So I’m driving back home and the rain is really getting thick, almost to the point where people put on their hazard flashers, and it strikes me that this would be a great time to get a couple beers and drive down to the beach to watch the waves come in. But it’s hard to turn around in traffic when nobody can see, so the rain and the cars just keep pushing me closer to the condo. And me, I can’t see much either, even with my wipers pumping as fast as they can, but I can see a Circle K, so I make my way to the left to get in that turning lane.

I pull up to the curb in front. Even exiting the car as fast as I can, I get half- soaked by the time I reach the door. I’ll get the other half on the way back.

There aren’t many people in the Circle K, just a couple of sleeveless guys, me, and the guy working there who has a little kid following him around asking him a question about every single thing that he does. “Why are you sweeping the floor?” The kid asks. “Because it’s my job.”

I grab a couple of Heineken 16 ouncers because you can do that in Florida, buy individual beers like that, and they have a combo deal where you can get two for $3.50. And head up to the counter.

“How’s it going?” I ask.

“Oh, busy,” he says, pushing up his glasses.

“Plus you’ve got your boy here.”

“Oh, no, he’s not mine. Oh, no. No. Way.”

“I thought he called you Dad when he asked what you were doing.”

“Nope. Not me. He’s not mine.”

So I guess he belongs to one of the sleeveless guys. But I watched them, and I didn’t see the connection. So I turn and look at the rain. “There’s nothing to do but go for it,” I say.

“Florida is an easy place to drown,” the checkout guy says and turns to the next customer.

I’ll get to that.

Not too many drivers pray for the rain to keep going, but I do. I’m trying to make it back to the island, to the town, to the road that will get me to the jetty, where I can sit in the car and watch the waves come in while I sip a beer. If the rain lets up, there’s no point. So when it seems like it might be easing, I drive faster in my personal race against time.

It’s not easy to get there. The whole town’s ripped up and Main Street is closed and I angle my way through side streets, moving ever toward the goal of the Gulf. Going too fast makes the water arc in giant wings on both sides of the car. When it rains like this, there’s nowhere for the water to go and you could hydroplane yourself right into a motel.

This sleepy West Coast of Florida town isn’t designed for much beyond being itself, but people keep coming, keep retiring, and the Atlanta Braves will set up shop soon just down the road, so shit’s about to get real. No one’s talking about it here, and if you ask them, they won’t say much besides “More traffic.” And now this town is added to that long and ever-growing list of places that just got overwhelmed by people. So I, just a visitor myself, am going to look at nothing more than the gray clouds, the yellowish-green waves, and the iron rocks that buttress the shore. 

There is a certain kind of person who likes to sit at the beach in the rain, and there are four or five cars there when I pull up in front of the boulders. One of them is empty. The one on the right has a woman in it, I can guess from her hair, but that’s all I can see. In my own cocoon, I sit first with the car off while I situate a beer in the cup holder and pop it open, listening to the rain pelt the roof, but then I want to see, too, so I turn the car on, don’t start it, and set the wipers on low. Every 29 seconds, I get a clear swipe of the outside world of stone, sea, and sky.

I’m about to take a sip when a police car crosses in my rear view, slowly cruising the parking lot by the jetty. Seems like a strange place to patrol in a torrential downpour. I guess he’s looking for a me, a guy who wants to drink a beer in a thunderstorm and not be bothered about it. I’m not legal, and I wait him out. When he’s gone, I find an old styrofoam cup on the floor and pour the beer into that. Just a guy watching the weather and sipping iced tea.

Or maybe he’s looking for the lost—people fishing on the jetty that need to leave, whoever was in the car to my left. I mean, who’s out here anyhow? Who are the other mes? This is the end of town, the edge of the world as it feels now with the whole Gulf in front of me, and if you aren’t in your car or outside, there’s really no other place to be. But I’m only creating mysteries for myself, I guess—the cop has done a perfunctory loop and gone.

I sat like this, just like this, on the other shore, decades ago, out at the cliffs in Santa Cruz and some small part of that old feeling starts to come back. Then, I was lost, the only connection between a suicidal friend named Kevin and the rest of the world, knowing that anything I did to upset the pretense of our daily motel existence would likely be the trigger that put him into action. They’ll tell you that every day along the California coast is 70 and sunny, but in the winter, it can rain for days on end, cold rain, and we had reached the point where I had the car and he had the room. 

It wasn’t meant to be like that. We went out there to find jobs after college, our heads full of Kesey and Kerouac, Hemingway and Steinbeck, and the great dream of America that was still alive back then. But the people we know the best have daily plans that we don’t know at all, and when he told me his, there was little point in working, and Kevin would try to sweat out his demons playing pickup ball with U of Santa Cruz students, while I hung out among the Deadheads in the park.

Eventually, I would just go out to the cliffs with a journal, write it down, whatever “it” was that day, try to figure it out, but there was no figuring it out. If I had money, I’d bring a Red Burrito combo from Del Taco. Sometimes I would bring my guitar and try to sing away the despair with the songs that meant the most to me that I knew how to play. They were a kind of primal scream, an unheard shout to the heavens in that space capsule of an automobile hurtling itself through nothingness in the pounding rain. There was great comfort in that car, alone and away from everything. But I came back to that room and his dark gaze with no clear solution as we slowly made our peace and decided where to go eat and get shitfaced on bottles of wine, an extravagant end-of-day ritual courtesy of his trust fund.

We spend our days trying to make logical sense of the irrational acts of others, and, even more, of ourselves. But I didn’t know that then. Then everything was possible and I called a friend for help and that set everything in motion. 

He ended up in Michigan and died there. Alone. In between, there were failed and semi-successful attempts at this and that on his part and on ours, those of us who knew him and thought we could save him. Today, they’d say it was chemical, treatable, but there was something more than that. There was a light that had gone out in him. Even knowing the tragedies of his life, I still don’t know what it was, and, with age, I no longer mind the not knowing.

And now I sit here in front of the water, an old man with far too many beers on the road between then and now, trying to hide his cup from the cops. If that is my rebellion against these days—I gain nothing from it, it offers nothing but trouble, and no one knows about it. If I’m lucky.

Florida is an easy place to drown. 

I’ve been down here long enough to know that. When the housing market crashed in ‘08, and the Russians were buying up everything in sight, I snapped up a condo dirt cheap, too. Granted, it is in a retirement community, but that hasn’t really mattered. I belong and I don’t and that’s allowed because ultimately there’s no one here but people getting older behind the doors of their condominiums. I’m old enough, just not retired or socially-engaged. So despite what the billboards would like to suggest about a place like this, it isn’t one big social beehive. Yeah, I got the invites at first, but you ignore enough of those and keep an irregular schedule and people leave you alone.

Me, I’ve got a space perfect for simple living, manicured and landscaped everything, a pool, grills, and golf courses I never use, a sheltered parking space and a front door on the third floor, up high for when the hurricanes come.

And now that cop is driving past again, twice in twenty minutes. He slows behind me, perusing my car from the back. Or is it my paranoia, the hyper-sensitivity of the guilty? Is he looking beyond me at the same gull on the rocks that I’ve been staring at? All I know is that time is frozen, I’m holding the cup low, and the rain doesn’t feel like the protection that it did. But of course it is. 

What small town public servant is going to get out of his car in a downpour to see if some old guy is drinking Heineken out of a used styrofoam cup? You’d weigh the same odds he would and you’d decide to let me drown in my car. You could always come back after it was over and oversee the dredging operation, so to speak. And so he moves on.

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Robert Bires (he/him) writes in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  He has published a variety of fiction and poetry in such journals as Sky Island Journal, Piker Press, The Centrifictionist, JAKE, and Dissident Voices.  He posts on Twitter @1GreatSongADay