It is now the Dog days of summer. And it is also the Bongo-Dog days of summer. Each weekend this group of like minded miscreant, unconventional musicians play at Wanna Wanna and now the Palm Street Pier also, giving their minion of disciples several options…
Bay or surf?
Daytime highs are in the mid to uppers 90’s, and the sea “breeze” blows fierce after lunch, a burning crescendo that picks up any unsecured items tossing them unceremoniously into the water, adding to the collection of flotsam and jetsam that clutter the shoreline and gin clear waters. The wind whips the bay and Gulf into a churning and anguished cauldron of off color boiling slop, relegating sailing to something akin to work, necessitating tiny head sails the size of washcloths and multiple reefs in the main in order to keep from rounding up in the gusty incessant blast furnace daily tempest. It is a nervous time of the year, listening to the NOAA weather forecast, checking the net for telltale and occult signs of the dreaded H word.
Any diversiado is a welcome relief.
We ran into the commander, his family and his new Paris Hilton cellphone
Saturday night at Palm Street Pier where the ‘Dogs were putting on an
inaugural show, having never played there before. The commander and
crew had just returned from Los Lobos Mexico where they had spent the
4th of July holiday in true expatriate American style. He had some pictures
to show me stored on his new cell phone. The commander tried to
prepare me for the new phone thing before hesitantly extracting it from his
pocket, but I couldn’t stifle a fit of great guffaws when he produced the
gold lame covered phone, complete with all sorts of high tech
accoutrements. His last several phones had succumbed to the rigors
of the marine environment, so he opted for this new device. Perhaps it’s a
truly rugged mans phone in disguise, I certainly hope so. I couldn’t
imagine hauling it out in a sailor’s joint (like the Palm Street Pier), and so
he furtively hid it behind nervous cupped hand as he showed me several
photos of crystal clear waters over the reef in Mexico where they had just
been. He assured me that the phone was on the recommendation of the
wireless company, but I eyed him with suspicion none the less….
The commander said that he had picked up some sort of revenge down
In Mexico, or at least that’s what he claimed, but I believe it was just a
ruse to split in shame after having revealed the fact that he was carrying
around a phone that looked like it was designer-designed for some
Hollywood strumpet…..
The band was playing on a modified barge that the owner of the Palm Street Pier, Billy Kenon had brought over from one of his marine junk-yards in Port Isabel. They had cobbled together some 2 x 4’s as sort of a safety device to keep the players on board, but every time a power boat roared by, the little barge would lurch and roll violently in Thompkins Channel and the musicians would do an unplanned buck dance trying to steady their already alcohol impaired sea legs. Joey, the songwriter and singer finally choose to sit down on a bar stool, thus solving that problem for him. Behind him, Night Magic, and Wind Fit made a fine-looking backdrop in the tropical night, Wind Fits’ mizzen sail still hoisted, gently swaying in the now still night. Beyond the boats, darkness loomed over the Laguna Madre as snook pounded the surface just beyond the light in tempo to the salsa rhythm of “Chato’s out of Prison”….
Soon after the commander and company left, Doug, the captain and owner of Wind Fit showed up heading past us to the bar. I called over to him, and recognizing the Olivia crew, he plopped down in a chair at our table next to the bar. Wind Fit is a striking Herreshoff 28’ Ketch, and Doug is perhaps the most accomplished sailor in these here parts. I have seen him sliding through the causeway overpass in contrary wind effortlessly while the rest of us struggled with set and trim, and he often singlehands far offshore chasing fish and wind.
Like most sailors, Doug is an eclectic and abstract individual given to hi seas hijinks and hilarity. There is not enough life available not to squeeze out every single last drop of it before the day is finished, and Saturday night was no exception. He was drinking rum-runners like one would drink iced tea, having been out sailing a good deal of this windswept day.
Doug was joined by his cousin, and later by another female crew. Both woman had been topless sunbathing earlier as Doug sailed Wind Fit up and down Thompkins channel during the afternoon, much to the entertainment of the tourists at bayside bars like Louies Backyard, Wahoo and Tequila Sunset- people who come to South Padre Island to act naughty and abandon for just a moment their normal landlocked lives, insurance salesmen, lawyers and computer jocks of all types all clambering to be free like the wind if for only an instant, but none willing to risk it for good.
Thompkins channel borders the island running north and south on the bay side, past expensive homes, where some of these same inlanders eventually settle, to try and become “islanders”. It is a great place to tuck in, sailing back and forth on a broad reach, sheltered from the worst of the driving summer winds. Wind Fit had an incident earlier in the day with some yuppie chick in a kayak, when his dogs jumped ship and ran up into her back yard, depositing a surprise on her manicured zoysia grass lawn. Doug is a true pirate in the best third world sense, and reckoned that next time, he’d be the critter leaving the bomb. He figured that the woman was just upset because of the inordinate amount of taxation that property owners on the Island have to endure…
I laughed out loud and found it hard to have any great amount of sympathy for her. Like me, Doug has been around here a good deal of his life, and has watched the island change from a pristine sandbar, with only a few fishermen’s shacks qualifying as “housing” to its present state of over developed, gaudy, erosion causing infrastructure, built one on top of the other jutting out into the bay and the surf, defiantly trying to resist the force of the sea, only to extract a toll on the land, on La Tierra.
Doug said that he shouted out to her; “Hey Lady, that stuff’s high in nitrogen…makes a good fertilizer. That’ll be $6.50…..” He shook his head and added rather morosely; “She wouldn’t pay though”.
Around 1230, the band wraps it up, and Wind Fit’s other crew appears at our table after his cousin succeeds in rousing her up from the boat where she has been passed out in a sun and alcohol stupor since the afternoon. The woman is coming back to life now, and asking questions.
I am a completely open individual, and what you see is what you get, but one thing I truly detest is the cliché, especially when someone whom you don’t even know asks you first thing; “so what do you do?”
“So what do you do?” she asks us first thing.
Without hesitation I answer; “I’m a remittance man”. “What’s that?” she asks with genuine curiosity. “Well…..my family gives me a certain amount of money each month to stay away. I’m trouble you know”. She nods gravely and I figure that’s the end of it. I’m not much interested in making small talk with this woman. Then D makes the mistake of asking her what she does.
Turns out she had been a realtor on the Island, but had become disillusioned with the business. There are about 1500 realtors in the permanent population pool of 3000 here on the Island, a fact that is substantiated by the amount of rental and new construction, which supports the transient population of fifty thousand or so…..all crammed together on a sandbar that is no more than a mile wide. She was now leaving for another Texas mecca, Houston. For now though, she was enjoying the debauchery that is Wind Fit.
She asks me again “So what do you do?”, and I repeat “I told you….I’m a remittance man”. Again we go through the entire litany of questions. Now I’m beginning to figure that she’s dense, or maybe she really is a former realtor.
Doug is trying to get her to massage his feet, but she says distastefully “I hate feet…..get them off of me”.
Wrong answer. This starts the cavalcade.
“What, you got a foot aversion?” asks Doug.
D asks her how long this has been going on and has she consulted a professional about it?
“No….I just hate feet”
Doug’s cousin grabs his foot and pretends to lick it. Realtor lady cringes.
.
Kathy, the trombone player for the ‘Dogs cruises by the table and says sort of puzzled; “Hey, I thought I kept smelling pizza when we were on the barge….. that's weird...does anybody have pizza here?”
“No, but what you might have mistaken for a Parmesan cheese smell could be Doug’s feet….”
Trying to change the conversation, the tone of things, realtor lady turns to me across the table and says “You look like Jesus”.
Well, I’m certainly not but anyway I say; “Bless you my child” and than add in an apropos scripture;
“And he turned to the woman, and said to Simon, Seest thou this woman?.... I entered into thy house, and thou gavest me no water for my FEET: but SHE hath washed my FEETwith tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head.”
“So what’s wrong with feet?” I query
Realtor lady rolls her eyes, inhaling deeply on a clove cigarette. “I HATE feet” she reiterates as Doug keeps putting his bare feet up on the arm of her chair, and she keeps shoving them off….
Cliff now has the XM radio on a classic station, and John Lennon is chanting “Give peace a chance….”
D says; “What he’s really saying in that song is give FEET a chance”
Now we ALL (except of course, realtor lady) begin in unison with the music; “All we are saying…..is give FEET a chance!”
The barrage of foot related banter continues.
In a final effort to extract the truth from me, realtor lady asks a third time; "REALLY, what do you do?"
"I sell womens shoes....."
In true sailor style Rum Runners, Cuba Libres and Vodka Tonics are consumed as the evening grows more and more animated. Sailing plans are made for the following morning. Under the power of our own feet, we shuffle out into the cool damp early morning dark, leaving Wind Fit and crew behind to continue the after hours madness at the Palm Street Pier.
Back aboard, I lie awake for a few minutes in the V berth chuckling over all of my crazy friends and the people who populate the shoreline, blown to and fro by frenzied winds and tide. I have jumped with both feet into this sea and there’s no turning back.
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