Once Upon a Time
Once upon a time I worked as a deckhand on party boat in Newport Harbor.
A normal cruise ran two hours and started with the busy-ness of pouring drinks, serving brunch, and clearing dishes. But once all that was done and the guests settled down to find the bar on their own there was no need to stay below. So more often than not I would climb up to the bridge, where Chuck the skipper would steer us past the yachts and multi-million dollar bayfront homes, narrating a guided tour over the loudspeaker, pointing out where John Wayne, Jimmy Cagney, Sonny and Cher, and even H.R. Haldeman once lived. Chuck was a gimlet-eyed smoker who lived on his own small boat in the harbor, his kids rowing ashore from the anchorage each morning to go to school. He dressed in the pressed white shirts and epaulets of a professional skipper with a cap to match, and very often I would see him drinking at Snug Harbor, the fisherman’s bar in the industrial back corner of the bay where the restaurant employees and frat crowd ended their nights with a kamikaze and a Budweiser. He was friendly in that setting, but never the sort to strike up a conversation.
But things were different on board the Isla Mujeres. Whenever I climbed up to the bridge to get away from the guests, Chuck and I would inevitably get around to talking about the one thing we had in common: a love for history. His knowledge of the Greeks and Romans was profound, and by great luck I was working towards a degree in history. So he would steer the big boat and pick up that microphone from time to time to point out where Captain Blood was filmed or Gilligan began his three hour tour, but mostly we went back and forth about this ancient battle or that, the conversation underscored by the awareness of two things: we both knew our history; and, nobody else that either one of us knew gave a damn about history. It was academic and boring, a compulsory high school checklist class and the sort of lower level college elective required before moving on to the more serious courses like statistics and marketing, which everyone seemed to be taking as part of the always popular business major.
I was not a great college student. If the weather was right I would buy two Molson’s at the Two W market and take my beach chair to the sands of Sixth Street, where I would blow off classes and spend the day reading. That’s where my dream of being a writer was reborn, overcoming my mother’s reminder when I was six and spellbound by the written word: “Don’t be silly. Writers don’t make any money.”
But not long after I stopped that deckhand gig, never again to stand on the bridge and talk history with Chuck the skipper, I began making a living as a writer. Inevitably, I began writing history. And as I did so, I began wondering why more people didn’t understand that history has more twists and turns, excitement, and mayhem than any novel I have ever read. The great characters of history are some of the most three-dimensional characters to wander onto the printed page — brutal, brilliant, shameless. Every story, whether the words are on the page or not, begins with “once upon a time.” History is like that, an endless saga there for the telling.
But all too often, history is taught and written as a boring list of dates and names. Nothing more. No lust, shame, arrogance, strategy. None of that. So I decided that if I was going to write history, I would try to spice it up a bit. There are three types of history book: those that put you to sleep, the deeply researched academic pieces, and the great ones that take you for a wild page-turning ride that no piece of fiction can match.
So let’s just all assume that I’m drawn to the third option. What does this mean? There are a number of great authors writing history that make you turn the page. But it means owing a debt to the story instead of endless facts, sowing those nuggets into the narrative in a way that makes them vital. It’s cliffhanger chapter endings, taut sentences, avoidance of tangents — just like Patterson and Ludlum (a blasphemous cross-pollination of fiction and non-fiction). But most of all it’s an abiding passion for history, telling the story like you would tell it around a campfire, trying to get the listener to lean in with anticipation, hanging on every word.
The word “story” lives within “history” for a reason.
It’s something I learned on the waters of Newport Harbor, once upon a time.
