I’ve never been there, so my impression of what Florida’s like is drawn entirely from books, films and the news stories that originate there. Among the places in Florida I’ve never been to is Melbourne, a city of some 78,000 people located midway down Florida’s eastern coast, about 60 miles southeast of Orlando. Melbourne, which served as a training ground for Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, was named in honor of its first Postmaster, a gentleman named Cornthwaite John Hector. Hector was an Englishman, but he had spent much of his life in Melbourne, Australia.
Florida’s Melbourne is also home of the Brevard County Manatees minor league baseball team, and to former major leaguer Cecil Fielder and Boston Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield. Among entertainers, it’s home to Saturday Night Live star Darrell Hammond and the birthplace of Jim Morrison, the late lead singer and lyricist for the Doors. Morrison didn’t stay in Melbourne long, eventually making his way to Los Angeles where he graduated from UCLA’s film school and formed the rock band named after Aldous Huxley’s book, “The Doors of Perception,” a phrase itself borrowed from a line of poetry by William Blake. Morrison was 27 when he died in a bathtub in Paris.
But we were talking about Melbourne, not Jim Morrison. You can gather all sorts of interesting tidbits about Melbourne on Wikipedia or from more traditional treeware reference sources, but I’ll wager that nothing you can find out about Melbourne will give you a better sense of the town than a small news item I saw tucked away in the P.I. a while ago.
The article said a man carrying a burrito and dressed as Captain America approached a woman in a bar during a costumed pub crawl in Melbourne. The costumed man began talking dirty to the woman, touched her inappropriately and then got into a brawl with the woman’s boyfriend. Police arrived and broke up the fight. Police asked several patrons, all of whom were also dressed up as Captain America, to step outside so the woman could identify the suspect. Out of that improvised superhero lineup, the woman identified Raymond Adamcik, a 54-year-old doctor, as her assailant.
A cutting edge news story like this one really brings out the investigative journalist in me. Many questions came immediately to mind after reading this shocking account. For example, who knew they had costumed pub crawls in Melbourne? And what are the odds that, in any particular pub crawl on a Saturday night in Melbourne, multiple men would be wearing Captain America costumes? Finally, and perhaps most baffling, what’s the deal with the burrito?
The press account of this incident clearly states that the assailant was carrying a burrito, but does not make it clear whether the burrito in question was part of Dr. Adamcik’s costume, or just how he came to be carrying it around with him at the time of the attack. Having never been to Florida, I have no way of knowing if bars in Melbourne routinely provide complimentary burritos the way some pubs in the Northwest offer up bowls of stale beer nuts and old pretzels. Without any more information on the origins of the reported burrito, it occurred to me that perhaps the thing might have played a more central and disturbing role in the good doctor’s nefarious plans for the evening. Before we go too far down that uncomfortable road, I have been assured by those of my friends most acquainted with modern degeneracy that burritos remain primarily a food item, and likely did not factor into Dr. Adamcik’s romantic plans for the evening.
Since we’re talking about Florida, perhaps you read about the recent death of Cedella Booker in Miami. The body of Ms. Booker, a feisty, deeply spiritual woman of 81 years who read the Bible every day and listened to gospel music every night, was taken to Jamaica and displayed in Kingston’s National Stadium where thousands of mourners paid final tribute to her before she was buried next to the body of her son in Nine Miles, Jamaica. Ms. Booker is probably more well known by her first married name, which she took at 18 when marrying a British man 32 years her senior, a man named Norval Marley. Cedella’s son Bob died of a brain tumor in 1981 at the age of 36.
In honor of the late Cedella Marley, the very much alive Muriel Tyner, and mothers everywhere, I wish you all a Happy Mother’s Day.
Islander Tom Tyner is an attorney
for the Trust for Public Land. He is author
of “Skeletons From Our Closet,”
a collection of writings on the island’s latte scene.
