Tampa Burn (44 page)

One of Harris's Tampa pilot colleagues was aboard. It was his job to navigate this ship several miles offshore, and then, without the freighter stopping, he would skitter down that ladder and onto a local pilot transport boat, which would take him home to Egmont Key, an island five miles to the west of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.

I crossed behind the freighter close enough to read the big gray letters on its stern:

An appropriate name, considering that country's history. Maritime companies who own unsafe, outdated commercial vessels usually register them in countries like Liberia, where inspectors are more easily bribed—if there are inspections at all.

I waved at the wheelhouse just in case the American pilot was looking. A fellow pilot of his was doing me a hell of a favor.

I steered sharply east again, quartering the freighter's long, rolling wake. Ahead, in the far distance, was a small sailboat, its sail a gilded ivory in the late sun.

It was about the size of
No Mas,
but I knew that it couldn't be Tomlinson. It was much too early for my purist sailor friend to be arriving in Tampa Bay.

But it brought his image to mind. Brought back the talk we'd had early that morning, the two of us walking the beach toward Sanibel's Lighthouse Point.

It gave me something to think about as I crossed the last three miles of open water to Bullfrog Creek.

 

 

OUR
talk had been more like a confession. Tomlinson's confession.

He was right. What he had to tell me put our friendship at serious risk. Knowingly, what he told me also put his own freedom, even his life, at risk.

“We should have had this conversation months ago, Doc,” he said. “I feel guilty as hell, man, because I've been putting it off. I know it's cowardly, but it's because I'm scared. I know that what I have to say might change everything between us. Forever.”

It had to do with the realization that he'd suffered a severe memory loss earlier in his life. Tomlinson told me that no one seemed to take him seriously when he said he couldn't remember writing
One Fathom Above Sea Level,
but it was true.

He said, “Look man, I realize I'm a figure of fun around the marina. That's fine. I dig the role. Hell, I
play
the role. But when I read
One Fathom,
I went into a kind of identity shock. Some of the stuff I'd written all those years ago, it was so powerful. Some of it was so pure. It scared me. How could I possibly have created something so beautiful, yet have absolutely zero memory of doing it?”

Tomlinson added, “I began to wonder, and fret: What other important events in my life had totally disappeared from my memory. And
why
? It had to be more than the drugs, man. Not even I used that many drugs.”

As we walked the beach, he told me about it. He was so troubled by the mystery that he began to do research into his own personal history. Finally, as I knew, early the previous winter he disappeared from the islands without telling anyone where he was going, without saying goodbye. He'd was gone for nearly four months, and then returned without explanation.

“I went to try and find out what happened to me,” he said. “I went back to my old university. Hung out with some of my old friends. I wanted to pick up the trail because it was during college, during that time of my life, that I lost my own personal trail. I lost my path, and I also lost great big chunks of my memory. It didn't take me long to figure out what'd happened.”

On the beach, he had stopped abruptly, lifted his scraggly hair, and pointed to a burn scar on the side of his head. The scar was shaped a little bit like a lightning bolt—ironic because he'd gotten the burn as the result of lightning.

“Electricity did it to me. Wiped parts of my memory bank clean, and it also screwed with my personality. Maybe for the better. Because, from what I discovered, I was a serious candidate for Asshole of the Decade before it happened.”

I said, “Before you got struck by lightning? That was only a few years back.”

“No. The memory loss, the personality change, were both caused by the electroshock treatments. I've told you about it. The ones I got a year or so after writing
One Fathom.
It was just after the bomb that killed the sailor at the San Diego naval base.

“The guilt, man, seeing those smoking bodies on TV. I went insane. No other way to put it. They gave me shock treatments when my father had me institutionalized. Strapped me down on the table every day for weeks. I think they way overdid it. I was so screwed up, I'd write letters and sign them ‘Sincerely as a fucking loon.' And I
meant
it.”

He continued, “It took me a while, but I tracked down the physician who'd administered the shock treatments to me. The zapper. The guy went on to become a brilliant psychiatrist, a great healer. I have something I want to show you. To explain what happened to me. He wrote me this letter.”

Tomlinson handed me two pages typed on the personal stationery of a California physician. We were standing on a section of dune near the Sanibel Beach Club. This early, people were already up there playing tennis, hanging out by the pool. I adjusted my glasses and read the letter quickly, skipping some of the more detailed portions:

I folded the letter, handed it to Tomlinson, saying, “He sounds like a good man. Like he genuinely regrets what he did.”

Tomlinson handed me the copy of the magazine article, saying, “Me, too. Regret it, I mean. Except that it changed me from Asshole of the Decade to who I am now, apparently. Wait until you read this.”

I
skimmed the article on electroconvulsive treatment, skipping much of it due to my own impatience. The interesting parts included:

I skipped down a page to read a segment that Tomlinson had highlighted with a blue marker:

I skipped a little further because Tomlinson had highlighted and bracketed the following:

I handed the article back to Tomlinson as he told me, “That's what I decided to do—revisit and re-experience key elements and experiences in my life. I was still trying to remember writing
One Fathom Above Sea Level.
That became my focus.”

He told me that the only remaining memory he had about writing his now-famous work was connected to a popular song. It was a song by a classic rock band named America.

He said, “You know their stuff: ‘Sister Golden Hair,' ‘Ventura Highway,' ‘You Can Do Magic.' The band's got two genius writers, so they've had a ton of hits.

“Back when I wrote
One Fathom,
though, the song that haunted me was ‘Horse with No Name.' Everyone knows the lyrics. ‘I've been through the desert on a horse with no name . . .'”

He sang a portion of it softly, then whistled for a while before explaining, “The line that just rocked me, though, was, ‘The ocean is a desert with its life underground, and a perfect disguise above.' Are you familiar with the line, Doc?”

I know very little about rock music. Tend to listen to Latin music, Caribbean basin stuff, and Buffett, of course, and lately have taken an unexpected liking to an extraordinary folk singer and composer, Wendy Webb. But even I knew the song he was discussing, though little else about the band.

He repeated the lyric: “‘ The ocean is a desert with its life underground, and a perfect disguise above, '” before adding, “For someone like me, a sailor, that line was like a three-pronged probe. It hit me in the marrow, the brain, and the heart. All the far-out implications, all the very heavy vibes and duality it communicated. That song, it just sent me off on a whole new spiritual trip.”

Tomlinson combed long, bony fingers through his hair and said, “The line was the seed that started
One Fathom.
That song. ‘A Horse with No Name.' That's all I remembered. The rest of my memory from that time period was a blank sheet. So when I disappeared from the marina? I got a piece of pure karmic luck. I called around, found out where the band America was playing. I met their road manager, Erin, and finagled a job as a roadie. So that's where I went when I disappeared. I was working for the band America. Can you believe it? A really cool experience, man.”

I watched him smile, enjoying the memory of it for a few seconds before he continued, “They had no idea who I was, why I was there. A great bunch of people. They do more than a hundred gigs a year, all first-class, and it was pure good karma that put me in the right place at the right time. So I helped them set up in L.A., Phoenix, Chicago, little towns in Iowa and Wisconsin. Yeah, and San Diego, too.”

San Diego, he said, that's where his memory started coming back to him.