Levi (The Florida Panhandle #3)

Chapter 1 Levi

The driver’s name is Carl and he doesn’t want to stop at the liquor store.

“My instructions are to take you straight to the property, sir,” he says.

“Your instructions came from a woman named Janice who books town cars from a desk in Nashville,” I tell him. “Janice doesn’t care if we stop. Janice went home hours ago.”

Carl looks at me in the rearview mirror.

He’s been doing that since the airport, quick glances between the road and my face, trying to place me.

He won’t. Nobody recognizes me without the stage lights and the black cowboy hat.

In the back of a town car at midnight in the Florida Panhandle, wearing a black t-shirt, jeans, and three days of not shaving, I’m just another guy who needs a drink.

“There’s a place on the left,” I say. “Half a mile. Pull over.”

“Sir—”

“Two hundred dollars. Cash. For a five-minute stop. Nobody will know. Easy money.”

Carl puts on his blinker.

The liquor store is empty. A woman behind the counter is watching a reality show on her phone with the volume up. She doesn’t look at me when I walk in. I find the tequila aisle, grab two bottles from the middle shelf with labels I recognize, and set them on the counter.

“ID?” she says.

I hand her my license. She glances at it, glances at me, hands it back. No recognition at all. Country music star Lee Streeter doesn’t buy his own liquor at midnight in a rundown store. Lee Streeter has people for that and my driver’s license says my name is Levi Mason anyway.

“Have a good night,” she says.

I nod, though I will not be having a good night.

Carl turns off the main highway onto a two-lane road.

I’ve only been to this part of Florida once before.

I played in Panama City Beach at a smaller festival years ago, in an amphitheater that smelled like sunscreen.

I don’t remember much of the show because I was drunk before I walked on stage.

The crowd was nothing but a wall of phone screens and noise.

That’s all I know of the Florida Panhandle. Stages, booze, and the back of a tour bus with the shades pulled down. I never even got a chance to put my toes in the sand.

We pull up to a wrought-iron gate with a glowing keypad. Carl rolls down his window and punches a code that my manager’s assistant sent in a text. The gate swings wide.

Everything past the gate is solid white. White buildings lined up on both sides, landscaping so perfect I’m pretty sure it’s fake plants. Just white buildings and white walls going on for blocks, like somebody bleached an entire town and then abandoned it at sundown.

I’ve got a real bad feeling about this place.

I lean forward in my seat and tap him on the shoulder. “Hey Carl! Carl, I need you to be honest with me. Is this a cult commune? Or a rehab place? I’m not liking the vibes it’s putting out. Where the hell are we?”

“30A,” Carl says, as if that’s supposed to mean something to me.

It doesn’t. Never heard of it.

“Thirty-eight? You mean like an area code?”

“No,” Carl says. “The number thirty, then ‘a’ as in attitude. It’s the name of the road we’re on. 30A is a big tourist destination here in the Florida Panhandle. If anyone asks you where you’re staying, tell them 30A and they’ll know it.”

I lean back in my seat. “If you say so. I thought I was staying in Panama City Beach.”

“You’re a fifteen-minute drive from there. Panama City Beach is a different world.”

The rental house is at the end of a cul-de-sac.

Gulf-front. Three stories of white and glass.

The floor-to-ceiling windows on every level reflect Carl’s headlights as we pull up.

Carl pops the trunk and I get my bag, my guitar case, and the two bottles in a paper sack.

He hands me a slip of paper with a code for the front door.

“Your manager’s office said to call if you need anything,” he says.

“Alright,” I say. I won’t be calling anybody tonight.

Carl pulls away. The tail lights shrink down the street and the gate closes behind them. I’m standing in the driveway after midnight holding a guitar case and enough tequila to get through tonight, but not nearly enough to get through tomorrow.

The story of my life.

The code works, the front door swings inward and the AC almost knocks me on my ass. The house is freezing. Whoever set the thermostat must’ve been planning to store meat in here. I step inside and look at what my manager, Freddie, is paying sixty thousand dollars a month to hide me in.

Big surprise. The inside is all white, too. White marble floors that my worn boots are already scuffing and white walls without a single photograph or evidence that a real person has ever lived here.

I keep walking. The kitchen has an island with a stone countertop that goes all the way from the surface straight down to the floor in one solid piece. Windows everywhere, black right now because it’s after midnight and the Gulf of Mexico is dark.

There’s fresh bread on the counter. An unwrapped thick loaf on a cutting board with a serrated knife, the good bakery kind with the crackly crust. I can smell it from where I’m standing.

A bowl of lemons. A cookbook propped up to a page with a picture of an Italian pasta recipe that involves about forty ingredients.

There are purple hydrangeas on the dining table arranged with greenery, stems placed just so, like somebody spent real time on it.

This must be the welcome package two grand a night gets you in this neck of the woods. Arranged flowers, fresh bread, lemons, and a recipe for pappardelle in case you feel inspired to become an Italian chef on your luxury beach vacation to the Redneck Riviera.

I tear off a big hunk of the bread because I haven’t eaten since Nashville. I skipped the airport food because I was recognized at a Chili’s in the Memphis terminal two months ago and Freddie’s been on me about public spaces ever since. My last meal was a bowl of corn flakes twelve hours ago.

I take a bite of the bread, then another. Damn, I’m impressed. The bread is actually incredible. Opening the refrigerator, I lean in, expecting water or maybe a beer. All I find is cheese. Two blocks of soft cheese, one white and one yellow, both wrapped in fancy paper. That’s it.

Unbelievable.

Somebody was put in charge of stocking a kitchen for a grown man staying for a month and the conclusion they reached was all I need is cheese. They had a loaded grocery store in front of them and came back with cheese and a loaf of bread like they were shopping for a mouse.

I don’t give a damn. Food is not my priority tonight.

Not when I have two bottles of liquor and nobody watching.

I open the first bottle and drink straight from it.

The first few swallows take the chill off the AC.

The next few take the chill off everything else.

The Xanax from the flight and the tequila find each other in my bloodstream and the edges of the kitchen go soft, then liquid, and the house stops pressing on me so hard.

This is all I need.

Just enough space to breathe.

Freddie is probably sitting by the phone, waiting for me to text him that I arrived in one piece. The tracker app on my phone has already notified him I’m physically here. It’s the mental part he’s worried about.

I should do that. I should also lie and tell him I pulled up the set list on the flight. Which I didn’t. The pill knocked me out cold. The only way I can fly these days.

The record label is giving me two weeks to learn the set list and clean up before the Panhandle Country Bash starts. Two weeks to prove I can show up prepared and act like I’m worth keeping. Then a two-week festival without making more headlines for the wrong reasons.

The slot wasn’t mine. Somebody else’s back gave out three weeks ago.

Freddie got me the slot before the ink was dry on the other fella’s cancellation, which is the only reason a label that’s done with me put me on a plane.

They don’t announce me till the last minute. Nobody on this coast knows I’m coming.

Freddie gave me my last warning at the airport drop-off in Nashville. “You show up sober,” he said. “You perform. You prove you’re still worth the investment. That’s the month. Do it or you’re out. Their words, not mine. This is your last chance, Levi.”

I don’t text Freddie. Instead, I grab my guitar case and walk through the house.

Every room has the same weird personality.

I picture kids running in after a day at the beach, wet bathing suits, sandy feet, sticky with sunscreen.

They’d get about three feet past the threshold before somebody had a stroke over the floors.

Who buys a house on the Gulf of Mexico and fills it with things that can’t survive a sandy footprint?

Upstairs there’s a master bedroom with a king size bed with a white bedspread and fourteen pillows.

I count them. Different shapes, different sizes, arranged in rows.

Figuring out which ones are for sleeping and which ones are for decoration would require more brain cells firing than I’ve got right now.

The bathroom has a huge glass shower with fifteen different nozzles aimed at angles that suggest the person who designed it has very specific ideas about where water should hit a human body. There’s a soaking tub by the window with a Gulf view.

I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and wish I hadn’t.

Three days of stubble heading toward a beard.

Black hair past my ears and greasy from traveling.

Dark circles under my eyes. The musician who needs to show up in two weeks is in there somewhere, but he’d need a great stylist, and a reason to show up. I’m fresh out of both.

My guitar case gets shoved far under the bed where I don’t have to look at it.

I go back downstairs. The couch is enormous, and deep cushioned, built for a magazine photograph and not for actual sitting.

There’s a soft blanket folded at one end.

I pick it up and drape it around my shoulders because I can’t figure out how the hell to turn the AC off.

There’s a panel on the wall with a million different settings that I’m afraid to touch.

I slide the glass door open to the terrace.

The air outside is a different world. Salt-thick, heavy, like sitting on the porch back home in Tennessee in July.

Except there’s no crickets, just concrete holding heat from the day and the sound of the Gulf rolling out there in the dark.

I can’t see it but I can hear it, not quite waves but close, like the ocean is breathing in its sleep.

If I were still writing songs, that might even be a lyric.

The ocean breathing in its sleep.

I pull out the weed and light a joint. The smoke is sharp and seeps into everything, my shirt, my hair, and the blanket wrapped around me.

I pull it in, hold it, let it go, and watch it disappear over the railing into the night.

This is the first good thing I’ve done in months.

Sitting alone on warm concrete, breathing salt air, putting smoke in my lungs until the noise in my head goes quiet with no Freddie or the label breathing down my neck.

The joint does its work. I reach the place where I’m not thinking at all, and it’s the only place I want to live.

I go inside and leave the door open wide so the Gulf air comes through.

There’s not enough liquor in me to shut these doors tonight.

The salt air pushes against all that AC and recycled air, filling the house with it.

I fall onto the couch with my boots on the cushion.

It’s softer than it looks. Through the open door the Gulf keeps breathing in its sleep.

That damn line again.

I leave it where it lies.