Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman (free ebook reader for pc txt) 📗

on the Boston Tea Party ship. The summer after junior year of high school I’d worked as a counselor at the YMCA day camp in our town, where Scott O’Donnell was head counselor; what none of us knew was that our boss, Scott, was also the weekend tour guide at the recently opened Boston Tea Party Ship and Museum, with its restored brig, the Beaver II. We thought he’d grown those muttonchop sideburns to look like John Lennon or in memory of Duane Allman, not to play the historical part of Captain Hezekiah Coffin, master of the original Beaver. One rainy day, for a screening of the Disney version of Johnny Tremain, I got to introduce the film and explain the Sons of Liberty to the campers. Later that fall, Scott picked me up at home in his car and we went to Friendly’s for ice-cream sundaes. He told me the story of how some years before he’d befriended one of the Beaver II’s three businessman owners at a historical reenactment fair and been drafted into their enterprise as a Boston Tea Party expert, though he really wasn’t one. In college he’d majored in psychology, and so he’d put in a lot of time in libraries and talking to historians, cramming to turn himself into Captain Hezekiah Coffin II. Now, with the first official Boston Bicentennial summer looming and the number of visitors picking up, he explained, he was going to be the on-site manager of the ship and museum, and his bosses had decided that by spring they’d need a full-time tour guide too. An outgoing and enthusiastic kid like you, Johnny Tremain, that was the first time he ever called me that. It was a perfect spring term senior year work-study project. I was even written up in the town newspaper: local teen is bicentennial son of liberty on boston tea party ship. Mamita and I drove into town and bought a dozen copies so that we could mail clippings to the admissions offices of every college I’d applied to.

But I didn’t actually play a Son of Liberty tour guide. I wore the costume of one of Captain Coffin’s seamen, an eighteenth-century Jack Tar, red-striped jersey, white canvas pants that fluttered loudly around my legs in harbor winds, a little waistcoat like organ-grinders dress their monkeys in, a funny black hat, too, square crown and narrow brim, that by the end of that summer I’d have to smoosh down hard over my wild bushy ’fro. Six days a week, I’d carry out my morning round of chores, mop the deck, set out the tea chests, shimmy out onto the bowsprit, and, holding on with legs clamped tight over the notoriously crappy harbor water, reach forward to undo the ties around the furled jib, then wriggle back down onto the foredeck to hoist the pointed sail. I’d climb the ship’s rigging, hold on to a rung, and lean out, hand cupped to my mouth to shout: Thar she blow-ow-ow-ows! Down below on deck, tourists from all over the world would raise their cameras; if only I could see one of those pictures now. I especially liked to sit up on the crow’s nest, gazing out past Fort Point Channel and the swing bridge. Deer Island was out there, where at the end of King Philip’s War the colonists had imprisoned hundreds of Wampanoag, most of whom perished during that winter of 1675–76. The notorious disaster of the Deer Island sewage station, overflowing with untreated crap, was a prime reason the harbor was so polluted, Chief Metacom’s revenge. From the Boston Harbor nautical map hanging in Captain Coffin’s office I knew about Wreck Rock, Hull Gut, and Hangman Island, cool names, I thought, for rock bands.

So at the end of that summer, I was leaving home for good to start my freshman year at Broener College. What was that going to change? I was desperate for it to change everything. That’s probably what I mostly thought and fantasized about, gazing out over the harbor.

Gentle, hulking Captain Hezekiah Coffin II, coming out on deck and seeing me up on the crow’s nest again, would call up: You come down from there, now, Johnny Tremain. From the way he’d train his pale grey eyes on my hair, that anxious glitter, I could tell he couldn’t bring himself to give me the order to cut it, that as much as he wanted to, he wanted also to respect his young employee’s individual right to grow an ever-expanding bush atop his head.

There was always a small pile of false teeth on top of my father’s bedroom bureau, loose nuggets in different ivory hues that he probably found in his pockets when he came home from work and that he’d take out and leave there. I’d never found a use for them until those weeks on the Beaver II, when I carried a handful of those teeth around in a pocket of my Jack Tar trousers, and some ketchup packets too. On his long Atlantic crossings, Jack Tar mostly ate hardtack, I’d inform the visitors jammed into the cramped area below deck during the shipboard tours I gave three, four, sometimes even more times a day. As much as Scott O’Donnell insisted on the ideal of historical authenticity, actual historical authenticity was in pretty short supply onboard the Beaver II. But I did always have tasteless hardtack to hand out to children. Crunch-crunch, they’d screw up their faces, going: Yuck! And I’d announce: History brought to life! Jack Tar sucked on lemons and limes to protect against the scurvy, but his shipboard supply—here, to bring a little drama to it, I’d pause and slowly look around before nearly shouting—always ran out! Describing the symptoms of scurvy, rotting bloody gums, falling teeth, I’d pantomime lifting my hands to my disintegrating mouth and with a gesture of tragic despair, hold out cupped handfuls of invisible oral gore. But what if I could find a way to