Snowbirds, part six.
DAY THIRTY
Friday, March 6th
Alyssa woke up and did the dishes. She came back and showed me a picture of a poor horse tied up to a trailer--their mobile stall where they’d spend the bulk of their life--connected to a huge RV. Wanting her to have time alone and free to draw and play saxophone, I spent the day out and about, running errands for us, which almost always meant urban foraging for more bullshit we needed to live comfortably. It was constantly reinforced for me how expensive I assumed it was for all the people online live their "nomadic" lifestyles.
My first stop was the Publix, where I picked up a giant refillable five-gallon jug of Zephyrhills spring water. We figured after buying it once, we’d just keep filling it up with nearby spring water; a website called FindASpring helped you locate the nearest free natural spring to you, and I already knew of at least one within reach of us. There was a helpful website directory of free resources for everything.
I also got this garlic herb tofu sandwich we’d noticed on their deli menu a few days before. When I went up and ordered it, a whole one on toasted white bread, the guy went and retrieved the tofu and looked down at it, confused. It was a small plastic container of tiny plain tofu cubes in water. I watched as he went to a co-worker and then to his manager to try and figure out what the deal was, because according to him this wasn’t the tofu they usually used. The manager looked at it, shrugged, grimaced, and chuckled.
“That’s tofu, hahaha!”
The three of them stood around, mumbling to each other, until I said, “Excuse me, is there a mystery surrounding the tofu?” The co-worker told me no, and the guy making my sandwich took a bag of the garlic herb tofu off the shelf. I thanked him for not giving me plain-ass soggy tofu.
But goddamn, this sandwich was ridiculously good: firm cubes of garlic herb tofu, a parsley and ranch spread, avocado, lettuce tomato onion, green pepper, spinach, banana peppers, jalapeños, and pickles (I asked for all veggies except olives). For a mere $6.49. As always, I tried my food stamp card to see how much of the water jug and sandwich it would cover, if any, and it took care of it all except the $6 cost of the jug.
I spent the first half of the day driving in circles around the plazas of Bayonet Point, Hudson, and Port Richey, where every chain that currently existed was represented by at least one location (but usually two) and long stretches of road prevented left turns. Because we weren’t yet sure the future of our mini-fridge and had optimistically purchased a buncha food that needed to stay cold, I had to go and retrieve a Coleman water cooler and two bags of ice. Alyssa needed two more milk crates for her clothes, so I had to snatch some of those from behind a store. I checked dumpsters behind Harbor Freight, Rural King, and Dollar General in hopes of miraculously finding something helpful, but they were all freshly emptied. While driving, I had the new car inverter charging my laptop for movie watching. I went to a Goodwill in search of a foldout table, but only wound up helping an older woman put a shelf in her cart and leaving empty-handed. I walked out with a huge Coleman cooler by telling the receipt checker that I had come in with it to measure how many bags of ice it could carry at once. "Oh, you should have one of these stickers, then!" she said as she placed a smiley face on it.
While driving around all of the same shit over and over, I stumbled across a big, 22’-tall, 58’-foot long, pink brontosaurus. I immediately had to pull over. There wasn’t an explanation as to why they were there, outside a place called Tree of Life Wellness Solutions. I loved them, though. Searching online later, I found out that they were built in 1962 by a taxidermist and his brother for the Dinosaur Wildlife museum they and their family owned. The business closed in 1998 and the pink dino still stood, a pleasant surprise on an otherwise soul-crushing strip of businesses. It was the only interesting thing I’d seen the entire day.
When I got back to camp, the entire first section of sites had been swarmed by more giant mansion RVs, their trailers, and the horses that rode in them, tied up and standing still within fences that folded open propped up around them, just big enough for them to stand and face one direction. If it weren’t for having been instilled with learned helplessness, they could have easily jumped over them and fled. It made me sick. All of the old white reptiles there with their horse slaves didn’t talk to their horses or each other the entire time I was there; just lived nearby each other in silence, generators running, living as luxuriously as one could afford to while on the road, likely raking in money off the lives of the horses who were their property.
For dinner, we had giant, quarter-pound Morningstar burgers that had pockets of cheese inside of them. I still melted slices of Chao cheese on them in the frying pan, and then fixed them up with butter lettuce, red onion, pickles, ketchup, dijon, and Just mayo, on warm toasted buns with some canned green beans on the side. These burgers were perfect.
The sun set and I think I got to lay down in bed for five or so minutes before jumping back up and going to back to Bayonet Point for some DoorDash. I spent most of my time sitting in the car outside a closed mall where a sign claimed wrestling matches took place, and over the course of three hours made only $22.75. My final order of the night paid me $3.75 and had me picking up almost a dozen cheeseburgers from McDonald’s, with requests for them to only have cheese and ketchup on them. When I pulled up to the house, all the lights were off, and when a kid answered the door he was unsure what I was doing there. Then I heard him say, “Oh, did Dad get cheeseburgers for the dogs?”
Yes. Yes, he did get $25 worth of cheeseburgers for the dogs, and he did not tip me anything.
Damn good sandwich from Publix.
Big pink dino friend!
Not-so-subtle reminders that we were still very much in the South.
Creepy Easter bunny up the road from our camp.
Sleepy sunset over our backyard.
Damn good burgers.
DAY THIRTY-ONE/THIRTY-TWO
Saturday, March 7th and Sunday, March 8th
I spent the entire weekend doing DoorDash deliveries. I had a goal set for myself that I was pretty determined to stick to: $100 a day. I still wanted us to make at least a grand in March for car insurance and a potential trip to the Bahamas, and I still wanted Alyssa to not have to worry about anything and have time to do her creative stuff. It wasn’t like I had much to do with myself. Any urges to create outside of writing journal entries on Facebook that no one read were immediately weakened by the futility and/or expense of it all. I wanted to at least be busy and feel useful.
As a result, I didn’t get to eat dinner with Alyssa for two days. While she spent her time creating, riding her bike, watching movies, and listening to podcasts, I sat in the car in various parking lots, waiting for the alarm to go off indicating I was being offered a delivery, driving in circles within a 15-mile radius of the counties I was serving, delivering the worst possible food mostly to people in big and beautiful houses.
Saturday was spent in central Tampa, an area I’d worked before. The "hot spot" the app directed me to was in a huge lot outside a discount grocery store, Planet Fitness, and an abandoned section called Magic Mall, between a Wendy’s and a Dunkin’. The tall River Tower with lights blasted up at it served as my compass, since I could see it from just about anywhere I went.
I scheduled myself as much as I could from 2 in the afternoon until 2 in the morning (actually 3, but I was robbed of my final hour by the clocks being set forward). I finished the book I was reading with no backup book. The orders were pretty steady, thankfully, and I got to take in so much of Tampa, a diverse and interesting city I was gaining a lot of new admiration for.
Most people did not tip, it seemed. I was introduced to picking up groceries from Walmart for people. One person didn’t answer their door or phone when I got to them, so I had to return everything. At least I was paid for it. Another, I had to park in a fire zone in front of a hydrant, walk down a brick courtyard, and go up three floors to deliver over 20 bags of groceries to a girl who couldn’t have been older than 21 with recently pedicured feet and no desire to help or tip me as I hyperventilated, lugging three 24-packs of bottled water to her one at a time. It was a particularly dehumanizing moment that reminded me exactly why I didn’t want to work a job. Another order, I pulled up to the restaurant and they weren’t even open. It didn’t feel good to be a convenience to wealthy people, but I wasn’t a drug dealer and Alyssa wasn’t a cam girl, and this was one of the only ways for us to regularly make money while out on the road.
Tampa was full of compartmentalized communities separated into three discernible classes, from what I could see: there were the upscale gated communities and cul-de-sacs with dramatic entrances and names referencing the tree or landscape that was decimated or the species of bird whose ecosystem was imposed on for it to be built; there were the quaint suburban neighborhoods of perfectly aligned one-story homes with garages, straight out of The Wonder Years but distinctly Floridian, distinguishable from one another only by the different pastel colors used to paint their exteriors; and then there were the apartment complexes, which despite being far nicer than any projects I’d ever seen must have belonged to the lower income folks of the city. Electrical boxes and large pipes of unknown purpose on the sides of the roads were also painted bright colors. Stray cats roamed the streets with a distinct fearlessness. There was little to no graffiti, other than a few awful tags by someone who wrote Lokey, either a toy attempt at legitimate graff or just ugly gang graffiti.
Saturday had a lot of life out and about, of course. The neon lights of bars and restaurants open late shone and drew in customers like a hypnotic human fly zapper. Cops lay in wait in the shadows of derelict mall parking lots like vultures who could rob you. I passed by many successful plunder where people had three or four cops surrounding, them out of the car and in cuffs while a cop searched their vehicle. Meanwhile, the reckless driving on 75 saw the extended shoulders of the interstate lined in the aftermaths of several head-on collisions, which cops didn’t seem too interested in. I was constantly being cut off by shiny muscle cars that sounded like motorcycles, undeterred from their erratic and risky driving by the numerous wrecks around us.
Sunday was spent in the Lutz/Wesley Chapel area where there seemed to be more shopping plazas than residences, though maybe most of the upper-class living took place in neighborhoods hidden in the man-made, idyllic wooded areas I delivered to, where people rode bikes, jogged in pairs, and walked purebred dogs like they were in a permanent commercial. I was out there from 1:30 in the afternoon until after midnight.
I found out Fords Garage was a burger and brew restaurant, themed entirely off of the Ford car? Anyway, the orders kept coming in. I shoplifted a copy of American Psycho from a Barnes and Noble after searching their online store for five or six books I actually wanted to read; it would figure Bret Easton Ellis would be the only one they carried. I ate shitty food for two days straight: bread sticks from Papa John’s, Impossible Whopper with fries from Burger King, a jerk tempeh and mushroom pizza from Mellow Mushroom. I felt so sick. A kid named Chase gave me an angry call about their Red Robin order, which I’d just picked up two minutes after receiving the order, right on the time the app said to pick it up by. It hurt me to bring it to him in his giant house and seeing his stupid face. I was tipped well for absurd late-night orders by rich people younger than me, getting stuff children with access to their parents’ debit card would order, like milkshakes and fries.
By the end of Sunday, I had made $180.80 before the expenses of gas. I supposed that was more or less a success? When I returned home, we were the only ones left. All of the old people and their horses were gone and our camper was the only thing left standing. It was both spooky and wonderful.
Get it? My last name is Gunn, so I took this picture. It's my family's highway, obviously.
Yikes.
The most bleak bumper I'd seen since "Someone I loved was murdered" years ago.
A very gross billboard for a local funeral home.
DAY THIRTY-THREE
Monday, March 9th
I got up again and prepared for another day of deliveries. DoorDash gerrymanders counties in a confusing way that I was still getting used to, and they wouldn’t give you directions to the “hot spot” they wanted you in until your shift had started. This oftentimes meant driving to where you thought you should be, only to then discover you have to drive another 15 minutes to get to where they wanted you. My shift started at 1, but I didn’t get to it until 1:37, partly because of unusually heavy traffic and largely because I went to the wrong county and then had to find out the hot spot to wait in was another 15 minutes away. My anxiety was already piqued.
My first order was picking up groceries from a Walmart: 113 items for $6.18. When I pulled up to the house that ordered them, I wanted to cry. It was one of the biggest homes I’d ever delivered to, standing on the water on its own grassy hill with several boats, surrounded by perfectly planted trees. I walked up the beautiful granite stairs to the doors--all four of them, with birds and intricate designs carved into the sturdy wood they were made out of. I rang the bell and then knocked. An older Hispanic woman answered, but I quickly realized she was The Help, as a wide-eyed, pale housewife greeted me and asked if I could pull up to the garage--all four doors of it. I carried everything in and loaded most of it into a hamper that was like a remote-controlled elevator to her kitchen? I’d never seen such a thing. She boasted to me that the she had reached the order limit.
“It cut me off at $500!”
Several hours later, she was nice enough to tip me $15.
I got another order just as I was trying to cancel my shift, so I took it. I wasn’t feeling well, mentally, so I wanted to take a day for myself and just be around Alyssa. The app had gotten me 47 minutes away from home. I hated thinking about the gas I was burning, wondering if the payments from deliveries evened out in a way that was still worth it. I daydreamed about robbing mansions and churches on the way home.
I spent the day relaxing in bed. I read a little. Mostly, I just enjoyed being in the woods all by ourselves with only the sounds of birds singing. For dinner, per my request, Alyssa mad chicken parm burgers using Morningstar chicken patties and Chao cheese with pizza sauce with a can of sweet peas on the side. Our cooler’s ice was finally melting; as advertised on the sticker, it did indeed stay frozen for three days. That night, the moon was huge.
Sometimes the night just calls for chicken patties.
No cellphone picture of the moon will ever be good, but this was our view of the backyard that night.
DAY THIRTY-FOUR
Tuesday, March 10th
Another day. Little errands became like adventures to me; having to fetch a resource and trying to get it for free made me feel like I had a reason to exist. I went out and got us some more ice for the cooler. We poured the cooler water into our other jug to be reused as dishwater.
For dinner, I made us nearly perfect grilled cheese sandwiches, with Campbell’s tomato soup. As always, I used Daiya cheddar slices, JUST mayo to get the bread nice and golden, sprinkled with some garlic powder on them before they fried. During dinner, we saw a big, beautiful bird that I was fairly certain was a peregrine falcon. I wasn’t able to get a picture.
At 7, I did a couple hours of DoorDash deliveries and made a surprising $54.23. Rich people were particularly generous (and gluttonous) that night. On the way home, I saw deer on the side of the road. It made me realize how long it’d been since I last had. Down there in Florida, at least in this part, it was more likely to see the corpse of a wild boar on the side of the road than that of a deer.
Relocating spiders became a regular task in the camper. For the most part, we let them set up shop, and applauded them as we watched them gradually stock up on a buffet of the small, annoying and intrusive gnat sorta bugs that liked to sneak in and freak out around our ceiling lights. We saw many jumping spiders, who were hands down the cutest spiders. That night, though, I saw one crawling down my arm as I sat on my phone and reflexively flicked them away. When I got up and turned on the lights to try and find where they landed, I noticed they had been sent straight into the ceiling fan and chopped in two. I felt really bad as I looked at the single glistening line of web blowing away dramatically from the fan. I would never kill a spider on purpose!
A very cheesy grilled cheese.
DAY THIRTY-FIVE
Wednesday, March 11th
I got up early and did a block of DoorDash from noon until 3 in the Bayonet Point area. When I got into the car to leave, I found a neat little boxwood leaftier moth on my visor. Later, an old man I delivered to told me to watch out for coronavirus. I had no idea just how annoying that was all going to become. It was a busy lunchtime rush, but pretty boring. I made a whopping $47, though.
I’d passed by a store with a bunch of bikes outside of it, so after I clocked out I went to it in hopes of finding an affordable used road bike. They had a couple really nice ones, going for $100 each, and a tortoiseshell shop cat sleeping between them with their paw over their eyes to block the heavy sun. I wasn’t ready to spend that much, though, especially since Alyssa’s debit card had been flagged and turned off by her bank without her notice or approval and I was at the moment the only person with access to any money.
For some reason, the inept people at her bank allegedly sent her an email (she never found such an email) and didn’t attempt to call her or anything else about whatever suspicious activity lead to her card being flagged (she would ultimately never be informed what got it flagged). They had already sent her new card to her address in New Hampshire, and we’d have to wait for it to be mailed to a nearby post office before she could get it. All things were annoying.
On the drive home, I also decided to stop at a little fruit and produce market I’d driven by several times throughout my deliveries. It had a big yellow wooden sign advertising 2-for-$2.50 strawberries and $1 pineapples, handwritten in sloppy paintbrush strokes. The place was called Produce Patch and they had a little bit of everything, most of which was grown locally and significantly cheaper than anything at the local Publix. It seemed run almost exclusively by tough women who looked like they dated or were themselves bikers, one of which was grumbling and swearing to herself as she stocked a stand of melons. For only $15, I was able to get four things of strawberries, a cantaloupe, three peppers, two bulbs of garlic, two peaches, a mango, and figs. This place was only six miles down the road from our camp.
I also found a $100 bill on the ground there, folded up and lightly covered in sand. Finding it decided that I would be canceling my DoorDash schedule for after dinner. I briefly wondered if it was serendipitous enough to go back and buy a bike with, but Alyssa and I both decided we should wait for her to get her card back first. It was ultimately the right decision, we’d find out.
We had my famous chili for dinner. I used the “politely hot” tofu crumbles from Publix since they didn’t have the Lightlife Mexican ground I usually used, and we chopped up the three peppers I’d gotten at Produce Patch for it. We also had a huge French baguette for dipping while it initially cooled down.
That night, we went out to the movies to see The Invisible Man. They didn’t have any ticket self-serve kiosks to scam and no way to sneak in, so we wound up paying full price. They decided the concession stand should also be the ticket booth, likely to cut costs, so we wound up waiting entirely too long to buy them behind old people buying snacks. Then the girl behind the counter who was visibly younger than us asked for our IDs? It was wild. I’d never been carded for an R-rated movie before, ever. Ironically, a six- or seven-year old boy would be in the theater with us later. The movie was really good, though; far darker and scarier than either of us could have possibly anticipated, mostly because it was literally about an abusive husband who was invisible, with an expected incredible performance by Elizabeth Moss.
That night would be our last at the camp for a couple nights. They were closing Serenova Tract off to the public so people could come in and kill animals for fun. These were apparently things found to be normal and appropriate on a so-called wildlife preserve. It was annoying to have to leave so animals could be murdered as recreation, but we decided we’d use the time away for a four-day vacation down to the Everglades and back.
Boxwood leaftier moth!
Sleepy bike shop kitty.
So much fruit.
My favorite chili is my own chili.
To be continued...
Friday, March 6th
Alyssa woke up and did the dishes. She came back and showed me a picture of a poor horse tied up to a trailer--their mobile stall where they’d spend the bulk of their life--connected to a huge RV. Wanting her to have time alone and free to draw and play saxophone, I spent the day out and about, running errands for us, which almost always meant urban foraging for more bullshit we needed to live comfortably. It was constantly reinforced for me how expensive I assumed it was for all the people online live their "nomadic" lifestyles.
My first stop was the Publix, where I picked up a giant refillable five-gallon jug of Zephyrhills spring water. We figured after buying it once, we’d just keep filling it up with nearby spring water; a website called FindASpring helped you locate the nearest free natural spring to you, and I already knew of at least one within reach of us. There was a helpful website directory of free resources for everything.
I also got this garlic herb tofu sandwich we’d noticed on their deli menu a few days before. When I went up and ordered it, a whole one on toasted white bread, the guy went and retrieved the tofu and looked down at it, confused. It was a small plastic container of tiny plain tofu cubes in water. I watched as he went to a co-worker and then to his manager to try and figure out what the deal was, because according to him this wasn’t the tofu they usually used. The manager looked at it, shrugged, grimaced, and chuckled.
“That’s tofu, hahaha!”
The three of them stood around, mumbling to each other, until I said, “Excuse me, is there a mystery surrounding the tofu?” The co-worker told me no, and the guy making my sandwich took a bag of the garlic herb tofu off the shelf. I thanked him for not giving me plain-ass soggy tofu.
But goddamn, this sandwich was ridiculously good: firm cubes of garlic herb tofu, a parsley and ranch spread, avocado, lettuce tomato onion, green pepper, spinach, banana peppers, jalapeños, and pickles (I asked for all veggies except olives). For a mere $6.49. As always, I tried my food stamp card to see how much of the water jug and sandwich it would cover, if any, and it took care of it all except the $6 cost of the jug.
I spent the first half of the day driving in circles around the plazas of Bayonet Point, Hudson, and Port Richey, where every chain that currently existed was represented by at least one location (but usually two) and long stretches of road prevented left turns. Because we weren’t yet sure the future of our mini-fridge and had optimistically purchased a buncha food that needed to stay cold, I had to go and retrieve a Coleman water cooler and two bags of ice. Alyssa needed two more milk crates for her clothes, so I had to snatch some of those from behind a store. I checked dumpsters behind Harbor Freight, Rural King, and Dollar General in hopes of miraculously finding something helpful, but they were all freshly emptied. While driving, I had the new car inverter charging my laptop for movie watching. I went to a Goodwill in search of a foldout table, but only wound up helping an older woman put a shelf in her cart and leaving empty-handed. I walked out with a huge Coleman cooler by telling the receipt checker that I had come in with it to measure how many bags of ice it could carry at once. "Oh, you should have one of these stickers, then!" she said as she placed a smiley face on it.
While driving around all of the same shit over and over, I stumbled across a big, 22’-tall, 58’-foot long, pink brontosaurus. I immediately had to pull over. There wasn’t an explanation as to why they were there, outside a place called Tree of Life Wellness Solutions. I loved them, though. Searching online later, I found out that they were built in 1962 by a taxidermist and his brother for the Dinosaur Wildlife museum they and their family owned. The business closed in 1998 and the pink dino still stood, a pleasant surprise on an otherwise soul-crushing strip of businesses. It was the only interesting thing I’d seen the entire day.
When I got back to camp, the entire first section of sites had been swarmed by more giant mansion RVs, their trailers, and the horses that rode in them, tied up and standing still within fences that folded open propped up around them, just big enough for them to stand and face one direction. If it weren’t for having been instilled with learned helplessness, they could have easily jumped over them and fled. It made me sick. All of the old white reptiles there with their horse slaves didn’t talk to their horses or each other the entire time I was there; just lived nearby each other in silence, generators running, living as luxuriously as one could afford to while on the road, likely raking in money off the lives of the horses who were their property.
For dinner, we had giant, quarter-pound Morningstar burgers that had pockets of cheese inside of them. I still melted slices of Chao cheese on them in the frying pan, and then fixed them up with butter lettuce, red onion, pickles, ketchup, dijon, and Just mayo, on warm toasted buns with some canned green beans on the side. These burgers were perfect.
The sun set and I think I got to lay down in bed for five or so minutes before jumping back up and going to back to Bayonet Point for some DoorDash. I spent most of my time sitting in the car outside a closed mall where a sign claimed wrestling matches took place, and over the course of three hours made only $22.75. My final order of the night paid me $3.75 and had me picking up almost a dozen cheeseburgers from McDonald’s, with requests for them to only have cheese and ketchup on them. When I pulled up to the house, all the lights were off, and when a kid answered the door he was unsure what I was doing there. Then I heard him say, “Oh, did Dad get cheeseburgers for the dogs?”
Yes. Yes, he did get $25 worth of cheeseburgers for the dogs, and he did not tip me anything.
Damn good sandwich from Publix.
Big pink dino friend!
Not-so-subtle reminders that we were still very much in the South.
Creepy Easter bunny up the road from our camp.
Sleepy sunset over our backyard.
Damn good burgers.
DAY THIRTY-ONE/THIRTY-TWO
Saturday, March 7th and Sunday, March 8th
I spent the entire weekend doing DoorDash deliveries. I had a goal set for myself that I was pretty determined to stick to: $100 a day. I still wanted us to make at least a grand in March for car insurance and a potential trip to the Bahamas, and I still wanted Alyssa to not have to worry about anything and have time to do her creative stuff. It wasn’t like I had much to do with myself. Any urges to create outside of writing journal entries on Facebook that no one read were immediately weakened by the futility and/or expense of it all. I wanted to at least be busy and feel useful.
As a result, I didn’t get to eat dinner with Alyssa for two days. While she spent her time creating, riding her bike, watching movies, and listening to podcasts, I sat in the car in various parking lots, waiting for the alarm to go off indicating I was being offered a delivery, driving in circles within a 15-mile radius of the counties I was serving, delivering the worst possible food mostly to people in big and beautiful houses.
Saturday was spent in central Tampa, an area I’d worked before. The "hot spot" the app directed me to was in a huge lot outside a discount grocery store, Planet Fitness, and an abandoned section called Magic Mall, between a Wendy’s and a Dunkin’. The tall River Tower with lights blasted up at it served as my compass, since I could see it from just about anywhere I went.
I scheduled myself as much as I could from 2 in the afternoon until 2 in the morning (actually 3, but I was robbed of my final hour by the clocks being set forward). I finished the book I was reading with no backup book. The orders were pretty steady, thankfully, and I got to take in so much of Tampa, a diverse and interesting city I was gaining a lot of new admiration for.
Most people did not tip, it seemed. I was introduced to picking up groceries from Walmart for people. One person didn’t answer their door or phone when I got to them, so I had to return everything. At least I was paid for it. Another, I had to park in a fire zone in front of a hydrant, walk down a brick courtyard, and go up three floors to deliver over 20 bags of groceries to a girl who couldn’t have been older than 21 with recently pedicured feet and no desire to help or tip me as I hyperventilated, lugging three 24-packs of bottled water to her one at a time. It was a particularly dehumanizing moment that reminded me exactly why I didn’t want to work a job. Another order, I pulled up to the restaurant and they weren’t even open. It didn’t feel good to be a convenience to wealthy people, but I wasn’t a drug dealer and Alyssa wasn’t a cam girl, and this was one of the only ways for us to regularly make money while out on the road.
Tampa was full of compartmentalized communities separated into three discernible classes, from what I could see: there were the upscale gated communities and cul-de-sacs with dramatic entrances and names referencing the tree or landscape that was decimated or the species of bird whose ecosystem was imposed on for it to be built; there were the quaint suburban neighborhoods of perfectly aligned one-story homes with garages, straight out of The Wonder Years but distinctly Floridian, distinguishable from one another only by the different pastel colors used to paint their exteriors; and then there were the apartment complexes, which despite being far nicer than any projects I’d ever seen must have belonged to the lower income folks of the city. Electrical boxes and large pipes of unknown purpose on the sides of the roads were also painted bright colors. Stray cats roamed the streets with a distinct fearlessness. There was little to no graffiti, other than a few awful tags by someone who wrote Lokey, either a toy attempt at legitimate graff or just ugly gang graffiti.
Saturday had a lot of life out and about, of course. The neon lights of bars and restaurants open late shone and drew in customers like a hypnotic human fly zapper. Cops lay in wait in the shadows of derelict mall parking lots like vultures who could rob you. I passed by many successful plunder where people had three or four cops surrounding, them out of the car and in cuffs while a cop searched their vehicle. Meanwhile, the reckless driving on 75 saw the extended shoulders of the interstate lined in the aftermaths of several head-on collisions, which cops didn’t seem too interested in. I was constantly being cut off by shiny muscle cars that sounded like motorcycles, undeterred from their erratic and risky driving by the numerous wrecks around us.
Sunday was spent in the Lutz/Wesley Chapel area where there seemed to be more shopping plazas than residences, though maybe most of the upper-class living took place in neighborhoods hidden in the man-made, idyllic wooded areas I delivered to, where people rode bikes, jogged in pairs, and walked purebred dogs like they were in a permanent commercial. I was out there from 1:30 in the afternoon until after midnight.
I found out Fords Garage was a burger and brew restaurant, themed entirely off of the Ford car? Anyway, the orders kept coming in. I shoplifted a copy of American Psycho from a Barnes and Noble after searching their online store for five or six books I actually wanted to read; it would figure Bret Easton Ellis would be the only one they carried. I ate shitty food for two days straight: bread sticks from Papa John’s, Impossible Whopper with fries from Burger King, a jerk tempeh and mushroom pizza from Mellow Mushroom. I felt so sick. A kid named Chase gave me an angry call about their Red Robin order, which I’d just picked up two minutes after receiving the order, right on the time the app said to pick it up by. It hurt me to bring it to him in his giant house and seeing his stupid face. I was tipped well for absurd late-night orders by rich people younger than me, getting stuff children with access to their parents’ debit card would order, like milkshakes and fries.
By the end of Sunday, I had made $180.80 before the expenses of gas. I supposed that was more or less a success? When I returned home, we were the only ones left. All of the old people and their horses were gone and our camper was the only thing left standing. It was both spooky and wonderful.
Get it? My last name is Gunn, so I took this picture. It's my family's highway, obviously.
Yikes.
The most bleak bumper I'd seen since "Someone I loved was murdered" years ago.
A very gross billboard for a local funeral home.
DAY THIRTY-THREE
Monday, March 9th
I got up again and prepared for another day of deliveries. DoorDash gerrymanders counties in a confusing way that I was still getting used to, and they wouldn’t give you directions to the “hot spot” they wanted you in until your shift had started. This oftentimes meant driving to where you thought you should be, only to then discover you have to drive another 15 minutes to get to where they wanted you. My shift started at 1, but I didn’t get to it until 1:37, partly because of unusually heavy traffic and largely because I went to the wrong county and then had to find out the hot spot to wait in was another 15 minutes away. My anxiety was already piqued.
My first order was picking up groceries from a Walmart: 113 items for $6.18. When I pulled up to the house that ordered them, I wanted to cry. It was one of the biggest homes I’d ever delivered to, standing on the water on its own grassy hill with several boats, surrounded by perfectly planted trees. I walked up the beautiful granite stairs to the doors--all four of them, with birds and intricate designs carved into the sturdy wood they were made out of. I rang the bell and then knocked. An older Hispanic woman answered, but I quickly realized she was The Help, as a wide-eyed, pale housewife greeted me and asked if I could pull up to the garage--all four doors of it. I carried everything in and loaded most of it into a hamper that was like a remote-controlled elevator to her kitchen? I’d never seen such a thing. She boasted to me that the she had reached the order limit.
“It cut me off at $500!”
Several hours later, she was nice enough to tip me $15.
I got another order just as I was trying to cancel my shift, so I took it. I wasn’t feeling well, mentally, so I wanted to take a day for myself and just be around Alyssa. The app had gotten me 47 minutes away from home. I hated thinking about the gas I was burning, wondering if the payments from deliveries evened out in a way that was still worth it. I daydreamed about robbing mansions and churches on the way home.
I spent the day relaxing in bed. I read a little. Mostly, I just enjoyed being in the woods all by ourselves with only the sounds of birds singing. For dinner, per my request, Alyssa mad chicken parm burgers using Morningstar chicken patties and Chao cheese with pizza sauce with a can of sweet peas on the side. Our cooler’s ice was finally melting; as advertised on the sticker, it did indeed stay frozen for three days. That night, the moon was huge.
Sometimes the night just calls for chicken patties.
No cellphone picture of the moon will ever be good, but this was our view of the backyard that night.
DAY THIRTY-FOUR
Tuesday, March 10th
Another day. Little errands became like adventures to me; having to fetch a resource and trying to get it for free made me feel like I had a reason to exist. I went out and got us some more ice for the cooler. We poured the cooler water into our other jug to be reused as dishwater.
For dinner, I made us nearly perfect grilled cheese sandwiches, with Campbell’s tomato soup. As always, I used Daiya cheddar slices, JUST mayo to get the bread nice and golden, sprinkled with some garlic powder on them before they fried. During dinner, we saw a big, beautiful bird that I was fairly certain was a peregrine falcon. I wasn’t able to get a picture.
At 7, I did a couple hours of DoorDash deliveries and made a surprising $54.23. Rich people were particularly generous (and gluttonous) that night. On the way home, I saw deer on the side of the road. It made me realize how long it’d been since I last had. Down there in Florida, at least in this part, it was more likely to see the corpse of a wild boar on the side of the road than that of a deer.
Relocating spiders became a regular task in the camper. For the most part, we let them set up shop, and applauded them as we watched them gradually stock up on a buffet of the small, annoying and intrusive gnat sorta bugs that liked to sneak in and freak out around our ceiling lights. We saw many jumping spiders, who were hands down the cutest spiders. That night, though, I saw one crawling down my arm as I sat on my phone and reflexively flicked them away. When I got up and turned on the lights to try and find where they landed, I noticed they had been sent straight into the ceiling fan and chopped in two. I felt really bad as I looked at the single glistening line of web blowing away dramatically from the fan. I would never kill a spider on purpose!
A very cheesy grilled cheese.
DAY THIRTY-FIVE
Wednesday, March 11th
I got up early and did a block of DoorDash from noon until 3 in the Bayonet Point area. When I got into the car to leave, I found a neat little boxwood leaftier moth on my visor. Later, an old man I delivered to told me to watch out for coronavirus. I had no idea just how annoying that was all going to become. It was a busy lunchtime rush, but pretty boring. I made a whopping $47, though.
I’d passed by a store with a bunch of bikes outside of it, so after I clocked out I went to it in hopes of finding an affordable used road bike. They had a couple really nice ones, going for $100 each, and a tortoiseshell shop cat sleeping between them with their paw over their eyes to block the heavy sun. I wasn’t ready to spend that much, though, especially since Alyssa’s debit card had been flagged and turned off by her bank without her notice or approval and I was at the moment the only person with access to any money.
For some reason, the inept people at her bank allegedly sent her an email (she never found such an email) and didn’t attempt to call her or anything else about whatever suspicious activity lead to her card being flagged (she would ultimately never be informed what got it flagged). They had already sent her new card to her address in New Hampshire, and we’d have to wait for it to be mailed to a nearby post office before she could get it. All things were annoying.
On the drive home, I also decided to stop at a little fruit and produce market I’d driven by several times throughout my deliveries. It had a big yellow wooden sign advertising 2-for-$2.50 strawberries and $1 pineapples, handwritten in sloppy paintbrush strokes. The place was called Produce Patch and they had a little bit of everything, most of which was grown locally and significantly cheaper than anything at the local Publix. It seemed run almost exclusively by tough women who looked like they dated or were themselves bikers, one of which was grumbling and swearing to herself as she stocked a stand of melons. For only $15, I was able to get four things of strawberries, a cantaloupe, three peppers, two bulbs of garlic, two peaches, a mango, and figs. This place was only six miles down the road from our camp.
I also found a $100 bill on the ground there, folded up and lightly covered in sand. Finding it decided that I would be canceling my DoorDash schedule for after dinner. I briefly wondered if it was serendipitous enough to go back and buy a bike with, but Alyssa and I both decided we should wait for her to get her card back first. It was ultimately the right decision, we’d find out.
We had my famous chili for dinner. I used the “politely hot” tofu crumbles from Publix since they didn’t have the Lightlife Mexican ground I usually used, and we chopped up the three peppers I’d gotten at Produce Patch for it. We also had a huge French baguette for dipping while it initially cooled down.
That night, we went out to the movies to see The Invisible Man. They didn’t have any ticket self-serve kiosks to scam and no way to sneak in, so we wound up paying full price. They decided the concession stand should also be the ticket booth, likely to cut costs, so we wound up waiting entirely too long to buy them behind old people buying snacks. Then the girl behind the counter who was visibly younger than us asked for our IDs? It was wild. I’d never been carded for an R-rated movie before, ever. Ironically, a six- or seven-year old boy would be in the theater with us later. The movie was really good, though; far darker and scarier than either of us could have possibly anticipated, mostly because it was literally about an abusive husband who was invisible, with an expected incredible performance by Elizabeth Moss.
That night would be our last at the camp for a couple nights. They were closing Serenova Tract off to the public so people could come in and kill animals for fun. These were apparently things found to be normal and appropriate on a so-called wildlife preserve. It was annoying to have to leave so animals could be murdered as recreation, but we decided we’d use the time away for a four-day vacation down to the Everglades and back.
Boxwood leaftier moth!
Sleepy bike shop kitty.
So much fruit.
My favorite chili is my own chili.
To be continued...