Ode to Cindy or "The Pimp With The Limp"

KEY WEST, MARCH 2015     I took her hand and stiffened my arm so she’d have something solid to lean on. The uneven dock planks presented endless trip hazards for that right leg and foot that drag a little. Cindy had a stroke when she was 35. She’s giving it her all so not to hold up the line of tourists behind us. Once on the boat I get her to a bench, then gather our snorkels, masks, and fins. The boat is full and festive as we head south of the southern most point in America, toward Cuba. The sky is blue, the ocean is beautiful. Several times I watch her as she’s looking out across the water, her short, dark hair fluttering in the breeze off a tanned forehead. Her impassive, intent expression reminds me of our father. Nine miles out we reach the world’s 3^rd largest reef, and anchor. As we don our gear, she smiles at me, “I may be the “pimp with the limp” on land, but in the water, we’re all equal again.”

Somewhere in the buoyancy and rhythm of the waves, the limp is released and she swims easily.

That night we link up with my musician and author friends at The Smoking Tuna to listen to one of my group, guitarist Chris Clifton. While Chris and his 4-piece band rip through several decades of American blues and R & B, we settle at a table with Shari Smith, an author from North Carolina and  singer-songwriter Eric Erdman from Mobile. When Cindy shakes Eric’s hand, the large screen print of a pistol on his t-shirt, a shirt promoting the band The Mulligan Brothers, captures her attention. I suppose a time will come with the image of a gun won't send her mind to dark places, but not yet. Still, she quickly falls into conversation and makes easy friends. Always has. When our group heads toward the Hog’s Breath to hear another group of friends, The Carter Brothers, Cindy is too tired to continue. I put her in a taxi to her hotel.

Three years older than me, Cindy was a best buddy and confidant in my childhood, the one who babied and defended me and included me in her games. We were the youngest two of four kids. When we were small, folks sometimes brushed the bangs off my forehead with the palm of their hand and said, “See? Kurt and Cindy look exactly alike.”  We did.

Once when I was perhaps 12, past the time when a cute, shapely girl of 14 or 15 would still look out for her kid brother, I was being bullied by an older, bigger kid a couple blocks from our house. He had me by the arm, explaining how he was “gonna kick my ass,” when Cindy came down the sidewalk headed home. He’d seen her coming and had time to lower his voice. Cindy flirted with the boy, chatting him up, batting her eyelashes and flipping the hair off her shoulder, enough to distract him. I got home with my “ass” intact.

For the next 43 years she's come to my aid or defense every single time I needed her. Sometimes when I didn’t know I needed her. When she was home from college and I got in a fight over a girl, she dropped what she was doing and spent her evening with me. When I was building furniture to pay for college and she was graduated with her first good-paying job, she hired me to build a bedroom suite. At the publication of my first book, she sent a copy to Oprah, insistent on getting me in Oprah's book club. When my marriage fell apart a few years ago, she was my ready supporter.

Me and Cindy at the Oldest House in Key West

Couple months back, when I posted on Facebook that I was going to Key West for a couple book events and suggested anybody headed that way for spring break look me up, Cindy sent a message saying, “I booked plane tickets and a hotel for Key West. See you there!” I had to laugh. She didn’t ask, “Can I hang out with you for the entire week? She just said, “Done deal. I’m comin.”

Fine with me. The pimp with the limp is always welcome.

Friday the 13^th, fifteen months ago, 6:30 p.m., I was walking into an Italian restaurant in Ft. Wayne when my phone rang. The screen image said it was Cindy, in Florida. I answer and she’s screaming. Her husband had killed himself! She’d come home from work and found him in a chair beside the pool, the gun still in his hand. She was in the driveway, hysterical, waiting for the police.

Sixteen hours later I was at her house, at the place where Jeff had killed himself, cleaning the pool and repairing things that got damaged with Jeff’s friend Phil. The two of us scoured Jeff’s computer, his job search notes, the stack of mail and magazines on the kitchen table, looking for a note, a clue, anything. Our goal was to make the house look completely normal before Cindy returned. If there was something upsetting to find, we were going to find it before she did. I started to pick up the shirt Jeff had laid over a chair before he went out to the pool last night, and the shoes he’d kicked off at the sliding door, but Phil stopped me. “She needs to touch those things,” he whispered. “She needs to start processing what happened here last night. Putting away his stuff is probably a good place to start.”

Phil is a long-haired, motorcycle-riding contractor, and a very smart man.

About 24 hours later, as Cindy and her grown daughter and I were running errands, trying to plan a funeral, we got notice that our father had died, back home in Indiana.

It is 15 months since that tragic weekend, and as I greet people and sign books on the lawn of The Oldest House in Key West, Cindy sits nearby, her body language is easy, relaxed. We talk with a woman who lost her husband just a few weeks earlier. Cindy offers comfort without getting emotional. In that conversation I can see how she’s healed. It’s been a long road, and she’s still on it, but she shares from her loss, commiserates and makes another quick friend.

The next night as I read on stage, surrounded by musicians and other authors, I can see Cindy’s face in the audience, smiling back at me.

Later that night, it’s creeping toward 1:00. We’re at the Hog’s Breath and several drinks into the night. The Carter Brothers are cranking through Steve Earle’s Copperhead Road. Tim Carter is banging on his mandolin, sounding like a guitar being slammed into a church bell. A little group of women have taken to the dance floor. Cindy raises here arms and grooves easily into the crowd. Somewhere in the buoyancy and rhythm of the music her limp is released and she dances without a struggle. She’s found yet another place where we’re all equal again.

Buy a copy of Kurt's book, "Noblesville"

Waterhole Branch

Live oak and dead boat at the Waterhole Branch

Sunlight falling through massive live oaks hung with Spanish moss casts a backlit, dreamy luster to the landscape. That, plus a rusting cabin cruiser on a trailer and the neighbor’s junk pile give the rural compound that is Waterhole Branch a tattered, cinematic beauty.

Shari had urged me to southern Alabama on a sorta blind date with a book editor, Joe Formichella. “I think you two would understand each other. I think he’s the guy to edit your book.” After I arrived we sat in Joe and Suzanne Hudson's living room. Suzanne is perched delicately, legs crossed on a couch cushion, wearing a black beret, smiling, silent. I’d read her novel, “In a Temple of Trees,” and had to remind myself that this seemingly prim woman, and former middle school councilor, had written the most violent rape scene I’d ever read in a book.

Her husband Joe is the writer/editor Shari wants to match me with. I’d read one of Joe’s books, too:  Murder Creek. Next day, when I’m on the deck looking out at Waterhole Branch, she texts me, “Come to the cottage,” to hang out and talk with Joe. I walk over to Shari’s cottage and we all chat. Joe leaves, Shari eventually smiles and nods toward the main house, “Not trying to tell you what to do Kurtie, but you need to go in a talk to Joe.”

On the deck at Waterhole Branch

She’s called me “Kurtie” since we were teenagers.

So I do. Joe, lean, with a youthful face and longish hair is wearing Tabasco logo print pajama bottoms

and watching English football on the television. I see my manuscript stacked beside him on the couch, dog-eared pages, post-it notes, and hand-written comments are evident. I drink gin, Joe drinks vodka, and we talk. Joe raises questions and gently pokes holes in the opening of the novel. Nothing he says is a surprise. I’ve had many stories that needed professional tweaking, but never had an editor who really knew how to do the surgery. I quickly see that Joe knows. And Shari had seen that he would.

Both Shari and I have a 5 in front of out ages, but when we became friends, there was only a 1. In perhaps 1977, she sat in front of me in a classroom filled with what are now ancient machines called typewriters. That was in Tipton, Indiana.

I played guitar and sang a Dan Fogelberg song at Shari’s first wedding in a little country church in western Tipton County. Her Mamaw was upset I wore flip-flops on the altar - called me a hippie. I built a rocking horse for Shari’s first child, Abbie. We lost track of each other. Years later, at the Pork Festival parade in my hometown, a dark-haired, freckled little girl appeared before me in a crowd. Turned out it was the little girl I’d built that rocking horse for years before. Little Abbie said flatly, “Call my Mamma. She misses you!” and then disappeared back into the crowd.

While I raised a family and stole writing time during lunch hours and late nights, Shari was living in New York and then North Carolina. While trying to get best-selling author, Rick Bragg to write a story about the people of her adopted small town, Bragg turned the tables and challenged her to write about them instead. Afraid of failure, uncertain she could do it, she stepped off the ledge and did it. Shari began writing.

The art outside my bedroom wall at Joe & Suzanne's

So in distant places, disconnected from each other, my friend and I were writing. We will both publish books this year with the same publisher. All because of her, this girl I sat behind in typing class.

In the cottage, Shari Smith has a MacBook Air in her lap. Her boyfriend, Chris sits between us with an unplugged electric guitar in his lap, plucking scales and blues riffs. Over Chris’s shoulder is a picture of Shari’s daughter Abbie, all grown up and a mother herself, holding her baby in a photo with Hillary Clinton, taken at a campaign event.

I know Chris hurt the middle finger on his chord hand in a recent accident. “Why don’t you take a few days off?” I ask. Beneath a tussle of salt-n-pepper hair, he considers me with the one-eyed, long, steady wink of a man looking up from serious work, “Chet Atkins said, ‘If I don’t practice one day; I know. If I don’t practice two days; you know.’”

Shari and I agree on a release date party for both her book and mine to be held back in Indiana. Immediately we’re texting people who must agree. Chris puts his guitar down to check his calendar.

I quiz Chris as he practices. He’s toured in James Taylor’s band and been a hired-gun guitarist for more famous folks than I could name. I realize I’ve probably seen him in concert repeatedly during my life and heard him regularly on albums and TV commercials. He’s looking forward to a weekend show, playing a gig with James Brown’s drummer.

I linked up with Shari again two years ago. She noted an emotional edge to my Facebook posts as I was going through divorce. She suggested I come down to North Carolina, where she was living at the time, get away from the turmoil, and write. After twenty years apart I drove down to her little farm and spent an autumn week writing on her back deck. From time to time she would drop a couple magazines beside me so I could read her work. In those magazines, I found that Shari was writing about her neighbors with gentle compassion and an ironic sense of humor.

Within a year we spent a couple days in a rural Tipton Co. farmhouse with writer, Joe Galloway, whose book, “We Were Soldiers Once and Young,” became the Mel Gibson movie. We sat up late drinking and eating pie with Joe, and did a speaking gig at our old high school in Tipton, together on the same stage where we both acted in The Sound Of Music 30+ years earlier, me playing Captain Von Trapp, and Shari playing a nun.

Writers Live Here: at the entrance to Waterhole Branch

And a year later her publisher is asking to republish my first book, Stardust, and soon thereafter asked to take control of the publishing of my 2^nd book, The Salvage Man.

But sooner than all that, Joe Formichella’s new book, The Waffle House Rules, will be published and I’ll be back in Waterhole Branch for the party.

I love you, Shari. Thanks for all the years of friendship and for carrying such a creative cloud of energy around with you. So happy I got drawn back into it.