Reinventing Mike Lake (6 page)

              Early on in our relationship I took jobs that paid one and two cents per word.  I also did all the filler jobs as I called them.  Basically, I just provided content page after content page for new websites so they seem established when they first hit the web.  This was mind-numbing work, but it eventually began to pay off with stories in magazines and newspapers.  Still, without my wife supporting me, there is no way I would have been able to have the time to build a decent resume.  It was a catch-22.  I had to do all of the work, which equaled hours and hours of time, but little pay, just hoping for the pot of gold at the end of the crap rainbow.  There’s no way I could have put the time in doing that on my own.  I would have had to support myself in another way, or I would have starved.  Or just ate a lot more meals that my mommy cooked. 

              Still, after six or seven years of writing, if you can call it that, I wasn’t sure if I was doing it for the love of writing, or the love of money.  I can remember many occasions when I had the idea to sit down and write something for myself – a short story, a novel, a screenplay idea, and I would think to myself, I’m not getting paid for this, why am I writing this?  It’s just the way my brain had become, and maybe still is, wired.  When one gets used to getting paid for something for so long it’s hard to do it “just for fun.”  I often wondered if athletes, musicians, and even healthcare professionals have similar thoughts.  Time after time I would get something going, but never had the desire to do go through with it.

              It was a conversation with my dad that helped changed my view on my struggling with writing.  My dad and I weren’t much for deep conversation, but the handful of times I really sought his advice he always came through.  He doesn’t waste words, and thinks carefully before he talks.  Many people say multiple things in hopes of hitting the target.  When my dad spoke, he almost always hits the bull’s eye on the first shot.

              It was about ten months after she died, and he and I were talking on my deck.  He heard my whole speech about how I was having a hard time finding the desire to do writing I wasn’t being paid for.

              “You’ll write when you want to.  When something moves you enough to write, you will,” he said.

              “Also son, all that money stuff you say doesn’t make sense, at least to me.”

              “Why”?

              “Because, if you were to write a movie, or a script, or a novel, or whatever, and it were to sell, you would be making a whole lot more money than you’ve ever made writing about dead presidents.  Hell, you’d have all the dead presidents you’d ever need,” laughing at his own joke that I suspect he didn’t intend to make until it came out.  But he was right.

              I guess I ultimately knew that if I were to ever sell something it would most likely be for a decent chance of money, but it wasn’t that part of what he had said that I focused on.  I’d write when I was ready, he had said to me.  There was no need to force anything, in other words.  I have thought about his words often since that day – all the way up to the dead presidents joke - and they have steered me straight when I began to have anxiety about what I was, and what I wasn’t, accomplishing in the writing world.  There, on the deck of my Uncle Howard’s beach house, was when I decided it was time to start writing again.  Without major money concerns, and no real concerns beyond finding a bed to sleep in at the end of the night, I was ready to write for myself. 

10

              For the next few weeks I walked around town with Bahama and sometimes Snuka, although Snuka was so big he tended to scare fellow pedestrians.  I snuck off for meals with my uncle that my aunt would never have approved of, smoked a lot, and wrote. 

              After more than a year of not writing I didn’t really know where to start.  I have a writer friend who always told me, “When in doubt, just write…”  I usually just try to remember that part of the quote, but inevitably he always ends with “…something that’s not complete crap should eventually come out.”

              I wrote about my wife, I wrote about my sister, I wrote about the GA Pig Shack, I wrote about my dog, and I wrote about myself.  After writing for about a week, while sitting on the deck, I noticed something funny about my writing, something that I must have trained myself to do.  I write in 1,000 word chunks because that’s how many words I used to write on my presidential biographies.  It didn’t matter what I was writing about, I would get to 1,000 words or so, and just run out of things to say.  Also because 1,000 words generally signified the end of a workday for me, I usually found it hard to continue writing after I met my quota, especially those first few weeks. 

              Day after day, not just at my uncle’s, but for the entire duration of the trip, I had to reprogram my brain, and write just for the act of writing.  This should be simple, but when all you have to do is write, it can be pretty intimidating.  It wasn’t that the environment I was in wasn’t an excellent one for writing.  I had a giant beach house, with decks protruding from all sides, so I had multiple places to re-hone my craft.  My uncle and aunt were always close by if I wanted to talk, but never intrusive, and looking back on it, I don’t think they ever asked what I was writing about.  They were just genuinely happy I was writing again.  Aunt Gail was always quick to have a meal for us, but just like my uncle would tell me in secret, her meals were usually too grainy, green, and cardboard-ish for my taste.  I usually had an appetite because of the other green I was partaking in, which I could also thank my uncle and aunt for, so it all worked out. 

              That month I also spent a lot of time at the beach.  When I was young, Howard had taught me how to boogie board when my parents used to visit him in whatever beach town he was living in that particular summer.  I tried boogie boarding again, but after a few looks from the local kids who actually knew what they were doing, I reverted back to just walking on the shoreline mostly, which was fine. 

              Sometimes I would bring the dogs down to the beach.  Bahama loved the water, usually scaring me because I always thought she was going too deep, but she always came back onto the beach wearing a grin to cancel out my fears.  Now Snuka, as Gail had mentioned, was another story.  Snuka loved the sand, but absolutely hated getting too close to the ocean.  There was an imaginary force field that only Snuka could see maybe 15 feet from the ocean.  When he crossed it, it would send him into doggy panic attacks.  A few times Bahama and I would go a few feet into the ocean to play around.  Snuka, wanting no part of it, would bark at us the entire time, showing his displeasure.  It was even worse when Howard and Gail would join us.  It was almost as if Snuka refused to believe his masters could defy him by going into the ocean.  Snuka wouldn’t bark when they went in.  Instead, he would turn his back completely to the ocean, and dig a hole.  This was no small hole, being able to fit a large dog, and Snuka would lay in it until Gail and Howard came out of the ocean, safely back on the right side of the force field.  Just like that he would snap out of it and be a happy dog again.  Some beach dog.

              A few days before I decided I would be leaving the friendly confines of Howard, Gail, and Treasure Island, I was feeling like it was time to go.  I most likely imagined it, but I felt like I was wearing out my welcome.  I think I was just eager to get on with the next part of my journey.  One night, walking back from an organic restaurant in town Gail insisted we visit, the topic of my next location came up.

              “What’s next?” asked Howard, as I saw him eyeballing the ice cream shop we would have surely went in had we not been with Gail.

              “Hmmm, I really don’t know.”  I really didn’t know.

              It was during this walk on Main Street that I realized that for the first time in my journey I was going to most likely end up someplace I didn’t know anybody.  This caused me some anxiety, but it was that being on my own feeling I was craving that originally inspired me to go on this trip.

              “How about the Florida Keys?  Hemingway lived there; isn’t he your favorite author?”  He continued with a laugh, “If it was good enough for him, it’s surely good enough for you.”

              “I agree.” I said, and I did.

11

              The drive to the beginning of the Florida Keys took about six hours, but because I was heading to the southernmost point in the United States, Key West, it took another two hours.  What I mean to say is that it would have taken another two hours if I would have driven straight there.  Instead we made a stop along the way, adding another hour to our trip.

              The beginning of the Keys is sort of like driving into a new state, but that analogy doesn’t really do it justice.  For example, when you are driving into Georgia from South Carolina, you don’t see any discernible differences except a sign welcoming you to the birth place of Jimmy Carter.  Entering the Keys is almost like driving into an entirely different place unlike anywhere else in America.

              What you first notice is that there is a two-lane highway on both sides of the road separated by a median.  If you are heading south, you are driving along the Gulf of Mexico.  If you are heading north, you are driving along the Atlantic Ocean.  These two sides of the road are simply known as the “bay side” or the “ocean side” by the locals.  To get to nearly any place on this stretch of road I learned you need to only have two questions answered.  Question #1: What mile marker?  Question #2: Which side?  There are neighborhoods as you travel, but 99 percent of the restaurants and tourists attractions on the way to Key West can be found by following those two simple directions.

              Shortly after getting into Key Largo, the first main Key, and perhaps the most popular one thanks largely, in part, to the Beach Boys song “Kokomo,” Bahama made a sound that indicated she had to use the bathroom, and quick.  I pulled into a hotel resort called Kona Kai.  At first I was just going to let Bahama do her duty and head right back into the car, but the palm trees, and the view of the Gulf through those trees appearing to me from the parking lot, had us off and walking. 

              I saw the building that was both the lobby and office.  I didn’t think much of it because I had no intention of staying at this place seeing that I wasn’t planning on spending as much money as I thought this place would cost nightly, but as I got closer I noticed works of art in the building.  Not much of an art appreciator, I was surprised when I found myself walking through the door.  Looking back on it, I believe I walked in because of the promise of air conditioning.  While the temperature wasn’t extraordinarily hot, I was already sweating buckets because of the humidity, which ranks up there as the highest percentage in America, on average.  Walking in, a woman sitting behind a desk with her bare feet visible under a typical office desk, introduced herself to me and Bahama, and we responded by returning introductions to Becky.

              Becky, it turned out, is the primary owner of the property, sharing the duties with two other partners.  She said she enjoys the day-to-day of running the smallish, yet beautiful property, and asked me if I liked art. 

              “Ummm, yeah” I said, glowing red.  I wasn’t a big fan of art, but I was a big fan of talking to Becky.

              I suspected Becky figured out that I didn’t have a clue about art, but she was nice enough to continue anyway.  “Well, here we have a large display of statues, mostly created by local artists, and some of the best photographs, all original, of many of the popular places in the Keys.”

              It was near the end of her description of her property that I casually looked at a four foot work of art, an intertwined body’s statue, symbolizing God knows what.  I then examined the price tag – $50,000.  The shock of the price physically caused me to jerk, and take a step backwards, right into another four foot statue, which I heard rocking on its pedestal.  I was temporarily paralyzed with dread, unable to turn around for fear I would certainly knock it over.

              Somehow I made a move where I stayed facing the $50,000 statue, but reached my hands behind my back.  Luckily, I was able to grab on to the tusk of the four foot elephant, preventing it from causing the most expensive domino effect in history.  When order was restored, I checked out the price tag on the tusk – $75,000.

              “All prices are negotiable,” she said, before adding with a laugh, “unless you break them all first.”

              As I was ready to make a beeline to the door, and to the safe haven of my car, she spoke.

              “The sun’s getting ready to set, would you like to go to the dock and watch it with me”?  Her voice didn’t suggest she was making a move on her clumsy customer, instead just asking a question she would have asked to any man, woman, child, or dog who happened to be standing with her at that moment.

              Weighing my options, I thought of two scenarios:  I’d find some way to fall into the water, or something equally embarrassing.  I was just figuring out that my safest option would be getting into my car and continue driving when Becky spoke.  “Come on, it’s a Keys tradition!”  Bahama accepted the invite, so I had no choice but to follow.  After all, at that point in my life there weren’t too many attractive women, or any women for that matter, inviting me to do anything lately. 

              Becky walked towards the deck, and I was surprised to see so many people, maybe around 30, taking up various spots to watch the sunset.  This didn’t seem to surprise Becky at all, as she explained that not only did the property have 14 rooms, but many people driving by at this time often stop to watch the sunset.

              It’s hard to explain a sunset and what makes one particularly better in one place more so than the other.  The sun, after all, is the same for everyone even a million miles away, but by just changing your view of the setting sun, you see something you have taken for granted all your life.