by Tim Gilmore, 1/26/2024
And but well it was always strange the storeowner sent his son to Trinity Christian Academy. Boys from the declining ranch house style neighborhood walked through the woods on Saturday mornings to buy black Metallica and Megadeth and Slayer t-shirts and Chinese throwing stars, blades curved with the direction you’d throw, and wonder who bought all those pot pipes, those bongs, variously shaped like skulls or busty women or red-horned demons, and how Exotica Imports could sell them legally.
me and my parents, Easter, Proxima Road, 1976
I was shocked the Independent Fundamental Baptist school didn’t expel me when teachers seized my class folders on the outside of which I’d scrawled lyrics by Metallica – “‘Kill’ is such a friendly word” – and Metal Church – “Watch the children pray, / ‘Save us, God, today!’” (Ironic if I’d then known the school’s and church’s legacy of child sexual abuse.) And the kid whose parents owned the neighborhood head shop — how was he allowed to attend? (You’d be sent home, suspended, if you were a boy and your hair touched your ears, if you were a girl and your skirt rose above your knee.)
Confused, in my teenage years, and righteously angry and sad and self-hating and depressed, I rebelled for a time against everything my church upbringing had stood for. It hadn’t kept my mother alive. It hadn’t saved me, as I wept and prayed when trying to sleep each night, from burning forever in the Lake of Fire. Oh how righteously I burned against it.
And I wasn’t one of the untold number of children raped and abused. That no one ever burned Trinity Christian Academy down, though parents – I later learned – had threatened to shoot Trinity’s pastor in the head, only proved to the faithful that God protected his men.
When I swung back, equally confused, the other way – was I 18 years old or 19? Was I desperately seeking the security of my early childhood? Was I mounting the antithesis to the thesis of my rebellion in my personal historico-psychological dialectic? – I listened to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and read Barry Goldwater’s autobiography and William F. Buckley’s Up from Liberalism and even Eugenia Price’s Lost-Cause Christian romance novels set historically in Jax.
Having gotten myself rebaptized after my mother’s death, 12 years old, newly afraid of Hell all over again, I’d drifted, avoided church what Sunday mornings I could, having stayed up alone the night before, watching MTV’s Headbangers’ Ball from midnight to three a.m. When I swung back, briefly, to church and the angry shelter of pseudo-biblical Southern political conservatism, I stood in church when the whole congregation sang after sermons, closed my eyes, transported myself to the group-sing and sang and cried.
And around this time, I understood Exotica Imports was no more. I haven’t checked old city directories, but it probably only lasted a few years or a decade. Yet as a known presence in the slow-moving time of childhood and adolescence, I’d thought it a thing that lasted. It had been and would be. I’d only bought a couple of metal band t-shirts there, and I can’t remember which. Anthrax? Megadeth? Kreator? I’d attended their concerts, never bought a throwing star or switchblade, certainly never a bong. For such a sinful rebel, I stayed innocent, felt guilty the time or two I drank a beer, tried LSD but never weed, kept my virginity.
And then The Asian American Bulletin offered me a writing gig. I’d imagined myself a writer almost since memory and I’d written for church’s newsletter, The Teen Challenger, and for my community college’s student paper, The Campus Voice. For the college paper, I wrote a story about Ross Perot and some embarrassing op-eds, and interviewed the actor Lou Gossett, Jr. ahead of his speech at the 1993 African American Scholarship Banquet.
Tim Gilmore, 1993, African American Scholarship Banquet, Florida Community College at Jacksonville
I wrote a fun op-ed called “The Pleasure of Mangled Words,” celebrating the schadenfreude of malapropisms, including a reference in The Florida Times-Union to “The Florida School for the Dead and Blind,” a conflation of plays as Fiddler on a Hot Tin Roof, and the question of whether JFK really said, in his ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech, “I am a jelly doughnut.”
In the space where I’d known Exotica Imports, I met with the editor of The Asian American Bulletin, of whom I remember only that he offered to publish me. He’d somehow read my editorials for The Campus Voice and expressed interest in my political acumen. I had none. He assigned me to cover a Filipino line dance and published an editorial he himself editorialized and headlined, “Clinton Economics Really Frighten Timothy.”
More than three decades later, I blow the dust off yellowing copies of The Asian American Bulletin, one of my very first publishers, and wince at the ironies. Nearby headlines include “Apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary” and “Psycho-Analysis: Why We (Filipinos) Love Christmas” and “Is Japan a Nation of Mama’s Boys?” The Bulletin, while representing all Asia in Jacksonville, slanted heavily Filipino, and jingoistically pro-American so.
Yet even The Asian American Bulletin of December 1992, in light of the 21st century crash of the American newspaper, carried more in-depth news and more varied analysis of more of the world than most local papers from across this vast continent do in early 2024.
In May 2023, friends Latino and white and otherwise, said this “hole in the wall” was the best place to get a simple taco or quesadilla anywhere in Jacksonville, and my Panama-born wife and I sat at the only unoccupied booth behind the tienda and scanned the list of Platillos Hondureños. I could get three tacos for $5.99, Pollo con Tajadas (chicken with sweet plantains) for $10.99, or Carne Asada, same price.
I’d tried menudo, elsewhere mondongo, so culturally significant from Mexico to Panama that a Puerto Rican “boy band” called Menudo hit American magazines Billboard and Teen Vogue as early as the late 1970s. I ate a dried fish eye in a restaurant American-sponsored Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega once used as weekend getaway.
Here, in the former headquarters of Exotica Imports and The Asian American Bulletin, La Razita calls itself a “Mexican grocery” as a catchall Florida phrase for what was America, named for Amerigo, conquest of an indigenous continent, thus, in this year of somebody’s lord, “Producto Mexicano y Centro Americano,” though most of North America truly, if not indigenous, is La Razita — the race, the little race, the tribe, the community — “tienda y taqueria.”
Tall parade bottles of Patrón Silver and Don Julio tequila stand full-feathered on shelves above pork rinds and chocolates. Big plastic dispensers of horchata, pineapple juice and Tamarindo stand with smiley-faced cartoons above levers that say “Push” and Refrescate! A dozen kinds of freeze-dried chiles – Mulato and Morita and Puya and Arbol Limpio – hang from pegboard “gondolas.”
Everyone here on his lunchbreak, this Saturday, short and muscular, speaking little if any English, comes here several days a week, seeks no specialty but earthy delicious fuel, colored by taste of the place he grew up all the better. Mostly he comes in, orders, collapses into a booth, by himself or with two or three more workers, eats quickly, tapping fingers on his phone, stands and delivers his plates and cups and leaves to work again.
Colored banners hang overhead. Every banner in Exotica Imports hung black. The Asian American Bulletin covered “Western Line Dancing” Filipino gatherings “at the ho-down at the Achy Breaky Nite,” which surely would have confused British imperialist Rudyard Kipling if he could look up from writing “White Man’s Burden” in support of American colonial control of the Philippines and see the future of Jacksonville, Florida, all of which has led unto the delectable taste of sweet plantains this particular moment (whichever particular moment in whichever decade or century you’re reading).
