You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
FLETCHER AND THE SCHIZOPHRENIC DUDE
Fletcher is a natural born salesman. He is friendly, cocksure, hand extended as he approaches us.
“Good morning.”
Fletcher is a wiry 60 year old. He is wearing a name tag that says CHAIRMAN. I stare at the name tag. Chairman?
“You guys want an umbrella?,” he says, pulling off his dark sunglasses.
His eyes dart side to side as a wry smile emerges on his well tanned face.
Who is this guy, I wonder.
“I’m Fletcher,” he says. “You guys staying at the hotel?”
“Yes, we are guests.”
“Great. Where you from?,” he says.
“Nashville.”
“Oh Nashville. F***ing great city,” he says dropping the first of many F bombs in a 5 minute conversation.
“Grown a lot,” I say.
“Use to live in the Gulch. I hate to say it, but when I lived there, you’d be killed just walking out your door.”
Fletcher is a salesman. He is a salesman plus. He’s salesman who reeks of being a con man. He is up close, talking, cursing, bursting my personal space. Why so much, so fast? What’s his play, I think.
He raises the umbrella and begins to tell me his life story in Nashville. He will drop names and tell me that managing restaurants was his business.
“F***ing won’t play music at the Sunset Grill,” he says. “F***ing Music City and he won’t play music, any music. Can you believe that?”
Why is he wearing me out on a Wednesday morning. I stare past him into the Atlantic. Somewhere out there is Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean. I try to listen to the ocean lap at the shore. But all I hear is this incessant jabberwocky.
“He said I ain’t playing no music in my bar. It’s music city. No matter what kind of music I play someone isn’t going to like it.”
I look at him in his bright orange shirt and matching orange shorts. He looks like a traffic cone with a chiseled angular face. He seems to be playing an angle, but what is it.
Fletcher smiles revealing a mouth full of meth abuse. I don’t know if he is a meth head, but he has the same smile I’ve seen in mug shots from a hundred drug round ups.
It suddenly makes sense. If he’s a 12 step warrior, that would explain the quick talking and the agitated nervousness and the wiry physical disposition.
God Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.
Fletcher will leave us to assist another pale white couple just emerging on the sand.
I know he’s playing an angle.
I watch him as he talks to the new couple. His arms are swaying and his body undulating as he tells his story and finds out about the new couple on the beach.
A few minutes later, Fletcher will return and hand us 2 bloody Mary’s.
“I hope you guys drink,” he says laying the drinks down. “If you are going to drink all day you have to start sometime.”
I’m hung over as hell from a night of insanity on Duval Street. I appreciate this huxster’s magnanimous offer, but I still question his motives.
“I’m pretty hung over,” I say twisting the cup on the plastic table beside me.
“You need to get well,” he says with a laugh.
I stare at this coconut hustler as he greets another couple.
“Where you from?,” he says.
“Gotta get well.” I run it over in my mind. “That’s code for a junkie who knows the only way to make the chills and the sweats and the nausea go away is to get another hit, another taste of the medicine. Only junkies say “need to get well.”
I decide that the Chairman of this southernmost beach in the USA, which is only 90 miles from Cuba, is a 12 step program veteran.
And that’s OK.
But don’t scam me. Don’t try and play me for a fool. I know he’s shuffling coconuts and he’s making me guess where the dollar bill is.
Fletcher walks away.
I stare at the ocean. The beach is 25 yards wide and the sand is mostly rock. I is the southernmost beach in the USA.
wonder what body of water is lapping at the shore. Is it the Atlantic? Is it the Gulf of Mexico?
The beach is 25 yards wide and the sand is mostly rock. I love that I’m at the southernmost beach in the USA. I love that I can spit and almost hit Cuba.
But what ocean is that in front of me?
I walk to the beach stand. Fletcher is gone. In his place is a man wearing a beach T shirt. He is staring at the ocean with a blank look on his face.
“What ocean is that?” I ask.
“Gulf of Mexico,” he says with complete confidence.
“Oh Really?”
“Atlantic ocean is about 30 miles that way,” he says pointing to the left.
I stare at the man. He looks like he should be living in a Nashville alley holding a cardboard sign that says WILL WORK FOR FOOD.
Instead he is my southernmost Magellan without the astronomical PHD.
“OK, dude, thanks.”
He never smiles. He stares pensively into the body of water he confidently calls the Gulf of Mexico.
I will watch Dude the remainder of the day. He will never sit at the towel stand again. For the remainder of the day he will fidget and fuss and walk around the periphery of the beach.
Dude is quiet but agitated. He is dirty or tan or both. He has a white t-shirt that is soiled. He is skinny and his worn cargo pants float on his hips like a parachute in a wind storm.
Dude has close cropped hair, shaved to a nub, like a concentration camp victim or a psychiatric patient. He is unsettled, waving at the sky. He pushes his right, bony hand through the hot humid air like a conductor directing an orchestra for the insane.
His head is bouncing, his neck swinging, undulating erratically like a demented pogo stick. He is pacing like a sick animal, back and forth on the little beach in front of the breakfast cabana in this 5 star hotel on the beach.
I call him Dude because I don’t know his real name. Dude is serious, wiry, on the move. He will walk and talk to himself for the better part of the steamy afternoon. The only time he connects with anyone on the beach is when he goes up to Fletcher. Fletcher is kind to him, like a father, guiding him, giving him beach projects to compete.
I suspect Fletcher understands his issues and has taken him under his wing giving him non-sanctioned jobs through the hotel.
Over the course of the afternoon I will watch dude pace, talking to himself. It’s a concern, and tourists who have had a few rum drinks give Dude a wide berth as they make their way back across the sand.
Later that day, I’m in a Duval Street bar called La Te Da. For some reason, I am still pondering the question of where one ocean begins and another ocean ends.
“Serie,” I command, picking up my iPhone at the bar. “Where does the Atlantic and the Gulf meet in Key West Florida.”
“That’s an interesting question,” Series tiresome voice chimes. “Let me see what I can find on the web.”
“It’s Fort Zachary Taylor Historic State Park,” the butch looking bar tender chimes in as Serie announces “Here is what I found.”
“I over heard your question,” the bar tender says. “That’s where it begins. That’s why Duval Street is known as the longest street in the world.”
I watch the clouds swirl over the bar. I cock my head. “Why’s that?”
“Because it connects two oceans.”
I smile. “Wow. All of that is right here?”
“Yup?”
“So was I swimming in the Gulf today?”
“Nope. Where your hotel is, you were in the Atlantic. Gulf is on this side,” she says motioning to Duval street and beyond.
She moves to another guest as the rain begins to sprinkle down.
An hour later we are back at the beach bar. I see Dude. He is talking to the clouds and waving at the sea gulls that fly over the trees.
I am at the beach bar and call over a bar tender. “Hey man. What ocean is that out there?”
He looks at the great aquatic wonder outside the windowless building. “That’s the Atlantic. It comes together with the Gulf about a mile from here. It’s known as the great washing machine because the Tides just slam together.” “
“What about that Dude out there?What’s his story?” I watch Dude rubbing his short hair cut and pacing in a circle around a lounge chair.
“Hey Willy,” the young bartender shouts.” Willy is an older bar tender with a beard and a ball cap. Willy looks at me with wide eyes as if to say “can I help You?”
“What’s up with that guy?”
Willy looks at Dude and then to me and smiles and shakes his head.
“He’s schizophrenic. He’s been here about two weeks. He’s a friend of Fletcher’s. He really shouldn’t be here.”
He shouldn’t be here.
The words resonate in my head as I swig the remainder of my beer. Why is he here, I think to myself. Nothing good can come from Dude being on this beach with five star vacationers from all over the Earth.
He seems harmless enough. He was polite when I asked him what ocean I was swimming in, even if he was a whole ocean wrong.
I watch Dude twist like a disgruntled washing machine, shuffling across the sand. He is talking to someone in his head.
The one thing I am sure of, none of the voices in his head are named Magellan or Copernicus.
Life’s Crazy™