Mermaid

My mother was a drunk and a mermaid. Or a mermaid and a drunk.

That’s the problem with words: whatever you say first sounds like it causes the second. But sometimes people are just two things at once. And more likely three. See, my mother wasn’t a mermaid because she was a drunk. And she wasn’t a drunk because she was a mermaid. She was just both, as long as I can remember. Oh, and a dreamer. A drunk, dreaming mermaid that drank and dreamed.

***

I’m looking up at the bar at the Lorelei. I have no idea how old I am, but my toes are in front of me, facing the tank. You might ask who perches a barefooted toddler like that, but that’s not the point. The point is Davey Jones. He is one scary motherfucker. His face is made out of painted cement, and he’s squinting. A stream of bubbles trickle up from his devil lips. In front of him, encrusted with barnacles and dainty plastic seaweed fronds, is his chest. Davey Jones’ chest. There’s jewels in it, and gold. A skeleton hand. I’m afraid to breathe. The air is dense with cheap stogie and Lucky Strike smoke, desperately priapic sweat and mixed spirits. Mainly brown spirits, I would guess now. But not top-shelf. Rotgut with off-brand names like Ole Chief and Wild Canoe.

The lights change. The shadows fanned out on the bar are suddenly both fuchsia and lime. The half-dead skates scatter in alarm, kicking up gravel.

Tada! There’s a jaunty fanfare.

Here she comes!

She floats above the seafloor, against a slapdash shipwreck backdrop. I give you my earliest memory of my mother, Serena the Siren. She lazily flips her tail and glides across the tank. Plastic half-shells coyly cover her aquatic bosom. She waves at me, but I am still paralyzed with fear. I cannot wave back. She is majestic. She is a vision. But I know she will die and leave me. Davey Jones will eat her. Her eyes are a chlorine-stung pink.

***

You Generation XYZers need to know that there was once an untamed Florida. A Florida still swampy and campy. A Florida where any entrepreneur with a fistful of twenties and a vision could start an empire. Corral some gibbons and an asthmatic chimp, toss ’em in cement pits and, hey, presto: Welcome to Ape World! Snag a dozen gators, steal some chain-link fence from Bubba, hook n’ dangle a chicken and bingo! The Kids Will Love Gator Isle!

When Corky Jackson bought the Lorelei after its first fire, he was just looking for a way to break even. He borrowed a couple of thousand bucks from his uncle and built what was subsequently billed as the state’s largest undersea theater of aquatic performers. AKA, mermaids. Serena the Siren was the first. And she, in turn, interviewed and hired Princess Merma, Little Lost Sailorgirl Leila, Pirate Annabelle, and a half-dozen others. Gradually, she became their mentor and de facto trainer, teaching them, the, er, ropes. How to surreptitiously suck air from the off-stage garden hose. How to ward off chapping with Vaseline. How to shimmy so the tip jar fattened and the doubles poured.

***

When you’re a kid, nothing is strange and everything is strange. One night in the motor home, deep into her signature mix of Tang and Smirnoff, my mother slurred:

“Don’t you worry, kiddo. I’ve got a plan. Taking care of your future. Screw Corky, that rat bastard excuse for a person. I’m writing it all down. Dates and names and dates.” She waved a rubber-band-bound black notebook at me and clinked her ice for emphasis.

I wrote off that moment and many others. Then, many years later on an airplane bound for St. Paul, I happened to read a longish account of the Lorelei’s second fire, the death of old Florida’s quaintest family attractions and about Corky being up on drug-smuggling charges. The article was supposed to be wistful and vaguely comic. But it described a part of my childhood in much the same way that a forensic examiner accounts for the specific idiosyncrasies of the dead that account for them having lived.

***

Her eyes are no longer pink but filmy with cataracts.

“It’s actually kinda fun, Jimmy,” she says. “Everything has rainbows.”

Mr. Swenson is her perpetual jigsaw puzzle companion. He points at my sunglasses.

“Good thing you’re wearing those, son,” he says. “That’s how pelicans go blind. From glare.”

“Mom,” I say. “Did you know anything about Corky running drugs? I mean, back in the day?”

“Hell, no,” she says. “Corky was a good man. He bought you a Big Wheel once.”

Mr. Swenson sits up alertly. “Those were dangerous,” he said. “Big cause of injury. Those and Slinkies.”

My mother leans forward conspiratorially. “Jimmy, you remembered my little secret?”

“Right here, mom,” I say. I hold up the small water bottle I have filled with vodka. “I’ll leave it in your room when I go.”

This is, of course, strictly verboten. I’ve no doubt that somewhere, buried in the 40-page small print of the contract I signed with Silver Shores, that it represents a medical transgression of the highest degree. And maybe you think I’m a bad person for it, an enabler, a law-breaker. But I figure, that at a certain age, our vices might be all we have left. That and memories. And maybe not those. They say that the most accurate memory anyone can have is the one of someone who has just woken from a coma. See, their memory is untouched and pure. The rest of us have gummed up the picture each time we touched it. Slowly, our mental fingerprints have obscured the truth, skewed the images, put rainbows around them.

So. I smuggle vodka to my mother.

Before leaving, I place the water bottle on her dresser, next to a brush and a snow globe. On a whim, I open the chest she keeps at the foot of her bed. Inside there’s an afghan. Slippers. Deeper still, mementos. Polaroids bound with a ribbon. My mother with a stranger at Baskin Robbins. In a Corvette, smoking. As a mermaid. And myself as a child. By a lurid waterfall at a mini-golf with a misshapen Popeye looming over me.

I dig deeper, and, sure enough, I find it. A stack of little black notebooks. Dog-eared and hard-traveled. It’s only curiosity that propels me now. The sins of the past are in the past and Corky’s transgressions mean less than nothing to me. I had some vague idea that the writer of the article I’d read might like them.

But the pages are illegible. They’ve been waterlogged at some point; the tight scrawling of names and dates have become lagoons of ink separated into its green and purplish components. Here and there I can make out a word or number. Tampa. Okeechobee. 24th. KOA.

I consider tossing them, but then I figure it doesn’t really matter. Replacing them, I see a more familiar object that makes me smile. It is a small dried alligator. The kind you’ve seen in countless chintzy souvenir shops. This one stares at me impassively with marble beads. On its back is painted Welcome to Lorelei, the Mermaid Kingdom! Something inside it rattles. I peer down its throat and then, using a pen, fish out a man’s watch. The face is scuffed but the brand is clear. It’s a Rolex. Absurdly, I’m reminded of some children’s book. Or a movie? How’s it go? A crocodile swallows a watch. That’s all I’ve got.

***

“I still don’t quite understand,” I say. “Did you steal it?”

My mother looks at me. Then she laughs.

“Found it,” she says. “Found it in the lost and found. And then I lost it again. Or thought I did. I knew I’d put it somewhere safe but then forgot where. Actually, I’d thought your sister’d thrown it out with the garage stuff. It’s yours, Jimmy! It’s your inheritance. Damn, I’m good.”

Mr. Swenson turns over the watch with one pale hand. “Submariner,” he says. “Worth a pretty penny, son.” “I’ve seen some high rollers in my time at the Lorelei,” my mother says. “I’ll bet you have,” says Mr. Swenson. Is he flirting with her? I can’t tell.

My mother looks at the fish tank by the nurses’ station. Her gaze is far away. Maybe all the way back into the seventies. I know I haven’t heard the whole story. I know I never will.

***

I sell the watch on eBay for $20k. That’s likely a year’s salary for a mermaid, but I don’t need it. Instead, I pre-purchase a top-of-the-line aquaburial package. That’s the deal where your loved one’s ashes are baked into an urn that is submerged as part of an artificial reef. With what’s left over, I bribe and guilt the activity director at Silver Shores into throwing a party. They serve fish sticks and goldfish crackers. There’s a bubble machine.

There are crepe paper streamers. They’re aquamarine, the very same color as time.