What happened?
For a while, she’d had such a good run. .
. .
Jacquie grew up poor, in Ocala.
DOB: 1960.
Dad was a short order cook. Migratory. Worked up and down those beaches in the summers—
Pompano, Vero, Cocoa, Daytona, Satellite, Neptune, Boynton. She had no ambition. All roads led to Ocala.
Dropped out of (the evocatively named) Junior College of Central Florida & became a Wal-Mart worker. At least it gave her the ability to live away from them.
Perfect timing because right about then her father got disabled & became a stay-at-home dad. Seemed like everybody’s dad had a fucked up spine.
The irony was, she met that married professor not at (the lyrically christened) Junior College of Central Florida, but at Wal-Mart. He was handsome, angry, boyishly hurt, sophisticated. 63, with a full head of hair gone professorially grey-white. Even looking back, Jacquie believes it to be true: that the outsized, sensuous quality of her remembrance of his outsized, sensual (boozy) cynicism wasn’t some trick that youth played on her mind. The man actually smoked a pipe, wore a tweed jacket with elbow patches. Now, she smiles to herself & says, Can you believe it? It really worked on him though (the look); and he really worked on her. Everything worked & was working. His pipe-stem breath smelled like sex & mouthwash. The professor was her 1st big physical love affair, she didn’t really have too many more after that, not on that scale, with that resonance. To this day, the Professor essentially was it, for a multifariousity of reasons. Jacquie got hooked emotionally too, oh did she did.
His wife found out but didn’t leave him.
The not so nutty professor gave Jacquie a camera.
And a boy — Jerry (Jr.) AKA Jerzy. DOB: 1984.
And child support; his wife found out about that too.
What are you gunna do.
She fooled around in her backyard with the Rolleiflex 2¼. Took lots of pics of cats and spiders in their webs. The film wasn’t cheap, she had to find a fancy camera store that stocked it. She lugged the thing to work. During lunchbreaks, she took arty parking lot (Wal-Mart) pics: shopping carts, crap cars, asphalt detritus. Everything but people, she never liked people in the shot, not if she could help it. (She wasn’t ready for people pics.) Her co-workers thought she was an agreeable dufus. Which she was. Got along with everybody and never made waves. The emptier the lots, the better. Jacquie loved her an empty parking lot, the slanty dividing lines, & empty curbside metered spaces too.
Oh and she went through a dumpster-pic phase.
Then she started getting her kicks on weekends (only when the professor wasn’t able to see her). Took pics of all the beach places where her daddy short-ordered, up and down. Obsessive. She was like someone who assiduously studied guitar; one day, mysterious moment, they just can play, suddenly they’re guitar players. Without knowing what she was doing, she’d given herself a carefully calibrated apprenticeship, & there came that moment of mystery when she effortlessly knew more or less what she was doing with the shutterspeed, the light, the artfulness of it. Self-consciousness lifted away. No agenda anymore. She went driving for hours, taking pics of anything, even people. Even the professor, but never the professor’s wife.
Her father died. Became a stay-underground dad.
Then, exactly 2 weeks after renting a bungalow (a belated gesture, but still) for Jacquie and their son, her beloved had an aneurysm. She went to the hospital & sat in the car in the lot, not knowing what to do. Most definitely not up for encountering the wife. Beleaguered. Weeping & listening to wrong songs on the radio. Taking pictures of parking places to soothe herself.
When a tall woman of officious mien strode toward her, she thought, She’s going to tell me to stop. It’s probably that you’re not allowed to take pics on hospital grounds.
Instead:
“I’m Jerome’s wife.”
(She’d never heard Jerome. He/she always used Jerry.)
The widow invited Jacquie to visit her comatose husband’s room. She never asked about Jacquie’s son. Only saying, “You know, we have no children,” which broke Jacquie’s heart.
(She wished she had brought her camera up.)
(The widow even left her alone with the body, because that’s what it was, just a body.)
When she got back to her car, the glass was broken, the camera gone. Even as she sobbed, she realized how textbook symbolic was the theft. She sat behind the wheel, collecting herself. Cheap glass diamonds littered the vinyl seat. She focused on the (less than half-empty) parking lot. That familiar, reflexive, self-medicating urge to get out and take pics, which was not to be. She kept thinking about the widow’s kindness. To come get her, to leave her with her professor, alone. A simple act of grace that still glows deep inside her to this day, providing warmth.
She bought a new camera, but her heart wasn’t in it. Hardly used it…
1990. Now 30 years-old— oh! Waitressing (again).
So unhappy, such unhappiness.
Single mom with a 6-year-old.
She decides to drive to NY and stay at the Chelsea Hotel. Has approx $3,458.52 in savings. (Left nothing by the Professor, for whom she held no resentments, he’d just leased her & Jerry Jr. the bungalow, Jacquie was certain he had plans to further provide, how could he have known he had a bleedy brain?)
She sets off, leaves Jerry Jr. with her mom.
On the way up (on the 95), she takes pics of kitschy outdoor volcanoes/miniature golf courses & all the tourist traps lining beach town main drags. More pics of where Dad worked, and the sunny desolate apartment houses they used to live in. Lonely moonshots, camp & lovely: the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater — the exquisite nearby homes of Jupiter Island, hidden behind privets & parterres. Forgotten Kennedy Space Center parking lot outback, forgotten custodians who worked at the Astronaut Hall of Fame. St Augustine Fountain of Youth giftshop pics. Swamps, plantations, & cemeteries, & pics of folks who spoke Gullah and could tell a good Gullah ghost story. (They were all good.) She goes to Jekyll Island & Cape Fear, she always wanted to because of their names — Cape Fear was a wash, nothing frightening about Cape Fear at all, there didn’t need to be, the name was perfect enough, gothy frightening name, frightful beacon in the imagination.
The Ava Gardner Museum. Yes. The old woman who works there — an Ava lookalike. The lonely parking lot. Yes. Of a castle in what they call the low country. A crazy-baroque synagogue in Savannah. On the beaches, she succumbs, like a teenager, to taking pics of shells: harps, pagodas & turbans, sundials, nutmegs, periwinkles.
There: a newish prison in the middle of a city, and the bailed-out blacks who pour forth. There was actually some kind of museum of slavery next door, & the just-released prisoners would bump right into it.
She drives & drives under gusty civil war skies.
Where am I going, where have I been.
She doesn’t bother with Atlantic City. Atlantic City will do very well without her. Besides, she’s running out of film.
She settles into her room at the Chelsea. (The Professor told her he stayed there a whole month once, that’s how Jacquie got the idea.) She hates it.
She’s lost, exhausted. Wants/needs to be touched. She puts on her sexiest dress and goes to a bar, fancy one, sleeps with the first man who tries to pick her up — a DP. Movie cameraman. Two weeks later, she’s living in his apartment. All the while, she’s watching herself, watching the insane speed at which things are happening, the whole crazy city, a million miles an hour, & now Jacquie a part of it. She loves it.