It should be noted that I sometimes talk too much - particularly when I am excited - and I certainly was excited on this occasion. This behavior wears Cari down. I know that she loves me very much, but there is only so much enthusiasm a person can take, and when I am excited about something (anything) I roll downhill with quite a bit of force. It is a wonder that she tolerates my stories and though I can see her contempt start to rise at the outset of one, most times my excitement gets the best of me and I must proceed.
Some years back, an associate editor for Esquire magazine named John Berendt wrote a book called Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil which chronicled the murder trial of a prominent Savannah resident named Jim Williams. A New York Times bestseller for a record 216 weeks, the book was a "fun read", containing a murder mystery and a menagerie of bizarre characters that painted the town of Savannah in a mystical light. When I moved to Savannah in 1997, Clint Eastwood and his crew happened to be shooting the movie adaptation of the book in Forsyth Park about three stories below my apartment. The film by all accounts was horrible, which was too bad because the cast was fantastic. But, even the best laid plans... you know. I enjoyed the book and treated it as a reference for the things that I might want to visit or recreate when I moved into my new town. My roommate, who had lived in Savannah for a number of years couldn't stand it. In fact, I think the copy of the book I have was his at one point; He was all too willing to give it up. His main problem with the novel was the inflated characterizations of the citizens of Savannah. He claimed to know some of them and said that none of them were as flamboyant or interesting as the book portrayed. He was right. Through the years, I met some of the people as well and none of them lived up to the larger than life personas they had been assigned.
But here is where my roommate and I have a difference in opinion. It didn't bother me that these people fell short of their billing because I never really expected them to live up to it in the first place. As a writer, I understand that it is necessary to pad real life people a bit for effect. If you didn't there would be very few interesting books written about actual people. Experiences are enhanced by knowledge of the people involved. A story about your friend is funny to you, but would mean almost nothing out of context when relayed to a perfect stranger. So, if you want to write a book about a fantastical place, about a unique group of people that is intended to be read by millions with no frame of reference, you had better err on the side of the absurd rather than the routine. To my mind it is not a lie or an outright deception, rather an amplification - and that is okay with me. In my opinion, the only time an author ought to be completely accurate when writing about another person is when they are writing their biography or their obituary, and my guess is that Berendt meant to write neither.
Some writers inflate characters, some conjure them out of thin air. But I think most writers succumb to a pleasant amount of what I call selective remembering. I know that I do. Selective remembering isn't fabrication as much as it is reconstruction. It is the combination of character, events, and most importantly, time. Time to forget the mundane and let the sublime marinate. Time for the mind to fill in the gaps and explain the nuances that were not evident as it experienced it. I think that all art is pushed by this phenomenon to some extent. If not, wouldn't we just be reading stories about people as ordinary as our neighbors or looking at paintings that we could not discern from photos?
All of that being said, what follows is a true story, at least in as much as it was relayed to me truthfully, which I believe that it was. While it could be argued that stories have a way of being embellished as they are told and re-told, I know the subject of this tale and I can fully vouch that his life is so fantastically depraved that the only reason I relay this story is because other ones are beyond belief.
The man's name was Jerome. We were employed by the same company for a number of years at or about the turn of the last century in a place called Skidaway Island, Ga. Skidaway Island was and is home to a gated private community called The Landings, which at the time was the largest private golf club in the United States. The Landings consisted of 6 golf courses serviced by four maintenance facilities and over 100 employees working in various horticultural departments in order to keep them pristine. Jerome was one of those people.The first time I ever heard this story about Jerome, I was at a pizza place called Vinnie Van Go-go's in the city market area of downtown Savannah. I was eating with my boss and several other co-workers when we began to compare notes on the biographies of the crazy people we had worked with in the golf course industry. I had played my hand, telling them about a man named Eddie that I had worked with at a previous job. Eddie was the first illiterate adult I had ever met. A fact that I discovered by accident one day when I asked him to help me interpret a pesticide label. He signed his employee handbooks, insurance forms, and the back of his paychecks with a wild scribble that was rarely the same twice. He was also nearly toothless which relegated him to a diet of rice, some sort of gravy, and meat that had been slow cooked until wilted. Eddie had lived a difficult life, and by all accounts had not been graced with fortune either inherited or earned. It was difficult to see him struggle through each day and it would have been downright heartbreaking if he hadn't been one of the biggest assholes on the planet. In the eight months I had worked with Eddie he had cursed at me on nearly a daily basis, thrown a wrench across the maintenance shop which found its stopping point in the spot on my back between my shoulder blades, and on the day I left that job for a new one, he whipped an empty liter of Jack Daniel's Whiskey at my truck as I exited the parking lot. The panel agreed, Eddie was a character. But, I was told, he was nothing compared to Jerome. As it turns out, they were right.
When I met Jerome he had been living on the porch of his mother's home where he slept in a garish coffin - the result of a series of events that are quite unbelievable to anyone who had not met him, but seemed matter of fact to those who knew him well. The coffin in question had been purchased at an estate sale earlier in the year by Jerome's mother. A sad effort in low-country funeral planning, it was intended for Jerome's stepfather who had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Jerome had been living in a mobile home with his girlfriend, but had recently been evicted due to non-payment of lot rent. His girlfriend left him, he was unemployed, and he was up to his ears in debt with bills from a local hospital. The medical bills stemmed from an incident that had occurred during the fulfillment of a bet he had made with one of his friends. The bet was that Jerome could shoot himself in the stomach with a .22 pistol and not have to be hospitalized. The wager was for twenty dollars.
To be certain, it was a stupid bet, but Jerome had an angle. He was sure that if he pulled the excess skin from around his middle, pinched it together and shot through it, he would not only fulfill the bet's parameters of shooting himself in the stomach, but also be able to secure the payoff by ably treating a subcutaneous flesh wound that in his mind couldn't be much worse than a large piercing.
As with all tragedies, there were a number of unforeseen circumstances that led to the dismantling of such a great plan. In his case, Jerome's undoing would be partially tied to the fact that he couldn't own a gun, the result of several gun related arrests. So, even with Georgia's liberal gun laws, Jerome would have to shoot himself in the stomach with another man's gun. Not possessing the instrument with which to shoot yourself could be a problem, but with Jerome's friends it would be easily remedied. The man who made the bet with him was more than happy to provide the firearm that he was sure would eventually secure him the twenty dollars. He even joked with Jerome that he wasn't going to charge him for the bullet the nurses in the ER were going to have to pull out of him. The fact that the gun was not his own was not Jerome's main problem, though it was a component. His main problem was physiological. Because although one .22 caliber pistol may not be remarkably different from another, the human response to a gunshot may be decidedly so.
As the story goes, the bet was to be fulfilled at a party on a friday evening at the gun owner's home on the back creek of Whitmarsh Island. By all accounts, there was a crowd of 15 to 20 people drinking and carrying on into the night - word traveled through the party about the bet, and like a sentence passed around a room it would grow more outlandish and grotesque as imagination and alcohol fueled its journey.
When it finally came time to make good on the bet, Jerome was all too happy to reveal his plan. It was late at night, so most of the partygoers had either headed home or moved on to a different affair. So it was that Jerome and two other men found themselves near the back creek with the moonlight bouncing off of the brackish water in the creek which was near high tide. Jerome waved the pistol in a defiant motion at the sky and then grabbing an impressive amount of flesh from the belly of his slender figure proceeded to fire a shot through his rolled skin.
The shot went through clean and if a person could have witnessed the event in super-slow motion they would have put twenty dollars on Jerome, too. But mere nanoseconds after the shot sliced through his bunched up stomach flab, nerve endings carried with great urgency a message to Jerome's brain telling it that he was under attack and that in preparation for another assault it would be for the best if he would collapse his frame to protect his vital organs and tense up every available muscle - including the ones in his right index finger that were wrapped a round the trigger of a .22 caliber pistol.
Although the first shot had performed as planned, the next one, as a consequence of Jerome's body buckling found a more direct route into his abdomen. A point blank shot that shredded its way through his intestines and finally came to rest near his bladder. Jerome was rushed to St. Joseph's hospital on the back of a Harley Davidson Super Glide, an unfortunate conveyance for such an occasion, but for various reasons, Jerome's friends didn't want police showing up at their home.
After an emergency operation and several weeks of recovery Jerome was ready to go back to work, but the construction company that he had been working for had replaced him and the phone calls were coming in requesting payment of his staggering balance to the hospital.
Broke, wounded, and with his reputation in shambles, Jerome drug himself to his mother's home just to be told that his room had been rented out for necessary income and that it was 4 months into a 6 month lease. Having little other option, Jerome decided to sleep for two months in the same vessel his stepfather would eventually sleep in for eternity.
After I finished telling my story about Jerome to Cari and assuring her that this wasn't even the best one, I looked at her face and noticed that it was filled with disgust. "What?" I said. Cari started gathering her things and heading inside, "I am not going to listen to your porch stories anymore," she said.
So there I was alone on the porch, glass of wine in my hand and I started to wonder to myself how much of my story was authentic. I catalogued the main story line and started to revisit the details as well when it struck me once again that I didn't really care if it was true or not. It was a good story.
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