He created the illusion that he was his own man, and free.
I was thirteen when I started riding the bus across the Everglades to visit him. I used to sit by the window and watch for alligators in the black canals beside the highway, as, in the far distance, fires lit by heat lightning burned off the dry grass and the stunted pines that grew in clusters like innumerable tiny islands rising from the shallow waters south of Naples. By this time, around 1972, my grandfather Robert Antrim had died, and my uncle had more or less abandoned any dreams he might have had of a life somewhere removed from his mother’s house. My own mother’s drinking had reached a level best described as operatically suicidal, and she and my father — married, divorced, then remarried to each other — waged their war nightly. My sister had got busy saving herself through academics. I’d got busy flunking out. Our Siamese had eaten a poisonous South American toad and was afflicted with seizures that caused her to fall down and twitch violently. The other cat had reached the age at which vomiting was chronic.
And when in the deep of the night my mother came into my room swaying, half conscious and with gray smoke from her cigarette wreathing her face, shattered by bourbon and white wine; and when she raised her hand to strike, and I easily batted her arm back, then stepped forward and quickly steadied her before she tipped; when, holding my mother upright, I looked past her to see my father watching us from the shadows outside my room, whispering that he was sorry for everything — when these things happened, there eventually came a point at which feeling, or whatever it is we call feeling, broke apart in me. And though it’s true that I felt anger and shame and fear — emotions that I live with still, more than thirty years after my solitary pilgrimages to the playtime world of Uncle Bob — it was also true that I felt nothing at all. And in order to share this feeling that was not a feeling, in order to be with another person, a man, as I realize now, who was like the man I might one day become, a man drained of feeling, I boarded a bus.
The bus carried me past Frog City and the Miccosukee Indian settlements, all those alligator-wrestling parks and airboat-rental outposts. At Naples, the scenery changed, and the bus took a right turn and headed up the suburban Gulf Coast, stopping in Fort Myers, Punta Gorda, Port Charlotte, and other centerless non-towns I can’t remember the names of, continuing north toward Venice, the home of retired circus performers, crossing one bridge after another and another, over narrow inlets and motorboats moored by the hundreds, before finally arriving, after what seems in memory an endless journey, in Sarasota, the town where I was born, and where my uncle, sunburned and smelling of English Leather and the beer he’d drunk the night before, waited to greet me at the station with the one question I have been trying to answer for myself ever since: “What do you want to do?”
We got in the car. We rolled down the windows. We turned on the radio. We began to drive. After a moment, I asked him the question I always looked forward to asking upon seeing him for the first time in a long time.
“Eldridge, what are you eating?”
“Pork chops.”
“How’re you fixing them?”
“I’m broiling them.”
“What are you having with them?”
“Spinach.”
“What else?”
“Rice.”
Or:
“String beans.”
Or:
“Fries.”
It worked out, he would explain — and my uncle was forced to explain this again and again, because people loved hearing it — that, over the course of a year, eating a menu that consisted of one entree per month (scallops in March; spaghetti in April; flounder in May), he got a balanced diet.
It is easy, looking back on all this now, to appreciate the despair and the terror inherent in my uncle’s preoccupations with self-sufficiency and preparedness, at home and in his car — particularly in the car, a four-door gas guzzler not unlike a rent-a-wreck version of the cars my mother’s father drove, a car different in every respect from the one that had, at a certain moment in my uncle’s youth, defined his enthusiasm for life. That car was a sexy, cherry-red Triumph TR3 with a walnut steering wheel and a rusted-out hole in the passenger-side floor — a casualty of salt air and the Florida weather — which forced the passenger to position himself extremely carefully, especially since the Triumph’s chassis rode quite low to the road. I was only seven or eight years old when Eldridge took me for drives in that car. As he accelerated and the RPM needle flickered on the dash, I would lean carefully forward and to the left, reaching, at my uncle’s invitation, to take hold of the wheel and guide the car along a straight path down the Sarasota streets.
But back to the story of Eldridge and his things. Each morning, he went to the carport and opened the trunk of the car. He stood before the items stowed there, moving and shifting his gear, replacing sweaty tennis clothes with clean ones, improving the overall packing dynamics, while, inside the house his white-haired mother, who often stayed up all night pacing, padded from bedroom to living room to porch to kitchen, worrying whether her son and grandson might eat a little breakfast before abandoning her for a day of horsing around and playing tennis and shooting pool with the friends from the Canada Dry loading dock out by the airport.
Once he’d established that everything was in order, that we had whatever we might need if, say, the world were to blow up and all life outside our car were to be catastrophically extinguished, we were off and running. Of what were our days together made? Looking back, I would say that our days were made of desire. We had structured activities, like tennis — I had not yet wrecked my shoulder with my high-toss, low-percentage, erratic yet explosive service, the theatrical serve of a flailing boy — and less formal pastimes, like wandering into convenience stores for supplies, crossing one of the crowded bridges leading to Siesta Key and the beach, driving north and dropping in at Joel’s house, stopping over afterward at Roger’s. There always came that point in tennis when the black clouds appeared from the gulf, and the rain came down, and everyone bolted off the courts and drank water. Then, just as suddenly, the sky would clear, and the world would become loud with the sounds of seagulls calling and smaller birds chattering. The sun would emerge, and we’d pick up mid-game, aiming to avoid puddles. After the game, we would walk out to the parking lot and my uncle would open the trunk of his car.
The trunk, as I see it now, was a physical repository, a form of warehouse or armory, in which my uncle secreted aspects of himself that would become, as the years went by, forbidden, denied, historical, forgotten. The things in the trunk were symbols of whatever in our lives — his and mine — might one day be taken away, totems representing sex and sport, music and work, eating and drinking, even talking and laughing. Together, my uncle and I stood in the parking lot with our hands in our pockets, staring at the pieces of the life we desired; and occasionally I would reach in and remove something, an article of clothing, for instance, or Eldridge’s disassembled fishing rod in its case. I might hold and admire the object, then put it back in its place, after which Eldridge would close the trunk and we would walk around to the sides of the car, open the doors, and get in. Our conversations were perfect. Whenever I said to him, in language sometimes having to do with home, sometimes with school, that I wanted to escape my situation, he nodded and suggested that we drive out to Siesta Key and have a swim at the beach before the sun went down.
The last day I ever spent with him, we played doubles with Roger and Joel. From the courts we could see Sarasota Bay and, lit violet against the red sunset, the shell-shaped roof of the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, known because of its paint job as the Purple Cow. After the game, my uncle and I walked to the car. As usual, we peered into, rummaged through, and slammed shut the trunk. Possibly I asked Eldridge about M. Had she been to visit? Was she coming? Did he love her? Did she love him? Would they ever get married? Why not? Then we drove to Joel’s house, in a development near Bradenton. Immediately after we’d walked in the front door, the telephone rang. Joel’s wife answered, put the phone down on a counter, and said, “Bob, it’s your mother. She’s been calling.”