Day 79: Jacksonville
Posted by Erik Frey Fri, 03 Jun 2005 08:03:00 GMT
This journal entry won’t have the right texture if I don’t at first explain that only part of my trip up the Atlantic coast has been geographic. That portion is easy to describe: I travelled from Miami to Jacksonville, Florida. What isn’t easy to write about is the railroad spike that was driven through my cynicism, or the gaping hole of despair that opened up in my stomach, then was cauterized, then opened again, and finally seared shut so suddenly that I am still reeling.
I’m not sure I even have a vocabulary for this experience. Typing ‘uplifting’ is unfamiliar on a keyboard – my fingers almost just cramped up.
day 79
Let’s start at the edge of Melbourne, two hours north of Miami, where Kira kindly dropped me off after feeding me and letting me sleep on her couch for a few hours. It didn’t start out well because it never does. Kira let me out of her car at a Walmart, gave me one last worried look, and wished me luck. It was raining. I huddled under an awning for a few minutes, fiddled with my raincoat and backpack, and steeled myself for what I was about to do.
I walked across the parking lot, then out onto the main avenue that criss-crossed both ways with heavy traffic, past the end of the sidewalk onto tall grass where no one walked. Imagining hundreds of drivers staring, I felt a strange sense of impropriety and embarassment wash over me. At that very moment, a giant SUV drove too close through a deep puddle, and the spray covered me from chest to toes in water.
Oh, GREAT!
I’m a HUGE LOSER, I thought to myself, covered in DIRTY LOSER WATER. I felt like I was in the middle of one of those naked dreams. Reaching the highway onramp, I grit my teeth, set my pack down in the mud, and stuck my thumb up high.
Two minutes later, maybe three, a pickup truck pulled over, and a guy named Tim greeted me as I stepped in. He told me he felt bad for a guy standing out in the rain. I told him not to worry; I hadn’t been out there very long.
I looked around. I was surprised by how easy that had been. I couldn’t understand why, but my abject shame from just a few moments before was completely gone. I felt alert and grateful.
Tim turned out to be a loud, coarse, friendly country-Florida guys, with brash jokes but good spirit.
“My wife and I are into S&M,” he began at one point.
“Uh… yeah?” I replied, reptilian brain kicking into gear.
“Yeah. She snores and I masturbate. HA HA HA!”
Ha ha! Oh boy. Tim drove me to the Edgewater exit, a few hours north of where he’d picked me up. The exit was nothing more than an empty road and a small gas station. It was raining still. It occurred to me that, logistically, I could be here for hours.
A man was putting gas into an old, decommissioned taxi cab. On a whim, I walked up to him and said, “You wouldn’t happen to be headed north, would you?”
He hesitantly replied he was, and we went through a semi-confused exchange, during which I brought out a map to show him where he was headed, and how it overlapped with where I was headed. He glanced nervously at my pack and asked, “You aren’t carrying a knife, are you?” I assured him I wasn’t, and this seemed good enough for him. Five minutes after arriving, I was in another car, driving away.
We rode east for a few miles before I pointed this fact out to him. He replied, “Oh, you know… I thought something was wrong,” then pulled a U-turn and found the highway.
Roger was a strange, shifty fellow. At first I thought he was nervous with me in the car (and he may well have been), but I think being distracted was simply part of his nature. He drove fifty miles per hour in the slow lane, every couple minutes adjusting the air conditioner, raising and lowering windows, adjusting the rear-view mirror, and shifting his hands on the steering-wheel. At every mileage sign, Roger would repeat the number of miles left to Jacksonville, then poorly reevaluate the amount of time left to reach the destination:
“Seventy miles… oh! We get there in half an hour.”
Besides that, Roger was a friendly guy. He asked about my family. Roger was from Nicaragua, so we discussed Central America. He told me he was driving his car to San Antonio because he was tired of the taxi business in Miami. The day before, his brother had been stabbed by robbers while driving a taxi. He politely explained his hesitancy to help me out by saying, “You just can’t trust people these days,”
Which is probably true,
as true goes,
on a sliding scale.
Roger had a plan to take classes to become a nurse in San Antonio. Someone had told him that once certified, he could “make… at least… fifty or sixty an hour”; he rubbed his thumb against his fingers when he said that – the international money sign. Good luck, Roger.
Roger dropped me off on Stockton street, central Jacksonville, right off I-10. I had a sheet of paper in my pocket with Leah’s number, but it was late, so I considered looking for a place to sleep and calling in the morning. The neighborhood looked a little unwelcoming. I walked a bit towards a gas station before noticing a plastic yellow ribbon that said, “POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS” Nearby was a white news van with its transmitter telescoping high into the night sky. I walked over to the newscaster and asked him what had happened.
“Oh, earlier there was a robbery, and someone got shot in the face.”
Just like that, he said it. I walked over to a taxi cab driver having a smoke break and asked him which direction I might walk to find a nicer part of town. He gave me an incredulous look and said, “Man, are you crazy? Nowhere ‘round here.”
Fair enough. I decided it was perhaps not too late to call Leah. I dropped some change into a payphone, and a friendly, bubbly voice answered. Leah was soaking in a hot tub and would come pick me up in an hour. I was thrilled. I took a nap in an alley, near a homeless man who appeared mostly harmless. He crouched behind some bushes, talking to himself and digging a hole into which he placed a coffee can.
An hour later, a car bearing Leah, Chris, and Garnet swooped in and carried me away into the night. Good times ensued.
