Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up Read online

  “Sharon Stone,” I answered.

  “I’ll allow it.”

  Chapter Six

  “And so, ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” I said, “only ONE PERSON could have committed this murder, and that person is ...”

  The guilty party suddenly jumped up, causing the courtroom to nearly spit out its chewing gum.

  “THAT’S RIGHT!” the guilty party shouted. “I DID IT, AND I’M GLAD!”

  It was Amy Fisher.

  Reader Alert

  Except for the column about zebra mussels clinging to the giant brassiere, this next section is about boating. I own a motorboat, named Buster, who appears a couple of times in this section. In fact, Buster appears in this section considerably more often than he appears in the actual water. Buster spends most of his time sitting in my driveway. Every now and then I’ll try to start him, thereby causing a couple of his key engine parts to fall off. Then I call the smiling mechanic, who tows Buster away, fixes him, and tows him back to my driveway, where he (Buster) sits for a couple of months, chuckling softly and slowly working his engine parts loose for the next time that I try to start him. The sea: It’s my life.

  Over His Head

  Summer is here again, and as the official spokesperson for the recreational boating industry, I’ve been asked to remind you that boating is a fun and relaxing family activity with very little likelihood that your boat will sink and you’ll wind up bobbing helplessly in the water while sharks chew on your legs as if they were a pair of giant Slim Jims, provided that you follow proper nautical procedures.

  Fortunately, I can tell you what these procedures are, because I am a veteran “salt” and the owner of a small motorboat, named Buster Boat. I spend many happy hours at Buster’s helm, and I always feel totally safe, because I know that (a) most nautical dangers can be avoided through careful preparation, good seamanship, and common sense; and (b) Buster is sitting on a trailer in my yard. The biggest danger there is spiders, which like to make webs on Buster’s seats because they’ve figured out that, statistically, Buster is less likely to wind up in the water than our house is.

  Sometimes, when I’m sitting at the helm, killing spiders with the anchor, scanning the horizon of my yard for potential boating hazards, I turn on Buster’s radio and listen to the Marine Forecast, which is always saying things like: “Barometer leaning to the southwest at 15 to 37 knots.” As a recreational boater, you should be familiar with these nautical terms. For example, a “knot” means about a mile an hour.” There is a sound nautical reason why they don’t come right out and say “about a mile an hour,” namely, they want you, the recreational boater, to feel stupid. They used to be less subtle about it: In the old days, the Marine Forecast consisted entirely of a guy telling recreational-boater jokes. (“How many recreational boaters does it take to screw in a light bulb?” “They can’t! Sharks have chewed off their arms!”)

  The Marine Forecast is always telling you obvious things, such as which way the wind is blowing, which you can figure out for yourself just by watching the motion of your spider webs. They never tell you about the serious boating hazards, which are located—write down this Boating Safety Tip—under the water. It turns out that although the water is basically flat on top, underneath there are large hostile objects such as reefs and shoals (or “forecastles”) that have been carelessly strewn around, often smack-dab in the path of recreational boaters.

  I discovered this shocking fact recently when some friends visited us in Miami, and in a foolish effort to trick them into thinking that we sometimes go out on our boat, we actually went out on our boat. It was a good day for boating, with the barometer gusting at about 47 liters of mercury, and we had no problems until I decided to make the boat go forward. For some reason, motorboats are designed to go at only two speeds: “Virtually Stopped” and “Airborne.” We were traveling along at Virtually Stopped, which seemed inadequate—barnacles were passing us—so I inched the throttle forward just a teensy bit and WHOOOOMM suddenly we were passengers on the Space Shuttle Buster. Every few feet Buster would launch himself completely out of the water and attain such an altitude that at any moment you expected flight attendants to appear with the beverage cart, and then Buster would crash down onto a particularly hard patch of water, causing our food and possessions and spiders to bounce overboard, forming a convenient trail for the sharks to follow. (“Look!” the sharks were saying. “A set of dentures! It won’t be long now!”)

  In this relaxing and recreational manner we lurched toward downtown Miami, with me shouting out the various Points of Interest. “I THINK THAT’S A DRUG DEALER!” I would shout. Or: “THERE GOES ANOTHER POSSIBLE DRUG DEALER!” I was gesturing toward these long, sleek motorboats with about 14 engines apiece that you see roaring around the Miami waters driven by men with no apparent occupation other than polishing their neck jewelry.

  So it was a pleasant tropical scene, with the wind blowing and the sea foaming and the sun glinting off the narcotics traffickers. As the captain, I was feeling that pleasant sense of well-being that comes from being in total command and not realizing that you are heading directly toward a large underwater pile of sand. I would say we hit it at about 630 knots, so that when Buster skidded to a cartoon-style stop, we were in about six inches of water, a depth that the U.S. Coast Guard recommends for craft classified as “Popsicle sticks or smaller.” This meant that, to push Buster off the sand, my friend John and I had to go into the water, which lapped threateningly around our lower shins. Probably the only thing that saved our lives was that the dreaded Man-Eating But Really Flat Shark was not around.

  So we did survive, and I’m already looking forward to our next recreational boating outing, possibly as soon as the next century. Perhaps, if you’re a boater, you’ll see me out there! I’ll be the one wearing shin guards.

  Moby Dave

  You can’t explain it, this need that men have to go to sea. I sure can’t explain it. One day it just seized me, like a case of the hives.

  “Beth,” I said to my wife. “Let’s take Buster to Bimini.”

  Buster is our boat. It usually sits on a trailer in our backyard, forming an ideal natural habitat for spiders. Spiders come from as far away as Brazil to make their homes on Buster.

  Bimini is a place out in the Atlantic Ocean. The main thing I knew about Bimini was that it was where Gary Hart went to establish himself as a leading former presidential contender. I wasn’t even 100 percent sure what country, legally, Bimini belonged to. But I did know that people regularly went there from Miami in their boats. When I announced that I was going to Bimini, many people felt compelled to tell me confidence-building anecdotes about their trips.

  “Oh, yeah,” they’d say. “One time I was halfway there, and this storm came up and the wind was 83 miles an hour and there were 27-foot waves and the engine conked out and the radio broke and we all got sick and my wife suddenly went into labor even though she wasn’t even pregnant and a huge tentacle came out of the water and snatched Ashley and ...”

  The reason this kind of thing can happen is that, even though Bimini is only about 50 miles from Miami, to get to it you have to go right through the famous Bermuda Triangle, which is formed by drawing lines between Bermuda, the Bahamas, and my driveway. Terrible things happen constantly in this area, with I-95 being only one example. Also, flowing right through the Bermuda Triangle, between Miami and Bimini, is the famous Gulf Stream, which serves as a giant, natural rapid mass-transit system for sharks.

  So I knew that, before I attempted to cross to Bimini, I had to get Buster Boat into shape. Step one was to take him to a mechanic, because several things had gone wrong with him while he’d been sitting on his trailer. This is normal. A major law of physics is that things decay faster on a boat than in any other environment. Scientists have attempted to measure this phenomenon, but their instruments keep breaking. If a screw falls off your boat, and you go to a marine-supply store to buy a replacement—which will cost you several
times as much as an ordinary civilian screw, because of course it has to be a marine screw—you can sometimes see your new screw actually dissolving on the counter while you’re still paying for it.

  So I took Buster to the mechanic, Dan, and he got everything working, and while I was writing the check I mentioned that I was going to Bimini.

  Dan gave me a concerned look.

  “You’re going to Bimini?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, over the sound of Buster decaying in the background.

  “You better get some spare parts,” he said. He started naming things like “transgressor nodule” and “three-sixteenths retribution valve.” I wrote it all down, went to the marine-supply store, and dutifully purchased every item on the list, although it would have been simpler to just pick up the Big Economy Box O’ Random Parts, because my mechanical skills are limited to annually installing the new registration decal on my car license plate. If Buster conked out in the Gulf Stream, I would sit in the exact center of the boat and throw engine parts at the sharks.

  But I was as ready as I was going to get. So early one Friday morning in July, Beth and I arose and—as bold seafaring people have done for thousands of years—went to a bakery. “Never attempt to cross the Gulf Stream without fresh pastries” is one of the Coast Guard’s Rules for Safe Boating. Then we drove to where we’d put Buster into the water earlier, climbed aboard, and headed out to sea, with fear in our hearts and crumbs in our laps.

  At this point I need to get technical for a moment and explain how to navigate to Bimini. Bimini is roughly east of Miami, so the simplest approach would be to steer a compass course of approximately 90 degrees Fahrenheit longitude. However, you also have to consider the fact that the Gulf Stream flows northward at an average of 2.5 amps, although this varies in certain areas depending on local shark motion. And then there are your winds, your tides, your barometric pressure, your jellyfish, your big, disgusting wads of floating seaweed, and your solar eclipses, one of which had occurred the day before we left. Taking all of these factors into consideration, I examined the charts, did a few navigational calculations, and decided that the best way to get to Bimini would be to follow Steele’s boat.

  Steele is Howard Steele Reeder II, a friend of ours who had graciously agreed to lead us to Bimini. He’s a boating enthusiast, although that phrase seems too weak to describe the level of his interest, kind of like describing someone as a “heroin fancier.” Steele, like most boating enthusiasts, is always in the process of simultaneously (a) fixing something on his current boat and (b) thinking about trading it in for another boat with a new and different set of decaying parts. For the Bimini voyage, he had to borrow his brother’s boat, because his own boat, which he had just bought, had already broken. Soon the marine industry will develop a boat that is prebroken right at the factory. When they finish building it, they’ll just tow it out into the middle of the Gulf Stream and sink it, then hand you the bill of sale. Boating enthusiasts will be in heaven.

  On board with Steele were his wife, Babette, and another couple, Linda and Olin McKenzie. Olin is a dentist. “Never attempt to cross the Gulf Stream without a qualified dentist” is another one of the Coast Guard’s Rules for Safe Boating. Too many maritime tragedies could easily have been avoided if the victims had been more aware of the insidious dangers of plaque formation.

  But the most important passenger on Steele’s boat was the Loran unit. This is a little electronic device that somehow, we think by magic, knows where Bimini is. “It’s over there!” says the Loran, via little electronic arrows. This is a truly wonderful navigational aid, and I hope that someday it will be installed in every automobile, because it would be pretty funny to see thousands of cars driving 55 miles per hour into the Atlantic Ocean.

  So Steele followed the Loran, and we followed Steele, bouncing along in Buster. Buster is not one of those big, heavy, Orson Welles-style boats that plow sedately through the sea. Buster is a small, light, Richard Simmons-style boat that likes to skip gaily across the tops of the waves, churning your internal organs into pudding.

  So we bounced through Biscayne Bay and out into the Atlantic. The tall buildings of downtown Miami grew smaller and smaller behind us (actually, they stayed the same size; they only appeared to get smaller, because of the Greenhouse Effect). There was nothing in front of us except water, which was dark blue, because the Gulf Stream is approximately 23.6 million feet deep. Anything could be lurking down there. There could be things down there with eyeballs the size of your entire boat. It’s best not to think about it. It’s best not to look ahead, either, because there’s an alarming quantity of nothing out there. It’s best to look wistfully back at Miami, getting smaller and smaller and smaller. At times, in the past, I had been critical of Miami, but out there at sea I was becoming a major civic booster. I was realizing that Miami has a lot of excellent qualities, the main one being that it is not located in the Gulf Stream. If your engine breaks down in Miami, all you have to do is pull your car over to the side of the road, put the hood up, and wait for a passing motorist to take a shot at you. But that seemed safer than being out in the ocean, relying entirely on two smallish boats and a little electronic device. What if the Loran wasn’t pointing us to Bimini at all? What if Steele’s brother forgot to pay his loran bill, and the device, chuckling electronically to itself, was steering us to Iceland?

  These thoughts ran through my mind as I munched pensively on a poppy-seed muffin and Miami got smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and finally ... Miami was gone. There was nothing behind us, nothing ahead of us, nothing on either side, except water. I didn’t look down because I didn’t want to catch even a glimpse of a giant eyeball. I kept my eyes Krazy Glued to the back of Steele’s boat, trusting that he would ... HEY. What the hell is Steele doing? He’s STOPPING! Out HERE!! “WHAT IS IT?” I shouted.

  “FISH!” Steele said.

  That’s right: There we were, in extremely deep water, completely out of sight of civilization, probably miles off course, possibly with icebergs drifting our way, and Steele and Olin had decided to try to catch fish, which are readily available in cooked form at any decent restaurant. So for the longest 10 minutes of my life, Steele and Olin fished while I circled them. I didn’t dare stop Buster, for fear that he’d decide the trip was over and refuse to go again.

  Finally, thank God, Olin caught a fish, which he released because it was too small. Your true sportsperson prefers a fish that is large enough so that when you cut it open, it spews slime all over the entire boat. But the fish had satisfied Olin’s and Steele’s urge to angle, and soon we were off again.

  We bounced along for another hour, with nothing appearing on the horizon. At one point, Steele and Olin went through an elaborate pantomime for my benefit: They got out a chart, looked at it, shrugged elaborately, pointed in opposite directions, and had a big arm-waving argument. This was of course highly entertaining to me. “What a pair of wacky cut-ups!” I said to myself. “If we ever reach land, I will kill them with my emergency signal flare gun!”

  Finally, after 21/2 hours, which in a small, bouncing boat feels approximately as long as the Reagan administration, Steele pointed to the horizon ahead. I looked out, and experiencing the same emotion that Columbus must have felt when he first caught sight of the Statue of liberty, I saw: nothing. But a few minutes later I thought I saw something dark and low against the sky, so I strained my eyeballs and ... Yes! There it was! Bimini! Or possibly Iceland! I didn’t care. At least we were somewhere.

  “Good boy, Buster,” I said, patting him on his compass. Praise is crucial to proper boat maintenance.

  A half hour later we reached Bimini harbor, arriving at the same time as a Chalk’s seaplane, which got there from Miami in about 25 minutes (this is known, among us nautical sea salts, as the Wussy Method). The harbor was full of huge recreational boats that cost millions of dollars and burn hundreds of gallons of fuel per afternoon so that sportspersons, equipped with thousands of dollars wort
h of tackle and tens of thousands of dollars worth of electronic equipment, can locate and sometimes even catch fish worth up to $3.59 per pound.

  A lot of people go to Bimini to find fish, especially the wily bonefish. There are many local guides who will take you out looking for bonefish; they’re all nicknamed “Bonefish,” as in Bonefish Willie, Bonefish Sam, Bonefish Irving, Bonefish E.E. Cummings, etc. While in Bimini I tried hard to get my traveling companions to refer to me as “Bonefish Dave,” but it never caught on.

  It turns out that Bimini is part of the Bahamas, which is, technically, a completely different country. This meant that we had to go through Immigration and Customs. I have never understood the point of this process. I assume they want to make sure you’re not bringing in bales of cocaine, or an undesirable person such as Charles Manson, or some agricultural threat such as the Deadly Bonefish Rot. But in most places they hardly even look at you. In Bimini they didn’t even look at our boats. Instead they handed us a bunch of forms, which we spent about an hour and a half filling out and getting stamped by various uniformed officials. (They’re big on stamping things; I imagine that about once a week a big ink tanker steams into the harbor to replenish the supply.)

  If I designed Customs forms, they’d have questions like:

  1. Are you bringing in any cocaine?

  2. How about Charles Manson?

  And so on. But the Bahamas’ forms didn’t ask anything like this. Instead, they asked—this is a real question—”Has plague occurred or been

  suspected among rats or mice on board during the voyage, or has there been unusual mortality among them?” How are you supposed to answer a question like that? Go down into the bowels of the boat, locate a spokesrat or spokesmouse, and say, “Any unusual mortality around here?” So I answered: No. I figured that if Buster contained any kind of animal life, it would be spiders, and they would be too severely vibrated to cause any problems.