The 5 Year Itch

by Ron Pihl    (added Aug 2015)

I picked Bob up at his apartment on the Southwest side of Ocean City. He was giving it up for the summer to make way for higher paying vacationers. He’d had this arrangement with his landlady for a few years now. She was a kindly old widow who reminded me of another time. She helped Bob round up clothes that were scattered around the tiny upstairs apartment and stuff them into a tattered navy sea bag. She told Bob she would clean the place up and to take care of himself. Nice landlady, I thought, who does that - someone who knows when Bob cleans one room the adjacent rooms were bound to suffer.

Despite his perennially disheveled appearance and booming voice, usually pronouncing inappropriate things in all the wrong places, Bob brought out the best in ninety five percent of the people he intermingled with and the absolute worst in the other five percent. I felt sorry for the five per centers, they doubtlessly lived joyless lives.

Aside from the sea bag, and owing to Bob’s newfound regime of eating only raw vegetables and fruit, we also loaded a cooler full of not so fresh vegetables and fruit along with Bob’s new $400 juicer into the back of my truck. Nothing surprised me in regards to Bob’s gastronomical pursuits. I fondly recalled the days of his beer and bacon diet (thank you Mr, Adkins) when he started wearing paternity pants to keep up with an expanding waistline. Soon we were off in my old Chevy, windows down, enjoying the feel of salty air on our faces.

With North Carolina and a masonry bakeoven workshop as our destination, we headed south, past Ocean Pines, where Bob and I had done stone work some years before on a second home for a couple from Baltimore. Bob fancied that their attractive daughter, who often came during the week, was taken with him. Bob was confident the meager bathing suit and extreme tanning sessions on the nearby deck was for his benefit alone. When this bronzed tart wasn’t on deck, she often sat on the couch with the sliding doors open to our view, smoking cigarettes and talking loudly on the phone to girlfriends back in Baltimore – something Bob found weirdly exotic - especially since he hated women smoking cigarettes and frowned upon boisterous members of the opposite sex. He often opined that all of his girlfriends smoked and talked to loud - no accident I thought. He paraded, in dirty shorts, no shirt, glistening with dusty sweat, carrying the largest stones back and forth across the wall to engorge his muscles - a regular Samson wooing Delilah.

We were staying nearby in a seasonal rental that suited our simple lifestyle of working long days, cooking our meals and drinking a few too many beers before collapsing from the day’s heat and rough work - until the bird lice incident.

While cooking fish one night, Bob had was trying to get the fan over the stove to work by banging on it - the stonemasons cure for most mechanical problems, when a rotten, abandoned birds nest fell onto the stove scattering bird lice all over the kitchen and Bob. This was at the time of the emergence, in the media at least, of the dreaded tick induced, Lyme’s Disease. In full panic mode, we both went to work gathering up the lice with wet paper towels. Bob, who abhorred all chemicals soon discovered a can of Raid in the broom closet and began spraying down the kitchen with a thick film of toxic aerosol.

The next morning I came out of my room to find Bob, Earth Boy, with his shorts to his knees giving his crotch a thorough spraying with the last of the Raid. He looked up startled and said “I was itching all night; those lice are borrowing in. You didn’t see this, it didn’t happen…”

Of course this  reminded me of the afternoon when Bob came by our cabin at Pine Creek in Montana to borrow kerosene to dowse himself in hopes of getting rid of the crabs, fast. He had a hot date pending that night with the sister of a famous female rock star. Until then, apparently there had not been any urgency in ridding himself of the pesky vermin.

Everybody was somebody around Pine Creek in those days and Bob was into the scene. He would show up at a construction site on a Monday morning, loudly proclaiming that he partied with his “dear, dear, friend Peter Fonda” over the weekend – it was told in jest but based in some truth.

Bob’s father was a well-known writer in the outdoor magazine world and had exposed Bob to that genre’s celebrities at an early age. Those heroes were more likely fly fishing notables like Lefty Kreigh or the consummate big game hunter, Jack O’Connor. Anyhow, he had decided to take “action against the scratchin”- all with hopes of getting himself imbedded deeper into the scene he so often lampooned.

Our week in North Carolina went quickly. We attended the retreat of a group that focused on training both neophytes and experienced masons in building outdoor wood fired bakeovens. We had a lot of laughs and even though Bob had stopped drinking, he was the life of the campfire parties that went on every night that week. He told epic stories of  various herb hunting adventures and pollywog gulping in Kentucky with his hero, Catfish Hunter, to a delighted crowd of back to nature types.

The plan was (had been) that Bob was going to go ride on to DC with me where my wife, Desiree, and our children were waiting for me at her mother’s home there. Then he was to take the bus to Philadelphia, where, old friend Tom Robinson had a stone job waiting for him.

Outside of Chincoteague, Bob announced that he wanted me to drop him in Berlin, MD, where he had left a bicycle on a jobsite and that he intended to ride it north, up the Delmarva Peninsula towards Philadelphia and have Tom come meet him before he got to close to the city for comfort.

Bob said he would pay a visit to Mrs. Clark in DC in September to retrieve his cooler and juicer. I wondered how he would survive without them. This was all news to me but I took it in stride. For as long as I had known Bob, he often veered way off course with little warning. Perhaps a new diet awaited him in Philly?

No thanks to Bob we finally found the bicycle in some brush near a new housing development. Once he had taken me to East Missoula to show off a trailer house he had rented but had not moved into yet. We gave up looking for the place after 45 minutes of driving up and down several dirt roads in what appeared to be totally unfamiliar neighborhood to him.

I tried to talk Bob into letting me drive him further north to Chestertown, past the busy traffic of Ocean City and Rehobeth Beach but he wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted to hug the coast line and take his time. We managed to get the sea bag lashed onto the back of bicycle and said our goodbye. As Bob was beginning to pedal towards new adventures and I headed back to my life, he turned to waive and shouted “tell Mrs. Clark I will see her in September and remind her, I’m a friendly ghost!”

The dog barked, as he does most mornings to wake us when I realized I had been dreaming. Bob passed away in 2010 (chemicals, no doubt) and visits me a few times a year, I am always delighted to see him…