SYNOPSIS:

Reg. WGAe as WG8654388 Semifinalist in the Nicholl's competition Adapted from my own award-winning novel, titled THE DEATH OF TARPONS. In 1994, facing his own battle with cancer, Corey John returns to Freeport, Texas where he spent the summer of 1955 amid the turmoil of his dysfunctional family. Fourteen at the time, he wanted nothing more than to go fishing for tarpon and win his abusive father Robert’s love. Standing before the now boarded up and empty seafood restaurant his grandmother owned, his memory returns to a time when stick-shifted Hudsons and lime-green Studebakers cruised the town square, and where the plaintive wails of Webb Pierce boomed from the Oyster Bar’s Wurleitzer and the smells of fried shrimp and stale beer mingle with the murmur of shrimp boat captains’ conversations over bottles of Pearl and Lone Star Beer as they hustle off-duty waitresses and smoke filterless Camels. Fading into the hot, humid Texas of his past, Corey relives that fateful summer when every attempt to win his father’s love failed. He remembers Sarah, his mother, present in the flesh but absent in the spirit, remembers her mostly lying on her bed, her Bible open and yellow tissues scattered everywhere as she weeps over her inadequacies in God’s eyes. His father schemes to have her committed to a mental hospital and succeeds. Only his grandmother Lucille, his grandfather Toast who is dying of cancer, and his best friend Destin are there for him. In addition to desperately seeking his father’s love, he aches to hook a giant silver tarpon on a fishing trip his grandfather promised him before he became terminably ill. There is a series of escalating episodes in which Corey tries to please his father, ranging from repairing his bike (strategically, in a place where his father will find him and see how “mechanical and a boy’s boy” his son is, and ending on a sour note when he can’t locate all the parts he has dismantled and his father has to drive, tight-jawed, to the hardware for replacements), to his master plan in which he will build, in a shed down at the shrimp docks, a fishing boat for Robert’s birthday. His father, a former WWII pilot and a workaholic, is frustrated by his wife, who’s pious and sexually unresponsive, and by his having been lured to Texas a few years back by his mother-in-law’s vague and still unfulfilled promise of a partnership in the restaurant, when what he really wants to do is pilot airplanes. Scenes involve a rattlesnake hunting expedition with Destin in which his friend, furious over his own father’s beatings of his mother, tries to snap the head off a rattler by whipping it by the tail; an incident in which Robert beats Corey with a live king snake he has refused to release and which has frightened Inez, their maid; a drunken dove-hunting scene with his dad; an alligator-hunting episode in which they strap stovepipe on their legs to keep the water moccasins from striking their flesh; an evening in which Corey stabs his big toe while gigging flounders out on the Gulf beach; another night when Robert opens a tent door in the back yard and thinks Corey and Destin are performing a homosexual act and kicks both boys; a time when Destin’s mother stabs and kills Destin’s father Dembo after the last in a never-ending series of drunken beatings and Destin gets sent off to live with an uncle in Louisiana; and a pivotal scene in which Robert finds out about the boat and mistakenly believes Corey has stolen the money from Toast and savagely destroys the boat with a crowbar after first beating Corey half to death. Near the end, when Corey’s last hope for his father’s love has been shattered along with the boat, his grandfather sneaks out of the hospital in Houston to take him on the promised tarpon expedition. They each hook and land a giant tarpon, and during the experience, they talk and Corey comes to an understanding of both himself and his father and ends up passively assisting his grandfather’s suicide when he decides to drown himself in the Gulf. Driven back to the house after the tragedy by an onlooker, Corey summons up the courage to stand up to his father, in a final, emotional scene in which Robert leaves the family forever.

SPATTERDASHERS