I’ve shopped this around to a few literary writing contests over the last year or two. But frankly, I look at what’s trendy in literary circles and I just don’t think they are going to take to this piece. Case in point, here are the winners of The Missouri Review’s recent Jeffery E. Smith Editors’ Prize that include Nonfiction winners How to Love Animals and How a Porn Star Rehabbed My Understanding of Feminism. There’s a vibe in those circles in 2020s America and this piece ain’t it. Not throwing any shade here, but I can take a hint. If you’re a banjo player, why go to the opera house for a gig?
But the recent Baltimore ship-to-bridge collision prompted me to publish this piece on Substack. The infamous 1980 collisions of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge are part of the story from my time as a sailboat live board in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Trigger warning, there is a dead body, two suicides, sex with menstrual blood, a little person porn star, obese pervert, unfiltered Florida, running my boat aground, and disillusionment of the modern world that invokes a lost species of apeman. What’s more, this is all true. Don’t shoot the messenger (me).
The Sunshine Skyway Jumper
I stood over the wet corpse, its stiff limbs contorted like a dead beetle. Teenage boy, fifteen maybe. Blue lips. Ashy white skin. Gym shorts. When the fight or flight reflex kicks in, as mine did when coming upon this dead person after stepping off my sailboat, our primal powers turn us into homicide detectives for a few hyper powered, adrenaline infused seconds.
I scanned my surroundings. A fire engine with two firemen sat across the parking lot under the shade of a tree. My boat slip was adjacent to the fire department’s where their slick paramilitary looking metal machine was moored. I often heard them go out at odd hours responding to the dispatcher’s call. The body rested on a tarp and I connected the dots.
Jumper.
The St. Pete morning air was sweaty. Florida nights soften the hard edges of the world while mysterious beasties in the palm hammocks chirp or ribbit or sing or, in the case of fighting opossums, scream. But that sunshine changes things when the soft edges vanish and real heat sets in. The chorus of animals quiet while humanity wakes with vrooms and clanks and yo’s. Hard edges and heat and vrooms and clanks and yo’s.
I spent the night sleeping on my 1973 vintage Catalina 27 sailboat that I nabbed in the wake of the Great Recession for about two grand. I pinched that money together after multiple summers working less than minimum wage in various oceanography labs as an undergrad research assistant. The half-abandoned boat more than paid for herself as I lived aboard and avoided my college’s dorm fees. So what if there wasn’t air conditioning or a shower? I’d spend the days in class and could pirate a shower at the gym.
I recently limped into the marina after a failed stint trying to live off the hook like a true purist. See, my college was surrounded on three sides by water, and the legality of dropping anchor and homesteading in that area was ambiguous. What is ambiguity but an invitation to make up the rules yourself? A vision of liberty glowed in my mind like Zion.
Alas, it was not to be. The ancient seizing wire on the old anchor gave out while I was ashore, leaving the boat afloat to drag the loose anchor chain right onto the beach of a small mangrove island. There my poor wretched home sat in shame for all to see until I could kedge her off. Kedging is a delightful word that describes the process of using an anchor and line to manually drag a vessel from aground when the tide is highest. One drags the boat a line length, resets the anchor, drags, resets, drags, and on to free floating freedom.
I strained at my labor to a rage-filled exhaustion, the old bird still stuck. Tired and angry, I waited another hour for the peak of high tide to try again. A soft puff of exhaled breath announced dolphin visitors. They circled for a time, perhaps giggling at me, and I cooled off under a sweet breeze. I laid back to admire the moon, the night truly velveteen. How can a person even be upset in this world of ours? I tried the kedging again. The boat bobbed off the sand with the slightest pull. A lesson was learned.
After kedging to safety, it was time to move into the neighborhood marina for I had been too conspicuous. My whole lifestyle was enabled by the right landlubbers in the area thinking I was harmless and looking the other way. But I had to do the thing right and I couldn’t even anchor properly. After failing to get my cantankerous outboard purring, I pulled a different string for a free tow into the marina where I would eventually stand over the boy’s corpse.
The marina manager Stacy was a beautiful Florida beach blonde, a recent divorcee probably fifteen years older than me. I explained my situation and she seemed to like me as proven with her offer of the marina’s inaugural student discount. Naturally I developed a sickening secret crush on her, our dynamic like a blushing Dopey the dwarf and Snow White. But her post marriage heart was for the sportfishing charter guys who were more her age and ran sleek speed machines of fish slaughter. These were the kind of athletic 45-year-olds with sun leather skin and backwards hats who never removed their sunglasses. High school baseball star vibes. While Stacy played that field and received many fun boat rides from suitors, she was always very nice to me. I could usually get her to laugh. If you don’t get a chance to make a crush of yours orgasm, getting her, or him, to laugh is the next best thing.
There were only three other semi-regular liveaboards in the small marina who I dubbed Old Dave, Fat Dave, and Lonely Bob. Old Dave was a kindly lifelong teacher with a father’s mustache who loved nothing more than to chitchat with a beer in his hand at sunset. His was a Morgan 38 sailboat upon which his wholesome family cruised back in the day. He knew a lot more about boat maintenance and the local waters than I and taught me a few things. If one turns out like Old Dave, it was a life well spent.
Fat Dave was an immensely obese man who perpetually sat on the aft deck of his motor trawler like a stately bull frog. He couldn’t leave his boat for half the day at low tide, the exit too athletic a venture. Fat Dave was a proper pervert. He brought up swinging and strippers and porn stars he knew every time I talked to him. Apparently, he could introduce me to Bridget Powerz—the most famous porn star in the world with dwarfism. Never did an eye twinkle like his when retelling tales from a local sandbar where boating swingers rendezvous for orgies. He hosted youthful visitors sometimes and I’d give his boat a wide berth fearing an invitation to join.
Silver bearded Lonely Bob hardly said a word except for once when we crossed paths in the marina bathroom. He was dressed in formal attire and abruptly turned to me, breaking his normal standard operating procedure of differential silence. “It’s the anniversary of my son’s funeral today,” he told me. I, midstream at the urinal, stumbled to say the right thing. “He killed himself.”
The marina was located on the St. Pete side of the four-lane Sunshine Skyway Bridge, Florida’s flagship bridge and gateway to Tampa Bay. The bridge with its massive central truss is an otherworldly alien megastructure that rises four hundred and thirty feet over the otherwise flat cityscape and coastal mangroves. Notably, the US Coast Guard cutter Blackthorn collided with the tanker Capricorn right off the bridge in January 1980. Blackthorn went down with twenty-three souls, the worst peacetime disaster in the history of the military branch. Four months later, the freighter Summit Venture hit a support pier of the bridge during a sudden squall. The collision led to catastrophic failure of the southbound road with multiple vehicles, including a Grey Hound bus, plummeting into the sea. Thirty-five died that day.
When I lived there the bridge was known for its suicides and suicide attempts. Someone told me it was the third most jumped off bridge in the USA. Unfortunately for jumpers, it just isn’t quite high enough to do the job at one hundred and eighty feet or so from the roadway to the bay. The results are reportedly nightmarish as jumpers do not receive a clean death upon impact. No, with limbs and ribs and internal organs crushed, these jumpers drown in just about the most pain a person can experience. Unless, possibly, the shock to the body is so much there is some kind of switch turned. I’ve heard rabbits have this adaptation. When in the hawks’ talons, the rabbit’s body is flooded with a chemical response that makes the experience to the next life more tolerable. Maybe that’s bullshit, but that’s what I’ve been told.
As I stood over the boy’s corpse, I think maybe everything I’ve been told is bullshit. I with fight or flight reflexes assessed the scene for about three seconds: wet body on tarp, firemen under the shade, fireboat in the slip. I then devolved from detective to a common variety moron.
“What the—?!” I blubbered. “Hey! What’s going on here?” The firemen animated. They didn’t anticipate a college student popping out of the ratty sailboat next to them. One of them sauntered over and he was no calendar model fireman who moms fantasize about when taking “me time” bubble baths. This mustached old duffer was a few inches shorter than my average height with a gut only a steady diet of stress-eaten Checkers cheeseburgers could produce.
“Sorry,” he said unapologetically and draped a blanket over the corpse. I connected a few more dots. In the state of Florida, only a certified mortician could declare a patient dead. This created a scenario where the firemen would fish out a corpse from the sea but once ashore, standard operating procedures dictated they wait on-scene for the professional’s declaration. So here these two gents were, forced legally to leave the body at the point of land contact so the mortician could announce the patient deceased for approved transport. The fireman gave me a tired look and promptly returned to his shaded fire engine. While the bedside manner was lacking, I tried to understand the man. Who knows how long they babysat this corpse as the sun rose.
I stood there for a time looking at the lump under the blanket. Indeed, it was like the lump was the entire universe. I thought of the kid’s final moments as a series of movie clips. Did he walk out there or park a car in a lane of traffic? I pictured the minutes of reflection or lack thereof on the precipice. What fight with friends or family or lover preceded the jump? Sober or not sober? Sane or no? Music? What song?
I ached for he did the deed whilst I slept. We both floated on the same waters during that peaceful night velveteen. I envisioned a prize tarpon plying past his body and under my hull in one effortless transect. But I was not the only one who slept on watch. All the human race had slept. I tell you, the lump under the blanket was the entire universe to me. Me, a disgusting, proud, healthy, virile, happy, alive person. A wave of self-loathing punched me in the gut the likes of which I had no reference. Over my shoulder was a backpack of books for class. I wore my one kind-of-nice shirt because maybe I was getting laid and that’s the kind of thing you do when you might get laid. In that moment, I was perverse. I was the most disgusting being I could possibly conjure. It was the body the apathetic fireman covered that was not disgusting. I wouldn’t romanticize the corpse and call it beautiful, but it was pure—not profane as I was.
But it was time to go to class and mentally I performed a remarkable pivot. Being disgusting and alive and maybe getting laid was pretty great, all things told. I gave the fireman an uneasy salute and went on my way.
Years later I’d watch a documentary about a proto human called Homo nadelis. In South Africa, archaeologists found a cave wherein these beings created Earth’s first gravesites about 250,000 years ago. These short, bipedal ape people somehow carried their deceased comrades into the depths of the labyrinthine cave system and buried their loved ones with prized stone tools. Fire pits have been excavated with flakes of goat bones, evidence of meals. Hashmark etchings on the cave walls represent some kind of artwork.
Death ritual. Is that the key hallmark of sentience as we know it? Elephants are famous for mourning their dead, as are the great apes. Crows and dogs too. Years later in 2018, the grieving orca mother Tahlequah would famously carry her dead calf for several days throughout Puget Sound. I chewed through Calculus II and learned about the great and banal ideas of science, art, and politics in class. But where do I learn to honor the dead?
They say you learn that outside of school, but few out here in real America know what to do either. I’ve been to funerals. We hand over money to strangers to do it for us like a band gig. A few folks try to speak at the ceremony, but what is a crumbled-up piece of paper with some prepared remarks for polite society supposed to accomplish? In fact, it’s worse than that. Most of the men in my life are cavalier about the whole affair. “Throw me to the wolves!” they’ll say. “Don’t make a big deal out of it, I don’t want it.” We collectively have been hit so hard with an intangible whip that we’ve devolved.
Homo nadelis 250,000 years ago would’ve known exactly what to do in my situation in the marina. “We have a place for him,” the proto people would’ve tried to communicate to me in their language. They would’ve prepared the body in their way and placed a stone tool in his hand. No doubt the rites they intoned and the method of carrying the body adhered to The Way. I’d help, lifting the body over stalagmites in the shifting light of a torchbearer. The grave would be prepared in the sacred space and an elder would say the rites, no payment required. He or she is the One Who Knows, forged over a lifetime of apprenticeship. We’d etch hashmarks on the cave wall, cook goat meat, and no doubt tell stories. Maybe a duo of my new friends would peel off to make love. We’d leave the cave eventually, full not just of goat, but of the spiritual fullness that we sent off the poor, strange Sunshine Skyway jumper. Too young, too sad. But we sent him off.
But it’s not 250,000 years ago. We are an uncaring, unintelligent species by these standards. I think these things even as I read about spacefaring and computers and complex politics and artificial intelligence and objectively hideous modern art. Eusocial behavior is what we call the interactions between insects. In our minds, obviously the invertebrate ants are not like us—such a comparison is blasphemous. Yet they are the ones who are least sentimental about their dead like us. They are the ones with a social order like a jobs-based economy: rulers, soldiers, workers, farmers. It’s ants and termites who build and live in cities like we do, not the noble intelligent beasts we admire likes dogs or elephants or crows or orcas or orangutans.
Maybe the dirty secret about civilization is that it’s not us becoming more enlightened, rather civilization’s great innovation was for us to become bugs. We sleep and the jumper jumps. Let the bored soldier ant scoop ‘em up and the mortician ant will fill out the appropriate paperwork. Don’t worry, there’s a shaded spot to park under. Take a siesta, everything orbits around being unawake in some form. To have a college degree yet not know what to do when faced with death feels less like a clear win and more of a heart wrenching tradeoff. We traded knowing death to be ants.
I did get laid, but later. I met her at a house party and it was one of those encounters where you just know it’s going somewhere upon eye contact. She had bright green eyes and a brassy Long Island attitude. It’s all Florida sunshine and shots and sex for the next few months. One time during a particularly intimate and athletic late-night tryst, her period began and I unknowingly left a bloody handprint on the wall of her windowless apartment above the bed. Afterward as we lay together, spent, the soft light of her dimmed lamp played over the red handprint of our cave. Her beautiful face was doe-like in the soft lighting, and I held one of her breasts with one hand where she guided it before sighing happily and falling asleep.
Unbidden to my mind came the corpse of the jumper. Why? I lay for what might’ve been an hour wondering why the jumper came to mind, but then I realized it—I was in a state of core existence. Sometimes we do snap out of the eusociality which has our minds like a drug induced haze—the pheromones from the queen. The veil lifts and we are ourselves again. Returned. Awake. Somehow in this naked state I saw the jumper clearly.
In that moment in the embrace of my perfect lover, I knew exactly how to react to the jumper. I’d roar at the top of my lungs in grief and implore all who heard me to wrap him in the tarp upon which he lay. The firemen would mount him atop the fire engine, and upon the truck the honor guard—Stacy and her chosen sport fisher suitor, Old Randy, Fat Randy, Lonely Bob, and Bridget Powerz among them—would stand as the sirens wailed, the makeshift hearse slowly taking us to the largest church in town. Calls would be made and upon those stone steps a choir would sing. The bells would toll. Opossums would scream.
The Word would find me, “he was one of us and now our son is gone” is the timeless and proper theme. We’d lament, fully expressing how we wish he could’ve stopped the jump. Once the ritual was done, we’d throw as large a meal as we could to whomever came. We’d leave once our bellies were full and we knew he was put to rest. Unbeknownst to us, perhaps a person in attendance who was thinking of jumping would decide to not. I’d finish the day alone, sailing under the Sunshine Skyway and sinking a chosen stone as final tribute to all souls, of the Blackthorn and all, under those waters.
While such things did not happen, the vision of it survives. The ant-ward march is not complete, and so long as I breathe it shall not conquer me entirely. I fell asleep but resolved to be awake.