Exit Zion, stage left.
by shell
This was my Hotel California, where every one had a story of heartbreak and madness. 90 days to change and this was my Zion, where even the hottest days in hell were no rival for the Florida sun. Each of these characters basked in it—the blinding midday light that bleached the hues of green live oaks and blue sky out until they were an acid washed waste of a background to a party of four and a ten galloon bucket of empties.
Four chairs and a wheelchair around a broken card table in the courtyard of the yellow stucco building. They took turns taking the bucket to the overflowing dumpster stuffed with broken mattresses, diapers and rotted food on the far end of the parking lot before returning to nurse another beer and let time write history across their brows in her immortal ink of hours and UV.
I sat amongst them, sipping a merlot, or a pinot noir, or a cab, listening to their tragedies or lamenting over my own. It was what I needed at the time:
- a retired blues musician and chef in a wheelchair who would spin food from a cluttered kitchen or serenade us with his harmonica, guitar, or soap box banjo over the smell of charcoal and burning meat.
- a frail artist with the smile of sunshine who lost his wife, squandered her life insurance on a sports car and came out on the other end with nothing to show but an identity crisis smoothed over by art.
- A little Puerto Rican man with an accent like honey that could spit fire at the first sign of conflict, which was usually at the skinny drunken man who recently left his “psychotic” ex who liked to call the cops on him and leave cats in his car (note: the cat he later adopted and watched us nightly from the bathroom window of his apartment. He decided to keep her because she liked to nag him when he stumbled in for a refill, “just like a wife”).
- An ex marine and his girlfriend. The girlfriend was at one point in time, my best friend, but through a series of winding paths and bad decisions on both of our parts, we were now just family. She was one of my reasons for moving to this area. My girls called them “Aunt” and “Uncle”.
Most importantly, perhaps: a jaded woman who’s story we learned within the first five minutes she sat down at our table the day she moved in: crying over a wedding album from a marriage that went down the drain six years ago when her ex left for Germany leaving her holding the cards on two teenage boys. She knew the local bars and flavors like the lines of a favorite book.
She had ten years on me, I had ten years to catch up. She was my sign post at these cross roads. I had ten years, what choices would I make?
Exit Zion, stage left.
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