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There is a lot I could say about the Panama Canal. I could mention how it was the largest railroad project ever undertaken. I could mention it was the largest civil engineering project ever contemplated. I could mention the billions of tons of dirt removed to make way for it, or remark on the intricate functions of its numerous locks. But really, while all of this is true, the most amazing part about it is this: It finished ahead of schedule and under budget.
We entered this impressive achievement from the north. As contrary to common belief, the transit is actually primarily a north-south affair, entered from the Caribbean on the north, transited in a south-south-eastern direction, and exited from the south into the Pacific. The canal transits a distance of 47 statute (not nautical) miles.
We approached Gatun Locks not long thereafter. The Gatun locks were a three chamber lock system raising the ships a total of 85 feet. The lock was a full-waste type of lock, ejecting all water used right into the Atlantic Ocean. The MS Rotterdam was built to Panamax specifications, and fit barely into each lock. The ship was pulled from ocean to lock to lock using several electric locomotives running on tracks alongside the locks.
Once we were through the locks, we went to breakfast, for the first time in the ship’s main restaurant; we figured it would be interesting to try something different than the ship’s massive breakfast buffet. The setting was more elegant, but the food was very similar. It was fresher, though. Susan seemed anxious to get to the kids activities area. John had met a girl at the teen lounge, and seemed to be interested in pursuing a friendship with her.
Jenny was all over him with questions about her. I was appropriately disinterested. I was not the person to instill a sense of no-sex-before-marriage. I certainly was not a poster child for the benefits of monogamy. Or maybe I was. But I wasn’t allowed to talk about it, that was for sure. I was not enough of a hypocrite to come down on John for such things, in any case.
Having more than one partner in my life has been, frankly, mostly rewarding. It made more than the relationships complicated, true, but I deeply enjoyed each one that I had, I mean, for the most part. But it was very emotionally complicated. It is very possible to be in love with more than one woman at a time; the solution to it is NOT a Ménage à trois. At least not for me. Sex really shouldn’t be the focal point of a relationship.
It gave Jenny and I more time to talk. I had been going over with her an almost chronological list of the important events in my life, leaving out a few events. I got into some of the more messy events of my life. There were more than a few people who came away from their meeting with me with long-ass hospital stays and even longer-ass medical bills.
I finally stumbled into a story where I beat the shit out of a guy who was operating a romantic money-theft scheme. Thing is, Rachel killed him after that. He deserved it. He tried again. Can you imagine the temerity of such a man? I beat the crap out of him and told him he wouldn’t get away so lucky next time and then we catch him at it again. IN THE SAME TOWN EVEN! We had to send the guy a message, man.
Anyway, Jenny managed to back me into a corner until I admitted that Rachel had in fact strangled the man in her bare hands. That was my Rachel.
“She killed a man,” Jenny repeated, “with her bare hands?”
“Yes,” I replied, “She was very strong.”
“How can you manage to do that?”
This was delicate. I was not as prolific with correcting the errors of nature as Rachel was, but like her I had cleared the barrier of remorse that comes with ending the beating of a human heart, no matter how rotten it is. I had done it enough that I couldn’t quite remember the hours of thoughts about what I had done. To me, a bad person going around wrecking other people going on living was a greater travesty than the act of stopping them from doing it. I suspected that Jenny realizing that would result in her making a beeline for an exit; I respected that. Which is why I only wanted to do it when she had a safe and easy exit available to her.
Outside, the islands of the man-made Gatun Lake were flowing past the our balcony. It was a beautiful backdrop. Perhaps too beautiful for the ugly discussion we were having. This, ultimately, was why Jenny and I could not make a life long partnership. It was impossible.
“Jenny,” I sighed, “I need to explain who Rachel was. She was a hobo like me. She left home because somebody raped her, and then her parents couldn’t accept the child; they actually violently forced a miscarriage. She felt like she was in a world of no justice for the most horrible of people.”
“But killing them?”
“The first man she killed,” I told her, “He was trying to kill me. She slit his throat. Sometime later, it was clear to her that she had saved my life. She felt good about saving my life; the killing became an act of good. The second murder, the man killed was a priest who molested little girls. Ruined their lives. Murder wasn’t the plan, but it was the outcome. She- we- felt like what had happened was good- righteous even. For her, after that, killing for the right reasons became the right thing to do, especially if no other solution worked.”
“You were ok with her killing those two people?”
“The first time, I was very upset,” I replied, “But if he had not been killed, I would have been. I was too grateful to be alive to really feel that much remorse about the death of somebody who tried to kill me for sleeping where they used to sleep. The second time, I was uncomfortable, but deep down I knew that the only way for him to be stopped was for him to be dead. After that ... I mean if I thought there were other ways, I would rather leave them breathing, but I accepted it. Jenny, these people were monsters- people who enjoyed hurting and destroying other people.”
“There are police,” she said, “Courts. Systems in place to take down people like this.”
“I wish I could see the world the way you do,” I mused, “It must be so nice to believe that bad people get justice served to them. Some do, Jenny. But my experience traveling the world, close to the bottom feeders, watching the outcomes, seeing the damaged people ... it’s not all of them- it’s not even most of them.
“I am not going to tell you how many people Rachel killed, but it was a large number. She was a free woman her entire life. And that was what society calls the worst crime- murder. Ever watched rape trials? And forget about confidence men, embezzlers, the nasty brand of drug dealers, heart sharks, child molesters, and crimes of hate- to name a few. I knew they did these things, I knew my reporting it would do nothing- I’m just a hobo. I knew that if the victims were too scared to report it, nothing would ever be done. So we did what needed to be done.
“I preferred to just put the fear of god into them,” I continued, “And so did Rachel. Sometimes- a lot of the time- it actually worked. Some people, they either did it again, or it was clear that they felt neither fear nor remorse. Rachel, when she saw that, she made absolutely sure they could never do it again. No, Jenny, I didn’t accept what Rachel did. I believed in it. Supported it. I didn’t love her in spite of it, I loved her for it, among many other things.”
Jenny stared at me with a little fear. This was so far out of her range of understanding. She didn’t know that the people who prey most on society’s soft underbelly not only get away with it, they prosper from it. I didn’t go after the bigger offenders- politicians, industrialists, civil engineering firms, mobsters, and large financial institutions. We went after the ones we could chew up and swallow or spit back out again. She couldn’t get this.
I didn’t really want her to believe it. It would be like the song “Caroline, no” by The Beach Boys. She would lose the thing that made her special to me. She was innocent. The world had broken me, and I came back angry and vengeful to those who did it.
“You’re scaring me,” she whispered meekly.
“Don’t be scared,” I told her, “You could never do these things. You don’t have it in you. My god, Jenny, your vengeance for the scumbag who married you and broke his vows to you in the cruelest way I could imagine, was to sleep with me. Your revenge for the man who scorned you was to share your loveliness, your love, your heart, with someone else. It wasn’t a revenge fuck, it was deciding to take your love elsewhere. You aren’t the person I would hurt, you are the kind of good person that makes me want to do something about the rotten ones.”
“You hurt these people for me?” It was a disgusted question, not one of affirming my love for her.
“Not for you, personally,” I said, “For people like you. For good people. People who don’t deserve to be hurt by these monsters. If there weren’t people like you, good decent people, there would be no point in protecting them from the bad ones. It would just be bad people hurting other bad people.”
“I hope I never see the world you live in,” she replied, tears welling in her eyes, “I don’t think it exists. I don’t want it to exist. Is that bad?”
“No,” I said, “it’s not bad at all. If you saw this world, it would shatter your own. I love you, I don’t want you to see it. I just need you to know the world I exist in. The one I want to leave.”
“Want to leave?”
“I’m 42 years old,” I explained, “I have fathered wonderful people. I have a family- multiple families- of good people. I have people who love and care for me. I want to shut out the bad people, go back to the nest I’ve built, and lay in it. I’m tired of walking among the scum of society. I will never be like you again, but I can’t fight this as one man. It’s pissing in the wind. I just want to enjoy life, with the people I love. To the extent you can accept what I’ve done in my life, I want you to be part of it.”
“Can you just stop?”
“I honestly and truly have no idea,” I said, “But if I stop walking with the monsters, I’ll sure as heck see less of them.”
“I want to change the subject,” she said.
“By all means,” I replied, “I don’t like talking about this, either. I need you to know, but I don’t want you to really understand it.”
“Something I really don’t understand is Kelly,” she replied, “Do you want me to understand that?”
“Yes,” I replied, “Very much so. The first time, I was vulnerable, my self preservation instinct clung to her. She hoped it would, she was trying to take advantage of that. It was a little while until we got together the second time, though. I wasn’t sure she wanted me to fall truly in love with her, the way I have. She kept trying to get me to go to you. But I knew that for you and I to form a life together, I’d need to have this conversation. I was fairly certain you were not equipped to marry the man I’ve become, so I avoided it.”
“I think you are probably right,” she replied, “But I am also fairly sure we can be friends. I am scared of the man you became, and I don’t quite understand the man you are. But I do respect you. What happened the second time?”
“Kelly was always a crazy hard student,” I replied, “She was barely seventeen when she started college as a freshman, and she over-stacked her courses. She was taking eight or nine courses a semester, and for her spring session after she knew I got her pregnant, she actually took ten. She took off the fall semester of her junior year, and then took another three courses for the next semester, while starting some of her graduate classes.
“She actually was enrolled in her PhD, at 22, and received her degree a year later. They immediately hired her, gave her a full professorship after a year, and made her assistant dean with this semester. She’s only 25, for Pete’s sake. So I didn’t really get to see her for almost a year after I got her pregnant. She’d drove me out to the farm once, and she was affectionate, but she was pregnant and very busy.
“A month and a half after Rachel was born, I called Cheryl,” I continued, “I was in Baltimore at the time, and I mentioned to her that I hoped Kelly was having luck finding a husband...”
“Husband?” Cheryl roared, “Oy caint believe ya said that. Where ye be?”
“I’m in Baltimore-”
“Go an git ay room in de nicest ‘otel, ‘an call me agayn.” Click.
I booked a room in the Lord Baltimore hotel. There may have been nicer hotels in Baltimore but this had the most character. Once I was checked into a king bed room, I picked up the telephone and placed a collect call to Cheryl.
“Hey,” I said, “I checked into the Lord Baltimore hotel-”
“Ye bastid,” she told me, “Kelly is on ay playne ta Balteemawr roight naw,”
“What I do?”
“Oi told ye,” she said, “Dat lassie loves ye, ye bleedin dolt.”
“She doesn’t need to come to Baltimore to-”
“She need ye ta knew,” Cheryl said, “KNEW! Dat she love ye. Oi need ye ta knew. Go an’ pick her up, she is on Delta 1299.” Click.
Cheryl was angry at me. Very angry at me. I was making another mistake about a woman, and she cared about that woman. After all, she was basically her adopted daughter.
I walked to the light rail station, which was right by the hotel, and took it to BWI airport. The flight was running about 20 minutes late, and got in around 4:40. I stood by the baggage carousel.
Kelly came down the arrivals escalator looking very sad, like she had been crying.
I walked to where the escalator was. She saw me. She was a tad chubby from having the baby, but she was ... she was Kelly. She marched right up to me and slapped me across the face.
“I fucking love you,” she said, “Don’t you dare ever ask my mother if I’m out looking for a husband.”
She went to slap me again, and I grabbed the hand. She went to throw the other one and I grabbed that too. I put them around my neck, and then hugged her and kissed her very passionately on the lips. She melted in my arms. It was at that moment that I knew. The way she melted, just went from the rage she had felt, as soon as she knew that I loved her just as much ... it was gone.
She felt so good in my arms, it took me a while to realize that people were staring at us. She was almost 19, and I was 35. I looked older than I was even then. I’m sure it was a scene raising a few eyebrows.
“I love you, too, Kelly,” I said, “I just thought you wanted me to go to Jenny. I didn’t know you wanted me, too.”
“I do want you to go to Jenny,” she said, “But I’m not done waiting for you until you marry her.”
I led the way to the carousel after we disentangled. She was so beautiful. The fire in her eyes really completed her beauty. It had been there since we first slept together. I thought it came from the child. I’m sure some of it did. But I knew now, it came from her love for me blossoming the way it had. Before this, she adored me. I mean, I could accept that as just being for me saving her life.
I had known she had this ideation that she wanted me as something beyond that. I had never wanted to encourage it. But it had happened. I needed the affirmation that she understood me, that somebody loved me, for who I was. For what I had done in life. I couldn’t believe that somebody would love me for who I was. That’s what had made it so easy to plan on just going out somewhere and removing myself from the human race.
But she did. Her mother did. My entire family in North Dakota had known what I did. And they all loved me, as family. And Kelly? Her love for me, who I am, it burned so hard. I felt bad. I realized just how hurtful the comment had been for Cheryl, and for Kelly.
I picked up her bag from the carousel and led her to the light rail station. We quickly boarded a train and I sat next to her and pulled her close to me. What other people thought, I didn’t care. I had made her question my love for her. I needed to ensure she knew that my feelings for her were very strong.
I didn’t feel about her the way I did about Rachel. She was a different kind of person entirely. My adventure with Rachel was a world different from the adventures I could have with Kelly. Kelly was not a wandering transient with a hope for seeing the world and experiencing an extensive combination of new and different things.
She wasn’t going to work on a fishing boat, or chop down trees. She wasn’t going to strangle a man with her bare hands, or slit a man’s throat. I don’t know if she had the physical or mental strength to do that even in defense of me. That isn’t who she is. Taking a life requires a certain kind of person, and Kelly wasn’t that kind of person.
She wasn’t the kind of person to spend a thousand bucks on a bottle of wine. She wasn’t really an impulsive woman at all. She was analytical. She had a sense of humor, but not like Rachel did. It was calmer, and far less sarcastic. As much as they were different, they were also similar.
Rachel and Kelly were both very intelligent. And they both knew it. They both were, frankly, outright arrogant about their intelligence. Rachel was arrogant in general; she walked through the world knowing that she owned herself. She had the certain kind of confidence found in some men and not many women- she knew she could take down 95% of anyone she met without much effort or risk, and beat almost all of the rest of them.
Rachel’s arrogance came with a certain amount of fearlessness. She had most of what she wanted. She had the freedom to do what she wanted. She had the money to indulge herself grandiosely from time to time. She had me to the extent that anyone could. She was completed in her dreams for life.
Kelly’s arrogance was only intellectual. She knew she was smarter and more intellectually capable than almost everyone she met. But she had very little physical confidence. She didn’t look in the mirror and see herself as beautiful. I mean Rachel didn’t either, but Rachel didn’t care. Kelly knew that she didn’t have the physical strength to even protect herself much; she carried pepper spray. Rachel would have laughed at needing it; she would like to have seen somebody try to take her. It was sickening that somebody did.
But the hardest difference, both for Kelly and me, was the feel of having what she needed. She needed family affection, which she had. She needed to feel respected for what she was good at- and she had that, too. Rachel didn’t need that- her own respect of herself was all she ever craved. But Rachel wanted- but did not need- me to be with her all the time. Rachel was reasonably content with the nature of our relationship. Rachel enjoyed our off-and-on togetherness.
Kelly wanted me all the time. Her hardest trial in life was understanding that I needed to be free as a bird. Back then, back in 2002, I still needed to be free. I wasn’t ready to stop and settle down. My brief flirtation with that with Rachel had scared me.
Hindsight is often clearer. Kelly needed me to either settle down with Jenny, and end our chances of a relationship, or she needed me to settle down with her. Finally, now, I knew that. Back then I didn’t understand that. Kelly intellectually understood that I was not going to settle down with her. But she hated that. In my own ignorance, I couldn’t see that.
When we detrained at the Universe Center stop, I took her bag for her. My bag was back at the hotel; I kept my bare necessities in my overalls as usual. She liked the hotel, sort of. It wasn’t a new hotel, in the least. The lobby was traditional for a hotel of this vintage; it was elegant and intended to be a place where people waited.
Regrettably, the interior of the room had been somewhat modernized. I was not particularly fond of that, but it was better than staying at a Four Seasons or something like that. Baltimore had once been an important port city that was quite wealthy. In recent years, however, it has become a bit decrepit. Racial tensions in particular were quite high, especially by the standards of the northeast. It weighed on the city’s rank as a destination for tourism.
I dropped Kelly’s roller bag on the luggage rack, and she sat on the bed. She looked sad and upset. She had been holding this in for a private conversation; I could tell.
“What do I have to do, Johnny,” she said, “To prove to you that I love you?”
“I know you love me,” I replied, sitting on an armchair in the corner of the room. Her body language did not suggest she wanted me near her at this moment.
“I mean love you the way I love you,” she argued.
“I know how you love me, Kelly,” I said, “I just didn’t realize it completely until just now. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t get what I did wrong,” she insisted.
“You did nothing wrong,” I replied, “I did wrong. You know what I am, Kelly. I’m not an easy person to love, especially once you know me. I knew you loved me, to the point of wanting me to stay alive. I thought you were trying to help me survive my depression. I didn’t realize you wanted me.”
“You don’t want me that way,” she replied.
“That’s neither true nor fair,” I retorted, getting up from the chair.
“I can tell from the way you keep dis-” I pulled her up from the bed with my hands on her biceps, pulled her really close to me and kissed her deeply and passionately.
“Shut up, kid,” I chortled, “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She looked deep into my eyes. Her own eyes cooly softened, her lips parted, and she started breathing a bit shallow. The next thing I knew I was on my back on the bed, swimming in a sea of Kelly. I’d been here before, a few times. It was only like this when love was greater than lust. It was like this with Suzie; it truly was. It was like this with Rachel. It was like this with Kelly.
It wasn’t like this with Jenny; that was more lust than love, although I didn’t understand that at the time. This wasn’t sexual play, it was affectionate. She just wanted to be near me, to make sure she perfectly affirmed to me, as clearly as she could, that she indeed loved me. It was scary. I mean it was nice, it was wonderful, it was truly affirming of someone caring about me.
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