Daysleeper

Not too long after I left the old man's house I was going to an old bar in the middle of the mainland side of town called the 'Oak Tree'. Someday I'll have to write about the struggle of that bar to find a decent owner after the Babe died, but that is another story.
Hanging out at the 'Tree' as we called it I got to know a guy who we'll call 'Tommy'.
Tom was a milkman and I was a headthumper. We worked nights. Tommy would be up and gone at 2:30 in the morning and get done about noon or sometimes eleven, I worked midnight to eight at one of the brand new condos on the beach.
On the weekends Tom and I would be bright eyed and bushy tailed when the bars closed and often went out for breakfast. He had a plan. He had moved back in with his folks for a few months after his last cohabiting girlfriend had burnt all his clothes except his milkman uniforms for "caring more about the damned milk than ME!".
Tommy cleaned out what was left of his stuff while she was at work, and had all the utilities turned off, told the landlord he could have his security deposit if he would evict the former woman of his dreams, and started locking the gate to his folks house that was on a couple acres of land just outside of town.

There was an altercation one night in a 24 hour grocery that Tom was stocking with her but the cops understood his side of it and Tommy declined to press charges because as he put it, "Her gun didn't actually go off!".

So, Tommy had a plan. He was buying a house from the owner of the bar that the Babe had bought for his ner'do'well son and daughter-in-law and that she had simply refused to live in.
It was on a lot that sat on the railroad tracks.
About forty feet from the freight tracks. Of course there was the crossing bell too.
After we'd been there awhile we'd simply stop speaking at the first clang of the bell. The bell really wasn't that loud, but you soon got to where you could hear it, and knew what would follow.
When you'd stop speaking people would ask what was wrong, at least the first time or two.
I'd simply raise a finger to my lips and say 'ssshhhh'.
About 45 seconds after the bell got going good the trains would come through.

The southbound freights weren't so bad because they'd be loaded with goods, cars, tanks of this and that and heavy.
The tables and floor would shudder a bit, but it was OK.
Northbound, unless it was a bumper crop citrus season, the cars were mostly deadheading empty and there is simply nothing as noisy as a empty railroad car doing forty or fifty miles an hour.
Add to that the fact that going back empty they'd collect strings of cars here and there all on one engine and the racket would go on for a long, long time.

So Tommy had bought this place and needed a roommate.
I was rooming with a buddy who worked days at a blind book center and though a fun guy just wasn't quite up to my level of hi jinks. I told him that I was moving and he seemed relieved.
I met Tom at the bar and we went down to the house in his car, a huge old Dodge that he had had forever.

I'd yet to see the place, agreeing blind to move in and was amazed.
It had been done on the cheap in the nineteen twenties when they built it.
Babe after his darling daughter-in-law balked at living in it had had it redone AGAIN with all new carpet, fresh drywall, new doors, new appliances, and a new big air conditioner in the back kitchen window.
The location of that window unit was important because in this house, what is known in the deep south as a shotgun shanty' there was no place that cool air wouldn't go.
'Shotgun shanty' is so called because if you open the front door and the back door and fire a shotgun with a tight pattern down the hallway between them the odds are you won't hit anything.
The place was just a long central hallway with rooms opening off it, kitchen in the back.

Walking in for the first time to the place I would end up living for four years, Tommy was telling me, "I get the biggest bedroom", but you can have your pick otherwise. The next biggest bedroom had a private entrance, good light and was roomy, but I passed it by.

"Are you sure???" Tom asked me more than once, as we were leaving, "Sure" I replied, lets setup a table in there and have a dining room, and someplace to play poker, and make the place FEEL bigger than it is", I told him.  The house had both breaker box and fuses box and the breaker box was in my new bedroom which proved useful for loud livingroom parties when you were trying to sleep.
So I moved in.

Six months go by. I work every night from Midnight till eight, go from work to school where I am studying the graphic arts and come home crash about three in the afternoon till whenever I get up. If I get up early I go to the bar and hang out with the gang of mid shift service workers, but usually I just go on into work.
Work was fourteen miles away and I was on a Kawasaki triple. When the weather was clear it was great, when it was nasty it was just horrible.

Tommy and I got along great, the only time we really saw each other during the week was the occasional meeting at the bathroom door coming or going. The the weekends were more than passing strange, however.
Where before we'd hang out at the bars and go for coffee or breakfast now we'd go in different directions and end up back at the house at four in the morning, drunk, sometimes high, and wide awake.

No cable on the teevee in those days, and we were smart enough not to play poker with just each other, so we became the one late night tevee channels' strongest critics.
We'd watch intently for the slightest error and then compose long rambling letters to the station on my old Remington Upright typewriter, which we'd gleefully mail away before going to sleep at daylight.

It was about here that I jerked one of a pair of Jehovah Witnesses into the house one bright shiny morning and made his life pass before his eyes for hammering on my door while I was sleeping,  but that too is another story.

This being a very old, very nasty house with a shell built into the inside to cover the facts we didn't live there long till we started to notice odd things.

Socks would walk from one room to the other on their own, Clean SOCKS!
We seemed to be eating an awful lot of bread though we didn't remember it.
Garbage bags would crash over on their own at times.
Eventually I was sound asleep one day when I heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire in the hallway. Fearing for Tommy, I took my weapon from it's hiding place and quickly pulled open my bedroom door.
I found Tom with the twenty-two caliber pistol I'd sold him sighting down the hall into the kitchen.

"I think I got him", he says... He's just a little guy but I'm pretty sure I got him. On closer inspection I see three little holes in the back door, beginning about a foot above the floor, rising about three or four inches on each one.

"Was he climbing walls???" I scream. "What the fuck are you shooting at!?!?!" follows.

"We got MICE" shouts Tommy, half deafened by the report of the little pistol in the confined hallway.

"Let me see that piece" I shouted at him, and he hands it to me, I take it and disappear back into my bedroom with, "GET A CAT" at the top of my lungs bouncing in the hallway.

And so to bed.

I'd unloaded the pistol that evening and laid it on his pillow  before I left for work, and thought it just  another funny story to tell the gang.

Time passed, Tom went on his rounds, grocery, women, and bar.
Work for me was as always, deadly boring. Sitting in the bottom of a forty story condo reading and passing folks in and out was enough to numb the soul. When something DID happen if was usually scary..
I must have read three hundred books sitting there. I went all the way through the LORD OF THE RINGS twice, and though it took me longer I actually finished Chip Delaney's "DAHLGREN".

The stunningly beautiful lady who worked days usually came in a half hour early so I was able to get on  the bike and get to the local "Junior" College in time for class, but by Thursday or Friday I was pretty much operating on instruments.
I still haven't decided if it was a wonderful or terrible thing but my work week ran from Sunday night at midnight to Friday morning at eight AM. I had a three day weekend every weekend and in those days I squeezed it hard.

So, the point of this story, yes there IS a point, is that a few days after He'd shot up the back door Tommy saw the mouse again and decided to activate a 'plan' that he had been considering all week.

Visualize this. It is now Friday afternoon, about three PM. I come dragging in after a horrible week of very little sleep, long days at school, with a fair sized paperbag of groceries that I had balanced on the tank of the Kawasaki for several miles and head for the kitchen to put them away.

It is a dark day but there is plenty of light to see what I'm doing so ignoring the light,  I go to the fridge and placing the perishables on the counter wad up the bag and toss it over my shoulder toward the garbage can.

A bright BLUE flash filled the kitchen followed by a loud BANG and the snapping of fuses blowing.

I found myself sitting in the sink.

Tommy had taken a three foot square scrap of half inch plywood, stripped the insulation off of a cheap brown extension cord, ALL the cord except the last foot or so up by the plug and used electrical tape to attach this bare wire in parallel circles to the board.

In the center of this scrap of wood he had daubed about three ounces of the household peanut butter onto the plywood and then moving the garbage can out back carefully plugged this monstrosity into the outlet on the back wall.

My paper grocery bag had closed the circuit, fortunately blowing the fuses before catching fire.
I took this thing and sailed it out the back door, replaced the fuses and went to bed.
Little was said over the weekend, we avoided each other, trying to keep the peace I suppose.

Sunday rolled around, I went to work, went to class, came home.

On the header to the door way into the back of the house and the kitchen was a hand lettered sign.

"BEWARE! ! ! ELECTRIC CAT (MARK II)".

This one had a new feature, a pan of WATER with the bare cord going down in and out..

I got it unplugged without  incident and was standing in the back door wondering just how to get rid of this thing when all of a sudden the Railroad crossing bells began to ring.

We started in the City of Ormond Beach Florida on a bright beautiful June day headed for Pasadena California, with a load of common concrete blocks and some household goods.
There was no leaving the blocks, the owners Mother was adamant. "Those belong to Dick, and I mean to see he gets them".

Dicks' brother was named Bob.
Bob was going to be doing most of the driving, I was along to make sure he got there.
Now Bob had a problem that now would certainly have some sort of warm and fuzzy title, but then was known by those who loved him and those who didn't as 'a case of the asshole'.
You could put Bob in a closed locked room (and often we wanted to), with five people and in an hour three of them would want to shoot him and the other two would be demanding a rope. Bob's problems had to do, accidentally, with alcohol, but only accidentally...

He'd 'accidentally' get drunk and start some shit somewhere.
We'd long ago decided that with him it wasn't the booze, the booze just let the 'inner Bob' out.

So why did I get in a U-haul truck with the guy for a cross continental trip? Well, suffice to say that at that period of my life one of the reasons that Bob and I ran together was that it made me look nearly normal, and the word around town was that, for me..., RIGHT NOW, a vacation was a good idea.

This was about 1973, a year or so before this the wonderful Paul Newman movie "THE LIFE & TIMES OF JUDGE ROY BEAN" had come out and a bunch of us had gone to see it. Bob had not been among us which was unfortunate for him. Had he been there I am sure that his brother Dick would never have uttered "that is how my brother will end up" at the demise of Stacey Keech as"Original Bad Bob the Albino".

There was a wonderful line in the movie when one of the grizzled types runs up to Newman as Judge Roy Bean and says [after Bean shoots Bad Bob in the back] "You call that sportin'? It weren't a real standup fight."
Judge Roy Bean: "Standup? I laid down to steady my aim."

Dicks' brother Bob forever became 'Bad Bob' or 'Ormond Bad Bob' that night.

So as I said, we started out from Ormond Beach on the coast of central Florida, headed for Pasadena/L.A. California with these household goods and this load of about a hundred concrete blocks. this was about the time of the first big Medfly scare, and every scale and weight station we tried to pass would send a trooper out to run us down, lights and siren going.

Since I had done my best to talk "Ma" out of sending these concrete blocks to Dick they got loaded last and every inspection officer that opened the roll up door would be faced with a respectable sized concrete wall. It made the truck handle oddly too.

Most officers would look at Bob, then me, then the wall and either laugh (I had the story down pat after the second stop), or start up in there and clamber around peering in boxes, digging around in trunks, just positive that SOMETHING must be going on.

Of course there wasn't. There might have been some recreational goods in the cab of the truck but they never looked there.

We learned that if we'd take the off ramp at the scales and stations they's just look disgusted and wave us through, but EVERY time we didn't we got ran down and searched.

I should have gotten on a greyhound and come back to take my lumps the first day. We left bright and early, but we only made about a hundred miles.

Just outside of Saint Augustine the right dually pair on the back threw a shoe. We limped it into civilization and called U-Haul and they asked us to bring it another three miles in to town. Saint Augustine may be the oldest town in the country, but in 1973 it was also one of the smallest.

Blessing or curse; I still don't know but the U-Haul was only a block from the 'old town' tourist area and when we got there it was lunch time. "New place right across from the Castillo that supposed to be pretty good!" the kid working on the truck told us, "Called the Mill Top" he offered.

Between the truck depot and the Mill top there were four or five other interesting looking places, three nice, clean newish looking respectable hotel/apartment style establishments and two dives that looked like they'd been there since the local language was Spanish, and in St. Augustine you just could never be sure.

We of course being young discerning types went for the dives. "We'll just have one each and then get lunch" we asserted. In the first one the barmaid tending bar was a knockout, drop dead brunette that Bob instantly fell in lust with.
"Damnit Bob, how many times to I have to tell you that women work DAYS in a place like this because they are entangled with some guy, not so you can pick them up!" I tried, unsuccessfully, to ward off disaster.

"Ah. Bullshit! You just don't know anything about wimmen", stroked Bad Bob.

She ended up slapping him, which surprised Bob, me,... her... and half the bar which was now getting filled up with the afternoon crowd. He really hadn't done anything to warrant it, he was just too cocky and persistent.

I imagine if you'd asked her later what had caused her to do it she'd have said 'I dunno... he was just an asshole!'.

After a cool down period in the next dark seedy three hundred year old bar, we went to the Mill Top, had a sandwich a couple of beers,

and headed back to the truck. New tires all around like a NASCAR pit crew, and away we went.

End part one...

When Freddy let me drive.

Ever do sixty miles an hour 18 inches above the water? My godfather and my folks next door neighbor was a man named Fred who had grown up on the Niagara River in New York State. To hear Fred tell it his father had destroyed at least the first, if not first several, (it could get a little vague), old boats he'd managed to acquire as a boy as being unsafe and he would have no son of his going over the falls! By the time I met him, Fred had grown and matured into a 6'3 round-faced crew-cut man who was the kindest human being I ever knew. Funny, strong, smart, he became my surrogate Father while my Dad worked overseas. We lived on the bank of one of the deeper estuaries of the Halifax River, Indian Lagoon system that drained and filled twice daily though Ponce Inlet between Daytona and New Smyrna Beach Florida. Fred went through a number of boats before buying his pride and joy, the earlier boats were not extraordinary.. a few outboards, a medium sized day cruiser.. But about 1963 somewhere he found what in its earlier day had been a Captains gig on some smaller naval craft. A HIGGINS BOAT. This wonderful old wooden craft had been kept up pretty well or Fred would never have touched her, she got a new coat of top quality varnish a classic rubbing of the brightwork with aluminum foil where needed and a complete carb rebuild and inspection. Fred was a pretty much self taught, (non-military), JET RATED chief mechanic at Volusia Aviation for many years, working there the day the stroke came on him a few months before retirement...And he had a goal. He wanted to own a boat that would do sixty miles an hour over the water. For those of you who aren't wet inclined your average ski boat might, wide open make thirty, or thirty-five miles an hour. Certainly in those days this was a hell of a goal. Sixty was cooking. All was well till he bought the 'offy' carbs. OFFENHAUSER carburetors were THE thing in the Grand Prix racing circuit in the mid to late sixties, and how he got them shoe-horned on this inboard I'll never know but they worked. They worked rather wonderfully. The GOAL was in sight! Most of the running was done over the measured mile that Fred had mapped out in the Intracoastal Waterway channel about three miles from our houses. Where ten year old I came in, outside of grabbing every 'check ride' I could get by hanging around out at the dock any time I heard a tool clank next door, was that these carbs weren't really designed for a boat, the hammering and banging of the hull at speed made the carbs go out of adjustment. So I got to drive. Imagine a 8-10 year old boy, growing up close to the newest, largest race track in the country getting to pilot a craft on the water well in excess of fifty miles an hour. Unpredictably. In later years I realized that there were times he was simply messing with me. When Freddy Let Me Drive Part II (Coast of Central Florida, 1960-64ish, near Ponce Inlet) My godfather, a man named Fred, had purchased a former captains gig, an 18 foot long WWII vintage Higgins inboard engine speedboat. Inboards were not common or favored on the east coast of central Florida in the sixties, outboards having the ability to be beaten over oyster and sand bars and continue to operate. Inboard rigs usually have a single shaft per engine coming through the bottom of the hull and up into what is essentially a auto style engine inside the boat. They don't take kindly to beating. Fred's goal was to achieve sixty miles per hour on the water in a craft he owned. To make this a reality he'd purchased a set of OFFENHAUSER racing carburetors for this boat. I was the next door neighbor kid, eight or ten years old. The new carbs on the boat, all I ever remember him calling her was "the HIGGINS", were not made for beating at speed over rough terrain or intracoastal waterway chop. They would produce amazing bursts of power, and then go out of adjustment. Fred was a big guy but he couldn't be in two places at once, someone holding the wheel was needed when you'd get that sort of engine surge. So I became the pilot. As I said at the end of part one of this little story there were times he was simply messing with me. We'd be beating down the Intracoastal at over fifty miles an hour, him in the back fiddling with the jets on the carbs and without any warning whatsoever the power would just cease. The Higgins was a tight, sweet little craft, and in years to come I realized that she'd probably have walked a stern wave her length without broaching, but I was eight or ten years old… A boat that is going that fast is cutting through an amazing amount of water, that's why you get wakes that 'V' away from the boat. As all readers who have messed about in boats know when you chop the power several things happen. One, all the water you've been pushing through says 'AH HA!' and rushes for the stern..Two, the stern (hopefully) rises, the bow comes down off plane, and the boat settles into the water. Add to this that my swimming abilities were of the 'oh shit' and try to claw back to the dock category. The first time we were beating down the line at about fifty plus in this thing, me with an eight year old death grip on the wheel, and the power chopped I knew what it meant to see your life pass before your eyes. To start with there were more power losses than I now think were likely. I think Fred was teaching me how to handle a boat and a powerful one at that. The day would go like that, me at the wheel Fred in the back, up and down his measured mile, a few houses to the east of us, but otherwise nothing but the river, the sun, mangroves, and each other. At the end of the afternoon he'd take the wheel, we'd go out almost to the inlet at twenty five or thirty which was damned fast as is, and as he'd come back towards Mill Creek and the run. He'd line her up and as we passed his mark he'd firewall the throttle. The old boat would come up to where I doubt there was much beyond a foot of it touching the water at any given time, and run in a roar that sounded like an airboat with a bad cold. The stopwatch told the tale, we would get SO close.. easing her back down onto plane Fred'd say, "well that was pretty damn good", and grin. I often see people now who have such trouble bringing boats into trailers on ramps and smile to hear the best advice Fred ever gave me.."It's all sailing" he'd say. "If it's wind sailing the power is on top and there are different rules, if it's power sailing the power is on the bottom but the boat handles the same." "Move the hull through the water, don't try to move the water around the hull."The funny thing is that I'm not sure we ever made the run he was after. In addition to the JFK murder, my closest friend in those days, a cousin a half dozen years older than me accidentally killed himself and three others in a Chevy Corvair he'd only had a few weeks, trying to move a Oak tree at close to a hundred miles an hour. I’ve always hated Corvairs. Things go out of focus for awhile there. Fred lived until 1982, was the man who explained women to me, (best as any man can to another), and his wife, Caroline still lives in that area, and is a dear dear friend. [Sadly she passed away in 2006]. My favorite non-boat memory of Fred is a funny little moment. He used to buy, then repair, and paint older cars in his open carport so often the tools would be spread from the dock to the attached garage on the street. I shagged a lot of tools as a kid. I learned the difference between a half inch and seven sixteenths socket by footsore experience and it taught me much. One day though, Fred who was a great believer in MARVEL Mystery Oil, sent me to the shop for his oilcan, the kind that had a lever pump built onto it. "And DON'T squirt it on the way back!" says he. Opening my mouth he gave me a look I remember to this day and said quietly, "I SAW you last time.". Move the hull through the water, not the water around the boat. ~~Lloyd