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Letter to the editor

Living between the lines

Along the road of hard living and regrets, Jim Germiller landed in prison and started writing poetry. Decades of destructive behavior later, the poet turns the page.

By LANE DeGREGORY, Times Staff Writer
Published November 3, 2007

ST. PETERSBURG -- it takes Jim Germiller just a few seconds to total up what he has spent on Southern Comfort.

"Two wives, three kids, two cars, a speedboat, a race car, a Harley, four houses and a 17-year relationship," he says. "And now it's all bye-bye."

He is sitting on a hay bale outside the Bay Pines VA Medical Center, a weathered cowboy hat shading his eyes. It's "Recovery in Action Day" and Germiller, 64, has been asked to read one of his poems to kick off this fall festival.

When he steps behind the microphone, his nerves show. He won't look up at the 100 veterans and doctors and therapists sitting in folding chairs. He just starts reading, speaking of solitude and death, pleading: "Listen to my voice."

He has a story to tell.

A lifetime ago, he got kicked out of high school in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and signed onto a Navy ship to Vietnam. He got shot, shipped home and married. Had a couple of kids, managed a Sears auto shop.

One weekend in 1975, he decided to go fishing. In Florida. He hopped on his Harley, picked up a stripper and headed south, leaving behind his wife and small sons. He hit the bars in Largo and Clearwater. "Then I hit the toilet."

The bar regulars called him Cowboy. His drink: Southern Comfort with a Michelob chaser. He says he could throw back 38 shots before passing out. When a guy bet him he wouldn't rob a bank, Cowboy sawed off his shotgun and won three years in prison.

In his cell, he picked up a pen and notebook. Plenty of empty pages, plenty of time to fill them. His first poem was titled I'm Done. But he wasn't. For 30 years, he was either in bars or behind them.

After his last girlfriend left him three years ago, he tried again to drown his past, but Comfort started tasting like regret. So he did something he'd never done before: asked for help.

Doctors at Bay Pines told him he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and is bipolar. "I thought I was just a drunk," he says. "Now I found out I'm crazy too."

Germiller goes to group sessions five days a week. His new friends -- "and some really good meds" -- are helping him learn to live with himself.

He still thinks of his first wife, who had a heart attack after they divorced. He remembers her in his poem, which ends the way a lot of barroom stories do -- ruefully, and with a touch of irony.

"She died. I'm getting better."

Lane DeGregory can be reached at 727 893-8825 or degregory@sptimes.com.

[Last modified November 2, 2007, 20:11:26]