Motorboatin' Son of a Bitch

The boat sat parked in the street, resting its hulk upon the old trailer like a whale washed ashore. It took up a good portion of the suburban road, the way RVs overtake the cement driveways of houses out west. You can’t help but wonder, ‘who owns that?’

We do.

A couple months ago Mike and I, along with his cousin and his wife, went in together to purchase Mike’s uncle’s boat. To us, we were getting a fire-sale deal on an investment in summer fun. To his uncle, I think he felt he was finally ridding himself of a thorn that had been plaguing his side.

I have no way to prove it, but I suspect boat ownership is akin to having a child. You dream of all the fun things you’ll do together. Cruising! Water skiing! Tubing! You know that there’ll be work involved, but you’re fairly certain it will be worth it. You know that you’ll part with a good amount of cash, and then some more, and then some more. Those outlays will never be repaid, but you’re ok with it. The joys of boat ownership will far outweigh the hurdles you must leap!

Speaking of joy, is there more joy than assigning a namesake to your beloved? The name you choose is important. It will become a representation of you for all the world to see. The boat we bought was named Roxy, after the beautiful Boxer Mike’s uncle owns. Much as we love Roxy, now that the boat was ours we wanted a name that better represented us. We thought about ‘Four Friends.’ Admittedly not the most imaginative of names, but it was simple and true.

So how to replace ‘Roxy’ with our new name? Surely we’d need to paint over the old name, and paint on our new one. Mike took a closer look at the word Roxy.

‘I think these are just decals,’ he mused. ‘We can probably just pull them right off and then paint our name on.’

He fiddled with the letters for a bit, and then came to a startling conclusion.

‘This is just electrical tape! This will come off no problem.’ As a test, he pulled at the corner of the letter ‘R.’

Sure enough, it came off. And all of a sudden, the new name of our boat appeared.