John D. MacDonald on boats—

 . . . The optimum image is the teak cockpit loaded soft with brown dazed girls while the eagle-eyed skipper on his fly bridge chugs Baby Dear under a lift bridge to keep a hundred cars stalled waiting in the sun, their drivers staring malignantly at the slow passage of the lazy-day sex float and the jaunty brown muscles of the man at the helm. But the more frequent reality is a bust gasket, Baby Dear drifting in a horrid chop, girls sun-poisoned and whoopsing, hero skipper clenching the wrong size wrench in barked hands and raising a greasy scream to the salty demons who are flattening his purse and canceling his marine insurance.

Excerpt from “The Deep Blue Good-By”

Tripping. Tramping. Vagabonding. The art of the extended drift.

At age nineteen, a friend and I scraped together enough loose change to buy a 1984 Plymouth Voyager minivan. We ripped out the back seats and retrofit the cargo bed for sleeping. Then, with $200.00 each, we set sail across the great American countryside with absolutely no direction in a physical sense, but a sense of direction in an esoteric sense that could only be understood by those who’ve been stricken with wanderlust.

We saw forty-six States, seven Canadian provinces, a skosh of Mexico and limped back into our home state of Alabama eight months later in a 1978 Honda Accord. All told, we covered about twenty-three thousand miles. Slow, trundling miles with sunshine blowing through the windows, our feet propped atop the dashboard, and, of course, a cooler full of cold beer tucked between the two front captain’s chairs.

I realize I probably shouldn’t advocate drinking and driving in any sense. But, at the time, we didn’t really consider ourselves to be driving so much as being passengers in a spectacular safari. Besides, I was only nineteen—I wasn’t even legally allowed to drink in the Sates. And is it really considered driving if you’re steering with your knees?

Nonetheless, within twenty-four hours of returning to Alabama I was planning my next safari. Where would I go now? Or, more importantly, where wouldn’t I go? I was in the maw of the trip, addicted in an almost physical sense. I felt I had a natural born feel for the road and an insatiable urge to exercise it.

Luckily, I was not alone; I soon discovered—particularly after leaving the States—that there existed an entire subculture of people who roamed the globe, drifting from continent to continent with no particular direction other than to see and experience and be alive. A sect of people who were not willing to surrender themselves to the nine-to-five grind. People who believed there was more to this existence than merely clocking in and clocking out. But, most importantly, people who were able to drown out the naysayers, sack up, and actually take that first step on the trip.

Without question, the most difficult thing about hitting the road for the first time is overcoming the negativity doled out by other people. But once you’ve broken away from the hometown gravitational forces, once you’ve pierced the bubble, the world opens up in wonderful and mysterious ways. Once you’re out there, amid the vast unknown, it’s easy just to let yourself drift, rip the top off some cold beers, and let the trip have its way with you.

My ebook, Nectar, is a novel about what happens after you take that first step and give yourself to life on the trip.

High Stakes Gambling on the Florida Turnpike

If you’ve never zipped down the Florida Turnpike in a 1973 convertible Karmann Ghia from Orlando to Islamorada, then you’re probably not aware of the incredible creeps per capita along this open roadway.

            A little high speed junket down this payway is harsh glimpse at a lofty concentration of perverts and bums, winos and drifters, dreamweavers and false prophets that infiltrate the Sunshine State from all shores.

            And let’s not forget to mention the tourists.
            I recommend packing a cooler in case you get thirsty. A twelve pack of some stylish malt liquor or some weird energy supplement/liquor concoction, like this Four Loko I’ve taken a shining to, works just fine. Bring that and an empty Gatorade bottle with the wide mouth. Once you get through the congestion around the Kissimmee exchange, the road will open up. Tuck one of those cold drinks between your thighs, lean on the gas, and find a nice easy seam somewhere between 90 and 100 miles per hour.

            If you’re like me—environmentally savvy—you’ll want to sidle right in behind a big American pig of an SUV. A Yukon Denali or even a throwback Chevy Wagoneer will do just fine. Get right up on the bumper of that big V8 hog and draft the sonofabitch like a NASCAR speedster on the Daytona oval. Let go of the wheel and steer with your knees. With the proper gas pedal/drift work you can tuck your hood right up under the tail of that SUV without the driver ever even knowing you’re there.

            Now dial the radio to some weird Seminole shaman chanting on the AM band, take a big swig of that energized booze, and relax. Do the entire stretch from Orlando to Florida City on three gallons of gas.

            Which is important, considering Northern Africa these days.

            But let’s leave all that for another time.

            What’s pertinent here is that you remember to never enter into one of the prefab Service Plazas constructed every forty-five miles along the Turnpike. I don’t give a shit if you’re famished or running on fumes or on the hem of an explosive bout of diarrhea. Veer off the Turnpike and find a proper WE DARE TO BARE diner a go-go and petrol station even if it’s twenty miles out of the way. These Plazas are to be avoided like K9 dogs at Phish concerts. In truth, I’d feel more at ease dragging a giant wooden crucifix down the cobbled back alleys of Tehran than electively slipping into one of these joints.

            And I’m a born-again agnostic.
            This, among other reasons, is why the Yeehaw Junction Service Plaza was the last place I wanted to find myself on this particular day. But here I was, parked among them, at every fault of my own. Just beyond my windshield swelled a cesspool of misfits and screwballs that had permeated Florida on all fronts hoping to carve out their own weird slice of paradise away from the cutthroat realities of the Middle Forty-Seven.

            Bums. Picaros. Hobos. Gunsels. Troubadours. Touristas. You name it.

            Unfortunately, the previous night, I’d been consuming a bit of liquid enlightenment with Jesus and a cast of other, less prominent, Jews in the parking lot outside the tax-exempt Holyland Experience in Orlando. A kingly hangover had left my head adrift on the sort of false power you achieve when you’ve been chumming around with heavy hitters. My natural instincts were spent. My capacities were tapped. My usually savvy perceptions had been reduced to that of a small child with a giant lollipop.

            In a moment of mental retardation, I’d accidentally failed to pack a Gatorade bottle to use as my high-speed in-flight piss bottle, and, in a second flash of stupidity, I’d overridden every instinct and eased the Karmann Ghia into the Plaza for a quick stop.

            Why not? I needed to take a wicked piss. How bad could it be?

            I flung open the driver door, spilling a half dozen empty Loko cans onto the tarmac, and hustled across the parking lot toward the sliding glass partitions like an unsuspecting victim.

            Just another hapless rape case in the making.

            Just another stooge about to get curb stomped for sporting my Mickey Mouse is Fucking Goofy bumper sticker.

            I’d considered using a Four Loko can as my chamber pot somewhere around Canoe Creek, but the idea of accidentally slicing my peckerhead on the sharp lip of that poptop as I drafted an orange H3 Hummer at 97 mph was akin to high stakes gambling.

            The risk, as they say, outweighed the reward.

            But now, as I reached the glass doors and peered inside the Plaza, I realized I should’ve taken that gamble. The scene inside was ugly. The designers—and now the regulators—of the Florida Turnpike were some of the cruelest bastards on earth. In a State that prided itself as a premier tourist destination it was tough to reason why the Authority had allowed some masochistic architect to insert these Service Plazas between the northbound and southbound lanes as the only pit stops on the Turnpike’s entire three hundred twelve mile stretch.

            As a result of these engineering marvels, the bottlenecking of unsavory patrons at any given hour was on par with the Welfare Office on payday and just about as sanitary. Every plaza from Okahumpka to Cypress Creek was exactly the same: its own disgusting little Petri dish of out-of-towners and foreigners all carrying bizarre diseases like bird flu and strange wormy parasites that swam up your urethra and hunkered down in the septic walls of your bladder. Everywhere inside—every doorknob and handle, every urinal and stall, every bagel and soda cup—something evil and quite possibly fatal was lurking.

            A nasty bout of traveler’s diarrhea communicated by some Brit from Worthing.

            A raging case of herpes smeared on a toilet seat by a whore from Mumbai.

            An epic strain of ringworm strewn across the terrazzo by a hillbilly from West Virginia.

            Not to mention an odd mosquito only found in remote Nicaraguan jungles—having arrived to Port Everglades in a banana crate—fluttering around like a flying dirty heroin needle and injecting the entire zoo of slackjaws, dimwits, knuckledraggers, and wartmongers with one another’s own personal version of nasty.

Indeed.

The people that visited these Plazas were not the cream of the traveling community. These were the paint-by-number crotch fondlers from elementary school all grown up now but still searching with addled eyes for the directions on the back of the box, still needing to be told exactly where and when to go and how fast or slow to do it.

These were not your visionaries, your philosophers, your free thinkers. These were the ones that bought the package deals advertised in the Travel section of local newspapers, the all inclusive cruises with prepaid side excursions to places like Carlos’n Charlie’s and Margaritaville.

Eat a plate of boiled shrimp, play the back nine, ride a rollercoaster, and hope you still had the energy to fornicate before jetting home to grumble around the office about how much a cheeseburger set you back at Pleasure Island.

I stepped up to the parting glass doors and held my breath as they hissed open. Screw it. I really needed to whiz.

Once inside, I hustled around an overweight herd down from Wichita that huddled together as though posing for a poster on diabetes. Then I cut around a gaggle of protesting Teabaggers who were so disconnected from the American pulse that they couldn’t figure out why everybody was laughing at their name. After negotiating that sweaty tangle, I breached the main lobby where things took a turn for the worse. Travelers driving down from places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Upstate New York, conducted themselves as though in an amusement park, barking sporty one-liners at each other across the lobby.

Go Eagles.

Guck Freen Bay.

America’s Team Throws Snowballs at Santa Claus.

Leaning against the walls in all directions, thugs sporting FUBU footwear and gold grills eyeballed one another like some dick-swinging contest was just about to get underway. The older, more mature, contingency huddled around kitschy kiosks racking up credit card debt on garbage merchandise—like American flags made in Taiping—that was bound to wind up in a landfill within a year’s time. Dozens of rednecks bought foam beer koozies that read I’d be with Stoopid if I could Find Him. Little bastard children and other illegitimate sorts in rat ears and inflatable Shamu helmets and Hogwarts top-hats squatted on the polished terrazzo wailing like boiling lobsters as piss oozed out their disposable diapers. Their parents, of course, were nowhere to be seen.

The remaining stragglers—various specimens from Brazil, the Eastern Bloc, Iberia, and the Greater Antilles—puttered around in a glossy daze muttering in foreign tongues about stopping and shopping at the Prime Outlets before holidaying at their timeshares on the outskirts of Coconut Grove.

It was a tough scene for the average human mind, and for me, in the middle of a nasty hangover and desperately sleep-depraved, it was a terrifying glance at a living exhibition of everything that was revolting and wrong in our national composition.

            Quietly, I wondered what these people would do if some manic methhead barreled into the room and started taking potshots. Absolutely random death. Complete existential awakenings. This was America, after all. Land of the free. Home of the gun.

            It was certainly plausible.

            But I doubted anyone within eyeshot could comprehend the notion that anything bad could happen in a state that was home to the Cinderella Castle and the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. It was simply too far beyond their dim capacity to reason. It was the equivalent of a dirty American getting blown to bits in Abbey Tavern by an inopportune IRA briefcase bomb. Or some lame retard getting arrested for smoking a bong of crippy in Jamaica. It simply wasn’t fathomable.

            I slithered into the restroom, which proved to be my third major snafu of the day, and exhaled.

            I knew then, without question, I should’ve risked serious penile injury and pissed into that Four Loko can then chucked it out the window like a trucker bomb before exposing my genitalia in a place like this. I was doomed. But it was too late now.

            There was no turning back and nowhere to run.

            Dive in, get weird, and see what was left when the light returned.

            The scene was awful, a horrifying experience. A pair of illegal Haitians worked string-mops over a brownish liquid that slopped around on the quarry tile at the boots of six wary truckers who waited for the warm-seated stalls to free up. The place was elbow-to-elbow, and everyone was on edge, hoping for a swift exodus from the echoing noises and ripe aromas, except for the token creepy fucker with sun-sensitive eyewear who leered in the corner with his hands plugged too deeply into his gabardine pockets.

            A spot opened up, and I lunged forward, thrust my piss into the urinal mint then shot from the Plaza toward my Ghia like a man with a purpose. I settled into the bucket seat, ripped open another Loko, then stabbed the gas pedal to the floorboard and fishtailed back onto the Turnpike.

            A few miles later the satisfying combination of ethanol and pure guarana seeped into my bloodstream. I began to relax. My pulse steadied. For a brief refrain, my vision carried across the watery glades as flocks of white ibises and egrets carelessly sailed the thermals. Then I noticed the mileage sign: Florida City 173 miles.

            Trouble.

            Could I make it without another piss break? Could I stave off my Loko intake long enough to make the run?

            Probably not. But there was no real way of knowing and no upside in guessing.

            I scrolled through the index on my Android phone and pulled up my new friends at the Holyland Experience. With credentials like theirs, surely they had access to the Gubernatorial G-V. This Turnpike game was for bootlickers and rookies; I was ready to take things pro.