Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself (18 page)

I like to think that the first time Michelle saved me was during that meeting, and that it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. All the other things I thought would change my life up until that point had ended in disappointment. I’d learned, early on, that I’d never be a Navy SEAL because candidates cannot have vision worse than 20/200 correctable to 20/20. Mine was 20/400, which was a deal breaker, and there was nothing I could do (no ocular exercises) that could change that. I became a Marine instead, but that was a mixed bag. Some of my greatest memories took place during my service, and I absolutely transitioned into adulthood in a way no other experience could have given me, but it disappointed, too, because the Marines was not a good career choice for me. There was too much entrenched intractable thinking, based on nothing more than tradition, where I was constantly told, “We’ve done it this way forever, and we’re going to continue to do it this way forever.” It was also my first real exposure to politics. I watched a high school dropout get promoted over me because he could polish his boots to a shine and answer irrelevant questions about Marine history and customs. I could out-shoot him in the range and best him in any physical challenge he could name, but it didn’t matter. It soured my attitude. It was the idea of moving in and settling down with Michelle that got me through the last few months of my military service.

I soon realized she was my opposite in many ways. Where I push, she glides. She’s quick to pick up new technologies—I like mechanical challenges, but learning a new computer program isn’t something I’m good at. She is, though. I’m good at linear convergent thinking, where she’s good at non-linear creative thinking and coming up with outside-the-box solutions to problems. I’m good at math, but she does the books in our businesses. She’s sociable and personable, maybe because she grew up with three half-siblings from her father’s second marriage, though they were so much younger than her. She had problems with her stepmother similar to the problems I had with mine, but not to the same extent. She more or less helped raise her siblings and, in doing so, developed the psychological resilience psychologists say helps people survive and prevail. She was a caretaker then, just like she is now.

Her father owned a car dealership but spent his winters on a boat in the Bahamas, so Michelle grew up around boats and boat people. When they were in the Bahamas, she and her father lived on his boat, fished for food, traded services for the things they needed, and took showers in the rain. She was still a teenager when she started her own business, more or less babysitting boats, clearing clogged scuppers so that the rain could drain from the decks, charging the batteries, pumping out the bilges, and doing basic maintenance on boats when the owners weren’t using them. She grew up to be an incredibly hard worker and extremely competent, and I know that when you’re trying to describe a romantic relationship, “hardworking” and “competent” may not be the first things most people would think of to explain compatibility, but we recognized these things in each other when we met. We impressed each other, and we respected and admired each other. I’m not sure how you could love someone without being impressed by them and respecting them.

We decided that after I got out of the Marines, and after a summer working construction in Costa Mesa first to raise some cash, I’d move to Newport, Rhode Island, where she was crewing aboard a seventy-eight-foot schooner named
Adirondack
. I got lucky and found a job as First Mate aboard a sixty-eight-foot antique sailboat,
Gleam
, built in 1937. Having no sailing experience, I did what I’d learned to do as a Marine: improvise and adapt. It was a rewarding experience, but I found myself in familiar territory after the guests debarked and the boat was tidied up, and I didn’t feel welcome socializing with the crew. The wiring from my past, the instinct to hold myself apart until I was sure what was going on, was harming me instead of protecting me.

In October of ’98 we moved to St. Thomas, which is part of the U.S. Virgin Islands, along with St. John and St. Croix. It’s the only place in the United States territories where everybody drives on the left side of the road, but the cars they drive are imported from the United States, so they all have the steering wheels on the left side of the car instead of on the right, the way they do in England. It was soon apparent that St. Thomas was a very nice place to visit or vacation, but it wasn’t a good place for me to live. I felt something like those cars, a misfit, built for somewhere else. I was a jarhead fresh out of the uniform, where I’d trained to shoot guns and kill people and, in a general sense, to be antisocial in the most lethal way possible. In St. Thomas, I got a job working as a crew member/bartender on a tour boat, serving drinks and making gourmet meals for charter guests. I thought the best way to transition out of the military would be to do something completely different, but I was wrong; to say I had an identity crisis is an understatement.

The boat I worked on was a day-trip charter that ran the same route, day after day after day, which made the job of bartending and cooking food even more mundane and repetitive than it already was. Michelle, who was more accustomed to marina culture than I, worked on a party boat that went different places and celebrated different occasions with a more interesting clientele who paid better and left her massive tips. She was having a ball, while I was being told by my boss to think of more fun ways to cut up and display pineapples. Even for someone with a mechanical or engineering mind, there are only so many fun ways to cut up a pineapple. Michelle and I saw each other only occasionally, when our schedules were somehow in sync. If she was working, I spent my down time riding my mountain bike all over the island or climbing the rocks.

I’d gone from feeling useful, doing a dangerous and important job with geopolitical ramifications, and feeling mentally and physically challenged every day, to cutting pineapples for yutzes in a tropical hospitality industry, surrounded by people whose goal in life was to not do anything, ever. Half the population of St. Thomas was on welfare or worked for the government, and the other half was on vacation. Some of the boating crowd had worked hard before retiring, it’s true, I knew that, but I couldn’t sympathize with the inclination toward laziness. If you work hard and make a lot of money, good for you, spend it on whatever you want, but if you make a lot of money and then just quit being useful to anybody else, what was the point? The point, for me, was that I was miserable in paradise.

One of the few reprieves from my general unhappiness in the Caribbean occurred the evening I proposed to Michelle. I’d secured a small powerboat from my boss, got a day off from crewing the sunset charter, and told Michelle to meet me at the dock as soon as she got off work, saying I wanted to go for a boat ride. A few weeks earlier, I’d gone to St. John and had a custom ring designed for her, but I wanted to present it to her in the most romantic way possible. When Michelle was a little girl, her nickname was “Seashell.” I found a custom jeweler and had him fashion a ring that featured his own “wave” design for the band, a dolphin holding a diamond in its belly, and a tiny seashell opposite the dolphin. It could not have been more appropriate for a girl who’d grown up sailing in the Caribbean.

As the sun set, we motored over to Honeymoon Beach on St. John. I knew the area well because we’d anchored the charter boat there every day for lunch. I dropped anchor just offshore and we swam to the beach. I’d tied the ring to the drawstring of my shorts. Michelle didn’t notice that every thirty seconds or so, I fondled my waistband to make sure I hadn’t lost her ring.

We walked ashore just as the first stars came out. She still thought we were simply out for an evening boat ride. I had her sit on my lap, and as we talked, I carefully undid the knot and slipped the ring into my left hand. As we looked up at the Milky Way, I took her left hand in mine and asked her if she would grow old with me, and look up at these same stars, years from now. As I spoke, I slipped the ring on her finger. She gasped, put her arms around me, and said yes. That moment is one I’ll never forget, a moment we shared together. I felt loved, truly loved, at last, and I felt safe.

She was dying to see the ring better, but without any light, she had to wait till we got back to Sapphire Marina. To this day, she says it’s the most beautiful ring she’s ever seen. That means a lot to me. Her ring, like our relationship, is unique. Many couples share a life together, but I don’t know how many really find a deep connection like we have together.

By spring, Michelle saw how miserable I was, and agreed to move back to the States. For some couples, mutually shared hardship can lead to breakups, but for us, it made us feel even closer. We moved to South Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In the fall of 1999, we got married at the Wind Point Lighthouse in Racine. We were both barefoot, and we walked down the aisle together, to the altar and back, rather than be escorted or “given away” by our parents. That was symbolically important to us both because it showed how we were then, as we’ve always been, each other’s biggest supporters.

In the fall of 2000, having survived the dreaded Y2K, we packed all our belongings into a five-by-eight-foot open bed trailer, with room to spare, and drove west. Our destination was either Anchorage, Alaska, or Southern California. We decided we’d figure it out along the way.

We chose to return to Southern California and settled in Dana Point. Michelle decided her dream job was to sell yachts out of the harbor. I was uncertain whether she could pull it off, but I wished her luck as she headed to the harbor to knock on doors. I should never have doubted her. She was hired on the spot and, within three months, became the top sales agent.

I found work in the harbor as a Marine technician, working for a young entrepreneurial guy who owned an outfitting/commissioning company. Michelle sold boats and I worked on them. This lasted for just under two years. We befriended a successful businessman who later backed us in purchasing Dream Catcher Yachts, the brokerage where Michelle worked.

I learned there are basically two kinds of people who buy yachts—those who know what they’re doing and are going to have fun on their yachts, and those who think they know what they’re doing and are going to try their best to kill themselves, or come close. It’s a little bit like selling motorcycles, where guys come into the dealership and say, “That looks like fun—I want to try it.” Men who buy motorcycles are, according to statistics, most likely to have an accident within the first six months of ownership, within ten miles of home, and the consequences of mental slips or mechanical failures are often dire. I learned that the hard way in Wisconsin, prior to joining Michelle in Newport, when my motorcycle literally exploded into hundreds of pieces after I hit the curb on a freeway on-ramp and went airborne. I was lucky and suffered only a sprained ankle.

I had called a friend to come pick me up. His mother knew my father and called Mark to tell him what had happened. My friend’s mother gave me a big hug when she saw me and appreciated the fact that I was still shaken up from the accident. When my father arrived, he said only, “There’s the asshole.” He wasn’t making a joke. He proceeded to scold me for not wearing a helmet. This was how he handled emotions that made him uncomfortable. First, he would put on his strong-man tough-guy demeanor and scold. Only later, after he’d calmed down, did he give me a hug and say he was glad I was alright.

That said, at least guys who buy motorcycles have some familiarity with how highways work, what other cars are likely to do, and how weather conditions can change or affect the roads. Many of the yacht buyers I encountered were men who’d suddenly found themselves with large amounts of money to spend, men who’d said, “That looks like fun—I want to try it,” and bought a million-dollar boat without any marine experience or awareness whatsoever. They’d head out to sea, thinking, “How hard could it be?” Then they’d see Catalina Island on the horizon, thirty-five miles off Dana Point, and think, “I can sail there, no problem.” I’d try to tell them that the Catalina Channel, which is 1,500 feet deep, is just as dangerous as being in the middle of the open ocean, but that seldom convinced them. The ocean is not always a safe environment. The consequences for making mistakes are greater on the ocean than they are riding a motorcycle.

Oftentimes I was asked to take them for a test drive in the harbor to show them how things worked, especially coming into and leaving the dock. I’d get the boat out from the slip and turn the steering wheel over to them and I’d see their stress levels go up and up, until they’d panic and start to lose control of the boat, nearly crashing into the fuel or pump-out dock. I used to pilot sixty-foot motor yachts fresh off the freighter from China, boats so new they didn’t have autopilots installed yet, from San Diego to Dana Point to deliver them to the buyers. A few times, I got into tough spots a mere hundred yards from shore. Currents, rocks, waves, fog—conditions can change suddenly and without warning.

The business was doing all right, just as a lot of businesses were doing all right, until the crash of 2008 when the economic bubble derived from mortgage-based securities burst. Anyone who spent any time on Craigslist or eBay in 2008 knows that the first thing that happens when the economy crashes is that boys sell their toys, things like boats or motorcycles. Suddenly, everyone was selling his yacht, or trying to, though no one was buying.

Fine
, my wife Michelle and I thought.
We’re intelligent resourceful people. We can roll with the times.
We came up with what we thought was a surefire business plan. In a failing economy, we figured, people who can no longer afford to pay other people to solve their problems become do-it-yourselfers. When I served in the Marines, I became acquainted with the idea of a hobby shop, a self-service garage equipped with tools and hoists where Marines could work on their own cars. It seemed like a no-brainer—the idea could work in the civilian world. We liquidated our boat inventory, sold the business, and, after calculating that Salt Lake City was full of frugal do-it-yourselfers, moved there to open a shop called the Wrench-It Center. We weren’t wrong about Salt Lake residents, but it was still a struggle.