My sister was cleaning up her garage a few weeks ago and came across a mysterious box labeled "Eddie." Inside the box among other old school keepsakes and family photos was a postcard from Harry and Sully when they went on their Caribbean adventure. If you were on the team at that time no doubt you envisioned a dream vacation of snorkeling and basking in the sun and regretted that you weren't going with them. The only details I remembered hearing about their trip was Sully mentioning something about "rum" and "a sailor getting hacked up with a machete." I sent Sully an email mentioning the postcard and the trip and this is what I got back:

Ed --

A bottle of rum, you say -- as in uno?  Rum was the elixir vitae, the coin of the realm, the curse and the cure, and mainly the cheapest thing you could slug down on the island.  I remember considerably more than a bottle rum.  Haven't touched the stuff since.  Rum pudding, rum punch, anything rum can still make me reprise the month-long hangover.

As for sleeping on the beach and the machete murder, that would have been Puerto Rico, where we arrived on something that stood straight up on the runway with a passenger list of brethren ne'er-do-wells who could throw-up in seven languages.  The Hawk spilled scalding coffee on me at 10,000 feet, and I immediately took the plane/rocket (choose one) to 30,000.  I remember we slept in the San Juan airport, where 747-size black mosquitoes drove us into the streets.  After an abortive gambling stint at the Caribbe Hilton, and a few "scud" burgers at the Castle Royale, we hit a park for a few Z's but had to move again when a sailor was sliced and diced to death near some kind of baobab-like tree.  We ended up sleeping on the Caribbe Hilton's ocean catwalk, whilst romancing couples sidestepped us.  Later heard that Frank Toomey proposed to his wife on that catwalk.  Ah, memories.

I was singing Belafonte long before that trip, but steel drums definitely started doing flip turns in my arteries on that month-long walk on the wild side.  Plenty of stories came out of it.  Submarine-pier adventures, 'cuda, shark and spiny sea urchins "scrapes," the great Kannapolis war-bond fiasco, the Jewish cemetery lizard fiasco, limbo farces, spear fishing to avoid starvation, being picked up in Miami as suspected Cuban refugees, and tarantulas in a rainstorm.  But I can't imagine us signing ourselves:  "Coach and Tom."  Blackbeard and Long John Silver, maybe.  Lots of other aliases.  The fact that Hawk has lived in the Caribbean for decades assures me that the authorities have given us blanket amnesty.  I shall now live with my shades raised again...

Bestest,  Seaweed Sully