Note: I wrote today’s piece way back in the early fall just before my “new” laptop developed a fatal hard drive fault. It took a long time to fix the computer and then chase down the old drive all over the country before recovering the data thereon.

It was the opening day of the 2016 college football season. We had watched our teams on TV all day long. We were not used to sport TV’s endlessly lengthy events and their stultifying demands on mind and body.

Television is real, because it is immediate, has dimension, shows you what you want to see, echoes what you want to feel, tells you what to think and blasts it in. To coin a phrase, “it is so right now.” Or at least it seems so. It rushes you on so quickly to further action that your mind does not have time to protest, WTFO? So, in an effort to make it through the second half of our late night game, we stepped outside onto the front porch for some fresh physical and mental air.

After five minutes, one of us went inside for a brief bathroom break. Upon return, we had a visitor.

Their gentleman caller had a puffy oval face like the melting dial of a dreamscape clock seen faintly across a dark room in the middle of a night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and the second, with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and knowing what it has to tell of the night passing swiftly further on — not to a new sun but to an eternity of darkness.

His visage was haggard and stubbled, but on it was a transparent hunger that touched everything around him with relentless curiosity whether we could meet and supply his need. It was a look of pale aging desire. His dark eyes were so fixed to the world that no person or thing ever escaped them.

He told us stories, or at least snippets of stories, interspersed with tangents and diversions that led to him asking for things from his listeners – drink, smokes, stories, personal information . . . he droned on and on, never letting his audience respond to his wants, diversions or information. His voice softly at times bemoaned that he was in the cold hour of a colder evening of the coldest year of his life.

We offered him smokes but no liquor. Tobacco acted like rocket fuel on him with his narrative threads then becoming more tightly jumbled together.

As he told his tales, he smiled warmly at his listeners. His face’s lines became smooth, his dark eyes blue and his looks younger. As his raging word torrents began to trickle down in pace and force, this transformative process reversed itself. His smile slid away, melted, folded over and down on itself like a tallow skin of his life’s candle burning too long and now collapsing and now about to be blown out. Maybe he was not happy, but he soldiered on, his real feelings and fears hidden from all but the most observant and sensitive.

He sipped on a tall boy of malt liquor he had purchased at the EL Cheapo gas station around the corner from our house. His evening’s elixir was encased in a small crumpled brown paper bag. The bag like its human holder had some years on it given the grime that was on it.

He claimed to have been in the “In the Garden of Good and Evil” book and movie. Twenty some odd years later, he bore a faint resemblance to the book character and movie actor. Facial shape. Check. Mole. Check. Voice. Check. What didn’t match was his age. He should have been in his early sixties. Their guest looked to be in his late seventies.

Life had not been kind to Jerry Spence.

Savannah Chatham County Police Department booking
photo of Jerry Spence from 2012 for shoplifting

So in the dim, wavering front porch light, pages of hairdresser Jerry’s loosely stitched together life book hung open. To him they were like snowy feathers upon which his words delicately painted scenes. In all of Jerry’s rush and fervor, his audience only had a few instants to hear his lines and read the spaces between them, and they saw flickers and felt the reflected warmth from past bonfires that he had started or fed. They still burned brightly in Jerry’s mind for the few minutes we spent with him on their porch. It was as if they had been stamped there with fiery steel.

Jerry was peculiar, aggravating, yet easy to forgive. We parted ways after an hour of incessant rambling. Still steady afoot, Jerry was outta smokes save for the one menthol stick we gave him at our parting. He was early on the second and last of his tallboys. Ever the flirt and schmoozer he had been from the beginning, he flattered his audience one last time and promised them that he would return soon.

When we went back in the house, we found the game was over. Our team had lost in overtime.

————–

Walking to Forsyth Park two days later, we saw Jerry sitting on a bus shelter bench on Abercorn Street half a block from their house. He raised his downcast eyes and looked through us, not remembering us or anything from that Saturday night we spent with him on our front porch.

After some internet and neighborhood research, we confirmed our story teller’s claimed identity.

Upon further reflection, we concluded that we had hosted and been participants in an impromptu séance with Jerry Spence and the murmuring ghosts of his past. Jerry was moving from a fabulous unreality that surrounded and shaped his 15 minutes of real fame which he had kept alive for almost two and half decades to a reality that he hoped was unreal since it was cold, frightening and final.

We have not seen him since that Monday afternoon.

Copyright © 2016 From My Isle Seat