Like Ahab & My Grandmother the Looter

After a fight where I called my brother a cunt around 3AM, I’ve had family on the brain. Here are two quick stories:

I found an Article* on my father’s boat while googling him earlier. My favorite quote: “But Tom, are you legal?”

The casino failed after one summer. The boat ultimately sank, well after the time we had it. Still, my father is ambitious. I love the man, dearly. Yes, for his knack at actualizing unrealistic things long enough for me to make them into my stories, but also because he is a loving father.

The Europa Jet, 1993 from New London Loft

I was just on the phone with my cousin for 23 minutes, a long call by my telephone talking standards. Jill, a mother of two, was raised more like my sister. Her mother and mine are siblings, and indulged in the giant Italian-American clan style upbringing. I was very close with all my cousins, but Jill most especially. She was there for me when I lost homes, when I needed employment and even when I sliced off the tip of my finger.

My mother was up from Florida yesterday and met my brother in Connecticut. The two of them, with my grandmother in tow, visited Jill and her family. I was just alerted that as Jill was preparing a care package for my brother to take to college, my grandmother Marie would reach in and pull things out… for herself. Now, Marie is constantly giving Scott and I care packages and I wouldn’t be surprised if she was stealing from Jill simply to give to Scott or me later. But still, Grandma looted.

Marie Tortora, aged 93

A Glimpse: My Mother, Thomas Graver and Our Casino Boat

My family is a continued source of inspiration, and my childhood was unlike most others as one year I was a prince and the next I was a pauper. This was a cycle, dictated by the whims of my father. It meant never knowing stability, living in grandeur and then losing absolutely everything. This story, and the story within it, shed a little light on a rather complex situation.

When I was in the third grade, my father, Thomas Graver, convinced the town of New London, Connecticut that they needed a casino boat. For an entire summer the Europa Jet cruise ship belonged to our family. It was the center of my father’s gaming corporation, Entertainment Afloat.

Buried in a drawer somewhere we have the introduction to my father’s fifteen minutes of North Eastern fame. It was a Boston Globe article entitled, “Like Ahab, Venturer Pursues Destiny At Sea.” And all of it lasted only fifteen minutes.

Before Thomas went down with his ship, I spent my summer either sleeping in our brick loft overlooking the mouth of the Connecticut River or on a house boat ten minutes away from the Europe Jet.

During my days and weekend nights I would sail into international waters and command the sea. I was the only child allowed everywhere on the boat. I’d meander through the casinos and drink Shirley Temples in the bar. I reigned over the two children’s rooms: a padded wall palace where I could bounce and scream off all the sugar I had consumed, and an arcade where I had jimmy rigged certain games to allow me to play for free.

I brought friends and made friends. Everyone knew it was all mine.

It was a sour investment and met a terrible end. The boat, actually owned by Europa and chartered by my father, pulled out to sea one day, holding everything belonging to the Entertainment Afloat Corporation hostage. My father owed everyone money, including the Port of New London.

We ended up in financial disrepair. (Though, years later, the boat met a worse fate, sinking in a storm under someone else’s ownership.) We lost almost everything.

Thomas bounced back. He sold used cars for a while. He invested in a monument in Germany, a casino in Abu Dhabi and a hotel in Turkish North Cypress. He would disappear for great lengths on end, traveling the world. Then he would come home broke, but filled with wonderful stories of dinners with Sheiks and war torn landscapes.

We lived in eighteen different homes before and during my time in college. Most of them were in the same three town vicinity. As my parents insisted that my younger brother Scott and I received private education we never had to worry about being passed between school systems. We did have to worry about being different people every year.

Our family would build a new, beautiful home, be unable to afford it, leave and start all over again.

The grandest of the homes, Artillery Road, was a white colonial situated on an immense wooded property. Scott and I could mount the hill in our backyard and walk for miles, leaving our property, but entering the virginal nethers of everyone else’s deep backyard. There were creeks and forts and even an abandoned barn house.

It meant the world to us, and having lost before, we cherished it, until we then failed again:

The sheriff had a key to our home. Still, he knocked. I was the one to answer the door; at least that’s how I remember it.

“Take what you need,” he said. “Everything else will be locked up here until you can completely vacate.”

We had ten minutes.

My ten year old brother went to his room; I to mine. I threw together one week’s worth of whatever an eighth grader believes he needs to survive: school uniform, gym clothes, books, comics and sports cards.

The four of us met at the front door of our great white home. The sheriff had gone to sit in his car. I now imagine removing people from the houses they’ve built for themselves wasn’t an easy job.

I knew my parents, at this moment, would be going in opposite directions. Scott would go with my mother. His eyes were red. She could look after him better than my father.

My mother noticed I was lost inside myself.

“We have to go, David,” she said. I felt how deeply her hurt ran.

And then I thought, “what about my father?” He looked like a crippled prince, wincing away his lost kingdom in front of his wife and children. We all knew it was his fault. Even he knew. But now, after years of having my father as more a friend and less a relative I can understand how he could believe this event to be a small sacrifice in the grand scheme of his ambition.

Within a period of time too short actually to think all of the following I remembered my father’s casino boat docking for the first time off the coast of New London; The FBI swarming to him, sifting through information about gambling laws, international drug smuggling, and stowaways. They were informing him. What power could a town sheriff have over a man such as this? I thought about the overwhelming swirl of his ink and paper and text during the publication of his newspaper, The Player’s Choice. I thought of his once grand hotel ambition in the United Arab Emirates. His experiences in Vietnam. His struggles with his four brothers. His old building in Germany. The compound in Turkish North Cypress. His exciting life. His ravenous nature and the ever buzzing bulb in his brain.

Then I looked at my mother; Tiny, her Italian heritage in her body structure, lifestyle and mindset.

And I thought, “How simple.”

I still cannot ever, ever forgive myself for judging my mother that day. The mother who was the only consistent foundation in my childhood. The mother that favored me because she knew without a doubt that I was smarter than everyone else. The mother that made me her best friend and confidante the moment I was capable of listening and interpreting.

There she stood with my little brother and I knew they’d be heading to my grandmother’s studio. I also knew my father would spend the last money in his pocket and rent a hotel room. He had no friends, no other place to go. And when the money ran out of course my mother would step in to salvage the situation. A hotel, I thought, would be more a vacation than an eviction.

“I’m going with Dad,” I let them know. I knew from her face that she wanted to know what she did wrong. All I could say was that I didn’t want him to be alone.

She cried. Her cheeks were red. Scott cried. I was sweating. I was only vaguely aware of my father’s presence. I tried to reassure her and although it didn’t work, she had to accept and was out the door with Scott.

We went to a hotel. We ate out that night and even had Dunkin Donuts for breakfast. The next day was Monday and my father brought me to school. Scott wasn’t there. I started crying in class. I was sent to the nurse. There I continued to cry. Before I knew it my mother was there crying with me. She saved me, took us to my aunt’s house where she knew I would be happier. Soon enough she would save my father and in doing so, in being governed by something as simple and blunt as love, she would trap herself in this cycle of gain and loss forever.

The power my father exercised over us came from the fact that we knew, of all the ungraspable elements composing his life, he clearly loved us. We were who this brilliant, exciting man always returned to. It swept the three of us up every time. And after his calm grew into a believed stagnation, we would let Thomas slip back into mania over a new idea and see it through until we once again lost everything.

A Taste: The Pear, the Quarry and Paul

I wanted, very much, for a year-in-review to be my first blog post. Well, I haven’t finished it. Too much has happened, too much needs to be said… but first, digested.

This is my favorite bit of writing to date, “The Pear, the Quarry and Paul.” Enjoy:

There are certain moments, cast in such specific light, that trigger a phenomenon that I’ll struggle, now, to describe for you.

It’s a process of reinforcement, of bolstering the mind and soul. Without proper understanding it could be confused as duplication or rehashing, even nostalgia. My argument is that of something more.

Where to begin? A description of the inciting events? A clear explanation of the passage that precedes this one? As time is a theme of this piece, we will begin here and now.

The only fruit I ever crave is the pear. I more regularly indulge in berries; blackberries or raspberries. But it is the pear that, when I am reminded of and pursue my want for, I am most greatly rewarded. There is a familiarity there, some unrememberable association from early childhood that allows me to simultaneously walk through many times and places. To relive sweet, life-rich memories. A multitude of Davids finding happiness at once, over the fields of memory. I, now, sit with the slices – silvery, green, a wet cream opal – of this pear, but with it I travel.

With this idea of the pear, let us now travel.

In the tumult that was college I took my best friend home for a weekend. She had been and continues to be, my rock; Diamond hard, as rare as an emerald, more valuable to me than either. My treasure.

Somewhere between Danbury and Westport we ended up at a mansion party with throngs of my then, still childlike, younger friends: physically beautiful, mentally free, high school attending princes and princesses. I was drawn to them, and back to them, by their ability to both capitalize and squander their exquisite powers of body and privilege.

Drunk on a bottle of Cristal, belonging to someone’s absent mother, cheers erupted around us.

“To the quarry! To the quarry!”

Swept up on wings of debaucherous adventure and Connecticut-style rule breaking we piled into cars and pursued. I remember nothing about the ride save for sitting backward in the trunk of Volvo station wagon and starred sky.

Twenty or so of us parked along the road beside a forest. In the almost hushed tones of paranoid drunks, we spread the warning: entering private property.

We commenced with a winding hike through the moonlit silvers – turning evergreens into still lifes, trapped in the mangled arms of deciduous neighbors.

Every so often we would lose a couple to a shrub, and after a questionably long, late night trail tour, we found the quarry.

With a fringe of onlooking trees and a cliff face rising opposite our position, we stood on the gravel shore of a mirror of the sky.

As a true representation of youth, we sought to destroy it. Quickly we stripped. The true adventurers, shoeless, ran through the trees making their way for the cliff. Maggie and I ran straight for the water and with all the force we could muster shattered the plain of the mirror, over and over – rippling the land and sky into waves, plunging through cool waters, crystals, time both our own and time belonging to the forest – to the family that carved out the quarry, to the rain the filled it and the ground water that fed it, to those that did this before us, to the animals that drank from it – traveling so fast through space and time we touched the event, or the creator that provided it, this mass, with life. All in a moment. There were thousands of smiling Davids, all held within me. This one vessel touched every great summit. More importantly, and the point of this exercise, a new me was created: one who will always walk happily through the quarry with Maggie.

I pull you now to time just before the pear.

The tumult is far greater, far more real than anything experienced in college. My struggles have deepened, and with them, the stress carried in my jaw and the recession in the light and set of my eyes. My ability to make justified assumptions or envision days beyond the moment I live in.

But the pear and the quarry visited.

This isn’t turning into a love story. It remains a life story, mind you.

I introduced Paul to a world I walk in, sometimes, like a prince. There, Le Royale, none the less, I was surrounded by people – and I say this without ego and a genuine lack of truly knowing why – who have made efforts to covet me. People who’ve made clear a desire to both fuck and date me. People, who I suspect, like me because I am still mysterious, because I withhold from them. Because I reject them, holding out for something different.

Again, without ego or exaggeration, this night was difficult for them and none hesitated to let me know.

My crime was showing vulnerability. With Paul, others cease to exist. The backdrop and supporting cast smear like a priceless painting left in the rain, with only its subject – him – so beautiful that the elements themselves are scared to touch.

Carelessly drunk and mildly addled by the treatment I quietly underwent at the hands of others, I danced with Paul. With ego, I do say that three ladies all commented that we were some version of the best or most adorable dance couple that they’d seen. I was equal parts disturbed by plans I overheard about “dividing and conquering” us, and at peace being there, at peace, with him.

With that as my set-up, we fast forward to the crux. The climax. The pear.

The bathroom window was open. The lights were off. The tiles glowed silver, the same light that bathed the quarry, only years younger. (If light, as I suspect, can age.) The same light that glistens in the nectar pockets of my pear now.

Thick, warm clouds of steam rolled out the window – sailing four stories down, dispersing in the air, delivering his scent to as many lungs, human or not, in every corner of the world. He mixed with the air and settled with the sea.

His skin was the tone and texture of marble. He was the moon.

I was naked, not yet in the shower. Self conscious. Terrified. Not wanting to destroy the picture. I don’t recall ever seeing anything quite so beautiful in my entire life. His posture. His proportion.

And when it all became to much, when life brimmed over with an exquisite awe, and I stepped in, I traveled time.

To his quickened breathing minutes before and the release of cages of Monarchs in my ribs, fluttering about singing with the voices of songbirds.

And I was six, naked, collecting shells on a sandbar with my father steps from our hotel in Molokai.

I was looking at myself, in Paul’s eyes, when we first met.

As life continued to pour forth I revisited first love and first kiss. I drove alone through the hills that nourished me as a young artist.

I was dancing around the fire pit in Thailand, wearing my robes, kicking up sand, covered in sweat and soot and dust, stomping my feet to the musical instruments our villagers had crafted. Flailing my arms, undulating rhythmic and tribal and as the surreal reality of that memory pushed my very limits of happiness, I was in my imagination.

Paul and I were naked, running through mossy forests of mythology. Younger. Boys. Spirits. Of the trees and of the water. Powerful, especially in our pull over people. Devilish, oft times unaware of why or how. The world was new, but we were timeless. And he smiled.

So we kissed. Then and there, in the present of the shower. I was not surprised to discover that his lips were as cool and soft as ever.

My pear is gone, but inside me right now, you will find a David eating it, a David at the quarry with Maggie, and David with Paul. In each of them, you will find a silver imprint of unknowable better versions of me.