Mr. Majestic

‘The ocean smells like semen. You know why, boy? Why it gives you that oceanic feeling, to give it, or get it. Well that’s a question that answers itself. Thank you.’

Okay, old man. Gross. And TMI. Maybe PTSD.

The old man laughed then, almost butt-naked as he was, and tottered back into his room from the front room. ‘There’s a joke in there. Seamen.’

And for a moment there was.

I probably laughed. But he’d already gone.

He was Charlie Carr.

I had come down late in July to the Jersey Shore, to couchsurf at various friends, and stumbled on his sign, offering $3000 to paint a house. Not usual to put the price right in there, is it? But there was little usual about him.

His house was one along on the boardwalk, an overgrown gazebo-style single-story fisherman’s house. Ancient. It sat pride of place right on the inlet that connected back towards the canals.

‘My Venice,’ Charlie lauded it quietly. He said every developer had asked to buy it. Some had threatened to. But he liked his ramshackle kingdom of shells, fallen boat parts, driftwood, and cheap beers, and he roamed it almost entirely nude and didn’t give two fucks.

Charlie’s house was falling to pieces and the town had, if he was to be believed, told him to fix it or else. And so he’d put the sign up. I’d found it, followed the little map placed on it in lieu of any contact info, and seen its matching pair tacked to the jamb of his doorway.

‘Can you do carpentry? Light carpentry?’

‘I’ve got three brothers, four uncles, probably six barns in the family. I got you covered,’ I said.

‘But that’s got to be more than 3K …’ I added.

‘Don’t worry. I’ve got wood and tools, been saving for years,’ he said, like it would barely involve me.

I started work a week that was hellishly hot. I stripped down to shorts and laughed at the whistles I’d get from the boardwalk. First things, I was up on his roof, and up on a ladder against the sides of the house, taking stock.

While I was up there, he’d walk around ruddy sunburned and round-bellied, like a summer Santa Claus, but with a bad habit of giving people the finger when they’d honk in the canal.

‘They’re just saying hi,’ I’d pointed out.

‘I’m saying bye, is all.’

When I was done looking, I asked him what he really wanted here. Did he know the town building code?

Nah, he didn’t. He knew something better, he said.

‘Make it majestic.’

And when I sat in a lawn chair then, at the end of the long day, watching the sun spread into a sunset, drinking a beer. While he was sitting in the side yard, dressed only in sand stuck to him, like a cutlet rolled in flour, watching the boats come in, I thought that the place might somehow still have that in it.

He had the oddest collection of bits of wood. I had to hand-saw it all. I replaced the rotten boards and bits of eave as best I could. I threaded his hodgepodge assortment of shingles into bare spots. I reframed a window and the main door, where the trims had come away and threatened to dump out like a loose tooth.

The whole time I worked, he watched, naked and beering. Sometimes seated on a lawn chair within his house, on the wide-plank floors, sometimes on the sandy lawn, and occasionally complementing my progress in a way that had me figure he actually did know what a good job was. And sometimes he was quiet, just there. I got to know his shadowed shape on the lawn, that twisted around like a sundial alongside the day.

The look where I’d ended up with the house, it was much better. A crazy quilt of a library of wood, but toothsome somehow. I’d next set to scraping the layers of paint. The house had seen plenty and seemed thirteen colours deep in spots, looking like the chipped edge of a child’s gobstopper. That took sanding and spiriting and even chiselling. But days later it was done and looked fittingly naked itself.

I’d asked about colours and he knew what he wanted. Seafoam Green.

‘I want the sea, right here in the house.’

And that’d been the easy part, spreading that liquid like melted ice-cream, all over the house. And people stopped on the boardwalk to look. I had a beer that night, in the very very dark, and the house practically glowed. And so did Charlie Carr. And he said to come tomorrow for settling up.

But Charlie died that night. He’d taken a dive into the inlet. I can’t say there was much distress. The cops knew he was off. And the boardwalk kept going by at the same ambling speed, with the same sunglassed faces.

One of the cops had come out with an envelope, calling me.

‘How do you know my name?’

‘He left this for you.’

Nick—an old man knows killing is a mercy better than death. And it kills me. It has, to see a strapping young man just at the start of everything. Balancing on a roof like it’s not a magic trick. It kills me. But it doesn’t lie to me. Not like the waves and honks, that it’s time to part. Not for hello.

To be pushed hard and spent is better than to never feel it at all. One last dive makes that complete. I came from water. I go back to it.

The house, it’s been all yours, from the second day I’d seen that. The papers here now reflect that. Maybe you’ll keep it. I don’t give no fucks no more, but I still wouldn’t mind that at all.

He’d signed it—Charles “Red” Carr. And I sat down in the sand there.