Sailing Out of Orlando

As a twenty-one-year-old he knew less about women than he thought he knew. Even less about himself. Every day spent with his girlfriend that was not complete bliss was a disappointment. How hard is it to be happy? Just happy. It seemed simple to him. It’s all he aspired to since being a teenager. It’s what he daydreamed about in high school. He tried living in California. A life of surfing and pot and girls with tans that showed the outline of their bikinis. None of that worked out quite as he envisioned.

His mom and dad seemed happy, content, anyway. Get a job, get a girlfriend, get an adult life he heard. Maybe there was something to this. Sharing an apartment with his girlfriend seemed like the right move. They were from the same town. Went to the same high school. When she left Long Island for the job her sister lined up for her in Orlando, he missed her. Looking forward to macaroni and cheese dinners together, he soon followed. They shared being broke. But sharing that made it less bad. Their talks about the future were reassuring.

She had her moods, though. And as pleasant as she could sometimes be, he was never sure when a mood would overtake her, and them. She was prone to complaining and sometimes seemed miserable for no obvious reason. She wanted a puppy, she said. We can hardly pay to feed ourselves, he said. And we’re gone a lot of the time. We can’t leave it alone in this apartment all day. Someday. Not now, he said. Then she would be grumpy about it, bring it up again a few days later, and tell him what her friends said about it when she met them for after work drinks. So now strangers are annoyed with him, too, he thought.

Lately he daydreamed about feeling the happiness that was so elusive. Living with this woman, an essential ingredient of the happiness recipe, he thought, wasn’t working out. He fantasized about getting out of there, plotted even. Talking all this over with her and expecting them to each say a civil goodbye to one another was out of the question. She could be a bit of a hothead. Sometimes she threw things. The feeling of living on thin ice all the time, confirmed the rightness of his need to escape. But getting out cleanly, too, seemed like a daydream.

And then one day there it was. Reading through the ads at the back of a magazine a small photograph of a sailboat caught his eye. Not a little one- or two-person boat. A big sailboat. The kind with a crew. The small print below the photograph said this boat was looking for crew members. No sailing skills necessary. Entry level position. So soon enough he found himself in front of the piece-of-shit typewriter he bought at the pawnshop when he enrolled at the community college. It could only reproduce the top half of capital E’s, making them look some kind of math symbol, and the bottom half of lower-case h’s, turning them into n’s. Avoiding E’s and h’s, he hammered out a letter of interest. He typed the St. Petersburg, Florida address on an envelope, bought a stamp on his way to work that night and dropped everything into the first mailbox he saw. Maybe he was just wasting his time, he thought. Daydreams, again. Pipe dreams. It was a long shot, but what did he have to lose beyond a thirteen-cent investment for the stamp and a few sheets of paper? Maybe being in Orlando already gave him an edge, he thought. The poster for the lottery at the gas station where he worked nights says, “If you don’t play, you can’t win.”

A week passed and thoughts of the sailboat became less frequent and less urgent until he pulled a large envelope out of his mailbox in his building’s lobby. The return address on the envelope included a fitting sailing logo and was fat with brochures about the company and the boats — there were more than one. This company provided a sort of high school with sails for “troubled youths,” privileged troubled youths apparently. The tuition was steep. But to new crew members they were offering room and board, a cruise around the Caribbean and more if things worked out, and a small salary. This opportunity was too good to pass up. This was his escape hatch. He probably would have climbed on board for no pay given his state of mind. The accompanying letter indicated he should send a resumé and passport photo if he was still interested. If they liked what they saw, they would then arrange a telephone conversation. Just like that the whole sailboat fantasy was becoming real to him.

He sent them everything they asked for and events unfolded quickly after that. He had his telephone conversation, an interview really. It seemed to go well, but what did he know? Then, a few days later, another sailboat envelope fell out of his mailbox. This one contained an offer of a job and a plane ticket to Miami for the following week. It instructed him to bring nothing more than could fit into a duffel bag. In fact, it instructed him to have a specifically green duffel bag with him. This would make it easier for his escort who would meet him in the baggage claim area to spot him. The letter offered no information about who this escort might be. They must know what they are doing, he thought.

He didn’t have a plan for this fantasy-now-reality. It was a one-step-at-a-time sort of thing from here on. He was between semesters at school. Dropping in and out of the community college was not an issue. He didn’t like confrontation and making people unhappy. He would put off calling his boss after he was in Miami. He convinced someone to cover his shift, so he had plenty of time for that call, he thought. His girlfriend? His flight was in the morning, but she would already be at work when he needed to leave the apartment. He could just walk away, he thought. No talk. No confrontation. No broken dishes. But he would have to leave a note. A brief note.

He sat in front of the piece-of-shit typewriter, but quickly thought the better of it and reached for a pen and paper. A handwritten note would be more personal. He wrote something about loving her but knowing that both of them were unhappy and how there was no contradiction there. He said something about leaving for her sake as much as for his, getting out of the way of her happiness, and so on. He added that he was taking a taxi out of there so that she could sell the van and keep the money. He left the keys and registration by the note on the kitchen counter. He made no mention of where he was going.

He was a bit nervous. His hands were shaking while he was writing the note. But by the time the taxi dropped him off at the Orlando airport he was feeling as if he could finally breathe deeply. He was feeling good as he checked his green duffel bag and boarded the plane. But when he found his seat, he almost immediately started having second thoughts. Was this the right move? Was he being a jerk by just leaving a note and clearing out? He thought about all the comforts of living with his girlfriend he is giving up, the familiarity of a home. In the sixty minutes it took to land in Miami, his thoughts went from the exhilaration of a life sailing the open sea to the image of his girlfriend in tears. He just cannot do this to her, he thought. He obsessed over how to get out of this mess he made for himself. But he was determined. He changed his mind. Maybe he made a mistake. So what? There is nothing wrong with that, he thought. He’s just human. He’ll get to Miami and simply get back on the next flight to Orlando and everything will be like nothing ever happened. This is not a big deal, he thought.

By the time the plane landed he felt better, but he still had to negotiate his way out of dealing with his escort. He was a bit relieved when the plane unloaded its passengers into a crowd, like cattle in a corral. The crowd would shield him enough for him to avoid meeting anyone he didn’t want to meet, he thought. He didn’t know exactly who would be looking for him, but he quickly noticed a guy with wispy blond hair, approaching him from a few yards away. His deep tan made him look like he belonged on a sailboat or on a brochure about sailboats. Making eye contact with this guy, exactly what he did not want to do, he knew that was the guy. So, he held up his palm like a crossing guard to the blond man’s face, not allowing him to get out a word and mumbled something about having to get somewhere and being late already. He fixed his gaze on a point across the room as if he found someone he was supposed to meet and headed that way, demonstrating that it was more important to be over there.

He walked around the airport for a while until he was sure the blond man was no longer lingering about. He made his way to the ticket counter of the same airline that just dropped him off and bought a one-way ticket back to Orlando on the next available flight which, mercifully, was in about an hour. If he encounters no glitches, he could be home before his girlfriend returns home from work. She wouldn't even see his note. He paid cash for the ticket. His entire savings was in the pocket of his jeans. He withdrew the few hundred dollars he had in his bank account the day before. It didn’t amount to much. This was all his savings from pumping gas and wiping windshields. His girlfriend had contributed little to their joint savings. The little money she made from her job filing and typing at her brother-in-law’s insurance office, a non-essential position her sister cajoled her husband into creating, was habitually spent on drinks and unnecessary accessories of questionable taste for the apartment. But best not think about that now, he thought.

His flight back to Orlando and taxi ride to the apartment were mercifully uneventful. He arrived a good half an hour before she would get off from work. The note was where he left it, undisturbed. He watched the clock for a while and grew impatient. He wanted her to be there so he could start to feel normal. He microwaved one of the dinners he found in the freezer. Finally, he heard the car door slam shut and the keys rattling in the lock to the front door. He asked her where she had been and said she should have called. She asked when did he turn into her mother and explained that she was having a drink with her friends after work adding, they all agree that we should get a puppy.