June 7, 2019: The Liveaboard

In Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, the first-person narrator, Binx Bolling, is on a search, and he will do nothing to lessen the wonder. In the end, Binx comes to a conclusion: “There is only one thing I can do: listen to people, see how they stick themselves into the world, hand them along a ways in their dark journey and be handed long, and for good and selfish reasons.” Binx is himself trying to see how he will stick himself into the world as well.

The notion has stuck with me for 40 years, and sometimes I find myself wondering: how has this math teacher or that tax lawyer worked out how to stick him or herself into the world?

I’m always wondering that about the Liveaboard. Who is he? Or, more to the point how does he do it? And why is he so sanguine? Of course, he could be a multi-millionaire. But if you give him a sideways glance, it’s certainly unlikely.

If you live on Bainbridge, you’ve probably seen him. He’s in coffee shops, all of them. He’s tall and slender but solidly muscled. He wears polo shirts or tee shirts and shorts and tennis shoes. He’s…what? Forty, at least? Maybe fifty?

Nancy dubbed him the Liveaboard because that seemed about right: He’s never farther north on the island than a half mile from the water, Winslow Way. He’s always dressed casually, always looks like he just finished working on something. Why get dressed for anything if you live on a boat? He looks like he’s prepared for quick, straightforward labor: pulling his boat to the dock, knotting it up, battening down the hatches, if you will, then striding up to downtown. Sometimes he seems marked by labor: bruises, cuts, dirt.

His face is lightly pockmarked. I haven’t been close enough to see the color of his eyes, but I’m guessing hazel—they’re light, but not blue. His light brown, greying hair is somewhat curly, and always unkempt. Quite often he looks like he’s just successfully survived a bender, his cheeks blotchy, his eyes bloodshot. He has thick fingers. He lounges in chairs. He puts his large hands behind his head when he leans back. He drinks a lot of coffee.

If you live on Bainbridge, you’d probably nod in agreement at Nancy’s assessment of how one runs into people: not at all for a decade, then five times a day. Once, after not having seen one family for months, we ran into them four times one day. They’re so nice that, on the fourth meeting one day, I told them we were having dinner at 6:30 and just come by.

Over the 20 years we’ve lived here, I’ve been through several of those cycles with the Liveaboard. If I had thought about him, I would have thought that finally he had moved on. But then there he is, outside Blackbird, or Town & Country grocery, with a cup of coffee, talking to someone—usually a man. I’ve only heard the Liveaboard speak a couple of times.

At one point, he had a girlfriend. She was cute, in her late 20’s, maybe early 30’s, dark brown hair, dark bright eyes, dressed like a liveaboard’s girlfriend might: in simple flowing dresses, pullovers with spaghetti straps, sandals. She didn’t have to have braids, but she did, and I remembered the hippie chicks of my youth. I hope she played the guitar and sang folk songs. Now you get who she was.

During the time that he was seeing her was one of the times I heard him speak: “Yeah, it’s interesting having a younger woman,” he told some man. “There are some weird daddy issues going on, but it’s OK.”

She wasn’t around the next time I saw him, and I’d like to think that she decided that life would be something different and better if she moved on.

But what does he do? Maybe it’s just a sign that I don’t know enough about the place where I’ve lived for 20 years. Could he be a fisherman? An engineer on the ferry? Does he really live aboard some boat? What is it like? Is it a mess? Compulsively cleaned, as a sailor might do? More to the point, how can he hang around expensive downtown Bainbridge all the time? How has he rationalized, justified, or simply convinced himself that, yes, this is the place that he belongs, that he is of the little town, its coffee shops, their patrons? That this is the best place and way for him to stick himself into the world.

I haven’t the slightest idea. Like Binx Bolling, I can only speculate and remain dedicated to the wonder.