Speedboat Brings Out the Landlubber in this Garcia Bend Resident

How a friendly family boating outing caused humiliation, pain, facial contortions, and tears. And that was just getting the thing in and out of the water.


THE POCKET WATCH
By Jeff Dominguez

Speedboat Brings Out the Landlubber in this Garcia Bend Resident

My cousin Willie bought a boat last week. Or, more appropriately, he bought an immense jet engine, two vinyl seats, and a steering wheel, all bolted onto a hunk of fiberglass. That's how it seemed to me, anyway, when we took it out to Garcia Bend, right across the street from my house, and launched it for Willie's first spin as its new captain.

With only two of us, just getting the thing into the water was a bit of a trick in itself. I had to back Willie's huge manual-transmission work van—the only vehicle with a trailer hitch to which he has access—down the boat ramp to the point that the van's back tires were almost completely submerged, hold it there while Willie unbuckled this and untied that, and then drive the van back up the ramp, park it, and hustle back down to the water, where Willie was waiting. All of this proved to be far more easily said than done.

First of all, the van is so high, and the trailer so low, that I could not see a thing when backing up. To make matters worse, the windows on the van's back doors are two little squares no bigger than, say, a couple of record albums, so I had to get Willie to sit in the boat as I backed down so that I could use his bobbling head as a sort of reference point to indicate roughly where the trailer was.

Simply moving forward in a huge van with a trailer attached is no picnic either. With Willie and his vessel finally in the water, I lumbered back up the ramp, and over the levee with trailer in tow, one wheel or the other skipping up and over the curb at my every turn down to the parking lot. On a cloudy and brisk fall morning, I did not expect to encounter much traffic in the parking lot, but it was like a Grateful Dead concert out there. And I have never seen white parking-space lines painted closer together in my life. Maybe it was the length of the lines—to accommodate vehicle and trailer—that created illusion of narrowness (considering the well-known principle of how vertical lines make one appear more slender). For whatever reason, it was only after a great deal of awkward entry and reentry that I was able, finally, to wedge myself completely into the only space left in the lot.

As I came back down the ramp to get into the boat, I realized that someone had removed the little dock that was once there for passenger loading and unloading. Willie yelled to me that a little further downstream there was a series of small beaches where he could pull up, and I could hop in. So I began to hike along the rocky section of levee along the water's edge, thinking that a suitable beach area was no more than a hop and a skip away.

A quarter of a mile later—I swear I was in the shadow of the Freeport water tower—I came upon a little muddy beach no more than ten yards in length. Willie, who was following along midstream, began to pull in. After such a long hike (for me, anyway), my knee (scheduled for surgery this month) began to give me problems. After years of absorbing athletic abuse of one kind or another, the knee tends to lock up on me occasionally. My orthopedist claims that there are several bone chips floating around inside the joint, and, invariably, one will find its way into the works, creating an effect not at all unlike the proverbial monkey wrench being thrown into the cogs of an otherwise finely-tuned machine. Of course, just as Willie approached the shore, a chip that must have been the size of an actual monkey wrench found a home in a tender spot in my knee.

I danced a painful jig, writhing along the muddy shoreline as Willie's boat got closer and closer. Fortunately, I was able to compose myself just in time to absorb the shock of the boat hitting land. My task then quickly became to shove us off with the necessary force to get the boat far enough away from the shoreline, and to do so from the unsure footing that the black quicksand-like "beach" provided. My "heave-ho" reduced pretty much to a "ho" by my locked-up knee, I summoned what upper-body strength I could and, with the great shout of a Russian weightlifter, pushed the boat out into the current. As I surged outward to follow it, each of my feet made an audible popping sound, like a cork being plucked from a wine bottle, as they simultaneously emerged from their ankle-deep sockets in the quicksand. I swan-dove to safety on the bow of the boat and crawled across the porcelain bow like a foot soldier under barbed wire and plopped, my knee unable to bend either way, into the diamond-tuck seat.

As I situated myself, Willie, who had been turned toward the back as he reversed us away from shore, turned and shrieked in terror. "My boat, my boat, my beautiful boat...!" he screamed, nearly in tears. I rose to see what had shaken him so, only to discover that, like a snail, I had inadvertently left a trail of black sandy slime across the once pristine white surface of the bow during my crawl to safety. We quickly moistened two towels and, more or less, swabbed the deck and then dried—yes, dried—the surface meticulously. With the boat restored to seaworthy condition, the fun resumed.

This boat was no gutless wonder. If this boat was anything, it was quick. Lightning quick. It was the Mach 5 of boats. It could easily have been designed by Pops Racer for his son, Speed, to take out on the weekends. I know now how astronauts feel at the point of liftoff. I don't know how many G's we were pulling, or even what such a statement means, but we took off with such a force, such a deafening surge from the engine, that I became plastered to the back of my seat, and the wind caught the corners of my mouth and pulled my flapping cheeks behind my earline, stretching my lips--we've all seen the NASA training films—into a ghastly smile that extended from one sideburn to the other.

My eyes involuntarily flexed into a tight squint, and tears immediately began to stream out the outside corners. There is a scene from the movie The Right Stuff in which Sam Shepard as Chuck Yeager finally breaks the sound barrier in a special jet designed specifically for that purpose. In the movie, as Yeager breaks the barrier, the scenery gets kind of dreamy and cloudy, and everything takes on a sort of blurry rainbow tint, as though he is about to enter another dimension or perhaps a wormhole. I went through that same thing in Willie's boat that day, except with a Twilight Zone twist--I spotted a few eyeballs and a couple of E=MC2's floating around.

As the roar of the engine (or was that my flapping lips?) died down, and the boat slowed to a speed that could be calculated by something other than military radar, I began to gather my wits. The smell of gasoline filled the air. I looked around and realized that we were in Walnut Grove. Willie turned to me with a smile on his face that made me think of a heroin addict who'd just received a fix. "My cousin," I thought to myself, "is a speed junkie."

I drove all the way home at a much more reasonable speed, which took up the balance of the day. As we approached Garcia Bend Park, I realized that the adventure was far from over. I now had to go through everything I had been through launching the boat, only in reverse order. This time, there was a line of impatient drivers with empty trailers waiting their turn to back down the ramp, load up their boats, and take them home. They were backing down the narrow ramp two at a time, which, normally, would pose no problem to me, but this time I was without the services of Willie's bobbing little head to serve as my guide.

Foolish male pride restricts me from going into great detail in describing the developments that ensued in my backing the van and trailer down the hill. Let's just say that the group of impatient boaters waiting behind me decided to adopt my maneuvering as a sort of community project. Right neighborly of them, huh?

Once I was made it down to the bottom of the ramp, with the trailer in the water, Willie began to have some kind of difficulty securing the boat. As I sat at that 45-degree angle for 15 minutes, my tender knee holding down the stiffest clutch I’ve experienced since my tractor-driving days in Clarksburg, I began to feel all the blood rushing out of my foot, along with the prickly sticking that creeps in whenever a limb decides to go to sleep.

"Alright, take it up!" Willie yelled. I looked back and saw him standing on the side of the trailer. Mindful of the potential jerk that was looming under the present conditions—an injured knee and sleeping foot—I was extra careful to rev the engine and release the clutch slowly. However, despite my efforts, the rear wheels spun out in the silt at the bottom of the ramp and screeched as they finally caught hold of the grooves cut into the cement ramp.

Finally on level ground, I pulled over to let Willie drive home. He stepped around to the driver's side door, soaking wet, with spots of spewn silt dotting nearly every inch of his body. "Thanks a lot, Jeff," he said, looking far more dalmatian than human. "Oops" was all I could think of to say, as I handed him the dirty towel.

My father-in-law tells me that the two happiest days of a boat owner's life are the day he purchases his boat and the day he sells it. I’m not quite sure exactly how happy Willie was that day, but, as for myself, I was ecstatic, happy that it was Willie, and not I, who was the owner of that boat.

The Garage Sale

I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time, but the reality of our first garage sale was infinitely more awkward and bizarre than I could have ever expected. The upshot of the experience can be summed up in two words: "never again".

THE POCKET WATCH
By Jeff Dominguez

The Garage Sale

Our garage sale went as well as a garage sale can go, I guess. I've always considered the very idea of my participation in such a thing to be quite distasteful. The idea of standing there in somebody else’s driveway, bartering with them over items about which they once felt strongly enough to pay full price... I just have many other things I'd prefer to do with my Saturday mornings. "Sleeping in", for one thing, comes immediately to mind.

Consequently, my experience with garage sales is fairly limited. Once, when I was in college, I bought a gold medal for the hundred-yard dash and a karate trophy at a garage sale apparently given by an athlete who was, I guess, getting out of the business. Whenever girls came over, I’d bring out the medal and the trophy and place them strategically around my apartment (“That old thing?” I’d say—It worked pretty well for me).

And then there was the time that I was driving through a neighborhood and happened to spot a 30-gallon aquarium for sale at a garage sale. I knew my buddy, Lane, was looking for a fish tank for his little boy, so I pulled over and asked the teenage attendant how much it cost. “You mean how much am I asking?” she replied, as if to correct my garage-sale-speak. She wanted thirty bucks, so I gave her thirty bucks. She seemed eerily delighted with the transaction. I suspected that something might be wrong with the merchandise—either that, or I had stumbled upon the Stepford household’s garage sale—but when I got the tank to Lane’s house, everything checked out okay. That left me wondering why she was so grateful.

Now I know. It’s because I didn’t dicker with her.

I understand this now, because now I’ve hosted my own garage sale. And I’ve learned the international language of the garage sale, the primary two phrases of which are “What are you asking for the (item)?” and “Would you take (amount)?” I’ve learned that the first and foremost rule of the garage sale is that price tags are pointless. And there’s no such thing as a sale price; it’s what you’re “asking for” a given item. And the first price you “ask for” has no integrity whatsoever. It’s simply a diving board into the slimy greenish-brown pool of garage-sale negotiation. Our problem was that we didn’t factor this principle into our original “asking” price. Like fools, we priced items at what we thought was a fair price based on such irrelevant factors as what we had originally paid for them and their current condition.

We found ourselves a bit bloodied and certainly shell-shocked from the early morning negotiations of the profoundly savvy customers who arrived in that first wave on Saturday. It was exactly the kind of situation I had feared when Lisa first uttered that dreaded phrase, “We need to have a garage sale.” The customers were completely indifferent to our original prices, countering immediately with prices of their own—practically before we could finished answering when they’d ask, “How much are you asking for the (item).” These people weren’t just bartering, they were bartering rudely. Our driveway had become a bare-knuckle marketplace, and we were peculiarly made to feel out of place in front of our own home.

However, rather than retreat in the face of desperate odds, we boldly regrouped, and, during the mid-morning lull, we sprang into action. As Lisa quickly removed all of the little price tags we had so carefully affixed to every item in the driveway, I calculated new “asking” prices for all of the merchandise.

The new prices would be based on a simple formula that, as far as I can tell, is subscribed to by all seasoned garage sale veterans. These veterans will shudder at my audacity—in fact, I may never be able to have another garage sale if word of this gets out (tell everyone you know, please)—but, as a public service, I offer the four-point formula here, to help any reader who may be planning a garage sale of his/her own:

1) The garage-sale pros will offer you half of the “asking” price of anything under a dollar, rounded to the nearest twenty-five cents. 2) They’ll subtract a dollar from any “asking” price that’s lower than ten dollars. 3) They’ll round down to the nearest five dollars on any “asking” price in the range of ten to twenty-five dollars. 4) They’ll round down to the nearest twenty-five dollars on any “asking” price over twenty-five dollars. Decide what you want for a given item, factor in this formula, and work backwards to determine your initial “asking” price. It’s that simple.

With the exception of the pricing snafu, the sale went suprisingly well. All the advertising we did for the event was a couple of cardboard signs at the intersection of Rush River and Windbridge, but, believe me, that was enough. We were besieged. We let the customers feel like they won the negotiation, and we got what we wanted for just about everything. In fact, we made several hundred dollars (well, three or four hundred) from stuff that had just been lying around. After an inauspicious start, we had engineered a remarkable comeback. Things went very smoothly the rest of the day—that is, with the exception of one somewhat ugly incident.

Just before lunch, with everything well under control, I managed to slink away, back into the house for a quick snack and an NBA playoff game, when, without warning, down the hall came a loud whisper from my wife.

“Jeff, get out here!” she cried.
“What?” I asked, running down the hall in my socks, alarmed at her strange tone.
She met me at the laundry room. “We’ve got a shoplifter!”
“Who?” I asked as I walked out into the garage, half a sandwich still in my right hand.
“That man,” my wife exclaimed. “The one walking down to the white Cadillac.”
“What did he steal?” I asked, fearing the worst—that he’d made off with my red bowling ball or another of our “big-ticket” items.
“That pair of earrings my mom brought me back from her trip to Arizona,” she blurted.
“The ones with the blue feathers?”
“Yes, the ones with the feathers. I saw him take them with my own eyes—hurry up, he’s getting away!”

I knew her exasperation was based more on the principle of the matter, as opposed to a sense of loss for a pair of earrings she’ll never wear, but I calmly explained to her that it just wasn’t practical for me to tackle a 50-year-old man on the asphalt, lean him up against his Cadillac, and strip search him for a pair of “Dream Catcher” earrings. What would I say? “Excuse me sir, did you steal a pair of earrings from my wife?” or “Alright, buddy, we saw you. Give up the earrings.” He’d laugh at me. Or, worse, he’d sue me. We simply hadn’t established a procedure for this situation.

Still, Lisa was utterly dejected. She’d felt bad enough as it was, selling a gift from her mom (“but we’re a little thin on costume jewelry,” she reasoned as she reluctantly set them out with the other merchandise early that morning). And now she felt victimized, as well. Anyone who’s ever had anything stolen from them will tell you how strangely violated you feel when it happens, what a sickening, empty aftertaste is left in place of whatever it is that was taken.

I searched my heart for a manner in which to offer her a measure of consolation. Finally, I decided that, perhaps if I offered to pay her, myself, for the stolen earrings, she might take some comfort from the gesture, maybe realize a sense of closure to the situation. It seemed to be the least that I could do.

“Look… Lisa… how much were you asking for the earrings?” I inquired.
“A dollar,” she replied, a slight smile of appreciation appearing at the corners of her mouth as she began to realize the kind gesture I was making.
I thought for a moment, put my head down, and reached into my pocket...
“Would you take fifty cents?”

She didn’t talk to me until sometime the following evening.


Jeff Dominguez is a longtime Pocket resident who writes THE POCKET WATCH whenever a worthy topic occurs to him (roughly once a month). Call him at 393-8300 or e-mail him at jeff.dominguez@yahoo.com.

Happy Birthday Grandpa...

My grandparents raised me from the time that I was a baby. Coming from a family of women, I was lucky enough to have an especially close relationship with my grandfather. During the time I was writing my column, I dedicated one that was published on Father's Day to him. Unfortunately, he passed in 2005, and, honestly, my life hasn't been the same since. Yesterday was his birthday, so, in his honor, I'm posting the old tribute column—Jeff.

THE POCKET WATCH
By Jeff Dominguez

Everything I Ever Needed to Know, I Learned From My Grandfather

It's kind of unfortunate, and I don't really hold it against him, but the fact remains that my father wasn't around much when I was growing up. Whether or not this was by his own choosing is a subject that is still hotly debated some 30 years after the fact by many members of my family. I've heard a lot of stories about the years surrounding my birth, and sometimes I don't know which of them to believe. All I really know are the hard facts: my parents were teenage sweethearts who married against my mother's parents' objections. As one might expect, the marriage was short lived, and, inside of a year after saying "I do," they were divorced. The unexpected twist was that, shortly after they had decided to divorce, my mother discovered that she was expecting a baby—me.

When we left the hospital after my birth, we came home to the only household I ever really knew growing up, the household headed by my mother's father, my grandfather, Ruben Dominguez. In a situation in which instability seemed imminent, my grandfather provided me not only with a home, but also with a sense of stability upon which I look back on as the saving grace of my adolescence. He was not able to lavish me with many of the extras that a lot of my friends enjoyed, but he saw that I always had everything I needed, the most important thing being a clear understanding of the difference between right and wrong.

Now that I'm a father myself, I'm beginning to understand the significance of the sacrifices he gladly made for me. I know now firsthand the weight of the worry that follows a father around 24 hours a day. And I marvel at his willingness to assume responsibility for my upbringing at an age when most men are thinking of their retirement. Raising a young boy—from toddler to teenager—is not usually found on the retirement itinerary of the average guy. But then again, my grandfather is not your average guy.

One of the oldest sons in a family that eventually grew to include 16 siblings, my grandfather was forced by his father to leave school at the age of 12 so that he could be put to work to contribute to the family income. By the time he was 13 or 14, my grandfather had already become a man, doing a man's job for a man's wages. When other boys his age were out playing ball or sipping a phosphate at the local soda fountain, my grandfather was performing backbreaking labor in the farmlands of Central California.

He was a gifted athlete who, without school to foster his talent at team sports such as baseball and football, turned to boxing as an outlet for his athletic ability. He developed punching power that rendered his opponents helpless and bloodied, looking as though they had been "hit in the face with a sledgehammer" according to those who saw Grandpa fight. Boxing was only recreation to him though, and his modest claims to fame in the arena lay in having gone the distance with "Kid Nelson—The Knockout King from New York City" and having served as a sparring partner for his cousin, who, himself, once "fought the guy who fought the champ." My grandfather was a welterweight, and, by virtue of his blue-collar career, he astonishingly managed to maintain his fighting weight until his retirement.

From a very early age, work was life and vice versa for my grandfather. He married my grandmother in 1932, during the Great Depression. Despite the hard times he lived through, he was never without a job. At a time when men looking for a handout stood in lines that circled city blocks, my grandfather was proud to earn his way. "Never accepted the dole," he says. "Not once." Instead, he picked cotton in hundred-degree heat for ten cents an hour during the Great Depression.

More than just some worker bee with a great left hook, my grandfather also had a soul. He was a musician. He tells me stories about working all day, playing in the band at the local dance at night, and then racing home afterwards, just in time to milk the cows. The son of a Methodist minister, he also knows the Bible as well as any clergyman who's ever stood behind a pulpit. Although he did not—could not—pursue higher education, he made sure that I did. But even with my college degree, I'll never be as wise as my grandfather.

Life is full of uncertainties and gray areas, and whenever a problem arises, I know I can always turn to my Grandpa for direction. His ability to see through entanglements and complications and get right to the heart of an issue is almost magical. His innate sense of good and bad and right and wrong is always right on the mark. I can't convey what a valuable resource he's been for me throughout the years.

When he was a little boy, he tells me, he wasn't exactly an angel. He says that he used to wake up in the morning with a sense of impending doom, thinking, "I'm probably going to get a really good lickin' today." His father, a man who possessed physical strength that has been described to me in terms on a par with that of your average comic book superhero, was also, unfortunately, a strict disciplinarian who adhered to the astonishing biblical principle of "spare the rod, spoil the child." The unfortunate combination of my grandfather's inherent mischievousness and his father's allegiance to corporal punishment left a predictable, frequent, and lasting impression on my grandfather, primarily on his backside.

Later in his life, when his own children needed discipline, Grandpa followed the only example he'd ever known. He was, I'm told, notorious for the severity of his spankings. Luckily, by the time he took charge of me, he'd abandoned that approach, and I grew up never once having endured a single spanking at his hand. Still, I obeyed his every directive promptly and without question. I did so out of a sense of respect that overwhelmed me. Perhaps someday, my little boy will attribute my own aversion to corporal punishment to the fine example that my grandfather set for me.

As far back as I can remember, Grandpa has always possessed a larger-than-life, almost mythical, physical stature in my eyes. Bigger, taller, stronger than anyone—to me, that is my grandfather. Through the years, I've grown pretty tall, myself, and one day, not too long ago, I realized that I now stand nearly a head taller than him. This realization hit me like a ton of lead. Here is the most imposing man I've ever known, the embodiment of the term "a man's man," the prototype for virility and inner and outer strength, and I'm standing here looking at the top of his head. "When did this happen?" I wondered to myself, flabbergasted. "When did I get bigger than Grandpa?" And then it came to me. As though a light switch had been turned on in my mind, I realized that it's true how a man's actual stature is measured not in feet and inches, but by the deeds he's done, the life he's lived. It's not just something nice to say; it's true—my grandpa is living proof. In reality, he now stands about 5'10", but he's assumed Bunyonesque dimensions to me.

My Grandpa is pretty old now, 83 this year. His bones have settled in over the course of his life and, he must be at least an inch or two shorter than he was in younger years. His body aches from years and years of difficult manual labor. His appetite is not as hearty as it once was, and he grows tired far more easily now than he ever did. Still, he remains the ideal to which I aspire. And even though I'm now a father, myself, I'll celebrate this Father's Day, and every Father's Day to come for the rest of my life, in tribute to him. Happy Father's Day, Grandpa!

The Pocket Watch appears in every issue of Pocket News. E-mail Jeff Dominguez at jeff.dominguez@yahoo.com; or call him at 916-393-8300.