Only in Florida

Some of the jobsites that my fiancé and I work on are in some pretty remote areas that are deep in the woods with red dirt roads. You see some pretty interesting houses and yards back in those woods. The most interesting we’ve seen, by far, was a series of 10 double wide trailers attached to each other into a makeshift mansion. They were attached end to end, side to side and end to side. They were even stacked on top of each other. Oh the questions I had for the builder. Is that duct tape that's holding them together water tight? How many rooms are there? Stairs or ladders? Most importantly, why?

4. Late night repairman

For a period of about almost a year we lived in a 4 bedroom 3 story condo one block away from the ocean, with the top 2 stories being ours It was work in lieu of rent remodeling the property. With the extra rooms, we would often invite someone in need of housing to stay with us short term. It wasn't long until we discovered their homelessness was often self induced.

One of our “guests" said he only needed a place over the weekend because he was gong to rehab on Monday. He promised that he'd refrain from using while in our home. On the second night he was there, around 2:30 – 3 am we woke up to the sound of drilling and screwing coming from outside on the deck. I went to investigate and found the guy outside working on my deck.

“What the hell are you doing?” I questioned.

He looked up at me with eyes bigger than an owl’s, white crust around one nostril, jaw clenched tight and talking a million miles per minute. “I swear I'm not on anything. You just had a few loose boards. I just wanted to say thank you for your help. If won't take long. I promise I'm sober.”

Needless to say, he didn't last the whole weekend there. It should also go without saying that he never made it to rehab. Him being the first we had tried to help, we should have learned our lesson right then and there.

5. A federal offense

One of ways we would make money on the side was a little business we called Previously Shat Beach Shit. We would clean the beaches up at night of broken and abandoned canopies, chairs and umbrellas. We then fixed them up and sold them back to the tourists. We would load up a beach wagon and I would drag these 300+ pound wagon loads along the beach to the next beach access.

“Need a hand dragging that?” asked a large stranger one night.

“Please! Thanks! We're taking it right over there to beach access 13 and our house is a block away. “ I answered.

Upon arriving at our place, we asked him where he was staying, thinking he may be a tourist. Turned out he was a local that was sleeping on the beaches at night. Well us being who were are, we made our usual offer of one of the spare rooms. He declined taking up residence as he had legal issues he didn't want to involve us in. He did, however, ask if he chill there the night and come by whenever he needed to get off the streets for a few hours.

For the next week, he would pop in randomly throughout the day and night. Every time he did, he was always worried about police. We even walked to the store one day and he insisted on taking back roads for fear of being seen. We began to think he wasn't being 100% honest with us about what his legal issues were. It was also beginning to get very annoying.

One day he showed up, acting more paranoid than usual and noticed a new RV in the lot adjacent to ours. Our landlord already had 3 friends parked there so we didn't really pay any attention to it. We were having a really bad day though, and didn't want to hear his paranoid delusions. I decided to try and play off his paranoia and tell him about Christina calling the cops on our landlord for entering our condo while we were not home without permission. Finally, he gave me the opportunity I was looking for.

“Seriously, though, what's with the new RV? Are you sure it's not under cover cops or something? I mean they don't usually do something like that unless it's a federal thing,” insisted.

With my back still turned to him as I continued to work on a canopy I responded, “Really?! What did YOU do that was federal?”

No sooner than I said that I heard his heavy footsteps going down the deck stairs. By the time I turned around, which was a mere matter of seconds, he was nowhere to be seen. Gone without a trace never to return to our condo again. We saw him a few times after that at gas stations or stores, but only in passing. The first time after the incident, he said “hi", handed me $5 that I didn't even ask for and hauled ass the other way.

6. Sharing is caring

One morning, a coworker of ours from a job that we were working at the time showed up to pick us up two hours early. Let's refer to him as Mr. J. After a few moments he explained that he'd been up an night and wanted to know if there was someplace he could take an hour nap before we left. We had recently allowed someone to take the spare room upstairs for a week or two. We're calling him Mr. Dover. Mr. Dover was gone at the time and wouldn't return until after we left for work so I told Mr. J to go ahead and nap in that room, but leave Mr. Dover’s belongings alone.

Mr. J took his nap. We left for work on time. All is good….. until about a half hour into our ride to work. Mr. Dover called my phone.

“Where the fuck is my Stroker 2000?!” he screams into the phone.

I'm hesitant to ask, but “Your what? Do I even want to know what that is?”

“You know exactly what that is! It's my sex toy! Who was up in my room?”

“Well I have Christina, “ I explained. “I have no need for one of those. Mr. J took a nap up there this morning. Mr. J, do you know anything about Mr. Dover’s Stroker 2000 coming up missing?”

Without even asking what it was, Mr. J replies, “That's disgusting! Who takes another man's sex toy?”

I explained to Mr. Dover that no one in the car knows what he's talking about. I told him to keep looking, he probably hid it someplace and just doesn’t remember. We hung up the phone and that was that. We did our work day and it was never brought back up.

Several hours after work Mr. J pulled in our driveway, got out of his car and went to his trunk. He pulled out a black garbage bag and came up our steps.

Looking a bit ashamed he went to hand me the bag. “Here, this is some of Mr. Dover’s stuff I took from his room. “

Refusing to touch the bag for fear of what was most likely in it I said “You put it back. I'm not touching a thing. I'm coming with you to ensure you don't take anything else and you’re not allowed back on the property. I can't stand a thief.”

“I was just borrowing it.,” he said.

In Mr. Dover’s room, he dumped the bag onto the bed. The contents of the bag were a few random shirts, a belt and….yup the Stroker 2000. What is the Stroker 2000? I'm not sure what's more disturbing the fact that this man borrowed another man's sex toy or the sex toy itself. The Stroker 2000 was a plastic toddler sized ass.