Panacea

I used to read dellazine.com. Sarah Jane was from Panacea and her daddy fished for mullet. She was out in San Francisco, then. Della from Della Street, Perry Mason's Girl Friday. Smart, for a girl.

We dug two summers at the mound on Mashes Island. (The first summer I was over on the Aucilla, but I helped clear the mound, helped backfill, at the end of the dig, and spent my weekends at the rented house on Ochlockonee Bay, with Brenda and her crew.)

The second summer we all lived in a beach cottage out on Alligator Point.

The county is turning Ochlockonee Point, at the end of Mashes Island, into more of a park, than it was. They're calling it Mashes Sands Park and there's an Ochlockonee Bay Trail.

I went out there the other day and there were some teenagers, out of school for the summer, in bikinis, swimming, so I didn't get out of my car. I look like an old lecher around teenagers. Just because I drool, and have food in my beard, and a coffee stain on my T-shirt.

In Screed I write about a guy doing his laundry at The Oaks.

A woman comes in and throws a pair of panties in the drier and leaves.

She comes back 15 minutes later and he is staring at the drier, with her panties in it, going round and round.

The Oaks no longer has a laundromat, a motel, a souvenir shop, or a restaurant.

When Clayton Oaks heard that Judge Gwynn married me and Brenda, in the Leon County courthouse, in his chambers, and that any notary public could do it, he said if we'd asked him he would have become a notary to marry us. We ate our wedding banquet at The Oaks, after the wedding in Tallahassee.

Fried mullet, cheese grits, tossed salad with blue cheese dressing.

Afterwards, at the reception, at the house on Alligator Point, we had an Ann Page Spanish Bar cake from the A&P. The crew threw grits on us, not having any rice. The grits were like sand in the nuptial bed in the apartment we rented on McDaniel Street in Tallahassee for the next school year, and spent our two-day honeymoon in.

One time I was coming back to Panama City from Tallahassee, where I'd turned a job application in, and I stopped at The Oaks to eat. I bought a copy of the edition of The Living Dock at Panacea with the Walter Anderson illustrations in it.

A man came over to the table and asked me if I'd like him to autograph it.

"Are you Jack Rudloe?" I asked. He said he was.

I said, "Sure. Inscribe it `To Brenda Saunders, Happy Birthday, Jack.'"

"Are you Jack Saunders?" he asked. I said I was.

We had both read all of each other's published work and he had read several of my books in manuscript, although we had not met.

We were both friends of Slim McElderry, who lived next door to the Gulf Specimen Laboratory, in the Out Back Smoke Shack.

I visit the Gulf Specimen Lab every time I drive through Panacea.

I think every lot in Panacea has a For Sale sign on it.

Some people live there, though.

Like Jack Rudloe.

He's trying to save what he can from the visioneers. Their visions are hallucinations. It's like Team Rodent got hooked on rat poison, and can't see what any normal person sees. What any sensible person sees. What someone like Thoreau saw.

Kerouac wrote about the unspeakable visions of the individual, and William S. Burroughs wrote about latah, or Windigo Psychosis, where people run amok in mass hysteria outbreaks.

That's what's happening on every side of Panacea. Can Jack Rudloe stop it from happening here? Right here in River City?

76 Trombones. The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Take the money and run for the train.

Jack Rudloe sold a story to Sports Illustrated about an alligator eating his Airedale dog as he was jogging around Otter Lake.

He said the alligator appeared in the middle of the path, got up on his hind legs and slapped the dog, like Alex Karras bitch-slapping an offensive interior lineman, then grabbed him in his jaws, jumped in the lake, and sounded, drowning the dog.

Rudloe jumped in after them and fought the gator for the dog but the gator was too strong for him.

Sports Illustrated rejected the story. The editor said it was too violent. And besides, an alligator wouldn't do that. Rudloe had made it up.

Slim McElderry knew someone on the Miccosukee Indian Reservation who wrestled alligators for a living.

He drove down to Broward County in his car--a white, hand-painted station wagon musicians had given McElderry in a rigged drawing of a raffle at the White Springs Folk Festival because they thought he ought to own a car--to see his informant, with several gallons of Otter Lake water in plastic milk jugs in the back.

Sure enough, the Indian had a cigar box full of pictures of alligators in fighting postures, including up on their hind legs like a defensive tackle. Mac brought a picture back to Panacea with him.

But on his way back he stopped in Delray Beach and introduced himself to us. He blessed our house and told me to stop worrying and take care of business- -I had everything I needed.

He gave us two gallon milk jugs of Otter Lake water.

I didn't have everything I needed then, with two kids in school, but I do now, on social security and an LDA grant. Last ditch attempt.

Sports Illustrated still wouldn't take the story. They paid Rudloe a kill fee.

What can you say?

New York knows more about alligators than Jack Rudloe, who dove into the water and fought one, for his dog.

Jeff Potter compares the three of us to John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, in Salinas, around the time of Cannery Row, and Joseph Campbell, who went across the country when he dropped out of graduate school, in Germany, following his bliss, and ran into them, in California, accidentally. Campbell went with Ricketts on a collecting trip to the Northwest Coast, British Columbia, and encountered all that Indian art and mythology and folklore up there, by coincidence. Which fit right in with what he was studying.

Mac wrote about this in a book called Panacea Fantasía.

Potter was negotiating with him to publish it, but I don't know how that turned out.

I know I'm not Joseph Campbell.

Or maybe I am.

Campbell quotes Nietzsche as saying, "Behave as though the hour were here."

Why not be. Who's to say I can't?