Concrete Swamp
Creatures invade a small Miami home
(My mother and I are at my grandmother’s house with Uncle Tim and Ray)
“Hrmmpphh!”
The sound came from the pullout sofa next to the cage. Uncle Tim was sitting, or rather, passed out, on it.
The couch was a putrid yellow, like stomach bile. The fabric layered with countless, unpleasant stains and textures.
Uncle Tim was snoring. (He’s always been an intense sleeper and watching him was unsettling).
His back would press out with a loud inhale, like pulling air through a balloon that had lost its elasticity.
Then he would stop. His body lying motionless for what felt like minutes.
Suddenly, his shoulders would droop and an even louder snore would follow.
Every time I witnessed this, I would repeatedly assume he had died.
I nudged him with my hand, startling him.
“What the fuck?! What do you want?”
But Uncle Tim usually came to his senses in a hurry.
“Oh, hey buddy.”
***
Uncle Tim liked me and assumed that I was unaware of his “issue” with drugs.
(This was Miami in the mid-eighties, at the height of the cocaine drug wars. It would be fair to say that my uncle engaged in the battle every now and again.)
Uncle Tim was also the first person to ever asked for my opinion about something. It sounds simple enough, but no one had ever done that before.
Of course, there was always the “What the hell are you doing?” and “Are you retarded?”
Both were frequent questions from my mother. But I considered those to be more complaints than inquiries.
Uncle Tim stopped by our trailer a few times a month.
He used to visit weekly — until my mother told the Park Manager not to let him in.
This was the same manager who had smoked cocaine in front of me before.
He didn’t enforce her suggestion. I doubt he even knew who she was.
Uncle Tim had the unfortunate knack of “running out of gas” — often. His face would peer through the plastic window in our door to see if anyone was home.
It would shake him when his eyes caught mine.
Then, he’d grin his overly dramatic smile, as if to illustrate that he was relieved we were home — rather than disappointed that he would have to concoct another story instead of stealing our very broken VCR to pawn. Again.
The pawn shop was another word for “bank” within the circles we frequented.
My grandpa Friel’s sister had given my mom a topaz bracelet when they had visited her in Chicago when she was a child. Whenever the utility bills had surpassed the child support check for the month, my mother would pawn the bracelet.
The owner would give her about $100 for it.
The next month, she would return and re-purchase the bracelet for $130.00. It had started much higher, but even the pawn shop owner started feeling guilty after a while.
On the other hand, Uncle Tim used the pawn shop as a one-way transaction.
It was a seedy establishment planted a block away from the trailer park, nestled in between the strip club Stir Crazy and the air-conditioned Blockbuster video.
Blockbuster was often our only escape from the humidity.
(We’d had our rental card revoked several months prior but that never stopped me from perusing the videos).
I had never been inside of the pawn store but the tint on the glass had peeled back in most areas, so I could get the gist.
This was the only bank my uncle would go to as the owner asked questions rhetorically, at best.
“Where’s the cord on this VCR?
“This is your Palmetto Senior High School ring”?
(No, it was not. Night school was a standard with our family. Granted, there were no “class rings” involved, but maybe that’s why my uncle Tim was forced to steal one?)
“Greggo! How are ya, man?”
Uncle Tim wheezed, as he reached around his belly for a lighter and started to sift through the tin ashtray for a remnant of a cigarette to smoke.
The front door opened before I had a chance to answer him.
“Knock Knock!”
Ray poked his dirty face in the house and winked as he spoke.
“I said knock knock!”
Ray let the door swing open and crash against the wall, nearly shaking one of the portraits down.
“What was that? Who is that? Ackkk Ackkk.”
Granny was coughing up something with some substance to it. It was going to take a while for her to speak again. Ray didn’t mind.
He made his way to my uncle and me in the Florida room as he kissed my mom’s cheek. He carried a six pack of beer under his arm. “Hey Teemy que tal,” he said in a thick Mexican accent, before sitting down on the couch next to my uncle’s bare feet.
Uncle Tim and I looked at each other as if to agree that Ray was sitting too close to him.
Ray looked over and whispered to him.
“Hey man, I gotta grab that from you.”
Uncle Tim was annoyed but sat up and nodded without saying anything.
He looked over at me with a sullen stare.
“Hey kid, you still have those one hundred dollars from your dad?”
(I didn’t know he remembered.)
I had bragged to him that my dad mailed me a one-hundred-dollar bill for the summer.
It was folded into a piece of loose leaf paper that read the words, “I love you, Coco.”
My dad called me this after a TV commercial I used to sing incessantly as a child. It was his special name for me. Much like the special 1–800 number that he bought for me in case I needed help.
“Uhh … yeah.” I mumbled my reply to Uncle Tim.
“That’s great! Hey, I am going to break that for you. You can’t walk around with a one-hundred-dollar bill kiddo. No one does that, you could lose it.”
I looked at Ray, who then stood up and yelled at my mother for something.
“Okay,” I said, handing Uncle Tim the money.
He grabbed the bill and jumped off the couch and out of the Florida Room. For as large of a man as Uncle Tim was, he was surprisingly agile.
He hollered from the darkened hallway that he had already reached.
“Be back in twenty Greggo!”
I didn’t see him again that day.
***
I would often find myself roaming in the backyard — two acres of dry crab grass speckled with the remains of cars very much retired. Several automobiles or pick up trailers sat on wheels, but some stood on cinderblocks, the paint jobs rusting away under the heat of South Florida’s sun.
The screens of the screened-in patio were absent. There were only fragments of bent aluminum and black rope shards hanging at funny angles.
The jewel of the estate had once been the majestic nine-foot-deep pool that sat just outside the back door.
Let’s just say there had been some slight neglect over the years. It wasn’t as majestic anymore. Nor was it a body of water that enticed anyone to swim in it.
The pool was now a swamp.
The lack of chlorine and the utter disregard for the pool chemistry had certainly been factors, but I think the catalyst to the formation of the ecosystem now swarming a few yards from my grandmother’s bedroom occurred when my mother brought a Publix grocery bag full of yellow ducklings back to the house.
There was a pond in Dadeland South where a lot of ducks lived.
We had just gotten cantaloupes at Publix for Granny when about five or six ducklings came waddling up to us.
“Their mother was gone, Tim. I looked everywhere. They would’ve died, Tim! I had to save them!”
My mother tried to justify to Uncle Tim exactly why she had thrown the two melons at my face and had started chasing wild ducklings with a cellophane bag.
The ducklings stayed in the then-murky pool for a few months before flying off, mentally damaged.
They stayed long enough to invite every disgusting creature a duck would encounter, though.
We witnessed generations of hideous frogs and lizards come and go as they belched and urinated their way into our lives — not too different from the humans who stopped there.
Next…The Monkey ESCAPES…sort of…
Visit to Granny’s Part 1:
Visit to Granny’s Part 2:
Visit to Granny’s Part 3:
Join from the Beginning of the Race!:
“Chasing Crazy”
