Touring the rocky coast
I’ve written about midnight Sept. 1989. I’m remembering it once more. Hurricane Hugo. Worst killer storm to ever hit the Carolinas.
I arrived to see my pal Mickey Spillane, then Earth’s prime kill ’em/shoot ’em/maim ’em thriller author who’d completed 50 greatest sellers that includes his fictional hero Mike Hammer.
Close to what remained of Myrtle Seashore — the 18-room Murrells Inlet home he’d lived in 35 years — gone. His boat sat in what would’ve been his front room. A reside pelican flapped within the eating room. The pelican was on a dock. The dock was now within the eating room. We examined wreckage with a flashlight when the pelican flapped his wings, chased us and threw us out.
A large gap was the once-glorious white home. The part fronting the water completely gone. A gleaming porcelain bathroom festooned the entrance yard.
The entrance door hung. Steps, gone. Trash was piled towards a 5-foot watermark like some horrifying sculpture. Bizarre issues caught to shredded screens. A rocking chair — not his — within the library. Saltwater crabs alive and effectively in every single place.
His boat wound up in the lounge. “Once I went away my neighbor had my home keys,” he mentioned, “however who wants keys when there’s no home?”
We sat on a porch festooned with fallen timber and bushes. The roof sagged. The ground had a gap. The partitions had been hanging. A boiler sat on his entrance yard together with water pipes, kitchen freezer, garments iron, and rocking chair that didn’t belong to him.
We noticed a now-rusted pot bellied range, smashed Tiffany lamp, Mexican tile kitchen, which was now full historical past, and an assessed $3,000 in saved groceries. In what had been Mickey’s workplace an ashtray — not his — that blew in from someplace mentioned “Residence Candy Residence.” An Ethan Allen chair someway obtained used for kindling. Service for 12 left just one pewter salt shaker underneath a mound of mud.
A 12 months later Mickey rebuilt. He mentioned: “The scenario was unsolvable. We bulldozed and began over. Value half 1,000,000 simply to tear it down and one other million to rebuild. We began from scratch. Took 9 months.
“The brand new home, on stilts, has 100% structural integrity. Ten ft off the bottom. Three tales. Concrete basis. The underpinnings have huge energy. An entire degree’s beneath our first flooring like a carport. We’re up on hurricane ties, concrete metal posts deep into the bottom up by means of the partitions to the second story. Hurricane home windows that may face up to large winds.
“Pine flooring. Old school Victorian tub on an oak pedestal. New old-style pull-chain bathrooms. Fear received’t put something again. Jeez, I’ve been by means of sufficient.”
Jehovah’s Witness Mickey stayed cool. He sat me in remnants of a rocking chair and mentioned, “I’m 71, grey. Fortunate I nonetheless have hair. I can’t spend what’s left of my life worrying.”
Close to a trusty vintage Smith Corona typewriter on which he pecked out his greatest sellers, he discovered what he mentioned was a 500 12 months previous bottle of wine, poured it right into a paper cup and mentioned: “Hell, I’m nonetheless doing OK for an previous bastard.”
Two companions on a prepare again from Florida. One abruptly jumped up, screaming, “My God! I left the protected open.” The opposite associate shrugged and mentioned, “So what’re you frightened about? We’re each right here, aren’t we?”
Solely in New York, children, solely in New York.
