Merry New Year! Here's the more than less final version of my Boozehound story. I think it's pretty good the whole way through, but that's for you to judge.
If you haven't read it since my original posting, you may want to read it again, as things have changed.
(1)
I first heard about him in the Spring of 1992. I was living in a shack in Tallahassee and hooking up with Cathie. We used to lie in bed in the afternoons (I didn't wake up until the afternoons back then) watching movies and trading war stories. I had some pretty good ones. I liked hers too, but they always seemed to involve cow-tipping, the picking of mushrooms, or some mythical creature who called himself Boozehound.
"Who the fuck is this Boozehound?" I finally asked.
She didn't have an answer. She didn't really know him, she said, only the stories she knew. And a few of them I still remember. One especially. It was about Mardi Gras. There was a discrepancy over a bill at a bar on Canal Street, and later on a patrol officer discovered him in an alleyway, passed out drunk in back of a stolen ambulance, with a dead deer lying beside him. It was a six-point buck, and no one knew how it got in there, not even him. He didn't even know how he got in there.
They were both wearing beads though.
Anyhow, a couple years after Cathie I became a fixture at a pub on Tennessee Street called The Higgledy-Piggledy. I went there for the beer specials. Every Wednesday and Saturday it was $4, all you could (should or will) swill. Thursdays it was $5. I used to go in there with about $8 or $10 and space out the tips. $1 for every five or six rounds. It wasn't much, but being in and out of college and on financial aid at the time, without too many pots to piss in, and living in an apartment whose most elaborate furnishings consisted of a fleabag mattress and a third of a worm-eaten sectional couch, it was enough. Maybe not for the keeps, but for the soul of the bar, it was enough. I was one of the most consistent drunks in that dump. Another constant being the guy who inhabited the barstool by the taps. He was there more than I was. He looked like a Ponzi schemer or a coffin salesman. Dark hair, delicate hands and always impeccably groomed, always adorned in his scientifically pressed button-down Polos, pleated slacks and sleek loafers that clicked faintly when he minced around the bar.
It turned out this was Boozehound.
I talked to him a few times, and I remember sitting next to him once. There was something about the burbling of a hurdy-gurdy though, and a white string of drool which left an impression on me. It spilled out of his mouth when he was flagging down the keeps and I wondered if he was as good as his moniker (and legend) implied. I had my doubts.
1998 I left Tallahassee and forgot about my lovely days with Cathie, and $4 drink specials, and all about the Boozehound too. But my brother was still there, and I suppose he and Boozer hung out once or twice. Then they graduated in the Spring, Boozer from graduate school, and when they moved back to South Florida, they exchanged phone numbers or something and somehow I got involved.
It happened on a Friday. At first I thought it was a joke. I lived in a tiny apartment in one of those crappy gated communities South Florida teems with. When I got home from work that night I looked at my caller ID and there were seven missed calls from the guardshack, plus three from the payphone outside 7-11. The last was only a couple minutes before I checked it. I thought about it for a moment, then opened the fridge and got a beer out. I got a bottle-opener out of the drawer which was right under the window and that's when I saw it. I saw a dark bag topple over the concrete wall bordering the complex (the compound rather - gated communities are more like compounds). It rolled into the mangrove trees, and then another one landed and a man nimbly followed, hurtling himself over the wall and snatching up the two bags. He slung them over his shoulders and darted down through the gully and up the street. I watched as he dodged between two cars in the parking lot and disappeared behind a van. Then he emerged, still sprinting, bags swinging at his sides. He scampered all the way down the sidewalk and disappeared again behind a row of shrubs. I looked to the other end of the parking lot and there they were, two rent-a-cops in golf carts veering around the bend. The Gestapo.
"Boom! Boom! Boom!"
My whole apartment squirmed. I went to the front door and looked through the peephole. Nothing. "Boom! Boom! Boom!" A face quickly rose up and as it drew close, the nose grew larger and the eyes narrowed. Boozehound. He looked the same as I remembered except for his hairstyle, which had reduced itself to a combover (fit for a politician). I opened the door and he bowled past me with his bags.
"Shut the door! Shut the door!"
I shut it.
"What the hell are you doing?" I asked.
"Hold on," he said, panting. He set his bags on the floor and put his hands on his knees, then looked up at me. "Didn't your brother... tell you... I was coming?"
"What?"
"Yeah, we talked about it last weekend..."
"Huh?"
I found out later they did talk about it the prior weekend, but there were never any plans made. Anyway, that was all moot now. Boozehound had come all the way up from Miami and needed a place to crash for the night. That was alright with me. It was just... "Who is this desperado?"
The Gestapo never found out either.
(2)
We drank at my apartment for a while, and ended up going to this dingy little honky-tonk in Davie (because it was cheap, one of Boozehound's themes). We drove his BMW there and parked in the gravel lot. It was dusty and full of pick-up trucks, motorcycles, RV's. When we got out of his car, he wiped his fingers on the hood and showed me the dust.
"I just waxed this thing," he said with a wry grin.
"Oh yeah?"
We went inside. We sat beneath the big American flag at the horseshoe bar and waited around for the barmaid. Finally this burly-looking biker-broad in stretchpants and a lime-green tube-top appeared.
"What'll it be sweetheart?"
"Two Turkey and Cokes," I said. "Doubles."
We waited some more. She was fumbling with some glasses in the sink. Then someone else got her attention and she sucked a heavy drag from her slender Menthol and started talking to him. I got up, checked the juke - Merle Haggard, Tex Ritter, more Tex Ritter. Hank Snow. The machine presently shook a little and the lights on it went out. A skinny redneck wearing a t-shirt with Dale Earnhardt's face jumping out of the front had the cord in his hand. He grinned.
"Band's about to play," he said.
I sat back down and the drinks were there. But I think the barmaid forgot to put Coke in them. It seemed like it anyway. Fire water. We started off slow and worked up the pace.
"Ya think I'm overdressed?" asked Boozehound, adjusting his collar. He was all pleated and pressed, looking every bit the errant tax-accountant. Everyone else in the place was dressed casually - shorts, torn jeans, rags, including me.
"Nah..." I said. "They'll never know."
He nodded, peered around cynically. He gulped his drink. Then he went into this long spiel about his wife. He told me all about their storybook wedding, all about the idyllic honeymoon in Cancun, and the father-in-law who hated him and how the marriage quickly devolved. He was in Tallahassee and she in Miami when it happened. "The coup de gras," he said. He'd gotten a rotten hunch in his gut and suspected something, so he spent an afternoon or two guessing passwords. Finally he figured it out. Something about FSU, Chief Osceola, and a birth date. He clicked through her emails and there it was:
"Oh Max, I can't wait for you to hold me in your arms. Our bodies are so perfect together. As soon as I get out of this fool marriage of mine, I promise you...""It's over now," he said. "I'm just waiting for the papers to go through. Here she is..." He dug his fingers into his wallet and pulled out her photo.
"What do you think?"
"She's pretty," I said.
"She's alright," he countered. "She looks a lot better in real life. She never takes good pictures. It must be that her soul comes out in photographs. The camera must somehow capture her soul."
Next to Boozehound sat a brutish-looking oaf with a head like an hog. He kept peering over at us and twisting up his lips, his big lantern-jaw pummeling a tiny wad of chewing gum.
"What's up?" I said.
He chomped. "I've had this gum in my mouth for two days straight, huh."
Boozer and I laughed.
"I'm serious," he said. "Longest I ever went was four days..."
Just then, the bar dimmed and red and green footlights lit up the stage. The band, which was a ragtag trio of yokels, had a lead singer who looked like a cross between Ivan the Terrible and Don Knotts. In basketball shoes.
"Y'all like David Allen Coe?" he shouted.
"Raaaawwwwwwooooorawww"
He strummed his guitar and the drums pounded and the sounds whirled. The dance floor quickly filled up with bodies. They leaped and swayed and pranced around, any number of fairies, gargoyles, carnies, yetis. It was as if the soul of the bar had suddenly expressed itself in a throbbing ring of half-lit subhumanity.
But the hogshead had its mucous-colored eyes affixed on Boozehound. He jabbed his own chest with his thumb. "I used to be a pro-am boxer in my twenties," he said. "Name's Guy... Bogart."
Boozer smiled politely and looked away.
"Hey! I'm talking to you, huh! Look at me when I'm talking to you!"
Boozer looked.
"Watch this..." Guy wrapped his big meatfist around his mug and chugged his whole beer... Only a small streamlet of froth dribbled onto his shirt. "Huh?"
I congratulated him for his "feat" and offered to buy the next round. It came pretty fast, this time. The three of us toasted and again he rested its eyes on Boozehound.
"Like I was saying... I boxed pro-am. I could rearrange that whole face of yours if you wanted me to..."
"No thanks."
"Ya think I'm lyin?"
"I never said that, I just said no thanks..."
Guy reached up and wrapped his large mitt around the upper portions of Boozer's face and a good part of his combover. He jiggled it slightly. "All this?" he said. "Nothin." Then he let go and stuck out his thick index finger. He pushed it deep into Boozer's chin. "But this?" he said, tapping sharply. "This here's nothin but glass, ya see."
A couple minutes later the two of them were standing up in the corner and Guy was giving Boozer a boxing tutorial. It looked more like tai chi though, or libido-charged grappling. It went on and on.
"There ya go... now bend your knees a little, huh... ya know what a rope-a-dope is?"
"It's you," I said.
I got up and went off to the bathroom. There was a long line at the urinal and some guy was crapping in the stall, which had no door. When I finally came out, there was a small stampede rushing towards the corner and a ring around Boozehound and his tutor. Guy, whose loose large mouth had blood leaking from it, rolled up his sleeves and was setting up. He took a heavy swing and missed. Then he came back with two swift uppercuts and Boozer, whose drunken feet seemed rooted in the floor, whose expression was utterly dead-pan, gyrated his torso about and in one fluid motion, dodged both shots. It couldn't have been choreographed any better.
"I'll kill you, you sonofabitch!" shouted Guy. "Huh!" His entire being oozed with fury. He came back with a straight jab and another uppercut. Boozer ducked both and spun around. He slipped through a hole in the crowd behind him, and I plowed my way around the horseshoe and wrapped my arm around his neck.
"He's really drunk," I announced. "I'll get him out of here."
We waded through the people and got in his Beamer and skidded out of there. Apparently Boozer had accidentally landed a shot during his "lesson."
"I think you're my hero," I said.
I was finally beginning to understand. Something.
(3)
Boozehound hung around at my place that whole first weekend, sponging beers and playing poker, and then he disappeared for a couple of years, mostly. I think I saw him maybe two or three times. In the meantime, I met Shannon, and she and I moved into a little 1950's Florida home in a little waterjerk town that called itself Boynton Beach. I liked it much better than living in a gated compound, but there was one thing I did miss - the gate - which, with the exception of desperados like Boozehound, was pretty good at staving off not so much criminals (I had nothing for them), but rather The Unwanted, Unannounced Visitor.
It became a problem.
I was an unabashed lover of solitude, and often, when I was alone, I would shut all the blinds, turn off the phone and escape into my own faraway thoughts or those of my favorite scribes - Seneca, Montaigne, Goethe, Schopenhauer, etc... It was wonderful when it lasted, but alas, there was always and invariably and to-be-sure the inevitable jackass who'd come along and murder the dream. And since this person (whoever it was) couldn't climb through the phone and get at me that way - sometimes for several days - he would take it into his head that my love of solitude was really loneliness, and that I was somehow craving his companionship, that I'd benefit from it even, whether I knew it or not. The truth is he didn't give a good goddamn what I knew. The truth is he was just bored with himself and needed someone to offgas his deathly inertia upon.
The real problem was my carport. If I had a garage, my vehicle would've been hidden away, and he never would've known my whereabouts. But he always seemed to know. And for some reason - at first anyway - when he came knocking on my door I felt strangely obligated to answer him. I'd invite him in for beers sometimes.
It was my fault. I was too accommodating at first, and didn't quite understand the mind-set of the pest. I didn't understand that if you give him something which appeals to his senses (beer) you will never get rid of him.
He will keep coming back again and again, like an invasive species.
In the end I just played dead in my room and stopped coming to the door. That pretty much solved it.
(4)
It was a Friday afternoon, and I'd gotten home early from work. I pulled the blinds, turned my house into a cave. Then I went deeper into my cave. I climbed into bed and threw the sheets over me. I tried to sleep. I couldn't. I couldn't write either (sometimes I wrote in bed). So I grabbed a tome off the dresser - Schopenhauer's masterpiece and my sort of bible, The World as Will and Representation - and thumbed leisurely through some of the finer passages...
Then it happened. There was a knock on the door and I ignored it. Then there was more knocking and nothing and then a loud bang resounded from the kitchen and the jalousies rattled.
"Hello?"
The voice was in the house. I heard crisp footsteps clicking across the terrazzo floor. They got closer, and then my bedroom door flew open. Boozehound had the knob in his hand.
"Que tal...?" he said.
He dropped his bag (his anchor), and there was nothing I could do.
We drank beers in front of the TV for a while, and a little later, when Shannon came home, we decided we'd all go out for dinner and drinks. First she had to get ready though, and while we waited, Boozehound, who had been telling me all about how his latest relationship folded, discovered a slight crease on the front of his shirt. He tried to smooth it out with his hand, and when that didn't work he requested an ironing board. We didn't have one.
"I don't believe in them," I said.
"Then how do you iron your clothes?"
"I don't do those kinds of things."
"Iron?"
"No."
"What?"
Shannon eventually scrounged him up a little traveling iron and he took off his shirt and as he went to work on the kitchen table, I came to understand that ironing was a magical and sacred pastime for him. It was full of gamble, and all sorts of glorious half-hidden horizons. It made him feel like he was truly in charge of the game, laying it on just right, giving every last uppity crease its proper dressing-down...
When he finally finished, he slung the shirt over a chair and let it cure.
Then he strode through the house in his wife-beater, his big swishing bags of immaculate slack, and these thin blue socks.
"You look really fit Boozehound," Shannon said.
She was sitting with me on the sofa and we were waiting for him to finish up. He grinned and thanked her, then grabbed a comb out of his bag and went for the bathroom. When he came out he did a running slide across the terrazzo, ala Tom Cruise. He did it three more times, each one less necessary the last, and then he threw on his shirt and we left.
(5)
We went to a seafood restaurant at the marina, and sat where we could watch boats as they twinkled up and down the intracoastal. Some of them glittered with Christmas lights and garlands and wreaths and the people all waving as they passed by.
We ordered conch stew and king crab and beers, and Boozehound regaled us with tales about his latest girlfriend, a school teacher. He spoke of their arguments and her idiosyncrasies, like how she collected coasters and snow globes and dragged him to yard sales every weekend. And there was a problem with her grammar. She often said "me and my friends," for instance, instead of "my friends and I," and he embarrassed her once by correcting at dinner-date with some friends, telling her, "mistakes like that are impermissible for a school teacher."
But she was the one who ended it, it seemed.
Something about vanity and the sex wasn't very good. He just wasn't that attracted to her, he said. She had a really pretty face, but this outsized rump he just couldn't get behind. And then the minute little blond hairs striding across her upper lip and how once when they were kissing, he felt a slight prickling sensation and made too much of it when he couldn't make it work.
Still, he considered himself a perfectly marvelous lover, what with his big uncircumcised crank, but he could only maintain these partial erections, he admitted, and that was part of his appeal: "I'm one of those guys," he said, "who can go all night long... without so much as coming."
Shannon seemed a little put-off by that comment, and I knew what she was thinking, but she liked at least one thing about Boozer - that he could open up about the minutia and goings-on in his relationships. Most men couldn't. I couldn't. I was never any good at that. I preferred thinking about other things, and letting my relationships slide. I was selfish like that, but I couldn't help it. I wasn't interested in matters of fact. I found them depressing. It was much easier playing the writer and hiding in my vices and artistic pursuits. That's why Shannon was good for me. She understood, and wasn't too demanding. She was also ultra-independent.
Anyhow...
Later that night, when the restaurant started clearing out, the bill came and Boozehound, who'd also been telling us about his job with the state and how profitable his rental properties were, offered to pay. But when he pulled out his wallet, he saw there was no cash in any of his secret nooks and crannies and asked if an ATM was nearby.
"Don't worry about it," said Shannon. "We'll get it."
"You sure?"
We were sure.
"Just on thing," I said. "You might wake up tomorrow morning in a stolen ambulance next to a dead deer..."
The legend of Boozehound.
He'd never live it down, he said, and to prove it, he snagged the Santa hat off the waitress's head and waved it around. Then he sweetly crooned to her:
"Maybe it's the clothes she wears
Or the way she combs her hair
Oh that makes me want to tell her that I care
Don'tcha know that she's just my style?
Ev'rything about her drives me wild..."(6)
I saw Boozehound only sparingly in the following weeks and months. We had a minor falling out and it happened like this:
I saw him out at a bar in Ft. Lauderdale one night and we were both drunk and he needed a ride home. He didn't want to spend the money on a cab, so we piled into my car and as we drove down Federal Highway, I mentioned something about philosophy. I tended to philosophize sometimes when I was drunk - a bad habit by almost anyone's standards - but I had this theory about possessions and clinging to things... that there was death in that, and he didn't agree.
"The most important thing in life," he said, "is comfort."
"Comfort's overrated," I said. Then I gave him a few undeniable examples, and he kept playing the role of the devil's advocate and trying to berate me, which was alright, but his motives were obvious.
"I know you're just a country-clubber at heart," I said.
He didn't agree with that one either, and eventually he tried to turn the whole thing into an argument. An angry one. Finally I said, "Just forget about it... I was only throwing something out there... let it go..."
But in the Taco Bell Drive-thru, it only got worse. I pulled up to the menu-board and ordered my regular soft taco, chicken Chalupa and beef Meximelt. Then Boozehound began placing his order. I say "began" intentionally. For him, there was a beginning, a middle and an end to the placing of any order. It was a never-ending process: "I'd like a chicken Gordita, but if you could hold the peco... no wait, hold the lettuce... you people always put too much lettuce on your stuff. Oh, and... I'd also like a taco supreme, uh, no sour cream on that... extra... peco, uh, and...could you please...?"
I couldn't take it anymore. "That's good enough!" I said. I jumped on the pedal. "No Mike! Nooooooooooo!" I slammed on the break and skidded up to the window. Then he brutally shoved me aside, cursing, and ordered everything again just the way he liked it.
But after we left, there was a problem with hot sauce - his little delicate cakehole couldn't endure the treacheries of hot sauce - so I grabbed all the mild and opened up the window.
"Nooooooooo!"
I let it fly.
(7)
2007I ran into Boozehound several times over the next few years. Once at the Hollywood Casino, once outside an Ethiopian diner in Miami Beach, and I saw him at a few different bars a few different times too. He was going through some kind of personal crisis. I heard about it from a mutual friend of ours. It had to do with his vanity. He was turning forty and having a really hard time with it. He kept getting into petty disputes with people in public places, and one of his former colleagues tried to choke him at a city commission meeting. Also, he'd become somewhat of a serial internet dater. He had his bio and a few photos of himself smiling out of a heavenly backdrop (they were taken in a portrait studio), plastered up on various websites and he was trying his hand that way.
The last time I saw him was at a Saint Patrick's Day celebration in Delray Beach. I was in a little Irish bar a couple blocks from the parade, when I noticed him tooling through the parking lot in a new candy-apple red ragtop Jeep. A few minutes later, he strolled into the bar. He was all got up in safari clothing, pockets and strings hanging everywhere, wide, bullying waterproof pants, his feet shod in a pair of big golliwog jungle boots. Gone were the days of pleated trousers and Polo shirts, replaced by what appeared to be his newfound admiration for fur trappers and the bludgeoners of game.
"If it isn't Crocodile Boozehound," I said.
He smiled at that one and sat down beside me. But when I introduced him to the barmaid as Boozehound, he corrected me, saying he preferred to be called Matthew now. The Boozehound thing was passé, he said.
"An old college nickname," he told the barmaid.
Then he ordered a chicken potpie and a draft. We drank several drafts throughout that afternoon, and our conversation was mostly amicable at first, but eventually it turned speculative and something turned on itself. It began when he said that people are going to keep getting smarter as time goes on.
"How do you figure?" I asked.
"Because there's gonna be more to know. More history, more technological innovations. More information for the mind to acclimate itself to."
"And distract itself with," I said. "Too much information can be distracting."
"How so?"
"If it's not processed correctly, and used wisely, it's useless and distracting. Wisdom is more important than knowledge."
"Yeah, but who says you can't have both?"
"You can," I said, "but most people don't. Most people would rather know how many poisonous snakes there are in North America, than understand what Pascal had to say about salvation. It's just the way it is. People don't want to think. They want to know. They want diversions too. And the more accessible they are, the dumber people will get.
He didn't agree. He said his theory was more in line with Darwinian thinking,
and mine was only "half-baked," and didn't hold water.
"Have you read Darwin?" he asked. "Well I have! I've read Darwin!"
"The people will get smarter as time goes on!" he insisted.
When happy hour was over, the barmaid, who had bought us a couple rounds, tallied up our final bill. She gave it to me and I showed it to Boozehound and he gave me a twenty, which covered his entire tab plus roughly five percent for a tip. Normally I wouldn't have said anything. Normally I would've paid the difference without even thinking about it, but I could see Boozehound was trying to slip one in, and I was sick of his penchant for chintzing out on bills.
"I think you owe a little more," I said. "When you're adding up your share, you can't forget about the taxes. As it is you're only giving her five percent... and she bought us a few rounds..."
"Oh c'mon..." he said. "You're gonna sit here and itemize the bill? Just pay it and lets get on with it."
"Listen, Boozehound..."
"It's Matthew. Call me Matthew."
"Listen Matt..."
"No you listen!" he said. He leapt off his barstool and shoved his wallet into his pocket. "I'm out of here." He pivoted around and stormed out the front doors. Then he barreled through the crowd and shouldered out into the opening. And when he crossed the walkway, he came out into the lights of the street and a heavy wind ruffled his combover, his hugely voluminous corn sack pants dancing with anger.
"Call me Matthew!" they seemed to scream.
End of legend.
