During my summers at Berklee College, I used to be a member of the Back Bay Boathouse. It was loads of fun going down to the Charles River and sailing in those cute little 470′s. They were small boats, but could hold four or five people no problem.
I was a pretty good sailor and would go at least two or three times a week for an hour or two. I had learned how to sail in summer camp when I was a kid back in New Hampshire, plus we’d sail on other occasions on Sunfish and Sailfish boats. Suffice to say, that by the time I got to the Back Bay Boathouse I already knew a lot about sailing.
I could hop on my bike and be there in ten or fifteen minutes tops. It was very relaxing and almost therapeutic in a way, to go down there and sign up for a boat and then set up all the sails and rigging and all that sailing stuff. It was a fun little ritual, for sure.
Right after my second semester at Berklee, I found a couple guys to team up with so we could move out of the dorms and find a cool apartment. I picked a Chinese punk rocker and a Latvian pianist. We were new friends but became pretty tight as the months went by.
We all put on our best suits and went to an upscale real estate firm in the Back Bay of Boston. They only dealt in high-end properties. We found a young realtor agent guy who had a nice suit on and he liked us right away.
We all lied about what we did for a living. Of course we didn’t tell him we were music students at Berklee. That would’ve been stupid and guaranteed that we wouldn’t find a cool pad. So I said that I was a famous record producer and my Chinese buddy said he owned a restaurant and my Latvian friend said he worked as a recording engineer at Synchro Sound on Newbury Street. That was the recording studio where The Cars made all their hit albums.
Actually, my buddy did work there, but as a runner; he got them food and cleaned up. Our little charade worked, and the realtor guy told us that there was this amazing three- bedroom apartment on Marlborough Street in the heart of the trendiest and best part of the Back Bay. He said it was going to go condo, but that it might take a year or two or three. We didn’t care; we were living for the moment. Six months would’ve been cool enough. He told us that we could live there for HALF PRICE because it was a time sensitive issue.
Our new best friend, Mr. Realtor guy, showed us the apartment, which was unbelievably nice. It was on the third floor of a brownstone building with an elevator that went right to our front door. The apartment was a floor through, meaning that it ran from the front to the back of the whole building.

A beautiful three bedroom, three bath, with a nice big living room and central heat and a/c with a nice modern kitchen. It had real bay windows that you could sit and watch the pretty girls down below and it even had a rooftop area where you could throw fun parties for the building.
It was by far, the coolest, and best apartment I had ever seen in my whole life. Certainly for Berklee standards it was the Taj Mahal, by far. Our realtor told us that it was going for $1,500 a month, but because he liked us and probably knew that we were bullshitters (but somehow respected that), he said he’d give it to us for $750! That meant it was only $250 a month for each of us to live there! We couldn’t believe our good fortune, because it was such a killer pad, and the neighborhood was incredible and the whole arrangement was just pure magic. So we pretended to be cool and said that we needed to talk about it first and then get back to him. After about 30 seconds we said we’d take it.
Let me tell you about my Chinese punk rocker roommate. He had one of those rock ‘n’ roll haircuts that was kind of like spiked, but long in the back. Sort of a punk mullet; a munklet!
He was from New York City and played rock guitar. He sort of acted like a tough guy, and wore sleeveless cut away sweatshirts, with the punk rock hair do and the spiked leather wrist bracelets. He actually wasn’t that great of a guitar player and barely could understand music, but he was a cool guy and a pretty good cook. I guess his parents owned a Chinese restaurant in New York and he used to make us one of my favorite dishes: baked chicken thighs and legs with BBQ sauce, white rice, and frozen corn. It may not sound that exotic, but when you’re a 19 year-old college kid, it was pretty darn good.

I told him about how much fun it was to go sailing and he said he had always wanted to go, but that no one ever gets to go sailing in New York City. He had a thick New York accent and you could tell that he was a city kid and probably had never seen much of anything except a lot of big city stuff, which, if you ask me, isn’t really all that much. It’s a lot of garbage and rats and angry, pushy people with a lot of tall buildings and concrete everywhere. Don’t get me wrong. New York has a vibe, and it’s cool and all, but it’s also a really dirty, rotten, filthy place with too many self-centered, mean people.

One day, I asked my punk rocker roomie if he wanted to go sailing, and he says, “Yeah, sure, I’ll go sailing. Are you any good?”
I say I’m the best and he has NOTHING to worry about. He’d never been on a sailboat and even though he claimed to be a tough guy from N.Y.C., he was obviously a little scared about going sailing. Even tough guys who can’t swim can drown — just like that.
We went down to the boathouse and signed in and got our little life preservers and got ready to go sailing into the sunset. The area of the Charles River that we could sail around was between two bridges and probably wasn’t more than a mile long by a half-mile wide, at the most. But it was enough to get a good little sail in, for sure.
Our Mullet wearing rocker was all excited and acted like a little kid, all laughing and joking and smoking his cigarettes and being all cocky and confident with his thick New York accent. Little did he know what was in store. He was saying how he wasn’t afraid of anything and how sailing was for sissies and that even though he didn’t know how to swim it was going to be a piece of cake.
So, we’re cruising along kinda slow and not much is happening. Sometimes, the wind on the Charles River is kinda not very strong but it picks up the further out you get. My buddy starts to get a little bored and he’s like, “Hey, man, can’t you make this thing go any faster?”
I look at him with a dull, Garfield-like glare and don’t say anything.
He’s already acting ungrateful and annoying me, and I feel like pushing him overboard. Anyway, out of nowhere the wind picks up a little and the boat starts to tilt and I tell him to hang on and LEAN back.
He starts to get all scared and like, “Hey, man, can you slow this thing down a little?”
I’m just ignoring him at this point and doing my own thing and telling him to hang on tight and lean back, but don’t fall in. I’m the captain of this ship and he’s going to have to just take orders from now on, simple as that.
So we’re cruising along and after about 20 minutes we get near the far end of our little sailing area by the bridge and we notice an odd thing. There’s this funny looking whirlpool spinning around slowly and gurgling with bubbles and stuff.
My buddy points it out and says, “What the hell is that?”
I say, “I dunno, let’s take a closer look, shall we, and see for ourselves?”
All of a sudden, my friend is getting kind of white in the face and starting to panic a little, with his little punk mullet fluttering around in the wind.
He says, “I don’t think that’s a good idea; we better stay away from that thing.”
I, of course, ignore him, and head STRAIGHT for the whirlpool. I’d been over that little whirlpool a thousand times and knew that it was just an underwater drainage thing and that it was harmless. But it did look kind of scary to the uninitiated eye.
We arrived at the murky whirlpool and now my crew of one is out of his mind with fear.
“I gotta get out of here, man. What the hell is that? I’ve never seen anything like that in my entire life!”
I tell him with a straight face while I’m looking directly into his beady, little, scared Chinese eyes that a giant sea rat lives under there.
He looks at me with the most scared Chinese punk rocker mullet hair cut white face and says, “The what?!! A giant sea rat! Are you kiddin’ me?”
I’m like, “No, man, for real.”
He’s crazy now with fear — completely beside himself.
“A giant sea rat! What the hell are we doing here? How could I have been so stupid to let you take me here!!” I tell him, “Listen, man, there’s a six-foot, man-eating giant sea rat under there and you better be cool because he attacked some sailors last week and drowned three of them.” I said it really seriously. “What the hell…we gotta get outta here, there’s a giant sea rat down there, man!!! I knew we shouldn’t a gone sailing…get me outta here, man!!!”
I guess when you’re from New York City you see big rats all the time and maybe a giant sea rat really isn’t that far of a leap when you’ve never been sailing before — and of course, if you’re not that bright.