St. Petersburg
by
A.J. Daulerio
illustration by Edith Zimmerman
Between 2015 and 2016 I bounced between Brooklyn, Florida, and eventually, landed in Los Angeles. But most of that period of time I spent in Florida. First time was for rehab in Singer Island, a small inlet in West Palm Beach. I was there for the last quarter of 2015, most of October, all of November, and the first part of December. I flew back home to Brooklyn and swore I’d never go back there again.
But I did end up back there again. I went back to Singer Island for outpatient treatment between May and September of 2016, but I was too scared to live in a sober living house since two kids I was in rehab with died there.
Instead, I found an overpriced condo on Air BnB, which I considered a better alternative. It was $1,200 a month and came fully furnished, although the couch and the hall closet both smelled like microwave soup and the ceiling fan in the bedroom sounded like a low-flying police helicopter.
The landlord was a wiry Russian man named Boris who bought the condo a couple of years earlier and moved down to Singer Island full-time after he spent the first half of his American life working in New Jersey. He spent most of his days working on the exterior of the property–gardening, mulching, putting decorative stones around dwarfy-looking palm trees. He said he was in the Russian military and some nights he’d get drunk and come knock on my door and challenge me to a knuckle push-up competition. He liked me, though.
Boris worked hard on the condo all-year-round mostly so he could overcharge tourists between December and April about $300 per day since it was walking distance from Riviera Beach. When I first moved in, I’d walk to the beach every day, but it was always an unnerving experience. In the morning, it was tough to avoid a run-in with some of the heroin addicts sleeping on the messy dunes or nodding out in the pavilion. And in the afternoon you could always find groups of mean-looking teenagers there tackling each other in the tiny waves, swimming in their blue jeans. No way I’d ever go there at night. I may have spent one day there the rest of the summer.
My two neighbors were active alcoholics whose lives had also taken a severe downturn so they, too, washed up on Singer Island and into Boris’s condos. One was named Billy, a 50-something loudmouth who was built like a former high school nose tackle. He had the most expensive unit, which was a little bigger than mine and it also had a small section of a grassy yard which he used to park his Ferrari-red wave runner on a rusty small-craft trailer.
I rarely saw him, but he had gotten in trouble several times with Boris for wrecking furniture and then refusing to pay rent until it was fixed. Boris had threatened to call the cops on Billy after he broke the glass door of the shower while he was drunkenly having acrobatic sex with one of the waitresses from a nearby crab restaurant.
I saw Billy at a couple of AA meetings after that and he’d always nod at me and ask me if I still lived over at the condo with that “evil Russian prick.” Boris held on to some of Billy’s personal belongings, hoping that would force him to pay up, but he just took his wave runner and left the rest.
My other directly-next-door neighbor was a 70-year-old man named Jack. He was a part-time handyman with a big head and a red face, the kind of face I imagined Bukowski had a week before his death. We’d both wake up before dawn and sit out on our shared porch and drink stale coffee and chain-smoke until the sun came up.
That time of the year it got real hot by 8:00 a.m. but Jack would usually crack open his first beer by 10 a.m.. He’d offer me one, I’d politely refuse, and he’d look at me funny. He spent most of his days drinking beer out on the porch, waiting for a call from his one client, a rich widower in Palm Beach Gardens. He was always complaining that she only hired him to fix her full-time contractor’s messes but he held out hope that she’d eventually give him the job–he could use the money. Until then, he’d drink beer all day and wait. Jack also had a middle-aged daughter he hadn’t seen in two years. Last he heard she was living in Milwaukee. Maybe she’ll call soon, he said.
Jack and I would play golf sometimes at the shitty little course a couple of miles away. He was an okay golfer, with a patient, fluid backswing, and a halfway decent short game. He was impressed by how far I drove the ball for not playing very much and said that a “young guy like me” should play more often because he thought I’d get pretty good. When I told him I was 42 he sounded very disappointed. “I could have sworn you were 25 or 26. Still a kid.”
We took turns driving the cart the rest of the round, but we barely spoke. It was like we were a married couple and I’d just revealed a shocking secret that left Jack feeling foolish and betrayed. He finally broke the silence. “42?” he shook his head again and took a big drag of his extra-long Winston. We both played lousy the rest of the day.
When I finally moved out of the condo for good in August to move to LA to be with Julieanne I left Jack my new coffee maker and a giant jar of loose change. He was genuinely touched by my gesture and shook my hand firm and steady and told me to visit him whenever I came back to see my parents in Jupiter.
In late September I received a text from Boris. “Jack passed,” is all it said. The next day I spoke with him to get more details and he said that the rich widower came home and she found Jack dead on her living room floor. “I think it was his heart,” Boris said. “But who knows?”
*****
Offhand. I can name 17 other cities in Florida I’ve visited throughout my entire life besides West Palm Beach. Here goes: Tampa. Coral Springs. Englewood. Winter Springs. Clearwater. Bradenton. Daytona. St. Augustine. Key West. Miami. Hollywood. Jupiter. Boca Raton. Orlando. Sarasota. Port St. Lucie. Delray Beach. I only hated one, number 18: St. Petersburg.
*****
In 2016–right after rehab, a couple of months before I moved into Boris’s sketchy condo–I spent almost a full month between the end of February through the end of March, sequestered up in a fancy St. Petersburg hotel at night, but I spent my days at the Pinellas County courthouse as one of the lead defendants in the Hogan v. Gawker trial.
And exactly six years ago today I was on the stand, getting grilled and humiliated for (illegally) posting 101 seconds of a sex tape of Hulk Hogan boning his best friend’s wife. He claimed, among other things, my publishing this both invaded his privacy and caused him emotional distress. Gawker’s lawyers disagreed.
One of the silliest, most unsettling memories I have of that moment on the stand was Hulk Hogan staring right at me, nodding his head like he was preparing to chokeslam me through the stenographer’s desk.
This was a break in character for him since he made a big show of hobbling around with a cane, acting enfeebled and sullen. He also had his lawyers respectfully ask the judge if he could appear in court with a tasteful black doo-rag because he was self-conscious about his baldness. The judge allowed it.
But now he was glowering at me, all business, all out of gum, ready to whoop my ass. Try to imagine Hulk Hogan staring at you as if he was pounding one of his giant fists into the palm of his equally giant palm under the table. “You’re dead, brother,” his expression said.
That’s not what I’m writing about today, though. No, today I’m writing about three days later, on March 18, the day the jury awarded a $115 million judgment against Gawker which eventually bankrupted it. That day was also my 42nd birthday. Apparently, I was a young 42–a kid, really. 25 or 26 tops.
But I was actually 42. It was a terrible birthday.
*****
Before I began to write this, I Googled “Worst Birthday Ever” and an Insider listicle was the first item that popped up. The headline on this article is “19 of the worst birthday horror stories that will make you not want to celebrate,” but, honestly, none of them are extremely horrific. Lots of breakups or untimely illnesses, but then there’s one poor kid whose 12th birthday was ruined when his foot was run over by a car three times. Here’s part of his recollection:
“Now you can imagine the sound a child would make getting their foot run over, but me, I got it run over three times. The driver freaked out and popped the car in reverse and then the front tire was resting on my foot (more screaming from me) and then rolled forward.”
So he almost lost his foot! Big deal.
I, on the other hand, lost what I thought was my whole stinking identity. And that identity was mostly my belief that I was once a successful and important New York City editor, but I was certain there were bigger and better things to come. Then it all vanished so shockingly once that verdict was read. And no one seemed to care about all that I’d lost.
But mostly: I thought my birthday was ruined forever.
*****
That turned out to not be true, though.
And there are many men in recovery who’ve suffered more than me, sinned worse than me, who’ve carried heavier buckets of shame and grief than I could fathom. I recently heard one of these men at an AA meeting say something that crawled into my heart: “You don’t have to have a good memory if you tell the truth.”
So I write about this day every single year because it was such an important, absurd part of my recovery–I was in early sobriety, a little under six months or so, and it was sobriety I didn’t keep for much longer after the trial ended.
Yet, it’s still momentous, just as important to me as my actual sobriety date. Because I now exist in the present. I’m no longer in that courtroom, dolefully staring off into the distance, hoping for the day in the future when I didn’t feel so ruined.
I’m older now, back from ruin and peeled off the rocks, upright and alive, finally, inching closer to some version of me that’s indestructible, never to be sunk by something so monumentally stupid ever again.
I’m 48 on Friday
Still a kid, really.
Here’s to another happy birthday. – AJD
