| TRAVELS OF DURSMIRG VOLUME IV THE ROGUES OF ST. AUGUSTINE AND OTHER SOCIAL MISFITS Chapter 12 |
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CHAPTER 12 STREET PEOPLE
John O’Sullivan; this special social misfit was one of St. Augustine’s many street people, except that this guy
was individualistically different and excessively fastidious. Clean to the point of having a psychotic paranoid
aversion of not even wanting to shake hands. John was possessed with a severe sanitation phobia.
Very Irish John was born in County Cork, Ireland, and he made his career serving with the U.S. Customs service
as an officer and retired to St. Augustine where he fit right in nearly unnoticed and rented a room in a boarding
house.
Distinctively dressed in the same outfit day after day John could easily be spotted with his perfectly neat navy blue
US Customs cap adorned with yacht braid, his navy blue suit and trousers meticulously pressed and immaculate.
His white shirt would be pressed, starched and buttoned smartly but the most distinctive characteristic of all about
John was his distinctive limp.
John wore an elevated shoe on one foot and used a cane as he ambled around town with his distinctive gait,
which also made him unmistakable on the downtown streets he daily frequented.
Eccentric and thrifty John frugally looked for the very best deal; Immaculate and sanitizing John even rented from
our friends, Rodney and Phyllis Shutt at their boarding house, where cleanliness freak John kept his bed up on
tall glass castors to keep creeping microbes from intruding which was part of his paranoid cleanliness fetish.
Not to take any chances, clean freak John kept his room regularly doused with excessive quantities of Lysol spray
as a disinfectant to the point that the stifling antiseptic aroma would suck your breath away.
John was a regular daily fixture on the streets of downtown St. Augustine and had a regular route that included his
confabulations with his regular cronies out at the end of the City Yacht Pier.
It was not possible to get past smiling congenial John without him telling you some of his short stories and
humorous one-liner jokes.
We found out that John was super sensitive when it came to an Irish joke. But he just loved telling jokes and one-
liners if they poked fun at anyone else.
(Funny was funny until you poked fun at the Irish!)
I don’t know exactly what made this social misfit tick but he did spend one or two days every week over at the
Florida School for The Deaf and Blind telling stories to entertain the youngsters merely out of the goodness of his
heart.
***
Dirty Bob; this Bob was a dirty stinking down-and-out lost soul. He was a wharf rat and bum that would aimlessly
wander the streets of St. Augustine.
Bob the street person slept anyplace but usually wound up somewhere down around the fish docks.
Dirty Bob wore filthy raggedy worn out clothing and never ever washed. His God awful putrid stench would
immediately alienate anybody that got near him.
I have often times wondered about Dirty Bob and the thousands of other derelicts like him that hit the streets
aimlessly shuffling along through life on the lowest rung of human existence. At the same time I witnessed self-
righteous God fearing people who claim to be devout Christians that are totally blind to this poor mans plight.
Our friend George Tappin told of seeing Dirty Bob drinking a cup of coffee into which he poured sugar swarming
with ants and then drank it right down, ants and all obviously without batting an eye.
George also told of another disgusting event when Dirty Bob was under the fish docks having sexual doings with a
street dog and a shrimp boat captain named Wainwright spotted him and attempted to run him down with his boat.
Dirty Bob was clearly a deranged social misfit of unknown origin claimed by no one and an unwashed out-cast. He
was in his world of one with no friends, no family and no place to call home.
Poor ragged vacant minded Bob had lost, if he ever had it, all his self respect and aspirations or the slightest
glimmer of some dream of joy or self fulfillment.
Dirty Bob was a real lost soul as even in a crowd he was still all alone… what cursed chains shackled his brain
and his spirit. He was almost invisible to his fellow citizens and given a wide berth even by the few that noticed
and took pity.
Dirty Bob was shunned like a leper.
His filthy encrusted body emitted such a putrid stench of unfathomably foul and all-pervasive gagging putrefaction
that even the slightest encounter would evoke the reflex even in the strongest person an automatic reaction to
retch. Even the recall of this encounter would trigger an impulse to regurgitate.
Dirty Bob was a no-count and when the St. Augustine census was taken I wonder if he was ever entered?
Like it or not poor down and out Dirty Bob was part of the community and a fellow human being.
***
SHIRLEY? Shirley who? She clearly was a social misfit that never used a last name and lived over on Anastasia
Island on Boulevard Des Pins.
Spaced-out neatly dressed Shirley was quite pleasant and surprisingly resided in a small windowless sheet metal
lawn mower shed beside the house where her daughter worked as a nurse to an old Frenchmen who happened
to reside in the only house trailer in the neighborhood.
Shirley’s daughter who was some kind of a nurse worked for the old Frenchmen that lived across the street from a
house Jane and I designed and built ten years earlier.
We were in the process of re-building the house after a protracted repossession and that is when we got
acquainted with odd-ball Shirley the social misfit who was in a mental dimension that completely confounded our
abilities to fathom.
The old man where Shirley’s daughter worked as a live-in nurse had been the original landowner on this street
with a French name and had subdivided the lots to his liking back when it was wild Florida scrub jungle of pines,
palmettos, red-bugs and rattle snakes.
When we got to know this threesome we seriously began to question the sanity of them all.
First the old man for putting Shirley up in his lawn mower shed and keeping the daughter in his house at the same
time.
Next we had to question the sanity of the daughter for keeping her mother out in the mower shed like some type
of undomesticated animal.
Lastly Shirley who; this was a lady that dressed presentably, kept her body neatly groomed and outwardly had a
pleasant and seemingly normal disposition. But, she did live in a sheet metal shanty with absolutely no electric or
plumbing and this was Shirley’s chosen place in the world.
One day silently and secretively Shirley slipped into our premises and mysteriously popped up looking for work.
We needed help at the time so the timing couldn’t have been better.
Cleaning house, in her 50s, slim, sandy hair, neatly but poorly dressed, Shirley dove into hard work without a
whimper or grumbles and didn’t need supervision.
Shirley was steady and thorough and we did not have to watch her. We set a fast pace and she kept up.
We had just foreclosed on this house and it had been trashed. This ten month long procedure we could only
blame on our sleazy snoozing money-grabbing lawyer.
In the interim none of the bills, taxes or utilities were paid so the closure was not only protracted but a costly
ordeal.
The roof had been blown off in a terrific wind storm some months earlier and all the ceilings and walls were badly
damaged and needed redoing. It was interesting that the house had been insured all this time but the dead-beat
living there never bothered to put in the claim and instead lived in a muddled mildewing moldy mess.
The main sewer line had been broken off and raw sewage had flowed for months across the floor of one of the
carports that was heaped high with garbage and old soggy carpeting.
The insulation under the house needed replacing due to the dripping water and Shirley went under the house and
helped Jane even though the crawl space was full of rattlesnakes.
While Jane and Shirley were busily putting the final touches on the house I went out to conquer the lot that was so
overgrown that the two story house could not be seen from the street.
(A brief history of the house; Jane and I had traded a camper-van for the waterfront property and then designed
and built this two story, three bedroom, three bath home that we rented out for nearly ten years and then sold it
and carried the mortgage.)
Every day when we ate lunch together Shirley told numerous sad stories of her tragic convoluted and twisted
previous life. The story of her four year old blond haired blue eyed little boy that died and she buried him on a
lonely hillside while she was touring South America with her boyfriend in his red Chevrolet Corvette.
Shirley always reverently carried a Bible around and told lots of strange stories of murders and other terribly
gruesome events. Tucked away in her tightly clutched Bible were many newspaper clippings...she said that she
was part of it all.
We left Shirley and she was to watch the house while we made an emergency trip to Wisconsin to be with Jane’s
ailing parents.
Upon our return we sold the house and gave Shirley the lawn mower…the lady that lived in a mower shed now
had her own mower.
Shirley was strange in many ways. Not just because she would without a sound be lurking around and then just
like a ghost drop into view and we never knew if she had been engaged in voyeurism or merely eavesdropping.
We sold that house and two other houses in three weeks and then moved on with our lives
next chapter.
From the old fort looking south across Matanzas Bay in downtown St. Augustine with the Bridge of
Lions and Anastasia Island in the background anchored boats of transient sailors ride for free.
John O’Sullivan; this special social misfit was one of St. Augustine’s many street people, except that this guy
was individualistically different and excessively fastidious. Clean to the point of having a psychotic paranoid
aversion of not even wanting to shake hands. John was possessed with a severe sanitation phobia.
Very Irish John was born in County Cork, Ireland, and he made his career serving with the U.S. Customs service
as an officer and retired to St. Augustine where he fit right in nearly unnoticed and rented a room in a boarding
house.
Distinctively dressed in the same outfit day after day John could easily be spotted with his perfectly neat navy blue
US Customs cap adorned with yacht braid, his navy blue suit and trousers meticulously pressed and immaculate.
His white shirt would be pressed, starched and buttoned smartly but the most distinctive characteristic of all about
John was his distinctive limp.
John wore an elevated shoe on one foot and used a cane as he ambled around town with his distinctive gait,
which also made him unmistakable on the downtown streets he daily frequented.
Eccentric and thrifty John frugally looked for the very best deal; Immaculate and sanitizing John even rented from
our friends, Rodney and Phyllis Shutt at their boarding house, where cleanliness freak John kept his bed up on
tall glass castors to keep creeping microbes from intruding which was part of his paranoid cleanliness fetish.
Not to take any chances, clean freak John kept his room regularly doused with excessive quantities of Lysol spray
as a disinfectant to the point that the stifling antiseptic aroma would suck your breath away.
John was a regular daily fixture on the streets of downtown St. Augustine and had a regular route that included his
confabulations with his regular cronies out at the end of the City Yacht Pier.
It was not possible to get past smiling congenial John without him telling you some of his short stories and
humorous one-liner jokes.
We found out that John was super sensitive when it came to an Irish joke. But he just loved telling jokes and one-
liners if they poked fun at anyone else.
(Funny was funny until you poked fun at the Irish!)
I don’t know exactly what made this social misfit tick but he did spend one or two days every week over at the
Florida School for The Deaf and Blind telling stories to entertain the youngsters merely out of the goodness of his
heart.
***
Dirty Bob; this Bob was a dirty stinking down-and-out lost soul. He was a wharf rat and bum that would aimlessly
wander the streets of St. Augustine.
Bob the street person slept anyplace but usually wound up somewhere down around the fish docks.
Dirty Bob wore filthy raggedy worn out clothing and never ever washed. His God awful putrid stench would
immediately alienate anybody that got near him.
I have often times wondered about Dirty Bob and the thousands of other derelicts like him that hit the streets
aimlessly shuffling along through life on the lowest rung of human existence. At the same time I witnessed self-
righteous God fearing people who claim to be devout Christians that are totally blind to this poor mans plight.
Our friend George Tappin told of seeing Dirty Bob drinking a cup of coffee into which he poured sugar swarming
with ants and then drank it right down, ants and all obviously without batting an eye.
George also told of another disgusting event when Dirty Bob was under the fish docks having sexual doings with a
street dog and a shrimp boat captain named Wainwright spotted him and attempted to run him down with his boat.
Dirty Bob was clearly a deranged social misfit of unknown origin claimed by no one and an unwashed out-cast. He
was in his world of one with no friends, no family and no place to call home.
Poor ragged vacant minded Bob had lost, if he ever had it, all his self respect and aspirations or the slightest
glimmer of some dream of joy or self fulfillment.
Dirty Bob was a real lost soul as even in a crowd he was still all alone… what cursed chains shackled his brain
and his spirit. He was almost invisible to his fellow citizens and given a wide berth even by the few that noticed
and took pity.
Dirty Bob was shunned like a leper.
His filthy encrusted body emitted such a putrid stench of unfathomably foul and all-pervasive gagging putrefaction
that even the slightest encounter would evoke the reflex even in the strongest person an automatic reaction to
retch. Even the recall of this encounter would trigger an impulse to regurgitate.
Dirty Bob was a no-count and when the St. Augustine census was taken I wonder if he was ever entered?
Like it or not poor down and out Dirty Bob was part of the community and a fellow human being.
***
SHIRLEY? Shirley who? She clearly was a social misfit that never used a last name and lived over on Anastasia
Island on Boulevard Des Pins.
Spaced-out neatly dressed Shirley was quite pleasant and surprisingly resided in a small windowless sheet metal
lawn mower shed beside the house where her daughter worked as a nurse to an old Frenchmen who happened
to reside in the only house trailer in the neighborhood.
Shirley’s daughter who was some kind of a nurse worked for the old Frenchmen that lived across the street from a
house Jane and I designed and built ten years earlier.
We were in the process of re-building the house after a protracted repossession and that is when we got
acquainted with odd-ball Shirley the social misfit who was in a mental dimension that completely confounded our
abilities to fathom.
The old man where Shirley’s daughter worked as a live-in nurse had been the original landowner on this street
with a French name and had subdivided the lots to his liking back when it was wild Florida scrub jungle of pines,
palmettos, red-bugs and rattle snakes.
When we got to know this threesome we seriously began to question the sanity of them all.
First the old man for putting Shirley up in his lawn mower shed and keeping the daughter in his house at the same
time.
Next we had to question the sanity of the daughter for keeping her mother out in the mower shed like some type
of undomesticated animal.
Lastly Shirley who; this was a lady that dressed presentably, kept her body neatly groomed and outwardly had a
pleasant and seemingly normal disposition. But, she did live in a sheet metal shanty with absolutely no electric or
plumbing and this was Shirley’s chosen place in the world.
One day silently and secretively Shirley slipped into our premises and mysteriously popped up looking for work.
We needed help at the time so the timing couldn’t have been better.
Cleaning house, in her 50s, slim, sandy hair, neatly but poorly dressed, Shirley dove into hard work without a
whimper or grumbles and didn’t need supervision.
Shirley was steady and thorough and we did not have to watch her. We set a fast pace and she kept up.
We had just foreclosed on this house and it had been trashed. This ten month long procedure we could only
blame on our sleazy snoozing money-grabbing lawyer.
In the interim none of the bills, taxes or utilities were paid so the closure was not only protracted but a costly
ordeal.
The roof had been blown off in a terrific wind storm some months earlier and all the ceilings and walls were badly
damaged and needed redoing. It was interesting that the house had been insured all this time but the dead-beat
living there never bothered to put in the claim and instead lived in a muddled mildewing moldy mess.
The main sewer line had been broken off and raw sewage had flowed for months across the floor of one of the
carports that was heaped high with garbage and old soggy carpeting.
The insulation under the house needed replacing due to the dripping water and Shirley went under the house and
helped Jane even though the crawl space was full of rattlesnakes.
While Jane and Shirley were busily putting the final touches on the house I went out to conquer the lot that was so
overgrown that the two story house could not be seen from the street.
(A brief history of the house; Jane and I had traded a camper-van for the waterfront property and then designed
and built this two story, three bedroom, three bath home that we rented out for nearly ten years and then sold it
and carried the mortgage.)
Every day when we ate lunch together Shirley told numerous sad stories of her tragic convoluted and twisted
previous life. The story of her four year old blond haired blue eyed little boy that died and she buried him on a
lonely hillside while she was touring South America with her boyfriend in his red Chevrolet Corvette.
Shirley always reverently carried a Bible around and told lots of strange stories of murders and other terribly
gruesome events. Tucked away in her tightly clutched Bible were many newspaper clippings...she said that she
was part of it all.
We left Shirley and she was to watch the house while we made an emergency trip to Wisconsin to be with Jane’s
ailing parents.
Upon our return we sold the house and gave Shirley the lawn mower…the lady that lived in a mower shed now
had her own mower.
Shirley was strange in many ways. Not just because she would without a sound be lurking around and then just
like a ghost drop into view and we never knew if she had been engaged in voyeurism or merely eavesdropping.
We sold that house and two other houses in three weeks and then moved on with our lives
next chapter.
From the old fort looking south across Matanzas Bay in downtown St. Augustine with the Bridge of
Lions and Anastasia Island in the background anchored boats of transient sailors ride for free.
