Tonight: Feet (Don't) Fail Me Now!

Last Week: Suffragette City

1972
With Nana, Aunt Iz
and my brother.
Packed in the Dart,
which broke down in Virginia.
Transmission.
My grandmother and Isabel
arguing loudly about whether to
head back or move on,
to Florida.
To Disney World.
My brother and I squirmed for an hour,
Isabel prevailed.
She was determined to see Ocala:
her hometown.
She told us she ran moonshine during Prohibition,
from Ocala straight into Georgia.
A fresh-faced teenage girl out for a drive,
.22 automatic in her purse.
I’d never seen Isabel smile like that.
Like I’d never seen her in a dress.
She wore creased slacks and men’s shirts,
the breast pocket bulging with a pack of Pall Malls.
Her beer was Ballantine’s, from Newark, New Jersey.
Purity. Body. Flavor. Ballantine’s.
Isabel had been there from the beginning.
She came up in ’44,
worked at Grumman welding Hellcats.
Her fiance – a flyer – was shot down, supposedly.
She rented a room from my grandparents.
My grandfather died seven years later.
Isabel was still there.
Could it be?
Could this story be right?
Or did I make it up myself?
Piece it together from things heard over the years?
We all thought she was Scottish,
Cooksey being her last name.
Turns out she was ADOPTED.
No one knows who her birth mother was.
Isabel, left on a doorstep at the orphanage.
We made it to Florida
With one day for Disney World.
One day to see it all:
Pirate of the Caribbean
The Haunted Mansion
Captain Nemo.
And, most important to me
The Indy Car race.
Which was closed
Due to rain.
Rain?!
This piss-ant shit?
This isn’t rain.
It’s an annoyance!
Would real Indy divers quit
In the goddamned drizzle?
Two thousand miles
And I don’t get to race?!
 
1979
Visiting Glenn Katz.
My junior High School year.
We were best friends
since thirteen.
Things collapsed at his house.
His father, the lawyer,
Embezzler, philanderer –
suffered a heart-attack
but did not die.
His mother tried to overdose
in the bathroom.
A year later she’s divorced
and they’re in Plantation.
Plantation?!
Who names a town Plantation?
I went anyway, eager to see
my best friend.
My first flight anywhere.
On Delta, when they smoked on board.
Glenn: My God!
He had transformed.
Lean, muscular –
a football player.
This kid who loved Monty Python and Cat Stevens
now hung out with guys nicknamed “Mongo”.
Big, stupid rednecks who wanted nothing more
than to snap bones.
I watched them fight
more than once
not knowing what to do.
Jump in or stay neutral?
I was Switzerland
Drinking Busch beer from cans.
My first real exposure to beer
and with those hot dogs from dinner
It’s no wonder they came up the way they did,
right there by the pool.
 
1999
Dad left Massachusetts.
Gave up the Antique Store on the main drag.
Memories.
He couldn’t come up with anything better than Memories?
He packed it in for Jupiter with Sharon (wife number three).
Jupiter, Florida: birthplace of Burt Reynolds.
Home to the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater.
Not anymore
 Dad got Sharon a ’47 Studebaker.
Red convertible.
They drove it around on Sundays,
Took it to shows,
Won ribbons.
She sat beside him,
hangdog look on her face.
He puffed his pipe,
smoothed his mustache.
They lived in a gated community.
Big, beautiful house stuffed with antiques.
All that money he never spent on his family.
We went to a flea market
where I bought legal switchblades.
One night, up late, he told me again
how he didn’t think he was my father
but he loved me anyway.

2011
My brother Mario died
same age I am now.
He was trying to kick
all the opoids.
I watched him once
cut open a pain patch
and eat the goop
with a spoon.
He broke his back
on a riding mower
when it tipped over
on him.
Went doctor shopping
in Floriduh.
When he died
alone in his double-wide
my nephew and I went down there.
We wanted to get his stuff
before his “friends” descended.
That house was like
something out of
Silence Of The Lambs.
Everything coated in nicotine.
Our eyes stung so bad
we found a Lowe’s
and bought goggles and masks.
Hours spent searching through
the dimness,
sound of a braying mule
and gunfire
off in the distance.
I found a bullet hole
in the bathroom
and closet
full of painkillers.
It’s a vision I can’t shake
and one more reason
to stay out of Floriduh.
When I retire
and want out of the weather
it’s Southern California or bust.
Fuck the rents,
the drought,
the fires,
the earthquakes.
Fuck it all.
It’s not Floriduh.