The Pope of Palm Beach Page 7

  Coleman rubbed it on his face, then curled up in the passenger seat and pawed at it. “I couldn’t find a weed guy, so this was my backup plan. I think it’s working.”

  “Coleman, catnip only works on cats.”

  Coleman faced Serge with sagging eyelids and a string of drool from his mouth. “Huh?”

  Two hours later, they passed a burnt-red lighthouse standing on a high point overlooking the Jupiter Inlet. The driver had a bottle of spring water, and the passenger a Colt malt.

  “I found a joint! Why am I always losing these?”

  “Where was it?” asked Serge.

  “In the sweat sock.” Coleman lit up. “Look at the size of those sand dunes!”

  “That means we’re in Hobe Sound,” said Serge. “Home of sugar-white drifts and sea-turtle nests.”

  “Remember your earliest road trips?” Coleman flicked ash over the edge of his door, and the wind took the whole joint out the window, then blew it back in.

  “Better get that.” Serge snapped open a bracket on the dashboard and passed a small fire extinguisher.

  “I’m on it.” Coleman knelt backward and blasted the backseat. White contrails of fire-retardant mist streamed out both sides of the car. “Another close one.” He returned the extinguisher to Serge, who snapped it back in the bracket. It was a seamless procedure from heavy practice.

  “Where were we?” asked Coleman.

  “Early road trips.”

  “Right,” said Coleman, upending the can of malt liquor. “When we were kids riding with our parents.”

  “Utter nightmares,” said Serge. “Because your parents were in charge of the itinerary.”

  “I remember they had to pull over because I swallowed a penny.”

  “You swallowed a penny?”

  “A few times. These were long trips for a kid.”

  “. . . I’m a highway star . . .”

  “My most painful childhood memory was going to Disney World,” said Serge. “Right after they opened Space Mountain.”

  “I remember that.” Coleman popped another can. “It was like the only thing the kids in the schoolyard could talk about. ‘It’s incredible! You’re flying around in the dark in your rocket ship, through all these galaxies! You can’t see where you’re going and suddenly this bar appears, and you think you’re going to get your head chopped off, but then the rocket dives under the bar!’”

  “Almost getting your head chopped off was the best part,” said Serge. “Everyone at my school knew about it. Kids took weekend trips with their parents and came back on Monday to file their reports: ‘Yep, almost chopped off.’ So when my family finally went to Disney, it was number one on my list. Then things immediately flew off the rails.”

  “What happened?”

  “My folks saved up a bunch of money and stayed at the Contemporary Hotel.”

  “The one with the monorail running through the lobby?” said Coleman. “That seriously rocked!”

  “It was the first Disney hotel designed light-years ahead of its time. Now it’s an ancient homage to an obsolete vision of the future, which is even cooler,” said Serge. “I know I’m supposed to hate Disney, but you have to tip your hat to certain things, like Space Mountain, which, in another believe-it-or-not, future-becomes-the-past factoid, is currently the oldest operating roller coaster in Florida.”

  “Righteous,” said Coleman. “So what went wrong when you came with your folks?”

  “The monorail was right outside our room, which meant you were supposed to get in it and zip over to the Magic Kingdom. But no, my folks had this stupid thing they always liked to do called visiting.”

  “Visiting?”

  Serge nodded with gritted teeth. “It involved prolonged sitting in a room with relatives and friends.”

  “What did they do?”

  Serge threw up his hands in aggravation. “Visit! Sometimes it involved a cheese ball. And you know me. Sitting still like that is the ultimate torture, but normally I could just run outside our house and escape the horror show. Except this time The Visit was at a hotel on the road and I got sucked into that bastard. Even worse, there was something tantalizingly close that I really needed to get to. I’m in that room crying and stomping my feet and pointing out the window: ‘Look! Space Mountain is right there! We can catch the next monorail!’ . . . ‘No, no, no, we’re visiting.’ . . . ‘We’ve been visiting for an hour! I hear the monorail!’ I started waving my arms frantically like a baseball coach. ‘Come on! Let’s get moving!’ . . . ‘No, we haven’t finished visiting.’ . . . I started running in a circle: ‘Are you kidding? Who are we visiting? The only people in this room are the same motherfuckers that live in the house we just came from!’—of course I cleaned up the language because that would have been a non-starter . . . Then my mom got out her camera . . . ‘Great!’ I cheered. ‘We’re finally going!’ . . . ‘No, I want to take some pictures first.’ . . . ‘In the room? Just kill me now!’ And they pulled me away from the window because I was banging my forehead on the glass. I still have those photos they took of me with the saddest expression like some refugee in Life magazine on crutches with a bucket of brown drinking water.”

  “That bad?”

  “Gets worse. We finally made it to the Magic Kingdom and we were there all of two hours when they start heading back to the entrance. ‘Wait, where are you going?’ ‘Back to the room.’ I said, ‘Why? Did you forget something?’ My mom said, ‘No, we’re going to visit.’ They told me I was screaming at this point. You know how I occasionally get carried away and lock on to something? Especially when it involves space?”

  “It’s come up.”

  “‘Mom! I haven’t been on Space Mountain yet!’ Well, she was really overprotective and said, ‘You’re not going on Space Mountain anyway. It’s too dangerous.’ . . . I’m like, ‘Mom, I can see your lips moving, but you’re just babbling.’ She repeated that I wasn’t going on Space Mountain, and that’s when I froze in a concrete position, folded my arms tight and said, ‘I am not leaving this park until I go on Space Mountain!’ They said, ‘Yes, you are!’ And tried to grab me, but I jumped back. ‘Come here, Serge!’ They reached again and I jumped back again, and this went on like nine or ten times, but I was a quick little squirt and there was no way they were going to catch me. A large crowd began staring and giving us room, and the next part is actually funny now: My family fanned out to circle me and effect the capture, but I saw it unfolding and just fucking bolted. Now it’s a chase. I swear to God this really happened, running all over the park, but see, I screwed myself. Today when you enter Disney, you hand them a pile of cash the size of a car payment, and all the rides are free. But back then, you got a book of tickets, A through E, depending on the quality of the ride, and Space Mountain was an E, or ninety cents, except I didn’t have any tickets or money, so I had to stop running and negotiate with my folks at a distance. ‘I need an E ticket!’ ‘Come with us right now!’ ‘I’m not leaving!’ So my mom eventually held out an E ticket, but I thought it might be a trick and was skittish about the exchange. And then that went on over and over, like she was trying to hand-feed a potato chip to a wild squirrel. Finally I yelled, ‘Put the E ticket on the ground and back away!’”

  “What were the other people at the park doing?” asked Coleman.

  “Oh, it was a big scene, but what did I care? My folks were the ones acting embarrassing. Anyway, they all eventually huddled and came to the consensus that they would never get to leave the park unless I went on the ride, so they set the ticket on the ground, and I snatched it and ran off to Space Mountain.”

  “Was it worth it?”

  “Definitely,” said Serge. “Almost got my head chopped off.”

  The Nova continued north and made a left turn in the middle of nothing. They cruised slowly up to a guard shack, stereo blaring.

  “. . . The low . . . ri-der . . .”

  “Two tickets, please,” said Serge.

  He was handed the s
tubs and a map. “Keep up the excellent work!”

  The Nova rolled several miles down a winding road through the hot, hostile scrubland of saw palmettos and wire grass.

  “What is this place?” asked Coleman.

  “Jonathan Dickinson State Park,” said Serge. “The legend of Trapper Nelson.”

  Chapter 9

  1976

  Eyes blinked. Where am I? The Pope felt the back of his head in sand. He looked up into the ashen faces of the paramedics leaning over him.

  “It’s me, Peter. You had a surfing accident at the jetty.” He pinched one of the Pope’s legs. “Do you feel that?”

  “Feel what?”

  He pinched the Pope’s arms. “How about that?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The paramedics gave each other a silent look. “Okay, let’s get him stabilized on a board and to the hospital.”

  Kenny stood nearby with the kids. Tears rolling down his cheeks, shaking with fear and guilt. “Is he going to be okay?”

  “It’s best you talk to the doctors.”

  “I want to ride with him.”

  They let Kenny into the back of the ambulance, and the lights and sirens came on.

  1984

  Pennies and nickels splashed into the water at the base of the fountain. Kids had been doing it for years. Rising from the fountain was a cone-shaped array of clear plastic strings that reached the ceiling and were brought to life by a circle of multicolored spotlights embedded in the roof.

  The centerpiece of the Palm Beach Mall.

  Everyone who grew up back then remembers that fountain.

  The Palm Beach Mall was the first in the area. One of the first anywhere, for that matter, touted as the largest covered shopping center in the southeastern United States. The concept of a mall was so new and futuristic that long before the stores were even open for business, residents made special family trips on the weekend just to look at it. It opened October 26, 1967. Governor Claude Kirk and Miss USA cut the ribbon.

  Now malls were everywhere. Newer, bigger. Shoppers went to them instead. And the original one on Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard was viewed like a fancy suburb that had gone downhill until cars were on blocks in the yard.

  Kenny worked at the mall. He ran a register in the Paperback Booksmith. It was corporate America’s idea of a hip place, with ads for concerts and the latest piped-in music.

  “. . . Girls just want to have fun . . .”

  “. . . Dance hall days . . .”

  “. . . Ghostbusters! . . .”

  Kenny continued ringing up the occasional customer. One of the books on display near the counter was written by sixties radical Abbie Hoffman, entitled Steal This Book. When Kenny wasn’t looking, someone stole it.

  The mall’s employees were idle the last hour before they turned off the fountain’s lights. Kenny made the final sale of the day—to himself—and locked up. Then he got in his ’73 Beetle and drove where he always did each night, toward the Port of Palm Beach and a short residential street just south of the Blue Heron Bridge.

  The VW pulled up the driveway of a two-bedroom wooden bungalow that was out of place among the overgrown ranch houses. Kenny grabbed a brown paper bag of groceries off the passenger seat and went inside:

  “I’m making spaghetti!”

  “I’m not hard of hearing!”

  Kenny came into the living room. “Got you a book.”

  Darby Pope raised his La-Z-Boy lounge chair as the hardcover landed in his lap. “It’s the new Willeford. Miami Blues.” He looked up. “How’d you know?”

  Kenny smirked. “How do you think?” He disappeared into the kitchen.

  Darby reached onto the tray next to his chair and opened a prescription bottle for another pill. Darby had never taken pills, not even aspirin. And when pot swept the surfing culture, well, he considered it essentially benign and he didn’t judge, but it wasn’t for him. Now he found himself swallowing pill after pill just to get through the day, and spent days just getting through the pills. He never came close to complaining. Could have been worse. Much worse.

  The eight intervening years had passed in a blink. They’d barely gotten Darby to the hospital in time. All the way over in the ambulance, a paramedic silently watching the monitors. Blood pressure dropping and dropping. He was facing death by a thousand cuts. He lost consciousness.

  They triaged his wounds, ignoring the shallow slash marks to his back and finally washing away enough blood to locate the big puncture where he slammed a pointy boulder with the fleshy side of a thigh.

  The ambulance guys crashed through the emergency room doors with the stretcher. “It’s Darby!”

  A nurse standing with a clipboard relayed the word back: “It’s Darby!”

  They came running and got him to the OR. You would have thought the president had been shot. They spared nothing, and by sunset he was out of the woods.

  In the following week, attention turned to the long-term picture. The spinal injury. All the doctors with all their training could only come up with this: Wait and see. These were the helpless days. The Pope never let on, cheering up all the moping visitors who came to see him. And did they visit. Dozens a day, the surfers, the lifeguards, the shop owners, former schoolmates, park rangers, cops, bankers, politicians.

  The Pope knew everybody.

  Then one day Kenny sat bedside and thought Darby was sleeping and gently placed a hand on his right arm.

  Darby turned his head. “I must have dozed off.”

  Kenny sprang to his feet. “You could feel that?”

  Darby’s eyebrows jumped. “I could feel that!”

  Doctors and nurses jammed the room. Tests. From there, the breakthroughs came fast. In seventy-two hours, all sensation, followed by movement and a full regimen of physical rehab.

  After a month, a crowd of doctors and nurses gathered in the lobby. They applauded and cheered as Darby waved good-bye with his cane, then limped out the doors into the sunshine.

  Once away from their view, his smile dissolved.

  His surfing days were over.

  “I’m browning the meatballs,” Kenny yelled from the kitchen. “I know you like them brown.”

  “I can smell ’em,” said Darby, washing another pill down with half a glass of room-temperature tap water. He opened a book.

  Kenny had arrived outside the hospital the day that Darby was released. He was in worse emotional shape than the Pope. “Sorry I’m late. Let me help you.”

  “I can walk fine.” He struggled slowly toward the car.

  “Let me get the door.”

  “I can get it myself.” Another ordeal.

  The VW arrived back at Darby’s bungalow near Blue Heron. He had always wanted to live on the beach, but the prices were not in line with a ship welder’s pay. So in ’52 he’d found a place on the mainland as close to the bridge as possible. One of the few remaining wood frames, because the Pope wasn’t ranch-style.

  Darby was still young then and went to work on the joint. He tore out the plaster and nailed up planks of unfinished cypress. He ripped out the ceiling, exposing the trusses and beams, and hung his surfboards. He built in a tongue-and-groove bookcase. He found a taxidermied marlin at a yard sale. He saw a guy selling oil paintings on the side of the road and bought a picture of a fiery-red royal poinciana in a distressed white frame. He knocked down walls, leaving the load-bearing piers, to open everything up. He was done. He stopped in the middle of the sunlit floor and turned all the way around with a smile.

  A magnificent space for his head.

  When he first got home from the hospital, the visitors kept coming like they had in Darby’s recovery room. One day, they stopped coming. Only Kenny remained.

  The Pope always made Kenny feel at home when he visited. A few months after the hospital, Kenny got a brainstorm. “Why don’t I move in? I could help.”

  I don’t need help, thought the Pope. But he was worried about Kenny. Great moral character,
though not the most focused guy in the world, bouncing between low-paying jobs and living in a crime-prone apartment complex on U.S. 1 that Darby shuddered to think about. The Pope saved well over the years, and had good insurance from his shipyard job at the Port of Palm Beach. If Kenny believed he was being useful, it wouldn’t seem like charity.

  “That’s a great idea,” said Darby. “I really could use the help. And since I paid off this place years ago, don’t worry about any rent.”

  What Darby hadn’t realized yet was that he indeed needed Kenny. Darby was a social creature. That’s how he got to be the Pope. But with restricted mobility and that damn cane, he got out less and less. It just became too much. He stopped knowing everyone, and they stopped thinking about him.

  The seventies became the eighties. “Hey, I have an idea,” said Darby. “Let’s go down to the Pump House. I haven’t seen it in years.”

  “Can you make it?” asked Kenny.

  “For the Pump House, definitely.”

  They drove over in the vintage VW. Kenny knew the walk would be difficult, but he hadn’t realized the degree. It took almost a half hour with that cane to limp down the jetty to the beach. Joints throbbed in revolt, but Darby was determined. When he reached sight of the shore, it was all worth it. A wave of nostalgic joy, and a smile so big it hurt.

  Kenny ran ahead to the new crop of surfers. He pointed back at Darby.

  “Guys, check it out. It’s the Pope!”

  “Who?”

  “You know, the legend.”

  “That old man with the cane?”

  “You’ve never heard of the Pope of Palm Beach?” said Kenny. “Only the best surfer in the entire history of the Pump House.”

  “Yeah, whatever . . .”

  Darby wasn’t so far away as to be out of earshot. He still had that big smile when Kenny returned, but now it was a fraud.

  “Man, were they impressed!” said Kenny. “Everyone still talks about you!”

  “Really appreciate you bringing me down here.”