Standing on the back patio, half-step past the corroded frame of the departed screen door, my hands were drawn to the natural holds — the now latchless bits of pitted aluminum — grasping at the spots where a dizzy man could find balance, where a spinning mind might stumble briefly upon clear sight.
Call it possession. Call it the whisper of unslumbered spirits. Call it just a hunch that this was the bent pose that Jack struck a thousand times, wavering between writing and another round.
Whatever it was, I was held there, stuck, head bowed and tilting toward the debris-strewn unswept concrete floor, with the relentless joy of Floridian morning sun off my shoulder — and now the infinite abyss of unrealized narrative opening before me — mind flung forward to the om-channeled chanting of a thousand tales untold.
How many visions crossed this gate? How many dreams drifted through these shredded screens? Was this the same porch where Ann Charters stood, here to record final interviews? Is this the place she described in my misplaced book, another thing lost between moves and foolhardy forays into failed self-reinvention?
What led me here to this nondescript, derelict, post-war starter home? What made me think to start down a beat trail towards midnight, belly full of pork and beans and plantains, head lightly drizzled with beer and buzzed with old-friend conversation?
What was it about last night’s half-renovated old hotel with alley-view windows and walk-up stairs? (“No, sir we have no elevator here.”) What about it made me think of old man Hemingway in a sweat-stained shirt, fiendishly click-clacking away, hammering ribbon to page, fingers alight with neighbor-cursed enthusiasm, loudly tapping into the night?
What then made me think to visit Jack? To hop on YouTube and see what footage might be found, what amusements might there be lurking? He’d not been on my mind, had not stayed bosom-close these recent years. I thought I was past that, felt discomfort the last few times I revisited his books: so much freedom I now read as irresponsibility, so much romance now cut as heartbreak. What pulled me to an interview about his lingering days crashed-out in Orlando and the side-note that Jack died here in St. Pete, no more than four miles away?
And now I ask: What haunts this land of ours? What ghost-tweaked algorithm directed my devices to swing into action to provide clear and accurate and on-point guidance to this fence-falling corner lot where Jack collapsed: suffering from unhealed fist-swings and a thousand ever-hopeful swigs and swallows?
In doubt I recall the night before, when debates arose about the surety, the objective provable realness of all things in the ungraspable beyond, that realm where angels wing and spirits soar. Was it The Unknowable or The Not-Yet-Known? Was it really a Thing? Was it even a Thing At All?
But then some vibration, some holy incantation got to work on me, shook me and said: “Shower quick! Go, and see!” Something brought me off the highway, the smartway, the full-tank satellite-mapped path up to the airport, where I’d soon jet off, back to snow and shivered through with chill-bite enforced sobriety.
Here now, sun-stroked, heady and led: “Stay, take your time! Grab each porch post at shoulder height, steady yourself, climb each stoop step with a heavy tread. Scratch your nails against the weathered windowsills, those ledges that gave rest to bottles and buttocks and old arguments unresolved. Remember! Now come ’round back my boy, come back and moan, come groan, come moan for man and roll your bones. Stay and snatch a dream before you go — for all, but for now — for you alone.”
