Crazy Larry

It's not a long nor complicated story.  It's about boiled peanuts.  This is Crazy Larry.  Give me a minute and I'll make the connection.  

At the gym. . . yea, yea, it's about all I have outside my mother's house anymore, so give me a break. . . I was talking to a big guy about old Florida and how much things have changed.  He asked me if I'd ever been to some places that no longer existed in a Space Coast town fifty miles east of here.  I couldn't remember for sure.  I talked about some of the places I had been.  He said the town sure had changed.  I said that when I was a kid, we used to drive to the beach and the road there would be full of little roadside stands selling watermelons or strawberries or smoked mullet. . . tomatoes, citrus, preserves. . . and boiled peanuts.  Oh, he said, I love boiled peanuts.  

"Have you ever been to that brewery on the corner of Bumby and Robinson that has the great boiled peanuts?  They have them with multiple toppings.  Man. . . they are awesome."

After the gym, I was hungry, but I had gotten a late start and after showering it was mid-afternoon.  I decided that lunch would be a beer and boiled peanuts.  I'd met people at the brewery before for lunch or a beer, always in the daytime, mostly C.C., but I'd never driven across town to go there alone.  Then I remembered that Crazy Larry was a regular there.  This is the same Crazy Larry from the Dancing videos I've posted shot by my mountain buddy out in Yosemite.  Larry goes out to stay with him and his family several times a year.  

I met Larry long, long ago through my dead ex-friend, Brando.  Larry was a pretty competitive marathon man and he had hooked up with Buz for his mountain adventures.  Indeed, when I got to know Larry first, I think, was the time Brando and I partnered up to take people on a climb of Popocatopetl in Mexico.  But that is a whole other story.  

I had a party at my house before the climb.  At the time, I had my half malamute half German Shepard, Wiley.  She was allowed to roam and she just mingled with the crowd trying to cadge a snack here and there.  But Wiley had a "bullshit" detector.  She really didn't pay much attention to people, but when someone a little "off" would walk by in the street, her radar would go off and I'd have to corral her.  And I have to say, she was always, always right. 

The night of the party, I heard her in back of the house going nuts.  I ran out to see what was going on, and there was Larry on top of one of the parked cars.  Wiley had "treed" him.  

Larry was a NASA engineer who wanted to be an astronaut.  He never got to be one, of course, but they used him for all the tests before they tried them on the candidates.  

"They put me in the centrifuge and spun me around until it felt like my guts were going to come out of my mouth," he once told me.  They didn't take the centrifugal force up as high after that.  The astronauts got an easier ride.  

At the time, Larry ate once a day.  He went to work and spent his lunch hour in the gym.  When he got home, he'd put on his shoes and run ten or so miles.  And after that, he'd have dinner--a fruit and cheese board and two bottles of wine.  

Every day.  

When I got to the brewery, I saw Larry at the counter looking like a bum asking for change.  I ordered my beer and peanuts at the other end, and by the time I got them, Larry was seated alone at a big table working on his scratch off lottery tickets.  This is what he does every single day, so I am told by my mountain buddy.  He comes to the brewery with a bunch of lottery tickets and drinks beer until five.  Then he gets some dinner to take back to his house, eats and goes to bed.  Early.  Drunk.  

I decided to sit with Larry.  

At first, he didn't know who I was.  He asked me some questions that made no sense to me, and then he said, "Wait. . . I've got the wrong person."  

Larry was already shot.  He pointed to the beer.  "This puts holes in my brain," he said.  Indeed it has.  Like my dead ex-friend Brando, his years of drinking have lowered his tolerance.  He's already drunk after one beer now.  

Years ago, my mountain buddy had started his own travel business and was taking people to climb all over the world.  One spring, he asked me to come along on a trip he was taking in the Sierras.  He wanted me to babysit a rough fellow I knew who had signed on for the ten day trip.  

"Just come out and keep him out of trouble," he said.  

I did.  

This fellow was a real handful, a drug addict coke head I'd known from the old steroid gym since he was a teen.  He'd had a rough life and fell in with the wrong crowd, but he was world class strong and later a champion kick boxer.  But he got himself in trouble with Johnny Law on a bad coke deal, beat up two policemen, and ran away.  He did a few years in prison for that one. 

Crazy Larry was on that trip, too.  For a week, we bushwhacked through the wilderness, obviously the first into the backcountry that year for we saw no tracks other than this of animals in the winter's snow.  It was a rough trip, but Crazy Larry was always on my mountain friends' heels and the cokehead was always on mine.  

At the end of the trip, we were in Fresno at an Italian restaurant.  That's another story, too.  I'll skip ahead.  Larry and the cokehead had been too long without their meds.  Larry drank far too much and he laid down in the hallway to his room when we went back to the hotel.  My mountain friend dragged him down the hallway and into his room and put a pillow under his head on the floor.  It was midnight.  

Larry had a flight home early, and at five, he was out running his ten miles.  I'm just saying, Larry was tough.  

"Do you still eat once a day?" I asked him.  

He nodded.  "I don't get hungry until around seven," he said.  

"You've been doing that your whole life."

We recounted some stories, Larry having trouble remembering details.  He told me in agonizingly slow and confused time about his last trip home from Yosemite.  Multiple legs, multiple delays and cancellations.  

"Larry, you're rich.  Why are you taking cheap flights.  You can fly direct into San Francisco from here, and then into Fresno."

"That's what I'm doing next time.  I'm flying first class direct."

"Are you still putting in your miles every day?"

"Yea.  I walk.  I can't run anymore, but I walk."

And so it goes.  

Larry scratched off another lotto ticket.  

"Fifteen dollars," he said.  

"What's the most you've ever won with those scratch offs?" I asked him. 

"Five thousand.  You have to go to a special office to cash one over five hundred.  It was a pain in the ass.  When I won five-thousand the second time, I gave the card to the owner of the brewery.  I didn't want to go through all that again.  Now I get hugs when I come in," he smiled.  "They love me, and. . . " he lowered his voice," I get free beer!"

Fucking Crazy Larry.

Beer and boiled peanuts gone, I said, "Larry, I'm going.  Let me get a picture to send to our friend."

And this is what I got.  

That was more than a minute, I know.  

Oh. . . I guess the cat is out of the bag.  What happened to Sober October?  Yea.  That beer in the afternoon was too good.  

Saturday.  I have my film Leica.  I'm determined to make some photos.  The film Leica is fun.  I will try to get to the Irish pub today and see if I can make something "noir" in there today.  Maybe.  I've lost so much of the old chutzpah, it is always "maybe" now.  But I am determined to "do photography"again.  

I just need to find some of the old mojo.  

"I need to visit soon and do another Photoshoot with you."

Indeed you do.