LatinosUSA

In 1997 I moved from Boston to Tampa for a job. I liked how stores were open 24 hours a day for I was young and did not well abide the clock. The best oranges you ever tasted were harvested and squeezed and sold in gallon jugs, roadside. I met an older man who liked to get loaded and go to driving ranges and whack balls at holes. He was crushing on me and I denied him. He got angry like I had done something wrong. He got in his red convertible mustang and spun out and traced the high lit palms like stars down the road to see the nude girls on Dale Mabry. I was a little fish who got away and so what, who cares. I was young and didn’t care much, either, or else I cared too much. I had been sleeping on the wall to wall carpeted floor for weeks before I finally decided on a repo pull out queen couch and bed with a southwest patterned fabric of cactuses and arrowheads, because there wasn’t enough square footage in my studio for both. I remember the day it was delivered by a snaggletooth redneck employed by Babcock’s, a furnishing store that sponsored racing cars, who handed me a baseball cap (the driver’s car number and signature on the lip) and a set of steak knives that came free with the purchase. I hated my job but it paid very well and I bought a small motorcycle so I could jet along the bridges and causeways where the pelicans scoop up the bounty of amberjack and grouper. I built my own relationship with earth and sky like the head banger palms ubiquitous to the region, rustling high in sun and wind. I remember the guy who lived in the apartment next to mine blasting the new album by Tool. He sold me weed and listened to me complain about my 9 to 5 and blasted the stereo when he had heard enough. When I pulled the seat cushions off to take up the bed there was a deep yellow sheet with green printed flowers that must have been the original owner’s. There was a burn mark from a cig. My imagination framed a girl like me but in a parallel universe, lying on it watching game shows and smoking and drinking, trying to relax after hitting the pavement searching for work. I imagined her guy coming over and them fucking and lying there afterward, thinking what a nice couch, too bad we can’t afford it, and fucking some more until a seam or two broke (which really did, I could see), and making the most of it. Then the repo men knocking hard on the door and her hand trembling and the ash falling off the cig and incinerating a green flower. Her pleading with them, singsong, as they 1-2-3 lifted it up. We can have some money for you real soon, honey, real soon. And I was going to take the cover sheet off and toss it but decided to wash it and keep it. It’s messed up to say, it doesn’t even make sense, but it made me feel local, southern, like I had penetrated the culture. Which you needed to do back then if you wanted to be trusted for real. I was clear Yankee. The civil war was still tugging on confederate hearts a hundred and fifty years on, and probably still is. Why I even wanted to penetrate southern culture I cannot tell you, other than to say I was not in my right mind back then. I befriended local girls with loose tongues who taught me you could speak truth plain in the southern way. I wanted more than anything to shed that cold northern wasp. That sweet staged veneer my mom taught me without trying because her mom taught her. Tampa was full of friendly people who weren’t so fuckin’ ashamed. I remember buying groceries at Kroger’s from a woman named Rebel. She called you darling. Darlin’ this and darlin’ that. She must have been a true southern belle in her day. I learned you could be proud just to be doing your best with life. You could be weak one day and strong the next. I bought a glass coffee table and devoted myself to becoming transparent. I quit my job exactly one year in to make good on the promise I was forced to swear so I wouldn’t be disowned. My parents wanted me to learn finance cuz it ran in the family and was an easy way to go. But I hated being a nepo baby and I hated making the rich richer. I don’t blame them. They thought they knew me better than I knew myself. I moved out of Tampa to Indian Rocks Beach with a friend and bought an old refurbished Royal and started typing away, living off what was left of my savings. I loved to write stories and didn’t care that there was no promise of money in it. That’s a lie. I cared too much. Well maybe it was both. I learned a lot of things in Florida that stayed with me long after I left for Chicago. The least of which was how to buy low and sell high. I learned you can keep after your dreams and be yourself, even if the whole world thinks you’re crazy. I learned to be easy on yourself, you’re not that important, just another fish in the sea… there’s no recommended daily allowance of orange juice and you can measure a great distance by palm trees. And if you’re having a bad day and feeling sorry for yourself, you can go outside and let the sun drive its optimism through your skin.