How had we managed to get ourselves into this situation?
How on earth did this happen? But more importantly, was this guy going to kill us?
These questions bounced around the inside of my head like moths trapped in a lampshade. I knew that the moment approaching within the next five minutes was going to be something that I would never forget in my lifetime.
If I survived to tell about it.
Before I throw you into this situation blindly, I’ve got to give you a little background.
We were on Spring Break in the South of Georgia. It was March 2002. We were all seniors in high school, except for my friend Seth’s Dad, Michael; he was in his 50’s.
Why we were in Georgia, and not Cancun or Daytona Beach? Why was a Dad there? I know these are the some of the questions that must be answered before I continue.
My Father went on a Kayaking trip in Florida and came back with a ton of brochures of all these beach resort places in the South. I myself am a brochure junkie, I love to look at them for some reason, I read them front to back word for word.
Why? I don’t know why, I fucking like to. It entertains me.
Upon my brochure investigation, a place called Jekyll Island caught my eye. It was in the very South of Georgia. It seemed pretty cool by the way the brochure described it. The next day I brought the brochure into the cafeteria at school and showed some of my friends.
I jokingly suggested that we go there for spring break since we had no other plans. I pointed to one of the restaurants on the brochure.
“C’mon you know you want to go to Black Beard’s Restaurant.”
I don’t really remember how it happened, but somehow within the next few weeks the ball got rolling, and somehow we had booked a trip to Jekyll Island. Six of us rented a pretty sweet house across the street from the ocean. But we needed someone 25 or older to be in the house with us.
That’s where Michael fit in. Michael wasn’t your typical Dad. Whenever we went over Seth’s house Michael would party with us, do the same things we did, and entered the same states of intoxication as us. Michael was the worlds coolest Dad in all of our eyes. We knew he wouldn’t give a fuck about what we did, and he would buy us a ton of booze.
OK OK OK, so enough background because I could write a book about just how bizarre this excursion was, but I really don’t feel like writing every detail.
We fly into Jacksonville Airport. Jekyll Island is just about an hour north of Jacksonville, just across the Georgia border. We hired a car service to drive us from Jacksonville to Jekyll Island. This is where the real story begins.
After waiting for a while outside of the terminal, a big conversion van screeches to a halt at the curb right in front of us. We pack our bags into the back, hop in and are on our way.
Our driver was a guy called Ned or Dave or something. I’m pretty sure his name was Dave, but we only referred to him as Tom H, because he reminded us of this off the wall character that we all used to work with at “Party City”.
He was tall and lanky and had a sleazy mustache. He talked a mile a minute, and wore big sunglasses. He kind of had a State Trooper look to him.
The whole way to Jekyll Island he talked our ears off, telling us his life story, perve jokes, and a little background about Jekyll Island.
Somewhere during the ride, Michael told him that he was a Doctor. After hearing this, somehow the thought got through Tom H’s head that we were all dying cancer patients who were on our “Last Hoorah” vacation, if you will.
No wonder he was being so nice to us.
He was only supposed to drive us to our house and that was it. When we got there he drove us to the supermarket, waited for us to finish shopping, and took us on a little tour of where to go on the Island.
After finally dropping us off, he told us to call him anytime, and that he would drive us to check out any of the other surrounding Islands for free.
What a nice guy we all thought.
A couple of days passed, and we realized that Jekyll Island was not the babes in bikini paradise we had thought it would be. In fact it was pretty deserted, mostly occupied by old people on golf vacations or residents of the island, who were again, elderly.
We couldn’t even go in the ocean because the water was too cold.
What the fuck were we thinking going to this place? Honestly?
We needed out, we were getting too stir crazy on Jekyll Island. We had done about all there is to do on that rock, which included going to Black Beard’s restaurant more than once.
So we gave a little phone call to our buddy Tom H. He gladly agreed to drive us to St. Simon’s Island the next day, which can be seen from Jekyll, and was supposedly a little livelier.
The next day Tom H. arrives sometime in the afternoon. We offer to pay him for the ride to St. Simon’s but he valiantly refuses any money offers. He says he won’t be available until later in the evening so either we would have to stay on St. Simon until then or call another taxi service.
St. Simon’s wasn’t much different than Jekyll. The most entertaining thing we did there was play mini-golf. It was hellishly fucking hot that day as well. By mid day we were all losing it. We were walking around aimlessly looking for something to do, but could find nothing.
We were all realizing that this trip was a disaster, and we were all in poor moods. We decided not to wait for Tom H., instead opting to call a taxi so we could leave sooner and at least get back to the house so we could drown away our sorrows with alcohol.
So we sat on the steps of some Mexican restaurant and waited for our cab, which said they would only take half an hour. Half an hour turned into an hour. An hour turned into two hours.
We were on the brink of madness, and at this point we realized that our vacation had gone in the shitter. We were all in terrible spirits. No one was talking. Everyone was fed up.
It was about time that we could call Tom H. as well. The sun was going down and the taxi had yet to arrive. We call Tom H. and he tells us he’s on his way. The taxi driver and Tom H. show up at the same exact time.
The cab driver is this fat greasy hick who can barely speak. He tries arguing with us and telling us we have to pay since he had to come all the way out here. My friend Seth tells him “Go fuck yourself, you fat greasy fucking hick.”
Tom H. looks stunned that such words could come out of a cancer patient knocking on heavens door.
We still refuse to pay the cab driver, and tell him to “Fuck Off!”, eventually jumping into Tom H’s van. Then Tom H. tries to break the tension by telling us about his interests.
He goes on to explain that he has been obsessed with lions since he was a small child. He collects lion everything and has over 500 lion items in his house. After explaining this, Tom H. gets a phone call from his “boss”.
In my opinion, at this time, he was on the phone with nobody. You couldn’t hear any voice on the other line. He was talking business and said we might have to stop back to his house for a couple of minutes. In my mind I felt it was a sick ploy for him to lure us back to his lion’s den and dig into our asses like we were zebra.
After getting off the phone, he turns to us and asks if it was alright if we could hang out at his house for twenty minutes or so, while he took care of some business. We all reluctantly agreed. He was chauffeuring us around for free after all, I guess it was the least we could do.
So we pull into his driveway which was somewhere on the mainland in the middle of Nowheresville, USA. As I exit the car, the intoxicating aroma of rotting eggs enters my nostrils. This whole god forsaken town smelled strongly like sulfur.
At this point I’m pretty damn frightened to enter his house. I had convinced myself this guy is going to keep us hostage, and skin our asses.
We enter his house and MAN, he wasn’t kidding about the lions. Lions everywhere you looked. Everything, and I mean everything, he owned was lion themed. Lion tapestries, lion pictures, hundreds of stuffed animal lions all over the place. Lion rugs, a lion phone, lion toys for the kids.
LIONS! LIONS! LIONS!
And then kids … yes, there were kids. To my relief there was a little boy and a little girl no more than 5-years-old and a mother with an annoyed look on her face smoking a cigarette in the corner. My fear about being murdered subsided, but only turned into fear about what kind of sick freaks these kids are going to be in the future.
Our time in the house was very awkward and uncomfortable. We all didn’t know what to do. The wife seemed very pissed off at our presence the entire time. The kids came up to me and showed me their lion figurines. We were there for about a half an hour. It was indeed the strangest experience of my life.
So strange that it is hard for me to associate my memories of it with reality, these memories got stored in the same file in my brain as old Looney Tune cartoons. It was truly that bizarre.
After the brief stay at casa del lion, Tom H. drove us back home and we were all in better spirits because we were laughing about the experience we just had. We couldn’t believe what had just happened.
A few days later it was time to leave and Tom H. picked us up and we were off to Jacksonville to catch our flight.
Tom didn’t seem to be to be in his normal peppy mood. He seemed down in the dumps and very quickly he explained why.
“Well you know that family you met the other night? Well yeah, they left yesterday and headed back to Indiana … my wife got fed up with me bringing in strangers to our home to show them my lions.”
I wanted to laugh, but couldn’t. Instead I looked out the window and tried to think about something else. At this time, Tom whipped out a wooden box and opened it. It was filled with about a half an ounce of weed. He stuck a tiny one hitter piece into the weed and smoked it, while swerving all over the highway at drastic speeds, and offered it to all of us.
Finally we got to the airport, and Tom H. bid us farewell. He talked for a while with Michael one on one before leaving. Michael told us that he said, “We were great kids, and it’s such a shame.”
Michael asked “What’s a shame?” and Tom H. told him he thought we were all cancer patients.
At this time Tom H. probably realized he shouldn’t have done all of this for free.
Waiting in the airport for our flight about and hour and a half after departing with Tom H, I was reading a magazine and I saw a fearful look in my friends eyes sitting across from me. Tom H. squeezed his head between mine and Seth’s head and yelled out:
This guy was out to get us still I thought, after all we did ruin his family life.
He told us the person he was going to pick up had their flight delayed so he had more time to hang out. I felt like I was in some sort of sick movie, and this guy would track us down at home.
Finally we got on our flight and we were out of there. I was shocked that he didn’t follow us onto the plane.
Five years have passed and Tom H. hasn’t shown up at my front door … YET.
