I was lost, and people could tell it. There were people with caps on, and old women weighing plastic baskets of shrimp, and other people with tanned skins and sunglasses watching me stumble around on the dock. Millionaires, probably, some of them, up from Orlando or Jacksonville or Destin, just taking a week off. I kept walking, and was grateful for my own shades. If the eyes were the mirror to the soul, I didn’t want anybody to see inside mine. I kept walking. I knew all this was just a temporary setback. It didn’t mean that I couldn’t ever be saved from my life, or that I’d never find the boat I was looking for. Somewhere, somewhere there, was a connection I could make, and I knew that all I had to do was stay out there until I found it.

I staggered on down the dock, looking, sweating, among browned women in the sun, diamonds glinting, doing all I could at the time, knowing the sun would always go down, and another night would come, that our forms of salvation were ours to choose, as blessed to the misguided like me as any church.

Waiting for the Ladies

My wife came home crying from the Dumpsters, said there was some pervert over there jerked down his pants and showed her his schlong. I asked her how long this particular pecker was—I was drinking beer, not taking it half seriously—and she said it sort of resembled a half-grown snail, or slug, she said, a little hairy. It was so disgusting, she said, and gave off this little shiver, doing her shoulders the way she does.

Well, a sudden unreasonable anger suddenly came over me, and I slammed my beer down. I’d already slammed several down. I said by God I’d go take care of the son of a bitch. I said, If it ain’t safe for women and kids to walk the roads, what’ll you think’ll happen when lawlessness takes over, and crime sets in, and the sick and the sexually deviated can sling their penises out in front of what might be some little kid the next time? She was just too tore up to talk about it any more. Had to go lay down and hold one forearm over her eyes. That sort of made me mad. This unknown guy getting his own personal tiny rocks off had messed up my own sexual gratification, and besides that, by God, it just wasn’t right. Here I was a working man, or had been, and come to find out it ain’t even safe to lay over here in your own bed and let your wife take the garbage off.