La Paix…I Went to Pre-school in F.Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda’s House

I went to kindergarten or day care, when I was very young, at a place that no longer exists…..

I was in Rodger’s Forge, near where we lived in Baltimore, Towson to be exact, on a property called La Paid. La Paix Lane Nursery is one of my earliest memories. The house was huge and beautiful.

The house was occupied by F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, for a time. Zelda was a troubled soul, schizophrenia, who was in and out of Sheppard Pratt mental hospital. Sheppard Pratt is still there and we used to walk around the grounds and hang out in the woods when we were you hippies. Scott was a series alcoholic. I believe her finished “Tender is the Night” there. They personified the “Great Depression”. It was their time…..They tore down La Paix in 1962

I remember my sleeping blanket and taking naps with he other kids on the floor.

My biggest memory is that there were 3 or 4 little multi-story houses in the garden, built for mice to live in….and they did. The looked like doll houses and had little holes for door but you could see that mice lived there and, sometimes, see the mice. I can see that garden very clearly, in my memory, although I must have been 3-4 years old at the time.

It’s a cool thing to look back on.

The Great Bahamas Cruise in a Tropical Depression….or….”The Shining” at Sea…

Oh my God, where to start?

Years a go my first wife and I won a free 3 day cruise to the Bahamas, out of Miami. We were excited and thought it would be an adventurous and romantic trip. Romantic? Perhaps…Adventurous?…..We had no idea…..

It started with a flight and a night in Miami, which was nice, my only time ever in Miami. I just remember all these cool, colorful hotels and clubs, Art Deco…really cool.

We got up the next morning and boarded a small-ish cruise ship.

About 2 hours into a 5 hour boat trip they cancelled all air and sea traffic due to a Tropical Depression forming. A HUGE storm had suddenly formed and our ship was going to go right through the middle of it. They announced it, said there was no need to be alarmed. They were prepared for such things. We had a brief safety drill and learned where the life jackets and life boats were.

All seemed calm and then it started to rain. After a while, rain would be an understatement. The rain was a torrent and the waves kept getting bigger and bigger. When I say “The waves got bigger” I mean BIGGER. The boat started pitching up and over these huge waves. It was kind of cool but a bit scary at the same time.

That’s when about 90% of the people on board started getting sick, I mean sick, as in, throwing up everywhere, including the crew. The crew handed out Dramamine but the real event was just getting started. My wife went out by the pool on the back of the ship, which was already staring to throw water out onto the deck, and her Dramamine put her to sleep. Lucky her.

Everybody and I mean EVERYBODY on that ship started throwing up, even the crew. It became horrific.

The ship would point 45 degrees into the air and come down and go “BOOOONG” like a giant Tibetan temple bell, each time it came back to the water. The waves would go, overhead, all the way to the back of the boat. It was crazy.

I walked through the ship and there was vomit everywhere, the handrails, the floor. There were “drammed out” people crashed out on every couch and some one the floor. The passengers were all on seasick pills or “knock-out pills’, which ever you prefer. For some reason I didn’t get seasick.

I walked through the casino and clearly remember a woman throwing up into a cup in her left hand while pulling a slot machine arm with her right. Now THAT is hardcore gambling….

The last straw and biggest mistake, for me, was going into the bathroom. The is where “The Shining” come in. It was something out of. horror movie….vomit wallpaper….the smell made me gag. I immediately turned around. It was worse than the rest of the ship. I decided to pee outside.

I went out on deck and just let the rain and ocean water soak me and wash vomit off my leg, where I had fallen into a wall when the boat shifted. I hung on, with my arms wrapped tightly around the rigging and peed, right there because I never got that far in the rest room. I was soaked, sea water filling my shoes.

I remember looking over in a doorway and there were 2 twenty-something Indian women clinging to each other. One yelled “This is terrible!”. I nodded in agreement and I actually thought, at that moment “I could die here”. At the same time, it felt like I was in a movie. A once in a lifetime experience.

Eventually it stopped. We went to our hotel. I got so drunk the night after, I believe I started divorce proceedings on that trip. I was mess back then. Thank God I got sober and leaned how to treat people better….ah well….

All I could think of was FREE BAHAMA CRUISE…trip of a lifetime. Anyway, it ended, we made it and, ironically, the cruise back to Miami was smooth like glass, like on a lake. And, yeah, the island was nice…..but that was the trip from hell.

 

 

The Road to (and from) Purgatory….The Most Challenging Journey to Ever Start a Relationship

Back in 1980 I met a girl. She walked into my record store  and I was immediately smitten. I am pretty sure I asked her out that day. She who will remain nameless out of courtesy.

We started hanging out together and that turned to dating and that turned to romance.

I asked her to go to South Padre Island, with me, for a few days. We set off on what was to be one of the most amazing trips of my life.

When we got to South Padre we walked along the beach after dinner. It was cool and beautiful. We decided we pitch a tent and sleep on the beach. Well, as we did we were descended upon by a MILLION mosquitos, I mean a million of ’em. Finally we surrendered and went to the “Indian Arms”, what had to be the cheapest hotel in South Padre. It was awful, dirty and smiled like bug spray.

After a good nights sleep we decided that we would head to Big Bend, instead, not likely to be eaten by mosquitos, there.

We drove along the Rio Grande and got a room, for the night, in Del Rio,TX.

We thought it would be fun to “drive” across the border and have dinner in Mexico. We left our important belongings in the motel in Texas…….ummmm….except for the pot pipe that she forgot was in the pocket of her denim jacket. Getting into Mexico was easy. On our way\y back across the Border the Border patrol did what you might expect when two hippies drive up in an old car, they searched us. They found her pipe in the jacket in the back seat and all bets were off, at that point. They hauled us both into different offices for a strip search. I remember that I was wearing a “Tam” a Rasta hat with all my hair tucked up inside it. They strip searched me, all the while I was saying “yes, we smoked pot but we are NOT dealers and have nothing else on us.”

I was buck naked except for the hat and when they pulled that off my heard my rib-length hair just tumbled on down. Still, I knew we didn’t have any weed on us because we HAD left that in the motel room.

The threatened us with jail but in the end they just let us go. We got out to my car and, basically, the whole car was in the back seat. I, naively, thought they put your car back together when they dismantle it….well, they don’t. We did what we could to put it back together, with them looking on. (Its funny how vividly this is all coming back to me as I write!)

Next stop, we pulled over at Langtry, Texas, to see Judge Roy Bean’s one room museum, “The Jersey Lily” named after actress Lily Langtry. At least we honored “The LAW” after bonding with the Border Patrol.

Somewhere outside of Langtry the car died. I don’t know much about cars but I DO recognize a disintegrated fan belt when I see one. It was starting to get dark so we hitched a ride back to Del Rio to get the belt. We ended up in the back of a pickup truck. We played in the covered back, with a Mexican family, all of us on top of the load of fire wood. (Have I mentioned that this was an interesting trip? Never had one like it..since.)

That night, we got a nicer hotel room, I think we improvised a coke can pipe so we could enjoy a little smoke…..

The next morning we had breakfast and hitched our way back out to the car. 2 really nice cowboys picked us up. They had a pipe, too, and tools to change the fan belt. :life was looking up!

We got to the car and it had been raided overnight and the battery was GONE….SHIT! The cowboys said they could pull us, with their car, and jump-start our automatic car. I didn’t even know you could do that! One of them got in my car and the other towed us along and, low and behold, my car started. As we parted company one of ’em said “Whatever you do, don’t stop until you get to the car parts store.” The told us there was one right as we come into Del Rio.

On to Big Bend. We had no further issue and Bis Bend was beautiful. We were standing and reading a sign about Native Americans who lived in the area long ago and I thought to myself “I’ve always wanted to find an arrowhead. Literally, that very minute, I looked down at my feet and found a very nice flint spear point that I have to this day.

We rolled out our sleeping bags and went down to the hot springs along the river. It was really wonderful the most wonderful thing about the trip aside from each other’s company. We bedded down and laughed ourselves to sleep because the campers close-by were doing the Kumbaya, My Lord thing…I kid you not.

A quote fomr my travel partner…”The best part of big bend?  Trying to sleep outdoors on a night when the moon is full…wandering into the water…Sandy bottom stream running through the canyon the moon throwing light and shadows down the stone corridor… strange that I am not afraid…then the sound of a fellow insomniac playing a wooden flute with the sound bouncing off the rock…the water..the moonlight…the sound all combine into a sense of right time…right place…imprints that last a lifetime….”

The way home was totally uneventful but by then we had had enough. I think we didn’t really talk much on the way home.

I still recall that through all of this adversity, she and I never lost our sense of humor, one of the things that attracted me to her in the first place, She had a WICKED wit.

38 years later…we reconnected and that is really nice. Life takes you along different paths.