The fable concerns a grasshopperr…that has spent the summer singing while the ant…worked to store up food for winter. When that season arrives, the grasshopper finds itself dying of hunger and begs the ant for food. However, the ant rebukes its idleness and tells it to dance the winter away….
— Wikipedia

Chapter 43: Harve de Grace and Tallahassee

Four full years unemployed, and not a sniff of work beyond brief freelance gigs. Unemployment benefits had expired. I had elected to withdraw my deferred comp at a monthly rate equal to my previous salary. Early withdrawal came with penalties. Absurdly, after my first year out of work our income tax was highest in twenty years.

Succeeding tax years were nearly as grim. The fiscal control in our marriage shifted irrevocably, with Chloe in full bitch-auditor mode about my every expenditure — especially internet and long-distance access charges.

Then my brother the tax expert weighed in on my side. Since I used the computer to freelance and had a book contract in hand, internet dial-up and long-distance fees were deductible from our joint return, as was the entire New York City book-selling trip. We could offset deferred-comp penalties. Chloe’s fiscal excuse to foreclose my internet use was stymied. She was very annoyed.

The spring after I was snowbound in duck camp I was trying to write the second book my new contract required. When not at work Chloe lurked like a dark shadow, convinced my keyboard time was all internet flirting. Even showing her chapters of the book in progress didn’t allay suspicion. And I felt phony, because I still was flirting.

My brother only knew I was mired in depression, a condition alien to his forceful nature. He thought pending publication of my book with a contract for a second should dispel all gloom. Finally he said come see him in Florida and he would forcibly drag me out of the dumps. And yes, with a five-thousand-dollar advance to write off, tell Chloe the trip was deductible.

He obviously didn’t know the first thing about depression. But his invitation gave me an excuse to try dealing with it my own way. I built in another Pennsylvania stopover to meet another redhead, this one living near Gettysburg. Her poetry in an internet poetry forum had impressed me when I solicited advice on Japanese poetry forms for my new novel. In literary discussions I said I missed the writing advocacy of my lost triple-doc. She had a lost “dark star” of her own from the internet.

Commiseration devolved to flirting as it usually did in Cyberia. She considered cybersex juvenile but like the triple-doc sure liked phone sex. She asserted she came to my voice twenty times in one call. Was ready to see the rest of the package.

Once burned, once not — the third Cyberian redhead was no charm. She was a short slender near-sighted young woman whose thick glasses made her bookish until her clothes were off. Things did not go well. She pushed me away from her Mons so she could masturbate, wanting to watch me watch her do what she did on the phone with me. The indelible image is perfect fire-engine red nails pumping furiously.

She said she was priming the pump. Well — okay. Eventually she let me fuck her. I hoped she wasn’t disappointed as I was. Later we drove around, ate dinner and talked poetry. She liked my rental Thunderbird. Her slender jean-clad legs nicely decorated the passenger seat, and her company was pleasant.

Next day she led out in her own car to guide to my second reason for the stopover: the famous Harve de Grace decoy show. The festival lifted depression briefly: a whole Maryland town celebrating duck hunting and decoys. She took delight in Northern ice-fishing decoys, something neither of us ever heard of. I bought a festival-logo polo shirt and miniature replicas of metal sink-box decoys.

At our motel a dramatic allergy attack swelled my eyes and nasal passages at the same time a horrendous thunderstorm knocked out power. The electric-card system automatically unlocked all doors. A bizarre evening: blurred shapes of guests on the breezeway seen through swollen eyelids, uneasy mutters under the crash and flash of the storm. She drove me to a pharmacy for allergy meds and enjoyed blasting the T-Bird through puddles. Applied ice wrapped in towels to my eyes and said she liked mothering me.

Power restored, door working, Benadryl relieving allergies, we had a disjointed fuck. Started nicely enough in bed until she insisted we stand in front of the mirror so she could watch us. I ejaculated over her pert ass like a cheap porn movie and lay back down with my cold towel while she masturbated.

She asked me to let her tie me up; she liked bondage with her dark star. Saw my look. No, huh? As in hell no. I saw her off and drove back to the airport to go on to Tallahassee.

My brother’s new vegetarian shtick amused me because the bent poet was a vegan. He and his wife did take me to a steak house. The appetizer was boiled peanuts, a delicacy of my youth. Ate so many I barely had room for steak. On my own I found barbecue, Krystal Burgers and Krispy Kreme. I hadn’t realized how much I missed home food and ate voraciously. Maybe food worked when sex didn’t. I rented an adequate Chevrolet for a solo weekend road trip. Not a single roadside boiled-peanut stand. When I got back, my brother said it was too early for them.

He proposed another road trip to our old haunts on the Atlantic coast, using my rental since I had unlimited mileage. The ever-thrifty Ant to my Grasshopper, his metaphor for our essential differences. Outsmarted himself: couldn’t impose his nicotine Nazism on my pipe in my car.

On I-10 east I told him about visiting our mother’s Georgia grave with our sentimental aunt on a side-trip from a state junket. And related stories about the matriarch and the old man that our aunt’s second husband, son of a Prohibition gunman, told me. How the matriarch baby-sat him when her bootlegger-chieftain squeeze had assignments for his dad. How she still babysat him after she married the old man, who was pals with his dad. How the bootlegger chief and the old man maintained a frigidly courteous truce in deference to the matriarch.
In the retelling, I said we were lucky in such a colorful family.

My brother expressed total disagreement. Baldly called us white trash. Said “shaking the dust of our childhood” was a goal since high school. So I didn’t mention the weekly flowers BC placed on our mother’s grave. He never approved of BC.

I mulled how different we were, raised under the same roof, while he gave me a tour of Jacksonville slum houses pulled from FHA foreclosures on his home computer. He thought showing how he built wealth an excellent anodyne for depression. And heck, he might score a good property while indulging my sentimental journey home. Multi-tasker, my brother. His eyes gleamed as we rambled decaying neighborhoods near the old King Edward cigar plant. Mean streets, with a few neatly-kept homes; the rest were brick derelicts, but solid beneath neglect.

See a thing as others see it: I saw a dump. He saw a house appraised at $30,000 — probably get it for $10,000 given the disrepair and neighborhood. Throw in ten to fix it up — or less — and rent for enough to cover a mortgage on, say, twenty. Or sell it carrying the contract for a person banks won’t touch. Either way, $10,000 equity up front. If a buyer or renter defaults, repaint and reload. Repairs deductible of course. The margin of risk: covering the note till a new tenant moves in.

I was more interested in a junkyard unchanged since the fifties when the old man pulled a trailer there behind his ’37 Plymouth to get a sink and bathtub for our beach house. Eerie how some places remained frozen in time while others vanished beneath parking lots, or subdivisions, already aged by decades of Florida sun.

Lunch continued his economic lecture — vegetables are cheaper in a cafeteria and of course better for you. I enjoyed my steak and shrimp in the face of his sanctimony. He waxed eloquent about the sound of the surf from our sleeping porch as the only childhood thing he missed. Evidently not enough to pay full price, though.

At the Beaches he tried to negotiate a cheaper oceanfront-room rate from a night clerk who had no such authority. Unsuccessful, he dragged us to an ancient stucco motel, there since we were kids.

Too far away to hear the ocean. The beds were lumpy. The air conditioning didn’t.

In St. Augustine we hit T-shirt shops in concession to my tourist status: “You’re getting an amazing amount of dispensations.” When I bought a beach towel with St. Augustine printed on it he nearly “bust a gasket” as our old man used to say. But he was impressed I drove straight to the apartment we lived where I read Of Mice and Men when I was in the fifth grade. I was following the matriarch’s final command: “Don’t ever forget.”

Amid his economic lectures, dissatisfaction emerged. He felt trapped in his life plan. Tired of his accounting practice. Tired of the childbirth center he helped found. Tired of managing 70 rental properties. Hated Tallahassee’s heat and humidity. Had surrendered to paying for AC when it was bad — virtually all the time — instead of just unbearable. I said hire a manager and move to the beach. Or liquidate while you’re at the top of your game.

He acted as if I blasphemed. He was close to his goal of a million net worth by age fifty, and determined to make it. And who was I to offer such a facile suggestion? Sunk in depression even my book contract couldn’t lift, struggling to create a new story for characters I never meant to write about again. Unable to find a real job.

When I tried to find work through what I imagined as my extensive contacts developed over fifteen years of state service, it proved the enduring wisdom of a book called The Job Hunter I read in 1968. It told the story of a fired Manhattan advertising executive who found his calls not returned, contacts evaporating and professional friends acting as if he had a communicable disease.

It had been terrifying to read in Georgia as a young man experiencing exactly that the first time I was fired. The six months I was out of work cemented my fear of unemployment.

Now I was four years without a job. Enough time to have an experience the book reported that I missed back then: a professional friend low-balling me for small projects with no future — and accepting in desperation. It took the near-death of my dog, and my erstwhile friend’s indifference to it, for me to quit. Nothing since. So Grasshopper was a poor one — in all ways — to advise Brother Ant about career choices.