Save the Florida sanity

Old Professor Michelson walked along his neighborhood streets disconsolately. He was one of those retirees who could not quit working. He had a lab out back of his house and a mess inside it A widower, he couldn’t bother to keep the place once his wife died. He’d been a slob before he married. During marriage, he helped his wife keep the place up because he liked being with her, but when she died he could not bring himself to care anymore. So he liked to be in his lab more than his house, but things weren’t working in his lab.

Professor Michelson was a plant geneticist.

He lived in Florida along the Gulf of Mexico. The streets of his town seemed to be warm and wet at night. He wished they had paved the streets with cobblestones. He thought he would like the way cobblestones looked in humid weather. Just plain old Florida asphalt, though. The stuff they wanted to do the whole state in, or so it seemed. He could never explain to himself why the hell he lived here, except he really liked working with the remaining wild flora. They had some good plants in Florida.

Prof. Michelson looked like your typical dowdy professor. Short, a little dumpy, very pale, long beard, bald. Disheveled clothes. He wore shorts, that was the only difference. Shorts and beat up, short sleeved dress shirts because he was a Floridian and it got hot there. As he walked, he looked up at the moonlit palm trees or down at the dirty sidewalks. Never much ahead of him though. He had a thoughtful look on his face but he wasn’t really thinking.

He came to a little park, about two square city blocks big. It was mostly just grass with trees and benches at its edges. One swingset at the far side. He’d driven by the place a thousand times but never given it much thought. City parks were long ago and far away for Prof. Michelson. He did see this rather heavyset man who looked like maybe he was one of the many mixed-race people you found in this part of the country. He couldn’t guess which ones. The man dressed much the same as professor Michelson, only his short sleeve shirt hung open, and he had some sort of black concert t-shirt on under it. Weezer, maybe? Belly?

The professor half looked at the man, much younger than he, maybe thirty’ish. Gave a very small nod and kept glancing around at everything not human, everything far in front of him. The man perked up when he saw the professor, though.

“Hey, Professor!” the man said.

The Professor stopped and looked back. The man got up and extended his hand. It looked as though the act of moving so suddenly caused him to lose some breath, though.

“Professor! Hey! Whatcha up to? I guess you don’t remember me. Just had one of your intro classes and I wasn’t any good, but…” the man looked off like he realized this was awkward and that - honestly - he had no reason to interrupt the professor from whatever he was doing or thinking on. Then, in the blithe way of some social outcasts, decided he didn’t really care, “I’m just sitting here thinking,” he announced.

“I… hello.” the professor began. “What was your name?”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry… I forget myself. Look at me. My name is Johnny Joe. Johnny Joe, Prof. Michelson. I never forgot you, no sir. Though it took me a while to realize what you got me thinking about. What are you doing?”

“I’m just sort of walking, I…”

“I was just thinking I’d like to have someone to have a beer with, Professor. Can I buy you a beer or two?”

“I don’t…”

“C’mon, man. You got something cooking?”

Which struck the professor like a thunderclap against a cooking souffle. No. No really, he didn’t have anything much going on. Not now.

The two men went into the handiest bar, which was a semi-seedy old Florida Jimmy Buffett’ified sort of dive, whose faux nets and parrots had probably been put up before Johnny Joe had ever been to one of Prof. Michelson’s classes. The two men got to talking about life. It turned out, they were both single men in the middle of lifelong projects that weren’t going so well. The Professor told Johnny how he was trying to develop a species of plant that would live in the same environment as the Florida manatee, serve as a food source to them and protect them from motor boats at the same time.

So, Johnny Joe talked excitedly about how he was trying to protect manatees, as well. “Cause I learned about them in your class, prof. Your class. You betcha.” Johnny Joe had done poorly in the professor’s class because he was a sculptor, an artist type. Since college, though, he had learned about mechanics and welding and other down to earth things. He made useful art, he said. “Or, at least, art you can do shit with. I don’t know if you’d want to do it, but you can, you might…”

He said he was working on a sculpture for the manatees, too. Only, not to build awareness about them, but to protect them. Something great! Something militant!

The prof got a little interested, then, listening to Johnny Joe. He was militant as well, even in his advanced years. What the professor meant by protecting manatees was that he wanted to make a plant that would catch in a motor boat’s propeller and wreck the thing. Rip it right off. This is how 66 year old men can be militant.

So after three, maybe four Miller Lites, the two men made their way over to Johnny Joe’s place.

Johnny Joe had built an enormous frame model of a manatee, probably thirty times the size of a real one. Three times as big as a motor boat.

“What I’m gonna do, professor. What I’m gonna do when I can get the money, is cover this here thing in plastic panels. The steel undergirding, that’s indestructible, see. I’ll put on plastic panels I can replace and it will look like a huge, huge fucking manatee, floating around on top of the water! I’ll ride it around ramming boats, or at least running them out their habitat, you know? The plastic can break off but the steel will do it’s job. You bet!” Johnny Joe’s eyes were wild. The professor wondered if the boy had ever sold anything he’d built.

“How’s it going to move around?” the professor asked?

“I’m going to make it human powered. Bicycle-like, you know. Pedal driven propellers. Figure it will take two or three people but we can do ‘er.” Heave-ho - away we go.

The professor looked at the giant steel frame and at the flabby figure of Johnny Joe. Suddenly, the professor experienced a contempt he rarely felt, the contempt of an ally in a fight that meant as much to him as life, but that ally’s wasting time, good energy. He looked right at Johnny Joe’s belly and pointed at it as he said, “You know nine Lance Armstrongs couldn’t move that monstrosity across a swimming pool. You get that, right?”

Johnny Joe’s back yard was a pathetic little rag of turf, littered with welding parts, scraps of medal, chunks of painted plastic. Michelson could see this as the birthplace of a million bad, futile, spacey ideas that must have alienated dozens of initial well wishers. He had this little one room house and he had this sad little boat sitting over by the back door. It sat on a hand-truck and had algae all over its bottom. The boy really did go out watching manatees all the time, the professor thought.  He’s not a poseur. Just an idiot. A poor idiot, too.

But Johnny Joe looked unshaken. He just laughed. “Let’s get back to that bar, professor. Maybe if we get some liquor in you, you’ll start seeing the way the thing will work. Or you won’t - but at least we’ll be drinkin’.”

And with that the professor felt the contempt leave him. It was as if, at age 65, he discovered a back hallway of adulthood he hadn’t known, that he’d always passed by without looking in on. He might as well have a few more drinks. Why not? His experimental plants wouldn’t get any wirier if he went to the bar or sat in the lab and stared at them longer.