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Project Boat

GLYNN WASHINGTON, HOST:

OK, so for about 4 years, every time I set foot in an airport, I was detained. Someone would take a look at my identification and then they want to speak to me in some back room. It got to the point that I'd have to build detention time into my itinerary. So one day my wife and I went to Mexico and, of course, on the way back I was detained.

This guy starts going through my luggage real slowly, real slow and out of my suitcase he pulls a pen from my alma mater and says, you went to the University of Michigan? Yeah. Well, so did I. And I'm like all right, dude. Come on from one Michigan Wolverine to another, what the hell is going on? Why am I stopped every time I try to get from point A to point B? He kind of thinks about it and he's like, I don't know what you did, I don't know why you did it, but for some reason you set off some kind of alert that I have never seen before. Never seen before? I didn't do anything? He kind of chuckles to himself, right, right. That's what they all say.

Today from PRX and NPR, SNAP JUDGMENT proudly presents "Suspicious Behavior." Real stories from people whose story doesn't quite check out. I'm your host, Glynn Washington and this is SNAP JUDGMENT.

WASHINGTON: Now, it is all well and good to avoid suspicious behavior when it's happening out there somewhere, but what if the strange goings on are happening right under your own roof? Mollena Williams has a story for us about her very, very interesting childhood.

MOLLENA WILLIAMS: My dad walked in the door one afternoon with a huge pile of lumber that he could barely fit through the front door and announced that he had a new project he was working on. Of course, the remnants of the last 20 projects were scattered around the living room, but this project was a little bit different. Dad announced that he was going to be building a boat in our living room.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG "SAILING")

WILLIAMS: I want to clarify here that this was not the living room of some palatial estate. We lived in the Johnson projects on 115th Street on East Harlem in New York City. Even though we were poor and lived in the projects, my dad would get these amazing bursts of energy and work three jobs and play his saxophone on the street for hours and hours to make enough money to take us on these amazing adventures. My mom wanted us to take all that money and move the hell out of the projects but my dad was convinced that it was more important for us to see the world.

He unrolled this piece of newspaper that had this sketch on it and he said, yes, I'm going to build a skiff. It's going to be probably 16 feet long - he was hoping for 18 feet, but if it was 18 feet, then he wouldn't have room to walk all the way around it in the living room. He cleared everything out in the middle of the living room so our television was now wedged next to the sofa, so if you wanted to watch TV, you had to stretch out the long way and you were about a foot from the television.

There had been a rug in the living room when this project started and my mom would freak out because she said, James, we are never going to get our deposit back. So he pulled up the rug, he had the workspace on the floor, on this bare - it wasn't even linoleum, it was like - it was pretty much like rubbley cement. Within two days we had the bottom of the skiff in the middle of the living room up on sawhorses and we had to kind of walk around it to get in and out of the apartment every day.

About the third week of building was a time that dad had to attach the sides of the boat and it required the sides to be bent. And his solution to making this happen was to boil four huge pots of water on the stove until our entire apartment was steamy and sweaty with boiling water. And then he took the planks and put them into the bathtub and had me hold them on one end as he poured hot water down them and said, OK Mo, push. And then little by little the wood would bend and stretch until it had just the right curve. And it would have to sit there for days drying out - we did this twice.

The second time we did it, the bending didn't go so well and the wood started to crack at the flexing point. My dad got really angry. He took a hacksaw and chopped the whole thing apart. And I went to my room 'cause it was better not to be around when dad was in the breaking stuff mood. It wasn't the first time I had seen that. Not long before, one of his saxophones had a key that had broken and he took a ball-peen hammer and spent the next hour smashing it flat from the bell all the way to the mouthpiece - just crumpled it flat and then stomped on it to fold in half and then fold it in half again and then threw it down the incinerator. It was sort of part of his pattern - he would get really excited about something, really excited about a project, really excited about building something and then if it didn't go well, it would derail him because he was bipolar.

After he was done chopping apart the broken plank, he took the pieces and kicked them outside the door and slammed the door shut. But eventually, dad calmed down, got another plank, got it bent, and then once those two sides dried out, we attached them. The whole project altogether took probably about four months. And by the time the boat had taken shape, he spent probably three weeks creating and carving a swan to go on the front of the boat that he bolted and glued on and it had these outstretched wings. That was his pride and joy, that carved swan on the front of the boat.

Finally, the day came when he declared the boat done. My dad borrowed my grandfather's old Buick LeSabre and we then took this boat down 10 flights of stairs. It was me and my dad and my cousins and we had blankets. And we put the blankets down on every landing and slid the boat down, then picked the blankets from behind, put them down in front and slid it down the next flight of stairs and trundled it around the corner to where grandpa's LeSabre was waiting and strapped it to the top of the car.

Now at this point, my dad could only see out of the bottom third of the windshield, so he drove us at probably about 10 miles an hour out to Coney Island. And we got to the edge of the water and I had my little life vest on and we were all wearing all-white because that's what sailors wear. And we all climbed in on our little special stools and my dad was the last one to climb in and he pushed us off. And then all of a sudden, wind caught the sail and we were sailing. I turned around to look over one shoulder - I could see people like little tiny specks on the beach. I don't even know how long we were out there, it felt like probably all day. And dad took the sail down and we paddled back in to the beach. That was the first time that we took that boat out and it turned out to also be the last time that we took that boat out.

And when we got back home that night, he went to bed and stayed there for a while, one of his longer times staying in bed. We never did move out of the projects, but I think for him to be on that boat that day with us, for us to have an experience that was so outside of living on the 10th floor in the projects in a 20 story building, it was liberating, it was freeing, it was so outside of being cooped up in a two-bedroom apartment.

As an adult, I look back and I say, for all of the instability, that was the best job that they could do and I'm going to say they did a pretty damn good job. I would not trade that day on that boat with my dad for anything - for anything ever.

WASHINGTON: That was Mollena Williams. Mollena is a new SNAP JUDGMENT favorite and we hope to bring you more of Mollena's stories in the very near future. That piece was produced by Julia DeWitt with sound design by Renzo Gorrio. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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