Handyside

Militias are forming. Little constitutional homemade armies, getting ready to fight the government. Members getting arrested for plotting to murder police officers.

The northeast is flooded. It’s under more water than ever before in history.The ground in Haiti, Chile and Turkey has fallen out from under the people, taking the foundations of their lives with it. Hurricane winds are blowing in Illinois and Europe.

There are video games now in which the goal is to rape teenage girls, get them pregnant, force them to have abortions.

Games?

Rape is a game now.

Games are fun.

What?

I don’t know.

People are friending and unfriending other people on Facebook.

Unfriending.

What?

I don’t know. I don’t pretend to know.

There’s no way to know anything about a circus. There isn’t anything to know. All you can do is try to fend for yourself and remember it’s not meant to be taken seriously. You just watch the show. Then it gets up and moves on out of town. And if you survive, you try and build something out of the wreckage it left behind.

Garth and I are getting ready.

We’re selling our huge laptop so we can get something small for backpacking. So we can keep working on the websites. I’m going thru my few possessions and whittling them down to an extremely bare minimum so that I can carry them without much discomfort. I’m researching hiking trails- long 100-mile trails that cross whole states, keeping you in the wilderness and out of the cities and the traffic. I’m looking at maps, hi-lighting snaky back-country roads.

We don’t plan to hitchhike or ride buses, planes or trains. We plan to go on our own two feet. We don’t plan to rely on the people or the machines of civilization for travel. We plan to rely only on ourselves. This leaves us completely free to come and go when and where we choose.

We do have the food stamps for a couple months. And we have $20. We may as well use them while we can. I’m not anti-government, after all. I may actually be a communist. I don’t know. Just like I’m not Pro anything, I’m also not anti anything. There’s not time for that- no point in it. It’s all falling down anyway.

I don’t want to waste energy being pro and anti things. I just want to use what I can when I can and live my life.

I believe the next decade will be a very interesting and action-filled time to live in this country. It’s a time of weird change. Not the kind of change Obama talks about. But the kind that nobody can do anything about. The kind that nobody controls.

And even if I’m wrong- even if the country’s goings on don’t turn out to be interesting- my own life will be.

About one more week before Garth and I get on the road….

February 28 thru March 23. 2010

Two days after our arrival at the Kiser Farm, I went for a walk in the woods. I climbed a tree while talking on a cell phone to my mother. I fell out of the tree and sprained my ankle so severely I was unable to walk for two days. It took 7 days for my foot to heal well enough that I could walk without aid. I couldn’t fit my foot in a shoe for two weeks. It was twice its normal size.

Due to my immobility, I got a lot of writing done. I published  the whole 6-week long story of the adventures Garth and I had on Wisteria Island. I sat by a window in the upper floor of a rustic cabin by a pond. Bare woods with a floor of brown leaves surrounded me on three sides. Ladybugs crawled out of the walls thru window panes. They infested the cabin so thoroughly that Garth was moved to vacuum them. He vacuumed every live one that crawled, and then he vacuumed all the dead ones that lay in piles on the outer window pane.

“Imagine that,” I said. “A huge vacuum comes out of the sky and sucks up a million people, including you. You’re inside this pitch dark dusty bag with a load of panicking human beings. Then a half million dead bodies fall in on top of you.”

Garth and I went to his friend Tavis’ wedding in Ohio. It was the shortest wedding I’d ever seen. Five minutes. They played the Star Wars theme at their reception. Garth made a legend of himself by dancing to Thriller in a pin-striped suit. Of all the things I’ve seen Garth do in the past year and a half, this was one of the most marvelous. Up until that moment, we’d done everything together. But due to my foot injury, I was obliged to sit and watch the frenzied flailing on the wedding reception dance floor rather than joining in. So I was able to observe Garth from a distance as he exhibited his most fascinating and endearing quality, that being his complete lack of concern for what everybody else thinks about him or what he’s doing.

Strictly for entertainment value, I read a lot of mainstream news during my time on the farm. I wanted to see what it is I miss out on while I’m on the road, at sea or inhabiting godforsaken islands in The Caribbeans. I read about 82-year old priests having sex with 19-year old altar boys, and a married couple letting their newborn baby starve to death while they raised a virtual child at an internet cafe, among other things.

In piecing all the stories together, I came to 2 conclusions. One is that there is no point taking anything seriously. The other is that someone is doing a very good job of distracting the general public from whatever it is that’s really going on. There has to be something else going on. If the daily CNN news is not a decoy, the best option for our civilization is probably THE RESET BUTTON.

And, on second thought, if it is a decoy, whatever is happening behind the curtain must be incredibly sinister. Why else would its masterminds endeavor to distract a whole civilization from whatever it’s doing? In that case THE RESET BUTTON is not only our optimal solution, it is imminent.

All lies are exposed eventually.

What do you think will happen when a huge mass of people who has believed for two centuries that they were the smartest and most aware civilization in history suddenly finds out that they were only a puppet or a machine, or maybe that they were simply tranquilized and swept under a rug, or used as a front?

I think that if they have any brain cells left at that moment, they will realize that they’ve wasted a lot of their precious time, and pure, genuine outrage might turn them back into what they once were… a nation of free thinkers who would stand up for themselves when wronged or repressed.

Sar.ah [sair-uh]

-noun

1. The wife of Abraham and Mother of Isaac Gen. 17:15-22.

2. Nihilist

Han.dy [han-dee]

-adjective

3. Convenient or useful

4. Ambitiously pursuing nothing

Side [sahyd]

-noun

5. A position, course or part of a person or group opposing another

6. Subscribes to nothing

And anyway, aside from all that pointless thinking I insist on doing despite its utter futility, I mostly spent my time enjoying the availability of hot, running water and the internet, which I used to find guitar tab for Beatles songs that reminded me of my Junior High School days.

At one point, Garth agreed to work for his friend, Randy. There was a two-week job tearing a house down. We decided to spend the $1000 he’d make on Live Video Blog-Casting (it’s exactly what it sounds like). But that didn’t work out for various reasons.

So we’ll be venturing forth with naught but a few dollars. We’ll leave for Colorado, where we’ll pan for gold, not with the intention of striking it rich, but for the purpose of entertaining ourselves by doing something we’ve never done before.

We’ll probably leave all of a sudden, provoked by the usual combination of unpredictable restlessness and a lightening realization that we’ve developed a routine. We’ll find ourselves getting rained on in the woods alongside a highway, or getting schooled by a long-haul truck driver on the genuineness of George Jones before we even realize we’ve left Murphysboro.

It’s a weird life you get into when you decide that everything around you has corrupted itself to a point of absolute purposelessness. I have no desire to stay in one place or to devote my life to the accomplishment of any single task or to the attainment of any certain status. Nothing definable interests me.

I’ve doomed myself (condemned, cursed, fated…I’m not sure doomed, with its negative connotations, is the right word) to wandering, running aimlessly (not from anything, not in search of anything, but just running because I have this energy that keeps driving me forward and sideways and diagonally),  trying to collide in the end with whatever it is that’s behind the curtain. Not that curtain. I don’t really care who’s doing what or what whoever is doing.

What I’m talking about is that I’m convinced there has to be something more real and less mechanical, something wild and raw and unprocessed…

SOMETHING DIFFERENT AND REAL.

There’s a staleness about everything. Staleness like beige walls and florescent tube-lighting. It’s exhaustingly redundant.

I’m done with it.

All I want to do is live my life. And I want to write about it. Not for posterity or fame or other people’s entertainment. All of those are pleasant bonuses and side effects.

I’m writing about it so I don’t get lost.

February 25. 2010.

In the morning, or just before it, before the sun came up thru the wet, drippy trees, Garth and I crawled out of the tiny, damp, humid tent that was sagging in on us, and our bones were all bent out of shape like a car crash, and our muscles were stiff and brittle like old rubber bands. And we walked. We walked along this trail that was meant for pedestrians. It runs parallel to the highway that goes all the way from Key West to Miami, over all the islands in the chain. And the wind was hard. It was blowing so hard I could lean on it like a university student leans on mantles in old legendary schools where you wear sweater vests and read the Great Gatsby in all seriousness, smoking daintily as if it matters. And our packs were uncomfortable for various reasons and hurting our backs and shoulders. And we crossed bridges over the green water, and passed tiny towns where the grade schools had signs with moving lite-up letters that informed us that the monthly goal was Integrity. And I said that the kids who took the goal seriously probably got made fun of by the kids who thought it was bullshit, and the kids who thought it was bullshit probably called the good kids Integritards. And we rested on the posts in the metal highway rails that come up to your hip if you’ve ever walked next to one, and we waited in bus stops and ate cocktail bread and walked, and then walked some more. We waited on cement foundations that held up telephone poles and we walked some more. We walked about 11 or 12 miles.

Then this young kid in a car pulled into the left turn lane and paused and yelled at us to see if we needed a ride. We did. We walked slow, waiting for him to circle around and come get us, and he pulled into a parking lot. As I was opening his door, a young girl in her 20s stopped in a truck with a canopy and yelled, smiling, I’m going to Tampa! as tho this was a contest and Garth and I were a prize. And I asked the kid where he was going and he was going only 3 miles down the road. So we got in the girl’s truck and her name was Ashlee.

There are so many hitchhikers in southern Florida that the drivers got sick of them and stopped picking them up, so I thought we’d have to walk all the way to Miami. It’s 150 mile trip. I thought we’d be walking for 10 days. I’d resigned myself to it, accepted it. But here we were on our way to Tampa. An eight hour ride right to the top of Florida.

This girl, she worked at a hospital for sea turtles and told us that if a turtle gets hit by a boat when it’s taking a breath, the air gets stuck under its shell and it floats for the rest of its life. It can’t go down in the water and find food. So they keep them in the hospital with weights on their shells. And she was a bird person. She loved birds. She drove us along a nowhere highway, thru the Everglades, where there were billions of rare birds every second, and she would point and bounce in her seat and nearly lose control of the wheel in all her excitement. She would announce to us to look and then tell us what kind of bird it was and how beautiful it was. I never appreciated birds so much in my life. She stopped on the side of the road so I could go look in the water and try to see and alligator, which I’d never seen before. When I got out of the car, I could barely walk because my legs hurt so bad from walking. I did see an alligator, but only when we were driving, out the window of the truck as we passed by, Ashlee also stopped at a nature sanctuary where a boardwalk runs thru the mystical swamps, where the leaves had fallen off the trees and they stood straight and empty in pink dusk and mist, and we saw a pregnant deer walking thru the swamp getting hung up on her stomach when she tried to jump thru the crotch of a tree. Ashlee told us that a bunch of deer were brought here to be re-introduced to the habitat and they all died agonizing deaths from hoof rot because no one took into account that the deer that live here had adapted to walking around in water all the time. She also pulled over all of a sudden in the midst of many lanes of traffic on the highway because she saw a stray cat in the grass and wanted to make sure it was okay. But she sat behind the wheel and worried and wrung her hands about it for ten minutes first so it wouldn’t get scared and run into traffic.

Ashlee told us of her life a bit too. When she was twelve, she grew pot in the woods and left a campfire burning out there and it caught the trees on fire, and when the fire department came, they found her plants, but all they did was tell her parents to reprimand her. She was a delinquent and went on an Outward Bound trip where nature is supposed to cure kids of their rebellious and troublesome habits and their bad attitudes. That’s where she kayaked thru the Everglades and fell in love with the habitat. When they left her alone on a beach with only a bag of trail mix, and she left it outside for the bears to eat, she got pissed off and sat on the sand. A flock of millions of pink birds flew across the sunset, made it look like the sky was pulsating. She had a huge revelation from that and went home and got rid of all her rap cds and started listening to Nirvana instead.

When Ashlee picked us up, she was on her way to Tampa to pick up her stuff from her ex-girlfriend’s house. They had recently broken up and she was really distraught about it. She was staying the nite with a different ex-girlfriend, and she asked if Garth and I could stay too. So we went to the grocery store,  and with our food stamps, we bought sandwich food and food for steak and egg breakfasts. We ate the sandwiches in the truck while driving and I was squished in a tiny half seat in the back. Garth and I had barely eaten all day, and I was dizzy and getting a headache from starving, so I ate two sandwiches and gorged myself and started to feel sick to my stomach too. To get the keys for the apartment she was staying in, Ashlee had to go to the Rainbow Room and meet her friends. The Rainbow Room is a gay bar and it was tiny and stuffed with women playing Pictionary on a huge white board. Garth and I sat at a table with Ashlee and her two friends, Sharon and Alex, and they bought pitchers of beer and shared with us, but I felt so terrible and nauseous that I could barely choke mine down. One of her friends, Sharon, was really into the game and she screamed the whole time in a resonant, high-pitched, nagging secretary voice that nearly split my skull open by the time we left. At the apartment, they made a bed of blankets for Garth and I on the floor of an empty bedroom.

February 26. 2010.
In the morning, Garth and I each took a shower in the apartment and changed clothes. My clothes from the previous day hiking in the rain smelled horrible from sweating and not getting any air thru my rain suit. We cooked the steak and eggs for Ashlee, Garth and I because her friends were already at work, then she drove us to highway 75. It was sunny and clear and I couldn’t walk that well because my thighs really ached from our 11 mile walk. We sat in the bushes on top of the hill of grass that sloped down to the road and ate something, then started walking.

Not long into our walk, a red Hummer pulled over for us. Hummers don’t normally pull over. This was an accident. The guy inside thought our car had broken down. When he found out we were just hitchhikers, he said, Well, Don’t kill me or anything, and drove us anyway. His name was Brandon and he was about my age. He loved blues music and played some for us that was his particular favorite. He had a house in Homestead, Florida, and in Alabama. He’d been a football player. He was a really large fellow. He had a three year old son too. The only time he ever took drugs was when he drank some Koolaid, not knowing there were mushrooms in it. Once, he got mad because the government said he made too much money to get food stamps, so he took his black lab into the office and said, Can he get food stamps? He’s black and I don’t know who his daddy is. Brandon said he didn’t know what he’d do if he suddenly found himself with nothing, like me and Garth. He wouldn’t know how to get food or where to camp or anything. The idea made him really nervous. Brandon said he never picked up hitchhikers and that after Garth and I, he probably never would again. He’d been nervous at first, making sure to pick up his wallet and put it in his pocket, eying Garth in the mirror, but he relaxed at the end and said Garth and I were good people and even gave us his phone number to call if we were around his area and needed something. He dropped us off near Interstate 10 just before the sun set.

There wasn’t much around except some woods and a McDonald’s and a Vietnam vet on the on ramp with a cardboard sign, so Garth and I walked thru the leafy ground and the leafless trees and found a camping spot in the woods, where we set up our tent properly and made a small fire and roasted pepperoni on sticks and put it on sandwiches. The sun shone thru the trees really bright and cool. We slept in our sleeping bags this time, and slept well and stayed dry.

Just after we woke up, rain started pattering down on the tent, so we got out in a hurry and rolled up the sleeping bags and re-packed our backpacks and trekked thru the woods and across the highway to the McDonald’s. It started raining hard just after we got there. I got out the bag of change we had, the last of our money, and started counting out enough nickles to get two coffees and something that would cost a dollar. A ten dollar bill landed on the table. Garth and I looked up and saw a young fellow had dropped it there for us. He had a young wife and some little kids. His hair was long and he wore camouflage and looked like Jesus and didn’t say too much. But his wife told us he was on the way to see a relative and they hadn’t been out of state in 20 years. They weren’t a rich family, just good people. Garth said, Thanks a lot. we might not have been able to eat later if not for this. There’s no telling where you’ll end up at the end of a nite hitchhiking, and whether or not there will be a store that accepts food stamps. So we spent our nickles anyway, so they wouldn’t be weighing down my purse, and started into the ten as well, buying coffees and sausage biscuits. A group of four retirees replaced the young family when they left their table, and one couple talked to us, but the other looked away nervously. They were on their way to Michigan, but their car was full. Garth said, If we’re really really lucky, we’ll get home tonite anyway. And if we’re really lucky, it’ll take another day. And if we’re lucky, it’ll take two more days.

It stopped raining by the time we were done eating and we went out and stood on the highway just in front of a No Pedestrians sign and stuck our thumbs out. A fellow named Roy picked us right up. He was in town for work, driving a rental car. He was testing planes. After he dropped us off, a fellow named Don picked us right up. He said, Y’all were smilin! Nobody smiles! I had to turn around and come get you to see what that was all about! He was a lab technician at a hospital and had a jaded perspective on life. He was really intelligent and talked a lot about politics. He dropped us off just short of Atlanta, Georgia.

There on the southern edge of town was a little seafood restaurant. They sold the fish and shrimp and everything raw out of a deli counter, and would cook it for you. The really good thing was that they sold the raw fish for food stamps and they’d cook it for a dollar in cash. So Garth and I bought some fish and hushpuppies and fries and paid one of the dollars that the fellow in the McDonald’s had given us to have it all fried up, and we ate in a tiny booth in the restaurant and got full and then walked back out to the highway.

We stood there for just a couple minutes with our thumbs out, until a fellow named Matt came by and picked us up in a truck. His dash was stacked with every Led Zeppelin album ever made, and one was playing on the stereo, and the first thing asked when we hopped in was, Do you guys like Led Zeppelin? He was a union electrician and talked a lot about that while he drove us all the way thru downtown Atlanta. I was really particularly glad for this ride, because I’d been worried we’d get a ride into the middle of Atlanta and get dropped off downtown. It’s extremely difficult to get rides hitchhiking out of big cities, so we could’ve been stuck walking thru Atlanta for days. But Matt dropped us off right on the Northern edge of the city.

We stood with our thumbs out again and a teenage kid on his way to work in a red minivan picked us up really quickly. He was a shuttle driver for a Chevrolet lot and was on his way to work. He only drove us for fifteen minutes, but dropped us off at a good exit. We stood there for a couple minutes and a Mexican girl named Gabby stopped for us. Every time I hitch I get a ride from at least one Mexican. They tend to not have as many qualms about hitchhiking as Americans do. They figure a person’s just trying to get somewhere. Gabby had two kids who were bilingual because they were born in the U.S. and were learning English in school while she only spoke Spanish to them at home. I always kind of wished something like that had happened to me. I wish I spoke two languages. I wish I spoke all of them.

Gabby dropped us off after a thirty minute ride. The sun was about to set, and it was getting really chilly, but because we’d only had to wait 5 minutes at the most for all of our rides so far, Garth and I were feeling pretty optimistic about staying on the on ramp instead of finding a camping spot. So we did, and a semi-truck stopped almost right away. The driver’s name was Dennis. He was from Missouri, and he was a huge country music fan and played country on the radio the whole ride and told us about every artist and said he liked them because they sang in a way that seemed like they genuinely knew what they were talking about. He liked the sad songs and he said they really seemed to feel it when they sang. He said he didn’t pick up too many hikers anymore because a woman he picked up freaked out in his truck and screamed at him and went psychotic. He picks people up now and then, tho, because his brother jumped parole and went hitchhiking, and he hopes that if someone saw his brother, they’d give him a ride. He stopped and bought Garth some hamburger-hot dog things and me a vanilla espresso and then drove us for six hours straight, past the frozen waterfalls in the rocky canyons near Chattanooga, thru the dark narrow roads, to Marion, Illinois.

Marion is just 45 minutes from Garth’s hometown, Murphysboro, so Ron and Clara met us there and drove us right to the Kiser Farm, where we had a glass of wine and told them about our miraculously fast and somewhat easy hitch from Key West to Illinois, and they told us we’d done so well because they’d been praying for us so much. Then Garth and I went out to the guest cabin and went to sleep in a really comfortable bed indoors.

Most of the people who picked us up this trip said they never pick up hitchhikers. But they stopped for us. I don’t know if it was because we looked clean and normal, because we had a guitar with us (one of Garth’s theories), because we were smiling and joking with each other on the side of the highway and looked happy, or because Clara and Ron were praying. whatever the reason, that was the fasted hitchhiking trip I’ve ever been on. I expected it to take three weeks, not three days.

February 23. 2010.

Garth raises and lowers the pump handle, sucks air from the yellow kayak. It folds into a remarkably small ball, which Garth shoves into a giant plastic bin. I help him pack clothes, tools, two GPS units, shoes and everything else he can’t leave behind into the empty space surrounding the kayak. Clara’s agreed to receive the box in the mail and pay the shipping. It weighs as much as a dead body.

Tom shows up. He invites us to Demolition Key. We take the back trail thru thick red and green swamp plants, arrive on Wisteria’s northwest shore. Tom and I hang back in the bushes. Garth waves his arms at the anchored boats. Ted rumbles toward us in a Carolina skiff. Tom falls over as he climbs aboard. Garth and I get in after him. We pause at Ted’s boat to get his handmade wooden canoe. We drag it behind the skiff toward Tom’s boat, Pat-Sea, and climb aboard.

Pat-Sea is around Gonzo’s size and it’s a mess inside. Tom and Ted lash the skiff to the mooring and let the sailboat loose. Tom leaves Garth on the tiller while he throws up the sails. The jib is massive. The lower edge touches the deck. It stretches more than halfway back on the port side. It blocks most of the view.

“Is your jib not the right size, or is it not all the way up?” Garth says.

“It’s shit. Cosmic shit,” Tom says.

The wind is light. We motorsail. A 30 minute, laid-back trip in hot sun. We pull the bimini cover over the cockpit for shade.

“It just seems classier,” Tom says.

I enjoy the sail. Garth and I never pleasure-cruised.

Demolition Key is north of Key West. Garth and I passed it on our way into the harbor on January 3^rd. It’s two little islands with a ribbon of water slicing between. We anchor between them. The cove is calm. One island has a bunker, a 10-foot by 10-foot cube cut into a hill, lined with thick logs like a cabin. Standing atop the hill, the whole island is visible.

Tom cuts down Australian Pines with a handsaw. They’re non-native. Invasive. Ted rows me to the other island in his handmade canoe. Big trees. Cascade of birdsong. There’s a perfect crater in the ground. Ted finds an exploded bomb and a non-exploded bomb. I sit on a log, snap dead twigs into inch-long segments, build tiny log cabins on the pine floor. I get a lot of satisfaction from the snapping. I snap sticks like a meth addict cleans house. Ted rows me back to where Tom and Garth are.

“You’re doing a really good job,” I tell Tom.

Trees piled like Holocaust victims.

“Thanks. I’m gonna die of heatstroke.”

Garth and I row Ted’s canoe around the islands. Hundreds of birds burst from shit-covered bushes in great frightened exodus.

Returning, we see Pat-Sea has drug ashore. It’s a debacle getting her to float out again. I’m so tired of saving boats. I won’t describe how we did it. Exhausting redundancy.

Ted, Tom Garth and I sit in the cockpit. Fog rolls in. Temperature drops like anvil. Sweaty from gone heat, I go chilly in long sleeves and jeans. Tom fixes spicy soup.  His fridge has all condiments. No food. He sautés real onions and carrots to add to the soup.

We sail back to Wisteria in a thick wall of cloud. One of the near hundred-foot charter sailboats slides forth from the mist like a ghost, all sails hoisted. A weird extinct scene. We slowly creep up to Tom’s mooring, tie up.

Ted canoes to his boat to change clothes. Garth and I help cover and bag Tom’s sails. He gives me a black suit jacket to wear over my gooseflesh. It doesn’t fit right.

“I’d never wear it,” he says. “It looks likes something my brother would wear to Harvard yard to take acid. You can keep it.”

He lends Garth a jacket too. We pick Ted up in the skiff, rumble in to Key West. Impenetrable fog. Lites in blurry haloes. Sparkly mist soaking my hair. I feel at peace in the dark, cold fog with blurry lites, hobo jacket, wet hair. I feel safe.

We walk to Dante’s to drop in on a pirate’s going away party. We go to Mangia Mangia, hip new Italian restaurant. 20 minute wait. Loiter in dark, cracked parking lot, walk up stairs of boarded-up school building or courthouse that reminds me of My Own Private Idaho.

We sit at a square table in the center of a fully crowded patio. Our waitress is the truck-stop sort. Rough tone of voice, cockney accent. She explains to me what broccoli rabe is before writing it down on her pad.

Tom  tells lots of long, tangential stories. Eyebrows always raised. Mouth always smile-shaped. An example of how amazed his audience is supposed to look.

Ted tells of going to Belize, “To find the end of the road.” He once had businesses, but lost them. The government won’t renew his passport. Child support. His girlfriend is in jail. “For selling crack cocaine.” Always so soft-spoken.

I have trouble listening to Tom. Trouble hearing Ted. I feel at home being quiet.

Bloated, we wander thru clean air left by lifted fog. Dockside Ice Cream Shop. I get Praline Paradise.

“This is fucking good as hell!” I marvel.

By the weird statue of the man with his neck twisted around, people loiter in gold and silver make-up. Sleepy and Mary show up. Lauren and her boyfriend show up.

Mary gives me a little white coral rock. She talks of dangly things. She’s cute and small, like a flower with no concerns other than to open up like petals and smile. You want to put your arm around her shoulders and lead her all around the world with you. You’ll take care of everything. All she has to do is be there.

Lauren’s pretty like a porcelain doll. She knows it in every word she says. Bitter narcissism. She says the coast guard and the FWC boarded her boat. They wanted Bruce. She said she didn’t know him. She knew of him. They say he’s been strong-arm robbing people.

Bruce doesn’t bother to hide. He is everywhere. Everywhere but caught. He’s the cartoon villain popping up from under the dock or peeking around the seafood restaurant just after the cops walk by. He tiptoes away whenever they get close, snickering to himself thru his toothless pirate grin. Where Garth and I were concerned, he was harmless. He never crossed our boundaries.

“You guys are some of the best people I’ve met on this island,” he declared sentimentally the last time he saw us. “And I love what you did with this camp.”

Ted tells the general company he got bit by a scorpion on Demolition Key. He bottled the bug, threw in a cockroach Tom found on his boat.

“I named if Brucifer,” he says.

Tom drives Garth and I across the water. We walk thru a foggy forest.

“This is our last nite here,” Garth says.

February 24. 2010.

Rain pummels the plastic roof. A preview.

It tapers off as we drink coffee, listen to NPR.

At 9:30am, Garth and I walk our stuff to shore. Ted appears. He helps Garth lug the giant plastic bin thru the jungle. I’m glad I didn’t have to do it. Tom picks us up. Our stuff weighs down his skiff. We rumble slowly to the Key West dock.

I sling my purse across my shoulders, heave my backpack up, wear the guitar as tho I’m about to play it, lay my sack of journals on the bin. Garth straps on his pack. We each bend down and grab one of the plastic bin’s handles. The guitar gets in my way. I take it off, lay it on top of the bin with the journals. We grab the handles again and lift.

We shuffle awkwardly to the end of the road. After ten yards, we drop it. It’s too heavy. Garth duct taped the cracks in the plastic box so the bottom wouldn’t drop out, but there’s nothing to do about the handles. They bend as we carry, about to break off.

We have to carry this giant, heavy bin three blocks to the Laundromat. There Garth can use the internet, find out exactly where the nearest FEDEX office is. We know it’s on Roosevelt Street. I’ve walked from one end of Key West to the other. I’ve never seen Roosevelt. That means it’s really far away. We can barely carry this box ten yards. We’ll never be able to carry it to the FEDEX office.

We have no money for a cab. We only have money for a bus if I don’t send my journals home. There’s no room for them in my pack. If I don’t send them home, I leave them here. I sacrifice them for this bin full of stuff I don’t want. Carrying the box is our only option. It will take all day. We’ll never get out of town.

We stand around at the end of the road. Garth debates his many shitty options. He keeps saying we. He says we’ve created a huge problem for ourselves. I told him from the beginning that I didn’t want any of this stuff. That I’d gladly leave it behind. He’s the one who has to have it.

It begins to rain.

We pick up the bin, lug it half a block to a platform with a roof. Garth gets out his rain clothes. I already have mine on.

Again, he debates his many shitty options. Again, he says we. He says we’ve created a huge problem for ourselves.

“I’ll just carry it myself,” he says. “I can tell this is making you miserable.”

“You can’t carry it yourself. We can barely carry it together.”

I have to be involved in this, whether I want to or not.

See also: every other problem we’ve ever created for ourselves.

We pick up the bin, lug it across the street, put it down. We stand on the sidewalk, breathing hard and sweating. We pick up the bin, lug it to the corner, put it down. We stand on the corner, breathing hard, sweating, leaning on fence posts. Ten yards at a time, we lug it all the way to the Laundromat. I drop it just outside the door, bend forward with my hands on my knees, my arm aching, my body completely exhausted.

Garth tugs at his handle.

“Come on,” he says.

“Let me rest for a second!!”

He drags the bin along the pavement and into the Laundromat by himself. I follow after I catch my breath, set my guitar and backpack on the floor.

I walk slowly to the post office. I want to be alone. Once there, I pick up my food stamp card and find I don’t have enough money to send my journals home. I carry them back to the Laundromat.

“I found a solution for the box,” Garth says.

He packs my journals into it.

When the laundry is done, we pack the clothes into our backpacks. Cliff comes by and Garth puts the bin on the back of his bike. They roll it to the Lighthouse, the center for homeless youth, where Cliff works.

I sit in a chair and listen to Rio bicker with a kid named John while Garth makes a lot of phone calls to Clara and to FEDEX. He arranges to have the bin picked up from the Lighthouse by a truck and sent to Illinois.

Famished, Garth and I stop at Faustos, the grocery store downtown. We pick up potato chips, spinach dip, pepperoni sticks, cocktail bread. We get water bottles too. I want to take a big one. It’ll fit in my pack better than lots of small ones. Garth says I’m being dumb about it.

I wilt.

He leans against the wall of the store. I sit on the sidewalk. We pack the groceries and eat the chips and dip.

“We solved our problem,” Garth says. “The box is gone. It’s done. I don’t understand what is wrong with you right now.”

I don’t give a shit about the goddamn box. You are wrong with me right now.

“I’m not going another step with you until you tell me what’s wrong. I don’t wanna go hitchhiking with someone who’s in a terrible mood the whole time.”

“I can’t tell you. You’ll just get mad about it.”

“We’re not moving then.”

“You don’t care about me. You don’t care how miserable I am as long as you get what you want. You don’t care if I have to walk in the rain as long as you get to leave when you want to leave. You don’t care that I didn’t even want any of the stuff that was in that box. You still had to bring it and cause a bunch of misery for both of us. You get stuff in your life and it frustrates the hell out of you and you turn into a huge asshole and start trying to control everything! Including me! You have to make all the decisions so that things turn out the way that you want. You don’t care what I want. You won’t even let me decide what bottle of water to buy. No matter what I say about anything, you tell me I’m wrong! I do not want to be in a relationship where I’m not allowed to make my own decisions!”

“If it’s so terrible, why are you still here?”

“You weren’t like this at first! You were nice. When we were on the road with nothing, you were nice. But the minute we started getting stuff, like the boat for example, you turned into a jerk. I’m still here because I want to see if you’ll be nice again now that we don’t have anything. Because if you are the way I thought you were in the beginning, I want to be with you.”

Garth doesn’t argue. He reconciles. I feel better.

We start walking down the highway that leads out of Key West. It’s 3:30pm. We don’t have much daylite left. Rain begins to pour down on us. It’s warm and humid. My rain pants and jacket aren’t breathable. They’re a sauna. I start sweating. My jeans stick to me. My shirt sticks to me. Water drips down off my brown driver’s hat. I’m getting soaked from the inside and from the outside.

I don’t actually mind walking in the rain. I don’t mind because we’re on the road again. I like being on the road.

We walk in the rain all afternoon. Just before sunset, a fellow named Greg picks us up in a truck. He drops us off at mile marker 10, on Boca Chica.

We walk down a road with woods on one side, trailer homes on the other, and sneak thru and opening in the trees. The woods are thick. A branch lashes me across the eye. There’s barely space for our one-man tent. The sun sets so fast we can’t see well enough to set it up properly. Garth ties the front and back ends to tree stumps and lies a trap over it. I don’t want to lay out my sleeping bag in the soaked tent. I don’t want to peel off layers of wet clothes and dig out dry ones in the dark, cramped woods. I crawl inside the tent fully clothed, rain gear, boots and hat, and lie on the bare floor. Garth crawls in next to me.

The tent is claustrophobia small. Like a cocoon. With both of us shut in together, it’s warm and humid. It keeps the rain and hard wind off us. Lying down in the dark, soaked, sweaty and barely able to move, we eat cocktail bread and pepperoni. Garth smokes a cigarette. We curl together on the bumpy ground. I turn and shift stiffly in a delirious half sleep. It’s one of the most uncomfortable nites I’ve had on the road.

It would be worse if I were alone.

In the morning, we get another call from Cliff. When the cops landed yesterday, Millionaire Tom and Clark the Filmmaker were in his camp. Tom and Clark got away, but the cops found the camp.

“Cliff asked me to go to his camp and find anything valuable or incriminating and hide it,” Garth says.

He leaves for a while, then returns with Cliff’s set of harmonicas, his chainsaw, his batteries and power inverter, his camera, his stereo, his solar lites and his IDs.

The 3 IDs show Cliff in his typical attire: Beard, Hawaiian shirt, palm frond hat and glasses. They name his occupations: Palm Frond Weaver, Juggler, Comedian, musician, artist, puppeteer.

Garth looks inside the camera. The memory card is gone. The cops have taken it.

He also brought back Tom’s tax forms. Tom doesn’t keep a phone. He came to the island to borrow Cliff’s phone in order to call his accountant or something. A multi-millionaire borrowing phones from homeless people to do his taxes on an uninhabited island…classic.

There was also a pair of Ken Doll legs Garth found on his way back. He attaches them to an animal skull and lies them in a compromising position in the pan with my potato.

I sit and write. Garth sits and writes. We sip our customary coffees. We listen to NPR. But we turn down the volume every time we hear an out-of-place sound. Garth keeps the backpack with the computer and his passport in it next to him. I keep my purse next to me.

I also keep my journal nearby. And on a lanyard around my neck hangs a press ID. I got it back in 2008, when  I created a travel website with a fellow called Kevin Ho. It’s still valid.

“I’m a journalist. I write for a travel website. Here’s my editor’s name. He hasn’t heard from me in 2 months. I cut all ties with civilization in order to infiltrate the street kid/boat bum subculture of Key West so I could write an authentic, in depth piece on the lifestyle. He’ll be surprised to hear from me. Generally, I pick a topic and disappear for a while, and he doesn’t know what it’s all about until he finds a finished piece in his inbox. Of coarse I’m hiding. If my cover gets blown I can’t finish the story and I’ve wasted the entire month I spent living out here…Subcultures are my specialty. Editors generally put up with me because no one else is willing to camp and/or trespass on uninhabited islands crawling with clinically insane, chainsaw-wielding homeless addicts for months at a time…”

Yes. That’s the story. It’s verifiable too. Good thing. Cops act better when they know their every breath is being recorded and published  for the masses to see.

After a lunch of cheese quesadillas, Garth goes off with a machete. He found another abandoned camp while spying on the cops yesterday. I hear a strange voice while he’s gone.

“Garth and Sarah!” it yells over and over again.

It calls from the wrong side of the island. Everyone we actually want in our camp knows that, even if you can’t find the entrance, you’ll get closer if you approach from the east. The yelling comes from the west. I hear other voices too, but this one is loud and clear and persistent.

“Garth and Sarah!”

No one we actually want in our camp stands around screaming our names like a lost 5-year old in a department store. They come quietly, and when they’re close, they announce their presence with an Ahoy. They say Garth’s name and his name only. He’s the functional, social one. If they’re looking to get something done, they’re looking for him. This voice belongs to someone who doesn’t know us. What’s more, due to yesterday’s raid, everyone but Garth and I has fled the island. They’re scared to even set foot here, much less run around yelling like an auctioneer, giving themselves away.

This is not an island homebum. This is someone who doesn’t fear the cops. It probably is a cop.

I grab my purse and notebook and step quietly into the woods, creeping thru thicker and thicker trees until I’m well hidden. I crouch on soft pine needles and write and wait silently.

Surviving in the woods, hiding from cops… I like it. I feel like I’m preparing for the end of civilization. I wait for over an hour. My legs fall asleep. Garth creeps in and finds me.

“What were you doing?” I ask.

“Same thing you were doing, just in a different spot. That voice…it sounded like it was calling for Cliff too. It sounded like it was saying, ‘This is John.’ Remember that guy, John Zion, who approached us at the dock the other day and asked us if we were on Wisteria? He was probably a cop.”

Garth and I wonder if maybe the cops are actually looking specifically for our camp or for us. We’re well hidden except if you’re looking down from a plane. Ours is the only camp they haven’t found by now. Garth and I are the only ones left on Christmas Tree Island.

We cook tuna and cheese quesadillas around sundown, listen to Cliff’s Ipod stereo, watch Clark’s documentaries on Cliff’s tiny DVD player.

I wonder when the rest of Wisteria Island’s Lost Boys will return. I wonder if any are in jail.

We hear cracking in the woods near the tee-pee, sneak over to check it out. It’s Bread and Jesse.

Earlier this morning, Garth called Cliff:

“They’re not doing too well out here. They can’t really fend for themselves. Someone needs to take them back to Key West.”

“That’s Bruce’s responsibility. He brought them out there.”

Cliff called Bruce while Garth told Bread and Jesse they should pack up and leave.

“The raids have changed everything,” he told them. “No one’s coming back for a while.”

According to Bread, he and Jesse were still waiting on the beach for Bruce when that unidentifiable voice started calling for Garth and I. Bread says the voice belonged to Tom’s friend Ted. This makes sense. Ted goes everywhere with Tom. But he rarely speaks, and when he does, he’s incredibly soft-spoken. So we didn’t recognize his voice when he yelled for us. Also, he’s only been to our camp twice and was escorted by Tom both times. He may not have remembered how to get here. People who have been here many times still can’t figure it out. Turns out Ted was sent by Tom to see if Garth and I wanted to go to Demolition Key for a few days and camp until things cool down here.

“Some special ops stuff is gonna go on here,” Bread says. “We’re not a country anymore. we don’t have a constitution. We’ve formed a union with Canada and Mexico. It’s a NAFTA thing. Some vets I know told me. That’s why they raided yesterday.”

Garth and I excuse ourselves and go back to bed.

We’ve established a routine. Routines are my arch enemy. But they are ingrained in human nature. Whenever a person stands still, they develope a routine. The only solution is to keep on moving to places that are new. Then moving becomes a routine.

I’ll be fighting routines- a futile gig- forever.

Happily, some force which I have yet to identify always makes sure to explode everything to pieces at the first hint of routine.

Here’s how it goes:

1.Garth wakes up and crawls over me to get out of bed

2.While I doze lazily, he starts a fire in the courtyard and puts a kettle of water on the grill for coffee.

3.The smoke chokes me awake

4.I brush my teeth, wash my face, use the toilet

5.Garth’s pouring the water into the coffee mugs and tuning the radio to NPR when I take my seat on the right side of the red table cloth, underneath the green awning.

6.Sometimes we eat oatmeal or toast with our coffee while listening to Al Qaeda for Dummies, The Taliban for Dummies or What I Think About the Economic Stimulus Plan (”airlines now charging $8 for a pillow…” etc.)

7.Garth gets out his brown leather journal and red spiral notebook and painstakingly translates piecemeal notes into enviably clear and chronological accounts of his Wisteria Island experience

8.I write in my recycled paper journal

9.When his coffee is gone, Garth alleviates his boredom by making sculptures out of helms, oxygen tanks and gas particulate meters- the type of thing that would end up next to Andy Warhol’s paintings of Mao in the Museum of Modern Art.

10.I do Yoga in the afternoon.

11.If it’s hot, we swim in the ocean

12.We make dinner

13.We listen to more NPR

14.Because it’s dark and we have no electricity, we go to bed at 6:30pm

Sometimes, I sew shirts, draw stripes on them with sharpies, put patches over sponsorship logos. Sometimes Garth digs holes, rakes courtyards and paths, brings in rotten couches from overgrown camps.

Every day, someone drops in on their way to somewhere else. Bruce comes asking for cigarettes, Clark comes with his professional video camera and fedora, Jason comes with weather reports and his volatile wife, Bev, Tom or Cliff comes with a new, reasonably sane couple who’ll be staying on a boat for a month, and gives them a tour of our camp, which has become one of Wisteria’s most well-known tourist attractions.

This is our life. We’re playing house.

We sometimes have brunch with our pretend neighbors. At Cliff’s Lauren makes omelets over the fire, with fresh vegetables and eggs. Someone named Eddie tells a story about an insane guy showing up randomly on his boat while he’s gone, wearing his clothes, drinking his wine and smoking his weed. Bread and Jesse show up, dragging their dog, DB, along because he has separation anxiety. Chainsaw, Lauren’s cat, runs frightened into the woods. Lauren spends the rest of the day yodeling after her.

At nite, people sometimes come over for dinner parties. Tom shows up, saying he threw his dinner in the ocean because he’s sick of Key West and its insanity. He brings Ted, a middle-aged guy who grew up in Minnesota. His family was so poor they didn’t have enough chairs for everyone to sit on at the dinner table. There were 9 people in his family. Tom and Ted follow us to Cliff’s, where 30 pounds of oysters with spinach dip simmer on the grill. Tom name-drops about NYC with Clark the Filmmaker.

Occasionally, Garth and I have to row to Key West in the yellow inflatable kayak. This happens once a week, when we run out of fresh water, an event we avoid as long as possible by washing dishes and boiling noodles and potatoes in salt water from the well.

This last time, we had to go in so I could get online and do something about my food stamps. How the process works is you walk 2 miles to the department of children and families, use a computer to fill out a form, answer ‘no’ to any question that accuses you of having anything, enter ‘General Delivery’ on the address line, subject yourself to a 5-minute interview in which they ask you if you’re getting benefits from any other state, wait a week, stand in an hour-long post office line, pick up an approval letter and an EBT card, activate the card and buy $200 groceries.

But when Garth and Iwent to the post office, he found 6 identical copies of his approval letter, and I got no EBT card.

So his card only had $50 left. It wouldn’t get refilled for 2 more weeks. We only had a few dollars cash which we had to save for things you can’t buy with food cards, like toilet paper and tampons. We’d starve if I didn’t get my card. I’d called the helpline on my approval letter 7 times. It guided me thru an hour-long electronic menu only to say, “All our representatives are busy; try your call again later,” and hang up on me.

So Garth and I rowed to Key West in big waves. We tied up to the 2-hour free dock because we couldn’t afford the $6 all-day dock. Garth went to the post office to mail off a box full of ID’s and personal affects we found in one of Bruce’s old camps. They belonged to the deported Canadian who previously owned the house-boat Bruce destroyed. I went to the laundro-mat, where I got online while washing our sleeping bags. The Department of Children and Families website was as useless as their helpline.

This meant Garth and I would have to walk all the way to the office to resolve the problem. Otherwise, I would get no food stamps.

The problem was the 2-hour dock. They’d been monitoring it. A guy with a clip-board would record your arrival time, and if your boat was still there 2 hours later, they would impound it. It would take more than 2 hours to walk to the office, deal with our problem and walk back. And if we got our dinghy towed, we wouldn’t be able to pay to get it back.

We didn’t see a guard at the dock when we arrived. Figuring it may be his off day, we decided to take the walk. Then Garth thought about how long the walk will be and decided it wasn’t worth it. Then he decided we’d starve if I didn’t get my food stamps, so we should go after all. Then he decided that trying to get money, whether from the government or by working, is what causes all our problems, so we shouldn’t bother.

We walked back and forth up and down the same block 4 different times, deciding we would go, then deciding we wouldn’t go.

“It’s up to you,” Garth finally said. “It’s your food card. I really don’t wanna walk all the way over there.”

“I’ll go by myself,” I said. “You can watch the dinghy- make sure it doesn’t get impounded.”

I started walking and Garth followed after me.

“I thought you didn’t wanna walk.”

“I don’t. But I don’t want you to walk alone.”

“I don’t wanna go either; but I know that when we run out of food, we’ll be miserable, and I’ll feel guilty because I could’ve done something about it.”

“Let’s not go,” Garth said again.

We got irritated. We argued. We paced indecisively. I tried to decide so Garth won’t have to. He refused to let that happen.

“If you wanna be the one to make all the decisions, then you need to actually make a decision!” I screamed. “If you can’t decide, then let me decide! I’m fucking sick of following you around in circles, getting nothing done!”

I’d wanted to say this to Garth for a long time. Now I was screaming it at him on a downtown corner in front of an audience of homebums.

Garth is intelligent, agile, attractive, generous, maddeningly perfect in so many ways… But he can’t make a decision to save his life.

He’s a perfectionist. And all his options include drawbacks. Because there’s no perfect option for him to choose, he will never be able to decide.

Yet he wants to be the leader and make all the decisions. There is no such thing as an indecisive leader.

It drives me fucking nuts.

We did walk to the office in the end, arriving in record time because we were both so angry we speed-walked the entire 2 miles. We went all the way there just so a clerk could hand me a pamphlet with a bank’s phone number on it. I called the bank and asked them for an EBT card and they threw it in the mail. It took less time for me to resolve our epic problem than it did for Garth to go in the bathroom and take a piss.

We bought some food at Kmart, then used some of our last precious change to take a bus back to the dock. Our dinghy was gone.

Impounded.

I guarded the groceries. Garth went to the marina office.

He spun them a yarn: “This dinghy deflates. While we were in town, a friend was supposed to come get it and stow it in his car. He just never showed up.”

“It’s $6 to dock all day,” the dock master said.

“There’s a bag of change in the back pack that’s in in the kayak,” Garth said.

They let him get it out. He began to count out nickels. They were all we had left. There probably wasn’t $6 in the bag.

“Never mind,” the dock master said.

Garth came rowing toward me in the yellow kayak. We loaded in the groceries and began the paddle to Wisteria.

Waves splashed in the whole time. The wind was against us, as usual. Water accumulated in the floor of the kayak. It got up to my ankles. It got up to my seat. The dinghy was so weighed down with groceries and water jugs, it hit bottom in a foot of water. We couldn’t row all the way to shore.

Garth wore his boots. He didn’t want to get them wet. He wears shoes or boots every time we go to town, even tho the dinghy always gets water in it and he doesn’t want to get them wet. I’ll never understand it.

He sat in the dinghy while I hauled the 6-gallon water jugs and dripping grocery sacks into the woods. He sat there in the bright yellow boat, in plain view of the entire harbor, telling me to hurry so no one would see us. To preserve his shoes, I got all wet carrying heavy, soaked things to shore and dragging the kayak close enough so he could jump onto the sand. He couldn’t have just taken the shoes off and helped me out after all.

We hid the dinghy under a tent in the bushes, carried the groceries and jugs to camp and put them away.

“We did it,” Garth said.

“I know.”

“Going to town is really traumatic.”

We liked each other again.

We always like each other. It’s things like walking in traffic and getting food stamps and having our dinghy impounded that we don’t like. Those are the things that make us fight. We always know we’re not really pissed off at each other.

So yesterday morning, Garth and I were sipping our customary morning coffees when the phone rang. Garth went in the hut, dug it out of my purse, answered, talked very quietly. He returned to the courtyard with my purse in his hand and an edgy expression on his face.

“It was Cliff,” he whispered, handing me the purse. “There are police on the island.”

We crept into the thick woods near our camp to hide. I forgot to grab the back pack I keep packed and ready for just such a moment. I forgot to grab tampons. I crouched low in the pine needles, clutching my uterus, gushing blood.

They would show up today. The one day of the month when I can barely function.

Bread, Jesse and DB came trampling thru the woods moments later. They were trying  to find our camp. Lost, Bread started shouting our names. When they passed close by, I waved at them, told them to get down and shut up.

“We came to warn you, there are cops on the island,” Bread said. “We were at Kid Camp and we saw a whole bunch of them.”

Garth, knowing all the trails no one else knows about went to spy. After a while, he came back to tell us we’d probably be fine if we sat in our camp and kept quiet.

The problem was that Bread is incapable of being quiet.

“You’re beautiful, baby,” he was saying to Jesse. “You’re titties are getting bigger and your ass is filling out and you’re not showing at all…”

She’s three months pregnant and he wants her to get a job at a strip club.

“You’d make $1,000 a nite… you’d work three nites and that would be enough for our boat…after that, the first old man that slaps your ass, you slap him in the face and get fired…”

First, any club where you could make $1,000 a nite doesn’t hire every girl that walks in off the street. She’d have to look like a Playboy centerfold and move like a contortionist ballerina on a stick.

Jesse looks like a 12-year old boy. At best, Tinkerbell with dark hair.

Second, at any club that’s willing to hire girls who don’t fit that description, she’d only make $1,000 a nite if she wanted do a lot more than just get slapped on the ass.

Bread has no idea what he’s trying to get her into.

“She’s already a suicide girl,” Bread went on.

Suicide girls are nude models with a semi-feminist, anti-silicone, women are naturally gorgeous attitude. They support alternative beauty. The girls all have a goth/punk style and a lot of piercings and tattoos.

“I like being able to say I’m dating a suicide girl. We’re gonna do photo shoots in every trimester…”

Then Bread moved on to religion and theology. He spewed forth historical facts about Jesus like projectile vomit. He claimed to be a satanist.

He was way too loud. His voice resonated all over the island.

Cliff called again. He was keeping a lookout from Key West. Another coast guard boat had landed at Kid Camp. They had AK 47s.

Voices started to come from all directions. They were coming toward us on the trails. They were coming way too close. The four of us crawled back into the woods. My heart raced. Jesse clamped a hand over DB’s nose to keep him from barking. Bread kept jabbering.

“Baby! I need to go to shore and get a ride into town! We need supplies!”

You don’t need anything you can’t wait for until after the cops leave.

“I’m just gonna go up to ‘em and say, ‘Thank God you guys are here! I was at a bachelor party last nite and my friends left me out here! I don’t even know where I am!”

You must be fucking joking. Your shoes don’t even match. You look worse than every other bum who lives on this island. Your story is full of holes. If you do that, you’re getting your 29 days. You only wanna go to Key West because you’re running out of beer and cigarettes. Another addict.

Bread continued to argue with Jesse, popping open cans of beer and chain-smoking all the while.

The cops sounded like they were only feet away. I was sure that either Bread’s loud voice, his cigarette smoke or his dog would give us away. To the dog’s credit, it never made a sound. Unlike its retarded owner.

“Baby! I really need to go get supplies!”

“You can eat with us tonite!” I snapped. “Just shut the fuck up!”

He’s went quiet. For 2 minutes.

“Where’s my guitar?” he demanded of Jesse.

“I hid it in the woods.”

“Why isn’t it right here next to you? Why aren’t you wearing it on you back?”

Why isn’t it on your back? It’s your fucking guitar. Take care of it yourself.

Garth went on another spy mission. When he returned he announced the authorities had left. We’d been in the woods for four hours by that point.

Garth and I went back to camp. Bread and Jesse came back to our camp as well.

“Baby! I’m the provider! You don’t even do anything except sleep and complain! I sell drugs…I hustle in town every day and bring back food for you… and cigarettes…I cook…You don’t even do the dishes…We have a relationship, but I fulfill both rolls! You just get mad at me for leaving! I have to make money! I can’t be by your side 24/7! I can’t bring you with me ’cause you walk too slow! You’re a hindrance! You can’t even talk to people! You don’t even know how to properly ask for a dollar! You don’t sell any art!”

Jesse stayed for dinner. Bread ran off to shore. After four hours, he didn’t return. She went to see if he’d caught a ride out. What he’d done is, he left his pants on shore and stole a kayak so he could join Bev and Jason for a beer on their boat.

Jesse came back with his pants.

“The coast guard are out in the harbor boarding every single boat,” she told us.

She sat and talked of her days selling weed in Seattle and the four miscarriages she’s had. She talked until we were all tired.

So that she won’t have to go collect wood in the dark, Garth loaded some of ours into a bucket and walked Jesse back to the tee-pee.

He and I went to sleep. In the middle of the nite, we awoke to Bread’s shouting.

“Where the hell are my pants!”

We could hear him stumbling thru the woods.

“OOOW!”

He howled in rage every time he ran into a stick in the dark. He was probably stabbing open his many moldy, staff-infected blisters.

He made it to the tee-pee, yelled at Jesse for an hour.

Everything fell silent.

Bim. Yes. Static…(static~~~~~~) Get your fingers off the volume knob, you cheap ‘55 Vegas leisure suit formica tabletop gold tooth toe-tapper! Look up at the sky and think of your fiddle strings- Yes, she was beautiful and I liked the way she moved when she pulled the bow across and used her ribs like an anguished mime tear accordian.

“This is my sister, Kimberly, she’s 19, been playing the fiddle a few years…”

Mary: (with eyes pointing two different directions) We could make simple skirts like she’s got on and repair sail covers…

It’s a garden wrapped around hips and a stomp- it flowers out long. She grins entertaining the audience- “Look in Ben’s underwear drawer, see if you can find a G-string”

(Take it out like a vien. Don’t tie it in knots- no blood will flow)

Squeak! Red paint fingerprint radio Yes! Radio 1984 Hammer pants L.A. streetcorner static news subliminally in background radio! Many weird frequencies… left by Cliff after game of horseshoes, invitation to see bluegrass band. Serious horns and dainty squaredancers.

At Cliff’s, Nikki sorts troll out of treasure sack scavenger hunt collection and a crumpled page of porn and “I found these shorts and socks,” she changes her socks and “I was playing scary beats on that” says Rio, calm today and easy, wearing caveman dress over leggings and flannel, handing me thumb piano to pull Hitchcock tunes off of in lieu of beerless coozy used as pinky-and-thumb-antennae hand puppet, knodding quietly but meaninfully.

“Get the fuck out of my camp!” Cliff screams as Crow, who he fatherly calls James, who wants to be Detroit gangster and pesters Cliff about a guitar.

“Cliff has a tough existence,” I say, after he drops us off on Key West.

He deals with kids at Lighthouse, chases them when they A.D.D. on loading boats for Haiti, “If I’m at a bar and a kid sits at my table, what am I supposed to do? Leave?” He gets pressure from his boss.

(Army comes over hill- imposing- valley war and funeral dirges)

Garth says he knows where Schooner Warf is. Doesn’t. Leans on pole, refuses- “Shut up about it!” when I say, “You caused us to get lost, now refuse to help get us unlost, instead get mad at me, I’m not having a good time…” walk away. “We walked past it 3 times…”

(Tip-toeing niceties and ominous elephant footprint thunderclouds)

“Once in Nashville, an old black lady asked me about my tattoo,” says Sleepy; (it arches like extra eyebrows across forehead curls ’round temples to cheeks ((ow! the particular, deliberate consonants of Spanish in static and airplane noise like Cuban refugees- !!- )) “I looked at Mary and said, ‘Did you draw on my face while I was sleeping again?’” The old lady laughed heartily and said, “He’s not gonna give you any more magic (Mr. Rogers neighborhood bulldozed on the verge of sunrise and mail delivery) markers,” and tottered away on her rocker (walker).

Flies land all over me. My coffee lid smells like feet. Adjust hat pointlessly.

Steve and Andrea are on the deck too. Steve stares at band below, never says a word. Everyone we know hangs on the deck above, not buying drinks, passing flask of Conch Republic Rum which Garth chokes on and if we sit below, among parrot heads, aggressive waitresses chase us out by asking what we want to buy. No one has a single Licoln-headed cent in this gang of homeless misfits!

Tom shows in brown sweater says to us, “You’re not allowed to leave the island!”

“I’ll allow you to make such rules only because you wear such a sweater.”

Cliff and Sleepy start cheek-to-cheek, crotch-to-thigh, ass-clutching dirty dancing to the country bluegrass. “This is bordering on awkward,” Tom says.

(Ballroom drama of sweeping gowns and fainting love)

“There are ten kids in our family… we’re the oldest… drummer 12…guitarist- only redhead- 14… bass 16… mandolin 15…” launch with applause into Man of Constant Sorrow heart-stomping need highway wall of saloon dust sound. Cliff yells and screams, not wanting these beautiful blond angels to become a Christian Rock band. “Yeah! Bluegrass!” he wails in approval.

Second set, Garth and I sit downstairs in front of stage, close enough to see zits and imperfections on Kimberly’s face of playing songs over and over being a “no life experience home school child with nothing to write songs about.” We sit with Cliff. They dedicate a song to him. Waitresses don’t bother him.

Rio and Nikki appear like mist fading in. An old man climbs Nikki. She pushes him off. She’s gorgeous and probably gets exhausted by sleazy advances. Her “old man” is in jail. Met up with friends after they beat up a home-bum and got pegged for it, tho not involved, when the cops showed up. “He should get out next Wednesday.”

The bassist, with hair in eyes swings head around, stomps, wild with stand-up monster boom fast-finger thick string eyes closed own universe not smiling, but digging and really digging painfully the deep rhythm sounds.

(A carriage pulls dead bodies in a pile in wagon down mud puddle dirt road on shaky plague black-and-white with devastating depression mustache of Charlie Chaplin trembling)

“Dancing coldies!” Cliff chimes, mimicking Garth and I, who jig-jog in unison beside plywood love-collage wall to warm bones relax rib-cramps of stiffening biting cold which crept in deeper like miner with a pick-ax all nite.

A fellow distracts Cliff into a philosophical conversation I can’t bear to listen to because it will have no end and involves Cliff asking vehemently with wide gestures, “Does God play hockey with his brother?!” and lasts 20 minutes.

(Film cuts to news reel, popcorn crunches in darkness)

When the debate ends we ducks-in-a-row after Cliff as he ambles wasted to dinghy dock where pirates in feathered hats and paisley wide-cuff jackets play lazy bumper skiffs trying to get out and wink at Cliff while he waits.

“I’m sorry,” Cliff says, bending knees pressing palms together at us, “But I need to go to the corner store.”

At Mustafa’s, Captain Bruce waits for Shot-out Sean, who shuffles in corduroy professor jacket and green scrubs like escaped asylumn patient, mumbling like in a mean grip of medication over the counter at the clerk, Mustafa, stone-face Indian man who says, “Sean,” knowing all homebums from daily encounters, “other people are waiting, you have to leave the counter.”

I skip in the aisles, hunting cakes and chips, selecting BBQ Pringles- Garth gave Cliff $10 in nickles and quarters so he’d spend $10 on us tonite- and giving them to Mustafa…

“I’d like to make a formal complaint on behalf of (Frankenstien’s lightening awakening) one of the homebums,” Cliff announces to Mustafa.

Sean shuffles to the door of the shop, stops, turns: “Mustafa! Why ya gotta HATE?!” he yells, disturbing tense, unfamilliar tourist customers.

(fly walks blue lines of paper like tight-rope, demands tips for circus-like performance)

Cliff, carrying 4-pack of Natty Ice, marches back to dock. We zoom across black ocean. He rams the nose of his bulbous skiff into a boat at anchor. A lite flickers inside. No one comes out. I don’t know what’s going on. The mood turns menacing. Cliff backs up, zooms around the ship, a square, boxy white house-boat, rams into the other side.

I just wanna get ashore. Can we attack people later?

(orange butterlifes pirhouette on coral under red-scarf-flourishing bullfights of Hemingway Spain)

“This motherfucker,” Cliff says, “is the one who thinks it’s okay to stay at my camp while I’m gone and rearrange my furniture!”

He zooms the skiff into shore. I leap onto Wisteria Isand’s beach, glad only my own feet are responsible for me. Cliff yells at the ocean, screaming out the 5-part name of Bernstien, the island’s true owner, challenging the black nite to kick him off.

Passing Kid Camp: “Garth! I need to tell you a secret! When it’s cold, where do you think those hermit crabs hide?! I found them!”

Cliff dives into a bush on his hands and knees, scratches wildly at leaves and dirt.

“Where are they!” he screams. “Their fire pit is over here!”

He claws rabidly in tree roots, beaming flashlite into darkness.

“Where are those crabs!”

“I need to put Sarah to bed,” Garth says.

Thru ghost blur trails we float to safe hidden comfortable bed quiet camp.

“I’m glad you’re normal,” Garth says. “I like you.”

“There are people over at Bruce’s,” Garth says. “I think there’s a she-male over there.”

We walk over to the tee-pee. Passing thru Art Camp on they way, we encounter 2 new kids. One is a boy with spiky blond hair, leopard-print leggings, make-up, jewelry and a mostly-empty bottle of Barefoot wine. He looks and acts a lot like a female lesbian.

“Is this your girlfriend?” she says to Garth. “She’s much hotter than you!”

“Thanks,” I say.

I know this act. It’s the I’m not comforatble with myself because I can’t figure out who I am, so I’m going to be really loud and agressive about forcing my feigned self-confidence upon others type.

This chaps my hide somewhat.

“You want some wine?” she asks, offering a bottle with 2 sips left.

I take it.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Rio.”

I hand the bottle back.

“You want some too, Mike?” Rio says to Garth.

A really beautiful black girl with long dreads and a furry green hood hovers quietly nearby, investigating the shoe pile.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Nikki.”

Rio and Nikki jump enthusiastically into the car-tree to go for a ride.

I wander over to the tee-pee. Bruce is there with Josh and Emily. There’s also a kid named Nick, who looks like a lost member of the band Weezer.

Sean sits shirtless in the back corner, rolling a joint and speaking in grave tones about his sunken dinghy.

“Did you hear what Crow did to me?” he asks. “He sent Smiley to come kick my ass! Can you believe this? I really did not need this the day after I sunk my dinghy!”

Sean had too many people on board his skiff in bad weather and was swamped by waves. He barely made it to the coast guard station before it sunk.

“It was like going down an escalator,” Sean says.

He didn’t eat for 3 days afterward. His salt-water-drowned engine stands against a chair beside Bruce’s fire, waiting to be fixed.

“Guys?” Bruce begins. “Garth and Sarah.”

He always makes sure he has your undivided attention before getting to the point.

“I don’t know if you wanna know this or not, but Truck sold your boat.”

“That’s okay,” I say. “That’s what we wanted him to do with it.”

“That’s what he said when he called. He said he’s comin’ back up here.”

“I figured he would.”

Why didn’t he call us? Why did Bruce know about the sale before we did?

“Truck probably didn’t want us to know about the sale because he’s probably spending the money on something stupid, like booze,” I say.

“I always tell my friends the truth!” Bruce says, leaning forward , looking me in the eye for emphasis.

The thing about Bruce is, he knows morals and values. He knows the kind of person he wishes he was. He wants to be a man who treats women with respect, who’s honest, genuine and straightforward, and who knows there’s no point chasing or hoarding money and things because you can’t take them with you in the end. Bruce believes in doing the right thing for karma’s sake.

It’s probably not often that he actually adheres to these golden rules, but he preaches about them with utter conviction.

Bruce wants to be a superhero and a rockstar. For all I know, he may have been on his way there at some point. But he veered off somewhere and missed the mark.

Now he’s just a homeless, toothless bum with nothing but a rusting drum set and a bad reputation. So he exaggerates and invents in order to console himself. He’s begun to believe his own stories. Some of them are probably partially true.

I the end, in his own fucked up way, Bruce is at least capable of being good.

Rio sticks her head into the tee-pee.

“Jesse, I need to talk to you.”

Jesse looks up from the wire and stone necklace pendants she’s making.

“What?”

“I need to talk to you out here.”

Jesse follows Rio outside. Soon the two of them have disappeared. Josh and Emily quietly follow.

It gets dark. Bruce goes out to cut firewood. He finds out the kids have destroyed his chainsaw and didn’t bother to tell him. The worst part about this is, the saw belongs to Bruce’s friend, Tattoo Mike.

The others have been gone an hour when Nick, the Weezer kid, begins begging Sean to walk him over to Cliff’s to see if they’re over there.

They find that the whole party has moved to Kid Camp and is being supervised by Cliff. They’ve taken the food and Bruce’s grills and they’re eating there.

Bruce gets sad about it.

They all came to Wisteria Island on his boat, gave him the impression they’d cook at his place and share with him, then they ditched him without a word.

I feel bad for Bruce.

It’s a mean thing to do- even to someone who’s typically a scamming, no-good bastard.

Garth goes to our camp to fetch some of the last of our food stores. Bruce and I sit alone at the tee-pee and talk.

It’s one thing if you bought the food and you told the other people present that you don’t have enough to share. People generally understand that without hard feelings. But to lead someone to believe they’d be fed and then sneak away is a whole other lousy story.

Garth brings back noodles, spam and Vienna Sausage. While he’s cooking, Bruce goes to shore to check on his skiff. He returns looking absolutely dejected.

“My boat’s sunk. And the gas can I just filled…someone took the lid off and detached it from the boat. It’s empty.”

“Well, at least you’ve got a bowl of hot food,” Garth says.

Bruce takes his plight rather calmly.

“This is really good, thanks,” he says 5 times while he’s eating.

After dinner, Garth and Sean, who’s returned from guide duty, help Bruce recover his skiff. I sit and watch his camp, huddled close to the fire. It’s cold. There’s snow in 49 of 50 states.

When they return, Garth and I go home to our own compound.

“I could write a children’s book called Bruce’s Bad Day,” I say, as we step thru the tree in the dark. “His chainsaw was broken, his party ditched him and his skiff sunk all in the space of a few hours.”

This is why I can’t hurt anyone. When I see people get hurt- even if it’s someone like Captain Bruce- I feel really bad for them. I’d feel terrible if I was the one who inflicted the injury.

“That lesbian boy told me I look like Micheal Jackson,” Garth says later. “When I walked over there earlier, she was like, ‘And who are you?’ And I said, ‘I’m Garth.’ She said, ‘And what does that mean? You’re Garth.’ ‘It means that in 1978, my parents named me Garth.’ Then she said, ‘Well, you look like Micheal Jackson. Has anyone ever told you that?’”

“First of all, you look nothing like Micheal Jackson. I have no idea where that could’ve possibly come from. Second, where does she get off asking Who are you really type questions when she can’t even figure out what gender she is, much less cope with her real identity?

People can be as many genders as they want. I don’t really give two flying shits about that. But I hate it when people I’ve known for a fraction of a second bust out that you don’t really know your true self bullshit. It makes me wanna kick them in the face.

The sun is a wan, jaundiced eye. Puss drips from its glare. The sky is a colorless hospital hallway. Clouds drag along in wheelchairs, hacking and coughing. Trees lean away from them and cringe.

The tarp above the coral courtyard puffs up, then deflates. Fire blazes, blackens a pot, boils noodles. A fly tiptoes like a detective across my wrist. DB, Bread and Jesse’s pitbull (named after the bank robber who jumped out of a plane in the northwest) trots in and chomps on the compost and dishwater in the basin Garth dug for hermit crabs. I walk him home.

“I found your dog.”

“We didn’t know he was missing,” Bread says.

“I’m goin’ back to my boat,” Jason says, leaning back in a camp chair.

“But I came to the island to tell everyone…gale warnings…20-40 knots…emphasis on the 40…30 degrees tonite with wind chill…start gathering firewood…90 % chance of rain…might last 2 or 3 days…”

The atmosphere dims like movie theater lighting. Wrecking balls crush the sky. It breaks like a dam. Water gushes down.

Tom visited this morning. He talked of “ethnomusicology” and the origins of bluegrass. He picked up my guitar, leaned his head close to the body, blond hair in the strings and picked only at the E-strings. He told me of a friend who fucked 2 different Anitas in one week.

He told us about Eastwind, the commune Cliff used to live on. They help people by teaching them political corectness, fear of confrontation and general repression.

This would explain Cliff’s “No Stereotyping Rule,” and his tendency to pace irritably and seem as tho he’s about to explode but never will.

Tom taught us about fighting. Gave us “inoculations,” which is where you recognize what you naturally tend to do when attacked, so you can consciously resist the urge to do it, replacing it with more effective tactics.

We played in the new yard Garth cleared out for horseshoes, throwing slow-motion punches at each other.

I felt like beating the shit out of Garth. I don’t know why.

After the lesson, when Tom left, I felt like fighting someone. Anyone. I often feel like that. I’m disappointed in a silly way, that no one’s ever picked a fight with me or attacked me.

Tom says most people will not fight for one of two reasons: Either they’re afraid of hurting someone else, or they’re afraid of getting hurt.

I cannot tolerate the idea of hurting someone else. Physically or mentally.

I know very well how to hurt someone mentally, but I never do it. Even if they do it to me.

If I was trained- or angry- I could hurt people physically. But it’s sad to see someone hurt. I can’t handle it. I would rather get hurt.

This, of coarse, does not apply to a stranger who attacks me, or even a familiar person who attacks me and actually causes me to feel threatened. I would gouge someone’s eyeballs out in a second if I thought they actually meant to do damage. If it were a question of survival.

For hours, rain crackles like grease in a frying pan. I wonder if they’re staying dry at Bruce’s. Probably not. The tee-pee is made of leaky, sun-burnt scraps of sail, and their porch is surrounded with haphazardly hung blankets.

Garth and I sat with them last nite. Jesse was there with two friends, Josh and Emily. They were waiting for Bread and Bruce to return with food.

Jesse told us about how she lectured Jell-O Biafra at an Anarchist Convention because he was advising everyone to Buy Noam Chomsky’s new book. She said the audience that came to listen to him speak was appalled by her outburst. She also told us she had a job when she and Bread first came to Key West. It was at a cafe run by a family with connections to the Czechoslovakian Mafia. One day, two yuppie tourists came by and asked about the menu. She talked with them a few minutes, then they introduced themselves. One was Jeb Bush. She lectured him about his bullshit policies and his bullshit brother. She was fired immediately.

Jesse’s rather intelligent and well-spoken. She reads a lot, pays attention to the goings on of the world, uses words like plethora (not in the average 19-year old’s vocabulary these days).

Her friend, Emily, is a young blond girl in camouflage road-kid get up. She’s probably about 19 too. She barely spoke all nite.

Her boyfriend, Josh, talked way too much. His bald head, round glasses and fluffy brown beard make him look like Allen Ginsberg . He fancy’s himself a bit of a poet too. He recited a poem he wrote, which was actually rather good.

Josh is 28. He went into the army at a young age and was a medic. He said it turned him into a Nazi. His friends cured him of that by sending him to live on a commune with gay witches. He hitchhiked for 5 years, and lived on communes and in monasteries and with the Amish. In the middle of his life story, he rattled off small-talk in 5 different languages and said he should’ve been a linguist. He’s pretentious and likes to show how smart he is.

Josh turned the conversation to politics. I got bored. To religion. I drifted away.

“What do you guys believe in?” Emily asked Garth and I.

“Nothing,” I said. “Religion is a fairy tale and politics are a game. It’s all distraction.”

Garth did not argue or elaborate.

Josh handed us one of his business cards he ordered for free online.

“Professional Pedestrian,” it said.

Finally, around 10pm, Bruce and Bread came back with Paul in tow.

Paul worked a tiny stint as Bruce’s slave last week, after Frank left and before Bread arrived. But he left when he got his food card and now has his own gig. He wore an 1980-style leather jacket and sunglasses with blue lenses like before. Garth started talking to him about web design. He mentioned video-blogcasting.

“Oh, there is plenty of money to be made in that area,” Paul said. “You can get paid by the day or by the week. I knew when I first met you guys that you were smart. I knew what I was seeing.”

He thought we meant porn. Garth had said PDA, meaning personal digital assistant. Paul thought he meant public display of affection.

Bread started yelling at Jesse the minute he arrived home. She sat hunched on the ground at his feet, wrapped in a blanket.

Bread is loud and obnoxious. He has something to prove. He knows everything. He thinks he’s in charge. If it’s his baby Jesse’s having, I feel sorry for her. Even Bruce thinks he’s obnoxious. The only good thing about him is he can play music.

Everyone went inside the tee-pee and sat around the fire. Bread played blues and grunge songs and sang like Kurt Cobain. Josh and I played hand drums. Emily played harmonica. Others watched and sang.

Bruce marveled and said, for whatever reason, “Everything I got here is left over from when I was rich.”

Read Josh’s blog

Read Emily’s blog

Jason walks into camp with a black garbage bag over his shoulder.

“What’s in the bag?” Garth asks.

“Electrical shit.”

Jason had just ransacked Bruce’s tee-pee.

“Bruce was there. I told him what I was doin.’ I have a use for this stuff and he doesn’t.”

Jason pulls a switch out of his pocket.

“I didn’t tell him I was takin’ this, but that’s okay cause he stole my dinner. He brought Bev back from town. She’d bought a burrito for him, for herself and for me. She left them in the dinghy when she got out, so he took ‘em. Then, fuckin’ his dinghy got fuckin’ swamped, so he says, ‘They floated away.’ The empty water bottles with lids on ‘em didn’t float away, but the beef and bean burritos did.”

Jason pulls a handful of wingnuts out of his pocket.

“I’m gonna put one on a necklace for my wife.”

He laughs, removes his Mt. Gay Rum hat, smooths his strawlike hair, replaces the cap.

“I’m making a horseshoe area,” Garth says.

Jason gives him a thumbs up, says, “We got one at kiddie camp. We do it on the beach.”

“We try not to spend too much time on the beach,” Garth says.

“I’ve been here so long, they can’t tell me what to do anymore,” Jason says. “If it’s the FWC, just duck into the fuckin’ bushes. They’re not gonna get outta the boat and chase ya. And if it’s not the FWC, they really don’t give a fuck. Fuckin’ I ask one of them, ‘How long you been here?’ ‘Two years.’ ‘I got 20 years on that! Fuck off!’ They know we use Kiddie Camp. And everyone uses that beach to patch up boats. When they start developing this place, and they actually make a construction area out of it, then I’ll leave. Fuckin’ until then…no.”

One day, everyone on Christmas Tree Island will be telling you it’s about to be raided. The next, they’ll be telling you no one cares.

No one knows.