Nomads

My first memoir installment.

                                      Nomads

Driving west on 98 towards 441, I looped through Pahokee and Belle Glade. It’s not the fastest way back from Ft. Lauderdale to Orlando, and that didn’t matter. It’s one of the most interesting ways, and that did matter.

The area felt foreign but familiar, as I get when I drive through the back roads of Florida, and I may be in Latin America or the Caribbean. Signs are in Creole, Spanish, and English. There were no chain stores for a while.

It was September 2009. My father had passed away a couple of days earlier. He made it to 74. He had a long history with drugs and alcohol. My brother used to say it looks so healthy when he has a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and cheap vodka with his breakfast.

On the way out of Ft. Lauderdale, where my father had died and had lived since the early 1970s, I stopped at Cracker Barrel with my cousin Julie and my aunt Helen. We all exchanged stories about my dad, repeating many we knew, and we had some new material to offer each other.

Julie told me about when she wanted to see our grandmother Edee in New Smyrna Beach. Julie was only 15 and had no way up from Ft. Lauderdale. She could ride back with Edee in a few days if she got there. My father offered to take her.

Julie recounted how what would typically take a little over three hours took over seven. They ate boiled peanuts, and he took the back roads and told stories about old Florida.

I left Pahokee and headed north on 441. The sun was shining brightly, and the rain started falling hard. The sun continued to shine. My visibility wasn’t good for a while. The rain suddenly stopped. I could see. Steam rose from the misty road.

My father told me stories whenever I was in the car with him. This was the backdrop for him to tell his best stories. His stories were often heavy with historical figures and ulterior motives by those figures. They were usually set in the location of wherever we were driving. It felt like I was watching a documentary while also being a part of the documentary.

I would soon pass Yeehaw Junction’s Desert Inn, which was once a brothel that ranchers frequented. He loved pointing that out.

Julie said that after my father dropped her off at my grandmother’s place in New Smyrna, they ate dinner. My father decided to drive back to Ft. Lauderdale. I’m not sure exactly where he was when the Highway Patrol pulled him over, but I think it was near Mims or Geneva. It turned out that his real motivation for taking the back roads was that he was driving a stolen car. He was taken into custody.

I don’t remember him doing any time for this, so I’m not sure what happened, but the story didn’t surprise me.

I’d always pictured him being pulled over near Geneva. I don’t know if I was told that or if I imagined that.

Geneva would be the best place for my father’s arrest. It has ready-made backstories.

Ft. Lane Park is in Geneva, off Highway 46. The park is named for Colonel John Foote Lane. He was a Colonel in the Second Seminole War. His post was Fort Drane, just north of Ocala. He was previously a math and philosophy professor at West Point. He entered West Point at age 13 and graduated at 18. He is also believed to be the inventor of the modern-day pontoon boat.

In 1836, he contracted encephalitis while stationed at Fort Drane. This caused him to go insane, and he put a sword through his head into his brain, ending his life.

I don’t know of any evidence of him ever setting foot in the area that is now named for him.

I imagined my father driving down Highway 46 telling 15-year-old Julie this story while they shared boiled peanuts and he sipped on a beer.

In 1992, a skull was discovered in the Smithsonian Native American Collection. At the time, it was identified as skull number 2244.

Later, it was discovered that it was Lewis Powell’s skull.

Powell had been involved in the Lincoln assassination conspiracy. Powell, alias Lewis Payne, was supposed to take out the Secretary of State William Seward as part of a holistic slaughter designed to knock off the top of the chain of command.

At the time, Lincoln was the president, and Andrew Johnson was the Vice President.

Seward was stabbed in the face by Powell's Bowie knife, ending up disfigured but living seven more years and serving as Secretary of State to Andrew Johnson. Seward is known more for his role in purchasing Alaska from Russia.

Johnson also survived after George Atzerodt failed to follow through on his assignment to kill Johnson. Atzerodt wandered drunk through the streets of Washington, D.C., throwing his knife onto the road.

John Wilkes Booth was the only one of the three who succeeded in his assassination.

Powell and the other conspirators were hanged a few months later.

Powell was a Confederate soldier. He, along with fifteen other Confederate soldiers and one Union soldier, are buried in the Geneva Cemetery.

Powell’s skull was reunited with the rest of his body in 1994.

It had been handed over in 1898 by the Army Medical Museum after traveling from a few different grave sites. Meanwhile, his body was buried next to his mother in Geneva. It turns out that an undertaker separated his head from his body in 1869. I’m not sure why. His family had come to Washington to pick up his remains in 1871.

I’ve heard stories that a phrenologist had taken it to examine. Phrenology was popular at the time, but the story is unsubstantiated.

My father loved the phrenology angle but didn’t present it as factual; he presented it only as a theory.

These two Geneva stories were his favorites. He talked about how kids need to hear these stories to be interested in history.

I passed through Lake Okeechobee. Highway 441 was desolate.

I started to think about transporting Lewis Powell’s head. 

Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia flashed into my mind. I thought of Warren Oates’ character in the film. He was an itinerant piano player transporting a decaying head through Mexico to collect ten grand. He encounters bombastic bikers, prostitutes, lots of gun-happy characters, and Peckinpah’s slow-motion violence.

This area reminded me of Warren Oates driving down a Mexican highway with Alfredo Garcia’s head. In these scenes, Garcia’s head fell from the bag to the ground and rolled around while flies hovered over its circumference.

Garcia, who is never seen in the movie, allegedly impregnated the crime boss’s daughter he worked for. The crime boss put a bounty on his head in the most literal way.

Both men’s detached heads became sought after vessels that reduced their lives to specific incidents that led to their deaths by very unnatural causes.

My father had been cremated. In his will, he asked family members to distribute his ashes into the Banana River in New Smyrna. None of us could figure this out. I didn’t know of any strong connection to the place. I surmised it was either a joke that only he knew about, or maybe he had smuggled some pot there in the 70s or fallen in love one of the many times he said he fell in love.

My aunt Helen insisted on a Christian ceremony. A few of us read the Biblical Passages that she chose. I wanted to read a Bukowski poem or something more representative of my father. I liked mixing that up with Biblical passages, but my aunt didn’t like this idea. It didn’t seem like the time for confrontation, so we compromised.

I handled the Communion ceremony. I mixed freshly squeezed orange juice and cheap vodka into a classic patina, Stanley Thermos. For the wafer, we ate Triscuits. He liked Triscuits with peanut butter, so we had them plain.

My brother threw his ashes into the Banana River.

About a year later, I was driving on a back road that connected to Alt. 19 just north of the Tarpon Springs Bridge. It was late morning.

I saw a casket next to the dumpster of a warehouse. I forget how big those things are. It looked about eight feet long and was made of white metal. I didn't get out and touch it or open it like some of my friends suggested to me later. I called my friend Alex. He said I should throw it in the back of my hatchback and ride the two hours to Orlando with it sticking out. I ignored his suggestion but thought about it briefly when he mentioned selling it on Craigslist.

I wondered about the casket's history and how it ended up empty next to a dumpster. I also thought about how most people pass through the world relatively anonymously and how many stories will never be heard.

The processor in a computer is often called the brain of the computer, but there is still so much more we hope to learn about our brains. So much of who we are is not visible. In our interior lives, our brains are still mostly frontier.

I went through Tampa, back from Tarpon Springs, and towards Orlando. I stopped and got some guava pastries at the huge 24-hour Cuban bakery in Seminole Heights. After that, I headed down the street to Nicko's diner.

It's an authentic Greek diner that looks like Airstream manufactured it. I ordered a Greek omelet and a cup of coffee, and I read the New York Times, hard copy, as I ate.

I noticed a man who looked to be college-age sitting across the table from a woman who looked to be about 35. She had a folder and kept pulling out papers that she seemed to be reading while talking to him. It looked like she was his case worker.

I heard bits and pieces of their conversation. She was looking at X-rays. I heard him say, "I can look at a copy of my MRI and tell you exactly what part of my brain is missing."