"Useless Wisdom"

I found myself in the Monroe County Detention Facility, where, consumed with severe desperation and depression, I cried for two weeks or more. They sentenced me in a Kangaroo court, giving me ninety days. I soon learned I was front-row to what goes on in the area, like how they get some of their money for the local economy, which is by keeping their jail full. 

They go to great lengths to bring people to jail. If you don’t spend enough money in a particular establishment, the place has one of their buddies on the force arrest you for anything they can get you for. If you don’t leave enough of a tip for your drinks, they will plant contra-band in your coat or cigarette pack when you go to the bathroom, and when you walk out, you will find yourself being stopped by a friendly neighborhood police officer, only to surprisingly find yourself going to jail for whatever it is they claim to have found on you.

If you happen to get in the way somewhere, they’ll arrest you for trespassing. You can walk out with a drink and be on the street drinking it but if they don’t like something about you, you will get arrested for open container because it’s against the law, when it’s convenient for them.

If you laugh it off, and go back home to Alaska, they will bring you back on the charge. Maybe you’re from Maine or Nantucket? Don’t try to duck it.

They get extra federal money, in addition to their regular funding, to back them up, and they’ll bring you back in a bucket.

They are getting their money at the taxpayer’s expense. It’s a license to rob people, and they use it every single chance they get. They are still, to this day, trying to get two hundred and forty eight dollars from me, that I refuse to give them, for the fine on the red light charge.

Dennis Reeves Cooper got kicked around so badly by the Key West Police Department that he started his very own newspaper where he takes great pleasure in exploiting the local absurdities. It’s called “Key West, The Blue Paper”.

Key West is sometimes referred to as Bone Island because of the human remains that routinely wash ashore. The Keys were long ago used as sacred burial grounds by Native Americans before any Europeans arrived. 

It has always been a haven for criminals, that is, ever since the days of Columbus- 520 years. 

They used to throw up Lighthouses to coax unsuspecting sailing vessels into the shallows, where they ran aground only to find themselves being raided by thieves who came upon them in Skiffs as though they were going to help. Ships crew and Captains found themselves to be robbed and most often killed. The money in the area, originally, came from this practice.

Modern day Land Pirates now coax their prey into the area with the promise of work and good pay... or good dope. Word on the streets of many states is always touting the Keys as having lots of work- a partial truth. Yes, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done, just as anywhere you go.

In the coastal region, where there are severe storms and hurricanes battering the shacks and businesses, as well as the constant dilapidation of extreme poverty, there is always work that needs to be done. And if you’re Cuban you get the job because they don’t really want to pay anyone from the states to do it. Between the Cuban people and the drunks, who are willing to work for whatever the pay is that’s available, things are easily dealt with. 

Everyone else is a sucker, becoming strapped for cash and unable to drive back home, losing their possessions to the pawn shops while being led on that tomorrow things will be different. Tomorrow everything will work out.

The tourists bring the money every other week for the numerous festivals that they organize but when it’s gone they count on storm damage claims. Many people file claims that they lost a boat in the storm, to receive money from FEMA, money that does not belong to them nor did they contribute to the taxes that provide the funds to real victims.

We mainlanders all pay for their claims, essentially taking the money and using it, in most cases, to buy Cocaine and other drugs, and keeping them supplied with Hurricane Lager and 305’s (the local brand of cigarette which will mark you as a local if you have them).

They brag about how they seceded but they beg for our money. Every single festival is a beggar, and so many fools go to take part in the deviance. And when it comes to the drugs, the money is going to foreign lands that are waging their own wars against us as a country. Poisons.

Roosevelt declared the Florida Keys a National park. What happened to that, I wonder? It’s a sham and a lot of people know the truth, some of them thankful to have escaped with their lives, unwilling to relive the nightmares with revisiting those memories.  

Me? I had to have a hands-on experience. It didn’t occur to me, how much trouble I was going to have. It was suppose to be “easy-peazy”. And I would have been, too, if I had not came with the fool I did or had some family with a lot of money living here or didn’t mind being robbed of all but my regrets.

Every single step I took along the way, there were people asking for change and cigarettes. Forty thousand people are on a two-mile by four-mile slab of crap for an island. I am told ten thousand are thieves, ten thousand are authorities, five thousand are employed and possibly respectable, four thousand live on boats, six hundred live in the jail at any given time, and four hundred live in the shelters, mangroves, streets and rooftops. And here I am, right in the middle of it because of my failure to do some of the homework first. What a fool I was, a drunken fool. Had I been sober in my approach I would have made a better choice and avoided the whole deal.

Now, as I am wondering how the world blew up in my hands, I remember Andy and Julie discussing the Witchcraft in the area. Julie tells him that she’s a “White” Witch, and Andy say’s that he’s a “Warlock”, which must be Floridian for Iguana crap because that’s closer to what he resembles than anything.

Now, I don’t know much about these sorts of things but there were many clues that the witchcraft business was a bigger piece of the Caribbean area than I could imagine. Maybe it’s because of the excessive exposure to the sun and heat, evaporating the seawater.

People are delusional from something, could it be they are drinking the water by breathing the heavy salt air? Am I hallucinating any of this myself? Stranded in the Florida Keys and stranded in my mind, I was just getting started.

They say we are given great difficulties to sort through in life, as we are capable of handling them, because God wouldn’t give us challenges that we couldn’t handle. Truth is, I never thought that much of myself but I was definitely being challenged.

Could it be the necessary evil to help me to quit drinking? Was it Danny and the angels that were keeping me from giving up in my spirit?

For the first time in my life, I admitted to myself of needing serious help. My baby brother, Josh, was living in St. Pete but I couldn’t get him to help. Our father, (my stepfather), had recently moved into his place, so he wouldn’t let me have the address or phone number for fear that I was harboring a violent resentment towards “dad”.
Whether that was true or not, obviously, was reinforced with our history and decidedly so, I suppose. Even now, I still have no address for him, and his dad has since moved to Pennsylvania, or so I’ve been told.

It sure would have been nice to have a little moral support from a family member right then.

Making attempts to reach someone from jail was hard. A phone call was managed to Bruce, who was on his way down to the Bahamas to have a stay at his family’s resort home.  He planned on coming through the keys first, shooting to the Bahamas after visiting Julie and Andy in Summerland Key.

The place was fifteen miles from the Monroe County Detention Facility, where I sat in a dormitory-style cell that held sixty-four men. I hoped for a visit from him. What I hadn’t realized was that he could become negatively influenced by those people he was to visit, which is exactly what happened. He was right there, within fifteen miles of where I was drowning in an ocean of despair, but he came and went without responding to my distress signal.

In the coming years I would discover that Andy and Julie used my identity to purchase a house and a vehicle, when I began looking into correcting my credit score, I found this out.

There was a bookshelf in the dorm, thank God. It measured thirty inches by forty inches Even though they were very light from dry rotting, guys were using the books as workout equipment, filling pillow cases to lift with them or using them as a barrier between the germs on the floor and their little patties or maybe they were floor protectors... none of it made sense but then again, not much of anything I ever saw an inmate do made sense. “Another Vote to stay in school,” I thought, while trying to find a book to take to my bunk. 

It was hard to find a book that wasn’t too destroyed to read, let alone a book worth taking the time to read in the first place but I found and read them as often as I could.

About once a week we were taken out to the “yard”, which was a small part of the building having no roof. It was lame but it was “outside” in the heavy humid air and sunshine. Fighter-jets shot through the air above us, adding a layer to our senses in addition to the stench of island decay.

It was such a disturbing realization, what I’d gotten myself into. I was unable to handle my state of duress. Not to mention being separated from medical care and medications.
My whole, so-called, life was being yanked out from under me and I couldn’t take it.

The nightmares were so bad that they had to relocate me to another part of the jail, where people didn’t have to rest before their slavery on the island.
 Inmates provide the clean-up labor on the streets and beaches, in their preparation for tourist season, and providing the labor for festival cleanup. Most of these guys had jobs to do on the street. But the place they moved me to slowly became interesting, and after a week or two I made a few friends.

The movie, Catch Me If You Can, had two key characters. William Hanratty was the cop, played by Tom Hanks, and Mr. Abagnale was the guy he was after. The Abagnale character is a real person- the uncle of Jean Paul Abagnale. Jean Paul had been living in the keys for some time but was locked up, like so many others, on charges stemming from Cocaine and alcohol. William Hanratty was in his late fifties or early sixties, who was also a Veteran from the Philadelphia area. He was a musician, and like so many others, was playing his guitar on the street for the tourists. He was living on retirement and Veterans benefits and had a mental condition residual from the military and alcoholism.

There were shiploads of musicians, artists, performers and treasure hunters and the like, locked up. It seemed like they all had been associated, in one way or another, with cocaine. There were witches, heathens, and once in a while a normal person- all victims of a struggling economy. Now, I was among them but only until my scheduled release.

When I walked out of jail, a day or two after Christmas, my olfactory senses became filled with the stale smell of cigarette butts on the breeze. It was as if I was wearing an ashtray for a respirator.

 As I left Stock Island, all I could think about was how badly I wanted a cigarette, so that I could have a fresh stink in my nose, while walking along the road leading away from the jail, the road which was dressed in litter and filth. Tobacco packages, butts and alcohol containers were like the leaves of fall on the ground.

Crossing the channel was the only road to Key West. This was known as Cow Key Bridge, home to whomever could keep from being arrested, Cow Key, being Stock Island. They called it this because it was the shipping port for receiving meat in the lower Keys.

There was a tattered American Flag jury rigged on a stick that was flapping in the winds. It was attached to the side of the guardrail that secured the roadway across the bridge. Looking around, I spotted a man below. I approached, explaining my circumstances and asking for a cigarette. It wasn’t hard to tell that he was another Veteran of the Armed Forces.

Bill Hanratty had told me, but now I saw, that there were lots of vets on the streets in the Keys. Rolling me a cigarette, the man filled me in on many key points to being on the street in the Keys, especially Key West. These were: don’t walk around with a backpack or a duffle bag, stay away from people with them, don’t stop and talk to anyone on a bike or drinking, keep away from the beaches, don’t try to hitchhike, and if you have no place to sleep you need to go to the Safe Zone. The cops cannot touch you at the Safe Zone but between seven a.m. and eight p.m. you have to watch out because if you get stopped, and you have too little money on you for a hotel or a restaurant, they will arrest you for whatever they dream up. There are all kinds of things from disorderly conduct and vagrancy to trespassing. It doesn’t matter if you are clean and legal. And if you try to take it to trial you will sit there while they file for numerous continuances until they give you time served.

Time served means you get out of jail but it also means you are guilty of whatever they say you did. If you try to go to trial, they will get a Psyche evaluation that says you are not fit for trial, which gets them the conviction too. You will not win.

Come, spend the money you have and get the hell out. They will take you off of the street if they don’t want you there. You will find no work and if you do, the money will be so small that it will just barely fill your daily needs.

Money is your only ticket to freedom, and you need lots of it or just enough to get out on a bus. If you can get some from a family member go to the bus station with it right away- GET OUT.

When I listened to him, part of me was concerned but another part of me was not willing to take his warnings as reality, figuring he was just another alcoholic with some type of weird mental condition.

Thanking him for his time, the cigarette and his advice, I left for Sean’s, no wiser than I was when I stopped to talk to this messenger.

zachery polk 4-15/2017 updated