Florida Road Trip

From there, we hiked on down the road a bit to the Old Mill Tavern. A woman at the door introduced us to Jimmy Huggins, a 29-year-old good, ol’ boy sign painter whose wife up and went to Oklahoma. Jimmy poured his whiskey in a plastic cup and went out to take at look at the VW.

After spilling his drink on the seat and crawling around underneath the bus, he diagnosed the problem as a busted wheel cylinder. He told us that the only place that worked on VWs was Chuck’s. And he told us how to get there: Down the street to the post office, then left at Juanita’s Beauty Salon.

But before we left, we went back into the tavern to buy Jimmy another drink, since he spilled the one he had.

He told us about eating gator tails, hunting gators from a pink Lincoln Continental in an orange orchard, and sharks. Jimmy doesn’t eat shark meat. One of his friends was eaten by a shark, he said, and “there was only 30 pounds of him left. They stuffed him in a 30-gallon garbage bag.”

After reading Jaws, Jimmy stopped swimming in the ocean. “Your skin gets soft and even those big ol’ needlefish start biting you,” he said.

Jimmy said he helped rescue a girl who floated 15 miles offshore. He’s the one who spotted her. “The Coast Guard kept asking what she was wearing and my brother was saying, ‘She’s nekid! She’s nekid!’”

---Excerpt from My Neighbor Was a Serial Killer--- A Writer's Memories of Mayhem, Romance, and Murder