I took off towards Titusville to meet my father's mother in her home, where we planned to carpool to Vero Beach to meet the rest of the nuclear family for Thanksgiving dinner. I was on an inverted sleep schedule. I drove a few hours south from Jacksonville and stopped in to a Waffle House in Port Orange for my 'mid-day' meal. I took a seat at the bar and got the look down from a couple guys who gave off the cop vibe. I took out a sketchbook and the waitress, who's name I believe was K... something, well I can't remember, but she was a beautiful light-skinned (that is, mostly black) young woman of 19 who upon seeing me pull out a pen and paper requested that I draw her portrait. I surprised her and myself with a not-half-bad portrait of her likeness in between her taking orders and me seasoning my sunny-side ups. A shuttle vehicle with handicap decals pulled up outside of the door and out came a man of the road, a southerner. Perhaps writing this so long after the event took place gives me that advantage of glorifying his entrance, but I do think there was something about his coming in to the Waffle House that night, like how a wet seagull finds a dry perch after a hurricane. He'd just come from the hospital, I imagined him as the type to rip the IV's out from his arms when he felt he'd been there long enough. He sat down and ordered an all American breakfast, no sooner did he start talking to the waitress, K... "You ever heard of Lynard Skynard?"
"Yeah."
"You like 'em?"
"Hell no. What do they sing again?"
Singing, "Sweet Home Alabama..."
"..Oh yeah, no."
"Well, you're looking at him."
He rolled up his sleeves of his flannel shirt to show his symmetrical tattooed forearms; Eagles triumphantly grasping an American flag on one forearm and the other grasping a 'rebel' flag.
Woof was the harmonica player for Lynard Skynard. He'd been around the world but most recently, in surgery rooms of three different hospitals, undergoing a cardiovascular bypass, which cost the rock star well over a million dollars (a great deal presumably in helicopter fuel, as he was airlifted from Knoxville to Chattanooga, then again to Port Orange to finish the surgery). Woof was looking to meet his son in Sarasota later that day so he too could spend Thanksgiving with his family. I told him I'm not going to Sarasota, but I am going to Titusville and offered him my passenger's seat. He said, paraphrasing, "Sure, anything that gets me closer". We buckled up and took off. He seemed like he was on the same wacky sleep pattern as I and we talked and listened to radio together as we drove south on 95, watching the sun rise and burn off morning fog from the swampland of central Florida. In our blissful conversation ( I was quite pleased, we seemed to get along swimmingly, and we maintained exchanging stories for hours) we overlooked the fact that Sarasota was in fact on the west coast of Florida. It began to near my proposed arrival time for /to pick up my grandma. Woof and I had to come to an agreement as to where I was to drop him off and how soon. He asked how the beaches were in Titusville. Nice, I replied. "Well, I'd really like to go to the beach today, let's just go there." In Titusville, we found ourselves with some extra time, so we went into a Village Inn for a cup of coffee. Woof asked the waitress if she ever heard of Lynard Skynard...
Woof had every colored hair, which poured out of the bottom of a black sun-soaked cowboy hat belonging at one point to a band-mate of his who'd since died in a tragic plane crash. He carried two harmonicas in his jean vest pocket. While listening to classic rock stations he would explain the songs to me (I was very curious) and in what ways the musician(s) or lyrics related to Lynard Skynard. It was fascinating.
After coffee, we took a drive towards Titusville beach. We felt a kinship, and upon turning onto a high causeway connecting the mainland from the barrier island of Cape Canaveral, 'Sweet Home Alabama' came on the radio. The sun gave off its first pure light of the day as we crested the Atlantic landscape. As romantic as it would have been to leave Woof there at the beach, we recognized somewhere along the way that he would have no way back to the mainland. He thought for a minute and we drove back into town to check out his gigging spots. Everything was closed for the holidays, so as the hour grew near that I was to meet my grandma, we decided on a McDonald's by the interstate. He said that his son would call soon and make the drive from Sarasota to come pick him up. I bought the two of us breakfast, then we parted ways.
