Read and Burn

Back when I was writing press releases for the University of Florida, I had a professor turn the tables and start asking me questions. He wanted to know what newspaper I read. I told him the St. Pete Times, and I’m sure I had a good rationale because I was in my 20s and had lots of reasons and justifications and speeches for why I liked or disliked things.“That’s a good paper,” he said. “But they go overboard on all that ‘the moon hung lightly in the fog-misted night’ stuff. Sometimes I just want to know who got murdered, you know?”

The professor had a point. I’m not opposed to a little poetry or finesse, but journalism school, years of simple punk rock, and my shattered attention span have me screaming, “Get to the point,” or “take that ‘word symphony’ back to creative writing class,” when an author gets too overblown.Which brings me to Love and Death in the Sunshine State, a book about the disappearance of a motel owner on Anna Maria Island which is about 10 minutes from where I grew up. It's where we went to the beach. My first girlfriend lived there. I was interested to see how it described the place, especially since the book got pretty good reviews.

Man, did that thing make me mad.

Author Cutter Wood hangs out on Anna Maria Island for a week, gets obsessed with the murder/disappearance and halfway attempts to investigate. Actually, his half-assed investigation is my favorite part of the book, where he’ll sleep until 10 or 11, show up to interviews unprepared,  and try to guilt the motel owner into giving him a reduced rate. Hell, I’d totally read a book about a lazy detective. Somebody get on that!

I think I hate Cutter Wood. I want Oprah to make him cry on the TV like she did to that Million Little Pieces fraud. I want him to be forced to grade his dumb students’ short stories for eternity while Jimmy Buffet plays on a loop. I want Donald Trump to be his roommate. I want the stupid typewriter he uses (yes, of course he uses a typewriter and has to mention it) to run out of ribbon right before he types out another overwritten “poetic” description of Florida.

Incidental characters sound like mashups of Tom Waits and Jimmy Buffet songs, and I don’t really think Woods actually talked or listened to them giving their “I’m just a sunburned carney worker propping up the bar here, but let me tell you some hard-earned wisdom about women and life” jazz. I grew up in Florida. I’ve ridden busses. I’ve worked terrible jobs. I’ve heard those guys all my life. They’re not that poetic.

It's also full of mistakes that are easy enough to fix in the age of Google. Mr. Bones is a bbq restaurant, not a bar. I don’t even think they have a bar. Hernando DeSoto died near the Mississippi River, not in Florida. The name of "The Sarasota Paper" is the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Tourist season is generally in the colder months. After mistakes like these, I’m a bit leery that he really saw a cook give himself a blood sugar test in a greasy spoon that smells like nail polish remover because it’s next to a nail salon in a strip mall. I also don’t believe the young woman that takes a birth control pill and a Flintstones vitamin every morning.  Do they even make Flintstones vitamins anymore?

You could say that the true crime book started, or at least turned respectable with In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s blending of reporting and novelistic tools to create a work that was able to get into the characters’ thoughts and motivations. You know what Truman Capote didn’t do? Dedicate over half of his book  to chapters about the author falling in love and moving in with his elementary school crush and teaching students he thinks are stupid and attending parties.

He also, from what I remember didn’t cover the thing in the most florid, overwritten prose that I’m not going to give an example of because I’ve already returned the book and trying to remember it angries up my blood. 

Sometimes you just want to know who got murdered, you know?

Return to the Sea

Years ago I received some advice from a wise old Native American. I had just moved back to Gainesville after spending a year in Atlanta delivering food and felt that I had basically wasted a year of my life. I didn't like Atlanta, but in truth, I didn't really give it much of a chance.

"Remember," he said, in a voice resonating with ancient wisdom, "Never live somewhere that isn't within a half hour of water."

Technically, that ancient Native American was really just one of my friends, and there was a very good chance that one or both of us were drunk on King Kobra malt liquor at the time, but I've remembered his advice ever since.

I'm no "Salt Life" guy, but I can't deny that the ocean has a pull on me, a calming effect, probably from growing up near it. Again, if I grew up in Nebraska, I'd probably be waxing philosophical about the meditative effects of wheatfields, so take my psychological musings with a grain of salt. It's one of my homemade therapeutic tools, along with punk rock and the healing power of a good drunk. 

The past few months, hell, past the year or so has been full of death and a strange, nagging feeling similar to waking up from a bad dream - you can't really remember what happened, you just know enough to realize you should feel bad or upset somehow. Then you wake up more and the feeling fades away.

A friend's dad had recently passed away. He was one of the few adults in my teenage years who treated me with respect and interest, even when that respect wasn't actually earned or deserved. Coming closely on the heels of losing another friend, this sort of seemed like a psychic last straw.

Since I am an unattached grown man who can take time off from work, I decided to take a trip. I didn't really have an idea as to where I was going, I just felt the urge to go somewhere.

I ended up in Bradenton. I didn't tell anyone, mostly because it wasn't planned, and partly because once I ended up there, I felt like being anonymous. Sure, I can be anonymous just as easily in Jacksonville, but it wasn't the same somehow.

I didn't shop around. I got a room at the first place I saw close to the beach. I bought some trunks and walked into the Gulf of Mexico. It was warm, and I could see little transparent fish swimming near the shore. It felt right. I felt like the kid at the end of The 400 Blows when he finally makes it to the ocean. Except of course, I knew all about the Gulf and that kid had never seen the ocean. Thinking about it, maybe I wasn't anything like that kid at all, and the only thing close to the French new wave were the European tourists gazing in disbelief at my pale, almost translucent skin.

The song "Drowned" off the Who's Quadrophenia kept running though my head in a loop as I swam and floated around for about an hour. 

Let me flow into the ocean. Let me get back to the sea.

I didn't think I was stressed, but floating out there in the Gulf I could feel the anxiety leaving my body and floating away in the water, probably out to Mexico.

I got out to get some food. Driving around the island (which is what we called the beach), I was struck by how many ghosts inhabited it now. That's where my first girlfriend and I used to go to watch the sunset and mess around. That's the channel where my dad and I would fish in. Both of them are dead. I was playing Quadrophenia and thinking how I had probably listened to this album on the same beach probably 25 years ago.

I ate middling fish tacos and listened to poor renditions of Bob Marley, Jimmy Buffet*, and Van Morrison while I drank a fruity drink and watched an angry sunset. I listened to the tourists and thought of ways to butt into their conversations just so I could insert some lie about being a tourist from the Midwest finally getting to see the Gulf.

See, I told you it was angry.

I came back hours later after the sun had set. The night was cloudy. The water was cold but I needed to get back in. I acclimated and started swimming.

I wanted to feel something. Something more than just the absence of stress from earlier. I wanted to feel my muscles burning, my lungs aching for breath, and hopefully avoid any Jaws or Kraken beneath me.

I swam out as far and as fast as I could, then stopped and treaded water. I panted in the cold water for a while, then dove as far down as I could before my sinuses threatened to implode or a Loch Ness Monster noticed me, then flew back up. I could still see the white sand of the beach, so I knew I was OK, even if I was starting to realize that maybe this wasn't one of my smarter ideas, what with the sea monsters probably starting to wake up.

In The Postman Always Rings Twice the protagonist wants to swim as far as he can in the ocean until he can't muster any more energy and just sort of let nature take its course in a sort of passive suicide. I didn't have anything that drastic in mind, and plus, I hadn't helped murder a diner owner to get with his wife, so my conscience was clear.

I swam back, walked to my motel and spent the rest of the night watching cable in bed, feeling worn out, both psychically and physically.

The next morning I got up early and drove home after a great night's sleep. Once again, I had stumbled on to a perfect homemade therapy - something to do with salt water, anonymity, and shark avoidance. Someday the American Psychiatric Association will recognize me for my services. I'm not sure where exactly my statue should be erected, but I have several majestic poses already picked out.



* Trick question! As a native Floridian, there are no good versions of Jimmy Buffet.

Pants on Fire

"Man, I just can't believe it."

The words came from the guy sitting next to me in study hall.  They were punctuated with a heavy theatrical sigh. Let's call the speaker Steve.

I sat there trying to focus on whatever I brought to study hall, but Steve wouldn't let up. He now complimented his heavy sighs with some dramatic head shaking.

I knew Steve would keep this up until I made some sort of comment, so I waded in.

"Uh...you OK?"

"Yeah...I guess. Sigh. I've got this girlfriend up in New York. Last week she was murdered by some drug dealers. Luckily, my uncle lives up there and he's got a bunch of friends from 'Nam who have all sorts of killer weapons. They know the cops can't do anything, so they're gonna take 'em down. I'm supposed to go up there for the funeral and meet them and blahblahblah..."

I had seen that Charles Bronson movie on TV last night as well, but let Steve keep whispering the plot, spiced in with declarations of his fighting and weapon abilities while I haphazardly went about my work. These stories had been going on for a while, and while I didn't really encourage them, they were fascinating just for their sheer audacity. He was taking a chance that I hadn't seen the movie he was plagiarizing as well as banking on the fact that I wouldn't call him out on any of his fantastical tales.

Which I didn't, so I guess the guy knew his audience.

It's funny - people feel compelled to share their secrets with me all the time. I've had countless conversations that start with "I'm really not supposed to tell anyone this..." or end with "I guess I really shouldn't have told you that."  It still happens, and I'm not really sure why. Maybe because I can be counted on to keep a secret unless it makes a really funny story. Maybe I have a trusting face?

But Steve's tales were something else. I was awed at the sheer audacity of them, if not their originality. They were generally blatant rewrites of whatever action movie had struck his fancy lately, interspersed with digressions on Steve's fighting skills.

I fancied myself an experienced liar, but my lies were utilized to get out of trouble or used as an occasional spice to liven up a story. I have completely grown out of such childish antics and would like to remind readers that all stories I post are run through a battery of fact-checkers, which explains why I'm down to like one story a month now.

But back to Steve. His penchant for stealing storylines was emblematic of a bigger problem. He was also highly susceptible to '80s media. At one point he became obsessed with the hit TV show Miami Vice, like a lot of people at the time. Unlike most people, he took it a bit farther and started dressing like a high school version of Don Johnson.

Of course, a lot of other people probably did that. What they didn't do, however, was go undercover.

Apparently there were a few convenience stores that would sell booze to underage kids. Steve would go into them dressed like a mini Don Johnson, buy some beer, then call the cops. Or maybe he was wearing a wire already, who knows.

I didn't really drink in high school, and honestly thought that the kids hanging out in parking lots getting drunk every weekend lacked imagination, but even I considered this a Benedict Arnold-like strike against the kids.

That was the last I heard of Steve. After we had both successfully completed study hall I didn't see him anymore, which was fine with me. It took a lot of psychic energy to act halfway interested in recycled action movie plots every day.

Occasionally I'd think about the guy, wondering if he had picked a new persona or had finally gotten comfortable enough with himself that he didn't have to do stuff like that anymore. Adolescence is a time to put on different guises and characters, and although most kids didn't take it to the extremes Steve did, we were all in the process of figuring out who our real selves were.

Then I'd forget about the guy, harnessing my mindpower to decipher the lyrics to punk rock songs, where the best skate spots were, or the best way to get my money's worth at the Wendy's buffet.

Years later I was working at a film developing place in the mall and I see Steve saunter up. He was a mall security guard, or possibly had bought a really good replica uniform from the same place he bought his Don Johnson getup from.

He didn't recognize me, and I didn't say anything to him. Actually, I couldn't even if I wanted to, since he was telling my co-worker some story about trying out for the Pittsburgh Pirates, who had spring training in Bradenton. After he left, I told my co-worker, "Hey, uh, I know that guy, and he makes up a lot of stuff."

"Oh, that's just Steve," she said.

Old Follks at Home

Bradenton, at least my little corner of it, was a strange place to grow up in. When my parents first moved there, there weren't many kids in our neighborhood for my sister and I to play with. There was also a prevailing parenting philosophy at the time that if kids weren't doing yardwork or domestic work, they should be out doing ...something or other until dinner time. That's how my sister and I made friends with a lot of old people.

Our street was full of elderly people - I remember at least two of them referred to as "The Colonel." You'd see them out watering their yards or smoking cigars and they'd talk to you. Somehow my sister and I decided to take our old person relationship to the next level.

I definitely remember us hanging out in a lot of sun rooms, Florida rooms, and living rooms (I sort of think all of these are the same room). Sometimes our elderly neighbors would give us cookies or candy, and we'd talk about...jeez, I have no idea. School? What else could we talk about? The houses were shaded by palm trees and you could see the quartz crystals sparkling on the outside walls. The rooms were heavily air-conditioned, so much so that you could almost see your breath indoors. You could also vaguely smell the residue of decades worth of cigarette residue on the walls.

Sometimes WDUV would be on lightly in the background, making me think now that we were part of the entertainment for cocktail  hour.

Funny thing is, I don't ever remember an invitation, I just remember going up to the door, like you would with an age-appropriate friend.


I do remember a couple of the old guys telling me some pretty cool WWII stories, but I've forgotten most of them, only retaining the impression of hanging out in the cold Florida living rooms while the ceiling fans whirred above.

I don't know what the old people got out of these visits - I guess they got to hang out with some little kids for an hour or so until we all sort of mutually decided our visiting time was up.

I also remember cutting through people's yards and gardens regularly - whether on our way to the bus stop in the morning, or just deciding to play in someone's back yard other than our own. There were lots of houses with landscaping full of ferns and palms dark enough that you could pretend you were in a jungle. There was also a family of wild parrots in the neighborhood that would screech occasionally to add authenticity.

We didn't have a strong concept of property rights, and luckily this is before Florida became synonymous with shooting people, and I guess nobody really minded a pair of kids trespassing through their property at the time. If they did, they never said anything about it.

Again, I realize that this is another of those stories that makes it sound like I grew up in the '30s or something, but if you think about it, culturally, the early '80s were still really the '70s. Then you have to subtract a few years for it being Florida, then another few years for it not being Tampa or Miami, and ....uh, do a little more subtraction, and you've ended up with 1964. That seems about right.

Aunt Mary's All Alone

My dad's funeral was on a Saturday. I left work early the previous Monday when I got the phone call and spent the rest of the week in a daze. I obviously knew he was gone, but it didn't seem altogether real, that someone I knew for my whole life (and had known me even longer) had just been sort of disappeared from the earth.

I spent a lot of time on the couch, sort of halfway paying attention to movies we had watched together, texting and talking to family and friends, and trying to wrap my head around his death.

Before my dad died, I had planned to drive down to Gainesville for a Radon reunion show that weekend. While by my estimations I have seen about 46,000 Radon "reunion" or "original lineup" or "final" shows, it's always a good time, and it brings all the oldsters out of the woodwork so we can drink and sing and act the fool away from our responsibilities and set the clock back about 20 years or so to recharge our worn out batteries.

While I obviously wasn't going to go to Gainesville Saturday night, I decided to spend Thursday night in Tampa, catch Radon in Ybor City, then drive down to Bradenton the following morning.

I was a bit conflicted about this plan. Should I really be having fun so close to my dad's death? Sure, I could tell myself that dad would want me to have a good time, but that seemed sort of hollow and somewhat disrespectful. In the end, I decided that it would be good to have a little fun to step into normal life for a little while and to steel myself against the funeral. Sure, that was a pretty cheap rationalization, but it was what I was going with.

I had a great afternoon; sure, sadness lurked around the corners, but I hung around band practice, drank some beers and talked with great friends that I haven't seen in a while, some of whom had gone through losing a parent and offered whatever advice or sympathy they could.

Remember that band in college, that one who might not be technically proficient, and maybe the drummer would slow down halfway through the set, or the guitars might be out of tune, or the singer might forget a verse, but it didn't matter, because after a few songs you and your friends transformed into a single organism, jumping and singing and making the wooden floor creak and bend under your weight while you could transcend, just for a second, the day-to-day cares and frustrations and become one, unified mass of humanity? Well, Gainesville was (and still is) lousy with those bands, and I was counting on Radon to bring that feeling back for a few minutes that night.

And they didn't disappoint. I knew the song that was going to kill me. "Grandma's Cootie," a song about an aunt left alone by the death of her husband who takes a ride on a roller coaster and sees the beach from the top of the coaster.



They played it about halfway through the set, right before "Stepmother Earth," a song that always made me think about the complicated relationship between fathers and sons, even though there's not really anything specific to that reading in the song.

Tears welled as I sang along with old friends and strangers, but they were different somehow. They were sadness mixed with that feeling of transcendence along with a bit of happiness. I could almost grasp a theory about loss and death and the power of friendship and love, but the music and gin and tonics clouded my thinking and it remains just out of reach.

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Most people freeze their musical tastes in their 20s, and while I have continued seeking out different genres and styles since then (just ask anyone who has had to endure my "Summertime Reggae/Ska/Rocksteady/Dub" playlist at a cookout), the music and friends I made in my 20s have a special place in my heart. You can use that feeling to live in the past and moan about how things aren't as exciting now as they were back then, or you can take a bit of that feeling now and then to jump start your heart, to realize that you are part of something, that you have friends and family who love you, and that no matter how shitty life can be at times, you will endure and thrive.

I'm not saying that that night cured me, I continued (and continue) to have bad moments and bad days. But it did help, and if the suits at the American Psychiatric Association will ever recognize my groundbreaking research into punk rock music as grief therapy, I feel many more people will be helped.

Spanks. Spanks a Lot

I'm always astounded when what I think are simple, universal experiences are anything but. I mean, yeah, I realize that some things, like your parents hiding ancient Indian skulls in your closet or being forced to pick up mangoes as a child are fairly esoteric, but most of what I write here I just naively assume are experiences that just about everyone who grew up in roughly the same time period as I did can share and laugh at.

So yeah, I'm always a little amazed that people are shocked that I went to a high school that still spanked students.

I grew up in a time when most parents spanked their kids. Most parents don't spank anymore which is probably a good thing. All it really teaches you (or taught me, anyway) is that there is someone bigger and more powerful than you who can cause you physical pain, so it's best to sneak around and not get caught. Or that you can inflict pain on someone smaller than you, like say, a convenient younger brother or sister.

I was spanked as a kid, and I hated it. Looking back, my parents had to live with me 24/7. I'm surprised they didn't beat me more just on principle. The weird thing was, it always seemed like any adult back then had free reign to grab you and start spankin.' I remember the first time I got spanked by a teacher. I was laughing at a comment someone next to me made in my second grade class. My teacher grabbed me by the arm, lifted me out of my desk into the dark, deserted hallway and gave me two licks with a ruler. While it hurt physically, the worst part was having to go back into class and sit down while everyone knew I was bad and got spanked. Also, I was shaking and trying not to cry.

Of course, that was in Mississippi, so I was probably lucky I didn't end up on a junior chain gang.

There were always teachers you had to look out for. There was a teacher later in elementary school who was notorious for shaking the hell out of kids. I know, because it happened to me. Once again, I was laughing, this time in a line, when she came up and said, "You think that's funny? Do you think this is funny," as she shook my little fourth grade body around like a paint can. This was a public high school in Florida. No other teachers came running up saying, "Hey, crazy teacher, I think you've shaken him enough," or "Hey! You know you can't shake kids, crazy teacher! We had that big staff meeting about that!" She wasn't even my teacher, just a woman who saw a kid who needed some shaking and decided she was the one for the job.

Most kids who grew up in the same era have similar stories; whether they themselves were spanked or shook, or they saw or heard about classmates getting similar punishments. This is probably why when a kid was called to the office, the entire class had to go "Oooooooooooooooh."

But what really throws people is when I casually mention that I was spanked in high school. In the 1980s. That's right, while everyone else in the country was dancing around to Kajagoogoo, having their John Hughes-esque day-glo good times, students at our high school were regularly spanked by adults.

I'm not sure what you had to do to get licks. I only remember getting them for talking/laughing in class (careful readers can detect a trend here) and once for getting three tardies. I don't know if girls got spanked or that was just a punishment for the guys. I do remember the last time I went in. I was a senior, which really seems too old for someone to get spanked. The dean gave me a choice of three licks or a three day suspension. I took the licks, since my parents wouldn't have to find out.

He called in a secretary. Apparently you had to have a witness. She looked at me and said, "Oh, I don't like it when they're little like this. They remind me of my grandchildren." I remember thinking, "You have the power to stop this, lady. Stand up and say something, and we can all walk out of here."

No dice. I grabbed a desk, took out my wallet, and spread my legs. Licks were delivered via an actual wooden paddle. The first one took a while, I guess he was warming up or trying to build suspense. It wasn't too bad, but holy crap did the next two sting. Just like elementary school, I didn't cry (plus, by now I had the advantage of being almost a full-grown man), but I was pretty shaky as I left the office.

In the years since I've had a number of jobs that required me to do things I didn't necessarily want to do, so I sympathized with the dean a bit more. The guy got a degree in education, thinking he was going to mold young minds, and instead he goes home each day with a sore shoulder and cramped hand from spanking teenage boys.

Years later, in my erotic life, I met several partners who liked the occasional spank. I am above all a gentleman, so I obliged. I'll admit, it was pretty fun, even though part of me was thinking, "didn't she get enough of this in high school?" Then I realized she probably had a normal upbringing where she wasn't getting spanked by deans for being late to class three times.

 It also made me wonder if maybe I was wrong in giving that dean the benefit of the doubt.

I Want Your Skull

You never know what you're going to find at my parent's house. With their garage sale obsession and shall we say, offbeat tastes, it's like P.T. Barnum, the Addams Family, and the Smithsonian Institution decided to merge their collections together and display it inside a suburban Florida home. you can turn up just about anything there; a stuffed bobcat, a Native American corn grinder, a barber chair, or a shrunken head that may or may not be real.

Not to say that they're hoarders. Hoarders have towers of old newspapers and fast food cups that they can't part with; my parents have collections and oddities. Well, I guess they would be collections if they were restricted to one or two interests and were more organized. I guess there's a fine line between collector and hoarder now that I think about it.

And you can't walk around a hoarder's house without sticking to their weird trash tunnels. You can walk about my parent's house with no problem. Well, except for the garage. You might get tetanus from the stacks of ancient tools and other outside garage sale finds.

Over Thanksgiving and Christmas I was poking around in closets, mostly to find my old collection of shark's teeth, but managing to turn up a Nazi helmet that I'm pretty sure my granddad took off of Hitler, two riding crops, two mandolins my great-grandfather used to play, a couple of Indian skulls, and an old self-portrait I did for high school art class.

Oh the skulls? Yeah, two skulls. Real human skulls that once held someone's thoughts and feelings. I thought it was odd that there were two skulls. I mean, I knew we had one - it was a skull minus the jawbone mounted on a black display that was apparently once owned by the Smithsonian, picked up by my parents at a garage sale in Bradenton, Florida.

I realize that most people might find it odd that a house would even contain one skull not connected to a living person, but those people have obviously never met my parents.

My mom was hanging around while I was exploring, trying to trick me into taking home some Cosby sweaters, so I asked her why exactly there was a half a human skull in the closet of what used to be my bedroom. The skull had a number painted on it, like a museum exhibition, so I figured it was an old museum piece that somehow made its way to Florida, like the original skull.

She got kinda weird.

"Oh that," she said in a tone I knew that was trying to shut down discussion. "I found that in Mississippi years ago. We found all sorts of artifacts. You've seen them."

"Yeah, but this is a human skull. You don't seem too excited about it. I mean, everybody's found arrowheads, but how many people actually find a skull?"

I asked some more questions, but she didn't reveal much more other than the fact that she dug it up with my dad sometime in Mississippi. My girlfriend was there at the time, so maybe Mom thought she was a snitch from the Bureau of Indian Affairs or something, and I let it slide.

But I couldn't stop wondering about it, in the same way I kept thinking that I really needed to bring that Nazi helmet home with me, even though I guess I couldn't really display it or anything, and if I hid it in a closet someone might find it and think I was a secret Nazi instead of just holding on to an important family artifact proving that my granddad took Hitler's helmet and...wait, what were we talking about again?

Oh yeah, the skull. I re-asked her over Christmas and she seemed sort of blase about the whole thing. My parents took a bunch of archaeology classes at Mississippi State and would go out on weekends and afternoons looking for artifacts. I remembered that because I was either with them and bored poking around field in the hot sun, or at home with my sister hoping they didn't get some ancient curse put upon them, and in effect, me.

So they turned up this skull. I asked how they knew it was an ancient Native American skull and not some fresh Mississippi murder, and they both kind of said that although they must have skipped the days when Professor Jones discussed ethics in archaeology, they paid attention the day he talked about how to determine a skull's age.

They cataloged their find and carried it with them for years, telling no one about it, with the skull's evil powers growing yearly until for some reason they decided to store it in the closet of my old bedroom. I'm sure it's what the proud Native American would have wanted, to be interred with my sister's old textbooks and my high school letter jacket.

Although now that I think about it, I'm not really 100 percent sure that skull wasn't in my bedroom while I was growing up, cursing me daily with its mystical rays. That would explain a lot, actually.

I took home the mandolins, left the Nazi helmet, and didn't touch the cursed skull. That thing can stay in Bradenton. I'm sure they've worked up a tolerance for the curses by now.

Hey, I just realized. I hope they don't get in trouble for having a skull now that I made jokes about it on the internet. Well, let's just say I made the whole thing up. Yeah.

Agony of Defeet

I had this thing against wearing shoes when I was a teenager. I don't know where it came from, and as with most things from that time period, it seems pretty ridiculous in retrospect.

I'd drive down to the store to pick up a Coke or whatever, gripping the gas pedal with my toes like a chimp, then walk over the hot, disgusting cigarette butt and spit-encrusted parking lot to go inside the store. I also didn't carry a wallet, so I'd pull out a wad of crumpled bills, Spicoli-style to pay the cashier.

I have no idea why I did this. Maybe I was trying to reinforce Florida stereotypes. Maybe I thought shoes and wallets were for chumps who were brainwashed by society into conforming to what The Man thought was acceptable.

The soles of my feet must have been tough enough to walk on hot coals.

One night I was with some friends from my community college newspaper. The newspaper class was in the late afternoon, and a group of us would hang out in the newspaper office late into the night. Sometimes we were working on the paper, usually we were just wasting time.

I wore shoes at school, so I have no idea why I was barefoot at the time, but there I was, barefoot as Fred Flintstone. We were hungry, so we ended up at Denny's.

As we walked in, the server pointed to the "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service" sign, which I had ignored in my hunger for a Superbird.

"You can't come in here without shoes," she said.

 "What? Who made that rule? Mussolini? This is totally bogus," I thought, or possibly said. 

We walked back to my car in defeat. Hey! I had a solution! I was going to get my Superbird after all.

I had a brown marker in the car. Why did I have a brown marker and not a pair of shoes in my car? That is a question I can't answer.

The paper's art director helped me decorate my feet into a pair of brown shoes. They didn't look half bad. Sure, you could see my toes, and the brown wasn't really evenly applied, but they looked good enough to pass. I think she might have even Sharpie'd some shoelaces on there.

I was totally ahead of the curve on this one.

You know you're getting older when you start to identify with the authority figures in the movies when you once supported the free-spirited kids. I mean, jeez, just shut up and do your detention, stupid Breakfast Clubbers. Don't you think the Dean has other things to do with his Saturday?

Poor Dean Wormer just wanted the parade to go off without a hitch.

I was promptly and rightfully kicked out of Denny's. I never got my Superbird. When I recall that night, I don't think of a free-thinking kid challenging a stupid rule and causing some squares to question their assumptions about their regimented life, I think of the poor server who was working the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift and had to put up with a smartass who really should know better.

I'd like to think I learned something that night, and started wearing shoes like a normal person, but I know for a fact that wasn't true, since my last night in Bradenton I got a ticket for operating a vehicle without shoes. I didn't even know that was a law.

I'd also like to think the experience of walking around shoeless added to my distaste of men walking around in sandals or flip-flops. Seriously. Nobody wants to see that stuff. It's almost as bad as marker shoes.

Talkin' Turkey

The summer I was 18, my parents took a vacation with my sister and left me at home. I had a job and couldn't get off (I didn't try very hard), and was considered responsible enough to stay alone for a week or two. It was awesome. My friends and I built a ramp the second my parent's truck rounded the corner, and I was free to lie around the house, watch TV during the day, and generally get a taste of what life would soon be like with no parents around. Well, in a much nicer house then I would ever have.

I had to make all my own meals, which wasn't really that big a deal. I could cook, and had enough money from my paycheck and whatever my parents left me that I could eat in Bradenton's finest restaurants. Also, I could drink Coke (well, Publix cola) for every meal to give me extra energy for skating and watching TV.

One afternoon I was in the garage, looking for something to do when I decided to check the refrigerator. My sister and I generally stayed away from the garage refrigerator, because it would occasionally give you a nasty little shock if you weren't properly grounded, and really, who needed the hassle?

But today, I would have gladly taken the shock when I saw what was waiting for me in the freezer. A whole turkey, all wrapped up and ready to cook.

Now, I love turkey. Love it. Love carving it up, love sneaking bites while everyone else is looking away, love leftover Thanksgiving sandwiches, just love the stuff. I'd say my turkey love is second to none, but I'm pretty sure I'm way down on that list.

So naturally, I had to cook that turkey. No more Wendy's salad bar buffets. I could save my money and have a Thanksgiving feast for the rest of the week. I bought mashed potatoes, dressing, all the ingredients I could find. I also invited my girlfriend over for the next day. I mean, what is more romantic than a Thanksgiving feast? Nothing. That's what. Nothing.

I was up early the next morning. I remembered that from my parents cooking turkey. I kept the bird in the refrigerator overnight, figuring that would be enough to thaw it out.

It still felt about as frozen as when I first discovered it, so I ran water over it. I thought I remembered seeing them do that. Then I set the oven for whatever the turkey wrapper told me.

Listening to NPR during Thanksgiving drives in the years since, I've learned about the Turkey Hotline, where you can call and get advice on how to cook your turkey. I didn't know about that then, and even if I did, I don't know if they staff the phones in the middle of summer.

So I had to wing it. After soaking it for a while, I set it in the oven. It was still frozen, but the oven would take care of that.

Hours later, the turkey still seemed kind of hard, but I was definitely making progress. I concentrated on the other aspects of my feast.

When dinnertime came around, the inner part of the turkey was still sort of frozen, even after about 9 hours in the oven, but it was just the two of us. We probably wouldn't get that far into the bird's insides, especially after the romance of the roasted turkey overtook us. And yeah, parts of the turkey looked a little pink and rubbery, almost raw, but we could easily avoid those parts. No problem.

Whenever I got hungry over the next few days, I'd take a big hunk out of the turkey with my hands, feeling like a Viking. I did notice a weird smell throughout the house, but I was an 18 year old guy living on my own. I just thought it was natural.

When my parents got home the next week, the first thing my dad said was, "What's that smell?"
I just figured it was me living in my own filth, so didn't say anything, but my parents seemed really concerned, walking around sniffing the air like hound dogs.

They located the culprit fairly quickly. Apparently you're not supposed to cook an unfrozen turkey. But if you must, you have to cook it completely. I didn't even really notice the toxic clouds of salmonella leaking from the refrigerator. I just figured the smell was just me skating all day and being lackadaisical about showers. And yeah, after they pointed it out to me, the insides of the turkey did look sort of black.

It's a wonder I wasn't dead or full of food poisoning, but I guess that can be attributed to having a teenaged cast-iron stomach. Now just thinking about that turkey is enough to give me the dry heaves.

You would think that an experience like that would keep me away from turkey for a while, but I'm happy to report that I didn't learn a thing from the experience and am still as deeply in love with turkey as I was as a teenager. Some things are eternal.

All We Are is Dust in the Wind

I'm not sure how I ended up getting a minor in anthropology.

Actually, I do. Back in pre-computer days you had to register for college classes manually. By the time the scribe etched out your schedule on your tablets, most of your day was gone. When I got to the front of the line, all the classes I wanted were full. So I ended up in anthropology.

I should have seen this coming -  the same thing happened on my first day of high school. I showed up with everyone else, but somehow my registration wasn't there. The principal said, "Well, it'll probably show up tomorrow. As of now, we have no record of you. Maybe you should just go back home." So I walked back home and missed my first day.

Hey, maybe I was the problem.

Anthropology wasn't too bad once I got over the fact that I wasn't going to minor in art history (where the real money was).  Except for Folk Medicine.

Folk Medicine was one of the classes I got stuck in because nothing else was open. The workload was insane - I still have a suspicion that I somehow ended up in a graduate class. There was a ton of reading, and none of it was what I thought it was going to be - helpful hints like, "to get rid of a cold, take half an onion and bury it at the crossroads at midnight while petting a black cat." No, instead, we read a lot of dry articles about epidemiology and other words I didn't understand.

There was a cool section of the class devoted to a disease spread through cannibalism,which kept me interested in between ...jeez, I don't remember anything else about that class, other than my thinking I was in way over my head.

Speaking of over my head, our final paper was supposed to be 30 pages. I had never written 30 pages before in my life. Just thinking about made me feel like I was supposed to turn in "Moby Dick" or "War and Peace."

Somehow I was able to do it. I have no idea what my topic was. Maybe something about cannibals or cavemen. I was pretty proud of myself. I mean, 30 pages? With an opening and ending and everything? There is no way I could pull that off today. As you've probably noticed, after like 6 paragraphs I get bored and trail off, post whatever I've done up to that point, and go to sleep.

This was also in the days of word processors, where you couldn't save your work. Well, you could, but not that much. Saving a 30 page paper at that point would have taken one of those huge NASA room-size computers, far beyond the processing capabilities of my Brother word processor.

I put the finishing touches on the paper while visiting my parents in Bradenton. It looked pretty impressive in the front seat as I drove back to Gainesville. I imagined I was a respected and famous author delivering his latest manuscript to his New York editors. "This is your best stuff yet," my sexy editor would say. "Let's celebrate by buying some new leather patches for your jacket for your Letterman appearance. Then we'll drink some martinis and have some sexy, literary sex."

But before that could happen, I had to stop in Tampa to buy records. I was still in the throes of a fairly serious record collection habit, and had to stop in Tampa every trip between Gainesville and Bradenton to get my fix.

I rolled down the windows as I pulled off the interstate, possibly in an effort to sniff out vinyl treats.

I'm sure you can see where this is going.

Out of the corner of my eye, I catch weeks' worth of work fly out of my open window onto Fletcher Avenue. As I watched sheets of paper that I had worked on floating in the breeze like a parade, I had a sudden revelation.

Like Bill Murray taught us in Meatballs, "it just didn't matter." Sure, these pieces of paper represented hard work, but in the long run, what did it really mean? Would anyone remember how I did in some class I didn't care about years later? And why was I knocking myself out in school, anyway? Why not just relax for a few years - maybe I should mellow out and wander through America, having real experiences, exploring my feelings, and communicating deeply with other searching strangers.

Then I remembered that I don't like exploring my feelings or talking to strangers and realized I had to corral that term paper.

I screeched into a gas station and ran out into traffic, frantically trying to grab the floating papers.

I straightened everything out as best I could and tried to reassemble my masterwork. I was missing a handful of pages in the middle, and there was no way I could find them.

I stayed up all that night trying to recreate the linking pages from memory. It would have been easier if it were the beginning or the end where I could pad some stuff, but the middle was a lot harder to figure out.

I eventually came up with enough filler to finish my paper and ended up getting a C+. There were no marks on the paper. I'm not sure the professor even read it.

I don't think I've ever written anything that long since. I never got a sexy editor. You know how you'll have nightmares of being back in school and having to take a test you haven't prepared for? Every once in a while I'll have a dream I'm chasing those papers down Fletcher Avenue in Tampa.

The Old Man and the Sea

As a kid, most of my favorite books discussed scientific facts about dinosaurs. One of my absolute favorite books, however, was titled "A Little Old Man," which sounds like a title slapped on right before the book went to press.

"You still don't have a title? What's this book about? A little old man? Done. Roll the presses!"

Holy crap! I actually remembered the title and plot accurately!

Not much happened in the book. This little old man lives on an island by himself, does some chores, catches some fish and endures a hurricane. A boat washes up on shore after the storm, and he hangs out in the boat, finds a cat who has kittens and that's pretty much the end of the story.

I don't know why the man was marooned on the island, but he seemed happy. In fact, I really wanted to live on the old guy's island. He seemed to have everything he needed, he could catch fish when he got hungry, he got to explore an abandoned boat, and even had a pet cat.

When I read this book, my family didn't live anywhere near the water, but it seemed very peaceful and relaxing. Although why I wanted to relax as a kid is sort of a puzzling. What the hell was I looking to get away from?

This is where I wanted to retire to after another stressful day of being seven.

If the old man's island seemed interesting, the abandoned boat was even cooler. Several pages were devoted to the man exploring this boat before finding his cat. I was mesmerized by those pages. Maybe my later love of discarded, neglected items owed something to vague memories of the old man exploring this abandoned boat. Or perhaps the little guy finding and keeping a boat would inspire a lifelong affinity for scams in which I could get what I wanted with little or no work

Years passed and I forgot about the old man and his kick-ass solitary life. I was in college but back in Bradenton for Christmas Break. I had been in town for about a week, along with my friend Curt, and we were both planning to leave Sunday afternoon.

Curt called me early on a cold and rainy Sunday morning.

"Get up and come to my house."

As a twenty-something male, you could not ignore a message like that. Many adventures started from such a simple opening, and you certainly didn't want to miss out on any possible excitement.

So I got dressed and drove down to Curt's parent's house where he directed me to the DeSoto Memorial, a series of nature trails where Spanish conquistador, explorer, and Indian torturer Hernando DeSoto possibly landed hundreds of years ago.

"I was walking the dogs this morning and I found something," he said.

I knew better than to ask. It could be anything. Pirate gold, old Penthouse magazines, a secret trail to Crazy Nathan's* house, anything.

We parked the car and walked down the grey beach.

"Check it out," Curt said.

He gestured to a partially submerged houseboat about ten feet out in the river. Holy crap! Just like the little old man!

"The Law of the Sea says that if we occupy the boat, we own it."

I wasn't sure how Curt knew so much about maritime law, but this was intriguing.

We could totally fix it up, I thought. Screw going back to school. We could sail around the world, gaining knowledge of the seas. We'd catch fish when we got hungry. Dock in exotic ports all over the world. Maybe we'd even have a cat, like the old man.

"We could use my dad's canoe to get out there," Curt said.

"Yeah, that'd work," I replied, even though the thought of getting out on the swelling, cold river was taking some of my enthusiasm away.

"Yeah, we could do that," Curt said, his inflection matching my loss of enthusiasm.

After a couple of minutes we realized that we weren't going to occupy the houseboat, so we chucked some rocks at it and walked back to the car.

Like most ideas you have in your twenties, it made a much better idea than reality. My childhood dreams to own an abandoned houseboat would have to wait.

I still don't have my abandoned boat, but I'm constantly on the lookout. 





*Crazy Nathan was a crazy guy who we were somewhat obsessed with. It's a long story. I'll tell you some day.

White Christmas

When I was a kid, Christmas Day was mostly a relief after the ordeal of Christmas Eve. I was so excited to see my presents the next morning, but terrified that I hadn't been good enough to deserve any that I would end up throwing up out of anxiety by early evening.

As I grew older, I didn't get as excited about Christmas, possibly in an effort to save my stomach lining. But I would still get flashes of Christmas Spirit, even when I was a teenaged punk rocker and opposed to everything that normal people might like or take comfort in.

Christmas Eve 1989 was cold. Around midnight I was with my friends Curt and Jennifer at her mom's house. I remember driving down Riverside Avenue earlier to pick up Curt and getting caught in a slow-moving trail of cars looking at luminaria and Christmas lights. I was 19 at the time, so this boring old person wagon train was a personal affront to my mission that night, which was to speed as fast as possible down Riverside's twists and turns to pick up my friend. Now, of course, I'll watch the hell out of some luminaria and Christmas lights.

Curt and Jennifer were both home on Christmas break. I was still in Bradenton, making my way through community college. It was a strange time. My friends had moved away and I was working part time and making awesome grades, the first time since about elementary school, probably because I was actually trying for once. But I felt like my friends were out there growing and experiencing stuff while I was spinning my wheels back in my home town.

In those primitive days, contact was pretty much limited to letters, occasional phone calls, and the reliable passenger pigeon, so the few times a year we could get together meant a lot. They would tell me about Gainesville and Tallahassee and how I needed to get up there, fast. That's what we ended up talking about that night. I remember Jennifer had given me a copy of the No Idea zine, with the Mutley Chix/Crimprshine split 7", and like all punk rockers at the time, we were talking about Fugazi.* Jennifer had an advance copy of what would be "Repeater" and we played it over and over again.

"There's a whole world out there where people are creating and doing stuff," I thought. "And I've got to be a part of it."

But I was also genuinely happy to be with my friends. A little later I was driving home through the deserted streets after dropping Curt off. I was thinking how grateful I was to have such good friends and was pondering the future and sort of wondering what and where my place was.

My thoughts were interrupted by waves of pollen from the palm trees falling on my windshield. "Stupid pollen," I thought. "I'm probably going to be all stopped up tomorrow."

Wait a minute, that wasn't pollen at all. It was...it was snow!

I hadn't seen snow in years, not since I was a kid in Mississippi. And it was snowing on Christmas Eve! I stopped the car and let the snow (really little more than frozen rain) fall on my face and hands.

Driving the rest of the way home, I finally got it. The Christmas spirit. Like the best Christmas songs and entertainment, I was feeling happy and excited, but just a little melancholy and thankful at the same time. I hadn't felt that way in a while.

And then I realized why I hadn't really felt Christmasy the last few years. I was waiting for that pure rush of excitement I got opening presents as a kid. But adult Christmas wasn't just about excitement and happiness, it was the whole mixture, with a little bit of sadness and hope and thankfulness.

Christmas is Charlie Brown loving a crappy Christmas tree. It's Jimmy Stewart hugging the shit out of his family. It's the insanely sad lyrics to "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" or Shane McGowan slurring, "I could have been someone." It's Scrooge getting the miserliness scared out of him.

And it's also Dean Martin slurring though "Silver Bells" and dogs at a bandstand happily barking their way through "Jingle Bells," but that's a whole other story.

In the following years, there would always be a time, sometimes only a  brief moment when I could catch that feeling again. Joy, contentment, chemical compounds rushing out to fight seasonal depression, who knows what it actually was. But each year there would come a time when I'd be alone, feeling an incredible mix of contentment and happiness, mixed with just a tinge of sadness to make it all the more sweet.

Whatever your holiday traditions are, I hope you get to experience some of that, at least for a little while this year.











* In the late '80s/early '90s, every conversation between punk rockers would eventually come around to Ian MacKaye and/or GG Allin.

I'll House You

For a couple weeks in high school, my friend and I had our own house.
We didn't actually pay rent or live there or anything. We would just sort of hang out there every once in a while.

We were walking home one day after cross country practice and a celebratory bonus meal at 7-11 (that was when you'd buy a Big Gulp and stash a microwave burrito in the cup. The plastic wrapper kept it from getting wet) and got caught in one of Florida's summer downpours.

We sat under the carport of a house for sale waiting for the storm to stop. While discussing the dangers of misdiagnosed mental illness expressed in Suicidal Tendencies' "Institutionalized," we noticed the door to the house had Jalousie windows.

If you grew up in Florida, you know what Jalousie windows are, even if you don't know the name. They were those horizontal glass Venetian blind looking windows. Here, like in this picture I stole off the internet while searching for "old Florida horizontal glass venetian blind windows."

While they offered several  benefits to Florida homeowners, including brightness, an ability to catch breezes and a cool mid-century design, they had a few drawbacks, the main one being the fact that a couple of high school delinquents using no tools can take out enough of the glass panes to slip in the house in about 7 minutes.

It was strange once we were in the empty house. We were quiet and probably a little scared. Still, we figured if we got caught, we'd just say the door was open so we came in out of the rain.

We noticed the previous owners had left some stuff behind in their move. Nothing too interesting, some glasses and silverware, some food and supplies and a Penthouse magazine I let my friend keep, a move I instantly regretted.

We remained fairly respectful and quiet in the house that first day, and left soon after splitting our feast. Of course we were going to go back.

We couldn't wait to get out of practice the next day to break back into our new clubhouse. Again, we just sort of hung around inside, ate some shoplifted 7-11 treats and poked around to see what the owners had left behind that we missed the first day. It was a weird feeling; we knew we shouldn't be in there, and we still remained fairly quiet in the house. That would change soon.

We had been visiting our house fairly frequently when in a rare case of quitting a bad idea while we were ahead, we decided we should probably stop hanging out there. So we decided to go back one last time, but this time instead of exploring, we would dedicate our last day in the house to science and the arts.

Specifically, I had a science project that had vexed me for years while looking at my parent's sliding glass doors. If a scientist were to throw a glass at such a door, would the glass shatter on impact or would the momentum be enough to leave a cartoon-like hole in the door? While I had made many advanced mathematical equations, I still needed real-world testing, testing  my science hating parents would probably try to actively discourage.

So we tried it out. As a teenager, it is insanely liberating to break something. It is even more liberating to do so inside a house you aren't supposed to be in. The sound of the breaking glass was magnified through the empty house, and while we were dedicated scientists, we weren't robots - it was exhiliratingly funny.

The arts portion of the trip involved us squirting some left behind Elmer's glue on the floor and coating the design with a box of cereal we found in one of the cabinets. I can't recall exactly what we made, but I can almost guarantee there was at least one anarchy sign.

We threw all the abandonded food (including a bag of flour) we could find through the house, a glorious food fight against ... the house? Squares? Homeowners? The Man? Probably all of the above. We had brought along a can of spray paint and decorated the rest of the house with punk rock slogans and band logos, along with what I considered the crowning touch -  "LEAVE THIS EVIL HOUSE" in all caps above the mantle, as if a ghost got a hold of some haunted spray paint, leaving a terrifying warning to the human residents.

We left the house, carefully taking our spray paint can so it couldn't be dusted for prints, and walked away, never to return. And I can only speak for myself, but I remember feeling a bit depressed. Not only because we were walking away from so much  potential science and art, but because we had found a place where we were guaranteed not be hassled or oppressed, a place where we were free to create however much mess and trouble we wanted without facing any consequences of our actions.

Its sort of a sick joke that as a teenager you have all this extra energy built up and only a handful of acceptable ways to let it out. Once I become President, I will take all the nation's foreclosed homes and open them up to teenagers to vandalize and destroy. This would not only help the kids blow off steam, it would help the economy by employing workers and cleaners round the clock.

And in our case we actually did  help the economy, sort of. Years later we were telling the story of our house on the track team when an older runner got sort of quiet.

"My sister tried to buy that house," he said.

Oh shit. Was this guy gonna kick our ass for messing up his sister's house?

"Yeah, because it was so trashed, her and her husband got it for like, next to nothing."

So remember kids, vandalism is a win-win. Not only is it fun and stress-relieving, you also have a great chance of helping out some struggling homeowners.

The Mall Has It All

I have about a 20 minute window for shopping. Too much longer than that and I get sort of dizzy and bored and holy crap, why didn't I just order pants on the internet like a normal person instead of driving all the way out here on my day off.

This, of course, does not apply to the countless hours of my life I wasted digging through record and DVD stores, looking for that elusive catch that would make me a more well-rounded individual and, more importantly, the envy of my fellow nerds.

I didn't used to be this way. In fact, when I was in middle school I loved going to the mall. Loved it. In fact, the summer before high school a friend and I would spend almost all day there, even though we didn't have any money. I'd give the guy's name, but I haven't heard from him in years, and I don't want to sell him out in case he's running for office or something, you know? Me, I've got no prospects, so I don't mind implicating myself.

We would walk or ride our bikes there, which from what I remember was quite a trek. We almost always had less than five bucks between us, so we'd have to plot the best way to stretch it to last all day.

That was hard because we were addicted to video games. We'd usually start out in the arcade, which would take a couple bucks out of the pot right from the start, but what were we gonna do, not play Gauntlet?

We could usually go to a couple of the stores in the mall with single games and say the machine took our quarters and get a refund. The managers didn't really believe us, but we'd usually be able to get 50 cents out of that which was enough to keep the video game shakes from returning. If that didn't work, or we felt we had gone to that well a little too much, we could always play the video game systems in Sears, but that was a desperation move, sort of like alcoholics drinking vanilla extract.

Far away from Bradenton, in a wonderful land called California, the Summer Olympics were taking place. The commie countries had boycotted the games, giving America a huge advantage. Why did this matter to two kids in Florida? Well, McDonalds had a scratch off game where you'd win free food whenever America won an event. We'd buy a drink or small fries and almost always end up winning something else - thanks Carl Lewis! When people talk about missing the Cold War, I know exactly how they feel.

After our meal, it was time to hit the movies. We would hang around the outside of the theater until we found two ticket stubs on the ground, which was fairly easy, as nobody cared about littering back in those unenlightened days. We'd show them to the guy at the front, telling him we left to play video games if he ever asked, which hardly ever happened.

Once we got inside, it was relatively easy work to get into whatever R rated movie promised gore or nudity.

And the mid '80s were a glorious time for teen boys at the movies - Porky's rip offs, slasher movies, barbarian movies - you pretty much couldn't lose.

Like all good things, our Celebrated Summer at the mall had to end. One day the theater changed ticket colors,  so when we walked through, the ticket taker called the manager.

We were told to sit in a chair and wait for the manager. Naturally, as soon as ticket guy's back was turned we split up and took off running. I thought I had it made until I felt a tightness around my neck. Ticket guy had some good hustle and caught up to me, grabbing me by the back of my collar and throwing me to the floor.

I was hustled off to the security office and my parents were called. I was banned from the mall for a year. I'd like to think I didn't rat out my friend, but I don't really remember, so who knows. I probably told my parents it was all his idea.

I'd also like to think that this scare taught me that you can't get something for nothing, and scamming free food and movies was no way for a man to live, but that wasn't true at all.  In fact, in just another three or four years, my mom would get a call from the cops telling her that I had been arrested for stealing a pizza with another friend. But that's a story for another time.

Man, was I a shitty kid.

Hate the Police

As a skater and punk rocker I had to hate cops. It just sort of went with the territory.

Honestly I didn't really have too much against them, other than just generally disliking them in principle as yet another set of authority figures keeping me from doing what I wanted. Usually they'd half-heartedly yell at me and my friends for skating somewhere, we'd leave, wait for them to drive away, then come back. They probably didn't care.

Besides, this was Bradenton, it's not like I was getting beaten by the LAPD. And I'd like to think that I was smart enough to realize that many of my problems with them (and most authority figures) had more to do with me wanting to bad stuff and them having to put a stop to it than anything they were actively doing to keep me down.

Every once in a while, though, you'd run into some real dicks.

I was about 17 and parked at the beach with my girlfriend around 10 or 11 PM. This was a regular thing for us since we desired privacy and didn't have an apartment, and I drove a 1977 Lincoln Continental whose backseat was about the size of one of those Japanese love hotels.

I was probably playing something romantic, like that live Bauhaus album "Press the Eject and Give Me the Tape." Man, I wish I still had that - "Rose Garden Funeral of Sores" was all kinds of awesome. And you know, for a band that was pegged as gothic and depressing, Bauhaus had some kick ass songs  - "In the Flat Field?" "Dark Entries?" Those songs kick ass. And while we're at it, while that first Joy Division album is supposed to be all depressing, there's some rock jams on that, too. Is "Novelty" on that one? You know, "When people listen to you.."

Wait, what was I talking about?

Oh yeah. So the music was working and we were in the backseat. We weren't actually having actual sex sex yet, but second base had definitely been rounded.Things were going pretty well.

Then there was a metallic tap, tap, tap on the backseat window.

"Shit! This is just like those stories where the hook-hand guy comes back from the dead to kill the teenagers having sex on the Indian burial ground," I thought, reasonably enough.

Within seconds of the tap, as I was trying to remember how the kids outwitted the hook-hand killer, the entire back seat was illuminated by a high powered flashlight being held by an angry looking policeman. Actually the beam was mostly focused on my girlfriend's chest.
"Step out of the car," a voice commanded. "Now."

The cop continued to shine his light on us. Well, mostly on her, as she scrambled to put on her shirt.
I got out of the car wearing only a pair of shorts.

"What are you two doing here," the cop asked. "Do you know I could arrest you right now for public nudity and lewd and lascivious activity?"

"No sir, I...No. I mean, I didn't. No."

"Do you want to go to jail tonight?

"No, sir."

"How much money do you have on you?"

"What?"

"How much money do you have?"

"About three dollars."

That was true. I pulled out my pocket to show him. For some reason I never carried a wallet in those days, preferring my bills all wadded up in my pocket Spicoli style.

"Get out of here and don't let me catch you here again," he said, as he glanced back towards the backseat, I guess in hopes that my girlfriend had decided to keep her shirt off during this conversation.

My hands were shaking as I got back in the car. "I think that cop just tried to get a bribe from me," I said to my girlfriend, more astonished than angry. After the initial shock wore off, I had lots of plans of reporting him and getting him fired, or writing a stirring letter to the paper, letting the people know just what the police force was up to on Anna Maria Island. Of course, I'd have to change some minor details. Like, maybe we were having a fully clothed picnic on the beach. In the daytime.

"They can't do that to me," I ranted. "I'm an American. What is this, the Gestapo? The KGB? Luckily, I got his badge number. Yeah, he didn't count on that. Let's see...there was a 45 in there...Was there an R?"
Naturally, I didn't end up doing anything, and we ended up finding another place to park at night.

One of my friends would relate this story to his friends in college later, employing the "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend" maxim from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In his version, the cop made me do push-ups and recite the Pledge of Allegiance before letting me go. I sort of wish that happened, as it makes a much better story than me driving off shaking and dreaming up revenge fantasies for a couple weeks until I moved on to other distractions.

How I Caught Crabs

Every teacher had a side hustle, whether it was selling real estate, subbing or peddling cosmetics. They also had all sorts of ways to save money throughout the year.  My parents were no different. They preserved and canned food, bought stuff at yard sales and all sorts of other things that make people think that we grew up in the 1930s or in some Little House on the Prairie frontier instead of the 'burbs like everyone else when I talk about my childhood.

Actually, with their vegetable gardens, second-hand buying, reliance on DIY home maintenance and yardwork (DIY meaning me and my sister), and love of the homemade over the mass-produced, you might stretch things a bit and call my parents early hipsters.

My sister and I just thought they were cheap.

My dad helped stretch the food budget by providing us with fish and crabs from the Manatee River, which was a short walk down from our house.

That makes it sound a lot more dramatic than it really was, like dad was some Deadliest Catch guy out there braving the elements every weekend to put food on the table for his family. Basically, he liked to fish, and he liked eating fish, so it all worked out.

We'd go out with him fairly regularly. Dad had a one-man boat that would fit him and one kid. Early in the morning we'd go out and catch trout or jack, which were awesome. A five-pound jack will put up enough fight that you feel like Ernest Hemingway reeling in a marlin, especially if you're a kid. People say you can't eat them, but people are stupid. Fried up they tasted just fine. Of course, I would probably eat a shoe or a bar of soap if you fried it up, so maybe you shouldn't trust my tastes.

The author in middle school. Ladies, I'm wearing those shorts right now.

Dad also had about 6 crab traps that he'd check once a week or so. You'd pull up the trap while barnacles squirted water on you, bring it on to the boat and take the angry crabs out with a pair of tongs. Dad usually handled the crab wrangling part. After that I'd have to clean the guts out of the crabs on the front yard with a hose, then bring all the fish and crab guts down to the river for disposal. I also remember having to carry the car battery from the boat up to the house, which  weighed like a thousand pounds when you're 13. You'd think that doing that every weekend would give me arms of iron, sort of like Conan turning that big wheel every day, but I never saw any results.

Before he made the traps, and before we had regular access to the river, Dad went poor people crabbing, which is pretty awesome in its simplicity. You tie a chicken wing to a string, then throw it out in the water and wait for a scavenging crab to bite it. Then you reel him in. I'm hoping that knowing this sort of stuff will help me after the apocalypse hits.

I was a shitty kid. I was constantly in trouble with one or both of my parents or school, which would lead to trouble with my parents. I was once grounded for an entire school year due to failing Spanish each quarter. That sort of stuff was pretty much forgotten when I was out on the river.

It's not like Dad was imparting big life lessons on me or giving me advice while we were out there, it was more like putting our fights and disagreements on pause for a couple hours. Occasionally he'd say something along the lines of "You know you're messing up," or, "You know you need to apologize to your mother" or whatever, but it was a nice oasis in my life of constant trouble, all of which, admittedly, I brought on myself.

After a while my sister and I got sick of crabs. We had blue crabs regularly - made into crab cakes, boiled, or made into a crab boil when my dad was experimenting with Cajun seasoning. Why couldn't we be like normal people and go to McDonald's instead? Why did we always have to eat crabs or fish?

Now of course, I'd kill for some blue crabs (that I don't have to prepare or clean or anything, of course), and haven't even considered going to McDonald's in forever. I can't say I miss the feeling of wondering the next time my laziness or one of my lies was going to get me in trouble, though. I manage to go fishing with my dad once or twice a year, and, like men, we don't really talk about anything important, just sort of sit there next to each other and let the time pass while we catch fish. It's still nice.

Man, do I wish someone would bring me some crabs.

I'm the Night Headhunter Searching for Some Head

I've never had sympathy for the bored. Maybe because I grew up knowing that uttering the words, "We're bored" would sentence me and my sister to never ending yardwork or cleaning, I learned to amuse myself, or at least not let my parents know how dull things really were around the house.

This attitude carried over through high school. While other kids were complaining that the lack of teen dance clubs made our city as boring as a doctor's waiting room, I was amusing myself by skating, fishing, hanging out in the woods, driving to Tampa, and all sorts of other stuff. And who really wants to hang out at a teen dance club anyway?

Once we got older, my friends and I still managed to amuse ourselves, even in the old folk's home that is Bradenton. As punk rockers, we knew that nobody was going to provide a teen club we'd be comfortable in; it was up to us to create, to entertain ourselves, to make the most out of our surroundings. Plus, we just really liked playing pranks.

One Christmas break my friend Curt brought down a styrofoam head he found somewhere in Tallahassee. We took it to my parent's garage and went to work - my dad had this spray that advertised how it would eat through a styrofoam cup (that's how you knew it was working). We used that to make realistic looking eye sockets and a nose hole. We sprayed the head a couple different shades of whatever spray paint we could find, giving it a somewhat realistic decayed flesh tone. For the final touch, Curt had saved some hair from a recent haircut which we glued on the head in different places.

The final result looked better than we anticipated. Hell, it creeped me out, and I helped make the thing. We hid it in the garage and forgot about it until my sister went out to get some ice cream, saw it, and let out a scream that shattered glass throughout the neighborhood. If we could pass the crucial 15 year old girl test, we had it made.

Now that we had this grotesque head, the only problem was what to do with it. Where would our artwork get the attention it so richly deserved?

Why not Wal Mart?

The next morning we mixed up a gallon of fake blood. We also found some weird plaster and chicken wire cylinder in the garage which we decided to hide under a tarp as a fake leg, sort of a bonus horror. The plaster "leg" was about 4 feet long, so it didn't really work, unless you thought Manute Bol got dismembered in a Bradenton parking lot, but hey, this was an extra, so it was good enough.

We drove to Wal-Mart and set up the leg behind the store, pouring fake blood liberally around our crime scene. Since the leg was our lesser artwork, we gave it a less prominent billing, figuring the head would be found first.

The head went into a plastic bag soaked with fake blood which was placed into a shopping cart. Then like cops on a stakeout, we waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Hey, how long was it gonna take for someone to notice a blood-dripping plastic bag in a parking lot, anyway? These unobservant people were totally messing up our opening.

After a while we figured we should make our own publicity and call the cops on ourselves.

In the days of payphones this was easy. I called the non-emergency number and tried to disguise my voice.

"Uh...yes, officer? I'm here at the Wal-Mart on Cortez and there's this...this thing. It looks like it's bleeding."

"Bleeding?"

"Yeah, it's in a shopping cart and it looks like there's a lot of blood around it. I mean, it's probably nothing and all, butmaybeyoushouldtakealookatitOKbye."

Then we settled back to wait.

We didn't have to wait too long. Actually, let me quote the Bradenton Herald from the article titled "Prankster Hits Bradenton Store:"

...When an officer opened the bag, Watkins said, "He turned his head and said, "I think it's real."

It wasn't. The head, it turned out, was made of plastic foam.

"They did a pretty good job as far as making it look like a decapitated head," Watkins said.

The practical joker apparently took a mannequin head, painted and molded it so that it would appear to be decomposed and put a wig on it, Watkins said.

So there you have it, our first review. The leg was found later, and just as we expected it was sort of anticlimactic.

Who says artists aren't appreciated in their own hometown? As a bonus, since Curt was in art school at FSU, he could count our juvenile prank as actual school work, so it was a win-win for everyone involved.

Sneaky Treats

We didn't have a lot of junk food in our house growing up. I don't remember if this was an actual rule or if my parents had some reason behind it or they didn't want us to grow up fat or if I'm just remembering the whole thing 100 percent wrong.

Our next door neighbors always had tons of junk food. Always. Man, did we love hanging out over there. Not only could we watch "Love Boat" and "Three's Company" reruns during the day which was forbidden at home, but we could eat Pringles and Twinkies while doing it. And their parents didn't mind at all!

Not to say that our parents didn't ever have treats, you just had to know where and when to look. Usually around payday you could find candy bars hidden under the vegetables in the refrigerator. If you got up on a chair and looked way, way in the back of the highest cabinet, you might find a bag of Tootsie Rolls. Sort of a last resort, candy-wise, but hey, it was chocolate.

This is how my sister and I learned how to bake. We started with Rice Krispie Treats, which were pretty easy. This brought up a new problem. We knew that if our dad found them, he'd eat most of our hard work (hey, maybe that's why there wasn't a lot of junk food in the house). So we'd clean everything up and hide the pan in my closet. For the next couple days we'd eat like kings. We'd also store pizza in there once we got older. It's a wonder we never caught salmonella.

We graduated into actual cakes soon after. We'd be up early on a Saturday waiting for cartoons to come on and end up baking a cake. Since we couldn't actually hide that in my closet, we had to begrudgingly share it with the parents who provided us with shelter, clothes, and the stuff to make the cake in the first place.

But sometimes we were either too lazy or didn't have the necessary ingredients to bake.

This led to my sister and I becoming very resourceful. On teacher work days when we were bored and hungry, we'd ransack the house looking for anything sweet. Cough drops would work in a pinch. We ate chocolate chips, boring old vanilla wafers, anything with sugar in it was fair game.

Then we stumbled upon a delicacy. Frozen chocolate frosting. My mom would buy containers of frosting and store them in the freezer until she needed them, unless we got to them first. We'd eat it straight from the freezer with a spoon - bending many spoons this way. After being frozen the frosting was chewy - sort of a cross between ice cream and candy. It was so awesome. We would finish up a frosting container in about a half hour (you'd have to eat it quickly because you didn't want it to unfreeze), watching TV and putting off our chore list until minutes before our parents would pull into the driveway.

Years later I heard a rumor that Prince was rushed to the hospital because he only ate containers of frosting for like six months. I do not know if this was true, but if so, Prince has quite a refined palate.

Looking back, I'm astonished that we didn't get up to 500 pounds in our reaction to our parent's no TV and no junk food rules. I mean, the second our parents left the house we were busting out the frozen frosting and turning on the TV. Maybe we had good genes or something.

Smashing Pumpkins

"Now hold on there just a second, boy."

"Why, it looks like that one's tryin' to get away."

"Oh, don't worry. I got him."

The late night silence of the suburbs was shattered with a sickening THWACK and the sound of two corrupt law enforcement officers descending into hysterics.
Except the two officers were me and my friend Curt. And we were in high school.

I should back up.

The night hadn't started well. My mom and I got in a fight. A huge fight that escalated quickly into probably the biggest we had ever gotten into. She grounded me, and I just picked up my keys, walked out the door and left. I had never done anything like that before.

But Curt and I had tickets to see Love and Rockets that night, and I wasn't going to miss out on that.

I vaguely remember all sorts of ridiculous plans on the way to St. Pete. I was going to run away and...well, I'd make money somehow, and I wasn't going to come back home until I had my first million. My parents would change their tune then, especially when they had some time to reflect on how shabbily they treated their now rich son.
Love and Rockets were great. Maybe not as awesome as the tour we had seen previously, but still, seeing the music that I played in my bedroom or car stereo actually coming out of three people on a stage about two feet away was incredible. Opening act Jane's Addiction were mind-blowing. All in all it was a great night of music that helped forget my problems for a little while.

Of course, I had the 35 minute drive home to worry about what was going to happen when I got home. Luckily, Curt had been saving something for just such an occasion.
He told me to drive about a half mile past his house. At the time this area was full of sandspurs, scrub brush and pine and Cyprus trees.

“Keep going…further…further. OK. Stop.”

“Open the trunk.”

I parked the car on the side of the road. Curt took the tire iron out of the trunk and led the way. I wasn’t really sure what was going on, but I really didn’t want to go home, and Curt had never steered me wrong, so why not take a midnight hike with a tire iron?

He walked to a little wooded area and stopped.

“Check it out,” he said, motioning with the tire iron.

He was pointing to a field of wild melons, all about the size of bowling balls, just hanging out in the moonlight.

“I’ve seen these from the bus for months,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to come out and smash them.”

As a grown man, I realize how silly this sounds (unless you are the beloved comedian Gallagher), but as teenagers, you have all this extra energy and aggression, and few ways to channel it. Sometimes massacring a bunch of fruit is exactly what you need.

And it was. The first melon smashed with a satisfying sound. We started talking in comical Southern sheriff voices, just to sort of set the scene a bit, and give the whole thing a little more flavor.

Soon our shoes were covered in melon guts, our hands ached from the vibrations off the tire iron, and I thought I was going to pass out.

Have you ever laughed so hard you actually thought you were going to die? Where your stomach hurts and you can’t breathe, but you can’t stop laughing at something that in retrospect, isn’t really that funny? It happens to me fairly regularly, probably because I’m easily amused, but this was the first time, and it still feels like last week rather than…jeez, over 20 years ago.

After we had destroyed all the melons, helping nature by distributing seeds for future growth, we probably had a 7-11 meal and skated for a while up at the middle school. Things were certainly looking better.

Mom and I eventually made up, and I have yet to make dazzle my parents with my first million. Or thousand, actually.

Now I’m not suggesting smashing up a bunch of fruit will solve all your problems, but…hey, you know what? Screw it. You’ve got problems? You’re stressed out? Go smash up some melons. Talk like Jackie Gleason in Smokey and the Bandit while you’re doing it. Seriously, you’ll feel so much better.