Once upon a time I lived in a warehouse in the heavy industrial district of downtown Fort Lauderdale. I moved there after I ran away from home at seventeen years old to live with a man that was much older than me. A man with whom I’d been having a secret affair with. I started as his apprentice, he was a Native American Shaman and as they say “one thing led to another”. It all started with a tarot reading, but that’s another story. We lived in this warehouse for three years. He had built a little room in the back, complete with a/c and single mattress on the floor (eventually upgraded to queen a few years later). We painted the walls purple and orange with abstract sponge prints and furnished our tiny living space with his handmade furniture.
The warehouse faced the South, the direction of passions and desires. It had two giant roll up garage doors that took some muscle to open. I’ll never forget the time when my friend helped me move down there and I opened the door, she said “Wow man, this place is way hardcore.” Hardcore, I kind of liked the sound of that, I thought.
The warehouse itself was full of his tools, woodworking tools and consequently plenty of saw dust. Saw dust was always on everything all the time.
There was no shower, only a toilet in the back with a small sink in which only cold water would spurt out from.
We had one window at the front that had been permanently blocked up by plywood some years ago. It was outfitted by decorative wrought iron security bars with a small box that probably held plants at one point. I planted moon flowers and morning glories here, they absolutely thrived and were the only bit of green around.
Staring at concrete and asphalt all day was extremely disheartening. I rode my bicycle to the beach everyday. It became a religious ceremony for me and I felt guilty when I wasn’t there. When I arrived at the beach I would take off running in one direction or another. On my morning runs I was lucky enough to witness the sun coming up everyday and all of the life on the beach and in the ocean. Unfortunately because I was there really early, sometimes I’d be the first one to find dead sea turtles on the beach. I’ll never forget the first time I saw one, I stopped right in my tracks and I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was huge, I came closer only to find that it had probably passed away not too long ago. It’s eyes, still open were like gorgeous green fire works, exploding into infinity. The depth of its eyes touched my core and I started sobbing. What other reaction is appropriate to the death of one so wise and old? One who had probably seen oceans and swam currents that I would never.
We had many art projects going on in the warehouse. One of which was a circular piece of plywood painted black, it was our voodoo board and if someone was pissing us off at one time or another, we would put their photo on it along with a piece of paper detailing what horrid events we hoped would come their way. If no photo was available we would craft a voodoo doll out of clay or anything else we could find. Former President George W. Bush held a permanent place on our voodoo board, complete with hatchet through the forehead and red paint for blood dripping down his face.
Another project we worked on together was a 16 foot dory, which is a row boat. We didn’t have a trailer for it, so we had to hoist it onto the back of his truck and tied it from the bow ring to the front bumper and transom rings to the back bumper. First we tested it in some of the local canals around Lauderdale and then it was time for the ocean. When we got to Port Everglades we would lift it off of his truck and down to the water. We had to time the outing the day before with the tides, we tried to sync it with the outgoing tide and come in with the incoming tides. One day I decided to go out by myself, what a dumb idea. I went out with the tide, rowed all the way out into the ocean and down to the next pier. On the way back I ended up rowing against the tides and the wind, it was exhausting. It took me twice as long to get back to the port as it did to row out of it, but eventually sunburnt and all, I made it.
When I graduated the eighth grade one of our teachers, the scary looking butch lady with the twitch, read us a book by Dr. Seuss called Oh the Places You’ll Go. I wish she had read me the non existent manual for Oh the Places You’ll Live.
At twenty two I have called many places home that most people have probably never dreamed about inhabiting, two warehouses, a mud hut without running water or electricity, hostels, boarding houses, the backroom of a trailer, the floor of a log cabin, a teepee in the Australian bush, a plywood shack in a Nudist Colony and my childhood home which my mother lovingly nicknamed The House from Hell.
At the moment I’m getting ready to move into a cottage a little bit North of here and its been six years since I lived in a house with a bathroom, a real kitchen, running water, electricity and a piece of yard to call your own. I can only imagine it will be a shock to my system.
The funny thing about moving into the warehouse when I was 17, was that it was actually my second time living in one. I had lived in a roofing warehouse with my mom and stepdad in Margate when I was nine years old for a few months during the summer. I slept on a cot at the foot of their bed. I had my eye sliced open once when our Rottweiler jumped off their bed and landed on my face. One time my stepdad and my mom got in a fight and he locked us out of the warehouse. So we got to sleep in the storage space next door. When school time came around, I got to go to the Hebrew Academy across the street. Nope we weren’t Jewish. My mother told me it would be a cultural experience for me, but the real reason was its close proximity to the warehouse. The Hebrew Academy was an Orthodox Jewish school. I had no friends when I went to school there and no invited me to their home to play. The kids said that it would be like them bringing bacon into their house. I just wasn’t Kosher enough. Years later and many high budget Holocaust films after, I found their attitude towards me absolutely ironic. Why is it that the most persecuted people in the world become the persecutors when they are no longer the minority? Just human nature I suppose.
Another run in I had with human nature was when I lived with my mom in a tiny apartment in Pompano. I ended up going to the local public school. I had to catch the bus at 5 a.m. I was the only white kid on the school bus, it was hard every morning for me to find a seat and not to get hassled simply for being the minority. Then one morning while I was standing there waiting for the bus, headphones in my ears but no music on, I overheard a conversation between two black girls that were three times my size, “Fuck that hippy! We should jump that tie-dyed rainbow piece of shit!” Gee, I guess they’re talking about me, I thought, totally stoned as I looked down at my hand dyed rainbow swirl t-shirt. My first month at that high school my mom was in jail. My grades were awesome that month. Then she came home and they dropped almost instantaneously. This was the last straw, I had pretty much had it with institutionalized education anyways and it seemed as if it was the world’s goal to keep me from succeeding at it. Besides, a few high schools ago, I saw the aftermath of a fight between two black girls, handfuls of hair rolling along the ground with the wind, almost like tumbleweeds after a shootout in an old western town. I didn’t want any part of that, so I started skipping. I still woke up every morning at 5 a.m., but this time instead to catch the city bus down Sample road to Federal HWY and towards Deerfield Beach. At the beach I would sit amongst the rocks smoking bowl after bowl until I felt ready to go back to sleep and then I slept on the beach for a few hours, then I would move to the front of Lazy Daze. Lazy Daze was a headshop that used to be on Deerfield Beach which was shut down after a few too many raids had taken most of their inventory and they couldn’t pay the lease.
