The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas by Davy Rothbart

Author:Davy Rothbart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: S & S
Published: 2002-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

NEVERGLADE

MY GRANDPA DIED on Valentine’s Day; two years later, when February rolled back around, my grandmother was sounding pretty lonely and down, so I figured I’d go stay with her in Florida and give her some company and also escape from winter for a while. She lived in a sprawling, crumbling retirement community east of Tampa called Neverglade Village; the entrance was marked off Route 8 by a beaten wooden billboard of Peter Pan riding an alligator.

My grandmother and I had always got along real well, but there’s a big difference between getting along with somebody and actually moving in and living together. All the same, things started off smoothly. I turned my grandma’s study into a little bedroom and she was cool and laid-back and let me keep my own hours. We found ourselves a good routine. I’d stay up really late writing and reading and go to sleep around six A.M., then sleep till one in the afternoon. I’d eat breakfast while she ate lunch, then we’d hang out around the little pool shared by her building and the neighboring building—we’d play backgammon or talk or read. Then we’d have an early dinner, I’d drive to the park to play basketball for a couple hours, come home, and start my night of work—at the time, I was trying to write a one-man play based on the life of Denny McLain, who was a star pitcher for the Detroit Tigers in the 1960s but later ended up a con man and a thief. My grandma would watch TV till midnight or so and then come in to say good night. She was amazing, one of those old people you could really communicate with—she responded to everything with clarity and wit, and wasn’t shocked by anything. I knew she was hurting, but she didn’t like to talk too much about my grandpa. Sometimes she’d sock herself away in her room with the Home Shopping Network booming. Then other times she would talk merrily on the phone to her friends.

Neverglade Village was huge—an entire dilapidated town of sorts, encircled by a four-foot wall, which seemed designed not so much to keep intruders out as to keep its inhabitants in; foggy-minded seniors had, in the past, wandered off into the marshes, where real alligators lived. Some days I’d jog a mile to the main pool and fitness center. I’d never done weight training before, but I kinda got into it, pumping iron while the easy-listening station cranked out songs from Dirty Dancing over a pair of tinny loudspeakers. The three or four wiry, rugged-looking old-timers who hung out there intimidated me at first but then began to sweetly give me pointers on how to do sit-ups and lat pulls correctly. Walking back to my grandmother’s apartment, red and yellow birds flapped everywhere, while cars crunched by at ten miles an hour down the white-gravel Neverglade alleyways. It was such a strange, controlled environment, but it was weird how quickly I got used to the mildness and hush of everything.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.