THE YACHT CLUB HAD an extensive fleet of dinghies and keel-boats. Lessons were open to members and non-members but they were mostly attended by members. Once members attained certain qualifications, they were able to reserve boats and sail them without instructors. Most days, Berg, Garrett, and Simon performed maintenance on the yacht club’s fleet, but they also crewed on the club’s charter boat. According to Garrett, several years ago Mangini had convinced the owner of the yacht club, Lucas Vespucci, to dip his toe into the world of chartering. He said there were several companies already doing it on the bay, mostly based out of Five Brooks, and they were making a killing. Vespucci bought a Gulfstar 50 for a hundred thousand dollars and sank a hundred thousand more into it to get the boat to pass Coast Guard inspection. For the past four years she had sailed as a charter boat but she had not come close to recovering Vespucci’s initial investment. Apparently, Mangini was under pressure to book more charters this season or risked getting fired. As a result, Garrett was under pressure to book charters, and he resented this a great deal.
“I can’t control who books and who doesn’t book,” he said. “He wants me chartering and he wants me doing all the maintenance and he wants me fixing Vespucci’s dad’s canoe. I don’t know, man. I can’t be in a thousand places at once.”
“Maybe if you spent less time smoking in the parking lot we’d get the maintenance done more quickly,” Simon said.
“Simon, say that one more time and see what I do.”
“Stop smoking in the parking lot.”
“One more time.”
“Stop smoking in the parking lot.”
“One more time.”
“I already said it twice.”
“That’s what I thought, bro,” Garrett said. “Step down.”
S/V Blown Away was a large, clumsy vessel designed for retired couples who wanted to go cruising in Mexico. The boat was almost always captained by Garrett but, on occasion, Mangini hired an old British man named Carl to captain her. There were also several other part-time crew, including a young woman named Shawnecee. She wore skate shoes and jeans and she had just come back from French Polynesia, where she’d been sailing on an educational tall ship. She said she was in Talinas for the summer to make some cash and then she was heading to Alaska. The first day Berg worked with her, he went down into the galley and saw a note on the whiteboard that said, “I love you Shawnecee. You’re doing a great job. —Garrett”
When he went abovedecks again, he found Shawnecee counting out life vests. Garrett always liked to have them ready before the charter began.
“Me and Garrett got in a fight this morning,” she said.
“About what?” Berg asked.
“There were potato chips all over the deck from the charter yesterday. I meant to hose them down before he arrived but my bike had a flat and he beat me to the docks.”
“Well, he seems to have forgiven you.”
“What do you mean?”
“The note below. On the whiteboard.”
“Oh no, I wrote that,” Shawnecee said. “He’s gonna be so pissed when he sees it. Doesn’t matter though. He can’t say shit to me. We started working for Mangini at the same time. I know just as much as he does.”
The boat was usually chartered by tourists or corporations that wanted to do some kind of adventure outing for their employees. On rare occasions, the boat was booked by locals to celebrate a birthday and, once, the boat had been booked for a Greek wedding.
“They had all these rituals,” Garrett said. “They poured a jar of black sand into a jar of normal sand. It was meant to symbolize… what was it meant to symbolize, Simon?”
“It was basically just like a bar mitzvah,” Simon said.
“It was not a bar mitzvah, Simon. It was a wedding.”
“It reminded me of a bar mitzvah.”
In general, they picked up passengers at Pier 4, near Talinas, and sailed them around the bay for two hours, usually during sunset. Garrett and Simon did most of the sailing and Berg, as second mate, served food and drinks. Garrett bought all of the food at a discount grocery store: hummus variety packs, sliced cheeses, potato chips, and, if the client had ordered the “deluxe food package,” deli sandwiches. Mangini didn’t want the clients to know where the food came from so Berg was required to take it out of its packaging in the galley and serve it on a platter or in a white bowl. Whenever anyone asked where the food came from, Garrett said they had a “private caterer.”
If there was down time during a charter, Simon would show Berg how to do certain things on the boat. He learned how to raise the mainsail and how to use a winch handle and how to tie a bowline. The work wasn’t exhausting but it was physical. He liked how his body was pleasantly fatigued at the end of the day, how his skin smelled like sun.
Berg was down to about four pills a day, but he was having a hard time reducing his dose further. He was, he knew, terrified of withdrawal, traumatized by his first experience of it. His whole body wracked with pain, bone-deep pain, and freezing cold. Always the cold in the morning, icy and dry, as if he’d slept in the frozen food aisle of the supermarket. Yawning and sneezing. Diarrhea and sticky chemical sweat. His body expelling fluid through every orifice available, it seemed, except for his ears.
Now that he had a job he had begun to look at places to move, but it was difficult to find affordable housing in Talinas. He talked to one guy who wanted to rent out his trailer and an older woman who wanted a live-in caretaker. He looked for housing in Five Brooks, Glen Meadow, and Palomarin, but he couldn’t find anything. Palomarin was closer to the eastern suburban corridor and much more expensive, and Glen Meadow and Five Brooks were so small that there were never any places for rent.
Lansing’s health was steadily improving, and every morning Berg inspected her closely, resupplied her with food and water. He thought she needed to be moved out of the crate, to a larger enclosure, but he was reticent to return her to the coop. She still appeared weak and he feared that the other chickens would attack her. He decided to build her a small coop out of redwood siding and two-by-fours that he found behind the house. He was getting better with his hands now: he had picked up a few tips from Garrett and Simon and he trusted himself with the contours of basic construction.
He spent too much time building the coop, outfitting it with several embellishments, including a circular door and windowsill flowers. When he was finished, he brought Lansing out to her new home. As he watched her flap around inside the coop, he was filled with a sense of accomplishment. It was all out of proportion with what he had done, but it was a nice feeling.