By Neal Romanek

 

 

My first memory of money was in the Adriatic Sea. I was four or five - or six - a little boysponge anyway, not yet able to tell the difference between myself and the world around me. The sky was so blue it was nearly green, the sea so blue it was nearly black. And these three bronzed bearded men - one of them was named Dave or Doug or Dan - hauled up something from the side of the boat. We’d been sitting, floating - "anchored" is the word - in that same spot forever. Since early morning. It was hot and well above noon and my scalp was burning and there were divers at work below - one of whom, of course, was my father. 3 divers, I think. My father and the two partners - in later years one of them shot his wife’s lover, then shot his wife, then shot himself, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. He’d gone bankrupt. I think his wife had started seeing some wealthy kid. Anyway, the other partner was a Spanish man. Not Mexican or Puerto Rican or anything. He was Spanish, I remember. Because he used to talk about bullfights all the time. I imagined a matador and a bull going at it, boxing, sparing, punches flying with hoof & fist until the matador got tired of it and skewered the bull with his sword. That’s what I used to picture anyway when he told the stories of seeing bullfights in Malaga. He’d lived by the sea his whole life, lived on the Mediterranean his whole life. In Later years he married some sprite much younger than he andthey lived in a house in Estepona, near Malaga, and they dived and did some salvage and were generally wet & happy. I think he’s still alive.

 

My father needs no introduction.

 

Crete was the first island I’d ever been to, I was told when I was young. That kind of news/information sticks with you. It’s important when your five or six or seven to know how many times you’ve flown in an airplane and how many different flavors of ice cream you’ve tried and when the first time was that you were on an island and how many times you’ve been to the sea. By the time I was five or six or seven, I’d been in and on and to and by the sea so many times that I could better count the times I’d been on land. How many times I have been to the sea in the past five years is an easier number. Two times, as you know. But that part doesn’t come up for a long, long time. These buoyed men were bearing up a basket - a steel - stainless steel - alloy mesh basket - inside a stainless steel - alloy - metal - silvery tub which was harness to a cable which ran up over the wheels of a pulley which ran down to a winch which the bronzed men cranked. One of them cranked. Another guided the boom. The third guided in the basket. And the basket, the tub filled with sea water, and the mess basket inside it was lowered to the deck and everybody crowded around. They let me go up to the front. Inside the basket was a mass of sand & dirt & shells - rubble & gravel - not much of anything.

 

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes” said one of the bronze men. The blond one, whatever his name was.

 

And after about a half hour after my dad and the guy who shot his wife & her lover eventually and the señor who lived by the sea with his sprite eventually, had come up on deck. The sand and gravel and dirt and shells were sifted and hosed with water and picked through and chop stroked - right at my eye level. I stood at everyone’s legs watching each step wondering when the magic trick would become apparent, wondering what was going to happen, certain that What was so wonderful about the dirt? Why did it need to be wooed & coaxed & coddled & massaged. Piece by piece the sea debris fell away and 3 flat black disks - like alligator scales, I thought, or a scale on some oversized beast you might see at a museum - or a zoo - somewhere. My dad peaked at them, held them in his hand beneath the surface of a tub of water - “That’s money,” he said. “There’s thousands of these down there. We could see them all over down there.”

 

“How much is it?” I asked him.

 

“It’s gold. You’ll see when it’s clean.”

 

“How much is it?” I asked again.

 

“Three gold coins. It’s a greek wreck.”

 

“So how much is it worth? How much could you buy?”

 

“There are so many of these that they’re actually not worth much.”

 

“They’re only worth their weight in gold. Too bad, huh?”

 

I didn’t know what he meant, but I laughed.

 

 

 

 

 

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