Chickenhawk: Back in the World

April 1978—I decided we’d move to Florida. I’d visited Florida often while we were in New York, just to get away. Patience usually stayed behind because the factory was like a young child, it couldn’t be trusted on its own. On one of my visits in 1977, I heard that some property on the Santa Fe River northwest of Gainesville was going to be sold in ten-acre tracts. We’d dreamed of living in the woods. I flew back to New York, told Patience about it, and she got on a plane that night. Two days later, she came back with a contract for deed on a triangular piece of land with over eight hundred feet of river frontage.

So, when we quit, we had a place to go. Uncleared wild north Florida woods just outside High Springs, but it seemed infinitely superior to the landscape of junked cars and squalor we had lived in.

We had an apartment full of stuff and had to move it ourselves, so we had a giant garage sale to thin it down. As spendthrifts, Patience and I, in two and a half years in New York, had managed to save about three thousand dollars. Rather than wasting money renting a truck and a storage warehouse in Florida, I decided to buy a school bus in New Jersey for fifteen hundred dollars. I brought it to Brooklyn and loaded it up with everything we owned. Bill Smith, who thought I’d finally gotten smart, helped us.

Patience and I figured that when we got to Florida, we could live in the bus while we built a place. Unfortunately, there was no room left. So we drove first to Maine—towing the Roach—and sold our piano to Patience’s mother and gave Patience’s sister, Vickie, boxes of books. The load lightened; we had space to set up some cots and stretch out. We drove from Maine to Florida in four days.

We arrived at the property on a warm spring morning and drove in as far as we could on our sandy road. The three of us got out and tromped around the woods to scout out a suitable path for a road to the river. The route decided, we worked like mad people, hacking down small trees and clearing brush with an intensity that was more than eagerness. We were obsessed. We wanted the bus to be where we imagined it should be: sitting on the riverbank, now. Patience and I hacked; Jack dragged the branches away. Late that afternoon, Patience and I, exhausted as first-day stevedores, drove the bus along our rough path and parked it next to the river. It felt like a victory.

The next morning, I stood on the riverbank and wondered what to do next. We had about a thousand dollars, the school bus, and a mortgage. We would soon be out of money.

Probably the only clever thing I did in New York was to have Abe meet me at my attorney’s office on Park Avenue, the same firm I’d used for my patent search, to negotiate a severance contract before I left. We couldn’t agree on a contract, but Abe knew I was serious. I left New York without a severance agreement, but I promised I wasn’t going to give up.

I called Abe and told him I wanted to come up and finish our business. He said okay and even agreed to have his company pay my way. When I got to New York, Abe surprised me by almost immediately offering to pay me eight hundred a month for two and a half years. For over two years Abe and I had competed in a game for which I had no talent and eventually lost. I guess he liked the way I lost. I agreed to his terms: in return for the money, I would not compete with him. I would’ve paid him to keep me out of the goddamn mirror business.

When I got back to Florida, I felt pretty good. I had some breathing space.

My dad invited us down to his Deerfield Beach condominium. “Now that you’re out of the mirror business,” Dad said, “you should get into the real estate business.” He said he was making tons of money and he’d teach me how to do it. Real estate wasn’t for me and I said no, and it really disappointed him. I still needed money to build a place to live, though. Dad gave me the name of a banker who’d lend me three thousand dollars.

When we got back to High Springs, I went to lumberyards and got prices for all the stuff you need to build a house. I sketched the largest cabin that I could build for three thousand dollars, a little thing sixteen by twenty feet. I made the roof steeply pitched so that the attic could be used for living space, too; that would give us about six hundred square feet. It wouldn’t be enough for Jack (now fourteen), but he was living in a tent next to the school bus now and it would be a relative improvement if he could move into the bus when we moved into the cabin.

For six months we lived in the woods developing a routine. Jack drove out to the school bus stop each morning and ran home in the afternoons. (He was on the school’s cross-country team.) Patience walked out later and got the Roach and often went to the library in town to use their bathroom (the mosquitos were fierce that summer). I’d quit smoking and started jogging.