ST. AUGUSTINE, FL-

I’ve spent most of my life in big cities. Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco. And for some reason, I’ve always felt safe. I’m not sure why, because I’ve lived in some unsavory places. I’ve rented apartments in neighborhoods that people with college educations tend to avoid - neighborhoods populated by surly hookers who won’t take no for an answer and guys with swastikas carved into their necks and elderly women suffering from night terrors and a seething hatred of “negrahs”. But I never felt like any of them would ever kick down my door or accost me as I waited for the bus. They were just local color, and if you caught them at their creative peaks, pretty damn entertaining. Spend a leisurely Sunday morning at your local slum diner, munching on a rubbery omelet and listening to a man with an eyepatch explain to his waitress how the mayor is spending our tax dollars to create a doomsday laser, and you suddenly remember why you never bothered to get cable.

The only time I realized I might be living in a less than desirable zip code was when my parents visited. They tried to be positive about my ghetto living conditions, but the panic always came out eventually, usually just after they’d said their goodbyes and were preparing to wander outside to find their car. My father wouldn’t step foot out of my apartment without placing a key between his middle and index fingers, like it was a shiv and he was heading to the yard to punish a prison snitch. He’d laugh when I offered to get the car for them, saying, “I’ve lived in worse ‘hoods than this. Ever seen a destitute mother sell her baby for crack money? Happens every day in Ypsilanti.” But in the tense moments before they left my apartment, I could see the hardness in his face, readying himself for battle.

“Just run for the car as fast as you can,” his expression signaled to my mom. “Anybody so much as asks for directions, he’s going to get an eye full of cold steel, courtesy of Toyota Corolla.”

When you live in the same place for too long, the weird stuff starts to blend into the background. I doubt if a farmer has ever looked out on his back yard and thought, “Holy shit, look at all those fucking cows! How the hell did I end up here? Have I seriously not had a friend in the last decade who I haven’t milked?” And by the same logic, you can walk out of your city apartment every day for years and not once think, “Wait a minute! That woman in the burlap sack who hangs out by the subway station, muttering about how she’s having Werner Herzog’s baby? Does she have facial hair?!”

My inexplicable feelings of personal safety disappeared when I moved out of the city and into more rural areas. I forget which comic said it first, but my fear of small towns can be boiled down to a simple punchline: City people will kill you, but in the country, they’ll keep you. You know why that’s funny? Because it’s true. Even in the most notoriously crime-ridden cities, they only want what’s in your wallet. But in a town where all the necks are red and the homes have wheels, they’re looking for something that money can’t buy. Like that surprised look on your face when you figure out what’s going to happen next. They’ll chain you to a radiator in their basement until their buddies working the late shift at the Waffle House get back, and then they’re gonna polish off a six-pack of Milwaukee’s Best before breaking out the power tools.

Maybe I’ve seen too many movies. Or maybe I’ve just gone to a rural CostCo at 3am and seen the people with their home-cut rattails and menthol cigarette smiles. Not to be a cultural bigot, but when a dude in a “These Colors Don’t Run” sleeveless t-shirt is buying a jar of industrial-size mayonnaise in the middle of the night, my only assumption (perfectly logical, I think) is that he’s planning a post-lynching picnic.

I’m not afraid of poor people living in the city, because poor people in the city can be crazy and violent and stoned and irrational, but at least they’re not stupid. In San Francisco, a homeless guy once walked up to me and asked, “Who slept for a hundred years: Rumpelstiltskin, Rip Van Winkle or Nebuchadnezzar of Egypt?” (When I answered “Rip Van Winkle,” he pointed a wrinkled finger at me, as if he was a winning contestant in a game show for vagrants, and screamed, “I knew it!”) But poor people living in small towns, particularly small towns located in the middle or southern half of the country, probably haven’t touched a book since they dropped out of grade school to work for their dad’s construction company. Their response to a question like “which literary character slept for a hundred years?” will likely be “I don’t know. Which one of you faggots wants to get cut?”

But the funny thing about cultural stereotypes is that they’re not usually true. Maybe a little bit true, but never to the full extent of my very vivid and paranoid imagination. When I moved to northern Florida last year, I expected the absolute worst. Urban living has led me to believe that any southern town with a population less than 10,000 is overrun with shirtless hillbillies in overalls, waiting to challenge city folk to banjo competitions before repeatedly raping our soft, pink anuses.

As it turns out, that’s not so much what goes on down there. I wasn’t the Ned Beatty to Florida’s homo-curious inbred albino. Which isn’t to say this state isn’t weird and foreign and scary, it’s just not weird and foreign and scary in the ways I expected.

For instance, I never would’ve guessed there’d be so many ghosts.

I live in St. Augustine, the oldest city in the United States. I know this because the locals remind me of it every goddamn day. Heaven forbid I walk ten yards without somebody telling me, “Hey, did you know that grocery store over there was built in 1597 by a Spanish Conquistador?” I didn’t, and as much as I want to believe that a guy in heavy armor cut a ribbon with his sword and announced, “I claim this Winn-Dixie franchise for the glory of Spain,” I don’t so much believe it. I do, however, concede that this town is old as dirt. The proof is in the odor. There’s only one word for it: Musty. Have you ever walked into a used bookstore after a rainstorm? That’s what every square inch of this city smells like. It’s a big pile of water-damaged books that’ve been left in a dark, humid space.

A lot of people don’t care for that smell. But to me, its like sweet perfume. I love the musty book aroma and the cobbled stone streets and the fire-trap homes made of old wood. It seems like someplace a writer would live, where a person can still sit on their front porch with a pipe and glass of cognac and make handwritten notes on a manuscript without feeling like a pretentious ass. I could see myself staying here for a long, long time.

Apparently I’m not the only one. St. Augustine has a lot of full-time residents, and most of them are dead.

When your new neighbors tell you that three out of every five houses on your block are haunted, it’s difficult to take them seriously. My first thought was that they were just trying to discourage the Dame and I from buying real estate. But then I overheard a piano being played in the house next door - a beautiful sonata that typically begins every night around 2am - and when I thanked the owners for their late night serenading, they admitted that there hasn’t been a piano in their house since the 1800s.

Not long after, the Dame and I were invited to dinner by a friendly middle-aged couple who own a bed & breakfast at the end of our street. At some point during the evening, they casually mentioned, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, that their home is haunted by a ghost who likes to play pranks on them.

“At least once a month, we’ll wake up under our bed,” the husband told us.

“Excuse me?” I asked. “Under the bed? As in… on the floor?”

“That’s right,” he said with a giggle. “We’ll open our eyes and we’re staring up at the bed frame, wondering how the heck we got there. It was kinda spooky the first time it happened, but after awhile we just got used to it.”

I don’t think I’d ever get used to something like that. If I wake up under my bed and there isn’t an empty bottle of scotch in my hands, I’m making a call to my landlord, and trust me, she is not getting her security deposit back.

When I shared these stories with Noria, one of my writing pals (and Nervous Breakdown colleague), her reaction was exactly what my subconscious had been telling me for months. “Isn’t this where you’re supposed to pack up and leave, or are you waiting for the walls to bleed?”

It’s sound advice, and under different conditions, I’d be fleeing the state before the first invisible hand started painting “GET OUT” in viscous fluid. But I like this town a little too much to give up on it so easily. So the Dame and I have made repeated attempts to stir up any poltergeists living in our midst, just to do a head-count. We do this mostly by screaming “What the hell is that?!!!” every time we hear so much as a creak upstairs. So far, nothing.

Since confirming that the Dame and I are living without supernatural squatters, I’ve felt safe in this town. Safe in ways I’ve never felt outside of a major metropolitan area. And then I saw a man almost get shot, and my carefully constructed house of cards was shattered.

I like to take long walks at night. The tourists are gone and the streets are empty and as long as I don’t think about the ghosts lurking everywhere, ready to jump out behind ancient buildings and scare the cowardice sauce right out of me, I can actually clear my head and get some thinking done. Just a few nights ago, I wandered into the park, as I usually do, because it’s almost always empty after dark and I can do a few loops around the perimeter without once seeing another human being. But on the night in question, I was unlucky enough to stumble onto a crime scene.

Sometimes you don’t appreciate just how green you really are until you experience something for the first time. Until last week, I’d never seen a cop pull a gun on somebody. I’ve seen it in the movies, just not up close and personal. It’s a lot more alarming than you’d imagine. When a gun comes out and people with badges are yelling, there’s a brief moment of confusion when you’re not entirely sure if their aggression is directed towards you. So your first instinct… okay, fine, my first instinct is to drop to the ground, cover my face and whimper. But that’s just how I roll.

I soon realized the gun wasn’t pointed at me, and I went from weeping man-child to amateur criminologist. The guy being repeatedly told to show his hands - the “perp” as I instantly took to calling him - looked like somebody who wasn’t altogether unfamiliar with the Florida legal system. He had long, gray hair, a t-shirt speckled with grease stains, and oversized jeans that obviously contained a good deal of stolen goods. He was holding his pants tightly at the waist, trying to conceal whatever was hidden underneath.

“Put your fucking… hands… up,” the cop shouted, gesturing with his gun for emphasis.

“I-I can’t,” the man told him.

“I’m not going to tell you again,” the officer barked. “Raise your hands or I will shoot you.”

“I can explain,” he said, still clinging to his jeans like he thought they might drop to his ankles if he loosened his grip even slightly.

I can’t possibly do justice to what I witnessed next. The cop demanded that he reveal what he was hiding, and so, with considerable consternation, the flustered hick began unloading his pants. As the cop aimed a flashlight at him, it became clear why his lower half was so disproportionately bulbous.

His pants were filled with raw meat.

Not just a little raw meat, mind you. He pulled out loin steaks and link sausages and pork chops and veal shanks and mutton cutlets and bratwursts and a full rib roast. He had stuffed enough meat down his pants to fill several small freezers. Watching him unload his meat cargo reminded me of those circus acts where dozens of clowns walk out of the same tiny car.

“I didn’t steal it,” he insisted, in that unmistakable southern twang. “I was just carrying it home.”

I don’t know why, but I believed him. His story was so utterly stupid and implausible it almost had to be true. The alternative didn’t make any sense. What were we to believe? He was a criminal mastermind who’d been robbing slaughterhouses and stashing absurd quantities of raw meat in his drawers? Or that he was an eco-friendly beef enthusiast who told his butcher, “No plastic bags for me, Sam, just load it into my pants?”

When it was all over, I fled back home and recounted every detail for the Dame. I expected her to panic. I thought her face would go ashen and she’d say something like, “That’s it, I can’t take it anymore. Start loading garbage bags with clothes and food. We’re getting the fuck out of this godforsaken southern hellhole right now!”

But she didn’t. Instead, she just shrugged and said, “Well, there’s no law against carrying meat in your pants.”

I was speechless. That was exactly what the cop in the park had said after checking Mr. Meat-Lover’s receipts and sending him on his way.

And you know what? They’re both right. There isn’t a law against carrying meat in your pants in the state of Florida. I know, I checked.

I slept like a baby that night. Somehow, the south didn’t seem so frightening anymore. Sure, I live in a town swarming with ghosts who push people under beds and play piano at inappropriate hours, and country folk who find nothing unhygienic about storing raw beef on or near their genitals. But that’s the kind of southern weirdness a guy could get used to.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 11:50 am and is filed under Death, Food, Moving, Oddities, Poverty. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.