The Tale of Kenneth “Bones” Florence
1/14/2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GSftrS2g78
Little-Son,
My special boy, I was thinking about you today. I was
thinking that I may need to pick up another IPad so that you can have mine to
play your games on while you are here. That way I can read my stories while you
are playing your learning games next to me. We won’t argue about who’s getting
the IPad next.
Anyways, it’s time to move on to another history of your
crazy dad’s life while growing up. I don’t expect that you will be reading this
anytime soon. There will be some adult content to this and I write these
history lessons for you to enjoy later. Today, we go back to Biscayne Blvd,
deep in the heart of Miami, Florida. There are other things that migrate during
the spring, besides the bullfrogs on a hot Florida afternoon. My Uncle Ken
would migrate down to visit us.
So during this time, there was My Cuban pops, Peter.
There was my mom, my sister Lisa, my brother Tony, and then me. I believe the
first time uncle Ken came to visit was when we all were cramped in a trailer on
the campground. This was before my mom’s Jewish boss, Mr. Diamond, let us move
into one of his properties. The first time Uncle Ken came to visit, he had just
finished doing a lot of time in prison for bank robbery.
So imagine this tall, biker looking guy. He had long
beautifully braided hair. He had a bushy mustache. He was built from all those
years of weightlifting while incarcerated. He was a full blooded Arian Nation
member in the prison. He was a bad mo-fo. He was also artistic as all hell. He
was a tattoo artist. I remember the many tattoos that he had. He had a wizard
on his back. He also had a huge castle on his back, which I would later
understand to represent his time in prison. He had the pink panther on the
inside of his ribs. He had two tear drops coming from his eyes. I would later
learn that those tear drops would mean that he killed two people while in
prison. He had the NAZI swastika on his back as well. He was a very dangerous
man, and we welcomed him with open arms to stay with us.
Now I need to go back to his mother, my grandma Mary
Jane, to paint a better picture of Ken. Grandma was a messed up Marine who got
discharged, drank and abused weak minded men. Grandma stabbed your uncle Ken
when he was only 15 years old. I don’t think a young man gets over that kind of
thing very easily, if at all. Grandma of course neglected all of her children
as she drank and manipulated men for the majority of her post Marine Corp life.
My uncle Ken ended up in some of the youth authorities
down in San Diego. He would be in and out so many times, that it was no
surprise that he would graduate into the adult system by the time he became an
adult. Now although I’m painting the life of a hardened criminal, there is this
weird thing about respect that guys like my uncle Ken lived by. Even when
robbing his first bank, I remember him once telling me how he told her to,
“Please give me your money, ma’am”. Yet he was by no means a nice guy. To be
very honest, he scared the shit out of me. It wasn’t the kind of fear where I
thought he would hurt me, but the kind of fear where I better listen to him
when he talked to me. He grew up in the 50’s and 60’s. Men were fearful back
then to a much grander scale than they are today.
So anyways, this big, muscular biker guy comes to stay
with us, and I thought he was the coolest dude in the world. It was during the
summer time. So I wasn’t at school. He was fresh out of prison. He hitch-hiked,
rode the bus, whatever he had to do to get down to see his baby sister, my
momma. She would work during the day, and I would hang out with my uncle Ken.
Mom put him in one of those ten man tents in our front yard. I always wanted to
see him draw. He was freaking amazing. He would draw the most beautiful
pictures that even to this day, I had ever seen. You would think a guy like him
would be drawing something dark or evil all the time. It was actual quite the
opposite. He drew beautiful ducks on a lake, with the reflection in the water,
with an enormous castle in the distance. He would draw flowers, dragons,
angels, mountain scenery, and the ocean. I had even begun a game with him where
I would try to test his skills by saying he couldn’t draw such and such. For
example, I’d tell him to draw me a big bear fighting in the woods against a
lion or something crazy cool like that. He would blow my expectations out of
the water. He had such an imagination. He was incredibly talented.
He was also a ladies man. I don’t know how a man straight
out of prison would right away have a girlfriend, but he always had someone by
his side. I’m not saying they were the best, but he was not a lonely guy ever.
So when he wasn’t drawing, I would go places with him. I remember him taking me
to a biker party. He told me they were Hell’s Angel’s. Now I can’t verify that
because I was too young to know even what that meant, but I know they were a
lot of people who rode motorcycles and got tattoos from my uncle Ken. That’s
how he made money (There were some other ways, I’m sure, but we’ll leave it at
that). I remember he would take me to the rough parts of Miami and talk about
life with me. I don’t remember a lot of what he said. I do remember some of it
was about respect. I also remember he told me how to pick up chicks. He was
very brutally honest. He talked to me like I was going to be a man myself in
about five minutes. He joked about how to pick up the ladies. From what I
remember, you just have to be very forward.
There was only one thing that I didn’t like. Sometimes my
mom and him would drink and talk about the past. I was too young to remember
what was being said, but it made me uncomfortable as a young boy to hear my mom
and him so angry. When I say angry, I mean anger because of very deep seeded
pains in their lives that they had a mutual connection to. Inevitably they
spoke of grandma. I always grew up hating the conversations that entailed her
name being brought up because it meant people I loved at the time were hurt
because of that name.
I remember a few weeks would go by and Uncle Ken would
tell us goodbye as he would go do his thing, wherever that was. He talked a lot
about family. He would try to explain to me what being a man was about. And
being around him, I just witnessed what it was like to be around a bad ass
dude.
He visited us again the next summer. There was more of
the same stuff from the previous visit of his. He’d tell me not to be so shy
with the girls and to be tough. He had these rubber nun-chucks, and he was
always showing me how good he was on them. He would make the funny Bruce Lee
sounds. He was actually really good at it. Here’s the scary thing about Uncle
Ken: when he said it was time for him to go home, he wasn’t talking about a
white picket fence. Prison was his home and he knew it. Even when he was
watching me, he would explain that that lifestyle was in his blood. He also
told me that if I ever ended up in one of his prisons, he’d beat my ass. He
said he wanted better for me and my siblings. He really loved my mom and would
have easily added another tear-drop under his eye by killing anyone who hurt
her.
He eventually did go back home. I don’t know all the
details, and if I did, I would not talk about them too deeply here. All I truly
know is that he ended up getting a 25 year sentence in Utah for being a
habitual criminal. Uncle Ken a habitual criminal? Of course. He spent more of
his life locked up than he did as a free man. When I joined the military, and
got stationed overseas, I used to write to him. He would always tell me that he
was proud of me. He would always ask me what kinds of things I was getting
into. He never once talked bad about the government. He knew his place. He
never had a negative thing to say in any of his letters. In fact in all his
letters to all of his family, he would purposefully write everything in old
English lettering, as if he was writing in calligraphy. When he would write my
mom, my Aunt Pat, or my aunt jean, he would draw them the most beautiful
pictures. He drew lovely pictures even for my grandma (yes, the one who stabbed
him).
I took leave of absence one year to go visit my siblings
and mom. At that time, the state of Utah had moved my uncle Ken from the main
penitentiary to one of the county jails. I was told that my uncle Ken had too
much power in prison among the inmates. They moved him to disrupt that. I
visited him in this county jail. He asked me how I was doing. Thinking about it
now, I think he was ashamed for anyone in the family to see him in that
condition. He was a little stand-offish and when he asked about my mom and
such, I could see his eyes swell up. I’m not trying to glorify an ugly
situation here, but I am speaking the truth here. By this time, I was about 23.
He was roughly ten years into his sentence. He would get denied parole every
two years. Finally, when I was a junior in College, I got word that he got
paroled. He was staying briefly in Colorado and I went to see him.
For a man who had just done twenty years in prison, he
did not seem to have a stress in his life. He was all smiles. He had his long,
braided (but now grey hair). He was full of tattoos. He had the hugest biker
mustache that I had ever seen. He had nothing but praise for what I had been
doing in my life. We talked. He asked about the family. He asked me how my kids
were.
That would be the last time I would ever see him. He was
supposed to report to a halfway house within a certain amount of time. He
decided he was not going to do that. From rumors, I heard that he hitch hiked
out east somewhere. He got himself a logging job. He did become a fugitive of
the law. The last thing I ever heard was that he died in the desert of
California. He died running from the law. One final interesting fact about my
uncle Ken was that while he was incarcerated in Utah, his artwork was displayed
in the governor’s mansion. He entered the Utah state drawing fairs and would
always get first place. I think the state would keep any moneys, of course. He
also cut his hair and donated it for the cure for cancer. I’m talking about a
man who robbed banks and had tears tattooed on his face. Uncle Ken epitomizes
the fact that life can be cruel, ugly, and beautiful at the same time.
I love you boy.
Love, Daddy.
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