Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

Introductions and manly handshakes were exchanged. The inside of the Toyota Land Cruiser was even more depressing than the pockmarked exterior, littered with fast-food debris, newspapers, shotgun shells, fishing tackle and cigarette butts. It looked as if some tweaker had been living out of it for weeks.

Russell had known Deke since the eighties, when he was an A and R man for Atlantic Records. He’d flown too close to the sun on wings made of cocaine and had eventually crashed here on Long Island Sound, where he’d reinvented himself as a fishing guide. He already owned the boat, and fishing was, as he said, the only thing he was good at besides scoring dope.

“I used to have a good ear, too,” he told Jack as they pulled out of the marina in his unnamed boat, a twenty-six-foot center-console Parker that had once boasted upholstery and working gauges. “But you know, once you hit your thirties, it’s hard to keep on top of it. You gradually lose your feel for it, lose your grasp on the balls of the zeitgeist. The new bands are kids barely in their twenties and you’re suddenly feeling nostalgic for the fucking Smiths and the Clash and Dinosaur Jr.; then before you know it, you’r e the fucking dinosaur. There were the great ones, like Mo Ostin and Seymour Stein, who go on and on, but basically it’s a young man’s game.”

“The drugs must’ve been good, though,” Jack said.

“Oh yeah, the drugs were amazing. That was the air we breathed. All access pass.”

“So, my man, what was, uh, your drug of choice?”

“Hell, I liked ’em all, though I have to say that it was crack that finally kicked my ass. I’ll tell you what was probably the greatest experience of my life, before it wasn’t, was chasing the dragon. Line it up, a little rock of crack, two pellets of smack. Oh my God, that was the fucking ultimate.”

Jack nodded, as if this were a perfectly reasonable assertion. “Gotta love the speedball.”

“I don’t think anything ever made me so happy in my life,” Deke said. “And you — what’s your poison, man?”

“Well, you gotta understand where I come from, crystal meth’s like mother’s milk. It’s practically the family business. I mean, hell, cookin’ speed and makin’ shine were the only jobs some people in Fairview ever had. So meth was in my veins, so to speak. But the kind of nastiness I’ve seen down in those hollers would have turned a weaker man to the Lord. In my case, I just moved my business upmarket to coca products and opiates.”

“Jesus,” Russell said. “I’m trapped on a boat with the fucking Glimmer Twins.”

—

It was a perfect day, bright and cool, with wisps of cirrus drifting through a steely blue firmament, nudged by a western breeze. They bounced up the north side of the point over Shagwong Reef and rounded the eastern tip of the island, turning south. On one side the lighthouse, a relic of George Washington’s administration, was perched on the cliff above the waves, two hundred yards closer to the encroaching surf than it had been when it was built; on the other, three thousand miles of ocean stretching all the way to Ireland.

Five or six boats were clustered a couple hundred yards off the point. Deke gave them a wide berth and cruised down along the south beach, where the surf casters were spread out along the shoreline, some of them casting, most just standing on the beach with their rods at the ready, waiting for signs of life.

“When the blitz is on, they suddenly multiply,” Deke said. “Line up shoulder-to-shoulder along the shore, casting into this seething cauldron of bait and bass. The surf casters are like the birds — they suddenly show up, swarming where the bass come up, like they’re summoned by some mysterious instinct, or maybe by cell phone. For six weeks these fucking guys abandon their lives and sleep out here in campers and shitty motels. And they hate us — the guys in the boats.”

Deke cruised past the huge radar dish, the lighthouse’s ugly modern twin, built during World War II, Deke said, when German submarines regularly popped up here. Deke followed the shoreline all the way down to Ditch Plains, the surfing beach, where a few stalwarts in wet suits were bobbing on their boards. Russell pointed out the old Warhol estate.

All at once the birds materialized over the tide line off their bow, dozens of them diving and rising over the swells like flags flapping on a battlefield. Deke gunned the boat and raced toward the feeding frenzy, slowing as they pulled in close and maneuvering for position as the other boats aimed for the same two acres of disturbed water, where thousands of fins slashed the surface, the gannets plunging into the water for the bait and the gulls skimming the surface for the scraps, the oily smell of the anchovy slaughter mixing with gasoline exhaust.

“Holy shit,” Jack said. Deke got him set up in the stern while Russell took the bow, casting into the maelstrom and hooking up on his second retrieve. The fish took eighty yards of line before he was able to turn it. Looking back, he saw that Jack was also into a fish. It was another ten minutes before Russell got it to the boat. Deke came around to help him bring it in and unhook it, a fat, shiny fifteen-pound striper that he lifted by its tail and dropped into the water.

“What the fuck,” said Jack, who by this time had lost his fish. “You’re lettin’ him go?”

“Catch and release,” Russell said. “The code of the fly fisherman.”

“Shit, man, that’s like gettin’ all the way into a girl’s bedroom and then just tuckin’ her in and kissin’ her good night. I just don’t get that at all.”

“There’ll be more,” Russell said. “What happened to yours?”

“He tried to wrestle it in, broke the line,” Deke said. “That’s all right; we’ll get the next one.”

The bait had moved with the current up the shore. Deke followed the birds and the boats to the next blitz, finding an opening and planting Jack in the prime spot, instructing him on his cast. Russell decided to wait until his friend got one on before he started in again. The water was seething with boats and fish and birds, all of them frenzied in their own ways. Jack flubbed his first two casts and caught Deke’s shirt with the third.

“Slow down,” Russell said. “Take your time.”

He kept casting and reeling as fast as he could, failing to connect with anything. “What the fuck?”

“Slow down your retrieve a little,” Russell said.

“You know I’m gettin’ fuckin’ tired of you always tellin’ me what to do.”

“All right,” Russell said, retreating to the front of the boat to fend for himself, hooking up on his first cast and brooding as he played the fish, his feelings mutating from stunned to hurt to angry. Ungrateful prick. He wasn’t so obtuse as to think this was about fishing. But he’d plucked this kid from obscurity, and his judgment had been vindicated, for Christ’s sake. He hadn’t gotten any credit for the sentences he’d sharpened, the paragraphs he’d trimmed of fat, and he didn’t want any, but neither did he expect this kind of resentment. He landed the fish on his own and unhooked it without bothering to look back to the stern.

Eventually, Jack hooked another one, after they’d moved the boat again, and Russell abandoned his post in the bow to watch the end of the fight, resisting the urge to tell him to stop bulldogging the goddamn fish, letting Deke carry that weight. And when the fish was finally in the boat, it turned out to be a whopper, at least twenty pounds, bigger than the two Russell had caught.

“Of course I want to fuckin’ keep it,” Jack said, in answer to Deke’s question. His exhilaration seemed to clear the air.

“Nice work,” Russell told him.