Russell Buddy Helm

1970. Bo Diddley walked into the dressing room at the Miami Sportatorium with the ease of a Zen martial arts master, dressed all in black with his thick glasses and his gunslinger black hat. He smiled and got right down to business, pulling out his square Gretsch guitar, he started jamming with the young fresh players brought in by Louise , our friend, concert booker  and general music business liason. Charlie and I were in Bo’s band. We had a great time.

In nineteen fifty nine, at Diamond lake in northern Indiana, I was ten years old and my older sister was spinning forty fives with some other fourteen year old girls at our two week summer vacation. The lake side bungalow was small but nice and accomodated my school teacher mother, her mother, my older sister and the young boy who had no father. His mystery always played at the back of his mind. Unless he was playing the drums, then the mind would shut off and he could just play. He walked back in from catching a blue gill on the end of the dock, he didn’t know what to do with it, so just left it on the hook in the water and walked back across the road. A sound grew louder as he neared the music coming from his sister’s dance group. It was drums. Big drums. It was Bo Diddley. The young boy’s brain caught fire.

I could read any kind of difficult percussion music put in front of me, Podemski’s advanced percussion reading was fun, Aileen Trafford  was a good and kind  drum teacher and also a very good drummer. Her daughter was a drummer about my age. Women were drummers in my eyes as well as guys. I had a chest full of medals for state wide drumming competitions. I was able to sight read extremely difficult snare drum parts while playing to the exacting click and blink of a metronome. I learned what sixty beats a minute felt like, and forty beats where the world would gear down and I would trip over myself rhythmically. My racing mind would witness the phenomenon of shifting time. Part of my mind would think the metronome was wrong, that it was jumping ahead, then slowing down, but I had to remind myself that I was the one who was jumping around in my head, speeding up the input of sensations, trying to make sense of everything all at once. Drumming gave me independence; a learned trait where the body can do a variety of activities while a central core stays calm. Aileen Trafford showed me how to meditate using rhythm. My open and closed drum rudiments were like scales on a piano, only we had to start the rhythm pattern very slowly, then speed up to our fastest controlled tempo then slow back down again to the ultimate slowest tempo. If this was done correctly, the judges awarded the medals. If there was a bit of flair, they wouldn’t acknowledge it. This drumming was stern, anonymous, consistent, exacting. Designed for orchestras and brass bands. There might be a drum clinic on jazz or some other exotic drum techniques but most of it was geared toward teaching world class orchestra percussionists. After all, Elkhart, Indiana was the capitol of orchestral music instrument manufacturing in the world. The Selmer Mark Six saxophone that Charlie was playing, was made on the street where I walked to West Side Junior High school every morning. I heard the testers running scales on the new horns. Mother had asked me when I was younger, when I was putting together organized meticulous scrapbooks of rocket research in the U.S. including the first rocket designer Dr. Goddard, all the way to Werner Von Braun, the transplanted German rocket designer of the dreaded V1 and V2 rockets that decimated Great Britain. Along with stories of American spies, history of the Secret Service. FBI, CIA. Things my father did.

“What musical instrument do you want to play?” she asked me.

I thought about the most popular kid in the fifth grade, Mike. “Drums.”

She tried piano, French horn, but in the end, drums were what I was able to practice every day. I could not improvise like Mike could, “How do you do that? There isn’t any music in front of you!” I asked at my birthday party. The girls were loving him.

“I just play, man.”

I could read music pretty well, but improvising was a great mystery that I decided I had to learn about.

Mother remarried, and I found myself sitting in the foulest swamp in central Florida with mosquitos the size of canaries, and no symphony. I learned to play the blues.

Bo Diddley was trying to get my attention. “Let me play your drums!” He yelled at me over the noise on stage. I got up off my new Slingerland chrome drumset. It was like a Cadillac.  Bo sat down and started having fun. The rest of us just kept the groove going. I played a cowbell just to have something to do. There were thousands of kids watching us. Finally Bo got up and came back to his guitar. He suddenly launched into an opera piece from Pagliacci. He could sing that too.

Eric Clapton and Tommy Dowd listened to both of Duane Allman’s impeccable slide guitar takes on ‘Layla’ and finally decided to use them both. A friendly guy was going on about the incredible session at Criteria the morning after, in our living room just a few blocks from Sailboat Bay. I liked the tinkling of the rigging in the gentle morning trade winds. It calmed me. I didn’t like this guy. He supplied people with dangerous powders. I had asked him to leave the last time he had dropped in unannounced. I was about to throw him out again when I noticed his clothing. His flowered  shirt was peppered with tiny burn holes the size of buckshot. His white pants were also spotted with matching burn holes. “Why do you have all those burn holes in your clothes?”

“When I got home from the studio, I was so wired, coz I had done so much blow, I couldn’t go to sleep.  I had to take some downers to try to get to sleep. That made me so depressed I wanted to kill myself. So I took my grandfather’s shotgun out of the closet, put the barrel in my mouth, but I couldn’t reach the trigger. That pissed me off, so I shot my dresser drawers full of all my clothes.

That’s when I heard a voice say, “Pay attention to this moment. This shows how stupid drugs are.”

Allan Ginsberg handed his autoharp to Jim and Danny, “Could you tune this for me?”

1969. We were all standing on the floating stage out on Key Biscayne at the Miami Marine Stadium on Rickenbacker Causeway. The concert featured Allan Ginsberg and Bethlehem Asylum. Only Bethlehem Asylum was not being allowed to perform because the Miami police department had not cleared our police records in time. Jim Morrison had recently been indicted for lewd conduct on stage and they weren’t taking any chances, or rather they were using any excuse to prevent rock n roll from happening in Miami. So we sat on the stage, on chairs, quietly while Allan Ginsberg recited poetry about homosexual love making to an almost packed crowd. The marine stadium looked like a gigantic vintage nineteen fifties toaster oven with the floating stage like a piece of toast that has just been spit out of the toaster. There was about two feet of water between the stage and the concert seating with big ropes at each end keeping the large floating stage fairly stable. It was a very cool piece of fifties Miami architecture. Kai had his sailboat tied up to the edge of the stage. Bananas and a few other beauties were lounging on the deck. Allan was having a fine time speaking about the subtleties of his brand of eroticism, making it as lewd as he possibly could. He didn’t look like a rock star so he got away with it. He was fattish, baldish, hornrimmed glasses, sloppy and gracious to a point, that could shift to snide at the drop of a metaphor. Captain Ego, Jim, was dressed as an American Indian. His hair was braided in two long ponytails. He had a bare chest with a bone choker necklace, Indian style headband, jeans with suede knee high moccasins and his constant companion; his clip on shades that fit over his coke bottle glasses. His eyes were never seen by the public. They were small and beady and did not fit with the rest of his personas. Allan Ginsberg kept checking out Jim’s pert nipples.

The flow of the groove was what we were experiencing as a band. The visions were similar on stage. Without drugs because the music was too intense to be stoned. People were sure that Christian Ghandi, the Bethlehem Asylum keyboardist was on some exotic cocktail of opiates but he was always that heavy. He was taller than the Ghandi that changed India, but you could see the similarities in his face and body style, thin, muscular, taught like a rope, but graceful. His skin was brown, hair thinning. A Brahmin in Florida, where local rednecks might have accidentally considered him a local African American.  His Harlem childhood experience set them straight right away by showing them his razor, “…and it’s rusty too…”

He took me with him to scout out the grove. Evenings we would visit different groups of people having their metaphysical meetings. Christian would engage them in sincere dialogue about the energies of the universe, they were sure they had all the answers based on their current doctrine, but Christian always blew them right out of the water with his cosmic intelligence, intoning one liners like, “You are just reciting things you’ve read in a book. That isn’t real for  you.”

Reading the Wilhelm Reich lab reports was like reading dispatches from the front. Each day, he came up with new insights about how the human works, the energies we have no names for. He developed theories about psychology that are still relevant and have become part of the vocabulary of healing. He coined the term, ‘psychological armor’, referring to the layering of physical and mental filters to silence our pain. It is an antidote to the harshness of the world, but it gets in the way when we need to change our behaviors. It turns out that rhythm can get through all that armor plating and move us in the heart, and that’s where I needed to go, only I didn’t know that yet in my conscious every day fearful mind. It was percolating deep down in the subbasement of my feelings and it’s groove was ancient.

Jim Lovell, commander of Apollo Thirteen shook my hand.

excerpt “History of the Groove, drummer’s story” Russell Buddy Helm © 2013

all rights reserved

Jim Lovell, commander of Apollo Thirteen shook my hand. “I’ve been wanting to meet you.” he said sincerely.

“No. Wait.” I said, “I’m supposed to say that.”

He nodded to Elvis’s beautiful third cousin, folksinger at the strip club in Cocoa Beach where the astronauts hung out, mascot of the Apollo team. “Trish has told me all about your band.”

We were in the University of Miami Student Union building at the end of June, Nineteen Seventy. He and fellow astronaut Conrad had given a moving speech on a new study called Ecology. They had seen effluviant feeding into the great bodies of water coming from cities and factories all over the world. It was fouling the precious waters of the earth. They had been the first humans to get a removed perspective and were very concerned about pollution. On their own dime, they toured and explained their sense of urgency about what we were doing to our planet.

“Would you like to come over to Coconut Grove, to our place, this evening? I offered.

He nodded. “After a dinner engagement on Miami Beach.”

Holly had rented the downstairs to the Cape Cod house on Royal Palm. She was a good soul and very supportive of the Bethlehem Asylum, acting as occasional secretary. I lived upstairs and was reading as much of Wilhelm Reich’s lab books as I had time for.

Orgone was Dr. Reich’s word for the Life Force. He was given research facilities at an Army base in Virginia, not far from Washington, DC, in the early nineteen fifties. He isolated samples from living human cells, put it on a slide, put it into a powerful electromagnetic field and observed the blue/white glow under the microscope. It was something that we all had, to a greater or lesser degree. But he observed an astounding side effect of his research; influenza epidemics were killing thousands of people across the U.S. even in the Army base he was working in, but none of his personnel got sick. They were thriving because they were drenched in Orgone energy. It was keeping them healthy. His mission/goal was to amplify Orgone in the modern foot soldier so that it would throw off radiation poisoning. He developed an Orgone Accumulator, where a person could sit inside and gather Orgone in a gradual manner from the surrounding environment. He described the box as layers of organic and inorganic material. But he had found a much more powerful and quicker way to generate and amplify Orgone in the modern soldier,  …Good, really good…really, really good…..sex.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff read his reports and freaked out. This was in the mid fifties, and sexual research was verboten. Forbidden territory, especially on a military base. They burned his reports and eliminated all evidence of his work. When he protested, threatening to go public with what he considered to be the greatest discovery of technological civilization they put him in Leavenworth Penitentiary for the rest of his life. “Listen Here Little Man.” was his last bitter polemic from prison. I will always remember one of his quotes from that book, “You just want another Hitler so that you don’t have to think for yourself.”

Our albums had no relationship to the live Bethlehem Asylum jams that were getting longer and more trance like.  We were fueled in part by Fred Neil’s acoustical raga improvisations. Way ahead of his time. Christian knew all about trance raga grooves since he was from India but his jazz technique took us where no band had gone before. Charlie’s thorough knowledge of modal and jazz scales on flute and sax were a perfect match for Christian’s keyboard genius. Danny composed many modal songs including ‘Theme for Bethlehem Asylum’ in an esoteric guitar tuning that made it difficult to perform live but had a mesmerizing effect. Jim on bass and me on the drumset had developed our psychic ability to anticipate and lock in the trance/dance grooves with compelling stamina and grace, slipping from Caribbean to RnB grooves to straight up jazz, folk, blues and rock. Jim’s operatic opus of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven”  swung like no tomorrow with bone and sax.  We sounded great but weren’t playing hit song ditties. We developed a style of meditative, trance jazz grooves that would last for hours and transform people’s consciousness, but it was intense. “I can’t trip when I listen to you guys.” someone said.

“Good.” Jim responded.

Commander Lovell arrived with Trish about nine in the evening, still wearing suit and tie from his formal dinner speaking engagement on Miami Beach. I suggested he take off his tie and relax. Get comfortable. He looked questioningly at Trish. She nodded her head in approval. This was a safe place. He could relax. He explained his predicament; “I have been through the most amazing experiences, and all I can say is, ‘It was very interesting.’ I don’t know how to describe what I went through.  I thought meeting artists like yourselves would help my communication skills.”

Our Jim, bass player and singer for Bethlehem Asylum, tonight dressed as General Custer with thin chin goatee, Errol Flynn mustache, and his ubiquitous prescription sunglasses suddenly prowled stealthily around Holly’s large apartment closing Old Florida jalousied hurricane blinds and hibiscus flowered drapes, then sat down on the sofa opposite Jim Lovell. He leaned forward and spoke right in the Commander’s face,

“Take us to the moon, Jim.”

excerpt “History of the Groove, drummer’s story” Russell Buddy Helm © 2013

all rights reserved

www.buddyhelm.com

Chuck Berry had a pained, angry look on his face.”Who is that guy!!?” he said from the back of the 20 foot tall platform stage.

“I don’t know.” I lied, sitting at the drumset, playing behind Jim, also known as Captain Ego, who was playing a borrowed guitar and singing Johnny B. Good, very badly. The audience was perplexed. They were expecting the real thing. Jim had snuck backstage, dressed in long fringe like a rock star, borrowed a guitar from BloodRock, walked on the stage, where me and Charlie and Christian were ready to back up Chuck in Tampa. We had done a few dates starting in Miami. Jim had left the grove and the band a few months earlier and gone back to St. Pete to hang wallpaper with his father. This was the first we had heard from him. Now he was bowing and waving at the pissed off crowd as he backed away from the mic, handed the guitar to a roadie, then backed up another few steps still waving and fell off the back of the stage landing in a pile of cases.

“I’m OK!” He yells.

Miles Davis stared at me over his trumpet while the rest of the Bitch’s Brew band cooked around him. As usual, his back was to the audience at the University of Miami outdoor concert. Wayne Shorter, Airto, Keith Jarette on freaked out electric piano, Jack Dejonette on drumset. I was standing behind Jack Dejonnette. My arm was in a sling, my right shoulder had eighteen stitches in it. I was full of codeine and still pissed about not being able to play. It was a long night. Miles and I got into a staring thing. People would talk about how hard it was to be eye to eye with Miles. His dark handsome face and wide eyes gave him a haunted aura. if you were the least bit paranoid he could scare you just by looking at you. We got an understanding that night. We didn’t talk, we just looked each other in the eye.

The Grove Pub was now getting hip. Bitch’s Brew was even on the jukebox. The Asylum had created a regular event there and people were coming forward to play and talk. It was a little home base. There was a lot of traveling, alot of playing. We played the first gig without Duane with the Allman Brothers in Miami out at the Sportatorium in the Everglades. The night was full of sorrow and apprehension. Could the Allman Brothers still be a band without Duane? That show was full of tears and inspired music. Berry came forward and led the band. He played Duane’s parts on his bass. It was incredibly inspiring to watch him yell and bully his band members into playing their hearts out.

But something had shifted in the fabric of reality. The magical moment was gone.

“Boogie!” Someone yelled from the audience. I had never heard that before. It had always been more of a spiritual experience.

Miles was defining the new mentality, and it was harsher and angrier than we had been used to. The world changes.

Jackie Gleason’s trumpet player’s wife subleased their apartment to me. Our Angel Marilyn had referred me. They were going to the Dominican Republic on tour. It was a Cape Cod style house on Royal Palm avenue. The upstairs apartment had one bedroom, a sitting room overlooking the lush front yard, a living room, kitchen, back porch and the most complete esoteric library I have ever seen. This was to be the first residence I rented with my father’s inheritance. He was around me in spirit and I felt like there was destiny involved. I had many conflicting emotions about him, especially guilt. I had never been allowed to find out who he was, but I always missed him.

“Do you believe that a house takes on the personality of the people in it? Or do you think that the people take on the personality of the house?” she asked me. I guessed that she wanted to hear the later; “We take on the personality of the house.” I said. She nodded. I passed the test. The place already felt haunted to me-but in a good way. I felt safe. Coconut Grove had a lot of old houses then that had history. There was energy in the houses. Angels and ghosts. It was like a magical Camelot jungle village for artists and magicians.

Dr. Wilhelm Reich jumped out at me from the full, orderly bookshelves. It was the beginning of a life long learning about Orgone; the blue/white life force energy he had isolated for the government as an antidote for radiation poisoning. I read the thick blue lab books, spellbound by this pragmatic scientist being led to a metaphysical discovery. His lab reports offended the War Department back in the fifties, so much that they ordered all copies burned. All copies except the lab books sitting here in this magical little apartment in Coconut Grove. Randy once said that sometimes we are fortunate to be standing at the tiller wheel of the universe. Coconut Grove felt like that. This apartment felt like that. I learned about how the Orgone accumulator stored up life force to stay healthy. I found out that there were people in the grove who actually had an Orgone accumulator down at the end of Loquat Avenue.  We had parked in their backyard the first week in the grove. Forty five years later, a woman walks into our store in Santa Monica, we talk about Orgone and she says the guy is still living there and still has an Orgone accumulator.. He was middle aged back then.

The collection of music was just as incredible. Shelves of seven inch reels of recording tape with jazz and blues. Everything. Coltrane to Robert Johnson. It was my finishing school; both musical and metaphysical. I soaked up the books and the music, eager for this next phase of my life to materialize into success with the Asylum. The landlady, a Christ Scientist, eventually complained that the plumbing was being overworked by all the Asylum members crashing there.

The night before we were to open for Miles Davis at the University of Miami, our new road manager from Macon, Georgia got overly excited and pushed me back through the glass window in the kitchen. I caught myself on the porch and did not fall to the ground two stories below. He was shocked and sorry, and very coked up. I called Marilyn. She took care of everything. She stood by me in the ER while they stitched me up.

A few months earlier I had been driving through the grove in the middle of the night, carefully and slowly winding down the moist dark narrow blacktop pathways between the bungalows hidden in the tropical confusion. Bicycling around the grove in the middle of the night was a totally cool thing to do. I saw Marilyn walking toward me with conviction. A can of mace in her left hand, a Derringer 22 in her right hand. When she saw it was me, she sighed relief.

“You need a ride?” I asked. She climbed in and told me it had been a rough night at the Grove Club. “The manager from the Taurus Steak House was being a real jerk.” She never got flustered, she ran a legal review. She knew everyone. We had played in her backyard and the mayor attended. It was a good idea to be friends with her; she was connected. Tonight something was different.

When we got to her bungalow, she invited me in. “What kind of Magic is your band using?” She demanded. I said it was music, although Christian, our keyboard player, was the heaviest metaphysical dude I had ever met. He was born Brahmin in Jaipur, India, had mentioned snake blood voodoo rites in Jamaica and jazz dues in Harlem. She then explained to me that the grove had been protected for a long time by a coven of good witches and warlocks. It was a good coven. The people were professionals in the community. This group of outwardly normal looking people would gather and generate protective positive energy for the grove. This coven even included a retired police chief. It really didn’t surprise me, the grove was an alternate universe. But, I was intrigued. She opened the French doors to a closet in her living room, and let see her secret Haitian style alter.

It was huge, filling the whole closet, and it was gorgeous. There were many colored candles, sequines sparkling and rhinestone encrusted  bottles. Dolls and coconut shell faces with embedded coquina shells. It was the real thing. “My teacher is from Haiti.” she said. “You need to know that there is a new coven in the grove. They are not good people.”

Vince Martin Got the Asylum back into Criteria Studios

excerpt “History of the Groove, drummer’s story” Russell Buddy Helm

©2013 all rights reserved

Vince Martin got us a gig recording a soundtrack for an NBC special on the Everglades. “We care for the Land” It was about the fight to save the Everglades from the airport developers. Joe Broder had a meeting with us in his office in the grove. He was head of “Friends of the Earth” which was one of the original political action groups for saving the environment. I bought new equipment for the band using my father’s inheritance and we had a great time recording background music for the voice overs and the panorama shots of the sawgrass. Vince had a vision and he could translate it to the guys in the Asylum. We all played very well. I used the tympani mallets a lot.

There is a brass plaque on the wall in Criteria Studios; “James Brown recorded ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’ using one microphone in the lobby of Criteria studios”. We had been in Criteria recording demos for every label but nothing was connecting. I had come up with a strategy that seemed to work. At the end of every concert, I announced to the audience that they would have to go to their record stores and ask for our album by name. Each concert I gave out a different record label as the one who was releasing our album. It worked. We got calls from almost every label I had mentioned on stage. They had gotten word from the record stores asking for our album. It was reverse advertising. It would have worked if there had not been other elements at play in our bid for musical immortality.

I turned twenty one in Coconut Grove. My father, Lt. Commander Russell S. Helm, US Naval Intelligence, reached out from beyond the grave and gave me money. Joe Bicycle notarized my trust fund paperwork from Cadwallader, attorneys in Philadelphia. I received a check for a modest amount of inheritance. Like a fool I invested it in Bethlehem Asylum.

The earliest childhood memory I have of my father; I was drowning. I was a baby floating in shallow water, admiring the sunlight filtering down to me through the green liquid. I inhaled and started to black out-then feeling like I was being lifted up by God. My dad saved my life. We were at a summer swimming quarry in rural Pennsylvania.

The second memory of my father is a short snow sled trip down the hill by the barn on our farm in Pennsylvania. It was a gentleman’s farm. Father was a spy, he wasn’t a farmer.

The third memory of my father I was about four.  He was sitting quietly reading the paper in the evening with my mother knitting. I asked him to let me smoke his pipe.

“Take a big breath.” he said. So I did. I got sick and threw up outside the kitchen back porch in mother’s flowerbed. My mother said it was cruel but I remember him saying, “He’ll never smoke again.” He was right. It affected my attitude toward all of the addictions and vices that became available in the sixties. All except women. He couldn’t help me with that one. He died mysteriously when I was four and a half. Women, I would have to deal with using my own limited knowledge.

It might have been assumed by certain people that I would follow in my father’s footsteps and join the company with no name. They sent a cougar with a crazy name down to USF to fetch me. I found myself in Georgetown having Chinese dinner with six operatives and two administrators. I was only nineteen years old.

“You’re really good with those chopsticks.” said the drop dead gorgeous Chinese female operative. She was hitting on me hard.

“I’m a drummer..” I said.

“We know that.” she responded condescendingly.

After questioning me about LSD and the antiwar movement for the next week, they finally realized I was not going to play along with them. I left but you don’t really tell those people to piss off. They don’t forget. From their lights, when I joined Bethlehem Asylum, a flag might have been sent up. Every antiwar rally, every free concert in the park, the fundraising for students to attend the moratorium in Washington DC to protest the war that shut down the capitol for several days. We were possibly on the list. But it was really guilt by association. We were not actively political. We were playing the soundtrack to whatever movie was going on, according to Jim.

Our roadies were in better physical shape than any of us. They turned out to be Co-intel Pro. That was the program run by government agencies to infiltrate antiwar groups. I woke up in the middle of the night in our newly rented coral rock castle on Main Highway next to Ransom School. A new roadie was going through my paper work. Even the groupies were spying on us.

excerpt “History of the Groove, drummer’s story” Russell Buddy Helm

©2013 all rights reserved

www.buddyhelm.com

Bananas warned me about the horny male dolphin. Anyone hanging on the surfboard floating in the middle of the lagoon might get poked in the back of their knees with his  rigid purple male appendage.

“The female is too young to mate.” She explained.

“Why doesn’t someone ‘do something’ about it? ” I asked innocently. I thought Dr. Lilly had done some sex research with dolphins back in the mid sixties. I was just back from a grueling snow covered tour in Wayne, Michigan. What did I know?

“You can try it. If you want to” she said to me flatly. I didn’t think so.

I was glad to see the Grove again. The Miami skyline actually looked good. It was a typical clear beautiful day on Key Biscayne. We walked out onto the wooden pier that had been nicely made from the lumber we had hauled down in the Asylum truck. The new male and new female came up to the end of the pier to greet us. They seemed happy, opening their mouths to chatter with us. I gently placed my hand in their mouths and tickled their tongues. They liked that- careful not to slice my fingers with their sharp little teeth.

The female and I got along well; too well from the male’s point of view. Later that afternoon, he slammed me three times. Six hundred pounds of horny dolphin landed on top of me after I had spent several glorious hours being pulled around and being embraced by the female. We had sort of fallen in love.

It had started off harmlessly at first. She pulled me around in a circle out in the middle of the lagoon.  I held on to her dorsal fin as she dove to the bottom of the lagoon about twenty feet down, turned in a circle then shot straight up and into the air with me hanging on as best I could. I was skinny and mostly hair so she did pretty well getting us both up and mostly out of the water. This went on for a long time. She didn’t get tired keeping me afloat. At one point we came up to the surface slowly, belly to belly and she looked into my eyes. I looked into her eyes; deep, dark, mysterious and loving.  She pulled me to her with her pectoral fins and hugged me close. I hugged her back. Belly to belly, we looked into each others eyes for a long time. Then she pushed me away. “This could never work.” I felt her say.

I swam into the dock and stood chest deep in the warm water talking to Suzanne up on the pier.  Florida swam around me in a tight circle. I lightly touched her side and belly as she circled me. She slowed down.  She stopped moving and stayed in front of me as I talked to Suzanne while stroking her side and belly. She stopped moving and just floated there. My fingers moved on their own, to where her tail flukes joined, thumb on top of the paper thin skin and fingers underneath. Occupied with talking to Suzanne, my left hand was rubbing Florida’s tail flukes and my right hand was rubbing her belly. Suddenly, she began to quiver all over. That took me by surprise. I could feel her vibrating. Suzanne was amazed and took a picture. The loud click of the old Pentax shutter woke Florida out of her reverie. With a self conscious start, she splashed away from me back out into the lagoon.  Suzanne said she’d never seen that before in a dolphin. She went over to the far seawall to talk with Bananas about it.  I swam back out into the lagoon.

The male intercepted me. He stopped in front of me in the middle of the lagoon. I did not have flippers or mask or snorkel. With no warning, he launched himself into the air and landed on top of me. It felt like a freight train hit me. I was suddenly underwater and drowning. I sputtered and came to the surface, yelling at him. “What are you doing!!!!” He didn’t like that tone and backed off, but then he came at me again, air-born. Wham! Right on top of me again. Suddenly I was scared. This was serious. I was filling up with water. I got back to the surface. I waved and hollared but no one was looking, no one heard me.  He could have killed me but he knew exactly how far to go. He launched again, and I could not move fast enough. He landed on top of me the third time and I figured I was going to be trying to explain this to St. Peter shortly. I gurgled up to the surface and saw the surfboard floating about twenty yards away. I swam for it with the last energy I had. He casually cruised over to the surfboard, put his nose under the board and flipped it. It shot across the water and jammed under the pier like a pool shark’s billiard ball in a corner pocket. He turned on me and looked me square in the eye. She got in between us. She stayed there facing him. Getting back to the pier was the longest fifty yards I will ever swim.

Bananas, Suzanne and the others finally looked, saw the slamming and came to help. I finally got to the pier in one piece. They helped me out of the water. I laid on the dock, out of breath. I had no fear of the male dolphin. I  understood.

We sat there and watched. She took him over to the far side of the lagoon and they stayed there floating next to each other. Then they were belly to belly. Then intermittently they rolled back and forth. First she was on top for a while then they would rotate and he would be on top of a while, then she would roll back over on top. They did this for a long time.

Bananas said later that when they opened the sea gate, the male left but Florida stayed behind.  Finally the biggest dolphin Bobby had ever seen swam right up to the gate and jumped. Florida went for him like a shot and they disappeared out into Key Biscayne. Fred, of course, knew all about this sort of thing. He wrote the Dolphin Song years earlier. I ended up recording the Dolphin Song with Tim Buckley later. My love song to Florida.

“…Searchin for the dolphin in the Sea. Sometimes I wonder, do you ever think of me?”

I still think of her. On a good day I can imagine that I might have been a godfather to a baby dolphin.