In the Land of Good Living
Page 4
While actual Boomers were populating this state, America’s rudder-steering cultural classes were teaching them to care naught for anything but the project of liberation. That is to say: If the Boomers wished to be free, truly free, they had to unmask and discredit every last form of inherited authority that placed demands on the resources of the self. Parents, priests, cops, Boy Scout troop leaders, elected officials, anyone over thirty—rightly or wrongly, these were denounced.
As Boomers came of age, they were schooled to search after a “unity” and “wholeness” of self. They were to reclaim “feeling” from the one-sided preeminence of “reason.” They were to rescue the body and its pleasures from the inferior and guilt-ridden place to which these things had been relegated. With the help of analysts and gurus, they were to exorcise all haunting memories of severe upbringings, restrictive churches, repressed traumas, prohibitive norms. Free from internalized oppression, they were to finally find their truth. They were to assign themselves identities which, because they were self-assigned, could be donned or doffed at any time, like dollar-store Halloween costumes.
Moose Lodge members and Chamber of Commerce types reacted as if they had a problem with this, but they didn’t. Not really. After all, the self—the self unencumbered of family, history, and custom—was supposed to be the ideal actor in the free market. Therefore, honchos left and right had found common ground here (even if they’d never admit it): a dawning neoliberal order in which the market and the wider culture were free to quietly work their solvent action on all impediments to the chooser within.
These braided Boomer ideals of (a) unfettered choice and (b) the authority of individual experience were the closest thing to a polestar that postwar Florida ever had. Clear the way for uncontested personal and economic growth! No superego stricture or top-down regulation here! Don’t forget, corporations are people, too! And anybody wishing to champion ecological, aesthetic, or moral criteria as factors in Florida’s development—go screw, fascist!
Florida: No value higher than whatever the will wills. Freedom here is understood as formless potential. The sole truth? That each individual fashions his or her own unimpeachable truth. In good conscience. And with a whiff of progress about it. Florida: No judge but one’s own.
Do you, friend! Because I’m certainly gonna do me.
—
CUT TO:
EXT. U.S. ROUTE 98—ONE HOUR LATER
The men walk between the pines.
GLENN
(to Noah)
No offense, but I have to ask. What’s the deal with the Dungeons & Dragons?
NOAH
None taken. Hurricane Opal destroyed my home in Fort Walton Beach in 1995, all right? I had to move to Navarre. I tried to hang out with the Air Force kids, but they didn’t want to hang out with me. So I hung out alone after school all day. I was by myself all the time. I had to make my own worlds.
NOAH (CONT’D)
I got good at making my own worlds. People at the comic book store would want me to DM. Be the dungeon master. It’s basically cooperative storytelling. You control a character, and then I describe the situations your characters get into. “You enter the dank dungeon and are confronted with a band of orcs. What do you choose to do?”
GLENN
And people win?
NOAH
Nah. You make up stories with your friends, and you stay sane.
The men snicker. Then they seize up. Offscreen, the CONCERNED CITIZEN’S JEEP is barreling down the piney alley.
GLENN
Oh, God.
The Concerned Citizen emerges from her vehicle, a cigarillo in her mouth and the RIFLE in her hands. She works the bolt action while striding toward the men.
KENT
(staring ahead)
Just—just know that I love you.
NOAH
What’s up!
CONCERNED CITIZEN (O.S.)
Don’t you question me.
She flicks away her cigarillo. She stops. She aims her rifle at the men. They raise their hands.
CONCERNED CITIZEN (O.S.)
WHAT’S IN THE CART?
GLENN
FILM STUFF!
CONCERNED CITIZEN (O.S.)
WHAT. DO YOU HAVE. IN THE CART!
NOAH
(calmly)
Cameras. Microphones. Tents. We are making a documentary.
The Concerned Citizen lowers the rifle from her sighting eye.
CONCERNED CITIZEN (O.S.)
A documentary?
NOAH
(calmly)
A documentary. We’re walking the entire state.
CONCERNED CITIZEN (O.S.)
WHAT’S YOUR CAUSE?
KENT
HUH?
CONCERNED CITIZEN (O.S.)
YOUR CAUSE. CANCER?
GLENN
WE DON’T REALLY HAVE A CAUSE.
The Concerned Citizen takes aim again. She approaches the cart.
CONCERNED CITIZEN (O.S.)
KEEP YOUR HANDS UP. BACK AWAY FROM THE CART.
The Concerned Citizen proceeds to dig through the men’s packs. The framing of the scene abruptly shifts, shifts, and then settles on the gravel below Thunder’s handlebar.
CONCERNED CITIZEN (O.S.)
COME HERE AND TURN THIS CAMERA OFF.
CUT TO:
EXT. U.S. ROUTE 98—MINUTES LATER
CONCERNED CITIZEN
(laughing)
That’s my bad!
Glenn is holding the camera, filming the scene. The Concerned Citizen has propped her rifle against Rolling Thunder. She stands with her hands on her hips, shaking her head.
CONCERNED CITIZEN
I called the MPs, and I told them some guys with beards were pushing some IED-looking thing right by the base. They never stopped you?
NOAH
They must have missed us.
CONCERNED CITIZEN
I really am sorry.
KENT
Hey, better safe than sorry, am I right?
The Concerned Citizen picks up her gun.
CONCERNED CITIZEN
(looking into the camera)
I want you boys to have this.
NOAH
Thanks, but no—
CONCERNED CITIZEN
(to the camera)
Take it. Don’t worry, I got more. Take it, or I’m leaving it by the side of the road. It’s for keeping the bad ones off.
KENT
(under his breath to Glenn)
Does not appear to be working.
CONCERNED CITIZEN
You boys have any salt?
NOAH
Like, for hydrat—
While holding the gun in one hand, the Concerned Citizen takes Noah’s arm with the other. She licks it.
CONCERNED CITIZEN
You can lick me up and down if you want. I’ve been in the ocean.
KENT
Aha, thank you, but I think we’re good.
The Concerned Citizen lays her rifle atop Thunder. Once again, she begins to tear up. She hugs each of the men in turn.
CONCERNED CITIZEN
(to the camera)
Travel safe, boys. Shalom. Think of me.
After the Concerned Citizen has driven off, the three men COLLAPSE onto the grass next to the shoulder.
GLENN (O.S.)
Anybody else still shaking?
NOAH
Balls currently under chin.
KENT
How did nobody driving by stop?
GLENN (O.S.)
We absolutely c
annot keep that firearm.
NOAH
We keep this thing, and we’re getting shot before the cop car has even rolled to a stop.
Noah pushes himself to his feet. He checks to see if the rifle is loaded. Then he walks it to the drainage ditch, where he underhand-tosses the gun into the black water.
GLENN (O.S.)
So, she was schizophrenic, right?
KENT
At the very least.
Glenn returns the camera to its perch on the cart. The men press on.
NOAH
Probably for the best we didn’t go around writing RAMADAN after all.
The friends’ straight faces begin to unravel. They look at each other. They laugh. Then they laugh harder.
FADE TO BLACK
—
MILE 93 — SEASIDE
NOSTALGIA IS A FORM OF WILLFUL FORGETTING
It’s been pouring rain for two days straight. Waylaid thus, I’m writing you on letterhead from the one motel in Seaside, Florida. It’s quite nice. The paper, I mean. Card stock. Premium matte. The concierge also gifted us a bottle of Robert Mondavi white wine and a Seaside-branded wine key upon check-in.
Naturally, we have strung our porch with dripping vines of hand-washed underpants.
Despite the weather, Glenn is in high cotton. He can’t stop filming out there. Seaside is an entirely planned community. Pristine, manicured, and as unnatural-seeming as the rest, Seaside is nevertheless unique in all of Florida in that it was laid out as a pedestrian community. No cars allowed in off the highway, except on select thoroughfares. Seaside’s eighty acres were formerly a wealthy family’s beach retreat; now, they constitute a conscious rebuke to the helter-skelter development and peckerwood debauchery of the rest of the “Redneck Riviera.”
Upon arrival the other evening, we rolled toward the town square on sidewalks lit by gas lamps. The streets were busy with red-faced couples riding beach cruisers, their bottles of prosecco clinking in handlebar baskets. “This is the first time I have truly felt transient,” Glenn said.
We wandered the scene in town, filmed it. The structures were built in styles that called for wood, that appeared to be wood, but…were not wood. They were coated in brunch colors—pink, mauve, periwinkle—that complemented nothing better than baseline white. Homes had been bedecked with verandas and tin roofs and were situated as if in relation to cross breezes, yet…all had clattering Rheems affixed to their sides like insulin pumps.
There was much dread here. Dread in the bottom of the lungs, dread occasioned by the uncanny. I mean, each home had its own official name on a sign out front of it, along with a roll of who’s inside.
“Yo man, how long you thinking of spending in this Lilly Pulitzer village of the damned?” Noah had asked Glenn. “I’m getting strong vibes of a sacrifice-the-outsiders scenario here.”
“I sympathize,” Glenn said. “I’m getting the sense that the people milling around the soda fountain are plants meant to keep tabs on us.”
Dread because we’re being commanded—not asked—to recall something fondly, I noted in my notebook.
“Lotta Trump bumper stickers,” Noah noticed as we walked the winding lanes under tupelo trees.
“Probably can’t post signs in their yards,” Glenn said. “Otherwise, we’d be seeing those, too, I bet.”
We shot streetside interviews with visitors. The takeaways were more or less the same: They liked it here because here they were reunited with something they had feared was irretrievable. Here, the present made a kind of sense. The limited system had an artificial coherence.
Great, we said. Cool. We grew tired of filming; we looked for a place to rest. The beach—no. The beach is everything we spend our days dealing with: heat, abrasion. We wanted to keep from that insidious dust. Instead, we stretched out on one of the small green spaces that dot Seaside. We alarmed passing families when we attempted to charge our gear via the landscape lighting’s electrical grid. Enough of them stopped to gawk that we were goaded into moving on. Their staring eyes gave us the bum’s rush.
“You begin to understand why public libraries are so popular with the indigent,” I said.
“A comfortable space where you don’t have to literally buy time just to sit there?” Glenn agreed. “Sign me up.”
The moon rose above the stars. The center of town was honeyed with the light of Edison bulbs. Blond women in white linen pants browsed boutiques. Robust men with dewlaps and tucked-in polos held palaver, like-minded, in front of several converted Airstream trailers dishing out artisanal barbeque. We sat at a picnic table not far from them. They halted their business jibber and sauntered toward us, hands tucked under their hips’ gut spillage. They lit up when Glenn pointed the camera at them.
“What’re y’all doing?” one asked.
“You see, we’re from Mississippi,” another clarified.
We gave them our shpiel; they were delighted by it. They kept asking, via slightly different phrasings: “Y’all doing this for charity?” “No, but what’s y’all’s cause, though, for real?”
Eventually, Noah barked: “It’s us. Our cause is us.”
“Y’all got some huge-ass balls,” one concluded. “Yessir,” another assented. “Heavy testes.”
We demurred. The man went on: “But what you really need, you know…” Whereupon this man withdrew from his rear waistband a compact pistola. Glenn and I yelped while dropping into half crouches, our hands aflutter at the sides of our faces.
“Are there vending machines throughout the Panhandle or something?” Glenn asked rhetorically as he straightened. “Are they handed out as door prizes?”
“Y’all ain’t know where you was going,” the men told us when we asked where we should camp for the night. “Y’all walked into Palm-Beach-on-the-Gulf. Redneck Palm Beach.” They suggested we push further inland and camp in an under-construction lot.
As it was not yet late enough for prowling, we parked Thunder under an awning—“None of these magnolia charmers are a flight risk,” Noah assured us—and sat ourselves at the bar portion of a beachside bar and grill. The lights were down; the screens showing pro football cast a pallid, undersea glow across the patio. A nondescript young guy in salmon shorts plus oxford shirt did not look away from the game when he said, “Hey there, cats. Seen y’all on the highway.”
His name was Damon. He was from southern Louisiana. He and Noah sniffed each other out fairly quickly; Damon was also a vet. He’d been an armed escort for bomb-removal teams in Iraq. Presently, he was using the revamped G.I. Bill to study at Louisiana State University. “Also to indulge my alcoholism, here on my honeymoon,” he said.
“Where’s, uh, your wife, bro?” Noah asked.
“Aww, hell, she says she’s got a UTI, so she’s back in the room.” Damon finished his drink, ordered four shots of Fireball whiskey. “You cats don’t go together at all, you know,” he said. “It doesn’t look like there’s a world where y’all fit together.”
Damon spent twenty minutes trying to entice us into wagers on the plays unfolding onscreen. He was an inveterate gambler as well as an alcoholic, he declared to the camera. Unbidden, he proceeded to tell it his goals and aspirations. Foremost, he said, was the investment service he wanted to start for guys just getting out of the service. “Me,” he said, “I’ve got some sharps to me. I knew what to do with my money. My daddy planted a pine stand for me when I was a kid. Come back home, that shit is mature and ready to be cut and milled.”
“Is that what you’re studying?” I asked. “Finance?”
“Were that I was a sharper man, I’d be looking into real estate. Selling the shit is always more profitable than trying to grow things on it. That’s how you make a lot of money in not a lot of time, boy.”
Noah, I could tell, had had enough of this inveigle. He was no longer athwa
rt his stool but on his feet, pushing his weight away from the bar. Damon was a little too unctuous for his taste.
“Aww,” Damon said. “Y’all are all right. You guys are fucking drifters. Y’all are ready for the apocalypse tonight. Now, in the event of the apocalypse, I would kill my wife and then myself very quickly. That’s it. She’s on board, she just don’t know it yet.”
With that, Noah began to pack up the sound gear. Damon took this personally. “You—drink your fucking drink. C’mon, now.” He turned to me. “And you—you look like Weird Al Yankovic.”
We found Thunder where we left her, unmolested, and we walked her down the middle of the street in the pellucid moonlight. The night was voluptuous, round, and perfumed. Silent but for the boom of the surf. “That guy with the gun negated the point he was making,” Glenn said. “I don’t want to be pushing this cart onto some guy’s property, then see a light come on, and then have to take cover.”
Reluctantly we made our way to the beach after tethering Thunder to a bicycle rack. Seaside’s beach was a marvel: a seventy-five-foot-wide sweep of fine powder, fishbelly white. The only blotches on the pristine moonscape were the listing lifeguard chairs.
We spread our rain tarp in the lee of a dune, directly behind the large receptacle where beach chaises sleep at night. With our arms pillowing our heads, we stared into the bath of stars. “Noah,” Glenn said. “I’ve been meaning to ask. Every couple of minutes, when we’re walking or not, I notice you expel breath from the side of your mouth. Like you’re exhaling secondhand smoke conscientiously. What’s going on there? If I can ask.”
“An IED,” Noah said. “In Iraq. The compression of the air when it went off—it fucked with my respiratory system.”
A breeze tickled over us on its way out to sea. Noah shifted on the tarp. Without a word, his body language communicated: Oh, what the hell. He opened up to Glenn.
“When I was nineteen, I signed up with the Marines. I was very high. This was immediately after I’d rewatched a DVD of Starship Troopers, so you understand. That movie, it’s a little fascist. It gets you pumped. September Eleventh had happened not too long ago at this point.