The Skinny Island Post

An old dear friend came to visit with us in the little house on Skinny Island last night.  We have known him for 50 years, but haven’t seen him for 25.  He has been living out in the mountain west for a long, long time, and doesn’t get back east much, though, like Papa, he is a Florida native, and in fact, probably related.  He was born in Jacksonville, with the middle name Cooper.  Papa’s great-great grandfather married a Cooper in Jacksonville in 1850.  The director of the original King Kong, Merian Cooper, was related, and we both claim him as a distant cousin.

This was my first and closest friend from eighth grade through high school, and beyond.  In a very real way we grew up together, supporting each other in the casual, unexpressed way boys do, in the passage from childhood to manhood.  After high school we went to different colleges, but saw each other on breaks and a lot during the summers.  When I played the guitar and sang, he was my harmonica player.  We learned to drink gin, and smoke cigarettes and those other things together.  He introduced me to Bob Dylan, Arthur Rimbaud, and Jean Paul Sartre, among many others. We joined the army on the buddy system, went through basic training and medic training together, living in the same barracks.  He went to Viet Nam, and I was sent to Walter Reed Hospital.  After our service we eschewed traditional mobility and enjoyed the counter-culture lifestyle for a time in Tallahassee.  We played a lot of music, and through a mutual friend, learned to be pretty decent carpenters.  Along the way we spent thousands of hours in conversation.  I learned more from this individual than perhaps any other in my life.  Last night, at a wonderful, casual dinner, and after, in the living room, it was very clear to me how and why.

He was our high school valedictorian, but never a bookish sort.  He just seemed to already know everything.  I was little better than an average student, but aware enough to know my friend had a truly beautiful, gifted mind.  In his early thirties he understood he wasn’t using that mind near enough, applied to and was accepted in medical school.  He became a psychiatrist, and for the past fifteen years or so, his practice has been with children and adolescents.  Questioning and listening to him last night was both an education and a lesson in humility.  The logical, ordered, deeply intuitive mind has been tempered and graced with a rare and genuine compassion, a sweet clarity of understanding that is simply transcendent.  I was once again lifted up by association.

We stood on the beach and looked at the ocean, and he expressed a yearning to be near this great body of water again.  I hope he will.

* * *

We didn’t see the Feral Poet this week, but he did send in some work for his Sunday page.  A brief note attached indicated he was out of town to escape the hub-bub of Bike Week, but that he was feeling especially effusive and limber, something to do with rum and fruit juice.

* * *

Absent Dog

Four literal clowns
lined up
along
the gymnasium wall
of my youth.
We represent
the absent dog,
one said.

Maybe.
But there was
much more light
than I remember
there being
for any dance

we ever had there,
and I have become
so suspicious
of all clowns.

* * *

Poem Falling on a Man

I hear it in the kitchen
at night
making huge linoleum
sandwiches.
It recites the Kama Sutra.
It wants my wife.

I could still
kill it
if I had the guts
but I keep
remembering
how much at first
it praised me
how much
it loved me.

* * *

Tangerine Eating

Something dynamic here,
instructive:

After a brief
obligatory struggle,
manifested
as in most change

by a clinging to the known
in the face of the unknown

repeated
eight to twelve times,
each segment comes away
a golden smile.

* * *

Conversational Spanish

All these wounds,
the deepest of which
are self-inflicted and spaced
with mile markers manned
by hollow-eyed, sleepless insurance men.
I have come up against the walls

of wide-open spaces

and brother, they are built to last.
Coffee sustains with the perpetuity
of saints, and is easier to swallow.
A couple in the next booth
converse in Spanish,
but all I get are the easy words.

* * *

Creamed Jade

Just let me have
a couple more summers
here, it’s worth it
to elbow past the jerks
and starving fat kids,
all the millions
sprouting mouse ears
and vestigial tails,
for a morning
on Boca Ciega Bay

the water like creamed jade,
the dolphins in to feed.

* * *

Very strange and beautiful sky this morning. This lasted maybe thirty seconds in these colors, then faded out, and the unusual rolls and bundles in the clouds were no longer discernible.

Coffee, then a brisk two-mile walk along the road, east wind buffeting, clouds moving in from the ocean breaking up overhead.  Balmy, blustery.  Second cup of coffee back at the house then out to check the garden. Besides radishes, there are okra, cucumber, basil, and onions now poking through.  Watered everything thoroughly, then set out eight more small tomato plants in lots of compost and manure.  Lingered there a long time in the early sun, seated on a bench I’ve made from a wormy driftwood plank I found on the beach years ago.  St. Francis doing a fine job with the garden so far this year.

Atlantic running big for two days now.  Constant, background roar all morning underpinning everything.  Did some e-mails and bill-paying, then sat good long meditation on steps of back deck in the moving, dappled sunlight.  The house blocks most of the traffic noise, but not the ocean.  Remarkable, really.  You can hear it all around, but distant, too, even in the trees.  The pair of Cardinals has returned; I heard them calling from different trees in the back, and two afternoons ago she appeared in the bay tree at the back window, as if to announce their return.  I don’t know, of course, if it’s the same pair, but there has been a pair every spring for as long as I can remember.  Perhaps these are offspring of an earlier pair.  We have resident Doves through spring and summer as well, and flights of visiting Grackles when the Bay tree berries fruit in abundance.  We’ve had hawks on occasion, and a very big Owl one summer, who would scare the daylights out of you when he took flight.  Sometimes night herons roost out back, on their way to the beach early for crabs.

Hummus sandwich and a Blue Moon for lunch in the sun of the front deck, then fell asleep for a half-hour.  Dragged myself to writing desk to try to get some work done. This is the view from the desk.  Lots of down time here. Starting to settle into the spring/summer routine.

* * *

I’m sitting here smoking a big ole Padron Cigar, and lovin’ every second of it.  Padron is a Nicaraguan brand.  The family left Cuba in the 60s, took what they knew, and a bunch of seed, and set up shop making a great cigar elsewhere.  But make no mistake, they hold to the Cuban tradition and, I would guess, go back in a second if they could.  On the paper ring of each Padron cigar is a little map of Cuba.  What’s that tell you?

I’m a Tampa boy; I grew up loving cigars.  Some of the best cigars in the world were made in Tampa between 1885 and 1950 or so, not so much after that.  My old man was a cigar smoker; good enough for me.  He would smoke them driving in the car with the windows rolled up.  That’ll get you acclimated; or addicted.  Take your pick.  That’s me up there, 1967, or so, in my grandfather’s house in Tampa, getting ready to stick my head out the window with this beautiful stogie in my teeth.  I used to smoke cigars under the table at Columbia Restaurant in Ybor City when I was seven or eight; and later played Canasta with Baby Siconi and the Trafficanti boys (sore losers.)  Cuban coffee all night and hit fifth grade in the morning with a butt still in my teeth.

I laid off in high school to run track for a while, but picked it up again in college, along with Camels, an admittedly poor substitute, but a good buzz, until something better came along. I became a musician, sticking the cigarette when I played, up in the gears above the nut.  Very cool.  A smoke would last about a song and a half that way, then you’d light another, puff it a little between tunes, then stick it up in the strings again.  No great harm.

Here’s the point: and I will hold to this tooth and nail as long as I live– the greatest feeling in the world, better than food, sex, sunsets, sunrises, babies, puppies, drinking, not drinking– is finding a cigarette in the corner of a pack you were certain was empty.  Say what you will, you don’t have anything to compare with that, but that.  If you don’t have that, you’ve missed something big.

But I’ve given that up, and I miss it.  Siding with caution for years now, it’s just the occasional cigar in the open so as not to offend the sensitive.  Padron, Fuente, Cohiba; tropical breezes and the sound of surf; a little gin and tonic to hold off the malaria; cigar smoke runs deep and sweet; generations of images.  It goes with the territory.  No apologies.

Almost too good to be true today; clear skies, the ocean blue-green, Trade-like southwest winds over long fetch bringing Caribbean warmth and humidity.  We’re due to hold like this for the next few days, then cool off a little, but just back down to the mid-seventies for highs, instead of eighties.  I guess we can live with that.  The last two winters have been funky here, say what you will.  Early freezes, followed by inordinately long stretches where we couldn’t break sixty.  Used to be we’d have a day or two of that then bust through the eighties again.  Damn dipping Jet Stream; needs to stay up where it belongs.  Not sad at all to see February check out.  We’ve been off and on sick with one thing or another since December.  Need a little warm healing time.  March is traditionally windy and frequently gray, but not the cold and depressing heaviness of February.   Did I say I’m not sad to see February go?

* * *

The radishes are up!  Probably should stop there.  Everybody could be a successful gardener if all you tried was radishes.  I barely got back up to the house after putting in the seeds and they were poking through.  Have potatoes sprouting as well, and put in cucumber, cantaloupe, yellow crookneck and zucchini squash seeds yesterday, along with bell peppers, Jalapeno, and  Habanero plants.  Need rain now.

* * *

Awakened by the sound of drama from the sidewalk very early this morning.  Woman sobbing, cursing someone; certainly a man.  Not an infrequent occurrence, actually, making it a phenomenon worth a little discussion.  Didn’t bother to get up to look at this event, guided mostly by the trajectory of her vocalizations–she was moving more quickly than most– but did listen until she was out of range.  He really sounded like he deserved every bit of it.  It is something of a stage out there, is all I can figure; wide open; big dome of sky; dramatic back-drop ocean scenery.  This one was a soliloquy, if you will, but we have had a number of intense dialogues.  There is one that is rather a serialization, the same couple hurling invectives to and from the convenience store every few nights.  Beer must figure in there somewhere, but I haven’t nailed that down yet.  There’s another–and I have gotten up to look at this one–where there is some distance between the two, again, repeated often enough to have a pattern.   She stands at one end of the sidewalk, just within view from the house, and he is walking away (but never seems to completely disappear down the way).  Every few steps he turns and tells her he’s done; he’s had enough; it’s over.  I don’t know about her, but I don’t believe him anymore.

One morning, before dawn actually, one little drama actually came to the door.  We heard some shouting, then a pounding on the front door.  I flipped on the porch light, and there stood a frazzled young woman crying her eyes out.  Beyond, on the sidewalk, stood a burly bearded man.  She implored us to call the cops, that he was going to kill her.  He, of course, couldn’t have been more kind, sympathetic, and understanding.  No, no, he said.  She’s just a little drunk.  I wouldn’t hurt her.  I told her to have a seat on the deck, and then I called the cops and waited until they arrived and had a discussion with the gentleman.

I think this is what you call, in theater parlance, Revolving Repertoire.  Oh, and a few days ago, I saw Crazy Ray and the Saxophone Man (see old post “Some Locals”) actually talking down on the beach.  Love to have heard that conversation.

There was an unexpected power outage at the offices if the Post yesterday, resulting in a temporary suspension of publication, for which, if noticed, we apologize.  An inordinate number of Grackles descended and began eating and expelling Bay Berries, short-circuiting the whole operation.  The presses are heating back up, and normal publication should resume some time this afternoon.  Thank you for your patience.  Talk among yourselves in the meantime.