spirits or spirits

Be impossible for me to pin an accurate date to this story, sometime in the eighties.  For a guy obsessed with writing about his past, my memory is surprisingly vague on lots of details.  Half decade resolution at best.  All I remember for sure is that I lived on my little fishing boat, had a girlfriend named Cindy who lived up by the baseball stadium. Gave me two nights a month, and in five years seeing one another I only called her twice outside our established routine. 

Every other Friday I called about seven, asked to see her as if it were our first time together. The out of routine calls were an incident where we shared the crabs, have to ask her how that happened, and the day this incident happened I gave her a call, needed to be with someone. Pay phone at the head of the dock. Hated that phone.

Sometime in winter, dark early, but I’ve got a six pack of Old Milwalkie’s Best and not much to do and before I knew it the cans are all empty and I’m drunk.  Sitting in the tiny galley in the fish boat called the Shirley B.  Deck house on that boat just big enough for a couple places to sit and a ladder to the accommodation and engine room.  Galley stove three feet from whirling v-belt shivs on the front of the engine.  Mine had plywood panels covering the machine in a vein attempt to dampen the roar when we were underway.   

Listening to CBC Sunday afternoon radio from the little black and silver set I got in Astoria the time I lay in there partying until I ended up at the medical clinic with bad gut.  Doc said he had been seeing people all morning with the same thing.  That was the time … different story.

About ready to pop the top on the last can when I realize there are a couple other beings in the room.  In the room.  Galley in that boat measured no more than ten feet long at the head but because of  the shape of a boat it tapered down quickly so that the floor maybe measured five feet in a v shape, four or five feet across at one end tapering to a point.  One side had a bench and fold down table, stove on the end of the bench where the room had the most width. Trough like bunks on the other side, high lea boards to keep a guy in bed when the boat is at sea. Later I cut out the lea rail in my lower bunk and made a sort of double bed for when the girlfriend came to visit … also a different story.

I’m in my favorite seat between the stove and green rubber mat table top. Stove rattles and hisses in answer to wind swirling around the rigging, boat tugging at the lines. Low voltage light bulb overhead casts a yellow light in my comfy little world.  Used to say you don’t climb in one of these little boats, you put them on like a pair of overhauls. I always liked the boat laying at the dock, lines doubled up, shore power charging the batteries, better than rolling around on the fishing grounds,  but we did put in some time on the ocean every year.  Next year I’ll kill um.

By now all the next years had been used up and I’m either studying to be a school teacher up at the university, or maybe it happened after that sort of fell through and I’m working construction for my brother, guess none of that pertains to this story anyway.

Pop the top on my last beer.  Did I say six pack?  More likely half rack and the foam spills over on the green rubber table mat and I don’t care would have drunk dialed a woman friend if the phone if it weren’t a  long hundred yard walk through the storm and cost a quarter.  Didn't walk around with little computers that have a phone app in our pockets in those days.

As real as the two characters were, I never looked over that way to see.  One of them heavy set the other slender and I want to say gender neutral.  Sensing they were beings from the other side, whatever the other side is, I peppered them with questions about religion  and philosophy.  Laughter met my most serious queries.  It’s all bullshit, but there is something we might call the spiritual realm, totally incomprehensible to human understanding, also incomprehensibly close.

Their laughter brought tears to my eyes.  In my cups by then, sobbing like a baby.  Probably the only time I cried between age seven or eight and age seventy-two, when strong cancer drug side effect included mood swings … also different story. 

On parting the spirits told me I’d always have a woman  partner even if she didn’t happen to be my first choice, and I should call the current girlfriend for some comfort.  Details of that comfort slip my mind, but Cindy didn’t do any of the woo-woo and I’m sure she dismissed my story out of hand. Poured herself a big glass of chible, lit a cigarette figured I just made up some shit to get laid an extra time that month.  

These kinds of experiences can be reproduced in the lab.  The spirit forms, not Cindy telling me about her night out at the gay bar.  The beings didn’t tell me anything beyond what is already in my head, stuff I didn’t know came back as incomprehensible, but it certainly has stuck with me as a profound experience.  Life changing, maybe not, but profound nevertheless.