Not Exactly the Finest Kind

By Scott Honey

Do you like a good ghost, alien, angel, rock n roll coming of age story thats really screwed up? This may be your type of tale!
More than two decades following his fifteen seconds of fame, former 1980s rock star Steve Finney now entertains in the Florida Keys as a part-time lounge act and full time bartender. Old friends drag Steve out of the tropical hideout back up to his old home state of Maine for, of all things, a high school reunion and a funeral. But then the inevitable trip back in time and to his old hometown up north gets weird as ancient aliens, angels, and ghosts from the past and present (are they all the same?) try to guide Steve on and off the path.
Joining the former rockers coming-of-age journey are some equally confused old friends. The restaurant manager who hates people. A medium who chaotically misinterprets the latest cause he is involved with and the voices he hears, and another buddy whose family is dying off like an endangered species. All of these events come to a head during another summer in the small tourist trap town of Acorn Bay, Maine.
Oh yeah, and theres a thirty-eight-pound talking lobster.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 2, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462875726

Scott Honey

Scott Honey grew up and lived for over three decades on the mid coast area of Maine. He met a multitude of characters and influences there, as well as from encounters in Florida and elsewhere around the USA, that he can't seem to shake. Eventually becoming employed within corporate America has inspired him to strive towards the career goal of “Full-time Daydreamer.” He lives with his wife, two young children, dog, and evil cat.

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Part I

Find Your Shoes

1 

You’ll Never Be An Astronaut

Steve Finney swore, but then laughed at himself and said aloud, It shouldn’t take long for them to all judge my ass.

Some of that craft-store glitter people think is cute to dump into the envelope with a card had spilled into his second Bloody Mary of the young day. He’d been scanning the Hallmark product, past the computer generated cartoonish pictures of champagne glasses and balloons for the words open bar when he went to brush some additional specks of the shiny crap out of the hair that covered his chest and midsection so as to avoid looking like a little kid’s piece of refrigerator art, but he had just made it worse.

The cleanest dirty-white short sleeved button-down, which had passed the smell test, wasn’t buttoned yet, and he made no move to do so as he stared at the invite to his high school reunion. He knew it was coming, just like a credit card bill after a shopping spree, but it was still manifesting that sinking feeling of doom as he actually saw it in print.

Steve pushed the now-experienced hair from his eyes, its steeliness starting to creep in around the sideburns, happy he still at least had most of it. As he headed out to the stone patio area from his dark abode, he was finally ready for the brightness of another day, and the warm tropical breeze blew through that same hair of a guy who probably, at his age, should have it cut shorter.

Bad news there? his friend Marty asked. The older man was sprawled out on a cushioned chaise lounge chair. His straw hat and rather ugly bright orange shirt had him looking like he just stepped off a cruise ship and had made an intended wrong turn to get lost from a group of seniors.

Only a request to go share my stories of near misses and on target failures, Steve replied, still staring at the card and repeatedly turning it over again and again, thinking there was more info.

I coulda been somebody, I coulda been a contender, Marty half-laughed, half-spoke through the lines of the classic movie. Not a bum, which—

Yeah, yeah, nice, Marty, thanks. That’s a shitty Brando, by the way.

Don’t sweat it, the old man said as he wiped what appeared to be perspiration from his own forehead. Gonna be folks there had it worse than you ever did.

Maybe Marty was right. Steve had been sitting in, playing in, or working in a bar off and on now for over two decades. Mostly working in one as a bartender these days, because for years, he had been trying to reclaim the right groove as a musician. It all now seemed to remain elusive, or the timing was never there, and good timing and rhythm were things a musician should have.

Back at the end of the ’80s, the band he played guitar in had a semi-hit and even a video on MTV (back when they actually played videos), and they enjoyed the decadence that came along with all of the success of an up-and-coming rock band. Only the ride came to a screeching halt too soon for Steel Mountain, and there hadn’t been another tour bus in sight for a long time.

That would have been a good life.

They were originally named Hilariuz Fuchs, a name the band, and only the band, thought was brilliantly funny with the play on words and spelling. But during what appeared to be their big break, at the record company meeting, the topic of a new name was brought up and actually required. The band then tried to come up with something that sounded like a person’s name, justifying that it had worked for Lynyrd Skynyrd and Pink Floyd, so that would be good, confusing publicity.

The suit-and-tie-wearing record company execs were too wise to let that one happen though, since Dick Venom, Abraham’s Lincoln, and Doctor J were the best new ideas the boys of spandex and leather could muster up. They needed something big, hard, powerful, and ’80s-sounding. Hence, the eruption of the mighty Steel Mountain, actually named by the big-haired-and-hoop-earringed receptionist at Cellar Rat Records, Inc.

It worked for a couple of years, the average lifespan of an ’80s hair metal band: but as the decade was ending, people, radio, and TV were tired of that particular sound. The Parental Warning label created by Senator Al Gore’s wife did actually help them break into the charts ever so briefly by way of inspiring teenagers to buy the record, which is more than a lot of garage bands can say, and a couple of his bandmates adapted after their brush with fame.

Actually, Steve hadn’t seen or even heard anything about the bass player or drummer since that day they all said, Fuck it, I quit, in unison.

But shortly afterwards, their lead singer, Chad Pallard, a former school teacher, had signed a huge contract to create a kid’s TV show over in Australia, complete with songs, other characters that sing with him, and dancing spotted hippos. He’s the asshole with the fake accent in the yellow shirt.

The lead guitarist, a five-foot-five virtuoso, had developed this weird sound that could be described as a mix between Jethro Tull and Yanni. He would later coin it Ice Age or Old Age music, something like that. It’s the shit they play in the dentist office now, since elevator music seems to have lost its edge. Yet the mini musician was starting to make big money playing and recording his aged cheddar sound. For a while, it had all inspired Steve to quit playing music altogether, because he had a backup plan.

Mmmm. Good Bloody, Marty said through sips from the power straw. Just enough horseradish. You got any celery? I knew a place that used to put a jumbo shrimp and olives as garnish in their Bloodys. Where was that?

This from the guy who used mint-flavored Scope mouthwash to make Grasshoppers at your Christmas party last year when we ran out of green Crème De Menthe. Steve laughed at the memory of Marty’s improvisation to continue making the holiday drink favorite for some of his guests.

Yeah, well, the old farts there and your dumbass girlfriend didn’t notice.

Steve had his illustrious bartending skills and savvy restaurant knowledge to fall back on back when the ride ended, thanks to his youthful experiences growing up in a New England tourist town. Steve had actually planned to open his own place and reinvent himself many times. Twenty odd years running now, he had never gotten past the point of planning for his own dream restaurant on late nights with other musicians, bartenders, and waitresses all working for someone else, who thought there still might be some wind left in Steve’s sail to catch a ride on.

During those times, the ex-rocker took gigs wherever he could get them as the ’80s ended without warning, like splattered bugs on a windshield. The restaurant was another half-baked, half-realized idea in a history of many, as movie stars, rock stars, and old football players and coaches opened up their own places and left Steve’s idea in the dust.

Just bartending for a while and playing to sparse bar crowds with just his acoustic and a PA, although not exactly the best way to pad the retirement fund that he had blown during his fifteen seconds of fame or make your mark on the world, would have to do. Both skills were actually waning, like the talents of an aging athlete, as the younger alcoholic abusers of the day came up with more and more complicated and stupid cocktail combinations, while the music changed, went retro, and changed again, too many times to keep up.

He was pacing himself, was the subconscious reasoning.

Dropping out of musical site and now living in the fabulous Florida Keys, where a lot of people go to hide or get lost, versus musically rediscovered in his case, the transplant who grew up an American world away on the coast of Maine in the small town of Acorn Bay was best at focusing on fun, it seemed. Other people’s fun, really. He was still playing music some nights, and he’d even had moments of creativity. Steve’s style had mellowed from the hard rock/hair metal of the ’80s he used to play. Those days were still a guilty memory of desperation and selling out to the demand for Power Ballad rock.

Since then, he had been getting back to the roots of his classic, country, and even folk rock upbringing as a retro playing retread and had even released a few of his own solo CDs over the years, which had produced blistering sales to hundreds of people back in Acorn Bay and Portland, Maine, and some more out of the back of his rusting Ford pickup truck to a few friends and drunk tourists on the chunk of coral rock he now called home in the Keys.

The two places people knew him or remembered him, but nowhere in between. Maybe he needed a web site. Doesn’t everyone have a web site now? Then there was this Facebook thing he kept meaning to check out. If long forgotten friends, bored housewives, and out of work ex-husbands could promote themselves, maybe he should. It had never been a question of passion. Steve only questioned if he was following destiny or playing into a practical joke thought out to get him by a larger being. Loser and Has-Been were some of the nicer names that same subconscious called him during the quieter times of the day. Steve grabbed the neck of one of his favorite guitars, a nice old Martin acoustic, in a forceful way a parent might do to their child who had disappointed them. No intent to do harm, and with tough love, but also trying to make a point or get something out of it, and the wooden body had scratches and nicks that could all tell their own story.

Shit, not everyone gets to pilot the space shuttle when they grow up, he thought and strummed a couple of chords before letting the inspiration go. Leaning forward out of the old wicker deck chair and setting the guitar up against the paint-chipped house, he picked his drink back up to sip in some more of the vodka, V8, and glitter crap mix, glancing over at Marty and holding up his drink in an air cheers motion to his older friend who was too far away to actually clink glasses with. Steve looked out in time to watch a pelican take off from the turtle grass, then tuck and dive into its own liquid drive-thru for a snack.

While soaking in the always-calming effect of the palm tree and turquoise ocean view back towards the rest of Florida Bay and points north, the thought came that the bird knew where it was going. Had he thought through his second move down to the USA’s link to the tropics as much as that pelican just had when it decided to take off from its perch, or was his also just an ingrained, hereditary, and natural impulse to avoid shit when it wasn’t going your way? This comeback was taking forever.

The way he ended up running down to the Keys to hide, after years of trying to attempt a life of normalcy with just pouring drinks then seeking out a real job, sometimes lately looked a little midlife crisis on those occasions when he thought too hard about it now. But then again, he was pretty sure you had to be in your late forties or fifties for that. You also needed to do something, like go buy a sports car and date someone half your age. So he was safe again, because those two things required a consistently decent income.

Jill, his live-in waitress girlfriend, was only a couple of years younger than him. She had been impressed for a couple of days with the story of his rock star past, claiming she actually remembered his band and saying his new stuff was good too when they first hooked up, but was also now well aware of his income, or lack thereof. She was still passed out in the bedroom after last night’s fun and was making him feel good about himself right about now, as he had gotten up this particular day at the crack of noon. Marty didn’t like Jill.

Where’s that girl? Marty would ask whenever he came by to visit, still not calling Jill by name, after how long?

He was back in the Keys nearly twenty years after the first stint. It was acceptable to move down there in the late ’80s. His two best childhood friends, Ronny Dawson and Jon Ollie Oliver from Acorn Bay, were having fun chasing the seasons down in the Maine in the summer to Florida in the winter cycle, like a lot of migratory humans do, shortly after the breakup of Steve’s band, which also ended their brief careers away from fishing and restaurant work, as Steve’s hired technical assistants (i.e., roadies).

While Ronny and Ollie went back and forth and season to season during that time, Steve hunkered down, hid out or whatever you want to call it, in Florida, too embarrassed and fearful of maybe having to answer questions about what happened to his band and when he would be forming new one.

He was the most well-known almost famous person to ever have lived in and made it out of Acorn Bay, Maine, after all. But like many not as big as you think you are entertainers, no one in his old hometown actually cared any more than the rest of the world.

Looking back at the card, Steve realized that if he did decide to go to the reunion, a booger-eater from the past, like Fred Timlin, would be grinning at him in a couple of weeks with the I wasn’t voted Most Likely To Succeed, but I AM! What happened to you? look.

Success only happens until someone screws it up, but failure can last forever, the mirror had said more than once to Steve. But maybe it would be an ego boost for him, this big return to past glory and escape from the real. He had to think there would be some old classmates and people from town still impressed with the former star’s past achievements, because his most recent career and living situation move had become yet another in a lifetime of questionable decisions that he was dealing with in the now.

The female one passed out in his bedroom every night had temporarily taken second place to a piece of paper requesting an RSVP.

Just then, Steve saw the familiar flash of light, like he seemed to see almost daily in recent months, as the pelican circled back, releasing the foul off-white-ish colored remnants of a previous meal from its missile launcher, crapping on Steve and his drink.

Pterodactyl-looking motherfucker! the old rock star screamed back at the bird, as if getting booed off the stage. His friend Marty just laughed and shook his head.

2 

Reminiscing With Ghosts

Steve had recently put it in perspective that you don’t see many guys in their late thirties and forties breaking out in entertainment as the newest kids on the block.

You know you are getting old and out of touch when hear a great tune coming from the TV, only to turn around and find that one of your heroes has sold another song to be the intro of the latest crime drama series or to sell cars that you begin to realize you’ll never afford again. The Six-Million-Dollar Man, one of his childhood idols from the ’70s, was now even pushing bionic hearing aids on TV infomercials. Maybe it was time to adapt. Steve Finney would sell out again too, if he had anything left to sell.

After cleaning pelican poop from himself, his guitar, the chair, and then pitching the Bloody, Steve fished a cold can of beer from the Coleman he kept just inside of the door to the patio. He shook the achy cold and wet from his hand, then shook his head at the jerk buzzing by on a Jet Ski and breaking the tranquility of the flats, as he justified the choice of another beverage.

The fat puffy clouds sat on top of the tropical water and horizon that seemed to be endless stratospheric whipped cream on top of an aqua blue pie. He had forgotten to eat dinner again during last night’s fun. Steve was hungry.

The reunion was causing some major reminiscing, and besides, the day was pushing into afternoon now. No bar shift today and no gig to play tonight, so he accepted the offer from memory lane and Budweiser to take a break from his tropical home and go back in time in his head to the cooler rocky coast of Maine. Food could wait. It seemed Marty had wandered off, probably down to the water’s edge into the mangroves, or to the store for some celery. But before leaving he had left Steve with: Headline reads, former rock star shot at and missed, but shit at and hit! HA!

During high school in Acorn Bay, the dream was to get out and conquer, and Steve had felt trapped and isolated by the real world, living out on a midcoast Maine peninsula as a kid, with only one way in or out, which sucked even worse if you didn’t have a car. Route 27 veers off from the more well-known Route 1, and 27 is referred to by some Acorn Bay residents as my fifteen-mile driveway. As a kid along that main road into town, Steve and his two older sisters used to jump off the billboards that stood in a field across from their childhood home into huge piles of hay in the summer and leaves in the fall. That was before the town had the good sense to put a ban on billboard advertising. It made the quaint little Maine town look cheesy.

After getting out, he had now ended up, years later, living down on exactly the opposite end of Route 1. Actually, the famous Route A1A on an island area at the end of an even bigger big-ass peninsula, trapped at the end of Florida in the Keys. There sure as hell was no shortage of billboards along the southern tropical end of Route 1. Advertisements for just about everything stood alongside of huge plaster and metal tributes to the flamingo and dolphin. He had a love/hate relationship with his current home. Talk about tacky and cheesy. Parts of the Keys were like a damn fondue pot.

Do they even make those anymore? he thought, distracted yet again, a common occupational hazard for him lately.

He washed the irony away with a swig of cold hops and thought of how he, Ollie, Ronny, and their peculiar sidekick Ian Rousley all grew up as best friends and had made several pacts during different stages of growing up to go and set the world on fire. Not at all different than any other kids anywhere else, and Acorn Bay, Maine, could not have been a better place to grow up.

The postcard-inspired summers with boats crossing the bay encouraged artists, outdoorsmen, and vacationers alike. Filling your lungs with the oxygen enema of cool fresh salty summer air actually felt like you were purifying them every time you took a breath. And the smell of fried clams and steaming lobster. The noise from Steve’s insides just then seemed to reveal his own stomach was trying to eat him, as he let the daydream effect his hunger even more. Steve addressed his aluminum friend.

Oh well, a burger in every beer, someone once said. Back to the movie in his head.

There were no locks on the doors of anyone’s homes in Acorn, and the fact that everyone knew your every move, like you were in some kind of very friendly controlled science experiment, seemed sort of lost innocence-esque now, but back then it fueled teen angst. Then to the chagrin of parents, teachers, coaches, and others, high school hit. Steve and his friends got their driver’s licenses, discovered the world of partying and early teen sex, because during the winters of Maine, there wasn’t a whole lot more to do.

The next move was obvious. Start a band with another friend, Scotty Edwards (he owned a PA system, actually handed down from his uncle who ran the Legion Hall). The forty-five-minute-medley version of Free Bird and Smoke on the Water was about all they knew, but they were going to be rock stars, and their band, Manchowder, was going to be a phenomenon.

They actually won the Battle of the Bands contest a few towns over at the Damariscotta Recreation Center two years in a row. But as senior year approached, their thoughts and ambitions wandered elsewhere, and the boys broke up not having played a gig outside of Lincoln County. Ian, Scotty, and Steve went off to college after graduation, Ollie went fishing, and Ronny went back to work at the Old Mariner Inn where he worked his way up through the years from busboy to valet to waiter to bartender and, finally, manager.

Having years ago given up his migratory pattern to the south once fall hits Maine, Ronny is now making his living during the summer managing the bar at the OMI, collecting unemployment during the long winters, and has had the simple goal of seeing all of the comeback tours by any and all of the bands from the ’70s and ’80s they grew up listening to.

Ronny is happy, for a bitter, cynical somewhat underachieving genius that doesn’t really like people and had been able to walk away from his drum kit decades ago without a second thought, which also made Steve jealous. Steve also knows that Ronny is going to snap out of it one day and come up with a cure for cancer or a way to time travel.

Or he’ll end up killing half the town.

Love that guy, Steve thought, then crushed the beer can in his hand and threw it at the master bedroom window of the house that shielded his slumbering lady friend. Wake up, ya whore-slut was what came out quieter and mumbled more than his courage had intended. Buzz kicking in.

Other than that two-year period playing rock star, Steve’s real mark on the world had been slinging drinks from Acorn Bay, Maine, to Key West, and one failed attempt at a normal life, as the calendars kept mocking him like a passing car and moving faster with yet another new decade on its way. All bartenders want to be something or even someone else. Except maybe Ronny.

After the blink of an eye with the eventual success, then failure of Steel Mountain, Steve had actually taken a class here and there, and he finally managed to get his BA through community college classes in Florida, while he ignored his guitars and bartended at a lot of places with tiki poles and sand floors. Some of the music in the 1990s that played on the radio and jukeboxes had a familiar tone from the past that he simply ignored.

His father joked at the time, once he got his degree, Did it in just under a decade. So are you a doctor or a lawyer now?

There are so many struggling actors, musicians, artists, and, of course, those taking classes somewhere in the pursuit of that real life, stuck serving the greater public, whether it’s a country club or a heavy metal bar. The problem is a lot of times, the move up and out never happens for whatever reason, choice, or circumstance. Ronny actually loves the restaurant business, despite his hatred of most people. But then again, cute, smart, fun Angela may be taking classes in child psychology while working as a cocktail waitress, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she isn’t going to end up a swinging from a pole in a strip club instead of counseling kids. And Steve had had his one shot it would seem.

The initial period of feeling sorry for himself after the breakup of his band saw Steve selling off most of his guitars, other equipment, and blowing through the last of the money he had earned in the rock-and-roll industry during what seemed like another lifetime ago to pay for school and have a little fun down south. Once it was out of his system, so he thought, he headed back up north, landing back in Portland, Maine, where Steel Mountain had launched its doomed career path so many years earlier.

Trying to regroup in his home state’s largest city, Steve would run into old Portland friends, people from his childhood and high school who would eventually ask, So what happened?

The goal at the time was not music or getting a new bartending gig, but trying to put that hard-earned college education to work, as a new century was coming into view.

Eventually, somebody his parents knew knew somebody else, so Steve landed a semi respectable job at a bank. Unfortunately, Steve used to drift off at Improving Productivity meetings and dream about bending his supervisor over the copier while smashing her huge Norwegian head with the lid. This led him to think that wasn’t healthy, and it might just be time to move on again. Or had he even been able to just get past the fact that his title, Business Systems Analyst, wasn’t really that funny, maybe he’d have been OK.

Anal-ist, his buddy Ronny Dawson would always mispronounce and laugh every time. Nice job title! Hey, it’s ‘Ass Master’ Finney!

The bank job should have been a back-to-earth achievement based in a normal person’s reality. His parents were ecstatic and relieved that he was finally going to put down the bar rag and the guitar once and for all. The suit-shopping trip with his mother felt like a graduation. But staring at a cubicle wall didn’t cut it, and the final straw was overhearing a couple of women in the office talking about the great talents of some loser on this new American Idol talent show. Steve Finney basically snapped, gave a thirty-minute notice, and walked out to the parking garage.

There was no question on what he had to do on that day just a few years ago. Head back to a place and time were he could chill out, think, plot his mighty musical return, and start the dream over. Now he was back to being the free starving artist with no one to answer to, no limits on creativity, no consistent income, and no health insurance.

Great plan. So there he sat, getting drunk again before happy hour was even thought about by most.

Time and deep thinking tend to not move much in the tropics, and if he had of just held on, he may have looked successful at this reunion, should he even decide to go. Hell, a business card from a bank. What a success story.

From the perils of being a rock ’n’ roll shooting-then-burned-out star to success in the financial world, the imaginary narrator said. The problem was that everyone still living in the old hometown knew everyone else’s business, including the details of those that didn’t even live there anymore. It was hard to bullshit anyone in Acorn Bay.

A couple of years earlier, Ronny and Ollie had snuck out of Maine in January for an impromptu visit to see Steve in the Keys.

Me and Ollie went up to the Central Maine Blueberry festival last summer and caught Blue Oyster Cult, Triumph, Styx, Journey, REO, and April Wine at one show. Shit, they’re still playing, Finney, Ronny had reported.

Whadda ya mean? I’m still playing. Writing a little too.

Yeah, big gig the other night at that tiki bar. What were there, twelve people including me and Ollie there? Steel Mountain should reunite. I’ll manage you guys this time around. Goin’ into rehab to quit drinkin’ seems to restart a lot of careers these days. Ronny stumbled over the last few words, giggling out the words, like giving up a practical joke too early.

Good one! Steve and Ronny laughed out in harmony.

Hey, look at that lizard over there on the palm was all Ollie added.

Steve had managed to stay close with Ronny and Ollie while he himself hadn’t been back up to Maine since quitting the bank job a few years ago and running back to the warmer end of America all over again, with a dream and a new worry.

Their old keyboard player from the high school days and childhood friend, Ian Rousley, was still living in Acorn Bay along with Ollie and Ronny, but was rumored to have become some type of introvert, just working on his art projects and living in his family’s old house and living off his dead parent’s money.

Too many nights listening to Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall,’ tripping his balls off, Steve guessed with Ronny over the phone one night.

A lot of people got lost in that record, his friend agreed.

When Steve had last spoken to Ollie on the phone, his old friend had said that he had seen Ian the previous year around Thanksgiving at the Bulkhead Bar, while they checked out Steve’s musical mentor, Stan Blake’s, new band.

Ian looked like Jesus, if the son of God had lived a longer life on earth and let himself go, Fin-Man, Ollie had said. You know, like Jim Morrison and Elvis did before they croaked, all bloated and shit. Anyway, he started to go off about politics and the ‘enviro-ment.’ but I just blew him off. He had the faraway eyes look, ya know? I can’t talk to that bird when he’s like that.

Bird was a term used for your buddies, your bros, your friends, usually guys, back home in Maine, and not to be confused with the term for a chick in England. No one ever seemed to know where it came from.

Hmmm. Bird. Chick. I never even thought of that, Steve wondered out loud to the snowy egret, poking around with its slender bill, on the stone wall back in his Florida reality.

He guessed that with all his old schoolmates he may end up seeing at this reunion, there had probably been great successes, great failures, levels of mediocrity, and like himself and Ian, those that just missed the starting gun.

As his new buzz on a new day started to kick in, he, for some reason, couldn’t place that lyric. It must be Pink Floyd, since he was just thinking about Ian’s unhealthy worship of that band, and he thought about calling Ronny, who would know for sure.

Just then the phone rang, and Steve smiled as the cordless display read Ronny’s 207 area code and number. Carmel instead of Karma, their buddy Ollie, the butcher-man of clichéd sayings, quotable quotes, and who at times Ronny and Steve joked, was as sharp as a marble, would say if he where there at the time.

What’s up, you old rubbah boot? Steve asked as he picked up, waiting to start the usual banter with his friend, slipping into his old Down East Maine accent, per usual when talking to friends from home, like it was an old pair of Docksider shoes. Actually, it also came out these days when he was nervous or drunk, or both, which was a lot lately.

Yo, Cappy. I was going to call you earlier to see what day you were coming up before the reunion, but, uh . . . now I’m calling to see if you can make it earlier, Ronny said, a little more serious than his usual tone.

Let me guess, you’re going to become the third Mr. Lisa Spencer, and I have to stand up as your best man? Steve joked.

Steve’s high school girlfriend Lisa had recently just divorced husband number 2, a so-called investment specialist, who took off from town with a lot of other people’s money. Florida’s squalls on the Gulf Stream had replaced the Nor’easter storms of Maine for Steve, but the tropical air could get dark and chilly, just like Lisa’s hair and eyes could be as dark as her heart and soul. Hindsight is 20/20 when you’re down, and too often enough, the days of youth and old girlfriends seem like a better time, even if they really weren’t.

The sudden thought of what she had scribed in his copy of their senior yearbook hit him. Apologies, promises, and bullshit. She was no Muse, for the musician, that was for sure. Too much literal or literary thinking there, dude, let it go.

Yeah, and torture myself like you still do? Ronny must have been reading Steve’s mind, as Ronny often did, but the dig hurt. He then heard Ronny’s voice ease up.

Listen, I need you up here, buddy. It’s Ollie and that damn . . . . wife of his. He’s been missing for, like, three days, and no one has any idea where he is. He’s dead, man, probably fucking dead . . .

Yeah, you should ask about Ollie. Marty was back and staring out to the distant point out over Florida Bay. Steve had to squint out the sun, even with the Ray-Bans on, as Marty’s big frame and straw hat didn’t quite block out all the glare bouncing off the clear water, since it wasn’t even a whole Marty.

There’s a shit storm brewing up there, and he needs you now, his hallucination was telling him as it slowly turned around. Besides, you must be getting sick of explaining this to her.

Jill stood there in a half-tied silk robe, with her stiff leftover-moussed dirty-blonde hair mangled and making her look like she’d been fucked by a horse in some weird sideshow act. Steve began to grin and smirk at his obviously impressive drunken love skills from the night before until she opened her sometimes pretty, sometimes annoying, mouth.

WHO the hell are you talking to? Yourself again? You’re acting so weird lately. It’s Ronny, here. And she thrust the phone at him like a dagger, scaring off the egret. The real phone replaced the air he had been holding up to his ear.

What’s up you, old rubbah boot? Ronny then began.

3 

Tree Hugging Gone Wild

He leaned over as far as he dared, all of a sudden realizing what it probably felt like to be a New York City window washer, even though he was only ten feet off the ground. The fear was that he would knock over the massive carving or, worse, lose control of the chainsaw in his hand and decapitate himself. Local cops would love that shit. No investigation, just Look what this crazy bastard did.

Ian Rousley cursed himself for not having a taller ladder. The garage on the property looked like the time capsule of a groundskeeper to the rich and famous. Old tools for yard trimming and maintaining areas on the property, like the now ghost-town-looking and abandoned tennis court with weeds growing up through the cracked asphalt, but no big ladder. The sweet smell of living pine trees and an early summer coast of Maine ocean breeze was layered with the sawdust of some of the pine’s dead cedar tree brothers. A gas and oil mix was also in the air, as he gave the power tool one last rev and stretched over to shave off the last piece. Hitting the kill switch on the Homelite, he leaned back and decided that was enough for today. Creativity and duty take time.

Carefully reversing his way down the wet and muddy aluminum rungs, Ian Rousley was back on Earth again, even though his head was spending more and more time north of the Milky Way. He set what most consider a tool of labor down on the flat grass and then took a seat on a smooth rock over by his cooler.

He began to admire his work after shaking the sawdust and even larger chunks of wood from his beard, while at the same time draining an evil plastic bottle of cold water with one pull and no guilt. One cause at a time. There was a fine sea mist in the air, but it was getting warmer, while still very cool temperatures hit after the sun left during these days in Acorn Bay.

Change was coming, Ian knew it, as the ancients had. And anyone with a calendar.

It wasn’t a new art form by any means, but chainsaw carving was something Ian had recently taken up. The vision in his head had been there for a long time, but only recently had it been made clear to him as to what form to use to construct the vessel of communication. He had done it all in the past, but this medium had made his vision clearer than anything that had come before.

He had painted, sculpted, and even had sold some pieces he had thrown from a potter’s wheel. Now with the finer sawdust swelling around him, he was like Charlie Brown’s old pal Pig-pen. The cartoon character always had dirt, dust, and an odor swirling around him. Ian was the modern-day version with the musty stink of clay, paint, always some type of dust, and now the lumberjack scent that made you think he was hardworking blue collar instead of far-out-space-suit collar.

Whether it was playing keyboards and singing in their old high school garage band to doing the paintings of the surrounding beauty of the Acorn Bay area, he had a need to express and was lucky to have been able to do it all of these years. He had gained local recognition for it, in both good and bad ways.

His dog was sniffing around over by a hydrangea shrub in pursuit of something.

Hey, Pakel! What is it, my noble beast? Ian asked the yellow historic hunting breed, whose head seemed too big