The night before was a merry stew. We left Ocean City and cruised to Sea Isle City to roam around some shops, play miniature golf, and then drink it up early at some place called the Dead Dog Saloon. We were there pounding pints quite early in the evening, eating greasy appetizers. Allyson was pregnant, so she was our driver.
The Dead Dog was a step above a dive bar, low key. But after a few beers, I was told by the manager that I had to either wear a collared shirt or vacate the premises. My Jameson Irish Whiskey graphic t-shirt that I remember vividly getting on my 30th birthday was suddenly equivalent to a swastika at 8:00 pm, and it needed to be covered.
Of course, they sold official Dead Dog Saloon polo shirts there, so I bought a white one and wore it sloppily over my t-shirt. I flipped up the collar, buttoned all the buttons, and mocked the notion that a collared shirt was necessary, as if we were in a private country club. I walked around the bar, chatting with others that were also notified and enjoyed my drunken glory.
I awoke early the next morning with a slight headache, but I needed to get up, as I was going on my first deep sea fishing trip with Harry, my father-in-law, and my bro-in-law Ray.
Now, if you angle it right, everyone can be deemed the black sheep of their family, but for me, I felt I always ran a bit blacker.
With my family growing up, my Mom, Dad, and sister were all nurses. We’d sit in the dining room in my late teens and eat saucy lasagna while they talked about blood and bodily fluids, which always led to a shush from me, or I’d just stammer off with my plate to the den.
My sister was a socialite in high school, always throwing parties and going out. I just stayed in my bedroom and reorganized my baseball cards, waiting for the promise of college freedom, watching Friday sitcoms that nobody watched.
During the holidays, my sister, Mom, and Aunt would dance to pop stars, like Bon Jovi, joyously after a glass of wine, as I sat in the corner wishing I could blare the Pixies. They would call me “Jesus” as my stoner long hair, scruffy beard, and flannel effortless wardrobe clashed with the whole look of the family. I didn’t really care, though, but I just felt like an oddball, although mighty comfortable in being just that.
Now, I was married and had joined a whole new family. The in-law dudes (father and three bros), were all heavily into hunting, fishing, home repair, and sports, particularly NHL and NFL. All of those items resulted in a big fat zero of interest for me, so I was quickly lost in their conversations.
Growing up, none of my friends or family hunted, so it was very foreign to me. I’ve never even held a gun, except for the fake one that I often whip out and shoot my cat with. Once you’re in your mid-30s, you know what you want to pursue in life, and you easily check out and into what you dig the most. For me, I could care less if I ate another piece of meat for the rest of my life. And, NASCAR and televised sports — it really didn’t matter to me if they all vanished and were replaced by non-stop Cosby Show reruns.
It’s not that I was a black sheep with my newly expanded family; I was a black sheep with the typical Philadelphian male, I suppose. My interests didn’t lay in building additions to a home or car repair. My focus was on HTML5, CSS3, jQuery and building the best web sites possible for modern browsers, as my livelihood depended upon it. My career as a web professional was taking over my life. It was the only way to thrive in that profession. Pixels and code were my building blocks. Coffee and beer were my engine. Writing and music were my release.
So, now here I was, about to embark on an early AM fishing trip with some seasoned deep sea fishery folk. I’ve always been easily carsick as a kid, from the days of my parents driving me around town. I originally thought that my parents were just bad drivers, but they weren’t.
I always preferred to drive. So, I insisted for the fishing trip and took us to a Wawa for some grub, although I was the only one that seemed to be craving anything. I bought a coffee and a bag of Frito’s Corn Chips.
While waiting to load the charter boat, I crunched down the chips and pounded the coffee and I felt, well, shitty, but at least more awake. Soon we were on the boat. I felt glad that I had finally joined Harry in one of these journeys, as he was always asking me to come along. Maybe it was the long lost missing link of my life that I needed, I thought.
The charter boat filled up with about forty people and we all hung along the railings as the engine chugged us out deeper into the ocean. The deep sea fishing poles seemed simple enough, as you just dropped your baited hook into the water.
Eventually the boat stopped, as if we had reached a precise destination. With the engine off, the boat instantly started rocking heavily with the wind and water, pushing the horizon up and down and jostling instant nausea into my system, as if something was jarred in my brain and I could no longer focus.
I darted to the men’s room, the one tiny men’s room on the boat, and vomited heavily the full yellow corn chip mush into the toilet — well, as much as I could into the toilet. My extended arms held onto the walls for support, as I would have fallen over otherwise. I tried to clean up the mess the best I could and then proceeded back out.
Harry had a baited pole ready for me and immediately knew I had yacked, pointing out that I was pale and unstable looking.
“Yeah, I got it out of me,” I said, grabbing hold of the pole. I was proud that I had made it to the toilet on time, getting it out of my system and ready to catch some bluefish, tuna, weakfish, flounder — anything. Maybe we could grill it up later, I thought.
We all hovered over the railing looking down at the water. But then it hit me again. The nausea was instant and relentless. I threw up into the water, leaving a trace of vomit alongside the boat, holding tight to my pole. Holy fuck is this embarrassing, I thought. Chunks of puke lined my sweatshirt as I couldn’t help but act like a 17-year-old girl that did shots of whiskey for the first time and was ruining the party for all.
Suddenly, I felt tension on my line and knew that I was either catching a fish or a heavy piece of debris. Harry noticed I was fading out and helped me reel in the sucker as I could barely hold onto the rod.
Out of the water wriggled a testy slimy black eel, about four feet long. One of the crewmen came over and told me to just pull it in and I dropped it on the deck. The damn thing writhed around relentlessly. It was a like a massive piece of black licorice that had come alive, trying to slap us all in the face. The crewman held it down with gloved hands and then pounded several times on the eel’s head with a mallet. Blood spurted around the deck and it eventually relaxed. The crewman tossed the eel back into the sea and then cleaned up the mess with a mop and bucket.
Now the nausea that had overcome me was leagues above any flu / hangover barf scene that I had ever experienced. With the flu, you may vomit for twenty minutes, but then you fall back asleep for hours. This was a non-stop assault that I couldn’t escape. In fact the vomiting part was actually the better part, allowing me to attain temporary relief. The waiting in between gags was the hell.
I wandered around the boat trying to find a sweet spot of relief, but such a location didn’t exist. I tried to smile at the people happily fishing, acting like was ambling towards a destination. I went into the dining area where I heard they were selling Dramamine. I bough a couple pills and swallowed them down. Some old fella chuckled and told me the pills needed to be taken hours before getting on the boat. “Those will just make you sleepy at this point.”
I sat in a booth for four by myself, gripping the table, and tried to focus on the horizon. It didn’t work at all. Also seated were a couple other seasick guys. I saw one dude vomit and I immediately gagged and tossed up some more onto the floor. Liquid chunky orange goo cascaded back and forth…and back and forth…sliding back and forth on the floor. One kid was about eye level with a trash can and stuck his whole head inside of it to yack.
Just a little over three more hours of this, I thought, holding onto the railing toward the end of the boat. Nobody was around there. Harry came over eating some scrambled eggs from the kitchen as the wind blew towards him. I warned him that I was about to hurl and that the wind might blow it towards his face. He got out of the way, letting me know that he was being easy on me. He described how he originally wanted to shove bait into his mouth and talk to me, but didn’t want to be too cruel.
I already felt like a douche because my chest and back were sunburned from trying a new “spray” sunscreen. It was like cooking spray, but didn’t work on my pasty skin at all, leaving a large red spot on my chest and stomach that resembled Pangaea.
Finally we were headed back to the dock. I was happy to hear the engine roaring and seeing us zip evenly across the ocean. At the dock, I stepped onto the deck and slipped and fell. I laughed at myself and got back up. What the fuck did I care, really? Nobody had caught one single fish. It was just the black eel and me, bloodied and butchered.
Back at the beach house, my wife and I decided to go out to eat at some Italian place down the street. We sat at a table outside and dipped bread in olive oil and watched a fender bender in front of us. Everyone was fine. A cop showed up. Traffic built up. Waitresses brought out entrees. Fresh water with lemon. Peppered cheese. Prodding jokes. Focused eyes, a goofball back on firm land where he belonged.
My First Client
Sure, I had done some freelance work before. I’ve designed web sites for bands and events, but they were all just friends and I was doing it for free. So, I wouldn’t call them “clients” per se. I already had a full time gig, so I wasn’t looking to start my own LLC or anything, just score some occasional moonlighting projects so I could sit at my iMac in my underwear some evenings and earn some extra loot.
One day I got a call from what I thought was a crazed drunk man. I could barely understand a word he spoke, as he had some kind of European accent. His voice was slurred and strained, as if talking was a grand task. After a laborious and awkward phone conversation of frantically scribbling notes , I got the basics:
- He found me on Google
- He wanted a web site
- Money wasn’t a concern, as he was a retired neurosurgeon
I had my first potential client, someone that had agonized over the proper designer to call and fallen in love with my portfolio. Or maybe I was the only sucker that didn’t hang up on him. Regardless, I had his name, phone number, street address, and I was soon to meet him to discuss transforming a book that he had written and turn it into a web site.
His name was Laurent, and he lived on the 29th floor of some luxury condo building on Walnut Street in the Rittenhouse Square area. It was an area I associated with using the Barnes & Noble bathroom to take a piss or enjoying a La Colombe coffee in the park and pretending to read. The following Saturday, I went to visit him there. He had explained that he was not in very good condition, was unsightly looking and could not go outside, and so meeting at a cafe was not possible. I mentally prepared for the worst, expecting to see the Elephant Man. The elevator quickly zoomed me up to his floor.
I knocked on Laurent’s door and it quickly opened. I looked down and saw a very short man, roughly four foot tall, with a frail build wrapped in a cardigan sweater. He looked to be in his late 60s, hair disheveled, and he moved slowly as if the hump on his back was weighing him down.
“Welcome…I am Laurent,” he said while extending his hand for me to enter.
The first thing that I noticed and could not help staring at was the stunning gorgeous view. To the left was a dining area with a laptop on a glass table and a large window overlooking the Schuylkill River and West Philly. We talked about the view for a while and then he had me sit at the dining room table. The furniture and decorations were very modern and sterile. Combined with random mysterious medical equipment laying around, his condo home felt icy. There were some macaroons in a ceramic dish, and he pointed at me to eat up.
“They call me Napoleon.” he said with a proud smile. “Because I am French, and short…And very stubborn…just as he was.”
Laurent explained to me that he had been writing a medical book of some sort about neurosurgery methods that he had invented. But during the writing of his book, he had fallen into a coma for a while — something to do with a race car driving accident. After regaining consciousness after his coma, and back to living his life, he found a Microsoft Word file on his laptop and realized that he had been writing a book. He had completely forgotten about it, and he didn’t know where he had left off, where he was heading with it, or anything about it. His goal was to feed me finished chapters of his book so that I could create a simple site where you click on each chapter to read it. Easy as pecan pie, I thought, although boring as hell.
The content of his book was way over my head. Who could possibly understand it, aside from another neurosurgeon? Even worse, it was filled with about one hundred “insert slide here” notations, requiring me to scan dozens of X-ray slides of spines. All that I had was a simple flatbed scanner, so I would have to scan each slide one at a time. He also wanted me to work on about thirty illustrations. I explained to him that I couldn’t draw anything (aside from a mean Garfield cartoon), but he insisted that they were simple and didn’t care much how they looked.
While discussing, Laurent’s laptop battery died and he couldn’t find the power cord. “Do you mind if we go into my bedroom?” he asked. “…I have another laptop in there.”
“Sure,” I said, realizing that maybe he didn’t want a web site at all. I figured if he tried anything kinky, I’d be able to easily swat his ass to the ground. I was worried about needles though. Maybe he was going to drug me. He moved sluggishly, but you never know, I thought.
Down the hall, I followed Laurent to his bedroom. He stopped at a photo of him and some woman, pointing out that she was his ex-wife and a bitch. In his bedroom, a laptop sat on his kingsized bed. Medical equipment was all over the place, weird wrappers, adhesives, spools of gauze, a machine of some sort, perhaps for heart monitoring. I sat on his untucked bed next to him and watched him carefully load another Word file. He had a bunch of them and needed to organize them before getting them to me — that is if I decided to take him on. It was already an ordeal.
I escaped without any strange teas shoved at me to drink or needles thrusted into my arms. My paranoia subsided descending the elevator as I tried to come up with a total dollar amount to send Laurent via email. Later that night, I emailed quite a high amount to him in the Statement Of Work, asking for half of it up front. I really didn’t want to do this job, as it wasn’t anything of fun content, and the design would be dull. There was no way to liven it up. I could tell that Laurent would be nagging me often, as he had already asked if I used AOL Instant Messenger.
Laurent responded an hour later. He admitted that half up front was a bit high, but he was willing to comply. He gave me the name of his personal accountant and told me a check would be waiting there for me the following day for pickup. The rush of instant money motivated me. I had half already?! Now, I just needed to head back to Laurent’s to pick up a shoebox of slides, and then bang it all out.
The following two months, I received fragmented cryptic Word docs from Laurent, some just half chapters, some entirely wrong chapters that needed to be rewritten. He liked to use various text colors, multiple font and font sizes — some were annotations to himself that mistakenly included. AOL Instant Messenger proved to be necessary just to get things aligned. He was a faster typer than a talker, so phone calls with him ceased. The scanning was an utter drab. I spent many evenings sipping on beers and singularly scanning vaguely different slides and hoping that I was putting them on the correct pages.
The illustrations that Laurent had me create looked like a first grader drawing a jelly fish, just god awful. Lots of squiggly lines and callout labels on top of a rainbow of colors. Of course, I added gradients and drop shadows to them to give it that “popping jazzy wow factor”, and Laurent loved it. This was seriously the worst looking junk I had ever spewed out of my iMac. I didn’t want to come up with a design solution. Laurent’s insistency of getting it done and the French / English language barrier was too difficult to deal with.
Our conversations were primarily about the book, but Laurent would occasionally mention his bitch ex-wife or bring up the weather and the Phillies. At one point, he wanted to take my girlfriend and I out to dinner, but I didn’t have a girlfriend. I couldn’t fathom the thought of going out to eat with him at some trendy Rittenhouse Square joint, so I just declined graciously and hoped each time that I saw him was the last. Missing slides and files that couldn’t be emailed led me to revisit him in the lobby a few times. His AIM pop-ups led to chats during my day job as well, and I had to get firm with him.
After four months, the web site was completed and I happily picked up the check for the remainder due from Laurent’s accountant. He sent over a few typographical fixes and I gladly updated his site. Laurent sent me emails from his colleagues that boasted what a great achievement it was for him.
A few weeks later, I received a bunch of emails from Laurent, all about five minutes apart. He thought I was ignoring him, but I was just offline for a while. He now wanted me to add an addendum, glossary of terms, and a comment page where viewers could leave comments. I told him that I would need to charge him for this, as it was an extensive job, although mainly text formatting. “Whatever you need,” he said.
So, I charged him a lot again. But this time, I was done in about a week. The comment page was quickly filling up with praise and Laurent was elated. But now he was emailing me about wanting to purchase an iMac, as he knew I was an Apple fan boy and the TV commercials were working their magic on him. “Can you take me to the King of Prussia mall?” he asked.
I realized that I had to end ties with Laurent immediately, as there was no end to his additional assignments. My inbox was flooded with messages from him, and none from any potential girlfriends.
About a week went by and I emailed Laurent to ask him when my final check would be ready for pickup. Days went be and he didn’t reply. I called him, dreading the thought of a tangled conversation with him, but he never picked up.
I suddenly felt gypped. I called his accountant and left multiple messages. Nothing. A couple days later I called again and was told that Laurent had passed away due to some complications with his head trauma. I felt like an insensitive prick. With sighs of grief and blundering jests of sorrow, the accountant explained he was busy with Laurent’s estate and asked how much was owed to me. I told him and the check was mailed to my apartment.
The comments section of the web site transformed into a remembrance forum for the few colleagues and friends of Laurent that had seen the site. I would sit and scroll through the deep pages of content and wonder if Laurent had sent it out to all the people he truly wanted to see it.
The site’s domain name and hosting were set to expire in two years. As the seasons rolled on, I’d occasionally tap the address into my browser to see if anything new had been written about Laurent. And on my last try, there was an error, a problem loading the landing page, as the server could no longer be found. The site was gone.