by Jack Gantos
He knew great stuff about biology and chemistry and medicine. I knew something about literature and what people plotted in their hearts and thought and suspected, but he knew the secret why behind each thought. I only knew how it looked once it happened, once it went splat in my face, and suddenly I wanted to know the why to everything. It seemed the most important desire I’d ever known.
“You have to read more science, man,” he encouraged. “It’s opening doors on behavior. I mean, literature is good. But the literature of the future is going to be based on genetics, not on environment. Believe me, the stuff we are learning is heavy.”
Right away I was disappointed that I wasn’t going to college. I had always believed in the maxim that the best way to predict the future was to create it. Now, the future appeared inaccessible to me. Without science I was just another stimulus-response cave dweller howling at the moon.
“I got lousy grades,” I said, feeling as if I had already wasted my entire life.
“Don’t sweat it,” he sneered. “You could go to any college in the world. You’ve got more than grades, you’ve got brains.”
“But no money,” I concluded. “Which is actually worse than being an idiot.”
“Well, I can help you there,” he started. “Let’s sell some weed and make some cash.” He ran his hands through his long blond hair. “We’ll drive up to Tallahassee and cop from the guys in the lab there. They grow the most potent stuff—hydroponically. None of the throat-burning yard twigs you cop from hippies which makes you jumpy. The lab stuff is mindblowing—better than Thai stick.”
“Yeah,” I said. I was totally caught up in his vision. He knew things I had never considered, had never heard of. He was on a roll, and I was ready to roll with him.
“Let’s hit the road,” I said.
It took me about a minute to load my car. I trotted over to Davy’s place and turned in my key and gave her a big hug and a gift I’d been saving for just this moment.
She peeled off the wrapping paper. It was a signed photo of Fess Parker, who had played Davy Crockett on the TV show. I’d found it in a thrift store.
“I love it!” she hooted. “You always have a place here, so keep in touch.”
As much as I loved Davy’s, I left the King’s Court feeling some vague relief that my high school year in a motel was over, but before I could consider what that relief meant I was swallowed up by the excitement of the adventure. I drove directly to the grocery store and cashed a check for three hundred dollars, which was half of my savings. I gave Tim two hundred for the score.
By the time we got up to Tallahassee it was dark. We checked in to a motel and he made a few calls.
“We’re in luck,” he said, setting down the receiver. “They’ve just dried a fresh crop and are plucking off the buds.”
I drove him over to the school lab and dropped him off. He had a student ID and could hang out there until the dope was ready. I went back to the motel room to wait for his call.
Four hours later I was still waiting, and I began to think that something went wrong. Maybe he wasn’t coming back. Maybe he’d been arrested. Maybe he’d ripped me off. I watched TV until I fell asleep. At sunrise I tried to drive onto the campus, but without a student ID I was stopped by security at the front gate. I returned to the motel and waited in my room until checkout time. Then I went down to the lobby and sat there all day trying to read the newspaper, but every time the phone rang, which was every few minutes, my head jerked toward the clerk, who was sympathetic enough to shake his head, no, no, no, with each call. At dusk I told myself I would leave at sundown. At sundown I told myself I’d give it just a little more time. I left at nine, when it was pitch-black out.
I did the best I could to rub him and the rip-off out of my mind by returning to my original plan. I got in my car and kicked my butt straight across the state to Jacksonville. In the morning I found where Stephen Crane had lived and sat in front of his house reading The Red Badge of Courage, which was so good I couldn’t figure out why I hadn’t read it earlier. Henry Fleming’s convictions impressed me. His desire to fight. His fear of being a coward. His renewed battle courage. Suddenly I felt incredibly lucky. Like Henry, I sensed I was enlisting in something great, too—writing—and that it was time for me to stop running away from it, but to face it head on.
I was charged up with a renewed desire to write. I hopped in my car and blew out of Jacksonville and drove all day in the rain like a maniac toward the Keys. I stopped in Melbourne to get some gas and thought of Jim Morrison singing about how people are strange. I looked around the gas station—they sure were. I jumped back in my car and got going. Once I passed Miami I began to see a steady stream of cars coming the other way, and I noticed no one but me was heading for Key West. I fiddled with my radio until I found a report that an early tropical storm was shifting north from Cuba and might hit the keys with hurricane force winds by nightfall. I gunned my car and sped down the causeway, skipping from key to key until I arrived in Key West. It was already raining sideways and the palm trees were wagging their leaves at me. I laughed out loud. It was thrilling. The whole place was boarded shut and taped up, but nothing could stop me from being there in the middle of it. I was still pumped on Henry Fleming’s courage. He was waving a flag and I was carrying a pen.
I found a motel made of cinder blocks and checked in. I got a good rate. Then I went down to a gas station store and bought what candles, water, and food were left. When I returned to my room I flicked the TV to the storm report and watched the almost-a-hurricane head our way. It never developed into more than a gale with eighty-mile-an-hour gusts. It passed over us in the night, dumping a foot of rain and blowing down the weak trees. The greatest damage was done to the tourist industry. The vacationers had fled. Of course, it didn’t help that the TV stations played Key Largo on one channel and a documentary on the “Great Hurricane of 1935” on the other. That hurricane had killed over eight hundred people who were fleeing by rescue train when a twelve-foot surge of water, whipped up by two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds, swamped the passenger cars and took them all away. When the bodies were finally collected, they were burned in tall pyres like Hindus on the Ganges. And when the rescuers ran out of driftwood, they buried the rest in mass graves.
In the morning, when I emerged from my room, the locals were out and about cleaning up the mess, and a few drunken tourists were still celebrating their victory over nature. But the rest had fled and left the place to me. Right away I started making my rounds. First, I went to Ernest Hemingway’s house. He had killed himself on my birthday. My tenth birthday. He took a shotgun, put the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger with his toe. My dad had read The Old Man and the Sea to me because it was a fishing story.
“I’d have shot myself, too,” he said after reading the obituary in the paper, “if it took me that long to catch a fish.”
Hemingway’s house had survived the storm, except that the giant swimming pool was filled with brackish water and debris, along with a magnificent sea turtle that I immediately named Ernest. I imagined the big man as wide across his back and tanned as the dark turtle and just as unflappable as it did a slow breaststroke from end to end.
I untangled an aluminum lawn chair which had blown into a manchineel tree. I sat down with my writing journal and grinned like an idiot. Just describing that huge, brooding turtle lumbering from end to end was inspiring. I was so happy to be the first one on the scene and wrote down all my impressions—just as Hemingway did in Spain during their civil war, and Crane after the sinking of the Commodore. Suddenly I remembered that John Hersey lived in Key West. His on-the-scene reportage of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was incredible. These guys had gone into the heart of something raw and humanly transforming and had survived to write great books. They got their beginning as writers by going where the action was—to war—and I could, too. With Vietnam on fire the army was taking everyone they could get, but there was no guarantee I could be a journali
st like Hersey. Instead, I could end up more like George Orwell and take a bullet through the neck. And there was something else—as much as I despised the war, deep inside I felt I was a coward. Like Henry Fleming I figured when the bullets started chewing up the ground around me I’d duck and run. I depressed myself. The only thing I had to write about was a turtle in Hemingway’s pool. Moments before it seemed so romantic. Now it seemed mundane.
In order to buck up I went searching for John Hersey’s house. Maybe seeing where he lived would give me another boost of courage. I got in my car and drove to a market. There were guidebooks to Key West but none of them gave his address. He was mentioned after Tennessee Williams and Elizabeth Bishop, whose addresses were listed. I went to the Williams house. It looked fine except the little white gazebo he built for Jane Bowles had toppled over. I had read A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie and, like everyone, I thought Williams was a genius. I hadn’t read Jane Bowles’s work but knew her husband’s book The Delicate Prey, which was just about my favorite collection of stories in the world. Paul Bowles had gone to Morocco to write about Moroccans. I was hoping that St. Croix might be interesting to write about. Maybe I could begin to write something important there.
I drove down to Elizabeth Bishop’s small house. I hadn’t read her poetry and wished I had. Someone once said that all writers should read into their weaknesses. And I was weak in poetry. But nothing could blunt my happiness. Fate, it seemed, had brought me down to Key West. Fate brought the storm. And I felt fated to write. I still didn’t have anything significant to write about so I just smoked another joint and recorded observations and reflections—just like Sal Paradise.
And like Sal, I missed my Dean Moriarty. I wondered what had happened to Tim Scanlon, so I called his home in Plantation, Florida. His mom answered.
“Is Tim there?” I asked.
“You aren’t Jack, are you?” she asked harshly.
I told her I was Dave, “his other friend.”
“Hey,” he said when he came to the phone, “what’s goin’ down?”
“What happened, man?” I asked. “I waited forever at the motel.”
There was silence. I thought I could hear his mother close a door. Finally he replied, “It was awesome. I had to sample the crop. It was like pure THC and sent me into a total genetic high. I couldn’t tell where I was. Finally I walked around the campus in a trance until security picked me up and called my folks. They had to drive up and get me and now they’re royally pissed.”
“What happened to the weed?” I asked.
“Oh, well, the good news is the security people were potheads and they just kept the stash. But the bad news is we lost all your money.”
I took a deep breath. Money wasn’t easy for me to come by.
“I’ll pay you back when I get working,” he said. “Promise.”
I didn’t listen to much after that, and when I got off the phone I didn’t know what to think.
I retreated to Sloppy Joe’s bar, where Hemingway drank and played cards with his mob of friends who would then go out in his yacht and try to spot and sink Nazi U-boats with hand grenades. I sat at the bar and read A Moveable Feast and cried with a kind of jealous disappointment because that beautiful time in history had passed me by and the contrast between the lush enchantment of Europe and my welfare-motel life was suddenly very sad indeed.
But I dried my eyes and after a few beers and a couple of joints around back I imagined the great books I might write. Of course, I didn’t write a word. It was easier to smoke joints and have someone deliver drinks than it was for me to deliver sentences.
The next morning I woke up with blisters on my forearms and hands. I was a born-and-bred Catholic and thought immediately it was some sort of writing stigmata and that I should get to a church. But then I remembered the chair at Hemingway’s house had been lodged in a manchineel tree and must have been coated with a little bit of the tree’s caustic sap. Ponce de León died from a manchineel-sap-coated arrow, and I figured I was a dead man, too. But after a few days of itching I figured it must have been the arrow that killed him, because I recovered just fine.
2
1 / st. croix
From the first week I landed in St. Croix I became part of a drug culture. Drugs were available everywhere at all times. Especially reefer. You could smell it on every other breath of air. In bars, on street corners, in passing cars, on buses, at the beach—people grew it in their home gardens and smoked it like cigarettes. It was so much a part of everyday life even the local police didn’t bother with it, which is why the island was also a depot for smugglers. The U.S. customs office was kept busy inspecting oil tankers from the Middle East which supplied crude oil to the refinery at Hess Oil. That left sailboats and speedboats from the British and French and Dutch and independent islands to slip into St. Croix at night and unload their cargoes of marijuana and pharmaceuticals from Europe and underground labs. Then U.S.-registered pleasure boats would haul the cargo up to Florida, where it was easy to unload into trucks at any backyard dock along the intercoastal waterway.
But all I did was smoke it. I never thought dope would lead to trouble, and I certainly had no idea it would land my ass in jail.
While I was in Key West smoking dope and wondering when I would find my writer’s voice, everything in St. Croix had changed. Racial tension in St. Croix had always run high. There were a lot of white haves and a lot more black have-nots. The tension mounted when a radical black party, based on the Black Panthers, formed and publicly called for white extermination. The racial divide widened, and the anger boiled. Homes were broken into. People were murdered. Stores were looted. Hotels hired extra security to patrol the grounds and beaches. Tourism dropped.
The news media picked up the story and before long the wealthy white people who were living in the States and building retirement homes in St. Croix decided to cancel their house jobs. It was that sudden. Now, nobody was working, black or white.
The story must have been reported in the Florida papers, but in Key West I was “too busy” to read one and didn’t hear about the situation until after I arrived. By then, it was too late to turn around. All my father’s building jobs had been canceled. I was trapped. Instead of finding ourselves building new homes or hotels, my father and I worked at building large wooden packing containers to fill the need of the hundreds of people who were scrambling to empty their homes and ship their belongings off island. The white exodus was on.
All day I built crates. Because money was tight I didn’t draw a paycheck and instead reluctantly agreed with Dad to be paid in room and board. With the little money I brought from the States I just managed to keep gas in my car. And there was no way I was going to save money for college. After my year of racial harmony at the King’s Court I found the turmoil in St. Croix very disturbing. I understood the black point of view, but there was no way I could get them to see my sympathies. I was just another white target on legs. The level of anger was beyond reason. Black activists were preaching white extermination and the place was getting ready to explode. It wasn’t long before I wondered if I could build a crate and ship myself off the island.
One morning after I had just smoked a joint rolled from old roaches a man came in with hand-drawn plans for a crate which included a false bottom about four inches deep. I remember him in detail. His name was Rik. He was in his late twenties, blond, shag haircut, green eyes, and a silver-dollarsized circular burn scar on his forehead. When I asked about the scar he said it came from being shot with a flare gun.
“What was that like?” I asked.
“Blinding,” he said dryly.
I didn’t ask more, but he said he was shipping art and archaeological artifacts that needed extra protection. Fine, I thought, let him ship the crown jewels. It was none of my business.
After work I went down to the dockside bar where all the whites tanked up on duty-free Heineken.
I took a seat at the bar, next to my dad. As I
looked across the room I spotted the guy with the scar sitting by himself. “What do you think of that guy?” I asked.
My dad took one look at him and had him pegged.
“He’s a dope smuggler,” he replied.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Just do,” he said. “It’s a gift I have.”
I told him the guy had ordered a crate with a false bottom.
“He probably wants to smuggle cash or dope or gold into the States.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe he has Indian artifacts or pottery or stuff he doesn’t want shippers to find.”
“Don’t be naïve,” he said. “I’ve got his number. Dope is his game. But I don’t give a damn where his money comes from as long as it helps get us off this rock.”
I felt the same way. I wanted off.
Since I didn’t have much money it didn’t matter how lousy the bookstores were, and the library was little help. It was so hot and humid inside I had to scrape the mold off the spines of the books in order to read the titles. Nine out of ten books I looked up were missing. The librarians just shrugged when I mentioned the apparent theft problem. And if I complained too much they turned up their desk radios and played at being busy.
Because I couldn’t find the books I wanted, I read what was available. The biographies were closest to the ocean and were especially moldy and not as desirable for the thieves. I read a few books about revolutionaries: Che Guevara, Emma Goldman, an odd book titled Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin, who was an anarchist, and a book by Alexander Berkman titled ABC of Anarchism. All this political.reading made me think the island was ripe for an all-out race riot and political revolution just like the Haiti Graham Greene had written about in The Comedians.
