29 November 2010

Leaks

(Beverly Harbor Marina, 1975. Photo John Legasey.)
 
The media is trumpeting the latest WikiLeaks disclosures this morning. It is worse than embarrassing. I read the sanctimonious words in the New York Times about their resolute but regretful decision to publish a selection of them.
 
It is infuriating. The revelation of the inner and honest workings of the American diplomatic corps is going to have serious repercussions, and make us look like dolts. The Israeli press says it makes us look like idiots, and the Germans say it is a disaster for American diplomacy. There are supposed to be hundreds of thousands of cables, some with really juicy gossip about people that could do us real harm are out there.
 
That kid who stole the secrets out to be publically horsewhipped. It got me fired up enough to click out of the Times and slip back into a time when there were no cell phones or writeable CDs. Hell, there were no personal computers in 1975, where that smart-ass kid write his stupid journal. I opened it up and looked at the rounded cursive script.
 
I don’t write much any more, nor does anyone. Seems like penmanship is one of those things that is going to atrophy in this world, like the buggy-whip business. I looked at the dark ink, and imagined a summer long ago:
 
“The New York Freeway clicked by at smooth increments a little more than a mile each minute. Skies clear, track fast. Syracuse, Ithaca, Albany.
 
Traffic was not bad, and I cruised with the speedo pegged in the middle sixties. Saw one bad speed trap west of Albany but was unmolested.
 
The troopers had radar car parked behind an abutment and a big sign further down the road saying “radar trap” after you had already been by the gun heading east,
 
The Smokey on the scene had about seven cars all in a line, moving down the cars in assembly-line fashion, enforcing radar justice. Gerald Ford may be President but this is all pure Nixon police-state. I hate driving this slow, and alleged energy conservation has turned into a program for local jurisdiction revenue enhancement, like drug policy.
 
The tape-deck under the dash was out of commission due to a faulty ground but was surprised to find good Rock n’ Roll radio stations every fifty miles to keep me pumped up.  I rolled with the windows wound up, air conditioning pumping with a soft sigh, the Caprice Classic humming along on her new radial shoes.
 
At about one forty-five I rolled without fanfare into Massachusetts. I tuned the radio onto a Worcester station and zephyred into the Boston metro without incident. I took Route 128 (The High Technology Corridor!) north through Waltham to the Beverly exit. I rolled into the Mickey Dee’s parking lot at exactly eight minutes after four.
 
No battered gray Vista Cruiser station wagon was in evidence. I confronted two issues: was this the same restaurant where Beau and Max were shoveling down fried?  Where was J.T. and the yacht Scapegrace? No phone on the boat, of course, and there must be a hundred McDonald’s in the greater Beverly-Swampscott-Lynn corridor.
 
The location of the boat was by far the more pressing issue, since I did not have enough money for a motel without blowing the budget, and I did not want to sleep on the hood of the Chevy. The Beverly Harbor Marina was just up Water Street a few blocks, so I walked up there on foot to check out the mooring where Scapegrace was normally berthed. There were hundreds of yachts at anchor or at the finger piers.

A boat is nothing more than a hole in the water you attempt to fill with money, I thought. The water is always there looking to leak in and sooner or later it does.
 
I walked down the ramp to the deck and out the finger to where the sailboat had been the last time I saw her. The slip was empty. I walked back up to the Harbormaster’s shack near the showers. A kid in a wrinkled Red Sox t-shirt and ballcap told me that “Yep,” he knew the boat well, “But haven’t seen it lately.”
 
He shrugged.
 
 It looked a lot like I would be sleeping in the car. I walked back out toward the parking lot and nearly walked by a mailbox with in a thicket of them that had “Scapegrace” taped on it. I stopped and looked inside, and sure enough, there was an envelope with my name scrawled on the outside.
 
Saved!
 
I ripped it open and read a set of instructions: “Call Edgar in Marblehead. He will know where we are.”
 
One issue down and one to go. I walked back to the Golden Arches and ordered three cheeseburgers and two large fries. Still no Max and Beau. The burgers congealed in a lump in my stomach. The only solution to that was the prompt administration of a gallon of icy cold beer. To that end, I strode across the street and into a bar called the Fore’N’Aft.
 
I was in luck. There was a Red Sox game on the color television over the bar, live from Cleveland. When I came in, it was 5-4 Sox over the Tribe. Five eighty-five cent beers later, it was 11-9 Cleveland. Reggie Cleveland of the Sox got tagged for the loss, with all those runs leaking out. It was a slug-fest with plenty of HR’s. I neglected to look out the plate glass window at the Golden Arches across the street. About five-thirty a big blonde-haired kid walked into the bar and headed for the cigarette machine to pump some coins in a get a pack of Larks.
 
“Hello, Beau” I said from my stool at the bar. “Eastern Connection ’75 is achieved.”
 
He looked over at me and gave me that sly smile I remembered from the interior line when we were going to do a cross-block on a defensive lineman.
 
Events after that are a little confused, so you are going to have to bear with me.
 

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