After getting the shits with LA for the previous 6 years, I left. I was working three building jobs and one day I fell asleep on the floor of one of them. That was when I woke up to myself and decided to leave. I had a huge yard sale and sold off everything I owned at fire sale prices, including a Mossberg .410 shotgun and a sweet Morris 12 String which I missed later. My girlfriend Anna and I piled into her Subaru Brat and headed north through Oregon where we were nearly assailed by rednecks, across Canada, circled through Quebec, groundhogs all along the way, saw a moose about 9 feet tall, nearly got in trouble with some more Quebecois rednecks who took exception to the Yank and his blonde girlfriend. Cooped up in New Jersey for a while in the house my grandfather built and where I had been born and then on to Fort Lauderdale where some fellow escapees from LA had moved.
I had a lot of crappy jobs in Florida, putting in swimming pools and working for some small time criminals who thought they were on top but were really just big fish in a small pond. And driving taxis and limousines. I was really bad at that but not as bad apparently as Rod who had a taxi burn to the ground on his first time out. The company we worked for wouldn’t allow us to go with the limos to Miami unless we had a gun in the car. Not for me. Florida was a “Right to Bear Arms state” which I sort of liked. I used to go after deer in the Everglades with a buddy of mine who refused to hunt anything in season. His brother used to hunt bear with a Colt 45. Proper rednecks these guys.
I also had a job as Mr Pina Colada hawking slushy drinks from a machine. One guy said to me,”Is there any rum in this or is the joke on us?” I had to drive across Florida to the Gulf side to pick up the Pina Colada mix on State Road 84, aka Alligator Alley. God knows what was in it but we sold quote a lot of it.
We had some musical adventures too including producing a disco version of Dancing in the Moonlight which happily never got any airplay. Sort of embarrassing. I played in a few Country Western bands. We had a job out west of Lauderdale in a place called the Hacienda, noted for speed traps, boot scooting and random violence. There was a club in Clearwater that was so smoky I had to strip off my clothes and leave them outside when I got home. There were three law enforcement agencies around Clearwater, the State Police, the local Marshall and the Broward County Sheriff’s Department. When the fights broke out they would all wait around the perimeter to see who would go in first. One club out in Davie County (picture) was a Ku Klux Klan bar. Infrequently a black person would walk in there and you could hear a pin drop.
Half the ceiling tiles were new and half were stained with 30 years of tobacco smoke. I asked the owner why he didn’t replace all the tiles and he said he only replaced the ones with bullet holes in them. There were bullet holes in the door next to the stage. One night a guy came up to the stage, pulled out a 45 and said , “Now you gonna play Dixie.” Another time a guy came on stage and sang a song about how all the black people were like monkeys and how we should drive them all into the Gulf of Mexico. Then he sang another tender and beautiful song about his baby daughter which made what he sang before that so much worse. All good Christians. It was really offensive to me but I was scared to walk out. Once in a while we had a fill in bass player, overalls, no shirt and no shoes straight out of the Everglades. He said, ”I’d be pleased as punch to play with you all.” That band used to practice in a nudist colony west of Lauderdale. The other guitar player was an ex Broward County Sheriff.
Eventually, the shine came off living in South Florida although it was very beautiful. Fortunately our friends had bought a 73’ steel hull schooner named Rangga which had the chequered history of hitting a reef in the Antilles, being on the reef for 14 hours (but took no water because it was built from 5.5 ml steel), being put on a freighter and shipped back to where it was built in the Chantier Naval de Biot in the south of France. Our friends had bought it sight unseen, which is crazier than buying a guitar that you’ve never played, which I‘ve done twice.
They needed somebody to go and re-commission the boat and since Rod and I were sailors and spoke pretty good French, they sent us over to get the boat back to the Americas. Thus began the next adventure, the Voyage of the Good Ship Rangga.
