For most of my life I have been cursed with the ability to see situations from two sides at once - struggling to inhabit the character of myself, and simultaneously seeing myself from the outside as I think others might see me. I’m not suggesting that this provides me with any greater empathy or understanding. It’s just one more way of separating myself from the action, and I often feel like more of a spectator than an actor in the play that is my life.
I feel like I have my feet planted firmly on opposite sides of a great divide. I am a middle child with an older brother who is the quintessential literary-minded genius. My youngest brother is finishing out a career in the Marine Corp’s Special Operations division. I also have an older step brother who was in the Marine Corp when I was young. I have a lot of siblings, but it’s basically a Marine sandwich full of academics and a firefighter right in the middle, for spice. We had step and half siblings that came and went at each of our different houses, but it was my older “real” brother, Taylor, and I that spent our most formative years together, shuttling back and forth between the separate households of our divorced parents.
Neither one of us was much into sports, BMX bikes, or petty theft, which set us apart from the kids in our suburban Florida neighborhood. Maybe we were just snobs, but we always viewed ourselves as being different than the neighbors. This was central Florida in the eighties, and our family was decidedly more liberal, arguably more educated, and possibly even a little better off than most of our neighbors. My stepfather worked for the county and my mother was an administrative assistant at the local university. My brother and I played on a few soccer teams that did nothing but lose, the Boy Scouts had politely asked us to leave, and until we discovered the physicality of music (and punk rock especially), ours was a relatively sedate childhood. My brother was, I think, content to live in a world of books, music, and poetry, but my tolerance for these things was limited. I despised his habit of carrying books around with him, burying his face in them whenever there was a lull in conversation. I would scream at him as he read and he would sit, unfazed, behind a wall that I could never breach.
We were both creative children, but we came at it from completely different angles. I built things and took things apart. Taylor did the same with language. Neither one of us has really changed. For me then it was cameras, watches, music boxes, and model rockets - anything I could get my hands on that contained a little mystery. Soon my parents were giving me broken clock radios and old televisions to keep me from disassembling everything of value in the house.
Taylor and I established a system of building model airplanes analogous to the relationship between the two of us. He would read the instructions carefully and direct my efforts while I freed each piece from its delicate plastic grid and glued it to the next one with the tiniest dab of glue. During one of these model building episodes, my grandfather called my mother and asked her what the boys were up to. She explained that we were building a model and what our division of labor strategy was. “Don’t tell Devon I said this,” my grandfather said to my mother, “but Taylor is going to make a lot more money than him.” He was wrong though. Neither one of us makes any money.
For most of my childhood, my father worked in a shop that made wood window shutters. The shop went through several different names during his twenty-plus years there, but we never called it anything other than “Shutters”. Knowing how I loved to tinker, he would come home with bags of scrap lumber and hardware. I found the tiny brass screws and the spring-loaded bullet catches especially captivating. On weekend camping trips, we would dig a fire pit and assemble these pieces into elaborate dollhouse structures that we called “Hitler Houses”. Like most of my dad’s little jokes, I had no idea where the name came from, but I assume now that it was a reference to the 1933 Reichstag fire, but who knows, I still haven’t asked him. We’re not really talking.
We would stuff each of the little rooms of our Hitler House with newspaper, douse it all in lighter fluid and set it ablaze. These exercises in architecture, design, materials science, and engineering ended in what was, for me, the best type of pyromaniac finale.
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Entering the workforce with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, my father viewed his life after college as a long series of failures – never living up to what he thought was his true potential. Later in life, my brother may have been interested in dissecting the finer points of Marx and Engels with him, but I thought his life at Shutters was far more interesting than his degree or his intellectual aspirations.
His frustrations with himself, in many ways, mirrored his frustrations with the schools of thought to which he had bound himself. This was America in the eighties. We were witnessing the fall of communism and the supposed triumph of capitalism. Reaganomics was winning out over Marxist ideology every day. It frustrated him to no end, but either through simple curiosity, or a masochistic desire to wallow in that which he despised, he always had a hard-bound copy of the latest Lee Iacocca biography or Trump’s “Art of the Deal” on the coffee table next to the big blue glass ashtray, the little hand carved Persian boat, and the ever-present pull tab can of Budweiser.
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At Shutters, Dad worked in the office while my stepmother, ran the finishing department - working alongside a group of women who meticulously sanded each shutter’s dozens of wooden louvers by hand. I loved riding to work in the truck on summer mornings - the early morning commute that was so different from my usual walk to school. Mugs of black coffee. Me riding in the middle of the bench seat between the two of them, straddling the gear shift, bare legs sticking out of too-short corduroy shorts, studying the “H” shaped diagram on the gear shifter’s handle, the worn pattern in the leather where my father rested the thick fingers of his turquoise-ringed his hand.
Shutters was a place where things got done, and the progress was easy enough to track. Raw lumber came in one end of the shop, finished shutters and bags of sawdust came out the other end. Line shafts still ran the length of the factory ceiling where wide fabric belts would attach the spinning shafts to the flywheels of the antique saws, drills, planers, and jointers. I once helped to search through a pile of sawdust next to the jointer where a new worker had just lost a finger to the spinning blades of the machine. Unlike a table saw or a band saw, jointers don’t take things off cleanly. As my current business partner said to one of the new guys in our shop, “If this thing takes your fingers off, you’re not getting them back. You’ll just have, like, shorter fingers.” Our search through the pile of wood chips was futile, the fresh chips being just a little more moist and pink than they normally would have been.
The language spoken at Shutters was a fluid mix of English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Bulgarian, and it was always an adventure to see what each person was having for lunch in the break room. These pre-dawn chats over weak coffee, in the presence of so many new and interesting characters had me spellbound. There was the weekend musician, the aspiring chef, the amateur archeologist - each also skilled with their hands and skilled in the art of casual conversation. These conversations were had for hours each day as they quietly hand-sanded yet another batch of louvers. I wanted to grow up to be like them - to spend my mornings on a cheap vinyl chair, its cracked upholstery covered in a light dusting of white lacquer overspray and saw dust, to hear the thunk of the time clock as people pushed their chairs back, groaned, and made some sort of “here we go again” joke.
My father and stepmother had worked at Shutters together for years. My mother had worked there as well. Then, at some point, my mother didn’t work there anymore, my parents weren’t married anymore, and my father and my stepmother were living together. Being seven-years-old at the time, this sequence of events was something I didn’t put together until years later. I remember passing through the new subdivision to our east as the two of them talked about their upcoming anniversary and how many years they had been together. I put my second-grade math skills to work and something didn’t add up to me.
We were headed towards the new stretch of Interstate 75 that connected Tampa to Sarasota and all points south. My dad had taken me out on that same stretch of road within days of its opening and we raced along its smooth black surface without another vehicle in sight, just he and I in a little beige Toyota pickup with fresh tires that hummed along on the slick new asphalt as he tried to get the speedometer up past 100. Open container laws were non-existent in Florida at the time, and I’m fairly certain that he had a can of Budweiser tucked between his legs, just as he did on any other outing that the two of us went on.
In a hazily remembered episode from early childhood, we were in the truck headed north on 56th Street at Fowler Avenue, on our way back to our apartment, when my mother and father were still living together. As we approached the intersection, we could see that the road ahead was closed. The Schlitz Light National Marathon was having its inaugural running from the Schlitz brewery on 30th Street down the as-yet-unfinished Fowler Avenue. A stream of Jim Fixx-inspired marathoners in silky shorts, tube socks, and Nike waffle treads were shuffling east on Fowler towards Temple Terrace. The police were out of their cars stopping traffic as the runners passed.
“What kind of bullshit is this?” my father asked the two small children in his car as he rolled down his window to question the police officer directing traffic.
This may be hard for some to imagine, especially those who may be dark-skinned, or foreign, but there was a time in America – and it wasn’t that long ago – when a shirtless, longhaired (White) hippie driver might intentionally (and somewhat hostilely) confront a police officer while driving -half drunk - in the middle of the day, with an open beer between his legs, and his two young children unbelted in the front seat of his pickup truck.
“What’s going on here?” he asked the cop from the open window of the truck.
“Sir, you’ll need to wait a few minutes until the last of the runners pass or turn around and go over to 301.”
“But I live right there!” my dad said, pointing at the apartment complex just north of the intersection.
“Sir, I’m sorry but you’ll have to wait until these runners pass. I can’t let anybody through.”
With that, he put the truck in gear, easing it slowly forward and causing the officer to side-step to avoid being hit.
“SIR! Do not go any further!” the cop said, strengthening his stance and thrusting his palm forward.
My dad grinned slightly and moved the truck forward another six inches, causing the officer to take a step back.
“THAT’S IT!” the copped yelled, turning around and dragging his heel across the pavement in front of the truck, drawing an imaginary line on the ground as he walked backwards across our path.
“If you cross this line, I’m taking you to jail!”
With that, Dad looked casually both ways…and just went for it. The startled runners managed to avoid us as we moved slowly through the intersection, and their voices receded and mingled with the voice of the angry cop. And that was it. No chases. No shots fired. We turned into the apartment complex and parked in front of our unit - Apartment #1 – in full view of the street.
Possibly my most treasured photograph of my dad, and the one that I think works best as a portrait of him at the time, is a 3x4 Polaroid taken, I think, at Tampa’s annual Gasparilla parade, although it could just as easily have been taken at the Daytona 500 or the San Antonio Rattlesnake Festival. In deep, dramatic Polaroid blues and blacks, the photo shows his midsection from about his belly button to his thighs. He’s shirtless, skinny - skinnier than I have ever been - wearing a pair of cutoff Levi’s so short that the tips of the white pockets are visible poking out below the ragged denim hem. He has the plastic ring of what’s left of a six pack of Budweiser looped over the metal button of his cutoffs, and the sixth and final beer swings from the otherwise-empty holder. The sun is shining. He has a degree in philosophy.