I HAD A DREAM (#14): Woke up from a dream this morning. A blond headed fella, wearing a white sport coat with a lobster hanging over his left shoulder, was playing guitar and singing in a little waterfront bar. The air was filled with marijuana smoke. When he finished his song he looked at me and said into the mic, “People are tired of this true confessions shit Simmons, tell them some of my stories.”
When we first heard of Jimmy Buffet, my roommate Steve (that is a sad story) and I, were living in a ground floor apartment in one of two run down fourplexes on a corner 5 blocks north of the Krystel Hamburger joint on University Avenue, in a run down part of Gainesville aptly referred to as “The Student Ghetto”.
The first time I took my ex-wife to Gainesville, we went by so I could show her where I lived during law school. We parked the Cadillac Seville next to the same green Chevy Nova that had always been in the parking lot and looked around. A guy came out of my old apartment and I said ,“I used to live there!” He invited us in to take a look around. The place had been well cared for, it looked exactly the same, except for a metal grate over the glass jalousie door that led from the parking lot into the kitchen.
Once we got back in the car, my X smiled sweetly and looked at me with big brown eyes, she’d grown up on a dairy farm in North Carolina and was her high school’s Homecoming Queen, and said, “No offense darling, but I’ve never known anyone that lived in a place like that.”
Back to Jimmy, the couple that lived upstairs from us has us had driven their green Chevy Nova to Key West and come back talking about a singer they’d heard. They’d bought his album, “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean”. Steve had been in the Navy and had brought back a Teac reel-to-reel tape deck. We recorded the album and played it constantly.
A “White Sport” led me to Willie Nelson’s 4th of July Picnic in College Station, Texas a year later, but that’s tomorrow’s story.
Back to Steve, the last time I saw him was in Gainesville in 2015. We met in 1969 at St. Petersburg Junior College when a group of us started Alpha Delta Epsilon, an illegal JC fraternity. Steve was the sweetest guy then, everyone called him “Super Steve”. He had a Ford Mustang fastback, like Steve McQueen’s in “Bullitt”, only Steve’s was grey with a red racing stripe. Steve was proud of his car and was always washing it because the old house on Emerson Avenue, that someone always rented and we used as our frat house, had a dirt front yard. That led to one of our most successful fundraisers, the ADE Topless Carwash, but that’s another story.
While Cathy and I were living in North Carolina, Steve and his ex-wife lived in Gainesville. They had come to visit several times and whenever we went to St. Pete to see my Dad we would spend two nights with them. I should have known Steve was in trouble when we went to play golf one day and Rush Limbaugh was on the radio. I asked him to turn it off and from then on we we careful to avoid discussing politics.
A year later when we visited, Steve showed me the “weapons” he had added to his gun collection and the gold coins he was stashing.
The next year Steve was into Survivalism and had a bedroom filled with freeze dried and canned food. He explained that he rotated it out whenever something reached the expiration date. I don’t know what he did with it, I was sure his ex-wife wouldn’t eat it until the apocalypse.
He also had a generator, cans of gas, and a victory garden. He explained they could use the swimming pool for water once the city services that we take for granted were disrupted. He showed me a hand full of black beans that he had grown. I said, “Steve, those are a dollar a pound and they last forever. Why don’t you grow more tomatoes instead.”
That was one of the last times I saw my friend from 50 years ago. He has since divorced and remarried for the 4th time. trump’s election was the end. Steve tried to convince me that trump was the man, and posted the most racists statements. I hope he wasn’t in DC last week, please not another Republican and golf buddy gone wrong.
