CREEPY CATALOG

Truth About What Happened To My Boyfriend On Board The Yacht I Stole

I guess you could call us pirates.

Ray loved to describe what we did with that coy phrase. I heard him say it so many times I immaturely started to mouth the words before he even said them whenever the subject came up.

I can't deny it was actually a good description of our favorite activity though. More or less, we essentially were, pirates.

It seemed crazy at first. Like, okay, maybe you do it once, as a thrill, on a drunken whim, but move on after that. That's not what Ray, a cluster of his friends, and I did. Instead, we took it to the next level. Turning it almost into a bit of a cottage industry. Stealing boats. Chopping them down and reselling them dirt cheap.

And I was much more than an accomplice. You could maybe actually say I was a catalyst. The one who poured gasoline on the fire.

The lazy trickle of islands that make up the Florida Keys are populated by more unmanned, under-secured boats than they are people. The rich and upper-middle class mostly leave their aquatic play toys tied-up to the endless docks and marinas generously sprinkled around the islands until they can get away from the modern torture of their office a few times each year to enjoy the water. They were sitting ducks and Ray knew it.

Ray started out small-time. Stealing crappy fishing boats and skiffs in high school. The cheap vessels people left the keys in all night from time to time. Naïve enough to think no one would waste their time stealing their hunks of rusty crap.

Ray would lift the boats and joyride them just for fun before ditching them somewhere nearby. Sometimes if they were nice enough (and had enough gas) he would get them up to his dad's old shop in Homestead, alter them and then sell them on Craigslist. Dirt cheap. That's how I met him.

I was in Boca Raton visiting my grandma with my dad, yawning through another muggy day when my dad took us on a detour to Ray's sketchy "used boat" lot to buy a cheap little fishing boat he found on Craigslist. I dreaded the trip, but had no choice in the matter, my eyes rarely leaving the screen of my phone.

Until we pulled up and I saw Ray. I was drawn in immediately.

Ray didn't look a day over 18, but he already had his own sizable boat sales operation, of which he stalked around shirtless, abbed, tanned and long-haired while clutching a brown Red Stripe bottle. He was like some kind of trashy, rugged, street surfer fantasy I had conjured up in my 17-year-old brain to try and rescue me from the boredom of my grandma's planned community and my dad's four-hour fishing trips.

I traded flirts with Ray throughout my dad's $500 transaction, my dad never the wiser, distracted by what he later told me was a "red hot smokin deal." Ray pulled a smooth move when I asked for the restroom and he personally directed me. He handed me his frayed business card with his cell phone number on it before he led me to haggard bathroom I ultimately decided was too gross to use.

I called Ray the next time I was down in Miami. He answered. We met at a broken down bar in Homestead where they let us drink stiff Long Island iced teas underage. He wasted no time in telling me how he was a modern day American pirate. I wasted no time in becoming obsessed with him.

We hung out almost every day of that trip. Flirted. Kissed. Got drunk on the beach during the day. Fooled around on the beach at night. Fell in embarrassing, emoji-laced modern teenage love until we decided I needed to go to Florida Atlantic University in Miami once I graduated high school in a handful of months.

That's when it really started. We stepped up to the big game when I moved down there full-time.

Ray had gone a long ways on street savvy – growing up in a trailer park with his grandparents in Homestead. His dirty blonde, beach bum good looks and body helped as well. But I was the true spark he needed.