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Time weighs heavy and I find myself looking back over my recent past, obsessively trying to discover how I ended up here on this beach on a fool’s mission.
And that’s a question that takes one hell of an answer.
First thing, I guess you have to go back to my arrival in the Sunshine State, about eighteen long months ago.
There I was; rolling by the orange juice stands and peanut brittle shops inside a Greyhound bus, gazing out through tinted glass at the verdant finery and thinking that I’d finally made it to the Promised Land. The violence, death, and rotten weather in my recent past were fading away like a series of bad dreams. As I stared out at the palm trees and the swamps, I felt a smile coming on for the first time in a long, long while.
Greetings from sunny Florida!
For years I’d wanted to send that message back home to Minnesota, back up to the frozen tundra. Get one of those postcards with water-skiing chicks on the front. You know, two nice-looking girls in bikinis gliding along the water while a third sits on their shoulders waving out at you. A banner flaps behind them proclaiming a welcome from the Sunshine State. The ladies wear big, broad smiles on Miss America faces.
Yep, I always wanted to mail that one up there to someone who hates winter. You know, rub it in a little. The catch always was that I never went anywhere to send it from. Set off for Florida, once, spring break of 1967, but never made it, because John Flint’s ‘63 Chevy blew a rod just south of Madison and we were forced to spend three days in Wisconsin drinking cheap liquor, eating cheese and chasing corpulent bar flies. By the time the repairs were finally completed, we didn’t have enough money left for Florida, so we stayed two more days in Wisconsin.
Eleven years later, I had made it all the way. But as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t send the card back home. Couldn’t risk it, in case the Zenith City cops were interested in my whereabouts. Although I was confident that Peter McKay’s death had been written off as an accident—which I really believed it had been—I couldn’t be totally sure of the district attorney’s desires. And if they found Johnny Wells in the trunk of his car at the bottom of the Nemadji River, well...
Second reason I couldn’t send that postcard: When I arrived in Florida, it was nearly May and the intended sting of the message would be weakened by the promise of spring in the North—however hollow that promise might ring in the land of ten thousand frozen lakes.
That’s the kind of shit you think about on a long bus ride. Shit can get going in your head and drive you nuts.
So I had to keep telling myself to stop thinking about the past. Put it behind me like a bad smell. Like the guy sitting in front of me on the Greyhound who’d stunk up the bus all the way from Atlanta with a foul odor like he’d slept in horse manure. I couldn’t smell the hillbilly couple in the back who were drinking cheap wine and rolling the empty bottles beneath the seats since boarding at a Stuckey’s just inside the Florida line, but I’m guessing they were also an olfactory nightmare.
Despite the irritants, about a half an hour outside of Tampa, I started to get excited. Soon I’d be off the rotten bus and into the Florida sunshine and all my suffering would be over. There were clearly enough pieces of the pie for everyone to get a bite: fancy cars, condos, and high-class women zipping around in convertibles or sunning in scanty bikinis on the beach.
Why couldn’t I have some?
I couldn’t see any reason why-not. But something just didn’t seem right. Not with me, not with Florida and not with anything. The land seemed desolate and lonely, in spite of all the vehicles and activity.
But this was Florida for chrissakes—home of cheap dope and plenty of it. Or so I had heard. And read about in High Times magazine. Even Jimmy Buffet was singing about the dope. I never thought for a minute that it would be hard to find drugs in Florida.
And it wasn’t.
Although I was trying hard to change my ways after the excesses and tragedies of the past, those noxious substances seemed to come to me unsolicited.
So, alone and a fugitive, I overindulged and got myself into an agitated mental state. Excessive booze plus excessive coke equals paranoia and erratic thinking. After one such binge, I found myself with a deep-seated craving for some sort of an emotional anchor, which, somewhere in my twisted mind, my former wife Carole represented.
So I wired some money back home and soon Carole and our son Mike, were on a plane and headed south. I was in need of an emotional anchor but what I got was something else again.
Carole Loraine Stivers Waverly, to be exact, my little flower child, in all her swirling confusion and beauty.
I was happy to see her and ecstatic to reunite with Mike.
Carole and I had been quite the couple. I don’t think we spent one night apart for the first three years of our marriage. We fancied ourselves like John Lennon and Yoko Ono, even had their album cover on our bedroom wall. Two Virgins—that was us.
But when the marriage fell apart, it was gone in a hurry: seemingly happy at Christmas—separated by the Fourth of July. Went from lovers to haters in one hell of a hurry. I guess it was my fault but sometimes I’m not so sure.
It’s clear to me now that I was trying to bring back the past. If only I’d been smarter or tougher or richer, maybe I never would’ve brought them to Florida. Could’ve kept them out of this mess, if only I’d been strong enough to make it alone...