Shun Sign State

Florida—America’s well hung state. The land is stretched, like a swollen drop ready to break. We are circus-folk and death metal, illiteracy and bath salts. We are amputees and retirees, bikers and diabetes. We are Disney. We are Aileen Wuernos and Old Sparky. We are late night tent revivals on the side of monotonous highways. We are tanned leather skin still smoking cigarettes at the world’s most beautiful beaches. White powder sand so fine like drugs in Miami. We are pink flamingos and proud. We are lush and tropical, expansive and clean. Alligators browning our bodies under old Spanish moss, those sprawling webs that writers write about.

I’m 27 years old, traveling north on Interstate 75, the main vein in the big sick state. Everyone else is driving south. South for business, south for fun, south for family—from Georgia to Orlando, Tampa to Miami, Fort Lauderdale to the Keys. It’s late. The palm fronds point in the opposite direction—shaking arms, saying no, no, no. A truck clouded in darkness rips through the night. I see its flag from across the median. An angry red behind a giant blue “X.” My first thought is why? ALL ROADS LEAD SOUTH–a partial phrase left stranded. I slip my heel off and push barefoot against the gas. The shoe slides under the break. A problem I will soon need to address.

My father’s father was a Cuban cobbler in Tampa. My father, alone at age 8, ripped a half inch off his finger while working in his dad’s shoe shop. He wrapped his hand in gauze and walked to the hospital, alone at age 8. He never looked at the finger or the browning white gauze—it’s better not to look. Now my dad makes prosthetic parts for people and my mom used to throw tea leaves against a wall in Miami. The leaves could have warned her. But they might not have known. Up ahead on this highway, my dad flipped his car ten years ago—fell asleep at the wheel while driving back from a job—hard legs and arms flying unconsciously in the trunk. This road is so dark.

I’m driving my parent’s car north on the highway, returning from a visit to my hometown. Before I was born my parents moved two hours south from their hometown Tampa to Fort Myers searching for something easier, something cleaner, something paler, something better. Some folks find their better, some find fool’s gold.

Before I moved to New York my parents left Fort Myers and moved an hour north to Venice. An inbetween place. A manicured place. An almost all-white place of 20,000 voted top 10 Happiest Seaside Towns by Coastal Living. A place where they exist in an almost only 1% trying to shade themselves, to squeeze in the shadow of the other 99. Known as the Shark’s Tooth Capital of the World, folks gather round every year to celebrate the vicious bite their waters once held.

But if you’re moving north for something better, you better keep going because it doesn’t get better until it gets worse. For example, in northern Florida they set fire to books, to couches, to crosses for something fun, for something better. My parents visit me in NYC and can see what I see. My mom complains about the walking. Shortly after her toes start disappearing. My dad makes legs and arms and other parts for people who lost theirs to fast roads, futile fights, and too much sugar. I often come home to a propped open oven. A leg is inside and the house smells of glue. Why are the parts so hard?—like armor for the absent.

On I-75 I pass a dimly lit exit sign for the Civic Center, home to the county fair since 1924. The homes and highway lights are bent and battered from the last hurricane—frail grasshoppers broken by the hands of children, houses crumpled like wet paper. Once when I was twelve we ran into my father’s friends, a pair of nudists, at the county fair. Most of my father’s friends are amputees. They extend their stumps like a man tipping his hat. The one-legged man and his wife showed me their Harley, their hog. The man sailed me around the Civic Center. You ride well, he said. Years later I burned my leg hopping on a moped. I refused to look at the large red stain. It’s better not to look. The flesh turned brittle and tan like the skin on a fried chicken. The nudists shed second skin and travel fast on hogs for something fun, for something better.

My parents had moved north for something better, but the tip was bad and then my mother’s sudden stroke—plaque moved north from her heart to her brain—the thirsty stutter of a Harley as it revs. Her brain died fast. Her body still dying. My father’s parts deflate. My mother’s body and brain—still partially paralyzed—only able to say a handful of words like “men” and “okay” and “I want.” Years later on a boardwalk in Tampa, I will push her wheelchair alongside my partner and his daughter during our visit from NYC and we are a floating family, eating ice cream under the sun by the fishermen, and my mom, a struggling body trying to float, can only point and say “okay–I want.”

I’m 27 and do not feel inconvenienced or burdened by being needed back home. I had read Bukowski and Faulkner and Carver and Kerouac and so back in New York I’m a writer staring out of a white guy’s fantasy in an apartment in Chinatown that in a year will burn down. All those male-authored books and my Ouija board and my underwear drawer and my ceiling will burn as I jump off the roof onto another building and now maybe I can write about something that’s mine. My neighbors will moan as I move up the stairs toward the roof toward the air toward something safer toward something better and I think, don’t look down, it’s better not to look.

Back in New York, I drink whiskey at Mars bars with men who are cruel and men who are funny and many who are dead. The night before Halloween the bartender and I break every glass in the bar and rip the wings off the ceiling fans. I feel a pang of pride seeing styrofoam cups touch painted faces. I count at least six from the bar dead, some from overdose, some from suicide, the boy left twisted in the subway—half on the tracks and half on the platform—his body will move up the stairs in a bag. I count those from my building, 1-2-3. Their bodies thrown, their bodies charred, the couple below me. Oh now there’s me, sen-ti-mental.

Here in Florida, I get to relax on a beach chair on the side of my parent’s home under yellow and pink grapefruit trees which will slowly die off and rot. I read books with the warm sun on my skin. New books by women, by philosophers, by medicine men. At age eight, I watched armadillos race at a festival in Labelle. In Spanish the word armadillo means “little armored one.” At the festival my mother let me get a temporary tattoo of the Grim Reaper. Days later, his skeletal face eroded on my leg. Some of my father’s patients want tattoos placed onto their new parts. Going through my dad’s garage I find a child’s prosthetic leg, tiny and alone in a box—purple and pink with a butterfly tattoo on the side.

Lounging outside on a beach chair I discover black mold on the side of my parent’s home, the home they will eventually give up when medical bills are too high and social security not enough. Homeless, they will move even further north. Better keep going. I glance at the black mold while I read my books. It will get ugly and unbearable like the rotting pear stuck to the carpet found two Christmases ago. Spiders sometimes crawl up the white steel legs of the beach chair and the soft, low, blue mesh seat will not protect me. Now, me and the spiders and black mold are here and I seem like a very good daughter. We eat grouper at restaurants right on the water. We throw bread for the catfish to gulp.

I cook while my mother is in a nursing home. I blend food for her—green, orange, brown—and pour it into big thermos’—we take them to the nursing home, my father and I, the car ride over, silent. The nursing home, a yawning wound, left open with infection. It’s better not to look. The wounds I saw growing up, the stumps, the seams sewn where the leg was lost, where the arm was torn off, flesh – torn – off, limbs removed, ripped and then stitched and replaced with hard materials. This nursing home must be the worst place I’ve ever seen and yet I’ve been to dozens of them as a child riding along with my father, visiting his patients, bringing them their parts, some with tattoos—I can’t remember much—only a stale, somber something.

Now that mom’s home, I rarely leave my parent’s place on Sunnyside Drive. It has a “Florida Room” with a jukebox, a dusty bust of Elvis, amber door knobs, and a bright yellow kitchen with flower curtains where my mother’s diapers now collect in a corner. I drive south to Fort Myers to visit a friend from high school. She is a stripper, an ex-heroin user, and wants to hear stories about my mom, she wants to look. I describe changing an exploding diaper on a heavyset woman and make stories about cleaning shit out of her hair seem bearable. We laugh like it will get better. She tells me about shooting up in her hands and all those guys that hit her—those years we stopped being friends. The conversation swells and dips smoothly like warm waves in the Gulf, like how it should be.

We drink in a ‘quaint’ downtown dotted with second-hand shops, with cats in the windows, a library, a park, a gazebo, and ice cream parlors that stay open past 10pm— families eating ice cream no matter what their circumstance. We see flyers promoting tomorrow’s Classic Art & Boat Show. Small pop-up tents block off the arteries of downtown. Big lacquered boats sit on dry concrete like dead sharks pulled out of water. We hop aboard the tallest one. I grip the helm and can feel the waves rocking back and forth. I close my eyes and wish for water. We live in our minds. We roll around the innards, singing and laughing and feeling a false sense of ownership. We hop off the deck—that horrible, egoistic craving to carve initials in a tree—I take out a Russian Red lipstick and draw a picture of a boat on the side of the boat. I see myself doing it, we live in our minds. We walk to the water and jump over ropes blocking off the long piers. Lying on our backs on the dock we swap stories of twosomes and threesomes and old times and new times while staring into the dark sky littered with little flecks of fading light listening between laughs to large marlin slicing in and out of water.

My friend and I walk under the bridge and find remnants of the Winter Festival. Large red and white candy canes curl up next to bags of trash and rows of men who are sleeping. Abandoned heaps of man-made snow gently melt against the bridge’s massive pillars. The tall American flag stands brightly lit in the center of the park, patriotism no matter what the circumstance. We throw snowballs at its fabric and laugh like everything’s fine, as if the world wants to get better. The artificial snow sparkles like Christmas Day in a northern place. It’s late, time to go. I set forth north on the highway. Tired but it’s only an hour ride.

The next exit seems so far. I smack my face awake. I roll the window down. As I whip by, I can barely make out the palm fronds swinging their hands by the bent and barely lit lights. I’m riding lightning down the highway. I can’t wait to get into bed, my leopard bed from high school where I once was soft and fragile. I’m singing. I’m feeling good. Everything’s fine. My eyes move south. And now I hear the sound of steel scraping. I grip the wheel. I flip. I know it’s better not to look—but I do. The sun is peeking from the clouds. The confusion of sunlight at dawn, a vast and empty space to learn from. The green field. The long Florida highway. I slip on its tongue. Hot gravel on my palm. There’s glass in my teeth. A broken coral casket. Something really hurts but it’s better not to look.

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Jacquelyn Gallo is a graduate student at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Dossier Journal, Art Critical, and 12th St Journal and has been cited alongside her most beloved sheroes in The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History. She describes her work as ‘Florida Gothic.’