Pushing a Rope
by Sidney Norinsky

Regarded by his crew as an old salt, a fact driven home to him again at each succeeding birthday, Sid Norinsky traces his madness for sailboats back some thirty years. It began back in 1967 when, having rebuilt and run an ancient Elco cabin cruiser around New York and New Jersey waters, he found himself bored with it but intrigued by sail.

After a self-training course on rented daysailers, he acquired an Eastward Ho 24-foot wood sloop in which he made the myriad mistakes every green sailor makes and, if he is lucky, gets away with. He sailed that rugged craft for two years till life forced him to sell it. A few years later he bought another old wooden sailboat, this time a Stout Fella 23-footer that he rebuilt literally from stem to stern. In 1988 he traded it for a San Juan 24 fiberglass boat and in 1992 traded that for an Islander 28, his present dreamboat in which he wins an occasional race. The story, Norinsky insists, is not purely autobiographical. Yes, some of the people and events are based on actual people he's encountered at a place called Willets Marina in the story. But their motives and their actions? Fictional he says. See if you believe him.

A short story...

The parking lot used to be one big, open mishmash where everyone parked just about anywhere. But in March, Lennie the landlord chalk-lined out three distinct sectors: Willet's Marina, the concrete mix trucks, and Crazy Mike's village.

At first people ignored the borders. But toward April Crazy Mike sat down at the controls of his truck-mounted crane, hoisted a fifteen-inch diameter, forty-foot-long pipe, steered a U turn, drove forward, and lowered the pipe slowly as his helper guided it down to the ground on top of the chalk line. The marina gang watched him in silence, except for Tommy, who shook his thumb in Mike's direction, saying "Tell ya, whatever he ain't got, he's got balls. Big ones."

This morning Elihu, walking through the lot, saw that Mike had extended the pipe out to eighty feet, probably no more than an hour ago. He imagined the scene. Dirty, buck-toothed Mike climbing down from the crane as his helper loosened the rusty lift bridle, then standing there, engine idling, surveying his newly barriered empire, grinning and saying to his countryman, "Am sa le arat eu ticalosilor alora ca nu este de glumit cu mine," Romanian for: "That'll show the dirty bastards they can't mess with me."

Elihu didn't know much about Mike except that he'd been the manager of the marina back in October when he'd brought his boat here for the winter. In January Mike was fired. Elihu had heard talk around the dock of Mike as devious, crooked, and combative. Now he saw the Romanian in action. This was the nastiest blow yet in his feud with the marina people. The fifteen-inch high pipe, well above bumper height, narrowed the marina parking area so badly that a few weeks hence, when the season opened, parking space for boat owners would be sparse. True, it also confined the concrete trucks but (he gauged by eye), the trucks had higher road clearance, so they'd probably manage better than the boaters.

He walked on, entering the marina, and stopped, gazing at the poverty row of battered, shabby, rotting old live-aboard motor cruisers tied up all along the docks, and told himself that Willet's Marina wasn't his business. Sure he wanted the proprietors, Maurice and partners, to succeed, if only to safeguard a free dockage deal he'd negotiated. But he, Elihu, was neither partner nor-fates forbid-employee in this hardscrabble attempt to dredge profit out of this silted-in shambles where, twice a day, a seven-foot tidal drop bared the bay's fouled bottom to everyone's gaze.

For the whole story (available on disk in Microsoft Word For Windows 95), download the file to your system. (28 typed pages; only takes a few seconds to download.)

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