Born to Fish Read online

  The next night they went back to the place where Greg had been shot at, but this time they set up a bright lantern there, then hiked fifty yards away into the darkness and crouched in the reeds, where they waited . . . and waited . . . and waited. It was nearly midnight when Greg finally heard the familiar blub-blub-blub-blub of the outboard motor. He knew it was the same guy, but they waited to see what he was going to do. Bang! A shot pierced the stillness.

  That was all it took. Greg and Scott unleashed a massive fusillade, firing their rifles wildly in the general direction the shot came from, filling the air with bullets and gun smoke. They had no idea if their bullets were going anywhere near the man, and they didn’t care. If he got hit, so be it. In their minds, he had it coming. Each of them fired more than a hundred rounds, switching clips and reloading again and again and again until they were out of ammo. And then they just lay back and laughed till their stomachs hurt, imagining the terrified man hunkered down flat in the bottom of his dinghy, cringing fearfully as the bullets tore past in the darkness, hoping and praying he wouldn’t be hit. No one ever bothered them there again.

  Greg was determined to earn as much money as possible, so he also worked on a vegetable farm between fur-trapping seasons. (The quality of the furs is poor during the warm-weather months of spring and summer, and fur trapping is legal in Connecticut from early November to early March.) The farm’s owner, Charlie Valentino, had come to make a payment on a gambling debt, and Greg and Scott were hanging around the backyard as Valentino spoke with Herb.

  “Why don’t you hire these fucking assholes so I don’t have to put up with their bullshit anymore?” said Herb, nodding toward Greg and Scott. Valentino did. Later that day, the boys walked down to the farm and began picking tomatoes in his field.

  Valentino was a middle-aged Italian immigrant, and he always wore white painter’s overalls as he worked side by side with them in the fields. After that meeting with Herb, he addressed the boys the way Herb had: “Hey, why don’t you fucking assholes help me pick the zucchini?”

  Once, when they were all picking tomatoes, Scott threw one at Greg, hitting him in the back of the head with a loud splat! Greg whirled around, but Scott nodded toward Charlie Valentino. Greg grabbed a tomato and hurled it at the man as he bent over the tomatoes, splattering the back of his white overalls with red juice. Valentino was furious, but he didn’t fire Greg, perhaps fearing Herb’s wrath. He glared at Greg and Scott, his face burning red with anger, but just turned back to his work.

  * * *

  A Big Fish

  At first, most of Greg’s trapping activities took place without the knowledge of his parents. But one day he was boiling traps in a big aluminum pot full of water and beeswax (to waterproof them) on a log fire in the woods behind his house, when his father came out to see what he was doing. “What the hell is this?” he said. “It looks like a goddamn hobo camp.”

  Greg shrugged and tried to avoid talking about it. Herb let it go at first. He had no idea what his son was up to. It wasn’t until months later that his parents began to realize the scope of what he was doing.

  One day Greg asked his mother if she would drive him to Wallingford so he could sell his muskrat pelts to a fur dealer, and after some hesitation she agreed. At this point he’d been trapping for almost two years and had nearly 600 pelts stored neatly in a chest freezer in the garage.

  “I had them stacked really thin, arranged from extra-large to large, medium, and small,” said Greg. “The Bortleins taught me all that. When I got to the fur dealer, I had everything laid out. I pretty much knew the prices, so the guy really couldn’t cheat me.”

  Diane was astounded as Greg pulled out box after box of beautifully prepared hides, each one sorted by size and quality. But that didn’t prepare her for the shock when the fur dealer gave Greg a check for more than $5,000, which he deposited into his own bank account. He was ten years old.

  Greg now had enough money to buy a boat, so he got his Aunt Cookie to drive him to Richard Brockway’s home in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Brockway was renowned for the wooden skiffs he built in his backyard, and Greg wanted one badly. He gave Brockway a down payment of $2,000 so he would start building his boat.

  What Greg was doing did not sit well with Herb. Not that he objected to the initiative Greg showed in earning the money to buy his own boat—he thought that was great. It was the way he was doing it. Call him a mobster with a heart of gold, but Herb had always loved animals and had given generously to the Humane Society. He proudly displayed a trophy on his mantel presented to him by the organization in appreciation of his many contributions over the years. (He had also given substantial financial support to Native American causes.) Herb begged Greg to stop trapping.

  “I can’t let this happen, Greg,” he said. “This is brutal.” But Greg was adamant that he would keep on trapping.

  “Look, if you stop trapping animals, I will pay for the rest of the goddamn boat,” said Herb. “Please. Just stop.”

  Greg didn’t say anything, but he knew there was nothing his father could say that would stop him from doing what he wanted. He had enough money to pay for the boat anyway. He just needed to earn a little more to buy a motor.

  A short time later, just before Christmas, Herb went to see Mr. Brockway and paid him cash for the balance Greg owed. He had the boat delivered to the house and put it in the garage. It was sitting there on Christmas morning as a present for Greg.

  “My dad thought I would just stop trapping, because I already had the boat,” said Greg. “But there was no way that was going to happen. That was how I made my money.”

  When Herb finally put his foot down and said he had to get rid of his traps, Greg just nodded and left the room. He packed up all of his trapping equipment and took it to his grandmother’s house, and that became the center of his trapping business. He started spending more and more time there, sleeping there every weekend and living there all summer long. He had his own room. No one would ever be able to set rules for him again.

  Greg bought an old Evinrude outboard motor for his skiff and started fishing almost every day—at first with Aunt Cookie. She helped him get a slip at the Branford docks.

  “We went there three or four times a week,” said Aunt Cookie. “We started at maybe twelve or one in the afternoon and didn’t leave until dark. That’s how much Greg loved fishing.” He was so competent, she felt like she never had to worry about him. He was very athletic even at that age and knew exactly how to run the motor and maneuver the boat in any situation. “He could back up that Brockway as good as you could park a car,” she said.

  Greg loved Aunt Cookie, but it was a mixed blessing having her with him when he went fishing. Although she was always eager and enthusiastic, she wouldn’t let him take the boat out of the harbor. The only time he talked her into going into Long Island Sound, she got seasick, so that was that.

  Sometimes Greg fished with a friend from elementary school, but more often he went by himself. He loved the solitude of being alone with nature, with no one to answer to and no one that he had to please. He could escape the turmoil of his home life and do whatever he wanted. Each day after school, he would ride his bike ten miles to the harbor where his boat was tied up and take it out. His parents insisted that he stay inside Branford Harbor, and he assured them he would—but he broke that rule every time he went fishing, sometimes cruising for miles up and down the coast to search for fish. He fished in all kinds of weather, without any navigational equipment or a two-way radio. This is when his relationship with the striped bass truly began.

  Greg started thinking again about the Race, where he’d first gone striper fishing with the Carlsons a couple of years earlier, and he longed to go back there by himself. It was a crazy idea. Mr. Carlson had a well-equipped sport-fishing boat more than thirty feet long, with a two-way radio and full electronic navigational equipment. Greg had none of that, just a small open boat with an old Evinrude motor, yet he planned to take it to o
ne of the most treacherous stretches of water in the area, where Long Island Sound meets the open Atlantic Ocean. When the tide is changing, rushing in or out, a colossal amount of water gets pinched through a skinny space, less than four miles wide, creating a surging maelstrom of boat-rocking water and a powerful rip. Over the centuries, countless crafts, both large and small, have gone down there, with a huge loss of life. According to local legend, the old lighthouse on Race Rock—at the entrance to the Race—is haunted by the ghosts of seamen who perished there. (The lighthouse was once featured on the popular television show Ghost Hunters.)

  Greg set out alone one morning from Branford Harbor, heading eastward to the Race, nearly twenty miles away. With his tiny motor chugging along, it would take nearly four hours to get there on a good day. But about three hours into his journey, a fog bank rolled in, blanketing the area for miles around and cutting his visibility to less than ten feet. He was functionally blind, with no electronics to guide him, no radio, not even a compass. He had no way to see where he was going, what rocks he might be approaching, or whether a boat or ship might be cruising toward him.

  “I couldn’t see anything,” said Greg. “Boats were going by me, almost running me over.”

  But then he heard the distant moan of the foghorn at Race Rock lighthouse and headed his boat toward the sound.

  As he reached the lighthouse, a sport-fishing boat loomed suddenly through the fog. It was anchored just off Race Rock, with the skipper waiting for the fog to lift. He shouted at Greg when his little boat emerged from the fog. “What the hell are you doing here, kid? You’re going to get killed.” He was older, perhaps in his sixties, with a grizzled face and red-rimmed eyes. He tied Greg’s skiff to the stern of his boat, and the two of them fished together.

  An hour later, Greg felt a tug on the end of his line and jerked the rod tip upward to set the hook in the fish’s mouth. The fish tugged back, and it was like nothing he’d ever felt before—the sheer brute power of this fish as it peeled line off his reel. He knew instantly it was much bigger than any fish he’d caught with the Carlsons, and he fought it with all his might, trying to turn it as it swam hard away from him. After nearly an hour, Greg was breathing hard, but he finally had the fish alongside, and it was enormous—the biggest striped bass he had ever seen. The man had a large landing net and swung it up under the fish, but even with the two of them, it was hard to get the fish into the boat. When they weighed it, it topped out at just over fifty pounds. Greg had caught his first huge striped bass, but it had also caught him.

  As soon as he got back to the harbor, he put the bass in his red wagon and pulled it around town to show the fish off to everyone he knew. His family never suspected how far he had gone to catch the huge bass; none of them knew anything about fishing.

  “I told everyone I caught it in Branford Harbor,” said Greg. “It was huge. My family ate it, and it was just the greatest thing.”

  Unfortunately, several sport-fishing party boats had seen Greg out there that day and several other times and had been complaining to the Coast Guard about this fool kid in a little boat who was going way out to sea and was going to get himself killed. Nothing happened at first, but the Coast Guard had Greg on its radar and was making every effort to catch him. One day they finally succeeded.

  “The Coast Guard tied my boat up to theirs and towed it in to port,” said Greg. “Then they called my parents. They had to drive all the way to Old Lyme to get me. I was in a shitload of trouble, but I was so unruly, I didn’t even care. They told me I couldn’t use the boat anymore, but I used it anyway.” Greg was ten years old and already completely incorrigible.

  * * *

  Gridiron Glory

  In junior high, Greg was often picked on not only by bullies but also by some of the teachers and coaching staff, who were furious that Dave, the star athlete, had left to attend a prestigious private school called Hamden Hall and was now tearing it up on the baseball field and gridiron there. They seemed determined to take their frustrations out on Greg. To understand their position you need to know how important athletics—and especially baseball—were to the junior and senior high schools in North Haven, and how the coaches had envisioned Dave Myerson’s vital role in the time they thought he would be there. Even in junior high, Dave was a fabulous baseball player.

  “He was the greatest pitcher they’d ever seen there,” said Greg. “He averaged eight strikeouts a game all through growing up.”

  Dozens of people would come to baseball games at the school and in the Babe Ruth League just to see Dave pitch—he was that good. Everyone knew he was going places, and they wanted to be able to say they’d seen him play when he was young. When the North Haven coaches imagined the next three or four high school baseball seasons, with Dave as their star pitcher, they saw state championships and endless glory for the schools—and for themselves. That all vanished in an instant when he switched schools. Losing Dave staggered them.

  The faculty and coaches no doubt reasoned, Why should we do anything to help Greg’s athletic career? If he ever amounts to anything as a baseball or football player, he’ll probably just transfer away like his brother. It was a shortsighted, petty, and small-minded attitude, and one certainly unbefitting public educators. Besides, they were only shooting themselves in the foot. Greg had no desire to attend Hamden Hall. Diane would have gladly sent him there but he didn’t want any part of it. That was Dave’s thing; it wasn’t for him. Greg had always had such a hard time with his schoolwork, because of his dyslexia, he no doubt shuddered at the thought of attending such a highbrow school.

  Despite the lack of support, Greg tried hard to succeed in his junior high school in North Haven. He joined the football team in seventh and eighth grades and could have made a great contribution if only the coaches had chosen to make use of his great athletic potential. But he got no respect there. In two entire football seasons, they let him play only once—in the final minute of a single game. That was it: his entire junior high school football career. So he became disgusted with the whole thing and lost interest in team sports.

  Fortunately, when he was thirteen, Greg found out about a vocational agriculture program in natural resources at Lyman Hall High School, and he jumped at the chance to escape from North Haven. Lyman Hall was full of working-class kids with low expectations, about as far removed as you could get from a private school. But Greg knew that transferring there would give him a chance to reinvent himself. He had no interest in becoming an athlete or doing any other extracurricular activities. He just wanted to be left alone to do what he loved most—go fishing. But he was already growing toward his adult size when the school year began, and he quickly caught the attention of Lyman Hall’s coaching staff. They had no qualms about taking advantage of Greg’s talents. Head football coach Phil Ottochian spotted Greg walking in the hallway on the first day of school and stopped him.

  “Hey, you’re going to play football,” he told him. “Be at the practice field right after school today.”

  Greg had no athletic clothes or equipment and had to wear his blue jeans and boots and scrounge up some pads and a helmet in the locker room for that first practice. But he was good, and the coaching staff instantly saw his potential. In his very first game as a freshman, Lyman Hall hammered the Branford High School team—and Greg was the star, sacking the quarterback, slamming hard into running backs, and physically throwing people out of bounds, at times being far more violent and aggressive than necessary to make a play. It was as if a tiger locked inside him had been unleashed.

  Greg was an instant success on the football field, accepted and embraced by everyone at Lyman Hall, and he became captain of the freshman team that first season. He was so strong and determined—a born leader who inspired everyone around him. But something had changed in him. Perhaps it was partly the frustration he felt because of his father’s illness. Two years earlier, Herb had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. At first his symptoms were barely noticeable,
but by the time Greg started at Lyman Hall, Herb’s physical condition had begun to deteriorate significantly. Or perhaps it was his mother’s constant efforts to micromanage his life. Or maybe he had just been picked on and pushed around for such a long time it made some kind of explosion inevitable. A kind of brutality overtook him.

  “I just wanted to kill everyone,” said Greg. “Before I started playing football, I had no idea how much aggression I had pent up inside me. I had been this quiet kid who always got beat up. But I was getting pretty big and really athletic.”

  It’s not that he had become a bully: he was actually the exact opposite. He knew what it was like to be bullied, and he became the protector of many students who were being picked on—people like his old trapping buddy Ron Bortlein, who entered the vo-ag program at the same time as Greg and rode with him to Lyman Hall every day on a school shuttle bus. He never let anyone hassle Ron, and he convinced other people that Ron was a good guy and worth knowing.

  “Other kids started talking to Ron and treating him like a friend,” said Greg. “I think it was a very happy time in his life.”

  But Greg could be brutal to anyone who made him mad. “I started to become a real tough guy,” he said. “I wouldn’t take any crap from anyone at that point. My father was sick, and I was pissed off at the world.” In high school, he often had black eyes and scratches like he’d just been in a brawl.

  Greg became close friends with Vinny Poggio, one of the best football players on the Lyman Hall team. Perhaps the fact that they both were dealing with tough situations at home drew them closer. Less than a year earlier, a devastating tragedy had struck Vinny’s family during a hundred-year flood that swept through the area. Vinny and his two older brothers, Richie (fifteen years old) and Bobby (sixteen), had taken a wild ride in a small inflatable raft down Wharton Brook, a stream behind their house that was usually tiny but had become a raging torrent in the flood. Their raft hit a half-submerged tree and got sucked under and ripped. The three of them smashed hard into the tree trunk. Vinny and Bobby were able to swim to the side of the swollen brook and drag themselves out of the water on all fours, but they didn’t see Richie. Could he have been knocked out by the tree? Or had he dragged himself out somewhere downstream? They began searching frantically in the driving rain and calling his name, but it was useless; they could barely see or hear anything. Vinny ran to their house, which was right beside the stream, and called 911 while Bobby kept looking.