Good Morning Key West

The reason I’m writing about this is because I was approached by an old Birmingham Jewish friend in a dream, who late in life converted to Christianity. The last year or so in our grammar school he was one of a cadre of boys who seemed to take special delight in teasing me and threatening to beat me up. He was the second person to read the manuscript of the last novel that fell out of me, after it was trigged by a dream in Key West in 2001. I didn’t yet know the dream’s meaning and would not discover it until a few days later, when I by then was in the vicinity of Helen, Georgia.

How the book came to happen is explained in the “Preface,” and I’ll not explain that again here. What I will say, though, is that my old Jewish friend received a copy of the manuscript from a fellow I met in Helen shortly after it was finished. The fellow in Helen originally was from Montgomery, and he and my old Jewish friend met during their college fraternity hell-raising days at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. The Montgomery transplant said my old Jewish friend was super apologetic about how he had treated me in childhood. I sent back word that I was going to come over to Birmingham and beat his ass. Just joking. Maybe we could get together. Swap stories. Which would never happen. He was a Christian now, didn’t agree with all I’d written. Actually, he was terrified.

My old Jewish friend shared the manuscript with an old lawyer friend of mine in Birmingham. I’d known this guy since high school. From time to time we would reconnect. In the mid-1990s, we sometimes spoke of spiritual stuff. He was struggling deeply with a very strong drive to prove himself. He’d been a golden gloves boxer in high school, as I recall. Also was big into competitive swimming, I think. Smart, too. But always pushy back then, like he had a big chip on his shoulder, a driving need to prove himself as a man. I kept trying to talk him into softening up, giving up the endless grind that never can be won, proving himself.

Anyway, not long after my old lawyer buddy read the manuscript, he went to a gym and did some sparring with a much younger kid, who hit him hard in the chest, bruising his heart. The doctor’s ensuing advice was for him to take it easy. It wasn’t long, though, before he was back at the YMCA working out, and while running on the track he had a heart attack, collapsed and died. I was in the Helen Library, writing something new on the same computer I’d used to write the novel, when my Montgomery-transplant friend came to me with this news. He was pretty darn shook up. I was a bit unnerved myself. I wondered out loud if maybe people ought not read the manuscript?

In the dream that caused me to write about all of this, my old Jewish friend said something about looking for the Book of Yannah, or perhaps it was the Book of Yonah on the Internet, and he couldn’t find it there. There is a young Slovakian woman named Yannah, who works as Sippin’ Internet Café in Key West, so I went there to see if she was at work. Yep. But in talking to her, I found nothing that seemed to have anything to do with the dream, other than perhaps it was telling me there was something I needed to write that I’d not yet written. I write nearly every morning at Sippin’, it’s sort of my office. Also, near Helen is a Mount Yonah, a Cherokee name for bear. The bear is powerful medicine in Native American spirituality. The bear brings introspection, looking in the mirror. A spirit messenger just about anyone would just naturally want to kill, but unwise to do so.

In early 2005, I met a younger woman in Gainesville, Georgia, about an hour’s drive from Helen. How we met was pretty interesting. I’d had a couple of beers in the Green Parrot in Key West one evening, testing the water to see if the spirit world would let it pass. My heart was all busted up again, over the same woman I’d met in Helen when I was writing the novel. A novel I told her God was writing. A novel she said indeed was written by God, after she finally was able to find the time to read it. Anyway, that night, after testing the water at the Green Parrot, I was ordered in dreams, because of the two beers, to give my 1993 Chevy Blazer to “the women in the church,” and then to go by bus to Kansas City. I heard “I’m going to Kansas City, Kansas City here I come” for the rest of the night. The next day I ran into a Key West woman I knew pretty well, told her about this. She said she and her four teenage daughters had no vehicle and sure could use mine. So I gave it to her, and she drove me to the Greyhound bus station at the Key West airport. I felt she and her daughters were the women in the church because she had often been a spirit ally. She’d also recently met the lady over whom my heart kept getting all busted up.

I walked out of the bus station in Kansas City to a homeless shelter from hell about three blocks away. I spent two nights there. During the second night, I was told to leave. I was back in the Greyhound station three blocks away early that morning. Alas, I’d only just missed the bus east. Then, a bus driver came in an said if I wanted to get to St. Louis, to come out and get onto his bus. It was a second bus, the first one was over-filled. So glad was I to get out of there. You don’t want to know what it’s like living in an inner city homeless shelter run by arch-conservative Christians who believe they know everything there is to know about God, who say nobody can see the devil because the devil’s a spirit and people can’t see spirits. There were three people in that concentration camp I needed to see, have some conversation with. After which, I was allowed to leave.

When the connecting bus neared Atlanta, I passed out and was told in a dream to go to Helen. So I whipped out my cell phone and started calling old friends. Reaching only one of them, arrangements were made to pick me up at the Gainesville bus station and drive me over to Helen. I figured I’d stay in a motel the first night. But when I got to Gainesville, my friend wasn’t there. When I called her, she said she wasn’t going to make it. She sounded really strange. It was surreal. I felt the Evil in the air could be sliced with a knife. I looked outside the station and saw a taxi and took off after it, as it pulled out of the parking lot with me yelling after it. Back in the bus station, I was able to get the attendant to call me a cab. I needed a ride to Atlanta. The same cab came back. The driver was Brenda.

She took me to the Gainesville library, so I could go online and check my emails. I had a three-county library card, which included that county. Brenda and I started talking. Quickly, I discerned she was a spirit woman, and she admitted that, yes, she was the kind of person who heard from the Spirit. She drove me to Atlanta at cost — $60 — and I got out of the cab and walked onto a bus just then departing for Miami. That was how it began with Brenda and me. We reconnected that summer, which I spent near Helen. It was then that I first gave Brenda the manuscript to read. She like broke out in the hives or something, and started having horrible nightmares and visions. We decided it wasn’t a good idea for her to read it.

I began to teach Brenda what I had learned. She was very country, uneducated. But her spirit potential was enormous. It was pretty slow go, though. She was superstitious, deeply influenced by chuch experiences. And by something else, which I finally sensed was that she had been molested in childhood. When she finally read the manuscript, all of that came boiling up out of her, like the demons from hell exploding out of a Stephen King novel, but these demons from hell were exploding out of Brenda. I’d been told in a dream early that year, “You are going through the worst part of Evil.” No shit. Brenda was the nicest thing that happened that year. The nicest. I lost my Montgomery-transplant and several other very close friends in Helen that summer. I had to deal with my father’s passing and the incredible Evil that lurked in his unfinished affairs. I had to listen to my heart-love tell me she’d taken a vow of celibacy in exchange for God helping her get a place to stay. That was the deal she offered to God. I never believed it was God that accepted the offer and gave her a place to stay. All she had to do was call me, the only man she’d ever loved, the only man who’d ever loved her. I had a place to stay and we would have been back together. There is no way to describe what all I felt in my body, saw in my dreams, experienced in other people. I’d like to say it was just that one year, but I can’t say that. I’ve been going through the worst part of Evil ever since. I write about some of it every day. I don’t write about most of it.

Not all that many people read the novel, which fell out of me in six weeks’ time. Of those who did read it, some said “Thanks for the read.” Like, no way, Hosea. A few seemed genuinely affected. Perhaps the most interesting question was how much of it was really true? What I’ll say is that there is no way to write a story like that by making it up. I had to have lived it in some way or another to be able to write it. In the fall of 2006 it came into print through PublishAmerica, a print-to-order publishing house. It can be ordered straight from their online bookstore at PublishAmerica.com. HEAVY WAIT: A Strange Tale. By the Priesthood Melchizedek, who wrote it through someone named Sloan Bashinsky. I guarantee this book is not literature. Not slated to join the Classics. I also guarantee no book like it has ever before been written and I seriously doubt another like it will follow. You don’t want to know how many people I get to know who were molested. You don’t want to know. Most of them don’t even know it. Although the protagonist is a lawyer with his own heavy crosses to bear, the heroine is the story’s heart and soul. She offers keys to the horrible prison cells in which many people have been locked their entire lives. People like Brenda, my beloved, my old Jewish friend and old lawyer friend. I plead the Fifth. The Monroe County Library system has several copies.

Political adversment (?) paid for and approved and written by Sloan Bashinsky, county commission candidate