Coming Ashore Read online

  “It shocks me that you study day and night and you still pray. So we are both shocked and appalled by one another.” I had had it with her ingratitude and her moral superiority. “Some of the great poets that you love to the point of distraction thought the concept of God was ridiculous. When do you think Coleridge was last on his knees?”

  “Wordsworth was a believer.”

  “And in love with his sister.”

  “You know as much about Wordsworth as you do about Old English.”

  I was sick of her sermonizing; I’d had enough of that in Catholic school and I was full to the gills with it. “Listen, your father is a little preacher in Maine who wants his daughter to be a chip off the old block. He reads Donne and is miserable and you read Wordsworth and are miserable. I have news for you. I have no idea if Wordsworth was having sex with his sister, but I can tell you one thing, he was having more fun than you.”

  “I will someday get a job at a prestigious university.”

  “And stew in your own juice, praying to some God that ­depressed your father and will depress you.” She was silent and I was still enraged so I threw in, “God is some hellfire-and-brimstone figure made up by a bunch of puritans to keep their peckers in their pants.”

  “People who live your lifestyle die unhappily.”

  “I haven’t had sex yet or even stayed out all night. I squeaked by in Old English. Gee, does it get any more depraved than that?” I felt like steam was coming out of my ears. “Listen, at least I could tell my parents I was no longer a believer. They’d still love me. You don’t have to be everything your parents are, you know.”

  “I have heard you talking on the phone in the corridor. Your father doesn’t even know who you are.” She had no idea my father had a brain tumour but still she was scraping the bottom of a very deep barrel.

  “Does yours? Or is he just looking at what he wants to believe is a reflection of himself?” Though tempted to go on, I turned out the light and rolled over to face the wall.

  >> <<<br />
  London was then dubbed “Swinging London,” and it put New York to shame. I bought miniskirts and bell-bottom pants and a very hairy sheepskin vest that stank and curled when it was wet outside or even just damp in my room. As I came down the stairs in the morning, Clive would yell up, “I smell rancid mutton.”

  When we were all cavorting down Carnaby Street, we ran into a friend of Clive’s from Eton who had, as he said, “defected to Cambridge” and finished last year. He and his girlfriend were going to go to Oxford that evening so they offered us all a ride back even though it would be a tight squeeze. We, particularly Margaret-­Ann and I, wanted to save money on the train so we took the ride.

  Clive’s friends were “mods.” The man had on a maroon velvet waistcoat. Under the coat he wore a ruffled shirt and black tight pants with slit pockets. The ensemble was topped off with a flowing purple scarf. No man I knew wore a scarf for decoration. The girlfriend wore a white plastic micro-miniskirt accompanied by matching boots with enormous platforms and buttons and laces. She also wore a top covered in small mirrors that tinkled like a wind chime when she walked. This couple was amazingly cool and if I thought I could tie my hair on top of my head as she had and look that “happening,” I’d have been thrilled.

  We met up in Soho and the six of us piled into a miniature station wagon. We were all singing along to the radio as it blasted José Feliciano’s version of “Light My Fire.” I looked up at a traffic light as José tried to set the night on fire and saw a policeman’s face pressed against the car window only inches from my face. I screamed in fright as though I’d just seen Beelzebub, jolting every­one in the car. The dandily dressed driver immediately reached into the glove compartment, pulled out a canister and whipped off the lid to reveal a row of home-baked brownies. He said we had to gulp them down right away while he stalled the bobby. He then got out of the car, slamming the door behind him.

  Clive and Peter gulped down two in record time and gave me two, which I wolfed down. As Margaret-Ann chewed on her third brownie, she said in her usual lugubrious tone, “I can’t lose my scholarship.”

  “Then eat and shut your gob,” the wind-chime girlfriend said from the front seat without turning around.

  We had just finished the last crumbs when the police had us all get out of the car; they took everything out, including the seats. They found the empty canister and asked what it was and the wind chimer said in her upper-crust accent, “Obviously an empty biscuit tin.”

  Apropos of nothing, Margaret-Ann said in an uncharacteristically cheerful tone to the bobby, “I love your hat.”

  The policeman looked at her, not knowing how to take her. There she stood in her drop-pleated skirt, red cardigan, navy boiled-wool double-breasted coat and sensible shoes, smiling like she was seeing London for the first time and loving it.

  “Thank you, marm,” he muttered.

  “You know I have always wondered why you fellows don’t wear your strap under your chin instead of on it,” she said.

  “Margaret-Ann, this constable is busy,” Peter said.

  “Well, it is strange,” she said, stretching the word strange out like it was elastic. She spoke so loudly and with such eccentric ­intonation that passersby were slowing down and eyeing the spectacle of all of us standing in a row before the police and the car seats lounging on the curb at Oxford Circus on a bitter February night.

  “I am not giving you a ticket this time, but I’m telling you right now, don’t go travelling around again with that number of folks in a mini.”

  We got in the car, and Peter said between clenched teeth, “­Quiet until we are away.”

  Finally, when we turned a corner in Soho, I said, “I like your hat?” and we all laughed hysterically.

  “There is no way I can drive to Oxford until I’m straighter,” the waist-coated man said. “We all need to come down for a while.”

  “I have to get back to review my notes for tomorrow’s tutorial,” Margaret-Ann said.

  “Relax. No one ever reviews their notes,” I said.

  “I’m giving a presentation.”

  “To one man — your professor. You’ll be fine.”

  “I have to get back!”

  “Margaret-Ann! No one is driving us to the train so put a sock in it,” I said. The others nodded.

  After about five minutes of silence, Margaret-Ann said, “Wait a cotton-pickin’ minute here. Could those signal lights be winking at us? I think they are.”

  It turned out this velvet guy was somehow involved with managing some musical performers. He said we could go to a jazz club on the edge of Soho. So we went back to within a block of where we’d started. It was now after midnight.

  The club was downstairs in a cramped hot half cellar. It was like being in a basement rec room in Buffalo. There were only a few tables, and the bar only held two stools that were directly ­under black lights. The only source of heat was the thick cigarette smoke. No one was more than a few feet from the stage. The bouncer, named Crocodile, greeted the velvet-clad dandy as though he were Lloyd George. He even knew the beautiful ­tinkling girlfriend.

  We sat down and Margaret-Ann said with gusto to the waiter, “I’m starving.” He informed her that the kitchen was closed.

  “Oh no!” Margaret-Ann yelled and dramatically banged her head on the table. The manager just glared at Margaret-Ann, since Eric Burdon was onstage singing “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.”

  As he sang, I wove my way through the thick blue smoke to get bags of crisps for everyone. When I dumped them on the table, everyone dove for a bag.

  I popped a crisp in my mouth and started coughing, then ­choking. I said to Clive, “Are there salt grains the size of dice sprinkled on this chip? I just swallowed one.”

  Mousy Margaret-Ann, who never spoke loud enough for me to hear everything she said, was
yelling to the waitress, “More potato chips over here, please.”

  “She is going to bring you a fried potato. You want ‘crisps.’”

  I returned my attention to the stage and for the first time in my life I could hear each instrument in the band playing separately, yet I could simultanelousy hear the band as a whole. I was convinced they were playing just for me. My whole body seemed to be rocking with the music, and I suddenly understood what it meant to have rhythm. My entire body felt loose limbed and each joint was moving. I looked around and everyone appeared ­friendly and warm. Strange for the English. Even Margaret-Ann looked benign. That’s when I suspected the brownies.

  “What was in those brownies?” I asked the mirror-shirted beauty.

  “Hash laced with a bit of my triple-mix fertilizer.”

  Eric Burdon started to sing “It’s My Life.” From there we went into “The House of the Rising Sun.” I felt the urge to dance — with no need for a partner. So I got up and did a sort of free interpretative number, convinced I looked just like Isadora Duncan.

  A thin black man in a large felt black hat with a feather in it jumped onstage holding a guitar as Eric Burdon was singing “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” and played background. Then the feather-hatted man stood up and played “Foxy Lady.”

  “I remember hearing about this guy,” I said. “He was a real hit at Monterey Pop. I wasn’t there, but my friend Sara saw him and said he was a total showstopper. Then his popularity just went off the charts. Wait until I tell her I saw him in this London basement.”

  It was a great night. Everyone was up moving and dancing and the lights pulsed with the music. Lots of people, even Jimi Hendrix, seemed to know the velvet-coated Eton man and ­greeted him. As Jimi Hendrix walked by Margaret-Ann, she shouted, “We’re American too — I mean as well.”

  Jimi smiled, waved and said, “Far out, man.” He sat down with a woman who had blond hair and bangs that completely covered her eyes.

  When Jimi got back onstage for the next set, he said, “I want to do ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ for the American girls over there.” He pointed shyly to us.

  Margaret-Ann dug her fingernails into my arm and screamed, “That’s us, Cathy!”

  Being on hash or whatever was in that brownie and hearing Hendrix’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was one of the highlights of the ’60s for me. I felt I knew exactly what he meant by every tortured cry of that guitar. The lighting man did “­rocket’s red glare” perfectly by having red spotlights explode on the ­ancient rubble stonewalls and the stage. Jimi’s rendition was spot on. It incorporated everything that had happened in the ’60s: Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, the riots, Vietnam, ­Chicago, all of it. It was as though Hendrix was saying, “I know all the shit that has happened, I know what it is to be black in America … but hey — it’s still a great place to be.”

  >> <<<br />
  Hours later, we stopped in Reading for an English breakfast. You can tell you’re still stoned if those rashers floating like pontoons in a sea of grease next to the fried, shrivelled tomato are lip-smacking good. Then you have passed the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for stoned.

  We finally made it back to Oxford by 8:30 the next morning. We were still a bit high but had mostly come down — all except Margaret-Ann. The Barson, meeting us at the gatehouse, said we were due home last night. Clive gave a big story about how we were fogged-in in London, where we had gone to see some plays for our Restoration Drama course. He blathered on about how we had decided to err on the safe side and stay overnight at his parents’ London pied-à-terre.

  I could tell that the Barson was contemplating informing on us. He hesitated, then turned around and entered our names in the logbook with yesterday’s date and said to Clive, “Master Hunter-­Parsons, your youth may have the day. Isn’t it a shame that youth is wasted on the young?”

  As we walked up our stairwell, Peter said under his breath, “Clive, old man, you’ve donated another bottle of Lagavulin 25 to the cause. That has got to smart. Remember that American Rhodes scholar who offered Barson a quart of Johnnie Walker Red? He just gave him a blurry-eyed scowl. Can’t sneak under the wire with the old Barson, can one?”

  CHAPTER 4

  when the calves sang to my horn

  Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

  About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green

  — Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”

  Spring comes early to Oxford and, compared to where I was from, it was glorious. It is like nowhere else in the world, for it’s a real season, not like the few weeks in New York when the spring comes late and the buds hurry to open and then are slain in ­infancy by the rushing hot weather. In England the fruit trees stayed in bloom and fields of daffodils and bluebells grew wild in infinite varieties and lasted for all of the long spring. The slightest breeze tapped their friendliness. Not only did they nod but whole fields would genuflect when I rode by on my bike in the dew-drenched morning.

  Spring also heralded the beginning of rowing season. Clive rowed for Oxford in the Trinity College boat and was in the top boat of eight. Eight long, lithe men rowed in a long, lithe boat wearing skintight, short navy unisuits and strange little beanies. The ninth man, who was short, slight and built like a jockey, was called the coxswain. He was crammed into the stern facing the rowers. It was his job to shout out orders at the rowers, who functioned as galley slaves. The rowers rowed backwards so it was up to the coxie, who faced ahead, to tell the rowers what was in their path. He also steered and motivated and yelled out directions and pace to the rowers.

  I used to enjoy riding along the Thames riverbank on my bike and watching Clive’s boat glide along. The athletic endeavour and the grace while in unison appealed to me. I wished that there could be a girls’ rowing team, but I knew that was only dreaming. (Twenty years later, I was part of a women’s rowing crew for twelve years, and we raced all over North America.)

  One day Clive thundered into my room and said, “It’s time for the Torpids. It’s a rowing bumps race and our cox has food ­poisoning from eating at Wimpy’s in London. I can’t find a sub­stitute. Everyone who knows how to row is already in the race. We need a coxie today or we will have to scratch. Do you think you can do it?”

  I looked up from my book blankly.

  “I will be right there in front — just inches away from you — giving you instructions.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He explained that the bumps is only done in Oxford and ­Cambridge and maybe London. It was started because the rivers are so narrow. Everyone lines up in his eight-man boat, bow-to-stern along the bank of the Thames, and then the coxie pushes off with a pole. When someone wants to pass a boat, they bump the boat and the coxie raises their hand and the rowers know they have been bumped and they have to pull over to the shore, letting the boat that bumped them move ahead. Once you’re bumped, you are out of the race.

  Typical of convoluted English rules, there were over-bumps, side-bumps, bump-up and bump-down. I couldn’t grasp the rules. They were way too complicated with a myriad of ­exceptions. Like the rules in any sport, they make a lot of sense if you know the game, and they are incomprehensible and arcane if you don’t. Clive finally said in exasperation, “It is really complicated but you have to know the rules.”

  Picking up on his agitation and knowing I had only two hours left to read a Pinter play, I simply said, “I’ll figure it out.” How bad could it go? The Thames is only thirty feet wide.

  >> <<<br />
  When I arrived, I was a bit taken aback by the hullabaloo. There were cameras and TV crews and what looked like the entire ­faculty. There were hundreds if not thousands of people in front of the University College boathouse. As we lined up, there were throngs of people with bikes to ride alongside the boats, coaches telling me what to do via megaphone from the s
hore and rowers asking me all kinds of technical questions about the rigging and the rudder and the bow ball and so on … to which I answered, “Just relax, I’ve taken care of it.”

  As the horn blew and I poled out, dozens of boats started forward. The best were in front. We were placed in the middle of the pack. (Establishing your position in the line-up is based on a ridiculous number of variables that seemed to date back to all other races you had ever been in and each step you had taken since birth.)

  Clive had shown me the two cables on each side of the boat that pull the rudder either to the right or left, and as I steered I drove my guys on. I was a good motivator since I was competitive. Clive was the stroke (lead rower) in the boat, sitting facing me. Our heads were only about four inches apart. My knees were in the way since the coxie is supposed to be tiny like a jockey, but I had long legs. I could feel the sweat spray my way as he flew up his slide and pulled with all of his might on the oars. I was fairly amazed by how muscular he was. He was tall and lean but in that clingy suit I could see that he was solid muscle. Just as I was wondering how I’d missed that he had a gorgeous athletic body, he reminded me, “Remember we can only bump, not smash into the boat in front of us.”

  “I totally understand.” I did everything perfectly and we bumped the guy in front of us and they moved over and we roared ahead.

  About two minutes later, I saw a boat coming closer. Then I could hear their coxie scream on the microphone, “Five hard strokes and we’ve got ’em.” They were on our tail and gaining. Clive had told me never to turn my head since it knocks off the exact balance of the boat and slows the speed of the glide. Clive was panting too much to talk. Finally I felt a slight, almost infinitesimal bump. I chose to ignore it. It could have been a ricocheting wake, and I’d never done this before. Clive’s face was so red it looked like he had it on inside out. He managed to whisper between staggered breaths, “Were we bumped?”