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"I sure can draw a crowd, can't I?" Levine
says, more amused than disappointed.
He tells jokes during a sound check, apologizes for not bringing his
harmonica, then makes a "V" sign behind the head of the library
executive introducing him. When she tells him he must stand behind a
podium -- and not simply chat near the front row -- he waves regally.
"Excuse me," he says. "I must go deal with
greatness."
But he is not even two minutes into the talk on his new book -- Bite
Me! Tom Levine's Most Excellent Stories, which is about fishing and
globetrotting and fatherhood and life -- when he interrupts himself.
"You guys really want me to talk about my book?" he asks.
"Really?"
When they press him, he shrugs and presses on.
"Well, it's probably the book of the millennium," he says,
his voice slow and languorous as always. "I don't like to overstate
things. But I don't think anything else will ever come close. It's
fabulous from start to finish."
Tall, tan, with an unhurried demeanor and perpetual grin, Tom Levine
might be mistaken for an aging surfer dude who spent a little too much
time waxing his board. But after twice running for Orlando City Council
and a 2000 mayoral bid -- in which Levine led a so-called "Peasant
Revolt" on a shoestring budget for just over 10 percent of the vote
-- he went back to his bread-and-butter as an outdoors writer.
Forever concocting new ways of making money while investing a minimum
of labor, he put together a collection of his pretty-much-true tales --
from backpacking in the Sierra Nevada to fleeing a lone, cranky black
buffalo in Uganda -- for what is by most accounts a hilarious new book. In
the past couple of months, he has sold more than 500 copies of the
self-published paperback, done signings at bookstores from New Smyrna to
Oviedo, and even gotten literary nods from Border's and Barnes &
Noble.
Still, he stubbornly refuses to take himself seriously.
"Are you bored yet?" he asks his audience five minutes later.
"Should I keep talking about the book?"
In the end, Levine sells four copies and gives a fifth to an elderly
man in a wheelchair who promises to send him the money later.
"Will you sign it?" the man asks.
"Sure," Levine says with a shrug. "I'll sign it: You owe
me $16.95."
KEEP IT SIMPLE
If ever there were a poster boy for enjoying the simple life, Tom
Levine would be it, even at 53.
On a weekday afternoon, he answers the door barefoot, the theme from
Doctor Zhivago playing on an old phonograph. "Thank God," he
says of the interruption. "Sam's killing me in Monopoly."
Sam is his 9-year-old son.
Levine lives in a two-bedroom 1920 bungalow about a mile south of
downtown with his feisty New Zealand-born wife, Michele Graham, his two
boys, Sam and 8-year-old Ely, a shaggy terrier named Yogi, assorted
squatter cats and no air-conditioning. He ripped out that luxury when he
bought the place a couple of decades ago, both for reasons of frugality
and environmental friendliness.
Levine is the lone breadwinner, a role he fulfills largely by taking
fishing trips and then writing about them, mostly for the thick, glossy
Florida Sportsman Magazine. Graham grows organic vegetables in the back
yard beside an impressive flower garden, and, when the boys permit such
erosions of precious piscine rights, Levine brings home his catch for
dinner.
He drives a rattling 1979 red Chevy van with a canoe tied on top; its
bumper stickers proclaim him "Proud to be an American" and make
a graphic suggestion for those who would use cell phones while driving.
Graham gets around by bicycle.
He is unfailingly amiable and content, except that he wouldn't mind
being rich.
"So long ago, if I would've died, I would've died satisfied,"
he says. "So everything I've got now is just gravy. Michele here is
the gravy boat."
He nods across the room to Graham, who has kicked off her shoes and is
sipping a glass of wine.
"Shut up," she says.
They met 13 years ago, fellow wanderers, on a little island in Puget
Sound, where she was whale-watching and he was on his way to Alaska. They
shared a passion for adventure and nature and a disdain for greed,
piousness and politics-as-usual. By 1992, he had brought her back to this
house in Orlando, where he'd been letting friends and strangers alike stay
while he was off traveling.
"He's not got a mean bone in his body," Michele says later,
when he is not listening. "People confuse his being carefree with
being irresponsible. In fact, he's very tenacious and articulate and
intelligent -- and he is completely unable to be intimidated."
Certainly, many have tried. Born to a Russian-Jewish father and
Irish-Catholic mother, Levine grew up in a strict, protective household
and was sometimes brutalized in school. Swaggering football players
figured they would teach Levine a lesson when he refused to cower, and a
sadistic gym coach, who didn't like the middle-schooler's attitude, made
him an object of relentless ridicule.
"Tom actually had his own way of thinking and own way of viewing
the world even then, and he wasn't afraid to express it," says his
decades-long best friend, Jack Raymond, now a 52-year-old cruise agent in
Orlando. "He got picked on quite a lot, so he really grew up fighting
for his own survival."
But he had been raised to have a sense of humor and to stand up for
himself. Both traits have served him well.
In 1973, shortly after graduating from what is now the University of
Central Florida -- where the would-be oceanographer switched his major
from physics to psychology -- Levine had a nearly deadly encounter with
police.
It happened the night his father, then 72, lay in the hospital, dying
of lung cancer. At about 2 in the morning, Levine left briefly to take a
walk and gather his senses, an act that for whatever reason aroused the
suspicions of a pair of Orlando patrolmen. When they ordered him to leave,
Levine -- hardly in a conversational mood and feeling no duty to explain
himself -- refused. The officers arrested him for loitering, cuffed his
hands behind his back, and, Levine says, ended up choking him until the
blood vessels burst in his eyes.
His mother and a doctor witnessed the incident from the hospital
window, and his brother ran to his defense. News accounts from the time
show that Levine eventually won a small, out-of-court settlement from the
police, who dropped all charges against him.
"For the record," Levine says, "even when they were
choking me, I still didn't quit."
Raymond sees it as his friend's trademark of sorts.
"He is definitely a survivor," Raymond says. "But the
other thing that strikes me is the incredible naivete in him. There is a
purity of his thoughts that is unadulterated by conventional wisdom, that
leads him to have this idealistic view of how things should be."
When, for instance, he campaigned against Mayor Glenda Hood and dentist
Bruce Gordy, posting handmade signs that read "Tom Levine Fights
Plaque" and, in the predominantly black Parramore district "Tom
Levine for Mayor -- He's OK for a White Guy," he seemed genuinely
surprised that he didn't win or at least come close. He once showed up
uninvited at what was supposed to be a candidates debate and refused to
leave, even when organizers called the police.
Asked to describe himself, Levine just shrugs blankly.
"I'm just a normal, ordinary person," he says. "I love
my family, I like to have fun, and I don't like to see other people
suffering. I think you need to ask everybody else why they're all going
off the deep end somewhere."
As he talks, a photographer tries to capture a portrait of him. Levine
leans back and raises an eyebrow.
"A little more cleavage?" he says.
STILL . . . CASH COUNTS
A lot of people like to think they have undiscovered literary talent,
an as-yet-unwritten autobiography, even the Great American Novel deep
inside them, merely awaiting an agent and the chance to sit down and
write.
Tom Levine is not one of them.
"I am not really so much an author as a product
manufacturer," he says, holding up the book. "This is my
product. I manufactured it to make money to keep my family in the finery
to which they would like to become accustomed."
Literary acclaim is nothing, he says, unless it means a wad of cash.
But despite himself -- despite the book's "forewarning"
instead of a foreword, its "author's excuse" instead of author's
note and an effusive back-cover endorsement by his mom, who has been dead
for nearly seven years -- the book is winning fans with its folksy,
tongue-in-cheek, Mark Twain-like style. Levine calls it a collection of
"nincompoop-crashing-through-life experiences" that have him
trekking across the Australian Outback, wandering around Africa and
fishing off the Galapagos Islands.
But there is often a subtle little lesson tucked away in its pages, as
well as homage to a Florida-gone-by, now ruined by overfishing, pollution,
pavement and fences.
"I read that first chapter, and I turned to my wife and said,
`This is fabulous. You have to read it,'" says Cory Reinert,
assistant manager of the Colonial Marketplace Barnes & Noble. "I
was hooked."
At the Titusville seafood restaurant Dixie Crossroads, where they're
selling Bite Me alongside the children's book Anna Lee the Manatee in the
gift shop, owner Laurilee Thompson says she is proud to stock it.
"I like him, and I like the book," she says. "I grew up
here and I can relate to some of the stories he tells about what it was
like then, and I'm always concerned about getting the message out about
our deteriorating quality of life. My goal is to subliminally educate
people."
His longtime magazine editor, Doug Stange, describes Levine's writing
as "a curious and invigorating deviation from the status quo. . . .
He travels on paper where others would not -- could not -- go, for sheer
lack of imagination."
THIS IS A PLAN?
It is classic Levine that his marketing strategy, if you can call it
that, is to wander in to whatever institution he's near -- tire store,
Italian restaurant, hospital gift shop -- and ask if they'd like to buy a
half-dozen or so copies for resale.
In this way, he finds himself on Park Avenue one recent afternoon,
picking up Ely, a budding violinist, from music camp, and dropping by a
boutique where he'd left a copy of the book for perusal.
"Sorry," the shopkeeper says. "I just haven't had a
chance to read it yet."
Levine is undeterred. "Yeah, well, you don't want to just grab a
few while I'm here?"
"Wish I could. . ." the man says. He nonetheless begins
leafing through its pages, and soon the two are swapping fish tales like
old friends.
"A guy like you -- it seems hard to believe you're not buying a
couple copies," Levine says at last. "It's actually better than
you'd expect."
The shop owner promises he'll read it. Levine thanks him, shakes hands,
and leaves still smiling, not the least bit discouraged.
He guides Ely out the door for the rattling red van, its floor strewn
with copies of Bite Me, orphaned flip-flops, a bucket, Frisbee and cast
net -- everything a person needs in life, as Levine likes to say. As he
heads home, 10 miles below the speed limit, he and Ely debate the morality
of war, the boy being contrary just for effect.
"You know," Levine says, glancing back at his son in the
rear-view mirror, "it's still not too late to take you back and get
another baby."
Ely rolls his eyes and sighs.
"Oh, Dad," he says. "Shut up."
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