The last of the leftover punch was a little cloudy but still tasted about the same. Eusebia and I sat on Pete’s stoop passing the sticky Vitaminwater bottle back and forth, waiting for him to come down so we could all walk back to her place together. Pete’s apartment was a seventh-floor walkup so nobody ever climbed all those stairs on purpose. Pete himself went up and down all the time and swore it didn’t bother him. He was above-average athletic and had once been a serviceable high school tight end: not slow, not small, good engine. In the first game of his senior year he broke three ribs on a doomed passing play, his opposing defender having correctly anticipated the ball’s flightpath and time of arrival. The football landed in Pete’s chest and cradling arms a fraction of a second before the defender’s shoulder, and Pete heard the arpeggio of his ribs cracking in quick succession, click-clack-clock, top to bottom, like the opening xylophone of “Gone Daddy Gone” by the Violent Femmes, which played on a loop in Pete’s head as he lay on his back in the mud, struggling to breathe. Thus ended Pete’s athletic phase and began his phase of post-punk folk rock, which in turn ended abruptly a few years later, in a Columbus, Ohio coffee house, just as ignobly, though with less violence. There was a story about this, too. And an anecdote about moving to the city, and on becoming an artist, and so on, so that Pete’s life always seemed like a string of colorful vignettes, a series of small, brightly-lit dioramas. I have zero anecdotes, I feel like. I don’t know what I end up talking to people about. For instance just now on Pete’s stoop I was telling Eusebia about how I’d been thinking about competitive bodybuilding, how it seemed connected to conceptual poetry, but I was not yet sure how. The punch was gone and she was smoking and checking her phone and only half listening. I felt pressure building behind my eyes and ate a Sudafed of indeterminate vintage.
Pete texted to say he’d be down in a second, he was just finishing some work. This could mean anything. For a long time Pete’s big project was a retelling of Flight of the Navigator, Disney’s 1986 motion picture event in which precocious child-actor Joey Cramer, as David Freeman, is taken aboard an alien spacecraft and whisked eight years ahead in time. David arrives in the future to find that life has hurtled along without him. Strangers now live in his home on Florida’s intracoastal waterway, and David’s family has long since given up hope of his return. Pete’s idea was to adapt Flight of the Navigator for musical theater. It was to be a collaboration with Molly from Eusebia’s building: she’d write the music and Pete would do the lyrics. Recently, however, they’d made out in the back of Jar Bar and afterwards been awkward, and their artistic collaboration seemed imperiled. Once I sat through Flight of the Navigator with Pete, passing a joint back and forth between us while he took notes on a yellow pad. Pete paused the video from time to time to jot something down or add commentary for my benefit. While the movie was shooting in Opa-locka, Florida, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded on TV and 200 miles up the coast, 72 seconds after launch from Cape Canaveral. The rocketship disintegrated over the Atlantic, killing all seven members of its crew, including Christa McAuliffe, a high school social studies teacher. When news of the disaster trickled onto the set of Flight of the Navigator, Pete says, many of the actors and extras were in costume as astronauts or NASA employees. Reportedly, 11-year-old Joey Cramer was devastated by the news, and came close to abandoning the film altogether. We tried to pick out scenes from before and after the disaster, as if the actor, and character, therefore, had fundamentally changed at a specific moment. Pete pointed out heightened emotions in the scene where Joey/David screams course corrections at the sentient spacecraft. This seemed like a good observation. Pete says that Joey Cramer retired from acting shortly after Flight of the Navigator was released, and withdrew from public life. Fans searched for him for years until he resurfaced decades later, in British Columbia, on a warrant for passing bad checks.
Now, on Pete’s stoop, I looked up Florida’s Intracoastal Waterway which at first I thought was called Intercoastal, a mistake whose significance I thought about in a dreamy half-sick, half-drugged-feeling manner for ten to fifteen seconds. Intramural sports, I thought. On my phone I clicked my way through a bunch of homemade webpages about Intracoastal Waterway enthusiasts called Loopers. Loopers live on boats and perpetually travel up the Waterway, through the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi, and back across the Gulf of Mexico in what is known, apparently, as America’s Great Loop. The Loop takes roughly a year to complete, and at any given moment there are hundreds of Loopers en route. After one complete circuit, once your ship has “crossed her wake,” you are entitled to display a gold flag on her bow. Your boat is a lady. You get different colored flags for subsequent consecutive loops. The consecutiveness of loops seems important in the Looper community, a real sticking point when it comes to getting those prestigious colored flags. A large proportion of Loopers are Boomers, empty-nested couples who relish the opportunity to take on new identities out on the water. Earl and Nanette Johnson become Captain and First Mate of the Seas the Day. David and Nancy Ostriker become the Crew of the Why Knot. A lot of couples wear special hands-free walkie-talkie headsets so that nobody can overhear them bicker while they try to coordinate docking or similarly precise maneuvers. Within the community, these headsets are called “Marriage Savers” and are available from a handful of online suppliers who specialize in outfitting Loopers. I thought about how to transform this information into something to tell Eusebia. Eventually I became aware that she wanted to order Pepe Rossos and we calculated whether we could order now and make it back before the delivery guy. I asked her to order me gnocchi bolognese and said I’d get beer from the Minimart on the corner.
“Tell Pete to hurry up,” I said.
“I know, I just did,” said Eusebia.
On the way to the store I thought about how astronauts come back younger than everybody else, and so maybe get to live in their own timelines, experiencing the world from a slight remove. I think this is based on the true science of high-velocity travel. I pictured myself looking up astronauts plus relativity back home in three to four hours. All the Minimart beers were warm. Eusebia texted to say that we were finally on our way.
2025