Rock Boat Angel

Let’s call it the early months of 2007, and the Rock Boat is chugging along the Caribbean waters through the night toward Mexico. Zac Brown is on board for his second boat; this time as an invited artist. His first year was also mine, and he was just as much a stowaway as Napper and I were. He knew he was going to be playing on a boat bound for Mexico though, and he spent the weeks prior to the voyage conceiving the lyrics of “Toes”, one of his first hits. On this, his 2^nd voyage, he chose to not tempt fate by writing another Rock Boat-themed tune entitled, “Where The Boat Leaves From”. The chorus is ringing in my head as I muster the strength to open my eyes to darkness. Is it darkness, or have I gone blind?

My head is pounding and the room spinning. It’s only when I sit up and my head hits the ceiling that I remember where I am: Top Bunk, Cabin Unknown, Caribbean Sea. I haven’t thrown up in eleven years so there’s really no rush to get to the bathroom, but nothing’s going to sort me out more than water on my face. I climb down the ladder and feel my way to the shared bathroom leaving a chorus of snores and hangover moans in the blackness behind me. I shut the door tight before clicking the light switch. As my eyes adjust, what comes into focus in the mirror before me is surely the outline of a murderer, spattered with blood head to toe, disheveled and likely in shock.

I do a quick body check for injuries, but find nothing save for the pounding of my brain. My feet are wet and standing pink water sloshes against the lip of the bathroom door with the rhythm of the ship’s movement. I notice my clothes from the night before wadded up, bloodstained, and lying on the floor of the shower.

By now, I’ve made enough noise and shed enough light on the room to wake the others. Their faces go blank with humorous confusion as I appear from the bathroom.

“What happened last night?” I ask, knowing that the hope of the guys I travel with being able to recall a Rock Boat night any more than I can as futile.

“What’s the other guy look like?”

“Who did you murder?”

“What’s the other girl look like?”

It’s an endless barrage of unanswerable questions until someone asks, “Did you have your camera with you? Where’s that?”

Brilliant!

“Right here,” I exclaim. “This is the key. All I need to do is to find this girl. She’s the clue. She’ll hopefully be able to tell me what happened last night!”

“If she’s alive,” a voice mutters from the morning shade of the cabin.

I spend most of the morning on the upper pool deck looking out over the Lido studying every female face until suddenly I see her! I check my camera to confirm and race down the stairs so as not to lose her in the crowd before I can get my answer. Cowboy Mouth has started tuning their instruments preparing for their ‘day at sea’ set.

On the pool deck I weave my way through a mess of hung over mates until I’m standing right in front of her, still continuing to switch my gaze from the camera to her face. She doesn’t look the least bit surprised to see me, which disarms me even more than the fact that she’s alive and doesn’t appear to be injured. Looking at her, I still remember nothing.

“You have no idea who I am, do you?” she asks as I search for anything familiar about her.

“Not at all, but I took this picture with you last night and I’ve been looking for you all morning hoping that you could clue me in on what happened.” I hold the camera out for her to see as if that was some kind of validation that we were together last night, even though she obviously knows and remembers me.

“You don’t remember searching the ship for car keys?” she asks.

“What?”

“Obviously not,” she says, her look one of disappointment. “Come here, jackass.”

She leads me to the bar located under the cover of the upper level pool deck.

“You were here drinking by yourself during the Shawn Mullins show and I came up beside you to get myself a beer. You looked at me and without taking a beat asked me where your friends were. When I looked confused, you just asked, ‘you know my friends, right?’”

“I didn’t know your friends, and I still don’t,” she continues, “but you insisted that I did. When you finally gave in to the idea that someone on this ship wouldn’t know you or your friends, you reached your hand out and said, ‘I’m Todd’.” She giggles at my blank look and moves on.

“Then I suggested that we shotgun a beer and started looking for something to pierce the cans. You told me to use my car keys, to which I laughed saying I didn’t have any car keys. It was then that you bet me that you could produce a car key in sixty seconds.”

“Did I?” I ask.

“Of course you didn’t!” she exclaims with a throaty laugh, “we’re on a ship in the middle of the Caribbean! Who the hell has their car keys on them? But obviously I let you run around making an ass of yourself looking for one.”

“Ok. Then what happened?” I ask, afraid of the answer.

“Well, we actually did shotgun beers using a knife the bartender had, and then we took that picture.” She points at the camera in my hand. “You hung out with my friends and me for awhile, but the shotgun pretty much did you in and you eventually stumbled off somewhere.”

~

That’s the story of how I met Danielle Lanier. Since then she’s become a huge part of my life. I’m not sure I can name a better friend or a better person. I’ve obviously known others longer, like Napper as an easy example, but Danielle is kind of a hero honestly. Her dedication to her friends and basically every living creature before herself is rare to say the least. I trust her with anything. We’ve had countless adventures since that night. I was an usher at her wedding, she’s been to Auburn, we’ve been in Vegas together, Rock Boat after Rock Boat, etc., etc. When Blue died she was the first person I texted. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone, but there were people that I wanted aware of what had happened. It was Danielle that coordinated and produced the coffee table book of his life and she also sent me the picture of Blue enclosed in a block of glass that sits next to him on the bookshelf in my office.

I didn’t kill anyone that night by the way, but a number of years went by before we had an answer for my condition that morning. It came as a simple one-sentence email from Napper with an attachment.

“We have our answer,” it read. The picture attached was from a Rock Boat photo gallery and showed me sprawled out on the pool deck surrounded by people trying to help me up. There’s an empty wine glass in my hand and the red wine that once occupied it was spattered across me as if launched from a shotgun blast.

That was the first time I thought I killed someone but didn’t in the end. The second time was during a one-night stay at the Shore Club in South Beach with Napper. I’ll get to that story eventually.