The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (15 page)

My uncle’s first taste of nautical life was in England, aboard a 149-foot trawler, the
Avon River
. He’d grown up in a Missouri hamlet called Arrow Rock, population eighty-one, where his domineering father encouraged him to follow in his footsteps and become a doctor. When John quit his pre med studies at the University of Missouri, my grandfather disowned him, at least in the emotional sense. Exiled and aimless, John was eventually lured to Saint Hill Manor in England, where a man named L. Ron Hubbard was launching a new religion.

John worked his way up the ranks, and eventually became director of accounts worldwide. His main responsibility was transferring Hubbard’s book royalties into Swiss bank accounts. For his full-time work and dedication to Scientology, he was paid ten pounds a week, or about $1,300 a year. He also labored as darkroom assistant to Hubbard—with whom he spent hours in the pitch black, listening to the leader’s private thoughts and ruminations. John earned enough trust that Hubbard hired him as a special Scientology tutor for his own children—none of whom, curiously, had yet been taught much about the religion. My uncle was eventually bestowed with the rare ordination of “doctorate of Scientology,” as well as a doctorate of divinity. After graduation, Hubbard asked him to join an elite group that came to be called the Sea Org, the official name for the Scientology Navy. Having been hounded by government officials in the United States, Africa, and now England, Hubbard hoped to move much of his organization to international waters, where they could live tax-free and plunder the seas for sunken treasure. He created Sea Org to expedite this Ahab-like undertaking.

Driving a fellow Scientologist’s Land Rover, John executed a Sea Org mission in Scotland to purchase the
Avon River
, a vessel that was to become one of Hubbard’s main exploration crafts. John and a small crew sailed her to Hull, England, where they spent a winter refitting the
Avon
’s hold; much of the old fishing ship’s interior was coated in rancid cod liver oil. Enduring the stench and lack of heat, they followed Hubbard’s orders and installed a blacksmith’s forge for the purpose of melting gold ingots into ballast, so that any recovered treasure could be transported in secret. They also supplied the ship with a hundred cases of soda for Hubbard, who seemed to live off Coke and cigarettes.

With encouragement from Hubbard, John took up the dangerous trade of “hardhat” commercial diving. Wearing a copper helmet the size of a dollhouse, a canvas dry suit, and lead boots, my uncle submerged himself in frigid waters to repair the
Avon
’s hull. He was so natural in the ocean that he began teaching others the trade. Hubbard had high hopes that his skills would easily transfer to undersea treasure hunting.

John and his fiancée, Ann, eventually married and lived together at Saint Hill Manor. Ann studied Scientology, but with much less zeal than her new husband. Over time she grew alarmed by the increasingly covert and dangerous nature of his missions. She was encouraged, though, by his nascent fascination with ships and the ocean after his winter on the
Avon River
. Using part of a loan from her stepmother, she and John purchased a used twenty-seven-foot sailboat, the
Tio Pepe
, for $5,000. After a winter on a stinking, frozen vessel, John needed some time off, and though they’d gotten engaged several months earlier, they’d yet to have a proper wedding ceremony. But word of their relatively “extravagant” purchase spread through Saint Hill Manor, quickly reaching the ears of Hubbard’s wife. Deciding there was no way John could afford a sailboat on his meager salary, and not bothering to ask for bank statements confirming Ann’s family loan, she accused my uncle of embezzling from the church. Equally quick to judgment—even of his most trusted inner circle—Hubbard himself declared my uncle a “suppressive person” and banished him from Saint Hill Manor and its carefully cultivated gardens.

John’s exile from Scientology was absolute and infinitely more severe than his emotional banishment from his father. Like the biblical figure Ishmael—the illegitimate son of Abraham who was exiled into the wilderness—my young uncle was deeply in touch with the orphan archetype, even if subconsciously.

Herman Melville, having lost his own father and been repeatedly rejected by his mother (in favor of his older brother Gansevoort), also clearly identified with Ishmael, so much so that he named his main character in his honor. According to Edinger, “What makes the image of exile in the wilderness so important today is that it expresses a state of mind that is currently widespread.” In another passage, he states that “
[Moby-Dick]
speaks so deeply to us today because this state of alienated meaninglessness is so prevalent in twentieth-century man. In the story of Ishmael’s voyage we recognize dimly the state of our own souls.”

John was barred from the Saint Hill grounds; none of his closest friends and co workers were allowed to speak with him or even acknowledge his existence, for fear of being declared “suppressive persons” themselves. Concerned that these fascist tactics might lead to a lawsuit or even physical reprisal, John and Ann decided to leave England the day after their wedding. They later learned from friends that Sea Org had labeled them “fair game,” a term akin to an open hunting license on “suppressive persons.” John had come to England seeking the acceptance and connection he’d never had with his father. Now he was cast out, banned from the garden, fleeing for his own and his wife’s safety.

My grandmother Mariana loved the ocean. She was a graceful swimmer and a Red Cross–certified lifeguard; on trips to visit my great-aunt Trudy and uncle Art in California, they ferried her across the channel to Catalina Island, to her and Trudy’s favorite swim spot, Love Cove. In her white one-piece bathing costume and mint-green swim cap, she spent hours in the glimmering ocean, floating like an angel from the deep in her perfect backstroke.

Trudy and Mariana’s love for the ocean also manifested in their musical choices. They both played the ukulele, an instrument that evokes a tropical, beach-barbecue dreaminess like no other. The ukulele became popular on the mainland after World War II, when GIs returned from the Pacific Islands and launched the tiki craze. My grandmother and Trudy picked up their first set, a beautiful pair of Martins made from real Hawaiian koa wood, after visiting the home of some Hawaiian transplants living in L.A. My grandmother and aunt were mesmerized with the ukulele’s exotic, chimey sound. They played constantly, singing traditional hymns like “Amazing Grace,” classics like “Shenandoah,” and bright Hawaiian tunes about the sea. But Mariana’s festiveness always faded once she left the West Coast. Back in Missouri, she confined her musical practice to the bathroom, behind a locked door. She’d often sit in a bubble bath for an hour or more, the faucet gushing to drown out her singing and the tinkling of her uke.

It’s a little sad that Mariana stayed in Missouri, her creative connection to the ocean relegated to an old-fashioned bathtub, when she might have moved to California with her progressive sister and led a more unencumbered and adventurous life, where she could have slipped into the ocean at dawn and gone out dancing at night, the way she’d danced almost every night during her college years. My guess is that her suppressed sense of adventure contributed to Johnny’s own wanderlust and his great love for the sea. Perhaps she was secretly supportive of his wanderings, of his eventual escape to the ocean. This was in stark contrast to the relationship between Melville and his mother. After their father’s early demise, Melville and his brother Gansevoort were expected to provide for the family, and especially for the demanding Mrs. Melville, who was known to harp on Herman for his lack of focus and direction. After holding down a series of odd jobs—teaching, importing, sales—and finding success in none of them, Melville embarked on a life at sea.

On my uncle John’s twenty-eighth birthday, and despite their minimal sailing experience, he and Ann set off across the English Channel. There was a definite sense of freedom for Herman Melville in escaping familial pressures and heading out to sea; my uncle John must have felt some of the same exhilaration as he sailed east from Dover. I imagine him and Ann aboard the
Tio Pepe
on a warm July day, seabirds hovering overhead, salt tang on their lips, watching the White Cliffs of Dover recede behind them. That incredible sense of liberation that only the sea can elicit, mixed with a healthy dose of apprehension, the same way I feel each time I escape the pressurized heat of Midtown Manhattan and paddle out into the brisk blue at Rockaway or Montauk.

John and Ann sailed up the Seine to celebrate Bastille Day in Paris—apropos their escape from Scientology’s psychic shackles and the beginning of their revolutionary new life at sea. Together they watched fireworks erupt over the river and wash the darkened silhouette of Notre Dame with waves of crimson, electric green, pink, and gold. After several days in Paris they cruised down the canals to Marseille, then on to the Mediterranean, where they spent three years adventuring around Greece, Corsica, Morocco, and Turkey, the watery paradise west of Palestine, the holy waters of the Holy Land. John became a self-taught master seaman, learning from books and observation the arts of rigging, piloting with a sextant and compass, and celestial navigation. In the mornings he and Ann swam in the gray-green sea, embracing underwater, no one to witness their nakedness but spiraling gulls and the abundant silvery life teeming underwater—monk seals and hundred-year-old sea turtles called Caretta caretta. They lived on a tight budget; John dove for most of their food with a speargun—disappearing underwater, then surfacing with fresh-caught silversides, golden gray mullets, mackerel, albacore, cuttlefish, and squid. When funds ran out completely, he earned money with his diving skills, recovering lost anchors and repairing boats, or even salvaging small treasures—strands of copper, gold, lapis lazuli—from ancient Roman and Phoenician vessels, German warships, British minesweepers.

They eventually sold the
Tio Pepe
and put the money toward a larger craft, the
Aquarius
. Departing the Canary Islands, they made a full-sail, downwind Atlantic crossing in twenty-eight days. Most mornings they found flying fish marooned on deck, pan-fried them in butter, and ate them with toast and coffee. They made landfall in the Caribbean port of Bequia, where they set up their head quarters for the next few years. John became a certified commercial diver and started his own diving and engineering operation. He was still haunted by what had transpired with his father and the Scientologists, and like Melville always considered himself a bit of an Ishmael figure, but he loved the sea and found great solace in mastering these new skills on his own.

The ocean was for him—as it was for me during my New York years—the one place that felt like home, a lush wave garden free from all the thorns and thistles of the broken world.

O
ne afternoon my boss calls me into his office.

“Go ahead and sit down,” he says. “And close the door.” Whenever he says this I know something’s up, that I’ve either done something wrong or I’m getting a raise, so I feel an attendant spike of anxiety.

“As you probably know, the publishing industry is changing,” he says. “People are reading less, fewer books are moving, and the kind of avant-garde fiction you’ve been working on isn’t selling as well as it used to.”

“Okay,” I say, picking at a ragged cuticle.

“I know you might not want to hear it,” he says, glancing out the window, off toward the Chrysler Building and then back at me, “but right now romance novels are the only thing selling very well for us. And that’s what Sharon wants us to focus on. So I need you to step up and start editing more romance.”

I leave his office feeling a sense of defeat, disbelief, and complete absurdity. Theoretically I don’t have anything against the genre, although, back in graduate school, even mentioning the word
romance
was the equivalent of standing up and yelling
pigfucker
during church. I’d read a few contemporary romances since I started out in publishing, mixed in with everything else I worked on. And some of it I actually liked. The dark romantic stuff, the gothic stuff, reminded me a little bit of Melville, whose work is often labeled “dark romanticism.” But romanticism and romance really have little in common. As a genre, romance traces back to masters of the novel like Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë. I have nothing but respect for both writers; I’d read and loved
Jane Eyre
. And a century later, their brand of spooky romance is back in vogue, and I think it’s sort of cool.

At the same time, a new brand of hyper masculine “frat lit” is building steam—in fact, my company publishes one of the genre’s poster boys. Some female coworkers told me what an asshole he was, how he’d deeply insulted them over drinks one night, as a kind of transparent, douchebag ploy to make them feel so bad about themselves that they’d sleep with him. So given the choice between frat lit and romance, I’ll take romance any day.

But despite my hating frat lit and clinging to a progressive, post feminist ideology, having to work on romance feels emasculating, mainly because I’m in a twelve-step program to deal with codependence—with my obsessive romantic entanglements. Compounding the emasculation is my own stalled writing career: the skateboard anthology isn’t selling well—partly due to the publishing company, Soft Skull Press, being on the verge of bankruptcy—plus my novel project’s going nowhere. It feels like a cosmic joke, then, to have to sit in the Pit and read romance all day, with its overuse of euphemisms like
her swollen bounty
and
the juncture of her thighs
—like a recovering alcoholic at a cheap wine tasting. The problem is that, while the writing is often better than you might expect, the relationships in these novels are characterized by idealization, obsession, heavy intensity—all hallmarks of my past relationships. Even worse, there’s a new emphasis on Latina romance, stuff that gets really steamy, and that reminds me, page after agonizing page, of Karissa.