BLUE

A good friend (who I will call Jack) and I used to go to Daytona every year during the week of July 4^th to hang out at the beach, fish on the river, and go to the NASCAR race. 

We would stay at his dad’s place on the Saint John’s River about 25 miles from Daytona Beach.  It’s a nice little fish camp with everything from old small RVs and campers to nice refurbished 2 bedroom cabins.  There are about 15 or so campers and probably about 10 small cabins.  Some of the campers have been in place over 20 years and have become pretty much immovable. The tenants have added all kinds of “upgrades” such as built on screened-in porches, huge TV antennas, satellite dishes, barbeque pits, boat garages, parking pads, gardens, and all kinds of yard art.

The camper we always stayed in was a small, sleeps 8 kind, with cold AC, a full size fridge, and a nice screened in porch that was as twice as large as the camper.  It was comfortable, clean, and even had cable for the 13 inch television.  It had a bathroom inside the camper (and here’s where things get a little inconvenient) but the shower stall was so small that you could take a shower, sit on the toilet, brush your teeth, shave, watch TV, carry on a face-to-face conversation with someone on the porch, and fix an omelet on the stove while grabbing the ingredients out of the fridge all at the same time.

We had a guy staying with us one year that was a friend of Jack’s dad.  Now I am a big guy, but this guy was about 6 ft and 350.  One morning he was taking a shower while everyone else was outside grilling up some breakfast when we heard a spine tingling scream that sounded like a wild pig being forced feet first into a meat grinder.  Jack’s dad rushed inside to find his friend, naked of course, STUCK in the shower stall where he had tried to pull a 360 turn in order to rinse himself off.  Having rinsed off some of the soap causing “squeaky clean” skin, he stuck to the shower stall wall when he tried to spin around. So, there he stood, a huge man, half covered in soap, shampoo in his hair, and wedged in the tiny stall like 50 pounds of meat overflowing a 20 pound box.  Because none of us volunteered to put our hands on the naked guy, we had to call the fire department to get him out.  I never heard about him visiting ever again.

On another trip, about 6am one morning, having just barely woken up, we were all laying around discussing what our plans were for the day.  It was race day and we were all pretty excited to get moving, maybe get in a little fishing before we went to the track later that afternoon.  About that time, rain started pouring down on the roof of the camper.  Jack’s dad went on a verbal rampage about how sorry the weatherman was for saying it would be sunny and hot with no chance of rain today.  This put a major damper on our plans, especially if it was raining at race time.  Jack’s dad stepped onto the porch to check out the weather.  That’s when he saw him.  It was Blue, the local crazy old, and I mean old, like 90 years old, man.

Really his name wasn’t Blue, I didn’t even know his real name, but Jack and I had given him that name because he looked and acted exactly like the old man named Blue in the movie Old School. He was a funny, loud mouthed, prankster, crazy, old man.

So, with Jack’s dad staring straight at him, and not a cloud in the sky, Blue stood there with a water hose in each hand raining water down on top of our camper.  Blue yelled “Ha, ha! Ya’ll fellers thought it was raining and it had ruined your whole day! Ya’ll just a bunch of fools.  If you want to see a real race, let me race ya!”

Blue had a brand new Dodge pick-up truck and he loved to challenge anybody to a race.  I believe if Bill Elliot stood right in front of Blue with his racecar he broke the 220 mph mark in, Blue would challenge him and think he could win.  No one ever took Blue up on his challenge that I know of.  We were all scared that he would either beat us and we would be embarrassed or he would lose, have a heart attack and that would be on our conscious the rest of our lives. 

One evening we came back from fishing and plopped down on the sofa in the camper and turned on the TV.  It was nothing but static.  We mumbled something about the cable bill not being paid then walked outside to see if there was a loose connection.  Upon locating the cable supply box, we noticed a splitter had been installed with the cable to our camper disconnected and lying on the ground.  We followed the newly connected cable up and over the camper, up through a large oak tree, across the top of two other campers, down behind an old wooden boat garage, across the grass, and to….yep, you guessed it, right to Blue’s camper, running through a hole in the window screen.  We could see and hear Blue through the window watching some silly game show and horse laughing loudly.  He was also yelling at his wife to watch.  Normally he yelled at her from outside the camper while she was inside, well beyond her reach. 

One day, while Blue was out at the grocery store, we all sat down together and compared stories and we concluded that in all the years we had known Blue and had visited the fish camp…none of us had ever seen his wife, nor even heard her speak.  We got chill bumps as images from the movie Psycho flashed in our minds, but then we just dismissed it as our exaggerated imagination.

Blue has since passed away, but those memories will always be with me.  Maybe he is in a place where he can yell at his wife and, unfortunately, now she can hear him.