Flotilla (2 page)

Now she wants to shoehorn some therapy in as a going-away present.

"You didn't tell me that you were going to send me to Dad's," I replied.

"If you want people to be honest with you," she said, "you have to start with yourself. Why, Jim? Just tell me that much ... why?"

I was officially under arrest at the treatment center and about to do 6 months in YA, but Mom managed to convince the PO that she had an alternative option. She convinced my probation officer - this ugly white lady with dead eyes - to let me come out to be with Dad on the Colony. The PO said that coming to the Colony would be "part" of my community service and they'd discuss the remaining details when I returned. Dad was to give weekly reports on my "progress".

I'm reviewing all of this history because there's no way I could tell her what I really thought. She'd blow up, I'd blow up ... I don't want to walk to the Port of Los Angeles. I was still trying to consider all my options when she pulled out of her parking slot at the rehab center and started heading toward the Denny's. The Lexapro made it hard to think.

I was feeling gross and I had a headache - this was definitely not the time to be doing an all-day boat trip. Mom had my stuff in the car and she gave me some clothes to wear for the ride. After two weeks of wearing sweat pants that kept falling off of my butt and hospital slides, it was weird to be dressed in jeans and sneakers.

My doctor put me on Lexapro to 'try it.' If that didn't work, he said, they'd give me Cymbalta. So many different medications for depression to choose from that it's almost like going to the salad bar. Just find the right mix to balance out the bad stuff in your head, kid. "Teach you to live life without a chemical dependency," he said, without a hint of irony.

I'm such a mess right now that all I can do is sit there in the passenger seat like a sack of Jell-O. Please don't ask me to do anything, please just put me in my bed and let me sleep. Please ... please don't ask me to go for a car ride and please, whatever you do, don't ask me to get on a boat and go 120 miles out into the ocean. I am so not up for this today.

But you aren't really listening, are you, Mom?

"It didn't have to be this way," she said.

"Not that again," I said, trying to sound like I wasn't terrified. My mom was sending me away - is there anything that makes your 'nads shrink up more than that?

"I hope you find an answer, Jim. You almost killed yourself. You're becoming an alcoholic."

"Mom, I'm not an alcoholic..." I started but she cut me right off.

"You're binge drinking and you're 14, Jim. Let's not kid ourselves." She looked away and I could see that she was about to cry. "I'm such an idiot. I can't believe I didn't see it. I ... I just feel like I've failed you, Jim and I need to know where I went wrong."

Nice one, Mom. I know you want me to break down and beg your forgiveness and admit that I'm the one who's stupid. But you're sending me away to live out on the ocean with my Dad and right now I'm not feeling that charitable.

So I didn't cry in front of Mom. I felt like it, but we're past the point where tears would have made a difference. After a few minutes, I noticed that Mom was crying quietly but it didn't really affect me. It should have made me feel something. I know people were watching and the waitress was giving me the stink eye. I felt some buzzing in my head, that's all. I blame the meds ... it's as good an excuse as anything else. She got it together eventually and we finished breakfast in silence.

It took a few minutes to find the dock in the Port of Los Angeles once we got there. I don't know if you've ever seen it but Pier F Avenue is really hard to find in that zoo. Close to half an hour tracking among the docks, Navy boats and container ships to find the squat building and docks that owned by the Pacific Fisheries' business office.

Mom pulled the car into the lot, popped the trunk and sat there. Maybe we were both waiting for the other person to say something. She silently handed me an envelope with some 'walking-around money' in it and I got out. I pulled my duffel bags that she had packed and closed the trunk. I walked around again to her side of the car, looking for a 'good-bye' or a kiss or both. She looked at me through the glass and took her foot off of the brake. She left me standing there in that parking lot without a word.

I had that buzzy feeling again - like I wanted to cry - but then she was gone and that was that. Here I was about to leave to go to sea and do the first 'adult' thing I'd ever done in my life. You don't cry at a moment like this. Even if you want to...you just don't.

"Help you?" a woman called from the door of the office. Maybe I'm not the first transportee that she's seen. I was processed through the office in about five minutes and then pushed out to the dock to wait for the ferry ride.

I paced up and down the planks smelling salt, tar and diesel fumes. Something hot to drink would have been nice but I didn't know where to get it and I wasn't going to go back inside. The Pac Fish rep paid as little attention to me as possible when I was inside and hinted that she might drop-kick me into the water if I kept her from the mystery novel she was working on. I sat there, cold and numb, for half an hour waiting for that boat to arrive.

When it did arrive, it was not impressive. The ferry boat itself was a small pilothouse that had a cabin for up to 10 people to sit in and it wasn't here to take on passengers. Two silent Mexicans pulled stevedore duty and stuffed packages into the cabin until almost every cubic inch of space was filled. It took me a minute but it finally hit me: they were hauling groceries. Somehow I was supposed to find a place to sit in there.

"All set?" a gravelly voice asked. The old Filipino pilot waved me onboard, helping me step onto the boat without dropping my duffel in the water. My first taste of colony hospitality was of him jerking his thumb to the top of the bundles that filled the cabin and saying "You can sit
there
".

He immediately cast off by waving to the guys on the dock and hitting the starter switch on the motor. It grumbled to life and in a couple of seconds we were on our way. I was suddenly reminded of a memory: waiting in line at Magic Mountain to board a rollercoaster I wasn't thrilled about. There's a small pit in your stomach where all of your fear and doubt lives and it steadily grows as you wait for the ride to start. You want to get off, maybe talk your way off of the ride without looking like a wuss but you know in your heart that there's simply no escape. You stew in your own fear and doubt until it's your turn to climb aboard.

The cargo was mostly food and the air filled with the smell of coffee and oranges. It hit me that I was really doing this. If I wasn't feeling so crummy, I would actually be excited. I tried shifting my weight during the loading only to hear corn chips or something crunch under my butt. The pilot yelped and made me get up while he checked the load. "I said
don't move
!" He snarled while repositioning something under the bags. He stabbed the air with a crooked old finger. "Okay...now sit there and don't move!" Meekly, I sat as ordered - the old fisherman spat some bitter words in Tagalog and refused to look at me for the rest of the trip. It was foggy and misty, with water streaming from the windows and a view that was only slightly less gray than the ocean. It was impossible to see where I was going to spend the next three months.

The Pacific Fisheries terminal is pretty close to open water at the harbor. After a few minutes of threading between a sailing yacht and a container ship we were off and pointing toward the horizon. It would still be 10 or 12 hours before we reached the Colony itself. Most of a day with no one to talk to and express orders not to move - was I allowed to pee? I tried making conversation with my host but he was apparently deaf between radio checks with the Colony because he never acknowledged that he heard anything I said.

The pilot was dressed in a green rain slicker and khaki trousers. He made adjustments to the console with hands that were like dark polished wood. The lack of any visual references outside the boat was disorienting to me but it didn't seem to bother him. He kept his eyes fixed to the large flat compass in front of him as he sat at the helm while an LCD panel displayed GPS info about our trip. We were on a course south from the LA harbor and would turn west after skirting Santa Catalina Island. I toyed with the idea of being washed overboard near Avalon. They let you stow away home on the ferry, right?

I knew roughly from Dad's emails that the Colony was out in the open ocean south of the Channel Islands but this boat trip gave his description a much larger sense of scale. The ocean was rougher and the crack of waves against the hull started to sound like gunshots. We were going out there, way out there, and if I wasn't convinced that I would be on my own before, I was now. The sinking feeling in my stomach, the rollercoaster feeling, was growing into a full-on panic attack. I was definitely off of the reservation this time and nobody was going to fix that.

Sailing for ten or twelve hours on the ocean can be a rude awakening when all of your previous water experience comes from wakeboarding on a lake. I mean, I didn't get seasick but there was nothing to recommend the journey. Halfway into the trip, the old guy let me get off the groceries and take a piss off of the rear of the boat when I thought I was going to explode. There I was hanging onto the railing on a pitching deck and trying not to fall overboard with my schlong out. If they ever make pissing an Olympic sport, this would be one of the events. He talked me through working the little galley stove and I heated up some ramen in cheap foam cups for the both of us. He threw in a Coke from stock he was hauling. The day felt two weeks long but finally the colony appeared before us, pitching in and out of the rain.

At first glance, the Colony looked less like a business than it did floating wreckage. This is where my Dad lived? It looked like a naval disaster. I could see the lights of the different ships but it was clear they were there to provide the minimum amount of illumination and only if one stood directly below or around them. The wind started to moan and whip the ocean into whitecaps. The old fisherman wildly spun the wheel and nosed the boat away from something. I craned my neck to see what had happened and saw a set of nets he'd nearly run into. Where were we supposed to tie up at?

The network of docks in the colony had been designed to allow the ferry boat to nose in and dock directly at the colony. I knew this from Dad's emailed descriptions but I couldn't see where that point was. As we neared a single boat, the pilot spun the wheel and goosed the engines slightly. I was certain we were about to crash but soon saw what the old fisherman had seen. The small opening presented itself and allowed the ship to come inside to dock in the center.

Riding up to the main dock let me get a closer look at my new home. The picture coalesced and I could see the boats and the people on them preparing their evening meals. The rain caused individual scenes to fade in and out of view. Open cook fires and people huddled around them. Men, women and children moved in and out of the shadows wearing cheap plastic rain gear if they wore any at all. Orange plastic work lights twisted in the wind over decks made out of cheap plywood covered with cheaper non-skid yellow plastic. Was it like this on purpose? An old Asian woman sat on a milk crate peeling potatoes. With her hair soaked and plastered to her head, she let the peels fall right into the water. She disappeared in the rain and then I was watching a group of Mexican men standing around a gas grill. Their cooking location was the back deck of a barge-like ship and they paused to look at me watching them. Then they were gone again as the boat motored through another turn.

I was either an alien visitor to a new world or the world's most pathetic tourist. The Colony being the jumbled mess that it was, you felt disoriented just looking at it. Brand new yachts rubbed fenders with broken-down houseboats. Trim plastic-and-metal docks touched puke-colored sheets of splintered pressboard sitting on top of sawed-off telephone poles. Cheery groups of Mexican or Asian families went about their business next to each other, ignoring the sullen-looking white guy across the water with the thousand-yard stare.

It took a while but finally the boat pulled up to dock next to the
Phoenix
, the ship at the center of this disaster zone. Dad had told me that he would meet me there. In our conversations, he told me a few things about the ship and it was strange to see it finally in person. It was like seeing the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco for the first time after looking at it for years in pictures, movies and television. I was here ... after two years I had finally arrived. I stepped outside to look at the grey cliff of steel, getting my face immediately soaked by the rain.