Florida House Update

FLORIDA HOUSE

by John Eder

Jeans flared, hair long, Grand Funk on the radio coming to your town to party it down, and I was a juvenile delinquent stoner living in a Florida house. Naples, Florida, the mid-70s. I’ve never really gotten over it, so fun and so horrible, all at the same time.

A classic Florida house is a modest one-story, with an open-air carport, circular driveway, terrazzo floors, louvered jalousie windows and a screened in swimming pool. My family lived in a succession of them after moving to Naples from New York in the early 60s to get away from the cold and our relatives, who got on my Dad’s nerves. Naples today is a big small town, chi-chi, stuffed with rich people. My last time there, I was below the flight path to the airport watching private jet after private jet flying over, crazy money rolling in like waves on the white sand beaches.

Different story in the 70s. Naples wasn’t even on a lot of maps. Long,

undeveloped coastline, vacant lots everywhere. A beautiful but stark place.

Hurricane Donna in the early 60s wiped out a lot of the geography. Donna demolished the Naples Fishing Pier, a famous landmark, and randomly leveled loads of trees, so a lot of the landscape was barren and sun-baked.

But there were also tracts of virgin, primeval woods, great places to build forts in. You could fish for crabs in a pond, and just wander around in nature all the time. Life was very much lived outdoors. A picture of my Mom and I on the beach has nothing but trees in back of us. Today the whole stretch is beachfront condo towers.

Yes, what a bummer. Modern Naples is gated communities, SUVs, silicone tits, showing off fuck you money, and service workers, in a setting of magnificent, manicured, manufactured tropical beauty. In the 60s and 70s that hadn’t happened yet. Just a small town with an unusual character, wealthy, yes, though not at the overkill levels of today. Naples had Port Royal, the Millionaire Acres down at the southern tip of town: mansions with vast, lush lawns, and quaint bridges over sweet little ponds, swans paddling around. As a kid, I used to go on long bike rides through the enchanting, shady, money-lined streets and imagine it as what Heaven was like.

Millionaires weren’t the only settlers. Long lines of redneck Florida cracker DNA had been on the loose for generations. Rednecks occupied state jobs, like cop or schoolteacher or worked in construction and fishing.

Redneck cops chased redneck criminals for burglary, drunkenness, wife beating, murder, and poaching alligators. Poaching was so bad the sheriffs even came to 4th grade assembly to show a gory movie about its evils, including a hideous scene with creepy rednecks – who looked like the gym coach - brutally skinning and butchering an alligator.

The hordes of transplant Yankees, my tribe, were carpetbaggers in spirit. Many made fortunes in real estate, buying up land from crackers who didn’t know any better, and cutting shady development deals with greedy state and local officials. On the plus side, having a bunch of Yankees gave Naples a different cultural flavor than a regular deep-fried southern town.

The crucial ingredient was tourists. Tourist season runs from Thanksgiving to Easter. Cars with “up north” plates would start showing up, all seemingly driven by the blind. They brought in a lot of money. They filled hotels and restaurants, they bought condos, they drove the local economy.

Blacks lived in a ghetto called MacDonald’s Quarters. I can’t remember ever seeing that many black people when I was a little kid, aside from at school. Blacks were invisible. Some people don’t understand how Florida is the South, the classic racist South of Alabama or Mississippi. But it is the South, and it was really the South then. People thought nothing of referring to blacks as niggers or coons or spoons; the latter slang I only ever heard in South Florida.

Another mostly invisible population was Mexican migrant workers, come to pick vegetables in nearby Immokalee, under rough conditions. Their kids materialized in the schools for a few months, woefully behind and friendless, then disappeared, off to the next hardass farm town.

The Asian kid who moved there in the early 70s, very personable and popular, immediately acquired the nickname “Chink�. He had to be fine with it, like it or not, if he wanted friends. Casual racism was like a bad smell that a lot of people had to tolerate and some liked.

THE GOLDEN ORCHID

Naples possessed vivid local color. Mr. Hayes worked at Boat Haven for decades. Boat Haven sold and stored boats, the multi-level parking garage of stacked pleasure craft a landmark. Boat Haven imprisoned sea turtles in a salt water tank in the parking lot by the bait store, with kitschy tourist lettering on the side: “SEE THE SEA TURTLES!” You could gawk at two unlucky sea turtles swimming back and forth in a small cement block tank with a tin roof over it. The nowadays, animal-rights-believer-me is appalled. 7 year old me – the me who used to go by there with my parents after church on Sunday, on the way to the donut place – that me loved it!

Mr. Hayes owned a fantastic customized automobile - a tricked out Edsel, rocket fins and triple bumpers, painted purple, enigmatically named the Golden Orchid – written in script on both sides. He cruised in the Golden Orchid, wearing wrap around shades and a Hawaiian shirt that matched the paint job, a parade with just one super float when the Golden Orchid rolled by.

Another guy operated a one man, open cockpit helicopter, basically

a go-cart in the sky. He buzzed over town, zipping past the fluffy clouds and startled seagulls. Behind St. Ann’s Catholic church, another nonconformist kept a huge aviary in back of his house, full of squawking birds.

Monkeys swung in the trees, and peed on people’s cars and threw their shit at them sometimes. Most of his neighbors were cool with it, as he lived on the hippie street, 10th Avenue, lined with beautiful old houses from the very first era of Neapolitan development. These houses were Victorian-inspired, two stories, with turrets and huge front porches, rented by the small population of local hippies. They were all bulldozed out of existence in the 80s. The houses, not the hippies. Well, the hippies too.

SWAMP BUGGIES & MOSQUITO BOMBERS

Naples originated the goofy redneck tradition of swamp buggy racing. A swamp buggy is a jacked-up pick-up truck with airplane tires, made for ass-hauling through the swamp. The existence of swamp buggies spawned an annual race. The Jaycees built “The Mile O’Mud”: a flooded, muddy racetrack, booby trapped with sippy holes to bog down racers.

The Swamp Buggy Festival Parade featured the Swamp Buggy Queen and her court, shriners in Flintstone cars, and Jaycee “deputies” hunting bachelors with beards. Jaycees chased down bachelors and locked them up in “jail” – a rolling cage, strategically positioned behind the float containing the Swamp Buggy Queen and her court. They could only get out by paying a $25 fine. It was a small enough town that all the redneck deputies knew who the horny bachelors were. Young guys wanted to get thrown in

the jail, so they could get close to the foxy Queen and the princesses. Plus there was a keg of beer in there. The Swamp Buggy parade was great!

The day after the parade was the race. The winner – the mud-crusted cracker gearhead who made it through – kissed the Swamp Buggy Queen and threw her in the mud!

Naples had endless satanic legions of mosquitoes. Mosquitoes had to be dealt with, for tourist money and malaria. This meant daily flyovers of decommissioned WW2 bombers billowing clouds of who knows what?

It can’t have been good, but it kept the mosquitoes down. These planes buzzed in rooftop level, trailing awe-inspiring pesticide trails. Tourists were stunned by these low altitude, fuck-off giant bombers. Pearl Harbor flashbacks, except with DDT. Mosquito control trucks drove around in the evening, pumping more huge plumes of pesticide, with a flashing yellow light going, in case you missed the block long clouds of insect death fog. Kids, attracted by the trippy light, loved to ride right behind the truck on their bikes. The authorities said there was no DDT in the gas, parents believed it was OK, no one ever said boo about it. We followed for miles, hooting and hollering, in and out of the toxic clouds.

IN SCHOOL

All the school principals, all the way up through high school, prominently displayed paddles in their offices, and were prepared, eager even, to use them. They drilled holes through the paddles to decrease wind resistance.

The most dreaded paddler, Lake Park Elementary School principal Mrs. Small, was, in fact, very small. A wrinkly, tough Southern broad with cats eye glasses and a blue-dyed beehive hairdo. Mrs. Small lived to paddle.

Despite Mrs. Small, public education was generally better then. There was just more going on. One theory is that during the Cold War schools were pumped with money because the country needed a steady flow of smart people to ensure the Commies didn’t blow us all up. There was phys. ed. every day, from grade school up. Music classes – violin by 4th grade – and in upper grades hard courses in humanities and critical thinking. Teachers advised questioning authority – the sixties reflected in public education. Even the cracker teachers seemed a little bit enlightened and

progressive.

Three elementary schools fed one middle school, which fed one high school. You grew up with the same group of people, first grade through twelfth. With no private schools even remotely nearby, rich kids went to school with trailer trash, crackers with Yankees.

Outside school, kids were mostly left to their own devices. A typical summer day for my friends and I involved maybe going to the Big Cypress nature center, where you learned about Florida wildlife – handled snakes, birds, lizards– hiked through the swamp on a scavenger hunt for banana spiders, or learned to identify all the wild birds in the Everglades. In the afternoon we’d ride bikes, hit the only 7-11 in town for Icees, run around on the golf course, evading the greenskeeper chasing us in his cart. Sweaty, we’d jump in somebody’s pool, then go ride bikes some more – unfettered, really, no playdates or supervision. Our parents had only the vaguest idea of where we were and what we were doing. They were cool as long as we were home by dinner time.

CLASSIC ROCK

The 60s were a sunny, humid haze of mosquito fog, comic books, woods, swimming in pools and the Gulf of Mexico, fishing, school. I was a good kid, a Boy Scout. But in the mid-70s, around 15, I felt the urge to misbehave. Satan? I chalk it up to underground comics. I was reading loads of R. Crumb comics and Zaps and National Lampoons. I sent away for the undergrounds. They were all about drugs. Cops lectured at our high school, warning about the evils of pot, LSD, black beauties, and I was thinking: wow, I can’t wait to try those out! I soaked morning glory seeds overnight and drank the dregs. It was supposed to get you high, but it did nothing and tasted like dirt and celery juice.

Rock and roll played into the itch – I’d never listened to rock up until my

mid teens. My parents played muzak and Broadway show tunes from the 50s. Then I met Dave. Tall, aristocratic features, Dave always wore purple shirts, purple pants sometimes, and a purple newsboy hat. Surfer hair parted in the middle. Bad posture. He stood out.

Dave was in a clique of brainy oddballs who didn’t fit in any other cliques. They were all in the Biology Club, a club for students who were interested in the sciences and also interested in boozing. One of the member’s Dad owned Liquor Barn in East Naples, and could supply any gathering with liquor.

I became good friends with Dave and his brother Donny, rabid fans of all the British rockers: T. Rex, Mott The Hoople, Slade, and the much despised in mainstream Naples High School circles David Bowie. Bowie was “fag music”. We loved Bowie precisely because he was taboo. What was even more exciting was that Dave played electric guitar. He and a couple of other guys jammed in a shack on the golf course at the Naples Beach Club, after hours. The drummer worked there as a maintenance guy.

I thought all this was fantastic! I had found my tribe. I started collecting records – the first thing I ever bought was the 45 of “Live & Let Die” by Paul McCartney and Wings. I would wait by the radio for the DJ on WNOG (Wonderful Naples On the Gulf) to play it, till I couldn’t stand not hearing it over and over and over, and went out and bought it with chore money. I became an avid consumer of records and rock magazines like Creem and

Circus.

Another cool thing about the Biology Club was girls. Pretty girls were in the Biology Club. 70s girls, in halter tops with butterflies on them, flip flops or platform shoes, puka shell chokers and long, ironed hair parted in the middle, bell-bottom jeans spray-painted on. Southern girls, the cool rulers of the high school hallways.

CANDY WAS A TEENAGE WITCH

In Biology Club, there was definitely fucking– Dave had gotten a beautiful girlfriend named Beth – she was one of those queens of the hallways, in skintight jeans. His brother Donny went out with Margie, another pretty girl, tall – they made an odd couple, since she towered over Donny. I set my sights on Candy, an arty girl, a girl into theater, a girl who claimed she was a witch.

Candy flirted, and I saw a chance with her. She dressed more flamboyantly than most, a little more Stevie Nicks hippie gypsy glam slutty. Fun to hang out with. And with witchcraft! Witchcraft was very big with a certain segment of the young white female population in the mid-70s. It was just in. Maybe because of Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones: they liked Satan. Candy claimed to practice white magic and to be wary of black magic.

Evil, she said darkly, like she had tried it and been upset when the Devil double-crossed her. I pictured her in a never-ending wizard battle between light and dark, initiated into a coven at a sexy ceremony in the woods, in between doing her nails and other girl stuff. She read people’s auras and hexed them if they pissed her off. We had Drivers Ed together. Cones marked the bounds: knock over a cone, points off. A girl Candy didn’t like knocked over cones, Candy proudly said: “I did that!”

Who was I to argue, I just wanted to boff her! In my mind I saw Candy as a Frazetta painting on a Conan the Barbarian paperback, all semi-nudity and demonic howling, conjuring up the Nephilim in her teenage bedroom.

I was all into it!

I got to second base with Candy, my first sexual experience with a person besides myself. We were in the back of our friend Chuck’s badass muscle car, coming back from a movie. Chuck, a Biology Club member, and his date were in the front seat. Ultra bold, I lay down across the wide back seat, my head in Candy’s lap. She was talking to them, they were talking to her, but it was dark, they were looking forward. It was a moment when a magic door opens in your life - you’ve longed for admittance to the club for so long, and suddenly the gates part and you’re in. Candy wore a frilly faux peasant blouse, and I just slid my hand up under it , touching her breast. To my astonishment and relief, she just kept talking, did not move my hand away or register alarm. I eventually had to take my hand

out of there, as I was the first one dropped off, so things didn’t go further that night – or ever. Candy took up with Chuck on a Biology Club field trip to Myakka River State Park, in the muscle car backseat. I consoled myself with the thought that Candy would cast a spell on Chuck, selling his soul to Satan, but, really, Chuck seemed pretty happy about the whole deal.

THE STONES, MAN

My first rock concert was the Rolling Stones in Jacksonville, 1975. The Biology Club were all fans. When the Stones national tour was announced, it was the biggest thing ever in music. Tickets went on sale for the Gator Bowl show, in Jacksonville, a seven-hour drive away.

The Rolling Stones were better documented than most bands, but even seeing their films was a rare thing –pre-MTV, VHS, DVD, VCR, internet, preeverything-all-the-time. To actually have the opportunity to see the real, living, breathing Mick Jagger prancing around on stage was double thrilling.

Celebs are now common in south Florida, but back then the guy who drove the Golden Orchid was the biggest star.

At the huge stadium – most of us had never seen a big football venue like that - the space was overwhelming. We staked out a spot and put down blankets, naively reserving it. The reality was it would be trampled under the filthy feet of the slavering hordes.

The Stones show clocked my first encounter with mass intoxication. I’d never seen people smoking pot, popping pills, and snorting shit in public. None of my friends and I were yet into pot or drinking much. We were underage, no fake IDs and pretty inexperienced at drinking. Bur people around us were at it like sharks in a feeding frenzy.

The Rolling Stones came on as the blazing sun dipped below the lip of the stadium. We’d clung to our little spot 50 yards from the stage, now wedged in with all our eager, smelly, hairy fellow fans as the real flesh and blood Rolling Stones entered in all their glory. They did not disappoint - all freaky and rock and rolly looking. People went nuts!

I went to the bathroom when they played “Wild Horses”. The men’s room was like entering the anti-drug movie the cops screened at assembly. Every cliché of fucked-upedness on parade. Scary, sketchy, skeletal dudes, really gone, vomiting, staggering out of stalls, rebel-yelling; who knows what went on in there? In the midst of it all, a king frightener, a white trash, feral, rat-faced guy whose eyes were so beyond red they were green like peeled grapes. I caught a whiff of his canker breath as he oozed by. I shuddered and hurried back for “Midnight Rambler”.

A few songs later, something was squirming around my feet. Dave and I looked down, someone on their hands and knees was crawling painfully through the crowd, toward the stage. He looked up at us. It was the greeneyed guy. He looked so much worse now. He was covered in mud. He was foaming at the mouth. He croaked out: “Which way is the stage?”

We silently pointed the way. He grimly set off toward the end zone where the Rolling Stones were blaring away.

Twenty minutes later, that terminally wiped-out figure hoisted himself up on the chain-link fence separating the band from the crowd. In between the fence and the edge of the stage was a small moat. He stretched himself across, holding out a hand toward an appalled Mick Jagger, who looked relieved when security pounced on the guy.

But they hadn’t counted on this wiry survivor’s drug-twisted physical powers. Whatever he had taken enabled him to fend off the security guys with one hand and reach out to Mick with the other, just touch me, man!

He somehow held his own, he couldn’t be moved. Finally, Mick shimmied over and just…barely….touched…him with one finger. The guy wilted, the bouncers threw him in the moat and leapt in after him. Dave yelled in my ear over the music: “That guy’s gonna get his ass kicked!” But hey – he’d touched Mick! You can’t take that away!

That concert made a very huge impression. I still have the program.

Using press-on type, I painstakingly glued in the entire set list on the back

page. How we loved the rock! We doodled the names of bands on our notebooks, daydreaming in class about how great it must be to be a rock and roll royal.

FUCK FOOTBALL King Football - in the social pecking order, jocks and cheerleaders were tops. Coaches naturally favored the kids on varsity teams. For the rest of us, gym class was a sadist’s private boot camp. Coach was a leatherlunged, black-clad ex-Marine. Oh man. Gym coaches are my natural enemies. Coach ran his class with military discipline, infamous for doling out laps or ordering anyone who offended him to “drop and give me twenty” push-ups in the relentless sun.

Fuck football! What a huge waste of time, resources, and even lives, as a popular player died during a goal line stand, right there on the field, in front of the crowd, when his teammate accidentally stepped on his neck.

But social life, the seasons, all revolved around football. Some of my friends were into it, some of them weren’t, but everyone went to the games because that was where it was at. Kids walked the quarter mile track surrounding the field the whole game, on parade, checking each other out.

People in the stands would get really worked up over the game. A lot of southern tough guys - Coach types – they loved it. My parents weren’t into it at all, Dad had played ice hockey back in Brooklyn, and that’s all he ever watched as far as TV sports. He just wasn’t a football guy, and since there were no hockey matches going on in Florida, that let him out. It was OK for me, since my parents never went to games. I could go there and do whatever I wanted.

Booze played a big role at games. One of my first experiences with alcohol took place at a Naples High Golden Eagles loss. Dave and I got a pint of Early Times whiskey, via our Liquor Barn connection. We had decided to start experimenting with drinking. Shitty at sports and talking to girls, I wanted to go pro at drinking. Dave had the bottle stuffed down his pants.

We climbed the fence to sneak into the game. At the top of the fence, I got a deep cut on my arm, caught on the barbed wire. Bleeding all over the place. I felt great! I was the man, I was bleeding, and I was going to get fucked up!

Dave and I drank all the Early Times, and then were so drunk. We felt free! We ran around like nuts, we told off people we never liked, we barfed all over the parking lot. There’s probably still a grease stain to this day, as I had fried chicken for dinner.

DUKE

Fishing is such a big Naples thing. The center of the universe is the thousand foot long Naples Fishing Pier. Some guys were into shark fishing.

It was fun catching boring regular fish, but shark was mas macho. It was illegal. To fish for sharks you must attract sharks, and the last things the Chamber of Commerce wants by the beach is sharks. The outlaw fishermen did it anyway, throwing rotting guts and buckets of animal blood in the water.

Their nemesis was Duke the pier guard, a Yankee gone native, fortyfifty-something, ex-military. He liked to throw his weight around. His claim to fame was rousting dirty old men rendezvousing for gay sex in the pier bathroom. That, and busting shark fishermen.

Duke co-starred in the bloody incident, witnessed by my friend Ray, that effectively ended shark fishing at the pier. Ray was a tall, tough Naples

High sophomore, well read and funny. His Dad was an English teacher, one of the coolest teachers in high school. Ray’s friendships cut across all cliques, on the football team for a while, honors English, he was smart, but could go redneck when he wanted to. He was fishing at the pier one night, when Rippy Stewart, a drunk good ole boy, hauled in a tiger shark.

The first thing you do with a shark you catch illegally is cut it’s shark head off. The jaws are the trophy. Throw the body –the evidence you don’t want Duke to use in city court - back into the Gulf of Mexico. Wrapping the head up in a brown paper bag , you can get away with it, hacking the jaws out later. You could walk around with a shark-head sized brown paper bag dripping with blood and gore all day long on the pier. Nobody would look at you twice; people carried fish home in bloody bags all the time.

Rippy, a classic, Dixie flag baseball hat wearing cracker, had severed the head, but not kicked the body over the side when Duke caught him at it. As Rippy lied about who the dead shark belonged to, his ankle got close to the freshly severed head, jaws agape, and bumped into it. Through dead muscle memory, the shark jaws clamped down on Rippy’s ankle, hard! Rippy howled, the shark wreaking vengeance from beyond the grave.

Rippy flailed around with this dead shark head latched on his ankle. Ray thought it was hilarious. He said the shark’s dead eyes rolled back eerily, as if in ecstasy. It was surprisingly hard to pry the head off Skippy’s ankle, and he needed a bunch of stitches. Subsequently, he got fined, a huge fine

for a broke redneck. Gigantically lettered signs went up forbidding shark fishing and promising a bigass fine like Rippy got. It drove the shark thing offshore. A few weeks later, Ray was about a mile out and hooked into something that dragged his 18-foot Boston Whaler long enough and hard enough for him to get spooked and cut it loose.

PARTY HEARTY

Ray was connected, and we went and got some pot one day. Rolling a joint in fun, pink, strawberry-flavored rolling papers, we drove through the endless palmetto scrub boondocks of Naples, smoking. It was sweater weather, which is magical and dreamlike when it happens, since Florida is usually hotter than hell. Pot was great! Everything was new again. Movies and music were better. TV with the sound off was funny. The 3 Stooges (on every afternoon after school) were fucking hilarious.

The stoners were the coolest clique, and the most inclusive, as smoking pot cut a wide swath through all social strata. I never felt like I fit in high school – and then I did!

I started hanging out hardcore with Paul. He was a lot like me, kind of a small guy, shy with girls, good at art. We both liked to draw; we both loved underground comics and intricate, nerdy hippie prog rock like the band Yes. Paul’s parents let him drive their VW van on weekend nights. Cruising in that van, we’d hit the drive-in liquor store on Highway 41, hoping the guy would sell us some beer. Paul and I and a revolving cast of Biology Club members tooled around for hours at night, listening to Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, smoking pot, drinking beer, always on the lookout for “the pigs” – the cops, our arch-enemies. The cops were fairly easy to evade.

There were miles and miles of desolate road to get lost on. Parties were way out in the boonies, places like The Mountain, a big hill of bulldozed land, in Golden Gate, a housing development in progress. There were big parties out there with kegs and live music. Being so far away from town, it meant a lot of drunk driving. It wasn’t just the Mountain. Long stretches of prime beachy real estate were still undeveloped, and you partied out there.

And kids drove drunk. I met Eric when he was wasted, driving his wealthy lawyer Dad’s Cadillac at a beach party, a rich, physically intimidating asskicker who got royally hammered all the time. He loved joyriding on the beach road leading to a popular party spot. It was just a narrow crushed shell trail underneath a low hanging, close-in canopy of trees. He’d get that Caddy going like 50, 60, 70 on this non-existent road, laughing wildly, thrilling his nervous passengers. Amazingly, nothing bad ever happened to Eric, but a kid got killed riding in the open bed of a pickup truck that flipped

on the same beach road.

Eric was the first guy to sell LSD at school, purple microdot. Ray and I bought some off Eric, taking it at lunchtime, then going to sociology class.

Nothing happened.

After school, Ray and I trooped over to our friend Stick’s house. Stick was a bearlike, bearded kid. His parents were cool, and, better yet, often absent, so his house was a hangout. Stick was tight with Eric and they were both buddies with Little Stevie. Stevie, shrimpy, sketchy, looked like a malnourished Indian, sometimes called Little Chief Stevie, which pissed him off. Eric, Stick and Little Stevie had all popped microdots before Ray and I showed up. Stevie, bummed at how nothing psychedelic had happened, took three more LSDs, and still nothing.

“This stuff is bullshit, man!”

We smoked a joint and then the LSD came on. I felt very high, in a weird, different, new, alarming but exciting way. In a profound way. Stick displayed model airplanes on a shelf, and I really got into these planes, fascinated by them, by the idea of flight. Pondering model planes, who thought of them, why people built models of things? These models pulsed with the arcane mechanics of the universe that led to airplanes in the first place, and then airplanes to fight wars, - wars! Plastic model kits reproducing airplanes used to fight wars, except in miniature, carefully assem-

bled in a teenage bedroom in Naples, Florida, by a young man listening to Pink Floyd. What are the chances?

I was tripping, but Little Stevie had blasted off to another dimension.

He was just going – “Uhhhhh….you guys….ha ha!”, laughing at the air, not at us or anything we said. “I have to get rid of these stupid clothes!” He stripped and sat cross-legged, on the wall to wall shag. Stick had hippie candles going. Little Stevie gazed intently at these hippie candles and said: “Gaaaaaaaah.”

Stick put on some freaky prog rock, music with sound effects of wind sweeping over the surface of alien planets, landscapes of parallel universes, endless abysses of time and space, through which Little Stevie floated like a Fritos bag in the ocean. We made fun of him, wiggling our fingers in front of his eyes and making booga booga noises at him, but then figuring it was probably not right and we just looked at him. Eventually everyone had to go home to dinner, always a problem. Stick said he would just keep watching Little Stevie till he came down.

I wound up walking home by myself, down the Tamiami Trail, the main highway through town. All the cars looked like metallic bugs, and the sky was huge. I got home and was able to sit down to dinner with my parents and eat, which was a chore, since the entire time I had the feeling the room was tilted on its side. Rather than looking across the table at my father, I saw down on him and he, the dishes, the food, everything was going to fall

the length of the living room, smash the louvered windows and fly off the edge of the planet and into space. But I made it through somehow.

Little Stevie recovered. Everyone loved purple microdot. It was a big hit and swept the stoners. Paul, our friend Jerry and I were on it at the circus. In the real old-fashioned tradition, the circus train arrived annually, the performers parading to the Swamp Buggy grounds, setting up under the big top.

Our group hallucinations included that the tent was growing, becoming a living thing. The roustabouts rigged the net for the trapeze act. One of the anchors was sunk right in front of our seats. The trapeze flyers themselves –short, muscular, Mexicans in gold tights, gold wrist bands, little gold ballet shoes, and gold capes walked over, agitated – right in front of us, right there. They pointed and argued with each other in Spanish muy muy rapido over the way the anchor had been placed, which, was just…

Paul was clenching his teeth really tight: “Oh, God…” I said “Oh, man…”

Jack said “Oh, ahhhhh, what?” Ancient Mayan superheroes had landed, hilariously arguing in space Spanish. We finally just started laughing really out of control. The trapeze guys didn’t pay us the slightest attention, they must have seen fucked-up, sweaty, cackling teenagers with huge, dilated pupils every night.

On the way home we were still high. It was a beautiful fall night out, not too hot, and the radio sounded extra great, Rod Stewart singing “Maggie Mae.” Jack said “Whoa! I can see the music! It’s little bubbly shaped cartoon looking musical notes. I can see a little band playing the song on the dashboard!” He said the notes looked different for each instrument, and that the notes for the mandolin were the prettiest ones. “I see fucking Rod Stewart! I love this song!”

MUSHROOM HUNTERS

Psilocybin mushrooms grow out of cow shit. Mushrooms were popular.

First of all: organic. Nobody knew or cared about anything being organic, but the reasoning was that natural stuff couldn’t harm you. Not only that, it was free. It came, like, from the universe, see?

Naples bordered redneck farming communities to the north and east, like the dreaded Immokalee, home of the baddest-ass, worst redneck high school in five counties, but more importantly, home to cattle ranches with thousands of acres of seldom patrolled land, full of cows, pooping. Under the right conditions – after a heavy summer rain when mushroom spores are floating around – they pop up in a matter of hours, right out of the cow shit. Free, high-octane drugs for the taking, by the bold. Because they were super illegal, plus you were adding trespassing to your juvie wish list.

The procedure: assemble small hunting party of three or four people, drive to Immokalee, park at the dead end of one of the deserted county roads against the fields. Slipping through the barbed wire fence, the hunt is on. Walking through the herds is unnerving, cows are big and bulls are scary. The farms themselves were meadows of grass, dotted with dense, shady stands of cypress and ficus trees, hung with Spanish moss. It looked like artwork airbrushed on the side of a hippie van. All it was missing was elves. In the shady stands of trees the cows would go to cool off and take a dump. That’s where the mushrooms were thickest. You’d poke around, pick a bunch of mushrooms, and then get the fuck out, pronto, because the cops were hip to mushroom hunters.

Paul and I, emerging from a clump of woods saw, way off in the distance, their backs to us, two uniformed figures walking down the fence perimeter. They didn’t see us hightailing over the fence. We had to pass three or four of the dead ends to get to our particular road. At one of the dead ends was a Florida State trooper cruiser, parked, empty. By some miracle, they hadn’t seen Paul’s van parked only a few dead ends up.

“Wow, we could totally fuck up their car!” But we just ran for it instead, and got away, since, where there’s one cop car, who knows how many others are floating around. Scared of getting stopped with the goods, we gobbled down our haul in the car, washing them down with warm lemonade, all gritty and gross. We didn’t think we would get off. But a few

minutes later, stopping at a light at a deserted crossroads, we burst into hysterical laughter at the absurdity of stopping for a traffic light on a completely deserted road in the middle of a swamp. “Ah ha ha ha! Fuck those pigs!” These days, now that I’m older, I love a good police presence, and count on cops to protect me from scary teenagers.

WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH

Nitrous oxide is laughing gas. Some enterprising kid realized that Naples Hospital kept their laughing gas in a fenced-in enclosure outside the hospital – unguarded. This was long before the age of security cameras. It was easy to scale the fence, boost a couple scuba-tank sized containers of gas over the chain link to a waiting accomplice, and zip off in your Dad’s car.

Nitrous tanks started showing up at parties – it was a wacky high. Laughing gas never made anybody laugh. It was more like getting hit in the head with a hammer, but it didn’t hurt, you were transported, briefly, to another dimension, like a miniature blackout. It affected your hearing – your hearing phased in and out: “WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH.” There was a tank at a party at Stick’s house – Little Stevie operating it, with a wrench attached to the top of the tank to open and close the valve.

Partygoers filled up bags with the gas and huffed it. Stevie decided to

suck the gas straight out of the tank and burnt his mouth, since it came out below freezing. He showed up in school with hideous, scabby lips.

The Biology Club took a tank out to the middle of the Palm River Golf Course late at night. We sat in a sand trap, huffing away in the moonlight.

When we were done, we tossed the empty tank into a water hazard.

The hospital eventually wised up, and moved the gas supply indoors.

Gas theft had been happening in other towns as well. Over in Hialeah, some kids decided to roll up all the windows in a car and open the valve.

It sounds like a bad idea, and it was, they all passed out and suffocated.

Another kid, in Homestead, got killed by opening the valve with a wrench.

He unscrewed the entire top assembly of the tank, which launched into his forehead at mach five, killing him instantly.

HIGHER THAN THE 4th OF JULY

My friend Dewey was a stoney rich kid from Port Royal, and an ardent shroomer. On the 4th of July we took a big dose and hooked up with a bunch of friends to run around town before eventually ending up at the beach, for the fireworks. First we went to Burger King. Why you would want to go to Burger King when you are off your face on psilocybin is a great question, but we wanted to hang with our friends.

Eric was there, being crazy. He was showing off a smoke bomb. “Dare me to set it off in here?” He was smoking a cigarette. You could smoke anywhere then, even in Burger King.

We encouraged him, yeah, yeah, set it off, and, to our horror, he did.

He just lit it with his cigarette, tossing it nonchalantly, not even looking.

The bomb bounced across a table where a clutch of rednecks was sitting: Granny and her two big good ole boys. It bounced right off Granny’s burger and went zizzing away, spewing clouds of sulfurous green smoke.

We ran, rednecks in hot pursuit, screaming how they were going to kick our fucking ass. On mushrooms, this was a primordial, epic cosmic conflict, time extending itself so it seemed to take eons to get away from those fucking crackers. But we ran faster than them, and went and watched the fireworks. Those fireworks were THE SINGLE GREATEST THING I HAD EVER SEEN, even though I had seen fireworks a million times before.

By the end of the night, I felt OK and went home and managed to go to sleep. Dewey, however, had problems. He had taken too many mushrooms. He walked from the pier to his house in Port Royal – six miles or so. He was losing it. He collapsed in a pile of palm fronds left by the side of the road in front of someone’s mansion, convinced he was dead. He lay in the fronds a long time, dead to himself, feeling his body decompose and be consumed by insects till it reunited with the earth. Then he came down enough to realize he was still alive, and walked home.

PARTY AT CHRISTIAN’S HOUSE

A lot of partying took place in Port Royal – especially parties at Christian’s beachfront mansion. I met Christian at my afterschool job washing dishes at a swanky restaurant. Christian’s stepfather developed half of Naples. He insisted, even though they were wealthy, that Christian get a job and learn the value of a buck. Christian was the only dishwasher who ever came to work in a brand new Fiat convertible.

After work, we’d go over to Christian’s fabulous house to drink and smoke weed. This estate had a gatehouse where a team of mechanics worked on his stepfather’s collection of antique cars. The driveway cut across acres of lawn and ficus trees, leading to the elegant main house, an Italianate villa built during prohibition. Bootleggers had smuggled booze

through there in the roaring 20s, so the legend went. A tunnel connected the house to the beach, and a hidden passage within the house connected Christian’s stepfather’s study to the indoor, heart-shaped, black-tiled sexy millionaire swimming pool.

Something stunned me, on my first tour of the mansion: the painting hung on the grand staircase. It was a study of a Seminole Indian by my Mom, an artist selling her work through the Naples Art Association. It amazed me that our lives could have touched these rich people’s lives, and that my Mom’s work had a place of honor.

Christian built a tree fort in a majestic banyan tree by the gatehouse. It was OK for his friends to go over there day or night, park, smoke weed, hang out, even if he wasn’t there. It was beautiful up in the tree fort, the sunlight twinkling through the leaves, the boughs creaking, the Hustler magazines stashed in a footlocker. Christian ran in an extension cable to hook up a stereo. It was stoner paradise.

I’d never hung out with any seriously rich people before and the whole scene awed me. A pack of dogs patrolled the grounds, dobermans and German shepherds, intimidating, but once you knew them you figured out they were complete pussies. They barked and moved up on you, but you could kick them, like Christian did, and they wandered away, bewildered.

Like all rich people, Christian’s parents were hardly ever home. If I had that house it would take an a-bomb to pry me out of there, I would never leave.

Christian’s stepfather’s giant, plush study, lined with books, centered around a big boardroom table, and this was where Christian would throw parties. When his mom and stepfather weren’t around, he’d move his stereo in there and we’d rock out. Kids from all social strata chugged beers and smoked out. The study opened on to a veranda overlooking the beach. You could run out and jump in the Gulf of Mexico, then run back in and drip all over the leather upholstery, Christian didn’t care.

Christian’s neighbor was an eccentric zillionaire, Mr. Slater. All sorts of urban legends floated around about how Slater had made his pile, most famously as the result of a patent on something really simple – he had figured out that if you put a slit in a foil gum wrapper, it would keep the gum fresher longer. However he got it, he spent it in singular fashion. He had a similar deluxe layout, like Christian’s house: the gate, the gatehouse, the grand drive, the stately main house. He also had deer and peacocks roaming his grounds, as well as the usual pack of guard dogs, which would sometimes get out of control and kill a deer. But the most famous thing about Slater was his salt water swimming pool, in which he kept a porpoise.

My sister lost the Swamp Buggy Queen Beauty Pageant 1966, but got a spot in the Queen’s Court. Slater opened the grounds of his mansion each year for the contestants to have their pictures taken by the Naples Daily News, commonly referred to by locals as “The Mullet Wrapper”, since it was often used to wrap freshly caught fish. They posed in their gowns

and also in bathing suits, and were allowed to swim with the dolphin in the pool. My sister did that, which I thought was just about the greatest thing on earth anyone could possibly do.

In the mid-70s, I spent the night at Christian’s tree fort pretty often.

One morning, Christian’s mom asked us to go return a hedge trimmer to Mr. Slater. I was all atwitter to meet the great man. We went up to the big door and rang the bell. His butler – he actually had a butler – opened the door and told us Mr. Slater would be down directly. The place was awesomely rich guyish, with wood paneled hallways, busts of Roman tyrants, and early twentieth century paintings of racehorses in ornate gold leaf frames hung on the walls. Slater appeared like a cartoon of a millionaire, a silver fox type dude in his 70s, padding around in a bathrobe and silk pajamas, late in the morning. Very friendly and nice, had the butler get us Cokes, since it was 100 million degrees out, like always.

“You boys like music, don’t you?” he asked. “I just got my new stereo system installed, you should hear it.” Opening a hidden panel, Slater revealed the amazing quad rig. Stereo sound systems were totally fetishised, and quadraphonic systems the latest, coolest thing. You could seduce girls just with a good system, and I wondered if Slater got any swinging old lady action with this thing. “The speakers are hidden in the walls, listen to this!”

He was as enthusiastic as one of us kids. Christian claimed Slater smoked weed. I was kind of hoping he would bust out a joint, but he just cranked

this system and it was fantastic. Unfortunately, he was playing Morris Alpert’s horrible, sappy song “Feelings”: “Feeeeeeelings – woah woah woah feeeeeeelings…..” Morris Alpert was right there in the room, except he was a twenty foot tall giant Morris Alpert. Christian and I were blown away by the sound, if not the song.

If only we could have brought over some Pink

Floyd records and tripped out with Slater! Still, I was thrilled to meet this legendary rich nut.

MRS. MAPLES OF NAPLES

The wealthy were, are, a big part of Neapolitan life. The filthy rich lived more cheek to jowl with the hoi polloi than today, when gated communities are the norm. It was before Prada and Valentino opened boutiques all over town. The rich guy shops were places like the Paddle on Fifth Avenue, where they hawked deranged mid-70s polyester leisure suits in colors and designs thought up by crazy madmen. For the ladies, Lilly Pulitzer did wildly patterned muu-muus and pantsuits. Old Republican fuddy-duddies dressed up in these outfits and made you wonder if they’d been sneaking out to the mushroom fields.

Among the well off was Mrs. Maples of Naples, as she came to be known in the accounts of her murder filling the front page of the Mullet Wrapper for months. She didn’t really have anything to do with my gang and me, except as the subject of a morbid mythology surrounding her death.

Mrs. Maples was found in the nude, after several days of her corpse decomposing in a closed, air-conditioned house. Her hands were severed at the wrists. This detail led to all sorts of tall tales, like “The hands are buried in the yard some place, in the hedge”, and ”My cousin’s friend saw a German shepherd walking down the street with a lady’s hand in it’s mouth”.

The house had been burgled, and her expensive jewelry gone missing.

Mrs. Maples had no known relatives.

I’d imagined Mrs. Maples as a kindly, sad little old widow who had inherited a gang of money from her late hubby and lived on it in melancholy style. A lonesome widow, starved for companionship, picks up wrong drifter, he offs her in a psycho hand-severing session and vanishes with the jewelry. The real deal was: Mrs. Maples had a BIG personality, a loud, tough broad, early anti-smoking crusader, forever showing up at City Council meetings to harangue the village elders to bar smoking in restaurants and other public places. She was a tall, imposing, severe woman with a hatchet face – you could chop down a tree with that face. She hated the teens skateboarding in her driveway. She’d yell at them and chase them off. In one newspaper account, the daughter of the chiropractor next door described her family’s tense relationship with Maples. “She would call up to yell at my father that teenagers were throwing rocks at her windows, and trying to kill her. She said she was ‘going to sell the house to niggers with six children’!”

Well known for having a fantastic collection of jewelry, she flaunted her swag all over the place. In the Mullet Wrapper, the waitress at a local diner mentioned how regular customer Maples would come in showing off her latest expensive baubles to her. Another part of the story mentioned how Mrs. Maples’ clergyman – she was an ardent Presbyterian – urged her to not show off her jewelry so much. You never knew who was watching.

UNLADYLIKE

A suspect was arrested in Illinois, and extradited to Naples to stand trial.

Sonny Winchell, a small time criminal and drifter, was busted in Rockford with jewelry matching the description of the missing Maples loot. News photos of Sonny being brought into town, cuffed, between two big, puffy redneck sheriffs showed a wolfish-looking dude, Jerry Lee Lewis rockabilly hair, in a lumberjack coat. Looking like an open and shut case, it was a shock when he was acquitted! Sonny was sent back to Illinois, facing trial for another crime, vanishing into Neapolitan history.

I tracked down the prosecutor, in retirement, in Islamorada, in the Florida Keys.

“I haven’t talked about that case in thirty years! I can’t remember everything, but I’ll try to help you out.”

“Why was Sonny Winchell acquitted?”

“Well, we caught him with the jewelry, but we could not 100% prove it was hers. Maples never had it photographed. Also, him having the jewelry didn’t necessarily prove he killed her, to the jury. This was way before all this forensic science, like you see on TV shows, DNA testing, ‘CSI’ stuff, so we just could not put the gun in his hands. In fact, the gun was never found.”

“Do you think he did it?”

“No, I don’t think he did it, I think a woman did it, and I think the motive was jealousy.”

“Wow, really? Who?” “I think Sonny Winchell’s girlfriend. I think Mrs. Maples and Sonny Winchell were having an, uh, romantic moment, and the girlfriend came in, drunk, with a gun, and shot Mrs. Maples. After the party.”

“What party?”

“Oh, Mrs. Maples was notorious for throwing wild parties that went late. Her murder happened right after one of the parties. If you look at the crime scene photos, there’s party debris all over the place.” So much for my lonely, little old lady idea of Mrs. Maples. “Oh no, she was quite social.”

“Like – she shot her while they were having sex?’

“Well, possibly. It would explain why she was found in the nude. Some-

body shot Mrs. Maples in the back of the head at close range. I think Sonny Winchell was either there at the time, or, if he wasn’t, he found out about it pretty quick. Whoever killed her just left her in the house, and closed the door. The air conditioning was on full blast, so the corpse smell didn’t get out for three days or so. She was locked in there – she had a bunch of little dogs, and the dogs ate on her corpse some. Anyway, I think Sonny watched the house, and when the cops didn’t come, decided to go in there and get the jewelry. Some of the most valuable things were the rings and bracelets, and that’s why he had to cut off the hands, cause they were too swollen up to get the stuff off.”

“He must’ve had a strong stomach!”

“Oh yeah, dead body, three days, dogs eating it, quite a scene.”

“Where were the hands?”

“In the kitchen sink. At the trial, we just couldn’t put the gun with Sonny. The murder weapon is probably in a canal. I suspected the girlfriend, but we couldn’t put the gun in her hands either, so everybody walked.

Sonny went to jail in Illinois on another charge, and, as far as I know, died in prison.”

“So my whole idea of Mrs. Maples as this sad old lady was totally wrong.”

“Oh yeah. But you haven’t even touched on the single most interesting

aspect of this entire case.”

“What’s that?”

“Mrs. Maples started life as a man. She was a post-op trans-gender sex change patient. She’d been to Sweden and had the operation in the early 70s.”

After I reeled in my jaw, I asked him, “So, Mr. Maples must have known, right?’

“Probably, but we couldn’t ask him since he was already dead, you know.”

Months after speaking with the prosecutor, I got a call from the defense attorney in the case.

“It wasn’t the girlfriend at all. Sonny and Maples never even met. It was Sonny’s sister. She was boffing an old, rich guy. The guy dumped her and Maples moved in on him. The sister was pissed and went over to Maples house, drunk, the morning after the party. The old guy wasn’t around, he’d split town to wherever. Maples opened the door in a bathrobe, with a gun.”

“She answered the door with a gun?”

“All these people were nuts. The sister confronts Maples, gets the gun away from her, and plugs her as she runs away. She goes to Sonny, they ditch the gun, he waits a day or so to make sure the coast is clear, goes

back in for the jewelry. He took the fall for the sister, who still lives in Naples by the way.”

Watching TV with my kid, in L.A., the latest heinous mayhem is on the news, and she asks me: “What was the worst thing that ever happened when you were growing up?” Easy answer: the Maples killing. Hands down.

BROS

The black ghetto was MacDonald’s Quarters, on the Gordon River, established at a time when there was plenty of waterfront to go around. Now it’s some pricey real estate. Then the Quarters were no go for whitey. It was just an unsaid thing, you didn’t go there. Conversely, you never saw a black person in white neighborhoods, except on a garbage truck or mowing median strips.

Since there were only a few public schools, everyone had black friends and vice versa, sometimes translating to having the black kids over, though very rarely the other way around. Sports teams integrated from grade school on up. Things were convivial between the races, as long as the blacks kept in their place. When the civil rights movement gained momentum, things got a little dicey. As kids moved into high school, the races separated socially.

Some of the black kids went predatory in high school, forming a little

wolfpack. One guy had the most pronounced individual style I had ever seen– jeans with one leg cut off, a floppy watch cap, and huge sunglasses with red, white and blue designer frames. He ran with Wesley Willis, a mean kid in platform shoes, skintight jeans and an afro styled to look like Mickey Mouse ears. Wesley was so far behind the learning curve they stuck him in with the special ed kids, but really he was just stoned all the time. But not too baked to hustle the smaller, weaker kids. He’d sidle up in a menacing way and demand: “Lemme hold a quarter.”

If you told him, meekly, you didn’t have a quarter, he’d command: “Hit yo’ pockets” in case you had any loose change in there. Stoners generally had better relations with the wolfpack, since they all got stoned together in the smoking area at lunchtime. Yes, there was a smoking area for students, bordering acres of forest, kids slipping into the dense woods to get stoned all the time.

Racial tension flared one morning during football season. As students arrived, they found the science hallway barricaded by a group of black kids. They had smashed watermelons all over the place. They were protesting the lack of black cheerleaders on the lily white cheerleading squad.

This was especially unfair since many star athletes were black. Cops were called. All parties in the principal’s office. Black cheerleaders by early afternoon, the whole incident filed under progress, a small victory for race relations and a bad day for watermelons.

KENNY AND KERRI Kerri was a smart, beautiful black girl, her family encouraging her to excel.

A lot of the Bros, as they were referred to by whitey, were generally

fucked to begin with. Kerri wasn’t.

She was in the marching band. The marching band always looked like fun, with lots of opportunities for getting up to mischief on band trips!.

Kenny was a white kid in the band, kind of an effeminate kid, kind of good looking, very funny and smart. Everyone knew; they were always hanging around together. God forbid you should see them smooching though. That would have been too much. It must have been galling, as hallway makeout sessions were happening all the time.

Even the special ed kids made out. Howie’s father had accidentally hit him on the head with a golf club, on the backswing, at least that was the legend. Somehow toddler Howie got on the golf course, creeping up on his Dad only to be konked with a one iron. Howie dealt with uncontrollable tics. His glottal spasms made a noise like a bell at a hotel desk: “Guk-guk-

DING!� He compulsively hit his ankle against the back of his leg. He rolled up little spears of paper in class, picking his nose with them, and sucking on the soggy paper. It separated the decent kids from the bullies as to who pushed Howie around and who stood up for him.

Lisette arrived in Naples freshman year, confined to a wheelchair. She had a water head, stunted limbs and a speech impediment. She did her best to fit in. She and Howie made a striking couple. And just like the handsomest jock and the prettiest cheerleader, they sucked face with a vengeance in the hallway. Lisette got sweaty and her face turned red when she lashed tongues with Howie.

But public displays of affection were verboten for Kerri and Kenny. This was the South in the mid-70s so they were keeping it under pretty tight wraps. Meanwhile, black kids pursued Kerri, including the king of the black kids, Emmett. A total badass, on the football team, big, fast, mean. Joining in lunchtime weed sessions with gusto, Emmett eventually graduated to supply side and became chief black dealer.

He featured in the major inter-racial fight of high school, a smoking area gladiatorial throwdown. My friend Ray had gone from pot consumer to retailer himself. He and Emmett had their respective cliques sewn up as far as distribution.

Getting stoned at school took place in the smoking area at lunchtime

and the parking lot in the morning. Kids hanging in their cars smoked out before first period, windows rolled up, emerging in clouds of pungent smoke and floating off to class. Ray and Emmett were making a deal in a van. Ray had hashish priced wholesale for Emmett, grams wrapped in silver foil. Emmett took them, but wouldn’t pay, he flatly declared, “I’m takin’ these. ” He exited, fading into the hallways as the bell rang.

What was going through Emmett’s mind? Ray matched up with him physically, never backing down from confrontation. By second period, word burnt through the hallways that Ray and Emmett were going to kick each other’s asses at lunchtime.

A gleeful mood took hold, like a real championship boxing match. Punk fights happened all the time, but this was the heavyweights. The combatants squared off, words were exchanged, they had at it. The cheering sections split between races, black kids egging on Emmett, white kids cheering Ray. It went on and on before some teachers watched for a few minutes, finally breaking it up. Ray finished off with Emmett in a headlock, thereby winning, but Emmett never gave Ray the hash back or paid him.

A couple years later, Ray, bigger dealer than ever, a college dealer, was back in Naples when he saw Emmett at the 7-11. Emmett looked pretty thrashed; high school was over. Ray’s getting in his car, Emmett says: “Hey Ray, you got that good weed?”

And Ray says, “Yeah, I sure do!” and peels out.

KERRI’S ROOM

Kenny wasn’t remotely a physical match for Emmett. But Kerri loved the slender white boy. He did have the virtue of a closed mouth. I never heard him speak much about his relationship with Kerri, unlike the other loudmouths in the school, boasting in the P.E. showers about every squeeze and grope. He did tell me one story: Kerri’s parents were away. She invited Kenny to her house, deep in MacDonald’s Quarters. To Kenny: crazy.

He was petrified he would get his ass beat. And yet…Kerri, lovely, willing.

So, he hid in the backseat of her car driving over the little bridge into the Quarters. Sometimes, driving around blasted in Paul’s van, we’d check out the Quarters for a thrill, but always get freaked out and leave, fast. Anyway, Kenny described Kerri’s house as just another middle-class, suburban house – the Quarters had good parts and bad parts, though most white people envisioned it as Trenchtown or Soweto.

So, there they were, getting it on. A knock on the door. They peek out

the window. It’s Emmett and a couple of his friends! Emmett knows Kerri’s in there, her car’s in the driveway. They knock some more, then come right over to the window of Kerri’s bedroom and bang on it. “We know you’re in there!” Kerri and Kenny are losing it. Are these guys gonna break in?

They’re crazy enough to do it! “C’mon girl, whatchu want with that white boy?”

It turned out it was more of a general question, they didn’t know he was in there, but understandably, Kenny flipped. His worst fears about a trip to the Quarters were coming true! Kerri didn’t answer the door. Emmett and his pals circled around for a while, like sharks, finally getting bored and leaving. Kenny bounced back and they did it the rest of the afternoon, Kerri smuggling him out after dark. They stuck together till Kenny’s family moved away, the subject of much gossip and scandal, but really just teenagers in love.

SHOPLIFTING The Biology Club got big into shoplifting junior year. One day some kid showed up with a bunch of new eight track tapes and announced he’d boosted them from the Eckerd’s drug store and that it was easy. Most stores had a one-way glass window with only one guy keeping watch over the whole store. Eckerd’s, a chain drug store, kept the records and 8 tracks close to the exit, in impulse buy territory. Standing behind a pillar, no way anyone could see you. Buying a notebook or something large, so we had a big bag from the store, we sidled up to the music section, grabbing a few tapes, throwing them in the bag, and making a frosty exit out the door.

Let me tell you, shoplifting is exciting. You get a real high off sticking it to the man. My friends and I, Paul and Jerry, waltzed away with a bunch of eight track tapes. These could be traded in the parking lot early morning smokeout for weed or cash. We were all about it it, our main extracurricular activity for a while, besides smoking pot and jerking off.

The peak of our crime spree was a road trip, in Paul’s van, to Fort Myers, thirty miles away. Fort Myers was a big city compared to Naples. Fort Myers had the Edison Indoor Shopping Mall, the only one of it’s kind in three counties. The team was myself, Paul, Jerry, and Danny, another Biology Club member, who had never done it before, but was up for it. In the parking lot, we divvied up the stores.

“OK, me and Jerry are going to Woolworths, J. Byrons and Maas Brothers, you guys go to Sears, J.C. Penney and the magazine stand and then we’ll switch.” Our first shift went really well. Jerry and I got all kinds of stuff, including our big score at Maas Brothers: two pair of fancy stereo headphones. We rendezvoused with Danny and Paul, who had made similar hauls, then switched off and did it all again. My personal haul was the headphones, twelve record albums, a bunch of pens, two pairs of jeans, a Oui magazine, and a wallet.

On the way home, we got greedy and decided to hit an Eckerd’s in a strip mall. Jerry and I wanted to rob Eckerd’s. Paul said no, we were pushing our luck, and walked over to Burger King to get a soda. Danny had the fever by then, and wanted to do it. He and I made it out of Eckerd’s right away with a few things, but when we got back to the van Paul wasn’t there. You would’ve thought he’d be gunning the engine, ready for a speedy getaway. Jerry was still in the store. Where the fuck was Paul?

Danny started hyperventilating.

Jerry appeared, literally sprinting out of the store with a bunch of records and eight tracks. He ran over and threw them under the van with Danny and my stuff. “I think Eckerd’s fucking saw me!” he said, his eyes wide.

“Get the fuck away from us!” Danny said.

Jerry snorted in disgust at his fear and announced he was going to go look for Paul. The store manager came out, spotting Jerry, pointing at him and yelling: “Hey!” Jerry took off running and the manager pursued.

Paul had missed all this and came back to the van nonchalantly sipping a Coke. His calm vanished seeing Danny and I hiding behind the van, croaking “We’ve got to get out of here!” He got it going toot sweet. I bolted into the front seat, Danny in the back, we were pulling out, Danny frantically hiding all the stolen goods from the mall under the seats. But all our stuff from Eckerd’s was still under the van. ”Get the stuff, Danny, get the stuff!”

“Fuck you, just get out of here, get out of here!”

Paul peeled out and we heard the eight tracks crunching under the wheels. “God damn it, Danny!” Heading south on the Tamiami Trail, we saw the store manager running down the highway shoulder, grimly chasing Jerry. But he was a fat fuck and never had a prayer of catching Jerry, who had a hundred yard lead.

“Open the door!” Paul yelled at Danny.

Danny was freaking: “Oh my God, oh my God!” but slid the passenger door open. Paul caromed the van onto the shoulder and Jerry leapt in, slamming the door shut behind him. We took the fuck off, leaving the manager far behind, presumably far enough behind that he couldn’t read the license plate since all the way home we thought cops would pull us over but they never did.

Jerry was amped: “Ha ha ha, whoo! Fuck that guy! Where’s the stuff?” meaning the stolen goods from the Eckerd’s, and we told Jerry that Danny had left it under the van to be destroyed in our hasty getaway. “God damn it, Danny!” Jerry rode Danny mercilessly all the way home. Danny’s last name was MacDougal, but Jerry thought it was hilarious to change it to “MacCockle”.

“Goddamit, MacCockle!”, “Fucking pussy MacCockle!”, etc. Danny quit the gang after that. The rest of us were still convinced of our future in petty crime; Jerry had just been stupid and vowed to never be stupid again.

Which was stupid.

BUSTED

Our glorious career came to an end one hot spring afternoon after it rained all day. We’d never shoplifted stoned, but today we did, and no doubt this affected our judgement. By the time we were casing the J. Byrons store after school, the skies had cleared and it was the usual hot sun beating down. We thought we could still get away with wearing bulky yellow raincoats. Jerry and I went into the store and stuffed a bunch of albums under the raincoats. Back to the van, we book, and Paul suddenly announces, direly: “There’s a guy behind us who’s been following us ever since we left the parking lot.”

We turn around and sure enough, there’s a total plainclothes cop type in an unmarked car, right on our ass, talking into a radio, glaring laser beam daggers at us. “Lose him!” Paul tried a few halfhearted turns, but it was obvious this guy was on us, and already calling it in. “Oh fuck oh my God!” Paul says, “I’m going to pull over, I didn’t steal anything.” Jerry and I

bailed out with all the merchandise into someone’s yard, hiding under the bushes, the pursuit vehicle flashing by. We dumped the goods in a garbage can, creeping back up to the Trail. Several blocks north, Paul’s van sat, pulled over, surrounded by three police cars, cherrytops ablaze: a major bust!

“Oh fuck, we are so screwed!” We knew Paul would give us up. We hiked back to my house, using alleyways to avoid the roads. My parents were home, and I hid my quaking fear, fronting that I needed to borrow the car to drive Jerry home. Jerry and I found ourselves in my Dad’s turquoise and white Cadillac sedan, freaking, driving through bleak no-mans land outside town, terrible badlands like the sort of places we’d be seeing a lot of in our new life on the run.

“Let’s just run away, let’s take this car as far as we can, we can go to California, they’ll never find us!” was Jerry’s idea. I seriously considered it, it didn’t sound bad. We could be street urchins in San Francisco. But we decided to face the music, so I dropped Jerry off and went home. All had been revealed, the cops had called, and my parents drove to the police station. My poor parents! The whole thing wound up with probation, grounded for the whole summer and reporting every week to a juvenile probation officer in East Naples. I think my parents were really discouraged and just kind of gave up, since there was little supervision of me during this time.

I’d get stoned and hitchhike to meet Mr. Wilson, who was a lame, cool,

mid-70s kind of public servant, probably stoned himself. He wore Neil Young sideburns and a short sleeve shirt with a tie and had one of those posters in his office of a cat hanging from a bar: “Hang In There, Baby!”

Even under house arrest, I snuck out after my parents were asleep, walking across the golf course to the Captains Cabin, a strip mall bar where they never carded. I hung out with the stoner kids who were regulars. It was miles to this place, I’d walk across the golf course in the moonlight, through sleeping neighborhoods, get drunk, then walk back across the golf course and sneak into my room. The golf course was beautiful at night.

Shortly after, I got busted again with Paul and Jerry. I had been off probation for maybe a week or so, having paid my debt to society, if not to J. Byrons. We went to Wiggins Pass beach one day, to smoke out. Wiggins Pass had recently been incorporated as a state park. We didn’t realize this meant heavier cop presence. We parked the van, hiking back in the Florida pines and passing the dope around.

Two park rangers came bursting through the scrub! Everyone threw the joints in the air except me. I ate mine. The rangers found the smoldering, thrown-away joints and radioed for the dreaded state troopers. Three trooper cruisers were sent to deal with us. The main guy was a lean, mean redneck state trooper: mirrored shades, acne-scarred skin, thin mustache, southern accent, and a manner that indicated we would be working on his chain gang for the rest of our lives. Wedging all of us in the back of a

squad car, they searched Paul’s van.

“Don’t look under the driver’s seat, don’t look under the driver’s seat…”

Paul chanted. But his magic was weak. The pockmarked trooper’s head vanished for a moment on the driver’s side, then came up holding a Prince Albert tobacco can full of roaches from past doobies.

“Oh, fuck!”

The trooper slowly lifted the lid and sniffed. “Hoooo-eee! Yew boys are goin’ ta jail with the spoons!”

They took us down to the drunk tank, which was filling up with Sunday afternoon loadees. The joint I had eaten got me very high, right in the police station, the bars of our cell separating into multi-colored, overlapping grids before my eyes. The other guys pitched pennies and acted tough, they made fun of the drunken tourists the cops were bringing in, but I was all numbed out. Once again, my parents met the cops, Mr. Wilson dropped by, and it was back into probation again.

I was amazed, given all I’d done, that they let me go see the Who play in Miami soon after. Mr. Wilson signed off, my parents too, though I didn’t tell them I was going with Paul and Jerry. I flew out of the house when Paul’s van pulled into the driveway, before they could say anything. Two hours to Miami, through Alligator Alley, a two-lane stretch through the empty heart of the Everglades. Fine in the daytime, but at night, terrifying. No gas sta-

tions, no lights, no nothing, just the occasional horrifying thump under the car as we ran over small animals. We made it there and back though, and the Who were great. When they did their song about teenage wasteland, we identified

JOEY

Joey’s house was right behind our house. I used to take the bus to school sometimes. I’d see Joey walking to the bus stop. He was semicool, kind of jockish, ran with the rich kid stoner crowd from Port Royal, even though we lived in this middle class neighborhood.. I discovered that Joey was a talented artist, in addition to being a jock on the wrestling team.

He did accomplished, realistic landscapes of Naples scenery.

Joey’s mom was divorced from a wealthy industrialist in Chicago, Joey’s biological father. She’d re-married an Lutheran priest named Herbert, a weak and ineffectual stepfather. Joey disliked him intensely. But Herbert and Joey’s mom were very tolerant with Joey, letting him grow pot plants in the backyard. I hung in his room for hours, each of us drawing in our

sketchbooks, smoking his weak homegrown.

A true friend is one you can be quiet with. It was like that with Joey, we’d draw, listen to records, stopping to show each other our work, and it was fun and it was enough. We didn’t need to talk a lot. We loved art. We had a great teacher in the art department. Class was right after lunch, so we would go in there baked. He knew we were stoned from our savagely red eyes. “You guys should close your eyes or you’re going to bleed to death.” he’d say. Everything was dandy for a while after my various probations were over. Then it got bad for Joey.

On Paul’s birthday, after school, Dewey, Paul and I decided to party in Christian’s tree fort. But we found Joey up there, in a hammock, naked, except for mirrored aviator sunglasses.

Joey had broken up with his girlfriend, a cheerleader. We thought he was upset about that. Anyone would be, she was hot stuff. But it didn’t explain why he was naked and acting so weird. We gave him a beer; he took a sip then absent-mindedly just started pouring it out. Precious beer!

We passed him a joint; he took a puff, and then tossed it over the side.

“Hey, what the fuck! Are you OK?” “You guys…uhhhhh…” Like we just couldn’t understand. And it was true we couldn’t understand when he took a small pile of twigs and lit it on fire, in a wood tree fort, in a wood tree. We had to put the fire out with

more sacred beer. He paced around naked in sunglasses, laughing to himself like he had insight into the horrible, dark secrets of the universe. We chalked his weird behavior up to a bad breakup. We thought whatever was going on with him would eventually wear off. When the sun started going down, we all had to go home for dinner. Joey begged: “Please, just stay with me.”

“I’ll bring you some food after dinner.” Dewey promised, and we left.

When Dewey came back Joey was gone. The sunglasses were still there.

BAD THINGS

Joey’s mom found him, and took him to the hospital. He was put in the first of many lockdown mental wards. When he came down enough to talk, he gave a fishy story of being dosed with LSD hidden in his employee meal at the Piccadilly Pub, a fancy restaurant he worked at as a busboy. Why someone would waste perfectly decent LSD on Joey was a mystery. Nobody at the Pub looked good to the cops as doing something like that, and nobody ever found out what really happened.

Christian’s folks tore down the tree fort. It was obviously being put to bad use. The teardown came on the heels of Joey’s meltdown and persons unknown pillaging Christian’s Mom’s medicine chest for all her valium.

They’d had enough of Christian and his stoner buddies. Joey was diagnosed as having a chemical imbalance, maybe or maybe not set off by psychedelics. He came out of the mental ward a changed guy, spacey all the

time. No more drawing sessions, I didn’t really see that much of him except at school.

His painting style changed radically, from realistic landscapes to crazy, colorful Fauvist freak-outs. They were great! A particularly striking work featured a skeleton fish floating in the stomach of a much larger fish, rendered in vivid oranges and purples, a portrait of inner turmoil and morbid obsession.

I got a phone call from Ray. He said Joey had started acting extra weird on the ride home in Ray’s VW. I went through the hedge between my house and Joey’s, and Ray opened the door. Joey’s parents were out.

Joey was huddled on the edge of the bed, naked, rocking back and forth.

“What’s the matter, Joey?”

“You guys….uhhhhhh…” He couldn’t talk again. His parents came home, saw what was happening, and once again had him locked down in the mental ward in Naples Hospital. Shortly after this, my Mom saved Joey’s life.

MOM & JOEY &THE SNAKE PIT

Joey drank cleaning fluid in an apparent suicide attempt, then walked out of the hospital in a daze, in his patient’s gown, his bare ass in the breeze. Mom was a volunteer nurse at the hospital, a candy striper. Riding her bike to work, only a few blocks from our home, she saw Joey walking down the street, looking totally out of his mind.

“Joey, are you OK?” a question he was now being asked all the time.

“Mrs. Eder, gaaaahhh….” Mom led him back to the hospital. She said it was like leading a toy balloon by the string. In the emergency room, nurses scrambling a crash cart rushed to pump his stomach. The doctors said he probably would have curled up in a vacant lot somewhere and died from poisoning if Mom hadn’t found him.

Poor Joey! After that, he was in and out of a string of mental hospitals.

The doctor’s solution to Joey’s chemical imbalance was more chemicals.

Loading him up, they tried to hit the right combo to even him out.

Skip ahead a year and a half, and I’m in college. Coming home over spring break, I went to a party at Ray’s house, and Joey was there. “They let me out, I’m cool now. I just take the pills and I’m fine.” He wanted to buy some weed from somebody at the party. I didn’t think this was such a hot idea, but Joey said he’d be OK. I insisting on going home with him and making sure he hid it.

None of us had served Joey very well but this time I determined to do my best to protect him. I should have flushed the weed down the toilet.

Instead, we went into Joey’s room. It was late and his parents were asleep.

An army surplus parachute covered the ceiling of his room as decoration. I climbed up there and put the baggie in a fold of the fabric. “Look, I’m gonna hide it up here, OK, don’t leave it out, promise me.”

“Sure, sure…” Joey was pre-occupied with lowering all the blinds in the room, then locking the door. He came up behind me and put his hands around my throat. He didn’t squeeze, still, it was freaky as fuck.

I broke his grip and tried to laugh it off: “Ha ha, very funny.”

“Ha ha!” he laughed robotically, putting his hands to my neck again. I had a flash that he wanted to kill me because I was living the life he would

have liked, going to college, able to get on with things.

I broke his grip again. He laughed some more, like it was all a big joke, not just his hands around my neck, but everything, his entire life, mine, the world, everything. “Look, I have to go, keep that shit hidden.”

The next day he got shipped back to the mental hospital. He’d left the weed out in plain sight and gotten out of control when his distraught Mom took it away from him. Cops, doctors, then another mental hospital, this time far away in Maine.

Six months passed, and I came home again from college. There was a party at a girl’s house. Who shows up but Joey, looking extra squirrely and desperate, along with a pudgy, balding guy in his thirties named Roger.

“I thought you were in Maine, man?” I asked him.

“I’m the main man!” he replied dementedly. A frenzied pounding started from the bathroom. Roger had gone in there and now could not figure out how to unlock the door, couldn’t or wouldn’t, what mattered was Roger was melting down in the bathroom. A couple of guys went out to their cars and got some tools and started taking the door off the hinges.

The Naples Police were cruising the party, checking the cars parked on the street. They thought it was odd, a car with Maine plates. Running the plates, they discovered the car reported stolen in Maine, a couple of days prior. So – just as Roger was released from the bathroom, the cops took

him and Joey away.

Now Joey was criminally insane, the worst kind of insane. He got locked up in an Ocala, Florida facility that was hardcore psycho territory.

After a few months of that, they released Joey for a few days to his parents, and he came back to Naples for a visit. All the college kids were back in town for the summer. Ray came over top hang out with me and Joey. My parents were out for the day, so we had the house to ourselves. I dragged the speakers out onto the deck and we were all lounging around on beach chairs, listening to Jimi Hendrix and trying out Joey’s prescription stash of thorazine. “They give it to us to keep us manageable.” It made you stiff and sleepy and was a shitty buzz. “It’s so fucked in there. I have to act crazier than I really am just to fit in.”

A few days later he went back to Ocala. A year went by, and we heard Joey had been moved around to many different facilities. At University of Florida, in Gainesville, I was living with Dewey, the kid who had thought he was dead on mushrooms, in a pile of palm fronds. We were still taking acid all the time. One night we tripped and went to see “2001: A Space Odyssey”. After, walking on a trail around Lake Alice, a big body of water on campus where alligators laid around on the banks, we talked about Joey and Naples in general. I’d never told anyone about the time I thought Joey wanted to kill me, when he’d repeatedly put his hands around my throat. I told Dewey, and right when I got to the end of the story, I jumped

– I flashed Joey hiding in the bushes behind me, grabbing me and dragging me to Hell! It was a visceral jolt.

“What was that?” Dewey asked.

“I thought Joey was behind me – FUCK!” and I had the same feeling again, even stronger.

We thought it was just the acid. Dewey said “I always thought there was like this hidden knife in Naples, like, under the nice exterior, the surface, there was this thing just waiting to get you.” Maybe someday we’ll find out there’s a Seminole Indian curse on all the white eyes who stole the land, making their kids take tons of drugs and lose their marbles. But people probably think that about everywhere, especially if they’ve gotten into trouble there and extra especially if they’ve taken tons of drugs there.

Three days later, Joey called from the Shands Hospital mental ward.

Shands is a teaching hospital on the university campus, barely a mile from Lake Alice – in the exact direction I had twice felt Joey’s presence coming from. He’d been there for a week or so. But he didn’t sound like a formidable psycho killer capable of reaching out through the ether with his mind to fuck with me. He sounded like Joey the mental patient but even more subdued, as if he had been further ground down. He wanted us to visit him.

“But I’m not the same, and this place is intense….so brace yourselves for… uh…weirdness.”

RUBBER ROOM

Getting off the elevator on the 11th floor, Dewey and I saw people doing the thorazine shuffle: a zonked, freeform lurch around a linoleum floor.

Down the hall was a guy locked in a rubber room, screaming and gibbering, it was fucked up. It smelled bad, like iodine and piss and shit and steam table food. Joey was a shade of his former self, from athlete to skinny, shrunken little guy. Like everyone in Naples, he used to be tan, now he was pale and dried-out looking, like he had been left in a corner of a dusty closet for too long. He wore his hospital gown. He said he didn’t have permission to wear regular clothes.

“But now that you guys are here, if you come visit me again, I’ll ask to wear my jeans!” He was all happy to see us, and we were happy to see

him too. We wanted him to be better, sincerely.

“Yeah, we’ll come see you all the time, man.” And we did. We even went to one of the group therapy sessions. He invited us and the doctor said it was OK. It did not go well. Me, Dewey and Joey, six other patients, and the doctor. Much compulsive rocking back and forth and twitching from the other patients.

The doctor said “These two gentlemen are

friends of Joey’s and are going to sit in with us today.”

One unshaven dude, with a hacked-up mental patient hair-do and feral, haunted eyes, sized us up and said: “Are you two faggots?”

“What? Huh?” “Like, you look like you suck his cock, are you the cocksucker? Which one of you takes it up the ass?”

“Uhhh…what?”

“Which one of you likes the big fucking cock right up the shit ass?”

The doctor said, “OK, that’s enough.”

“I’m just saying they look like fucking faggot dicksmokers.”

Aggression made some of the other patients uncomfortable, they squirmed in their seats and gurgled: “Urrrgh, uhhhn…” But, after a few minutes the heat was off us, the patients focusing on each other, ruthlessly picking apart their fellow patients’ every personality tic. I wasn’t real im-

pressed by group therapy, and neither was Dewey.

Joey perked up when we visited. We even checked him out for a day, taking him to a big art fair in Gainesville, with lots of painters and craftsmen. He was all into it. He asked the doctor if he could get some art supplies. He started painting a picture of the pilings at the end of 7th Avenue, in Naples. Spring break came along. Joey asked: “Can you take some pictures of the beach while you’re down there? I could use it for reference.”

“Sure. But listen, when we come back, I wanna see this painting all finished, it’s great.”

“Yeah, man, have a good trip.”

“OK, we’ll see you in a couple of weeks.”

As the double doors hissed shut behind us, I told Dewey “He’s gonna be all fucked up again when we come back.”

Returning two weeks later, I had a bunch of snaps of the beach. But the desk nurse said Joey became agitated when he heard we were there and had himself placed in restraints, strapped down on a gurney, in the rubber room. He didn’t want to see us no how.

As we left, Dewey said “You know, I know all this stuff about Joey, I’ve known him since we were on Pee Wee football, he had a lot of problems with his Mom and his real Dad.”

“I know all about him from hanging out drawing, about his family and Hubert and his cheerleader girlfriend.”

“We should see if we can talk to the doctor about all this stuff, maybe it would help.” So we called up the doctor and pitched him on our ideas.

The doctor said: “We’re not interested in the case’s past, we’re interested in curing it.” It. And that was that, we were cut off. Shortly after, Joey was shipped off to another medical prison, and we were of the opinion that the sinister powers that be – the Hidden Knife - just wanted to keep the money flowing that they got for keeping him locked up.

RABBIT ON THE FLOOR

At 21, Joey was released on his own recognizance into the wild. He went to Chicago, where his wealthy father lived, and got a job in a car wash. I spoke to him every so often on the phone. He spent his money on a bag of pot and a hooker every week.

“It’s not a bad deal!” he said cheerfully.

He married the hooker, a black girl named Eva, and they moved to Naples. In 1988, I was visiting Naples for the first time in many years. Eva was pretty and nice but you could feel her looking for the exit. I couldn’t see it lasting, Joey was still mental walking wounded.

They had a kid. Eva ran away, and filed for divorce in Chicago. Joey raised his son with the help of his mom, in a cramped little apartment by a canal in East Naples. A rabbit ran around loose, rabbit shit and food pellets all over the place. But the kid was all right; he did well in school, and got into college on a scholarship.

Joey rode around town on a bike after getting pulled for speeding too many times. He got lippy with a deputy, and his license was revoked. He still painted, but couldn’t get a show, even in Naples with all its galleries.

They didn’t go for his landscapes, which weren’t bad, and probably would have sold. But his social skills were non-existent, and his appearance rang alarm bells. He had a detached retina, the result of a bar fight. That eye was dead and white, he looked scary. “Those snotty gallery fucks. When I come in, they get on the phone and act like I’m not there. The weird thing about it is when my Dad dies, I’m going to inherit a ton of money, and they can all go fuck themselves.”

I kept in touch. Once we went out to Immokalee, looking for cow fields to photograph. He told me some crazy stuff then, like “I can breathe underwater.” Pointing out a gnarly tangle of palmetto he said, “That’s an Indian burial mound, that’s a sacred energy spot.” But it wasn’t. It was just some palmettos. Joey is pretty good on his meds and paints every day. His Dad is still alive, so Joey louches as a someday wealthy Prince of Naples in waiting.

CLASSIC ROCK VOL. II

The next Biology Club rock and roll field trip was to see Queen at the Lakeland Civic Center. Queen were a weird anomaly in the 70s rock pantheon, as they were, duh, queeny. But Queen never got the derision laid on freaky David Bowie by Naples High School mainstream tastemakers. They had radio hit cred; “Bohemian Rhapsody” ruled the airwaves the entire year it came out, so they got a pass. Dave and I were fans long before that, and Dave’s girl, Beth and my buddy Paul came along to the show.

We took my Dad’s bomber 15-year-old Mercedes diesel. Driving up two lane highway 17 through the center of the state was a time warp, breezing down a country road lined with cypress trees hung with Spanish moss, over bridges spanning narrow rivers, total Mayberry RFD action. Then the red light came on, the car was overheating! We broke down in Wauchula Springs, a tiny town, just enough go left in the car to pull into a service station by the side of the highway.

Interior central Florida is a whole different world from the coast; it’s

straight up redneck. Lucky for us there was a clutch of local gearhead cracker teens hanging out at the gas station on a Saturday. The radiator belched steam when I popped the hood, these kids flipping us out by running their fingers in the steamy fluid and licking them.

“Yup, yup, that’s radiator fluid, it’s sweet tastin’.” They probed around in the engine for a while, checking it out and checking us out. We were aliens, long hair, bell-bottoms. “Whoo, look at y’all’s hair! Y’all is a bunch of hippies!”

Finally, the leader of the gearheads announced, “You need a new thermostat.”

“How long is it gonna take?”

“Waaaaal, we’re gonna have to send to Fort Meade for parts, it’s a Saturday, closed Sunday, dunno if they’re gonna have foreign parts, could be a few days…”

“A few days! We’re going to a rock concert tonight in Lakeland!”

“Rock concert! Who y’all goin’ ta see?”

I had to think a minute, I could imagine the reaction to Queen: “Queen!

You put an ‘r’ on the end o’ that you got zactly what they are: queer!”

Thin Lizzy were opening, they were appropriately macho, so I told them: “Thin Lizzy.”

“Thin Lizzy! All right, ‘Boys Are Back In Town’!” I couldn’t tell if these guys liked us or wanted to kick our asses, one of them chasing Paul around with the air hose, blowing his long surfer hair around with it. But the leader of the pack admired our Thin Lizzy rock and roll spirit, announcing “Waaal, looky here, yew gotta rock and roll, we kin just cut out the thermostat, should get you up to Lakeland and back home if you don’t push her too hard.”

They did bypass surgery and we were ready to roll in forty-five minutes. We’d picked the one gas station in all of central Florida where the car could be fixed on the spot, by savvy adolescent cracker motorheads. They hardly charged us any money, so we decided to give them a tip and also blow their minds. We rolled a joint and put it in a $5 bill. As we rolled out, I called the main man over and said, “Hey, here’s a tip!”

Behind us, the kid unrolled the fiver, and the joint fell out. We rear viewed him picking it up, gawking and holding it up for his pals to see, and they all went “Whooo-eee!” and waved at us as we disappeared up 17.

Lakeland Civic Center was a big auditorium national acts kicked off tours in, working the kinks out in the sticks before they hit the big cities. General admission, standing, we wormed close to the stage, five rows back. Thin Lizzy were OK, I had a headache from our travails and also smoking pot all day, so I couldn’t get into it, but Queen were fantastic! This was pre-mustache, leotard Freddie Mercury, he and the band were spellbinding.

For the encore, they came out blasting “Hey Big Spender�, the Broadway show tune. Freddie had a crazy kimono on, and was swigging from a big champagne bottle. He doffed the robe to reveal candy striped hot pants and nothing else, and tossed the champagne bottle into the crowd!

It whizzed over our heads to some lucky kid behind us. A triple terrific, transcendent rock and roll joy moment made possible by rednecks.

COOLING TREND

1977: things getting crazy for friends and acquaintances. Paul’s cousin Allan was a North Naples semi-redneck hippie hybrid tough guy, into drugs and petty crime. A so-so student, but he seemed to get along OK, getting with a lot of the stoner chicks, he was good looking. He just went insane one afternoon, taking a shotgun to the beach, shooting seagulls before the cops came and took him away. He wound up committing suicide with the same gun a few years later.

Ai ai ai. Dewey’s dad started to have big problems. Dewey was from a real southern gothic family. One of Naples most successful lawyers, his dad was called “V” by pretty much everyone who knew him, after the Roman numeral at the end of his name, he was from a long line of proud Dixiecrats, who had gone through all the juniors and thirds and fourths, and he

was the fifth. V ran his thriving practice out of an office in Crayton Cove, an exclusive area with restaurants, shops, and a pier. Next to it was the Cove Inn, a discreet hotel where V maintained a suite. Dewey threw parties in there sometimes. V had that suite at the Cove for getting wasted after work, without a drive home. V was a classic high-achieving alcoholic.

Dewey’s family had a tragic history. Dewey’s mom was a suicide. V’s beautiful current wife was the stepmother. A huge, full-length, formal portrait of Dewey’s real mom hung eerily in the foyer of their lush Port Royal home.

Dewey had parties at the house, V hanging with us, getting blackout drunk as the evening wore on, sitting in an armchair, holding court with a great sense of humor, and a terrific southern accent. “When are you gonna cut your hair, boy?” Dewey’s long-suffering stepmother would scrape V out of the chair, once he more or less passed out, and get him to bed.

Things went underwater for V toward the end of senior year. He drove his car into the bay in back of Crayton Cove one night, wasted, right off the dock. But nothing happened; the courts didn’t take his license away or anything. He was too well connected with the local judges and cops and was a good ole southern boy. He plowed his replacement Cadillac right through the plate glass window of a fancy boutique not a month later, mowing down a bunch of mannequins and finally losing his license.

V died relatively young, a few years later. To everyone’s surprise, there was no estate, no money to speak of, and the family had to sell the Port Royal house for a song. Dewey kept the painting of his mother, but never hung it, just kept it wrapped up in the attic of the house he eventually settled in, in California, as far away from Naples as he could get without leaving the continental United States.

FLOATER

The Gulf of Mexico brings snowbirds to Naples and is the source of every dollar and every golden memory made there. It’s also the ocean, meaning cruel and unknowable. It’s not all golf carts and swanky homes when there is a massive body of water seething at your doorstep.

A half-mile off the coast, Ray was teaching me waterskiing. I sucked at it, plus smoking pot and drinking all day under the hot sun. I was all for giving up , then Ray saw something floating in the water off the port side.

“What is that?” At first we thought it was a dead dolphin, but edging closer, to our horror it was a human body!

“Holy fucking shit!”

“What do we do? What do you think happened?”

Ray didn’t answer, just gurgled the boat closer to the floater. To our disgust and fascination, we saw a bloated, late middle-aged, balding, heavy-set man. Poking above the water were the top of his head and

shoulders and one hand, frozen in a horror movie clench. Below the waterline, one of his legs was partially chewed off.

“Sharks got to him, whoof.”

“I’m gonna puke!”

“Guy’s been in the water for a while.”

The body was a ghastly greenish white with bloody holes on the shoulders where gulls had pecked at him.

“He is fucking A dead. I’m calling the Coast Guard.”

Talk about buzz kill. You could see little fishes down around what was left of the legs.

The Coast Guard guy took our position. The voice out of the radio was metallic and squawky: “Can you get a rope on him? Don’t let him float away. We’re gonna get a boat out to you, but they’re down by Gordon Pass right now, so you need to stay put, unless you want to try towing him in.”

“Look, we’ll just stay here but it’s gonna rain soon.” In summer, everything’s sunny and bright till 3:30 almost exactly. Thunderheads build up, the sky bruising purple and yellow, and then unloading like the Flood. It’s over in fifteen minutes, but a heavy fifteen minutes and not one you want to be out in.

Ray got the boat hook out. “See if you can get him a little closer, and I’ll throw the ski rope on him.” Ray always brought out the man-up in me, I didn’t want to be a pussy, so I just was cool like I boat hook dead bodies all the time, noticing sad little details like the design on the corpse’s shredded Hawaiian shirt of happy island girls doing the hula.

“Ugh, fuck.” Hooking the collar of the shirt, and pulling the guy a little closer, the head rolled around a little. “Oh Jesus Christ, I so don’t want to see his face!” We were spared, rigor mortis stiffening the body up, so we didn’t have to gross out over his dead eyes. Ray got the rope around the guy’s neck, pulling him in closer to the boat and tying off on a cleat.

Calling the Coast Guard back, Ray told them “OK he’s roped up, where’s your boat?”

“They’re still a half hour away, you want to try towing him in?”

“I guess, it’s gonna pour, man. Where should we go, my boat slip’s down by Boat Haven, that’s far.”

“Just put in to the nearest pass, go to Doctor’s Pass.”

Doctor’s Pass led to the Moorings, a tony neighborhood, I was imagining pulling up to some rich people’s dock with a dead body in tow and how flipped out they would be. “Uh, OK, so we’re gonna try doing that.” The

storm was moving in, lightning flashing, thunder booming.

“This guy’s head is gonna come off if we just tow him by his neck.”

“You wanna get in the water with him and put it around his chest?

“Are you fucking kidding? OK, let’s just go, it’s starting to rain.”

The storm began dumping, Florida style. Ray’s boat didn’t have a canopy, so we just had to take it, and motor on. The corpse’s head thumped against the side as we made grisly progress through the chop. The thumping stopped all of a sudden, the body slipping out of the noose and bobbing in the Gulf again. Giant raindrops spattered the water all around us, as far as the eye could see, which wasn’t very far, the rain was coming down hard.

“Goddamit!”

Throttling back and doing the boathook and rope routine again, rain streaming down on us; we saw it was no good towing the guy. We had to haul him into the boat or just wait for the Coast Guard. No way were we hauling him in, so we sat there in the driving rain. Finally it stopped and cleared up like it had never happened.

The Coast Guard showed up twenty minutes later, and they got him onto their cutter, a diver tying a rope around the guy and the swabbies winching him up. I didn’t even want to see that and neither did Ray, we just

looked away, you could hear the water running off in a rush as the body cleared the water.

The Coast Guard identified him a day later, a tourist missing from a big, crowded charter fishing boat out of Sarasota, they’d been looking for him for two days. The post mortem was a heart attack; he’d keeled over the side. Nobody noticed at the time, he’d come by himself, an avid fisherman, a retired business exec from Ohio. He was a widow, and it was only when his daughter missed their daily phone call that he was reported missing.

My parents were extra kind to me for a few days, but by and large we didn’t get too fussed over. No post-traumatic counseling, except the Coast Guard had a chaplain talk to us to make sure we were OK. After leaving his office, Ray and I drove around in his VW smoking a big joint.

Ray was all philosophical about it. “At least he was doing something he loved. Like, in nature.”

“I guess….pass that doobie.”

STANTON

Stanton ruled the Stoners. People just gravitated to him and looked to him as the arbiter of what was in. His Mom was a circuit court judge. In grade school, he brought this stash of horrifying photos of highway accidents that his Mom had to scare drunk drivers, the puke file, in for show and tell. Truly hideous and a real disincentive, people hanging out of wrecked cars with the top of their heads scraped across the asphalt like a pencil eraser rubbed across sandpaper. Originally black and white, but hand-colored, colorized, for modern audiences. I wondered who the poor sap was who had to figure out what color dashed-out brains smeared into a highway would be, but was otherwise mesmerized, as were all the other boys. Stanton was super cool! He had a laconic, diffident manner and a sharp sense of humor, sarcastic and cruel. He was a cruel cool kid.

Some time in senior year, he abruptly ran away, and joined the carnival.

There was a circuit of county fairs throughout the south and he joined one

of the traveling attractions, a Big Wheel ride. One night, while working on a repair, the jack supporting the ride snapped, and the rig fell, severing Stanton’s little toe. After that he came back to school and wound up graduating. In the reverse value system of stoner cooldom, his severed toe and carnie credentials made him more boss than ever.

A lot of the stoner kids moved out in senior year. You could get some dumb job and get your own apartment, and this was truly living

No one

wanted to live with their parents, not even Christian, who had a mansion.

Mike was another redneck stoner hybrid tough guy, and one of Stanton’s best friends and drug buddies. He was one of the first people to move into his own place.

A beautiful girl named Terry had shown up at school in sophomore year or so – a willowy blonde hippie rock and roll girl from Canada.

She had

pale skin, icy blonde hair and an ethereal vibe about her, even though she was also down to earth and fun. She played the guitar pretty well. She and Stanton palled around. She wasn’t sleeping with him, though it was obvious to anyone who looked that Stanton was totally in love with her.

Terry eventually went for the much more attractive Mike as a boyfriend.

Late in the year, Mike threw a keg party at his house. Terry was officially his girlfriend. Stanton was there, and, as the evening wore on, and drinks and drugs were consumed, the alchemy that takes place in the brain cells of frustrated lovers happened to him. He confessed his love to Terry and

kissed her. Everybody saw it, except Mike, who was out of the room for the moment, but it got reported to him fast. Mike was much bigger and tougher than Stanton. It seemed unfair when he punched Stanton in the face, knocking him to the floor. Stanton left, that was the end of his friendship with Mike. A few years later, Mike went to jail for dealing cocaine, got out, straightened up, got an electrical license and made a lot of dough working on houses during the construction boom in Naples. Stanton did a stretch for possession, did not straighten up, and lives life on the fringes of Naples society still, at his Mom’s house. Terry went back to Canada, married a helicopter pilot, and accepted Jesus Christ as her savior.

AFTERS

Wow, was I happy to get out of high school! Ray and I had been accepted to University of Florida, starting in the fall. Paul was also accepted and was going to join us for winter semester. Ray and I wound up having dorm rooms close to each other.

Ray, Paul and I had gotten pretty close in our last year of high school, hanging out a lot together. We cruised around in Paul’s van, doing ridiculous stuff like driving out to the Mootispaw Mansion in the middle of the night, stoned, to scare ourselves. The Mootispaws were a legendary cracker ne’er do well family, who had a bunch of kids, all of whom were constantly in trouble and getting expelled. One kid, Daryl, was famous for punching out a teacher in middle school, and then kicking him again when he was down!

The mansion was an old abandoned house down a dirt road, overgrown with weeds, ceiling caved in, rats in the bushes, creepy as fuck. We used

to go out there at night and leave the van high beams shining on it. We’d smoke weed and poke around in the house and freak ourselves out for fun.

The Jaycees later took it over, appropriately using it for a haunted house at Halloween. Finally, the fire department burnt it to the ground as a training exercise.

Ray and I settled into Gainesville college life.

One morning, Ray called

me up and said to come meet him. He sounded weird on the phone. He only lived across a couple of courtyards, and when I saw him coming out from his dorm room into the common, I could see he was crying.

“Paul’s dead.”

Paul had been a passenger in a car going from Naples to Fort Myers up the two-lane Tamiami Trail at night. An oncoming car pulled into their lane, Paul’s car swerved out to avoid a collision, hitting the end of a guard rail of a bridge they were passing over; nowhere else to go. At seventy miles an hour, the rail sheared through Paul’s side of the car, killing him on impact.

Paul was buried in a gunmetal blue casket. The sun poured down, it was hot. We saw our reflections in the metal as we bent over to carry the casket. Paul’s friends gathered down at the pilings on 7th Avenue, shocked, numbed out, drunk and stoned. Some kids half heartedly paddled around in the water, others sat on the pilings drinking beer. Terry played her guitar a little, some sad song. The clouds were building up way

out in the Gulf. It would rain like clockwork at 3:30. The one-man helicopter guy went over, zipping up the coastline.

Sometimes, when we came back from college, Ray and I would go out to visit Paul’s grave, and smoke a joint there and pour beer on the ground, like gangsters. Many years later, back after a long absence, I found Paul’s headstone gone. His parents had moved to Texas, exhumed him, and he is now a resident of the family plot somewhere outside Houston.

CLIMBING THE WATERTOWER

Sometimes I think about all the things Paul missed out on that he would have liked – just being alive, college, getting laid, career, maybe being an artist, punk rock, hip-hop, travel, marriage, kids, computers, cel phones… all that. I’m glad about this one thing we did, climbing the water tower.

The City of Naples water tower commanded the skyline, 300 feet tall next to the police headquarters and the fire department. Climbing it was a rite of passage. If you were really fearless, you spray-painted your initials up there, or “Go Eagles” if you had school spirit.

Robin lived on the 10th Avenue hippie street, in one of the old Victorians and had the unique situation of basically living by himself at age 16. His mom was who knows where. His dad left town for long periods on drug runs, and Robin had a room of his own in the turret of the Victorian. Late

in senior year, Paul and I were hanging out in the turret, getting high with Robin, when we started talking about climbing the water tower.

“OK, we’ll just go look at it, we’ll scope it out.” We all agreed it was just a scout.

It was dark out, and we saw where the base of the ladder met the ground, the layout. The coast looked clear, no cops around. Paul and I were much more chicken than Robin, a go-for-it kind of guy, in that smug, transcendent hippie way. And now he said: “Let’s go for it!”

“Maybe we can just come back another time when we’re more ready.”

“What ready? I’m going!” And up he went, scurrying up the ladder.

Now we couldn’t not go, we would be labeled cowards forever. It didn’t look that crazy from the ground, but as we climbed higher and higher, it was terrifying.

A platform with a rail ran around the edge of the steel wa-

ter tank. Where the ladder met the platform, it was constructed to angle out to allow you to pass over the railing. At the very top, for the last few rungs, you were climbing at a vertiginous 45 degrees to the ground far below. As we got closer, Robin was up there yelling at us.

“This is great, wow!”

“Shut the fuck up, man!” I was so scared, I thought just the weight of his words hitting my ears would make me tumble off into space and die.

“Do you need a hand?” He moved to help me, arm outstretched.

“Are you crazy? Don’t touch me!” I finally hauled myself onto the platform, just sitting there for a second, panting, getting it together.

“Wow!” Paul said, and I looked around.

Below us was wonderful Naples on the Gulf, the layout of the streets, things you hadn’t realized, like the way some streets curved and then straightened, details you would never notice on the ground. The tops of royal palms peeked above the streetlights, which gleamed like Mrs. Maples jewels at a diner counter. To the west the abrupt darkness of the Gulf of Mexico, the lights of fishing boats far off on the horizon, to the east, the lights of town melted into the vast emptiness of the Everglades.

We found some old spray paint cans somebody had left up there, but couldn’t think of anything particularly cool to write, so we just left it. Climbing down was easier, and we made a clean getaway. Years later, the water tower was torn down. My Dad asked me “Did you ever climb it?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Good.”

SUNNY, WITH MANATEES

I’ve been stressing all these bad and crazy things that happened, but there were lots of fun times and moments of transcendent, unspoiled Floridian beauty. The Biology Club had a party at the beach one afternoon.

We had a big swath of white sand to ourselves, fifteen or so kids, my rock and roll friend Dave and his brother Donny among them. We were looking out at the sun closing into the horizon when we saw a familiar shape break the surface. “It’s a manatee!” It was really close to shore, and Dave, Donny and I jumped in the water to see if we could swim with it. It had gone below the surface, and the three of us were in a small ring, trying to figure out where it went. Suddenly it surfaced, right in the middle of the three of us, like it was purposely playing around. You could see its whiskery, alien face and hear it exhale, then take a deep breath. Now, it’s hard to spot any real manatees anywhere, but there are plenty of manatee shaped mailboxes.