Jed Wolf

As he explained the poorly rendered image of something holding an accordion on the back of his left calf, he reminded me of the cross dresser out on A1A who’s ink reaches up from beneath her sequined blouse, and the legless vets and dirty teens panhandling with their pets in the shadows of this tourist town.

“She thought she could pull it off, like our marriage I guess. Do you have any Coke?” he asked as he showed me a pic on his cell phone. “This is what it’s supposed to look like.”

His grandmother, Frieda who raised him had once appeared on Ed Sullivan. “Can you send me that pic? I might know someone who can fix it,” I said, knowing I didn’t.

Though the guilt of absconding his Grandmother’s image for a Facebook post haunted me, the need to solve the mystery for my readers won out.

With no new projects or hurricane’s on the horizon, I’d become bored merely existing in paradise, but unlike Dr. Frankenstein, surely my subject would never find out, or forgive me if he did for innocently bringing an anonymous enigma to life. And if something bad happened, at least I’d have a record.

He never knew his mother until recently. He’d found her in New Hampshire raising a rugged little niece for a sister he never even knew he had until last month.

“Kinda’ screwed it up, “ he said last evening on our front porch, chewing the ice from his rum and coke. “Ya think?” I said, staring at his enormous calf.

“I bought my wife a good machine and quality ink but she wouldn’t practice.”

“No kids?” I asked. “Nope.”