The Mile High Club

It was a beautiful day in June when Julie showed up at the job. Nearing nine-thirty, I figured she had something to discuss, wanting to do it over my coffee break. This was a bit of a surprise since I hadn’t received a call, letting me know that she was coming. No, she didn’t want to have coffee. She had come to tell me that Danny was found dead that morning when his boss went to pick him up for work at Robert’s house. Oddly enough, it was Danny’s last day of community service. His mother immediately went to him, to try to wake him from his final sleep, finding him on his back with his feet crossed and arms folded across his abdomen. He had gently passed away in his sleep. It was the sixth of June 2006.

This news struck me very hard. Danny and I had been planning to go to the Keys when we stumbled into Julie’s life. The idea was to land a property management gig and take occupancy of a place near the beach or live on a boat, while composing and playing music around town. If we had done that, we may have not had the troubles that we ended up having, and would have possibly struck up something big in the music scene.

Dan had confidence in our act, seeing that as very possible if we got in the right area. He thought the Keys would be the place for that to happen. Then I remembered the list he had made that said, “The final move”, on it. I didn’t want to understand it, I suppose. It didn’t quite register to me what that meant but now I knew why he had spent a lot of time helping me ready the studio room at my house, giving me some lessons and guidance on working in there with the equipment he had given me.

He kept saying, “you’ll figure it out”, whenever I sounded confused about the recording process and with working on his compositions that he entrusted me to publish. He also gave me some art lessons on drawing portraits and scenery so that I could illustrate the children’s stories we had both written. He was making all the preparations necessary for the things he wanted me to do for him, tending to the business that needed to be handled so he could depart from this world. The road was being paved.

                        The strangest thing of all was recalling the dream I had the night before they found him. I was working on my truck but my truck and I were both in the river, in three feet of water. Something swam up along side of me and popped out of the water. This thing was a little over six feet tall, thin, covered in moss and other plant matter, looking very much like a rabbit or something. It startled me very much. Feeling a great sense of danger, I grabbed something and swung at the creature, striking it in the head, which knocked it out. After putting it in the bed of my truck, I took it to someone to explain what had happened. The creature stirred while I was showing it to them, so I grabbed a tool and struck it again, killing it. Then I realized that it was Danny. I had killed him. This really added a great deal to my grief, and was far too much to bear.

                        As if that wasn’t bad enough, Dusty had mysteriously died three days after Danny did. She was found in the yard with a mouthful of grass. The other dog freaked out to the point where the neighbors called the cops. It would have been nice if someone would have looked out there first because when Animal Control came, Jean answered the door and said the dogs were not hers- costing me fifty dollars to get the dogs back, even though one was a corpse.

                        Andy called around the third week of August or so, saying that he’d heard about Danny, asking me to come down to paint for him. Since I was so desperate to avoid going to jail for child support, having not yet received my disability insurance from Social Security, I agreed to do it. It was only to last a few weeks, which was just long enough to gather up the twenty-five hundred dollars I needed to keep from getting put in jail again. He told me to make sure I “bring the old lady along”. In the planning stage, I called my kids and spoke to Cody, whom was receptive when I told him I was going to go to work for a few weeks because of the court thing, and that I would be out of town until then. We would resume our time together then. That particular three weeks was the longest three weeks known to man, a “Key West” three weeks.

                        Memory doesn’t serve up who took care of Jean when we left- maybe it was Aunt Rose. Julie booked a flight and reserved a car, and the bags were packed. Julie and I went to the airport to board our flight. We checked our bags and sat nervously while awaiting the prompt to board. After some time passed, I asked whether she had brought any pot for the drive down the keys to Big Pine, which she assured me she did. This was to be my first time on a commercial airliner, and boy, was I worried.

                        My thoughts of a “friend”, whining about motion sickness and having to take Dramamine to fly, crossed my mind. We opted to wait it out in the bar over a drink. Thoughts turned to crashing, as we boarded. Soon the force of the engines was throwing us down the Tarmac, tipping us back in our seats as the thrust lifted us into new heights. We seemed to just barely hang there, the weight of the plane dragging along behind the engines. Panic struck me for a moment but I stomped it out with other thoughts.

                        Now, I was all about the view of the earth below, and getting into the Mile High club. Curiosity somehow helped me decide it was a fair idea to try it… in the bathroom ALONE. It didn’t sink in, while the full surround of mirrored panels tried to tell me a story of security issues- things like surveillance cameras for anti-terrorism efforts. Aborting the attempt, shaving a few strokes off of my game, I finally realized it wasn’t a fair idea after all- Too Late. It must have been a sight, for who ever monitored the cameras, to see. Hopefully, I wasn’t the only case of that type of thing. It was pretty embarrassing.

We landed, retrieved our bags, and found a brand new Mustang waiting for us at the reception area. There was every rental car company to choose from. The car was gorgeous but that goes without saying- everything brand spanking new is gorgeous…. except for someone else’s newborn baby or someone else’s…. well, anything that belongs to someone else.  Julie drove us out, finding a party store where I bought some libations for the drive. Julie used the lavatory to dig the smoke from one of her cavities. After I smoked four cigarettes in my wait, she finally came out of the restroom and got in the car with me. I had already soaked my shirt through, changing into a fresh one, due to the sweltering heat and humidity.

“I thought I was going to have to come in there, what’d you do, fall in?” I asked her.

She said, “No, I had a hard time getting it out”, handing me a pin joint.

 I asked, “Hard time getting it out? You’ve had two kids- the hardest part of the job should have been washing your hands and drying them off, so you didn’t get the rolling papers wet!”

We got on the road, heading for the highway through the keys. Now, I was expecting a vacation style doobie but then again, if you have to throw it out the window, you don’t want it to be a lot, so I gave her the benefit of the doubt, asking, “How many did you roll? And what’s with the pin joint?”

“I could only roll one”, she declared.

“Isn’t it like four hours to Big Pine Key?” I inquired. 

She said, “Yeah but that’s it- that’s all there was”. 

Now, I am confused, really confused. She had spent a half hour in the bathroom, rolling one single pin joint. Obviously upset, I asked, “that’s all there was? What? What do you mean, that’s all there is??? I thought you were going to bring some weed? I saw that man-made phallus you had when I moved in. Judging by the size of it, you could have fit a couple ounces of kind buds in that thing. And that’s it? That’s all you brought? AND it’s SCHWAGG WEED!” I was so upset; I started mimicking a conversation with a fictional passenger:

“Oh, pardon me, what’s that weed you have there, … brick-weed?”

“Oh, no, it’s dick-weed, you fool, my girlfriend, slash genius here, went through the hassle, and risk, of a federal drug charge to bring a cigarette cellophane with a tenth of a gram of the lowest grade weed in Michigan stuffed inside of her cavernous Vagina… vagina… vagina... gina… na… na… na!”

Oh, GOD, how stupid could I be, to let myself be pulled into a void so black? There’s killer pot that they grow up to sixteen feet tall, all over Florida, that we could have gotten hold of when we got off the plane. We would have been better off trying to score at one of the party stores on the way or mail it down ahead of us, as a general delivery, to pick up at the Post office. I was baffled that this woman was in charge of a trust fund, and the life of an eighty-four year-old woman. Thank God, Jean didn’t have a clue what was going on. She would have died from an aneurism or heart attack if she were in a mental capacity to mind. And here I was, guilty by association, and oblivious to what was in store for me next- like a lamb being led to a slaughterhouse by, quite possibly, the world’s finest specimen of a village idiot.

Andy had painted a Fantasy Island kind of picture, where a huge house stood in an image of Paradise. There was a Sports car with a T-top, Sea kayaks, an ocean style fishing boat, among other things, Key Deer being one of them. He volunteered to come pick us up at the airport in his “T-top” but then stated that he had to work too, which was a clever ploy to un-volunteer. He knew that anyone who knows about contracting work would never insist on someone taking a day off of making money while it was there to be made. He was a con but I needed money. So, there I was, once again, ready to fraternize with vermin. The price to pay was, yet, to make itself known.