I’m Pop Top the Sailor Man

June 1999
I’m Pop Top the Sailor Man
By Bob Coskrey

During the period between 1958 and 1976, I did a good bit of sailing, and I mean a good bit of sailing compared only to what I’ve done since then—one totally forgettable outing about five years ago. And I am using the world “sailing” in the most speciously crafted of Clintonese. To actually put it in a nauticoid’s language, you would say that I “crewed,” or maybe even more accurately, “crewed up.”

Well, let’s stop jibing around the buoy. I have never owned a boat of any kind, much less a sailboat, in my entire life, I used to sail with a good friend of mine in his small (11’) Frostbite Dinghy, and my major job, the sole function and focus of my ephemeral maritime existence, was to open beer cans for my friend while he did the sailing, and considering his unquenchable appetite for that beverage, this was no titular job. I was not allowed the luxury of sitting there like some beer-sucking barnacle, while he maneuvered and negotiated the boat; I had to make sure no more than a few seconds had lapsed from the time he flipped his empty beer can into the bilge till I placed another cold one in his thirty, trembling hand (I exaggerated a bit with the “trembling”).

This friend whose identity I will protect with the initials, C.C. (“Captain Courageous”), was descended from a long and briny bloodline of super sailors, and he would set out to sea regardless of the weather. I opted to crew with him only when I felt there was a reasonable likelihood we would be returning, which, in retrospect, considering the vast quantities of beer we consumed, was probably never.

There was in addition to us another crew member who faithfully accompanied us on all of our excursions, a huge Igloo brand cooler, filled to the brim with sudsy sustenance. This was one of those cylindrical shaped industrial type metal coolers, that you normally saw on construction sites in those days, and we lugged it not only into the b, but to practically any social event that we attended that would allow is unprepossessing presence. Completely stocked, it must have weighed 60-70 pounds and may possibly have been the cause of the ruptured disc that I now carry in my back. The difference in C.C.’s height (four feet, eleven inches) and mine (five feet, eleven inches) resulted in a lopsided distribution of weight in my direction. My only regret is that I had but one back to give for my Country (Club Malt Liquor).

Every once in a while, when C.C. had guzzled down sufficient courage, he would let me handle the mainsheet, which is the rope used to trim the mainsail (by Neptune’s beard, I remembered) or the helm. I guess he felt it was a good idea to have me trained just in case during the precarious times when we turned around (“came about” or “jibed”) or when nature beckoned him to stand at the bow like some obscene bowsprit becoming one with the sea, I could handle the boat and maybe even save him if he were thrown into the churning depths.

Little did he know, had catastrophe ever tested my feckless skills, he would be sleeping in Davy Jones’ this very day. We actually sailed in a few regattas, though obviously no one, including ourselves, ever took us very seriously. However, had there been someone creative enough to have come up with a specific race designed to gauge a combination of sailing and drinking prowess, perhaps tilting our division the Swillboat class, we most certainly would have garnered a mantel piece jammed with trophies. But we achieved no (favorable) recognition for our efforts, only the personal gratification of varying levels of male bonding and mead-manufactured treatment.

Even when C.C. and I returned to begin our nocturnal landlubbing exploits, glassy-eyed and premelanomically tanned, our good times continued, as we “sailed” blithely through bars and parties, at rare times, even graced with female accompaniment, if the planets were agreeably aligned.

This formula pretty much always worked for us: a day at sea with the well-stocked Igloo and the Frostbite dinghy followed by a rip-roaring good time on terra not always so firma.

Except for this one time, when just for variety’s sake, after 10 or 12 summers of “smooth sailing,” we thought we could just this once, change one of the ingredients. Why not? What could it possibly hurt? This time, instead of beer, P.J.; instead of the trusty Igloo, a small boxed shaped Styrofoam cooler just for this case.

P.J., in case you don’t know, stands for Purple Jesus. And I don’t want to hear any complaints from the Christian Coalition. I didn’t name the thing, but if I ventured a guess, I would say an Episcopalian probably did. Anyway, P.J. is a very powerful potable made with grain alcohol (190 proof or 95% alcohol), grape juice, and/or lemons and oranges. The brand of grain we always purchased was Everclear, which we always referred to as “Neverclear” because of its brain-scrambling side effects. The P.J. drinker was always branded ignominiously with a purple tongue, a condition which naturally always evoked derision from onlookers.

P.J. was always—in those days—mixed in a gallon Coke syrup bottle, and if measured correctly, tasted just like grape juice. By the time C.C. and I were halfway through our bottle, we began to realize that our reflexes, cognitive skills and speech had regressed much beyond the half case of beer stage, and very shortly after this, the wind and the outboard motor, perhaps affected by the P.J.’s devastating fumes, came to a sputtering halt, as well. Fortune briefly squeezed its welcome between our gloomy clouds in the form of a large yacht, whose owner towed us back to the marina despite his crew’s audible misgivings:

“My God, Jack, look at their tongues and lips. They’re P.J. people!”

To disguise our abysmal chagrin at being towed by a crass powerboat (there is a certain snobbery among sailing purists—I was a mere pretender—about powerboats) we accelerated our drinking pace. This was, to C.C., at least, like Vikings being towed into harbor by a guy on jet-skis wearing one of those big feathered Richard Petty cowboy hats.

Unluckily, this was one of those unique occasions when I actually had a date and, in fact, C.C. and I both had been invited to her graduation exercises at Ashley Hall that afternoon. Not wanting to lose our buzz (one very much akin to that of a B-52 bomber by that time), we ill advisedly continued to sip away at the P.J., only stopping long enough to shower, change clothes, and try, in vain, to remove the tell-tale purple from our faces.

At the very solemn graduation ceremony, we made complete asses of ourselves, laughing inappropriately during prayers, speeches, and the school anthem, not to mention doltish comments to my date and her family.

At the nadir of my revolting performance, I finally succumbed to my nearly total body P.J. transfusion, and, feeling queasy, loped erratically off to find a cloistered corner to release the entire contents of my stomach. I managed to sneak into a one and a half foot wide area between a building and a wall, where no one could witness God’s rightful retribution. After discharging seemingly all that I had digested for the past week in a purple hued, semi-solidified bouillabaisse of abasement, I felt a sudden urge to lie down and woke up about 2 hours later in that same spot to darkness and a caravan of ants marching across my face. Brushing myself off, I walked—much straighter than earlier—to a nearby phone booth, called C.C. at the Charleston Yacht Club, and learned that my date had found a more wholesome, reliable, and non-P.J.-afflicted escort, and that my most logical destination, at that point, was home, which was conveniently only a few blocks away. I did just that, making my first rational decision of the day.

The next day, C.C. and I vowed to never again violate our time-honored regimen of the Frostbite dinghy, the Igloo, and the beer. In fact, we cleaned and polished the Igloo and honored it with a case of Michelob the following weekend. And I can recall, even now, the sound of the first beer that I dutifully opened for my perpetually parch-throated Captain, and I smiled through faintly purplish lips, as I thought of the great times we would have that day and the final few lines of a happy little sea ditty splashed through my head: “…though my skills are diminished, I’ll pop till we’re finished, I’m Pop Top the Sailor Man. Pop! Pop!”