Unorthodox Angles/Andrew Gramling
Tales Across Time: “Beware of Sharks”
The drive down to Florida was uneventful but exciting. My used blue Toyota Tercel that my mother arranged for me to buy from a college student in Madison about a year earlier was holding out well for the ride. New songs I hadn’t heard before like “Saturday” by Ludacris were playing on the radio as I crossed down into the South late at night.
I was heading off into a completely unknown situation. No job lined up, no family, no support network. The only point of familiarity for me was my old friend Jared. The rest would be new and unpredictable.
Whoever heard of Lakeland, Florida? I sure hadn’t, even in my half a dozen trips down there. That would be my new home for an undetermined amount of time.
I arrived in Lakeland late the next morning. I made my way over to Gilmore Avenue, which is where Jared was staying. The apartment looked like a motel, with two floors, no lobby, and doors leading directly into apartment rooms. Being March of 2002, it was still cold in Wisconsin, but it was warm and sunny down here with palm trees scattered all around.
One of the first things Jared and I did was go to a local Chili’s and have some margaritas. This was the first time he and I could have drinks together legally in a public place after both of us recently turned 21. He just turned 21 a week or so earlier, and I did back in 2001 just a couple weeks before 9/11.
My father, Uncle Jim, Aunt Mary, and Cousin Jerry took a trip to the Bitterroot Valley in Montana in mid-August of 2001 to go hiking on a trail. My Aunt Mary lived in the area, and she was an experienced hiker and basically our guide. I turned 21 up near the top of the mountains, on our most challenging day when we weren’t sure if we would have enough water to even make it all the way since on the map we had, a water source we were depending on turned out to be nothing but swamps and horseflies.
The trail was a lot longer than the map had suggested on that day as well. To keep hydrated, we had to eat huckleberries that started to appear on the side of the trail, hoping we didn’t run into any bears that were looking to eat them also — or us. Eventually we made it to a small rush of water that was spraying directly over and across the path. That was the best water I’ve ever tasted because of not only its purity, but also because of the challenge we had to endure just to find it, which for me personally was like a rite of passage. That night, we all slept underneath the stars off the path next to the rush of water, and my Aunt Mary gave me a glass case with each kind of coin made in 1980, the year I was born.
The next day we hiked down to the bottom, took turns taking a small plane from across the Idaho border back into Montana, and I had my first drink as a 21 year-old at a saloon. That was definitely my favorite birthday in memory.
I wasn’t sure what kind of place Lakeland or even my new neighborhood were, but I learned quickly, as doing anything else could have serious consequences. The police were often, more than usual, cruising around the block. A police helicopter also flew around the neighborhood at night with a searchlight on, going up and down the streets.
One of the first things I heard about anybody was about our neighbors that lived across the street running alongside our apartment complex to the left looking out the front door. Jared told me that they were responsible for killing an off-duty police officer at Denny’s late at night and were never caught for it. There was an interesting mix of people. Some were straight hood, and there seemed to be a few that were somehow a mixture of country and hood. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen that combo before. People drove around the neighborhood listening to songs like “Don’t Trust No *****” by Khia in the chopped and screwed remix where the tempo is slowed down, making it sound more demonic. The bass came in hard and could be felt thundering from blocks away. There were people on every corner that looked like they had killed someone on their face and in their eyes.
This wasn’t the place where people came to live because they wanted to. They came here because they had nowhere else to go, and I wasn’t any exception. I left Madison to get away from the gangs, drugs, violence, and backstabbing, but very soon it became clear that I left the wolf’s den only to fall straight into the shark tank. Being able to swim wasn’t the only issue.
