Traffic was almost nonexistent on the West Side Highway, and we pulled into the marina parking lot less than ten minutes after leaving the club off Spring street. Grabbing a bulging leather briefcase from between the seats, Rob said, “Let’s go check out what you’ve got for me.” Docked all by herself at the end of the gas dock and illuminated by floodlights, La Forza dwarfed all the other vessels in the marina. “Wow!”, Rob exclaimed. “You’re getting paid to live on that? Sounds like a great job to me.”
“It is.”, I replied. “The thing is, it’s also a really big responsibility too. You have to have the skills to navigate, maintain, and safely dock a boat that big. It’s not like a small powerboat where if you bump the dock, you can shrug it off and say ‘Oh well‘. That’s some serious tonnage sitting there, and if you run into something, the damage can run into thousands of dollars in costly repairs. Let’s get on board. Birgit can give you the tour and fix us a couple of drinks and a snack while I retrieve the E from where I’ve got it hidden away. If you’ll recall, we were just about to eat when the cops showed up at SOMA, and I’m still hungry.” While Birgit was showing Rob around, I went down to the engine room and fished the sealed package of Ecstasy tablets out of the drum of lube oil. I discarded the still dripping oily wrappings in the recycle bin near the fuel pumps, and rejoined Birgit and Rob in the main salon. She was recounting the tale of one of our more disastrous charters in the BVI’s involving a Swede and his two sexually precocious daughters that had Rob in stitches laughing uproariously. I helped myself from the pitcher of margaritas on the table and grabbed one of the toasted English muffins with crabmeat from the platter. This was one of my favorite snacks. Birgit first toasted the split muffins with butter in the oven, and then spread a mixture of crabmeat, cheddar cheese, and curried mayonnaise on top before finishing them off under the broiler. They made for great “boat food” as they could be prepared and frozen ahead of time, then easily heated up while underway offshore.
“Here you go, Rob.”, I said, handing him the parcel of tablets.
“You’re gonna love this.”, he replied. Birgit and I watched as he opened his briefcase and took out a small plastic box. “There’s now an organization called Dance Safe that produces these test kits that allow you to instantly test the purity of any pill sold as Ecstasy. There’s a lot of crap being sold as “E” that’s really Ketamine, MDA, or something else cut with meth. They set up tables at raves and test pills for free, or you can buy one of the kits for a few bucks. Just watch this.”
While B and I looked on, Rob took one of our tablets, and scraped a few flakes from the pill into a vial of liquid from his test kit. After a few seconds, the liquid turned a deep indigo color. “Fantastic!”, Rob exclaimed. “This stuff is really righteous. I’ll get thirty bucks a tab for it. If the price we agreed on is still ok, the cash is all right here in this case. Can you get more?”
I handed the valise to Birgit and replied, “No, sorry. This was strictly a one time deal. This cash will keep us going for a long time and we’re not inclined to make it a long term thing. But hey, thanks. I feel a lot safer dealing with you than someone I didn’t know well.” After promises to keep in touch and a vaguely worded invitation to join us on some future adventure, Rob left to join up with his crew in Brooklyn and get the sound systems ready for the rave later in the evening.
While Birgit was hiding away the neatly wrapped bundles of hundred dollar bills we’d exchanged for our ten thousand dollar investment in the Ecstasy, I went around dimming the lights in the salon, poured us two snifters of Irish Mist, and tuned the flat panel TV to Leno just in time to catch his opening monolog. Birgit reappeared and settled into the couch beside me with a sigh.
“Hey babe, what do you think?”
“Jimmy, I’m so glad all that’s behind us. Even though I knew the cops had no reason to hassle us, I was still scared to death when they came bursting into that club. I’m ready to relax and enjoy the trip to Canada, and then I want nothing more than to be back on board our boat back in Miami. This whole smuggling gig is too stressful for me!”
“I have to say that I agree with you. Let’s enjoy a half hour of Leno and hit the sack. A ‘sidewalkers’ segment will be on in a few minutes. and I never get tired of seeing just how dumb people can be.”
I thought I’d slept well as I’d drifted off very soon after my head hit the pillow, but that must have been wishful thinking on my part as I was up and wide awake at four-thirty in the morning. The stress and anxiety I’d felt dealing with yesterday’s events had affected me more than I’d thought they would, and I was more than ready to get on with the job of moving this yacht up the Hudson to Canada. I eased out of our bunk very quietly, trying not to wake Birgit, and set coffee to brewing in the galley. While I waited for it to percolate, I started singling up all the dock lines and removing the shore power hookups to stow them away. The decks were wet and clammy under my bare feet in their coating of early morning dew. After a brief stop in the galley for a mug of coffee, I headed for the bridge and started the engines to warm them up. I’d allowed B. a few extra minutes of sleep, but the vibration of the big diesels soon had her up and about.
“Good morning, sweetie. I tried not to wake you up.”
She replied, “You didn’t really wake me, but I was vaguely aware that you’d gotten up early. Starting the engines did that. Do we have time for coffee and breakfast before we get underway?”
I replied, “I’ll make you a deal. We’re going to be motoring against the current all day. If you’ll take the helm and get us underway, I’ll bring you breakfast before we pass under the George Washington bridge. I’d like to make it to the Poughkeepsie Yacht Club by dinnertime, and that’s about eighty miles up the river. I called them a few days ago and they’ll honor our yacht club membership from St. Thomas. They’ve got a bar and restaurant for members. It should be nicer than a commercial marina.”
With Birgit at the wheel, I made short work of reducing our dock lines to a single spring line. The current took our bow, slowly swinging us out into the river until Birgit nudged the throttles ahead pointing us towards the G.W. I hopped aboard and headed for the galley to fix a couple of the bagels with cream cheese and chives from H&H we’d bought the day before on Broadway and 79th. It took just a few minutes under the broiler to toast them, and I took the tray I’d prepared up to Birgit on the bridge. I relieved her at the wheel and aimed us just to the starboard side of the channel under the center span of the bridge.
Almost impossibly high overhead, we could see black dots that were automobiles and trucks inching along towards Manhattan in the early morning commuter traffic. “Bet you’re happy we’re down here instead of up there?”, I asked.
“You’d be right about that.”, Birgit replied. “This river looks pretty nasty though.”, she said, pointing down at a discarded condom floating seaward in the dirty brown water.
“That’s a Hudson river whitefish. Don’t worry, the river is much cleaner just a few miles upstream.” Despite the dirty brown water, we really were blessed with a perfect early Fall day to begin the last stages of our journey to Canada. Even this early in the day, with the sun just beginning to light up the bluffs of the New Jersey Palisades off the bow to port, the forecast was for a light northerly breeze and a high temperature in the seventies by noon.
At seven, Birgit left me with a fresh cup of coffee and retired below to watch the Today show to catch up on the news from around the world. Neither of us ever watched much television, preferring instead to enjoy the views of our immediate vicinity. This morning, however, the scenery was less than inspiring, at least in the lower reaches of the Hudson upriver past Yonkers and Dobbs Ferry until we were about to pass under the Tappan Zee bridge. At this hour of the morning, the bridge was still clogged with commuter traffic, I buzzed Birgit on the intercom and relinquished the wheel to her so I could go over the waterway chart once again.
“I’m going to kick back and read for a bit if that’s ok with you, sweetie?”
“No problem, Jimmy. Is there anything I need to watch out for?”
“Not a thing. The channel is clearly marked, and we pass port to port if you encounter any traffic. Just keep an eye out for any barge traffic. You may see strings of barges and we need to give them a wide berth. They need a lot of room to maneuver. Other than that, just sit back and enjoy the day. By early afternoon I thought we’d pick up one of the moorings in a bend of the river at Bear Mountain State Park to relax and have some lunch. That’s the furthest I’ve ever been upriver. Did I ever tell you about that trip?”
“That’s one I don’t recall,”, said Birgit. “Maybe you did and I forgot. Tell me again.”
One thing about a loving relationship as relatively new as Birgit’s and mine was tends to be the fact that old life experiences can be judiciously shared as new ones without the fear of being seen as boring. “Ok, but I’ll warn you that it might just be one of those stories where you hear it, and think to yourself ‘I guess you had to be there’. That said, even all these years later, I can’t think about it without laughing.”
“I’d spent the summer at a camp in New England. It was run by the same prep school I later graduated from. The week previous to this I was part of a group that climbed Mount Washington in New Hampshire, so I was really psyched about mountain climbing. This week I was participating in the sail training program on board the school’s ninety-eight foot schooner. We’d sailed down from New England to New York city to take part in one of the ‘tall ships” extravaganzas. At the end of the weekend, the skipper decided to sail up the Hudson for an overnight stop at Bear Mountain. When we got there, we were all turned loose ashore for a few hours to explore the park. Where we anchored, there are spectacular cliffs all along the shores of the river. There’s a gravel access road following the shoreline below the cliffs. One of things the counselor in charge of our Mt. Washington trip had shown us was the basics of rappelling down a cliff face, and I thought that was really neat stuff! Of course, that was my first thought when I saw these cliffs at Bear Mountain. This other fellow and I took a hundred and fifty foot length of line ashore with us and began scaling the cliffs. We found a good spot to tie off our line, and began preparations for some fun descending the heights. Soon I was leaning backwards and pushing off the cliff face with my feet to descend a few feet with every jump. Suddenly, I was startled by a loud mechanical voice from far below. ‘Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Stopping for a moment, and looking down, I saw a New York State trooper standing by his car with all his lights strobing away. I yelled down, ‘I’m
rappelling’. This was the obvious answer, but patently not what he wanted to hear from me, as he was getting red in the face and seemed really annoyed. Well. it took me another five minutes to get safely down to the base of the cliff. By then, the skipper of the schooner came walking down the road with another group of campers just as I was placed in handcuffs, and put in the back of the police car for breaking the law by climbing on the cliffs. I never did learn how the captain talked the trooper out of charging me for that transgression, but I sure got lots of grief from my parents when they heard about it later!”
Birgit made a sound that was more snort than laugh, saying, “God, Jimmy. It’s a wonder your parents still talk to you at all anymore.” The weather stayed perfect and, the river turned a dark deep greenish blue as we motored on. The Hudson Valley now looked more and more like the countryside immortalized by Clifford Irving. If you closed your eyes, you could almost picture it as it was when Henry Hudson first explored this river in 1609. After a brief lunch hooked up to a deepwater guest mooring at Bear Mountain, we got underway again, By late afternoon, we were getting close to our destination for the evening at the Poughkeepsie Yacht Club.
When the cell phone in its cradle on the nav station started ringing, it was a few seconds before I realized what it was. I hit the ‘send’ button and said “hello?”.
“Hola, señor Jimmy. Felipe aquí. ¿Cómo te va?”
“Hi Felipe. We’re up the Hudson river near the city of Poughkeepsie. We’ll have La Forza delivered sometime later this week. What’s up?”
“First, let me tell you that my associates in New York were well pleased with the smooth transfer of their product. They are fully satisfied and I am indebted to you for your help. Sadly, the second thing is far more troubling. Your young friend, AJ, stopped by my club last evening, and wanted to know if I had any way to contact you. She did not say why, but I think I’m aware of her problem. Several days ago, the morning news announced a drug bust involving a large yacht and the subsequent arrest of two young men. I fear that your friend, Clark, has foolishly gotten involved with the wrong people, and may have used your boat to do so. I doubt that I can be of any assistance in this matter without exposing myself. Perhaps I’m mistaken, but I do not think so. I am truly sorry, my friend.”
Exclaiming “Shit, shit, shit!”, I hung up the phone and slammed my fist down on the chart table.
“What’s wrong, Jimmy?”, asked Birgit.
“I think that God damned Clark has gotten our boat seized by the either the DEA or Customs for trafficking. I can’t believe that AJ would have ever gone along with anything like that, but we need to call her as soon as we can get to a pay phone ashore.”
The last few miles to the yacht club dock in Poughkeepsie seemed to take forever. As soon as we were secured in our berth for the night, and had taken care of the formalities like making sure they offered reciprocal privileges to members of one of the yacht club cards I kept current, I made a beeline for the pay phone on the wall near the entrance to the bar. Considering that it was early evening, I didn’t think I’d find AJ at home, but tried dialing the number in Homestead anyways, As I’d feared, my call went straight to voicemail. At least her answering machine was turned on, Trying to suppress the anger I was feeling, I left a message asking AJ to call us back at the number for the cell phone on board La Forza in the morning. After Felipe’s phone call, I feared the worst, but taking it out on AJ would not solve the problem, and I could not believe that she’d been involved anyways. My anger was going to be directed at Clark if it turned out that Vamp had been actually impounded due to his stupidity. If true, he’d be safer locked up where I could not reach him!
Birgit found me in the clubhouse bar working on my second double shot of Mount Gay. I told her that I’d left a message for AJ to call us in the morning, and that we’d get the whole mess resolved somehow. I could tell that she did not believe that any more than I did, but we both just ignored the ‘elephant in the room’ and went in to dinner.
