The Way Back

When I was in my late teens or early 20s—this would have been way back in the late 90s or early 2000s—I bought two cameras at two different times. One them was a Nikon 35mm with an absurdly loud shutter (or was it the autofocus?). I’m not sure of the exact model, although I am sure that it was a beautiful and expensive camera. If I tried to buy one today it would cost a small fortune.

I remember taking a lot of photos with that camera, but I don’t remember any of the photos I took. I know I took photos at parties and at my parents’ vow renewal ceremony at Father Chuck’s little church on Nebraska Avenue where it crosses the Hillsborough River in Tampa. My parents never got to see those photos—which I can only guess weren’t very good—because I never developed them. It’s entirely possible, in fact, that I never developed any of the rolls I shot with that camera because I didn’t have any money. I remember keeping a bag of them for a while, but they eventually got lost in the shuffle of my life at that time.

The other camera was a slick-looking Olympus point and shoot with a three megapixel sensor. I’m sure it was Olympus. I’m guessing about the sensor. I know it couldn’t have had many megapixels because this was in the early days of digital photography and the higher resolution cameras were very expensive and, again, I didn’t have any money. There are a few images I remember well that I took with this camera, and I wish I still had them.

The first was a photo of Wayne Koerner and his daughter Molly, who was a toddler at the time, standing on the beach. Both were wearing sunglasses and blue bathing suits. I took the shot from below against the cloudless blue sky. I might have been sitting in a beach chair or laying on a blanket. I know I printed it at Walgreens in color at 5×7, which was already too large for the image to handle, and when I gave it to Wayne he said he loved all of the blues. It was a very “Florida” picture, and I think I submitted it to a photo contest with that theme. I would remember if it had won.

Another was a photo of Donnie Dahl’s parents, Don and Barbara. I printed this one in sepia, which I thought matched the timelessness of Donnie’s parents, again at a low resolution 5×7. Don Dahl had his usual sort of amused half smile, which was half hidden behind the massive mustache he wore to hide the fact that he’d lost his teeth to radiation when he was a radar man in what the Vietnamese call the American War. (It’s entirely possible that I have some of these details wrong. Hopefully, Donnie will correct them when he reads this. He is the type to “read the articles.”) Barbara had a deer-in-the-headlights look that I think she had a lot because she was a thoughtful woman and this was her thinking look.

The most memorable images captured with this camera weren’t taken by me. They were taken by Wayne’s roommate Blake’s beautiful girlfriend whose name I cannot remember. I was taking photos at a punk rock show Wayne had organized at the Harbor Club in Tampa—this was at a time long after its prime and long before it burned down in what was likely a case of arson and insurance fraud—and Blake’s girlfriend took the little Olympus to the bathroom with her friend who was also beautiful for a few mirror selfies. This was before social media and mirror selfies were really a thing, of course.

When they returned the camera a little later, I wasn’t very surprised to see that the girls had taken some shots of themselves flashing for the camera that, apparently, were just for me. Despite lots of struggles, I’ve had a rather charmed life in some ways. This kind of thing is one of those ways. I’m not sure how Blake found out about the images because I’m sure I didn’t show them around—I’ve always been discrete—but I imagine she told him. I remember he confronted me about the photos in the front yard of the house he shared with Wayne and got in my face and told me that I “better delete those fucking pictures from the camera.”

I didn’t know Blake very well. What I did know is that he frequently woke up screaming in the morning. This was a symptom of his PTSD from having served in Operation Desert Storm. I had no interest in making an enemy of him (or anyone else, really), so I deleted the images. I do remember thinking at the time, “Well, that’s silly. These are digital images: even if I delete them from the camera, I could’ve backed them up to a computer already.” Of course, I didn’t have a computer and the only way I had to save the images was to take the camera to Walgreens and print them in low resolution 5×7, which in this case I had no need to do: The images of those girls are burned into my mind, hopefully forever, out of Blake’s or anyone else’s sight but my own.

I’m not quite sure what happened to either of those cameras. I might have sold the Nikon back to the used camera store I bought it from on Busch Boulevard and N. Boulevard near Chamberlain High School. I think I gave the small but mighty Olympus to a friend. In any case, I’m sure nobody ever made better use of it than had those two beautiful girls in the mirror of the Harbor Club bathroom.