RhondaK

Love Clichés: The Road Trip
From Tampa Bay to St. Augustine, Florida

Love means not ever having to say you're sorry. --Erich Segal

Apparently love is never having to say that you're sorry you forgot to mention your sordid past, the year long relationship with the cocaine generous male hairdresser, the chronic hepatitis C or a failed relationship with Jesus that even the needle couldn't make you forget.

Thinking on this I have to say I pushed the convertible a bit over 90 mph flying past the happy family with nothing short of loathing and malignancy. I couldn't get out of the city fast enough, away from the crack addict X boyfriend that hid his disease with the finesse of capped teeth and street-bred 3-Card Monty.

I'd lost the shell game and was now gripping a steering wheel in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other. What I was lacking in dignity was compromised further by my thigh high hose, a fringed skirt, and high heels with which I could annihilate a football field of bubble pack.

Breaking up is hard to do so it is best to deal with its ravages driving to a far away place to drink with strangers who have no idea how whipped you've been.

I feel the drag of history on my heart. I have an affinity with Osceola, the Seminole Chief. He grieved the white man greatly with his exploits. He escaped from through a small window in a fort in St. Augustine. I knew if I could just make it to that room to feel the walls where he bled, where he planned and where he knew freedom even through death was preferable to the cold walls of imprisonment, I knew I could find my own small window to crawl through.

 

He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals. --Benjamin Franklin

By the 3rd county, I realized that I couldn't take anymore Valium. I had to set the bottle of champagne aside. The air whipping through my hair had begun singing to me. Every other car contained a potential new lover. I was grieved to see the future father of my children leave on the Kissimmee exit. Wheeling off slowly in his beat-up plumbing van, he waved good-bye. If Interstate 4 were the pathway to a point in the Wild Wild West we would have had time to howl with the coyotes, but here, I was a wheeling down the road in dances of 70 to 100 mph blowing kisses at dream lovers who too, were leaving me.

I don't know why my X left me. I know why he should have left me. I was full of educated conjecture. He of the perfect teeth and nature's little six pack, had found a woman to subsidize him an apartment. He ran off to be close to a man with an HBO contract. He'd skittered off to live two blocks from a crack house where everyone knew his name. He'd gone to get his own phone where I wouldn't review the caller ID with the concerned responsibility of a jury foreman. He'd left to keep his place to his own liking as a fear of my feather boas had driven him away. He'd found my love as suffocating as I had found it scary. He left and I didn't ask him why.

I'd never loved a lost cause before. Behind me was a bottomless pit I had survived and yet I longed for it with such snakes in my blood I thought I'd turn into Medusa herself. But I had to turn my heart to stone. I had to stare into my own eyes and kill my own desire before it killed me.

Three counties into Florida and 1 county closer to Daytona Beach I pulled on the J. Roget champagne again trying to gauge a legal blood alcohol level against a diminishing capacity to forgive myself.

 

To be lucky in love requires falling in love many times--and always with the same person. --Mignon McLaughlin

As I pulled into the Daytona Beach Kennel Club, the greyhound track, I kept trying to think of any number that would change my luck. My mother's birthday, my bounced rent check, the serial number of the bike the X had pawned for crack or the day he left me relieved, yet stunned by the awesome revelation of who had really been sharing my bed. The number zero kept coming to mind. The number even a dog doesn't run under.

The nicotine is the first thing that hits you when you walk into the room of fevered gamblers. In Daytona, bad sunburns and cheap booze enhance fever. My game plan is to always find the lady bartender. They always bring me luck. Men often sit close to her telling her of their plans and their hunches. I usually travel well on her bartender stoicism.

In minutes, I had my own free drink and my own advisements to win. On one side was a Bronx-bred Italian Buddha whose stomach was straining at the single button he used to keep himself legally within the dictates of "No Shirt, No Service." It contrasted with his hands that were weighted down with diamond-flooded gold rings. On the other side was a simple, local lawn maintenance man in dirty, grass stained white pants. Between them, I tried to figure out the best way to win on $20.

I lost until I won. It was no more desperate than that. Pinned between two strangers with hearts alternately on sleeve and nicotine stained fingers, I felt the hopelessness of it all ripping away the cheerful effervescence of the J. Roget. The orchestrated competition set in a ring where the winner would be victorious only by chasing a fake rabbit better than any other dog.

To catch the fake rabbit would be death. To stay so close to almost taste it, ruled one a winner.

I held the ring he had gave me in one palm, flushing it away against the sounds of men yelling for a victory that was only as sweet as the odds allowed it.

 

Tell me whom you love and I will tell you who you are. --Houssaye

Truth is, and this is precisely how I told it on 1520 HAWK Radio before I left Tampa for Daytona Beach, the truth is, he felt like home. Once broiled on acid for a weekend of angel singing sunrises when we made love I thought we were breakfast. I thought we were toast, eggs, grits and coffee percolating on an open range waiting for the cowboys. When I told him this, he seemed to understand what I meant. I had never been breakfast before, though I had perhaps been over easy frequently.

The radio show was amusing. I got to laugh at myself, my incredible shrinking skirt and the fact that I was so broken hearted I was driving 3 hours to drink at a biker's bar where no one knew me. I was driving to bend into the curves of A1A to bleed in another place 5 hours away to talk to the ghost of an Indian Chief.

The radio guys loved me lauding me as a poet though my deepest secret is that I don't write poetry. I write paragraphs.

Poetry - poetry eludes me like love.

 

Mac, you ever been in love?
Marshal, I've been a bartender all my life. --Unknown, from the movie "My Darling Clementine"

Straight to Highway A1A and take a left, head for Daytona Beach's Main Street. On the weekends the street would be lined with motorcycles, on the weekdays, the regulars come to world famous biker bars. None are as famous as The Boot Hill Saloon that is situated across from a cemetery. Their best-selling T-shirt reads, "Better off here than across the street."

It is a particularly nice graveyard.

The beautiful man behind the bar, a man seasoned with more heartache than the barrel of peanuts he lords over says this to my question: "How do you get over a failed love affair?"

His smile reaches from pierced ear to doubly pierced ear, "Have a beer!"

And so I do. And do. And do, again, just in time to meet Mac and Marty who have much to say on love. Mac says,"Love never goes away." He has been married 24 years. Marty says of waking up with your soul mate, "When I wake up with her, it is all the God I need."

Not feeling much better, I turn to Blue. His wife just died. His only interest is getting me out to his U-Haul to meet his brother who is sleeping in the back of the moving van. I decline. Mac and Marty get protective.

I drive off thinking of the loves I never had that each of these men embraced. I wonder if there was anything in the back of that U-Haul but imprisoned disillusioned women running from failed love that would fall further for the line, "I have someone who would just love you, but you have to come out to this van."

 

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke. --Lynda Barry

When the valet of Hi Tides opened the door to my sleek, rented convertible I fell out on A1A like a silk stocking of well-oiled goods. I flounced there like a woman who felt that showing off her underwear in the middle of a highway suggested such dainties as: "quality" and "class." I rolled to a stop thinking, "now this…this is find end to things…" imagining being crushed by a 18-wheeler. Worse. Traffic stopped in both directions as I flailed trying to find a way to stand on my own two feet.

Hi Tides doesn't need a valet because of its reputation, but because it is on a cliff overlooking the latter end of Flagler Beach. Parking is sparse and must be arranged like a gas combustion chessboard.

Bottom covered, ego so splattered a pratfall like that couldn't touch me I sat at an outside table for six and simply spread myself out. Books. Camera. Notebooks. I began fanaticizing about walking in the sea, taking one item of clothing off with each step until my bare bottom served as a stark contrast to family dining.

I ate quickly feeling my mood sink faster than the sun's setting.

 

The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand. --Fred Allen

I wish I could say wheeling down A1A, I was carefree. No. I wish I could say I recall his packing with a bit of boredom. No. I wish I could say I let the wind whip through my hair as I touched myself intimately hoping a herd of Harley riders would pull up along side for the show. No.

I wept from Flagler Beach to St. Augustine. An hour and ½ of fat melodramatic tears blowing to the backseat like empty potato chip bags.

Frankly, the Cure was involved. How I didn't stop, cut my wrists, take all my Valium, drink the remaining 4 bottles of J. Roget and swim out to sea I couldn't tell you. It could have been the stark vista of Maitland where the sea crashes whitely against a marshy river. It may have been the blue-green of the Palmettos that had seen so much worse than this.

After all, I was only a girl whose man walked away into the arms of a lover far more intense than flesh itself. He had left me for his own demons, his own arms and smoke that melted time.

 

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope. --Walter Benjamin

In St. Augustine, I selected the hotel most likely to make a person suicidal. The pool crawled in a wealth of green underwater life. Two TVs sat on top of each other in my room. The bottom one worked. The air conditioner wheezed. I would get my $5 deposit back if I didn't mess up the other bed. I was in a hell of beige and 50s sensibilities abandoned.

I couldn't drink anymore and left to walk over the Bridge of Lions. From 1927, it has served as the grand way to drive into the ancient city of St. Augustine. Walking across it one can look to the east and imagine armadas and cannon fire. However, I was weeping. I thought about jumping off the bridge, but the most damage I could sustain was losing a shoe.

I hid behind one of the faux battlements and looked down at the sea. This is where I began hallucinating.

Not that scary, I "had twelve too many beers" sort of hallucinating, but a lucid "I wish I could have had 12 too many beers" genre of visual mythology. I saw them. In them, I mean, I saw black figures dancing on the water. The waves were not waves. They were footprints. They were a dance.

I could never kill myself with water. Water is a world of separate joys.

I also understood something about the nature of God…the higher spirit…the Goddess. It isn't correct to look up into the infinite sky. I found the spirit was under my feet the whole time. Supporting me. Holding me up. Holding all of us in a place where we could chose to weep, dance or die.

 

Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart. --Marcus Aelius Aurelius

I didn't visit Osceola's prison the next day. I found that maybe I had found that small window. That sliver of hope just wide enough to slide through.

I went back down A1A , stopping at Hammock at a juke joint called Peggy's Daughter's Place. Sounds of "She's Got the Rhythm, I Got the Blues," soaked the atmosphere that was filled with locals blending their beer with tomato juice. Miraculously, I didn't need the timeless hangover cure. I was edgy. Hungry. Indecisive. Hating things. Loving something I could barely see out of the corner of my eyes.

I had to get back to Daytona. I paused long enough to eat breakfast and read a line from a book. It said: "999 of an inventors inventions fails. He considers them practice shots."

A1A becomes a place where my rattlesnake smile and hot-pants sneer crept out for the first time in weeks.

 

One should always be wary of anyone who promises that their love will last longer than a weekend. --Quentin Crisp

At the Ponce Inlet, I find some solace in the idea that bikers are modern day pirates. It only makes sense if you were sitting there with me hunched over a cold Budweiser elbows deep on the prow of the good ship Miss Genieve that serves as a bar in a cove rendered historical for its use by pirates.

The bartender, Jeff, admits he goes to a nude beach in the next city. He says he never looks at anyone else. I can't imagine going to a nude beach and not looking over everything I possibly could.

Across the bar, Danny admits he slept with a hot Norwegian chick last night he can't remember the name of this bright day. His wife left him for a shrimper. "Can you imagine a woman going down on a man in a shrimp boat," he asks incredulously. For the recent anniversary they didn't share he sent her a 14K gold shrimp to remember his absence by. She wants him back. He wants her to suffer.

I write secret words to myself in my journal, "A fire in the belly is a champion for the ridiculous. You have to keep going in order to honor yourself. Getting fire in the belly means simply surrendering to the truth."

I have no idea what I meant.

 

We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them. --Anais Nin

After spending a night hitchhiking on Harleys and making love to swimming pool jets, I decided to go to church before I left for Tampa.

I ended up eating an eclair while wearing an amazing array of rhinestones parked at a drive-in church one block from the beach. I had planned on drinking the rest of my champagne sans glass like a barbarian while
listening to the preacher's sermon. However, the man of the cloth's sincerity stilled me. I listened to his sermon as he related a story about working on a chain gang. I took communion instead.

"What God had made clean, you cannot make profane," he said. Instead of clapping or saying amen, people beep their horns.

I left the X boyfriend there; crack addiction and broken promises intact. I simply left him there on the prayer altar of the Daytona Beach Drive-In Christian Church and began the drive back to home.

 

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