golf hat, and lazily swung a five iron while his bikini-clad girlfriend drove the boat. He’d stop each swing at the top and pose, asking her if his club had passed horizontal.

  “He swings like one of Jerry’s kids,” Fortney said. “Get him a telethon. Tonight he’ll be in the cabin with palms up staring at a crystal pyramid and listening to Yanni. I’ve seen chimps better dressed on the David Letterman show.”

  Leeds said, “You’re just jealous of his boat. And his clothes, and especially his girlfriend.”

  “Well, no shit,” said Fortney. “How observant you are.”

  “Trouble with you is, you’re a very archaic person for someone who ain’t that old,” Leeds said, checking out the babe, who smiled at him.

  Fortney said, “In August I’m forty-five. Then I’m old.”

  “You been old for years,” Leeds said. “Give the modern world a chance. You probably didn’t vote Republican in the last election because our senatorial candidate’s wife was a New Age preacher. Am I right?”

  Fortney replied, “Okay, name the most nonsensical things in the modern world if it isn’t New Age music, decaf coffee, booze-free beer, and Ross Perot.”

  “You didn’t vote for our candidate, did ya?” Leeds persisted. “Even though lots of political leaders had crackpot spouses. People like Abe Lincoln, Ferdinand Marcos, Nelson Mandela, Hillary Clinton.”

  “There you go again,” Fortney said. “I h
appen to think Willie’s main squeeze is sexy. If I ever take a third wife I’d like somebody much like Hillary Clinton, only warm-blooded.”

  “What was wrong with that babe down at the bar the other night?” Leeds wanted to know. “The cuppie with the black hair and slightly gray roots? She doesn’t have Hillary’s chunky loins, but what the hell.”

  “What’s a cuppie?”

  “That’s what they call the America’s Cup groupies,” Leeds said. “Cuppies.”

  “Nothing’s wrong with her except she’s older than the regatta.”

  “She told me she’s thirty-eight.”

  “Sure,” Fortney said. “If you ever pull off her panty girdle, just count the rings and report back if she’s thirty-eight.”

  Leeds eyed a leggy babe sprawled on the seat of a 22-foot ski boat. Her boyfriend tried to throttle back to the speed limit as soon as he spotted the cops. “I won’t be pulling off panty girdles,” he said. “My marriage is as sacred to me as Gramma’s underpants.”

  Fortney didn’t reply. He knew that his handsome young partner spent at least two nights a week at the little gin mill on Quivira Way, feasting on Aussie leftovers whenever the professional sailors weren’t around to handle roving cuppies.

  “Look at this,” Fortney said suddenly, turning the Boston Whaler toward a rented Bayliner that had run aground at Crown Point.

  There were six black gangbangers on the grounded powerboat, all in colors. Each one wore an oversized tank top or sweatshirt and Jams baggy enough to hold his ass and a case of Colt 45 malt liquor. Two of the bangers had shaved heads, two others wore knit caps; all wore black high-top sneakers, half unlaced. They were trying to look bad, but that’s pretty hard to do when you’re sitting dead in the water and a beach full of white teenagers is hooting and hollering.