MONDAY
I remember so many things. I made everyone laugh yesterday with my detailed memories of this house, this as I was given a guided tour of the place. We got to the walk-in closet in my mother’s old room. I said “This is where she used to hide the Christmas presents.” Sustained laughter at my casual dissection of what was supposed to be a childhood mystery.
I walked a lot today. Tampa is not a walking town. I am on my own out there, save for the occasional tribe of kids who live within walking distance of Buchanan, the school where I used to play soccer. So when I say I walked from here to Lake Magdalene eyebrows rise. Really it is not that far. A couple of miles, tops, I think. But around here you have to walk a lot farther to see a lot less than in New York. A lot of ugly houses. Like, impossibly ugly.
Memories include:
- That’s the house where I stole a kid’s Tony Dorsett football card.
- I drove into that subdivision once because Pete’s friend lived there.
- This is the only church I ever went to in Tampa, besides the ones at school.
- That’s the cul-de-sac where my friends and I had the Great Conversation about coming out as gay and other developmental peccadillos.
- That Walgreen’s is on the site of the old Mini Mart, where I focused my thieving energies during my childhood phase of shoplifting. I never got caught but I remember how the old lady behind the counter just glowered at me one time as I nervously idled in the Topps trading card aisle.
- There is a rose in Spanish Harlem.
- The bar I went to yesterday — Uncle Fats — is on the site of what I have always believed was the Winn-Dixie that was firebombed in 1983 by one Billy Ferry. I was at summer camp at the time but heard about it. I look up this incident now and find that it was not there but in Clair-Mel. I don’t even know where that is. My sister also believes the Winn-Dixie firebombing happened very close to here.
Today, without intending to, I spotted the remains of a payphone I photographed probably 20 years ago. On the ceiling of the empty enclosure is a hornet’s nest. Piled at the bottom corner are several hornet carcasses. If my memory had given that payphone any detailed regard at all it would have been to assume it was further north, toward Lutz. It is, I think, on a spot which used to be considered the outskirts of Tampa, but which is now more developed. Years ago I think it was a last stop before cow pasture.
I walked past some sewers on Diplomat Drive. Those sewers lurk like open mouths, or portals down which anyone could unwittingly slither. I might never have made that association if not for the day when one of them was a focal point of ugly drama. Dozens of people gathered around one particular sewer drain, believing a 7- or 8-year old child would emerge. He had slithered into another sewer opening on Diplomat Drive, telling observers to “Wait for me over at the one on Sovereign Court.” The kid claimed he knew what he was doing, had done this many times, and that he would emerge shortly. But he never appeared. His older brother stood by, pacing and becoming visibly anxious. He was surrounded by people who seemed to think that the kid would be fine, that he had done this many times now, that he was just playing games with us all. If he ever did emerge it would have been to a stony silence. No uproarious applause would have been there to greet him.
I never knew how this episode ended. Everybody dispersed, with the brother saying he was going home to call authorities. These were all people I had never seen before. It made me realize how many houses around me were silent to me but had rich stories brewing within. I walked past countless houses today, marveling at the silent-to-me lives carrying on within. There is so much of this world I will never know.
I swam in a swimming pool for the first time in, I’m guessing, three years. That was at a Montreal hotel. I remember the salesman who sold us this pool. I talked to him on the phone, attempting to give him directions to the house. Evidently I nailed it, even though I remember giving directions that would have made no sense to anybody. I was saying stuff like “If the Winn-Dixie is on your left you are going the wrong way” and “If you are looking toward Tampa Stadium you should turn around.” Tampa Stadium was not visible from anywhere this person might have been driving. Whatever I said he was suitably impressed, saying over and over how stellar my directions to the house were. I was 9.
That salesman saw the Camphor Tree in the back yard. Knowing this tree would be a problem for its dropping of twigs and leaves into the pool he regrettably said “I could not get Bob Graham (Governor of Florida at the time) to cut that tree down.” He was probably right. It is a “protected” tree that basically cannot come down unless life and limb are in peril, or we secretly hire an arsonist.
The tree in the front yard is a monster. George was joking about it, saying he saw pictures of the house soon after it was built, when this now sprawling octopus of arboreality was just a little sprout. “Why couldn’t somebody have just yanked that thing out of the ground back then?” That tree, I let George know, was at the center of the final meltdown between my mother and father. It had to be trimmed, lest it consume the house, but mother would not allow dad to hire his buddy from Daytona Beach to do it. She wanted somebody licensed and bonded. Dad’s friend was a tenant in his building (and kind of a fuckup, as I would learn years later). So mom hired a commercial tree trimming company at a cost that was thousands upon thousands dollars more than what my dad expected to pay. And yeah, he paid for it, even though he didn’t live here anymore. Among his many resentments he paid for everything. Mother often talked about how she paid for things, never qualifying this with the fact that it was his money she used to write those checks. She could be almost infantile in that way.
…
TUESDAY
Yesterday I slept about 12 hours. I did not expect that, but I guess travel of any kind is exhausting. You have to BE somewhere, a tiny form of imprisonment. Today I was up at a closer to normal hour of 10am. I have sunburn on my neck from yesterday’s exposure to the 90-degree sun. It is hotter today. I kept hydrated yesterday, which was probably smarter than I realized. Probably not walking far, if anywhere today. Going to Ybor to see Stephanie and Doug, friends from Sunswick who moved here a few years ago. They work in Tampa’s nascent craft beer industry, at a brewery neither I nor anyone I mentioned it to has ever heard of. Tampa was always a big beer town, what with Busch and its accompanying Busch Gardens. But these days Busch doesn’t really count as beer.
Yesterday I landed at the first bar I’ve ever been to in New York. Uncle Fats on Fletcher and Florida. Kind of a divey place, though I have trouble calling a place a dive bar when it is obvious that it was designed with diveyness in mind. You become a dive bar by circumstance and entropy, not by announcing “this is a shithouse.” And it’s strange to me to find a bar within a strip mall, but I guess that’s Florida for you, or America. There is another place nearby that I’ll look at tomorrow. I think it’s called the Road House, on Florida. I might have opted for that yesterday but it would have meant crossing 8 lanes of traffic, and since we don’t generally jaywalk outside of New York that would have added 20 minutes onto the journey. I DON’T HAVE 20 MINUTES TO WASTE.
…
I have been nursing a thought about Fishdom that is funny only in the sense that it is not funny at all. In the game you blow things up using sticks of dynamite, grenades, etc. The ultimate blower-upper is a nuclear device, represented by the yellow and black circular symbol we undoubtedly recognize from the abundant nuclear fallout shelter signs around New York. I wonder if there are players of this game who are offended by the use of a nuclear weapon in a video game, thinking it trivializes the deaths at Hiroshima.
…
It is not lost on me how idyllic things are here, if only for these 48 hours. I don’t remember when I last contemplated the idea of moving back here, but Diane had said I could have this room back if I wanted it. I was thinking of it as an end of the rainbow kind of possibility, something to consider if I ever make it to my 60s. But I don’t know. It is as I imagined. The one thing I would get here that seems to elude me in New York is QUIET. Here it is practically a silence, filled only by the tinnitus in my head and the occasional inexplicable bouts of one of the dogs barking.
We all sat around night, on the couch, watching Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. I made the kid laugh, not just this time but many others. I commented that the wheeloffortune.com URL looked to me like Wheel Off Or Tune. I tried to imagine what that might mean, but mentioned a couple of other web URLs I’ve noticed that just don’t look right without punctuation or spaces. A building in New York is called The O’Neill Building, but their web URL reads “The One Ill Building.” Another one (I did not think of this last night) is anything starting with “artisinal.” Artisinalcheese.com reads “Art Is Anal Cheese”. I probably would not have mentioned that one in the company of a 15 year old, although I did go ahead with probably the most famous URL-in-need-of-a-hyphen. A store called Pen Island can be found at their PENISLAND.net url. That made the kid (and my sister) giggle.
His film-making class is making a trip to New York soon. They got their itinerary last night. It sounds insane the amount of places they plan to see in a few days time. But the first stop is none other than the Museum of the Moving Image, which is basically across the street from me in Astoria. I might try to make an appearance, depending how early they are there. It’s one of these trips where every minute of the day is planned, so getting away on their own is about impossible.
Diane was reading off the list of places they are supposed to see. One of them was Ellen’s Stardust Diner. I said what I said to my friend Melissa when she told me she was working there: “Oh, God, I hate that place.” Everyone laughed. I also admitted that I am no fan of the Museum of the Moving Image, not that this should influence his experience there. Other destinations include the Top of the Rock, Times Square, Radio City Music Hall, Chelsea Market, The High Line, and I don’t remember what else. The organizers have never done a tour like this before and I have to wonder if they even know what they are doing. MoMI as a first stop makes sense, since they are flying into LaGuardia. But Top of the Rock and Radio City are on different days, and Radio City is followed by the Chelsea Market, while it has been declared that NO ONE WILL BE RIDING A SUBWAY. Oh and they are also going to B&H. At first I’d ask WHY? But these are film-making students so I guess there’s some appeal. And it is kind of a cool place, with the free candies and floating baskets.
Uncle Fats is the first bar I have ever been to in Tampa. All was fine until a singer took the stage. He did a few songs that were innocuous, including Jim Croce’s “Operator”, which I think is the greatest payphone song ever written. But the fourth song was an original, and it was so bad I could not fucking believe it. He was trying to sound like Pavarotti but he was so bad it was making me sick. I had to leave.
All good. I’m going out into the noonday sun. Going to send this in case I spontaneously combust, leaving no trace of this magnificent thought stream.
