For ten years under the live oaks I slept, the view up Noble Avenue made possible because where I slept is now gone. The home was moved out from town toward Ocala, leaving a gaping view of the basketball courts, now a parking lot for the elementary school. With each passing day, slowly my presence in Williston is erased. I walk the streets and not a familiar face I meet. No one knows for ten years here I slept.
No one recalls the nights spent upon the court, the constant shooting of the hoops. No one recalls the only white boy on the Red Devil team who took the ball down the lane, breaking the full court presses. No one cared number twenty-one gave his turn in the shooting rotation so others could get their names in the paper.
And where today is their remembrance? Have their homes been moved away from where they slept? When they walk the Noble avenue, do people stop and say, why there goes the top scorer the night the white boy broke the full court press and dished off to him?
It was past time the house was moved away from the church. It was never a good fit sitting in the shadow of Methodist divinity. Always the tossing in the bed, aware of our sin, the creeping rottenness within us. No amount of latex paint from Mr Nobles or antenna adjusting from Doyle and Rossi could help. Hank could not keep the plumbing unclogged and Flavis could not make the lights work. So in the end they gave up on the white house and moved it down Ocala way.
The new brick parsonage would sit comfortably away from the shadow of the church, under the pines of the Wise. No transient wolves would be able to readily knock and knock on the door for some gas. Prudent move, to remove the ones from the house on main, slumbering in the house and in the church, standing embarrassed with the women, as Dan did, when the ladies were recognized on Mothers day, waking from a deep dream, mistaking the standing ovation of maternal adulation for noon benediction and time to make ones way to the Chick-Inn.
The Chick-Inn Restuarant on Noble by Carse Oil where Nettie and NE sat at the corner table, always the corner table, leaving us to take the picture window table, with a view of the Woman's Club, tiredly reminding us where the night before we had danced wildly over the floor. Jackie the football star, fallen too soon to sleep while driving home from Memphis, with his local band singing in perfect Gibb brother mimicry," There's a light, certain kind of light, that never shone on me, to love Somebody, to love somebody", anybody, it did not matter in those days, we took love readily, easily out into the fields beyond Devil's Den every Friday and Saturday, as others entangled arms around the a sticky seats of the downtown movie house, a Night of the Living Dead ecstasy, burying her head in your arms, the smell of perfume, bangs and popcorn with the sight of entrails more than a sophomoric teen could possibly take in.
And we continued to take them, first upon our Stingray banana seat bicycles ,our name bracelets dangling upon their wrists, our possession, then later in our Volkswagen station wagons, to prepared campsites, way out in the barren sand hills, in range of the huddled hippies, living off love and imported weed from the local deacon, sitting within shot of Sheriff Pat on Sunday, singing Bringing in the weeds, I mean sheaves, rejoicing in the wonderful bounty of free love, the collection place clanging. It was a time of rawness, no google to tell us how it was done, we just muddled through, by word of mouth, stoking the fire in the hole we had dug, mostly chickening out of our braggadocios intent or becoming too imbibed in the Boone's farm to carry things any further, waking the next morning, the girls somehow long since gone home, we recovering from the pathos of a wet dream hangover, blanketed over with dew and sand in our face. And it all of grace for those of us who never consummated in ear shot of the hippies, for mostly those who went all the way head long, went into an unprotected life of misery, akin to those hapless transients forever passing through in search of their Ocala.
And so I came late in the still of the summer night and lay upon the epicenter of all those memories. With the day glow green walls, Alvin Lee, Jimi Hendrix black light posters and star painted ceiling removed, after all the years of airing out, I finally had a clearer view of it all. And it wasn't just my sleeping spot I recalled. It too was the spot where a grandmother coming from her final bath, lay the queen bed that were here, her last words," Get me a drink of water !" to see the false teeth relax and fall, the clutch of death holding her gown at the neck over a washed body, forever haunting this spot where she rose into eternity. The nitro pill upon the table, a boy with the glass of water calling, grandmother? Grandmother? The first close-up encounter with death, worse than any Night of the Living Dead movie could portray, techni-color and slow motion. For weeks after Knauff removed her and we returned from West Virginia from burying her, the boy slept in the bunk bed with his little brother, the death bed hallowed and unworthy of his guilt of not getting Monnie her water in time.
The house saw it all from 3rd street overlooking Noble. It saw Travis across the way at the Standard Station pumping free gas to those transients, willingly, happy just to send them on down Ocala way. It saw the towering Sable palms lining Noble avenue removed and the asphalt four- lane intruding near the front porch, speeding with ease the passers through to Ocala. Ocala, the land of the rolling Golden Hills, the thoroughbred horse farms, the Silvery Springs and the visiting cowboys of Six Gun Territory, it was our preferred city, sought before the University town of Gainesville with it's sin city being the only lure in the day. Ocala had the best Jerry's drive in, Eddies Thunderbird a perfect fit. The homegrown girls of Ocala were decidedly superior in beauty to the imported gator- legged sophists of Hogtown. With all the sending on, the transients found Ocala to their liking and set up endless trailer parks, bleaching out to a faded shade of gray under the kingdom of the sun. Avoiding the mostly wealthy, northern trailer transients, we soon forsook Ocala and made our way in the opposite direction, honking the horn and making a wish at the Pottery Palace to enter the land of Steve,Ray and Cade to worship a revived divinity in Urban sprawl. Would in their collective wisdom the parsonage committee had moved the parsonage past Wacahoota and Westward toward that new Jerusalem on the edge of King Payne's Prairie. But divine order has its humor and so, forever paying for the sin of our wrong moves, the parsonage was destined to sit forlorn in an overgrown field, upon a never ending widening of US highway 27, just this side of the once golden hills of a Castro couch thrown to the curb.
And I sleep miles from the spot. Yet in the night I toss and turn upon the hallowed spot. Nightmares of the spot haunting.
Someday the parsonage committee will gather, somber in intent with shovels and break ground for a marker upon that spot of slumbering place, and it shall say something to the order of:
Here he slept, here he couldn't forget.
And perhaps I shall visit again when I too am but a transient in need of gas, to get me through to my kingdom in the sun, my grayed siding but a mocking memory of the boy who once took that ball so skillfully up the court, to give it up, like the ghost, to others, lusting for the greater glory.
And if you live long enough, perhaps you too shall come and lay upon your empty spot. You shall ponder where once you slept as a child, how soundly it was and how it seemed the place would always be. And you will rise, and the impression from the grass by coming day, will have returned from your lying to point upward. The groundskeeper that morning will mow over the spot, oblivious of the old top scoring black gentleman who faithfully mowed before him, downing secretly his plain-bagged MD 20/20 under the shadow of the court, keeping at bay the memory of a lost NBA career.
And they will eventually take you to a place they call Orange Hill, a place where many, many go who no longer have homes or spots to return to. They will in their benevolence, give you a spot you can call your own.
And the groundsmen will regularly come to keep the grass at a respectable height from the sky, and there will be no impressions left in the night upon your spot, for this is your spot, and it will forever be remembered as your spot.
Here they lieth in this spot
Their houses moved
And eventually everyone
forgot.
