Authors: Tom Winton
One is of the first night we went partying out there. A preview of what was in store for Jimmy and I that entire summer.
It was a Monday night, not a good night for finding ladies. But after three nights on the road, we were ready to pound down more than a few brews. Early in the evening at an empty little nothing bar in downtown Denver, we'd gotten a tip about a place called Mister Lucky's. The place was a huge three-story disco with a band on each floor - rock, country, whatever you like. It wasn't even nine o'clock when we motored into its sprawling parking lot and already it was two-thirds full. We couldn't believe that on a Monday night any place would be jumping like this one was. Anyway, Jimmy and I were leaning against the first floor bar maybe ten minutes, hadn't even finished our first beers yet, when we met two chicks, stewardesses on a layover from Detroit who, two drinks later, were more than willing to check out our room at a sleazy no-tell motel called the Tumble Inn.
The next day we found, and moved into, the apartment in Aurora. It was a nicely furnished one-bedroom job in a brand new building just off East Colfax. They'd had two vacancies to choose from, one on the first floor, one on the third. There was no deliberating. Jimmy and I both preferred the one on the first floor, and it turned out to be a wise decision because it wasn't long before we had new acquaintances, females of course, knocking on our bedroom window at all hours of the night. Needless to say, we were always happy to accommodate them, unless of course we already had company. What a town!
But as ridiculous as it sounds, even out in Denver I always kept an eye open, bloodshot or otherwise, for Theresa. Every time I saw a black-haired girl of her stature, my heart would flip and gallop until I made a negative identification. Probably two hundred and thirty million people in America back then, yet I still had small, ridiculous hopes of someday running into her. I kept up this vigil for nearly thirty years.
Despite the good time we were having out west by summer's end, we were beginning to miss home. Then, one early September Saturday afternoon, right after a golf-ball hailstorm subsided, we made a spur-of-the-moment decision to load up the car and head back to New York. I well remember that first night on the road, partly because I was sober, and partly because it got very hairy.
It was about an hour before midnight. We’d been driving along a desolate blue-highway running arrow-straight through an endless sea of Kansas wheat fields when, out of nowhere, an intense electrical storm came up on us. In the snap of a finger, this God-awful wind developed, bringing with it thick walls of driving, horizontal rain. Bold cloud-to-ground lightning strikes lit in flashes the sky and the landscape from one horizon to the other. The thunder was impossibly loud. Every time it rumbled we could feel the road shaking beneath my balding tires. Then, right in the middle of all this natural fury, what do you think happens next? The windshield wiper motor crapped out.
As much as we wanted to drive out of this mess, find a motel, we had no choice but to pull onto the road's shoulder and wait. After a while, exhausted from all the driving, Jimmy climbed into the back seat, I killed the engine, and we both tried to get some sleep. But it wasn't going to happen. Suddenly the wind got cooler and stronger yet, so strong that the Plymouth started swaying on its tired old springs. One time, I swear, the driver's side wheels actually rose an inch or two off the grassy shoulder. As unnerving as this was, it didn't happen again. Soon fatigue overcame concern and we managed to fall asleep for awhile. The last thing I remember before falling off was what sounded like a train roaring close by. I thought this awfully strange since we'd seen no tracks, nothing but those wheat fields, for the last hundred and fifty miles.
When we awoke an hour or so later, the rain and winds had eased up some so we resumed our search for a motel. For sixty long miles I drove, chin jutted over the wheel, my soaked left arm out the window, wiping rain off the windshield with one of my old army fatigue shirts. Eventually, in the middle of that statewide wheat field where another two-lane highway intersected ours, we came upon a small motel. Unlike the trip to Denver, when a Holiday Inn along I-10 in Columbia Missouri wouldn't give us a room because our hair was too long for their liking, this little mom-and-pop place did take our money. When we got inside that room, both of us far beyond exhaustion, our eyes hanging out of our heads, it took one titanic effort for me to stumble across the room to the closest bed. Still fully clothed and plenty wet, I lost consciousness mid-fall as I toppled into it.
The next morning, when we rose with a bright, promising sun, we felt reasonably refreshed though not exactly new. Kind of like a hangover that had been dulled by plenty of sleep. Right after showering and dressing, Jimmy and I were drinking free coffee and smoking in the motel's lobby when we overheard a conversation between a bread delivery man and the desk clerk. They were talking about a tornado that had touched down the night before. About fifty miles west, the delivery man said. I knew then that the roar I'd heard alongside the highway, when the car was rocking and rolling, hadn't been from any train.
When we got back to Queens, Jimmy and I got another apartment. Neither of us wanted to go back home. Once you leave, it's awfully tough going back. Even if my mother had shaken her demons I wouldn't have. Considering her condition, she was getting by OK without me anyway. Sylvester had been home with her since his discharge from the Air Force. Between her social security survivor's benefits and what Sylvester earned as a clerk down on Wall Street, they had no problem paying the bills. With 1B being rent-controlled and inflation still a new word in most people's vocabularies, living was still affordable. With the help of the GI Bill, Sylvester had no problem paying for his night courses also. Hell-bent on getting his degree, being the brainiest in the family, though maybe not the smartest, he went to Queens College four nights a week after work.
Getting a college education may have been an all-consuming goal for Sylvester, but I no longer cared about it. As far as I was concerned, any future I might have had ended seven months earlier when I lost Theresa. Hurt and bitter, I felt I was getting educated just fine. I thought I was kind of like Louis Lamour, getting my smarts outside the classroom from real-life experiences. I was majoring in sex education, and minoring in adventure and good times. Like that old Grass Roots' song, I wanted to only 'Live for Today'.
For the next three years in Flushing, that's exactly what I did, partied hardy at clubs in Queens, Manhattan and out on the Island. Then I became antsy again. I needed a change of scenery. Like my father had most of his life, Jimmy and I had nothing jobs as cab drivers so we wouldn't be leaving any big careers behind. We weren't locked into anything, and when I suggested splitting again, Jimmy was more than game. This time so was Donny Scully. Yup, his hollow wedding vows to Susan Dibenedetto had long since lost what little meaning they had to begin with. That charade only lasted eight months, until Jimmy and I returned from Colorado. Shortly after Susan gave birth to their baby boy, Donny lost what little ability and desire he had to continue the charade. Stevey Waters did not come with us. He was upstate and out of the picture. In his third year at Syracuse University, after screwing off the first two, he was buckling down, thinking about med-school. So the three of us headed south this time, to Florida.
Needless to say, like it had everywhere else, Theresa's ghost followed me down I-95. And after we got there, that big red tropical sun never set on a day that I didn't think of her. I was still haunted by all those hurt-filled replays of happy, innocent times from a period in my life when I still had a viable reason for living. But despite this burden, this unshakable loss that would torment me no matter where I went, I adapted reasonably well to life in Fort Lauderdale. How could I not? The town was an Eden for us single guys, its sugar grain beaches eternally basking, blanching, beneath that warm southern sun, the unique fragrance that every day hung over the thousand spread blankets, the sultry scent of Mother Ocean blended with gallons of Coppertone rubbed on so many bikini-clad bodies., and all those 'Fort Liquordale' night spots, all filled with golden-tanned women, all there for the taking.
Though summertime in 'The Sunshine State' is, to put it mildly, hot and oppressive, the winters are magical. We found the trade-off well worth it. At least Jimmy and I did. Less than six months after we arrived, Donny went back to New York with a topless dancer he'd hooked up with. But Jimmy and I stayed. For three years, we shared a two-bedroom apartment off Commercial Boulevard. During that time, Jimmy had a succession of nowhere jobs with plenty of down time in between. A lot of months I had to carry him. But, Jimmy was my friend, had been for a lot of years, so I kept my bitching to a minimum.
My first job in Lauderdale was as a groundskeeper at Holiday Park on Sunrise Boulevard. It was a sprawling city park with several baseball diamonds, tennis and basketball courts and an auditorium on the grounds. The acres of grass in between these facilities kept me atop a rider mower, alone with my thoughts, for countless hours.
The gig was a no-brainer which was fine by me. To me, working was, and still is, merely a necessary evil. The less stress I had to endure for a paycheck, the easier I could tolerate it. I didn't much care about having 'things', never had many anyway. And what you don't have, you don't miss. You might yearn a little if you let yourself get caught up in that mindset, but you never miss them. As long as I had reliable wheels, a roof over my butt, two squares a day, and enough scratch to party on weekends, that was fine. I was in my twenties and had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn't know in my thirties either. It wasn't until just a few years ago, after leaving forty behind, that I finally realized I wanted to be a writer, but more on that later.
When I wasn't cutting grass, or reapplying baselines on the ball fields at Holiday Park, I whiled away a lot of time fishing. Mostly on Anglin's Pier at Lauderdale by the Sea. It was a convenient spot since Commercial Boulevard dead-ends where the pier stands out of the ocean on its spindly wooden legs. I went there often. Sometimes, on a Saturday or Sunday morning, if I got out there before sun-up (I learned early on, that was the magic time to have your line in the water), I'd spring for breakfast at the tiny restaurant at the foot of the pier. Anyway, the first time I got into a school of Spanish Mackerel out there (sorry, I should pass this one up but somehow I just can't), I was 'hooked' on fishing. Because I enjoyed it so much, I quickly learned a lot about the sport and was soon making some pretty respectable catches.
But my attraction to angling wasn't just about how many fish I could yank onto the pier's planking. It transcended that. The truest reward, although I did love the anticipation and the excitement of catching fish, was the sport's cerebral benefits, the calming, almost spiritual beauty of the ocean at daybreak, the sometimes total concentration of the act that leaves no room in the mind for other burdens. Then there was the often impossible challenge of outwitting a piscatorial creature that had a brain the size of a BB. The rush I'd get when some mysterious, unseen powerful force frantically bent and bounced a rod in my trembling hands. The alarming scream of my reel's drag, as a fish hightailed for the Bahamas, reminding me that the last remaining yards of line were melting off the spool. Yes, I had finally fallen in love again, with fishing, a passion that would remain in my heart, right beside my other love, for the rest of my life. Every time I connected with a good fish, the whole rest of this crazy, troubled world ceased to exist. Just like it had the year I danced with Theresa Wayman.
Two or three times a week, after work, I'd drive down A1A to Bahia Mar Yacht Basin where I'd stroll leisurely along the very docks where John D. McDonald's fictional character, Travis McGee, docked his 'Busted Flush'. In the beginning I enjoyed watching the charter boats come in with their catches after a day at sea. How I longed to myself troll the Gulf Stream’s indigo waters. To go out on a sport fishing boat and hook up with such gallant battlers as the dolphin, wahoo, sailfish and, maybe just once, the majestic blue marlin. During those walks along the sun-blanched docks, I fantasized about catching direct descendants of the same game fish Ernest Hemingway had done battle with forty years earlier down in the lower Keys.
But such a thrill was much too expensive for my budget. The catches displayed on the dock's racks in those early evenings had been cranked in by people of a different class; sunburnt tourists with more money than should be legal. Write-off conscious corporate types, people who didn't know a reel's drag from its free-spool. It seemed sacrilegious that these people could buy an encounter with such noble game fish. After a while it enraged me to think that the fish brought in each day, drained of their life and color, were so often used as mere bait to land bigger catches such as mergers, multi-million dollar accounts and leverage buyouts.
Despite all my ill feelings, when I befriended a skipper named Fred Wrinkle at Bahia Mar and he offered me a job as mate on his 36 footer, I jumped at the opportunity.