Manager Steve, other than being such an egomaniac in the truest sense, but also a big city Tampa boy looked down on people from Lakeland.

“I’ve never seen so much trash in my life,” he said to me one day.

He also went on to compare himself to Lakelanders, saying they were at the level of the rim of a garbage can and he was way up near his own, six-foot plus head. I didn’t know enough about the place to make any judgments. I was still trying to figure everything out.

When I was back in Madison, one of my favorite things to do was drive and listen to music. If there was no clear destination, that was even better. I used to want to keep driving until I left the city limits, and just keep driving into infinity. I wanted the freedom to roam wherever I wanted to go. It seemed as though that time had come.

Here in Lakeland, there were a couple of radio stations that played the kind of music I liked, which was mostly hip-hop. The radio stations weren’t local. One was a Tampa Bay station and the other was an Orlando station called 102 Jamz. 102 Jamz had one of the funniest radio shows I had ever heard before. The host would ask a series of questions to the caller, and if the caller would answer incorrectly or take too much time thinking, the DJ would play a sound where first you hear the old AOL “Goodbye” followed by a guy shouting “BIIIIIAAAAAAAAAA***!” I don’t know how they got away with doing that. It kind of goes with Florida’s less lawful style.

A lot of Southern and even local artists got priority on the radio. There was Khia from Tampa Bay whose songs always had powerful bass and were suitable for subwoofers you could hear from a mile away. Perhaps her most popular song was K-Wang.

“Step so clean

Just step so clean

K-Wang with it

Step so clean”

Another artist from Tampa named Rated R, not surprisingly based on some of his lyrics, was also on the charts with his hit “In Here Ta Nite.”

“I ain’t even posed ta be in here ta nite, but all these thick old girls here ta nite. Ballers in the back drinkin’ yak gettin’ right cuz uh, these girls be bumpin’. Whaaat?”

That was definitely the clean version.

Another song that got a lot of air time was Awnaw by Nappy Roots.

“Aw naw, Hell naw, boy

Y’all done up and done it

Aw naw, Hell naw, boy

Y’all done up and done it”

Strangely, there was a California artist whose one-hit wonder “Bump on the Beach” got played a lot too. I guess it somehow worked because Florida is surrounded by beaches. It wasn’t of my usual variety, but due to constant exposure, it became part of the experience.

“Everyone likes The Bump on the Beach

My beats will make you bump on the beach

Smooth skin, hot flesh is all within reach

Gettin’ crunked, shake your rump down at the beach”

New songs were being churned out every week, it seemed. The radio was producing non-stop hits that kept everything interesting.

As a child, my family and I spent most of our visits in the Tampa Bay area, so that was naturally the first place I was drawn to. My blue Toyota Tercel was still holding up well as I made the trip to Tampa several times to explore. I entered the city on the eastern side where there were a lot of long and straight roads with little traffic and intermittent splays of palm trees in the medians. There was one street called Fowler Avenue where I found an interesting place called Merlin’s Bookstore. With a name like that, how could I not look inside?

Merlin’s Bookstore had rows of shelves full of spiritual and philosophical books, very similar to the ones that my friend Richard in Madison kept at his small bookstore. There were also swords and other rare items around the place. I came more than once to buy books, and I even bought a sword, partly because I’ve always wanted one since I was a child, and also because who knows?

The girl who usually worked at the register had glasses, reddish-brown hair, and she seemed a bit aloof. Her dress style seemed kind of counterculture-ish, and it shouldn’t have surprised me considering what an off-center kind of place this was. The language in those esoteric books was still a little difficult for me to understand, but it definitely put some new ideas in my head. I imagine most of the people who wrote them lived very solitary and secluded lives and may have been more focused on the abstract than the practical, but that is what I found so fascinating about it. Sometimes it was uplifting, and other times it was confusing and led to some warped conceptualizations about life since I didn’t yet have a very discerning mind. In the very least reading was something to take my mind off this dangerous place I was living in for a while.

Further down Fowler Avenue toward the eastern edge of Tampa, I recognized a restaurant where my father and I went on our last trip back in ‘96, back when everything was still OK and before “life” happened. What happened to THAT Florida? I remember everything being so fun, exciting, and new. Now it seemed like everyone wanted to kill me. Where there was sunshine there were now clouds.

The restaurant was a sandwich shop called Miami Subs. I teased my father because we went through the drive-thru and he ordered a Philly cheesesteak and said “uh” between every word, and it made me laugh.

“Can I have a uh Philly uh cheesesteak?”

The person taking our order probably heard me laughing. I don’t remember my father thinking it was as funny as I did, but my memory could be off a little. I stopped there and got a sub a couple times for the sake of old memories.

Tampa indeed felt like a big city for me. I would drive through there at all times of the day just to explore. Lakeland was only 30 minutes away, so it was very easy for me to do on weekends when I didn’t have to work. Before long, I discovered that some times of the day were more unfavorable for driving than others.

One night I was driving through the north side of Tampa. It was about 10:30-11:00 at night. I stopped at a stoplight, and a minivan stopped two lanes over on my left side. It seemed like we were the only two vehicles on the street. Was everyone else sleeping already?

I didn’t look directly at the other vehicle, but I could see the driver and the passenger talking and looking over at me and my car. They seemed to be getting really excited the way they kept turning their heads quickly looking back and forth at each other and then me. I still had them only in my peripheral as the light changed green. Instantly, they swerved two lanes over and got behind me.

“Yeah, I thought they were interested in me,” I thought to myself.

It seemed very suspicious to me, but I knew my best choice right now was to stay calm. If I got excited, I would play right into their game, assuming they had hostile intentions towards me.

I turned left, right, left, right, and still they were right behind me. I passed a police car that pulled someone over on the side of the road and they were still behind me.

“Who are these guys and what do they want?” I thought.

The minivan got in the left lane and started driving faster than me and was about to pass me. I let them catch up to me so I could see who they were. I had never seen such looks from anyone before. Both the driver and passenger were wearing baseball caps. It was dark, but I could easily see the expressions on their faces. They were both smiling, but their eyes said, “We’re gonna kill you!” Truly the most twisted and demonic thing I’ve ever seen. The van slowed down and went behind me again. I continued on with my plan of staying calm until something happened.

I seemed to be going further and further away from more densely populated areas. These long dark roads had zero traffic on them, and I was sure that if someone was killed on them, no one would know until the next day, and I sensed that it probably happened before. I was going deeper into unfamiliar territory, deeper into shark inhabited waters with no communication to the outside world. Nobody knew where I was, not even my old friend Jared who was probably back at the apartment in Lakeland. The only ones who knew where I was were these two killers right behind me in the minivan.

I kept driving until I saw a road sign that said “Dead end” underneath it on the right side of the road. Suddenly, it was like my hands started acting automatically and urged me to turn right on the dead end street. Despite being calm, my heart was definitely beating faster since I was consciously aware of the amount of danger I was in.

“What??? I can’t turn into a dead end street! It WILL be a dead end, for ME!” I thought to myself.

My hands kept on urging me to turn, and they actually did begin turning the wheel without my permission, as strange as that sounded. I only had a few seconds to make my decision as I was coming up quickly to the dead end, not so long to make a life-or-death decision.

Because the sensation was so overwhelming, I decided to let go of my rational mind and act purely on instinct, I decided to turn into the dead end. What a mistake this was going to be!

As soon as I turned into the dead end, I saw a small plot of land made of gravel on the left side of the small dead end street that was unfinished. It looked like it was an unfinished parking lot that would one day be big enough for about ten cars. I pulled into what I assumed was an unfinished parking lot and did a u-turn. Just as I was turning around, I saw the minivan that was chasing me pull into the dead end, turn off its lights, and drive right past me. Either they didn’t see me, or they thought I was someone else and didn’t expect me to be coming back in their direction so fast. The minivan got stuck in the dead end and had to do a y-turn, probably several y’s to get out. I didn’t hesitate. I drove out of the dead end and left a trail of rubber on the road behind me. Those carjackers, serial killers, or whatever they were had been successfully ditched! Again, it felt like something beyond myself was guiding me through that situation. I’ve never had such an involuntary reflex like that before, and at such a crucial time where there was a thin line between living another day and dying tonight.

This situation reminded me of a story. A couple years earlier I was at a friend of Jared’s apartment off of Broadway in Madison. I met this girl only one time, but a year later or so Jared told me she got carjacked near the Florida-Georgia border and was shot in the face and killed. I felt bad to hear the news because she was kind to me in the short time I was there, and she had a daughter too. In Florida, you don’t mess with anyone unless you have a gun, because the other person most likely will have one. I was grateful that this time, there wasn’t going to be a story in the newspaper about me, at least, not like that.

The next day, I saw my next door neighbor José from Tampa and told him what happened.

“Which part of Tampa were you in?” he asked.

“The north side,” I said.

José nodded his head and blinked as though what I said made perfect sense to him.

“Tampa crazy. Don’t ever go there alone,” he said.

I certainly wouldn’t go there at nighttime alone again. During the day it felt safer, but there were still certain parts of Tampa that felt uneasy, like someone could jump out of the bushes and start shooting at you. In more recent times, a voice coach of mine from New York City said that a colleague of his was getting Ubered by someone in Tampa and they drove right in between two cars that were having a shootout. The colleague was hit by a bullet, but no life-threatening injuries were received.

I was still bewildered by how different this place seemed from when I was a kid, the last time was only six years earlier. How did things change this much? Was part of it because I changed since then? I was just trying to start a new life — to get away from the gangs and the violence, but now I ended up in a place much worse! Was ALL of Florida like this? I didn’t know, but I was still determined to find out. Undaunted by what happened, foolish or not, I determined my next destination.