by R. W. Jones
“Yeah, hate to ask you do that being I just got here, but I am pretty hungry,” as the gigantic sandwich I had eaten for breakfast was starting to wear off.
“Great, I’ll make us some smoothies, and fresh salmon with wild rice. How’s that sound?”
“Great, thank you,” I said, as she was heading towards the kitchen in no-time.
Despite not seeing my uncle in quite a few years, I gave him a look as if to say, “What’s up with this?”
“Yeah, I don’t eat quite as bad as I used to.” Seeing that my face had turned to a frown, concerned for his health, he quickly added, “Don’t worry, I’m healthy, so it’s nothing like that. Gail said if she was going to marry me and follow me around from here to there that I had to eat a bit healthier. To put it like she did, ‘I’m not going to eat this shit for the rest of my life.’ Loving her like I do, I agreed, but don’t worry Mike, I still have my favorite places.”
I whispered, “Does she know you still eat out?”
He replied, “Of course, we don’t hold secrets from each other,” but after a laugh he added, “I just usually don’t tell her about it.”
I sat down next to him in a beach chair, and for the next hour over lunch I told them what I had done so far. Gail was almost moved to tears when I told them about reconciling with my sister and niece. They also both got a chuckle when I told them about my wallet, and even offered to give me the money I had lost.
I asked them about their dog, who was off with Bahama giving her the lay of the land, sniffing through the sand in the front yard.
“Oh, that’s Snuka. Funniest thing – one night, not long after we moved out here, he came up to us when we got back to the house after a walk, scaring the shit out of us.” They both laughed.
They added, “But that’s not the funny part. After we saw he was calm and nice and all that, we noticed he had on loin-cloths like the old wrestler Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka!” More laughs followed, this time from me too.
“After calling the local shelter and leaving some signs up throughout the island nobody claimed him, so he became ours. For a beach dog he’s terrified of the water, but as you can see, he loves the sand. He usually shakes most of it off before going into the house, but it feels like we are changing the sheets every day.”
“Yeah, because you let him sleep in bed with us,” Gail added, with a smile.
After some more light talking, my uncle asked, “So, what are you doing here?”
Taken slightly aback, but keeping up with the jovial feel of the conversation I just laughed, not knowing how to answer. “Good question.”
“Ahh, I know that feeling all too well, I think you have some of my blood in you after all.” Before I could say anything he added, “I’ve been where you are many times, maybe not with as heavy heart as you, but I have always felt like I am searching for something. While I figure out exactly what I’m looking for I figured I’d do it in the most beautiful places I could surround myself with. As you can see, we have plenty of beauty, and we have plenty of room, so you are welcome to stay as long as you want.”
Gail nodded her approval of his invite. That’s how Bahama and I ended up staying in Treasure Island for the next month.
9
It had been maybe ten years since I had been high – I mean really high. I had smoked a few times at cookouts, parties, and a concert or two, but I hardly ever felt any differently afterwards. With Howard and Gail around it was going to be hard not to be high. They celebrate almost every occasion with the words, “Let’s get high.” Going to the grocery store? Let’s get high. We’re going for a walk. Let’s get high. I need to get air in the tires. Let’s get high! I want to get high! Let’s get high!
While not an authority on this topic, I was assured what I was smoking was “good shit.” I felt that my uncle and aunt are nice enough people to get connections in every city that they live in, and that’s how they always had a healthy supply of “herb,” as they like to call it. However, when this came up one night my uncle told me they have been using the same supplier for close to 25 years. Perhaps, sometimes, it’s different types of weed, but always the same supplier.
Their supplier, a couple with whom they had become good friends, lived in Arizona. Uncle Howard met Zeke and Callie when they were vacationing in Phoenix one winter. Howard said he knew he wouldn’t last long in Phoenix because it wasn’t close enough to a large enough body of water, but as a consolation prize, he did find a source to make sure his weed never ran out. I was told Zeke and Callie grew weed out of their basement, and have connections all over the world to other forms of herb.
Knowing Howard wasn’t venturing to Phoenix every time he ran low, I asked him how he stayed stocked on one of my first days as his roommate.
He replied, “I know you’re family, and I love you like the son I never had, but I’d rather not answer that.”
I respected his response, and didn’t press for an answer. I was free to use my imagination. Whatever I was smoking with him sure did help my imagination. I just figured a weed stork brought it to him during one of my hazy daydreams while staring out in the Gulf.
Even though there was no pressure from my uncle or aunt to do much of anything, I was again getting the desire to write. It’s odd to think that smoking a ton of weed would make want me to do anything other than eat, but I think it was because of my chemical-filled brain I was getting antsy to get something out. It’s no coincidence, I thought, especially while feeling like this, that it seemed most writers needed a little extra motivation, if you will, to be the best writer they can be. Inspiration has to come from somewhere, right?
A few peers in my college writing class and I would get a case of beer, and sit around one of our crappy apartments. Only a few beers in and I think everyone experienced a wave of inspiration. Occasionally, we would go from wanting to write books to wanting to write movies. The problem with combining drinking and writing is the fine line where you feel inspired and the point you start to get too drunk to even operate a pen. By the time our little group graduated we had at least a half dozen “scripts” started. My favorite one was the one we started on the inside of a pizza box. The main character was a pizza delivery driver. Imagine that.
So I don’t know if it was the weed, or my surroundings, or that I just generally missed it, but I started seeking out part-time writing jobs again. For most of my marriage I made a living taking in all kinds of freelance jobs. When I was much younger I fancied myself a Hunter S. Thompson, always wanting to be part of the story, but there weren’t many opportunities for me to do that. Instead I settled for becoming a semi-professional biography writer, usually writing a famous person’s entire story in 1,000 words or less.
Through the years there have been many jobs. One of the big (see: financially rewarding) jobs I had was writing a biography on every president in the history of the United States, again in 1,000 words or less. The stories were to be given to an editor of an 8th grade history book, and then they would put the information I gave them in the context of the textbook. You had to be incredibly unbiased and neutral in your writing. It helped to have a grip on American history, but really anyone with a competent internet search function, and an 8th grade writing ability, could have done the job.
I also worked for various magazines, ranging from news, sports, and, even once, professional wrestling. For a while in college I had gotten into the habit of just applying for any job I could, trying to earn enough money to buy an engagement ring. A wrestling magazine, much to my surprise, asked me if I would rank the order of WrestleMania events from worst to first. I had been a bit of a wrestling fan in my youth, but at the time of the writing and since then, I hadn’t watched wrestling in years. So, I watched every WrestleMania and sought out the opinions of people who I knew that watched wrestling. It was interesting watching over 60 hours of wrestling, but at the end I felt like I had a pretty good grip on it. For the record, I picked WrestleMania V as the best. The backlash was strong.
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As the years passed during my college and young adult years, my desire to write a novel grew stronger. Snapping back to a haze of reality on my uncle’s deck, I decided that’s what I would do then, only I would use a computer and not a pizza box. I had tried many times before to write a novel, but usually after a few thousand words I would think it was awful, and quit. Then after a few more months I would try again, then rinse and repeat. Another false start.
In the year of my mourning, I began to get the strong urge to write again, especially the last few weeks when I decided I was going to hit the road for an adventure of my own. From time to time I wrote short stories of imaginary adventures and a character similar to me took shape. I didn’t think they were that good, but I shared some with my friends and family, and they seemed to be well received, but then again they didn’t want to hurt the already fragile feelings of someone they cared about.
Most asked me if I had done the things the characters had done in the story, and almost always the answer was no. I know it wasn’t their intention to make me feel upset with that question, but it always reminded me that for the last year, and in a lot of ways long before that, I hadn’t done much of anything that would be considered an adventure. Those innocent questions ultimately helped lead me on this journey.
My wife always made more money than me. When she died I was left with what we had already had, plus a very substantial check from the insurance company. We always agreed with each other that if one of us were to die, we’d want the other to live relatively worry free. My wife and I didn’t live exactly frugally, but we never bought things we didn’t need, we didn’t eat out much, preferring dinner with my family, who loved to cook, and we saved quite a bit. I was lucky enough to have a wife who supported my passion for writing. In freelance work, there could be long lulls between employment and then there was the amount of time I’d have to spend building up a resume so I could realistically have a chance at the big jobs, which were few and far between.
Early on in our relationship I took jobs that paid one and two cents per word. I also did all the filler jobs as I called them. Basically, I just provided content page after content page for new websites so they seem established when they first hit the web. This was mind-numbing work, but it eventually began to pay off with stories in magazines and newspapers. Still, without my wife supporting me, there is no way I would have been able to have the time to build a decent resume. It was a catch-22. I had to do all of the work, which equaled hours and hours of time, but little pay, just hoping for the pot of gold at the end of the crap rainbow. There’s no way I could have put the time in doing that on my own. I would have had to support myself in another way, or I would have starved. Or just ate a lot more meals that my mommy cooked.
Still, after six or seven years of writing, if you can call it that, I wasn’t sure if I was doing it for the love of writing, or the love of money. I can remember many occasions when I had the idea to sit down and write something for myself – a short story, a novel, a screenplay idea, and I would think to myself, I’m not getting paid for this, why am I writing this? It’s just the way my brain had become, and maybe still is, wired. When one gets used to getting paid for something for so long it’s hard to do it “just for fun.” I often wondered if athletes, musicians, and even healthcare professionals have similar thoughts. Time after time I would get something going, but never had the desire to do go through with it.
It was a conversation with my dad that helped changed my view on my struggling with writing. My dad and I weren’t much for deep conversation, but the handful of times I really sought his advice he always came through. He doesn’t waste words, and thinks carefully before he talks. Many people say multiple things in hopes of hitting the target. When my dad spoke, he almost always hits the bull’s eye on the first shot.
It was about ten months after she died, and he and I were talking on my deck. He heard my whole speech about how I was having a hard time finding the desire to do writing I wasn’t being paid for.
“You’ll write when you want to. When something moves you enough to write, you will,” he said.
“Also son, all that money stuff you say doesn’t make sense, at least to me.”
“Why”?
“Because, if you were to write a movie, or a script, or a novel, or whatever, and it were to sell, you would be making a whole lot more money than you’ve ever made writing about dead presidents. Hell, you’d have all the dead presidents you’d ever need,” laughing at his own joke that I suspect he didn’t intend to make until it came out. But he was right.
I guess I ultimately knew that if I were to ever sell something it would most likely be for a decent chance of money, but it wasn’t that part of what he had said that I focused on. I’d write when I was ready, he had said to me. There was no need to force anything, in other words. I have thought about his words often since that day – all the way up to the dead presidents joke - and they have steered me straight when I began to have anxiety about what I was, and what I wasn’t, accomplishing in the writing world. There, on the deck of my Uncle Howard’s beach house, was when I decided it was time to start writing again. Without major money concerns, and no real concerns beyond finding a bed to sleep in at the end of the night, I was ready to write for myself.
10
For the next few weeks I walked around town with Bahama and sometimes Snuka, although Snuka was so big he tended to scare fellow pedestrians. I snuck off for meals with my uncle that my aunt would never have approved of, smoked a lot, and wrote.
After more than a year of not writing I didn’t really know where to start. I have a writer friend who always told me, “When in doubt, just write…” I usually just try to remember that part of the quote, but inevitably he always ends with “…something that’s not complete crap should eventually come out.”
I wrote about my wife, I wrote about my sister, I wrote about the GA Pig Shack, I wrote about my dog, and I wrote about myself. After writing for about a week, while sitting on the deck, I noticed something funny about my writing, something that I must have trained myself to do. I write in 1,000 word chunks because that’s how many words I used to write on my presidential biographies. It didn’t matter what I was writing about, I would get to 1,000 words or so, and just run out of things to say. Also because 1,000 words generally signified the end of a workday for me, I usually found it hard to continue writing after I met my quota, especially those first few weeks.
Day after day, not just at my uncle’s, but for the entire duration of the trip, I had to reprogram my brain, and write just for the act of writing. This should be simple, but when all you have to do is write, it can be pretty intimidating. It wasn’t that the environment I was in wasn’t an excellent one for writing. I had a giant beach house, with decks protruding from all sides, so I had multiple places to re-hone my craft. My uncle and aunt were always close by if I wanted to talk, but never intrusive, and looking back on it, I don’t think they ever asked what I was writing about. They were just genuinely happy I was writing again. Aunt Gail was always quick to have a meal for us, but just like my uncle would tell me in secret, her meals were usually too grainy, green, and cardboard-ish for my taste. I usually had an appetite because of the other green I was partaking in, which I could also thank my uncle and aunt for, so it all worked out.
That month I also spent a lot of time at the beach. When I was young, Howard had taught me how to boogie board when my parents used to visit him in whatever beach town he was living in that particular summer. I tried boogie boarding again, but after a few looks from the local kids who actually knew what they were doing, I reverted back to just walking on the shoreline mostly, which was fine.
Sometimes I would bring the dogs down to the beach. Bahama loved the water, usually scaring me because I always thought she was going too deep, but she always came back onto the beach wearing a grin to cancel out my fears. Now Snuka, as Gail had mentioned, was another story. Snuka loved the sand, but absolutely hat
ed getting too close to the ocean. There was an imaginary force field that only Snuka could see maybe 15 feet from the ocean. When he crossed it, it would send him into doggy panic attacks. A few times Bahama and I would go a few feet into the ocean to play around. Snuka, wanting no part of it, would bark at us the entire time, showing his displeasure. It was even worse when Howard and Gail would join us. It was almost as if Snuka refused to believe his masters could defy him by going into the ocean. Snuka wouldn’t bark when they went in. Instead, he would turn his back completely to the ocean, and dig a hole. This was no small hole, being able to fit a large dog, and Snuka would lay in it until Gail and Howard came out of the ocean, safely back on the right side of the force field. Just like that he would snap out of it and be a happy dog again. Some beach dog.
A few days before I decided I would be leaving the friendly confines of Howard, Gail, and Treasure Island, I was feeling like it was time to go. I most likely imagined it, but I felt like I was wearing out my welcome. I think I was just eager to get on with the next part of my journey. One night, walking back from an organic restaurant in town Gail insisted we visit, the topic of my next location came up.
“What’s next?” asked Howard, as I saw him eyeballing the ice cream shop we would have surely went in had we not been with Gail.
“Hmmm, I really don’t know.” I really didn’t know.
It was during this walk on Main Street that I realized that for the first time in my journey I was going to most likely end up someplace I didn’t know anybody. This caused me some anxiety, but it was that being on my own feeling I was craving that originally inspired me to go on this trip.
“How about the Florida Keys? Hemingway lived there; isn’t he your favorite author?” He continued with a laugh, “If it was good enough for him, it’s surely good enough for you.”
“I agree.” I said, and I did.