Don and I outside after the meeting, him smoking a cigarette, me chewing gum, the both of us watching early afternoon traffic school up and down US-1 in the blind profanes of commerce. He’s looking much more relaxed than when he came in, finding the air he couldn’t find alone, answered within himself, between sides of self.
“Thanks for talking last night,” he gruffs, squinting at a ravaged El Camino as it chortles by.
“Helped me probably more than it helped you,” I mutter. “I need to remember how close it can be sometimes. Especially when I don’t think it’s that close, when time away lulls me into thinking I’ve got this thing licked.”
“Three years sober, and you’re still not safe?”
“I know I’m not safe on my own. Too many solitary hours creep me up and bite me in the ass with memories of my wife and kid, singing lullabies straight out of a whiskey bottle. So I have to stay close to here.”
He doesn't reply, just keeps reading traffic, indexing, sorting, flagging. Looking for parts in the pattern, the presence of dark weaves just under the wake. Of dorsal fins, semaphoring invisible jaws. Even though he’ll never get behind the wheel of a cruiser again, long experience has forever trained his gaze.
Something else he’s thinking about too, tabulating those exterior motions of darkness and light to sum to a decision. He seems to surface, close enough to a final thought. “This morning they brought in some interesting stuff -- clay jugs, more doubloons. Best of all the anchor, three hundred and fifty pounds of old Spain-forged iron, so encrusted with barnacles you’d think it was a pure lump of seabed. The crew looked like kids on Christmas Eve. Stuck around only long enough to gas up and load on grub and extra diving gear.”
“So what happens when they locate the wreck?”
“Dispatch someone on the hot foot to stake their claim with the state and stay quieter than a dead man til the claim is on record. Triple the diving crew and start salvage operations round the clock.”
A kid on a Ninja hauls south on US-1 in a tear, the motorcycle's engine farting loud and high as it whips the terrible figure -- a boy, really -- about and around cars.
Don clenches his fists then relaxes, loosing a long sigh. He looks back at me. “You know, if you’re interested in getting in on the salvage I could talk to the skipper. He owes me a favor from the old life. They are going to need some extra hands on the boat to help with the topside part of the salvage. Might give you something more to do than just sit in a chair watching the ocean all day. A guy could get lost there.”
I told him to let me think about it overnight and let him know at the next meeting. The last thing I need is an adventure in la la land, but it might be fun to help haul up the booty. Besides, he’s right: the last thing a drunk needs is time and money, and I have far more of both than I know what to do with.
He grunts and walks off, hunched over, old, healing in the slow way that kills many folks before they get there. Unlocks a beat-up old Schwinn from where its chained to a trash can, heaves himself up and weaves down the parking lot and waits for an opening and traffic and then lumbers out and across, almost indifferent to the horn of an semi coming up from the South.
***
Driving back to the house, I pass through old beachfront communities whose star -- or sun -- has long faded. A sun-ghetto of sorts, everything looking hammered by the long season’s annihilate light, still harsh now, down at the nadir of winter. I’m passed by an older guy riding a Harley with a blonde woman hanging on from behind; the guy is wizened but still has long brown hair tied back in a ponytail, his bare arms emerging from a leather vest tanned deeply, wears lots of jewelry on his fingers -- unrepentently and desperately liplocked on youth. The woman is probably in her mid-thirties, pretty enough to seem improbable sitting behind him, everything in the right place, breasts heaving against the guys's back, her arms around his waist, ass like a bottomless heart beating in my eyes as the dude speeds on ahead of us. Neither wear helmets.
Maybe its the torpid license of beachside living, but everyone seems both way young and too old, permanently at leisure, in defiance of the middle way of life with its hard work and home-building routines. At least that’s the way my bruised daimon prefers that I see things today. And though I haven’t held a shot to my lips in years it still burns there, urging me to delay here, where it is always dangerous to wish for more leisure than I am due, more welcome in the summer than I may survive.
Whatever: in these sea-warding, dessicated, overbright neighborhoods and strip malls and trailer parks there is a feral ambience, a self-evicting willingness to rot in dissembling heat, to drink it to the dregs, savoring the brilliance even as it burns every inch of the skin, the soul.
Here in Florida where new settlements raise their roofs from swampy tundra by the hour, it doesn’t take long for them to age, trending downward into low and and lower valuations, becoming tracts for the elderly and the underemployed, eventually abandoned of all notice, disappearing beneath a throttling canopy of vines and kudzu. ... By the beach these suburbs continue in notice because the beachside arterials are still trafficked. Besides, even ruin close to the beach is a growth industry, attracting new falling faithful every year. US-1 here is in bad repair, the pavement cracked and tarred so many times that it looks like the weather-scarred hide of those beach walkers who endlessly trudge the sands -- dry, durable, indominable -- And the trailer parks and apartment complexes just seem to smoulder more deeply into their pyres, soldering themselves down into miasmal tracts of earth long leeched of moisture.
All this embues these regions with a dark, viciously sweet eros, goaty, furious, swaggering, so that simply living as such close proximity to the worst forms of sea- and sun-worship is a form of copulation, hundreds of thousands of aging votives getting their temple nookie in vast hot salty draughts, wallowing in the cancerous undrinkable light, pickling their rotten souls in Southern Comfort and marijuana noons, ripening and rotting on the boughs of an infernal tribe’s grove, smiling with blackened teeth sharpened for pleasantry. These are fatassed suburbs with saggy tits and too much jewelry, fuckable most exactly because they have fallen so far, sunk so deep below sea level that the pristine gloss of the each day by the sea has the appeal of a forever lost childhood--addictive, deadly, becalmed.
I’ve had so many blackout drunks in the rooks and nooks of this party suburb, losing it on Daytona’s boardwark and the Cocoa Beach pier, starting to drink at 9 in the morning and on through the daylight hours and dissembling into night, knocking back shots of tequilia as I nursed long-neck Buds, watching the brilliant sea crash and fold around surfboarders, the beach like a flame, the far ocean like a blue dream ... The jukebox playing everything from “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” to Christopher Cross’s “Sailing” to “Train Train” by Blackfoot and “Panama” by Van Halen, all of those hard-partying beach anthems that put the salt thirst on us, translating reverence into revenance, the black road of desire ... Drunkenness like a beached whale at some tideline which marks the ghastly precincts of those suburbs, wholly given over to the shore which runs at black angles to the waking one ... I’ve gone down on waitresses and welfare mothers hauled off from those bars, lapping at pussies as if to drown myself there, heading down to a wreckage of self so familiar that whatever I took there I broke some larger piece of what remained of my heart. And coming to there, first light like shards of glass shrieking through grimy small windows in laughing contempt, my night’s partying partner out cold, dead drunk, sinking out of sight ...
I watch that woman on the back of the Harley and want her desperately, want to be the aging knight of motlen swords who is driving her; to be given over to fatal surrender and endless depths once again, to live out my last hours like the bum hero of “Leaving Las Vegas,” still as death on a bed surrounded by empties as the sun swaddles the room with a womblike fury, cremating my bones into ash finer than sand, my ends something breezed back to the waves ...
The Sioux say such desire is the blue or black road which runs east to west, the direction of selfish error, exiled from any tribe. It runs through my history, it’s pickled in regions of my brain that makes me ache for awfulness at the entire cost of a useful and good life: Always a part of me walks that road, seeking the blasted trailer parks at its end, plunging into nights of waste and ruin, diving toward the bottom of a bottomless glass. Yes, well. But today I just keep driving north, watching the guy on the Harley with the woman holding on turn right, headed for their beach of consummation while I just head home, sad and small and negligible though it be.
