In the Land of Good Living

by Kent Russell

  “But no,” I said, contradicting myself, walking back my despair for the sake of the hypothetical student who cared. “No, really. You shouldn’t beef with these editors. Most of them are kind, patient. They’re professionals who could have been lawyers. You know? Ad execs. But they chose words. They went with vinyl when they could have jumped to any streaming platform.” I looked to the ceiling, bit my lip, shook my head as if in grateful wonder. Even so, I continued, you will need to familiarize yourself with the politics and cosmology of this editorial class. You will need to learn how to deliver on their expectations. “This is the secret,” I said, lowering my voice after propping myself against the edge of the table in front of me. “This is the secret to all publishing, from magazines, to books, to I don’t care what. If you really want to get published, what you do is ape the stuff that’s already succeeded. You go after the consensus. You tell a story to these editors about the things they already believe to be true. You hand them a mirror they can see themselves in. Or see themselves as they wish they were.

  “Now, if that sounds less like writing than flattery, well…” For a couple of beats, I considered how best to conclude this thought. “Not everybody is cut out for this business. I’m not even sure I am, now that I think about it.”

  I was sweating boisterously at this point. And if at this point it occurs to you, dear friend, that I was making an ass out of myself—it didn’t to me.

  “Nonetheless!” I shouted. I scrutinized the students. They were listening, all right. Uncomfortable as they were, they treated me with the politeness they might show a man discussing his own private religion. And I was so full of boozy joie that I loved them for it.

  “Just…just ask yourself this,” I remember myself saying. “What do you give highest value to? Figure out what that is—what you bow before—and you will come a little closer to understanding yourself, and what you want out of this. Ask yourself: What are my forces? What am I aligned with?”

  I placed a hand to my chest like a doyenne with the vapors. I had a chunky burp to hold in, yes—but also I was moved. For their part, the students looked at me as though my skeleton was incandescing.

  “Make yourself a servant of that thing. Writing is serving. Living is serving. Choose what you’re gonna serve. If it’s success—get derivative. If it’s yourself? OK then. You want to write about your odyssey toward self-liberation? Hey, that’s basic as all hell, but you do you. Point is, you gotta serve something.”

  My own face flushed as I took in theirs, pimples and foaming beards and all. They had a helpless vital pathos about them, like dogs with their first red erections. I’d made it thirty minutes into the allotted hour. I started for the door before I broke down.

  “I don’t know, man,” I said over my shoulder. “We’re gonna have to come up with something going forward.”

  —

  MILE 446 — PALATKA

  A FRIEND IS, AS IT WERE, A SECOND SELF

  With what remained of my shore leave, I wheeled Rock-a-bye Thunder to a bike shop. The affectless hipster I paid ten dollars to tune her up told me all was for naught. Rock-a-bye’s rivets were rusted out, her spokes were loose, her cracked tires belonged to a gauge he’d never seen on this continent. The stroller was knocking on heaven’s door, he said. Prognosis: two weeks.

  Lugging my pack was a nonstarter, as you know. So I got to thinking. What could replace a pram? A wheelbarrow? A Radio Flyer wagon? One Craigslist search and thirty dollars later, I had my answer: a jogging stroller! Jog-a-bye Thunder is a regal purple, and she comes equipped with bicycle tires, shocks, a handbrake, and a seating area deep enough for multiple packs. She’s got a cup holder, friend.

  When it came time to depart Gainesville, I met Noah and Glenn southeast of downtown. They walked up grinning and grab-assing. They were actually beholding one another without my intermediary position refracting the light. They’d spent the long weekend going on double dates and, having just seen their wives into a cab bound for the regional airport, they radiated post-conjugal-visit contentedness. The both of them glowed as if heavily moisturized.

  “Check her out,” I said, pushing down on the jogging stroller’s handlebar and popping a modest wheelie.

  “Hell yes,” Noah said. He bent down, strapped in his pack next to mine. Then, straightening, he pulled me into him by my elbows, gave me a lingering hug. I hugged back.

  “There’s a storage area underneath, if you’ll notice,” I said to Glenn.

  He sauntered nearer. He slid on his sunglasses as if to protect against the shit-eating grin shining out of his face. “I missed you, fucker,” he said, giving the pressure point in my shoulder a too-hard pinch.

  “I missed you, too,” I said, scowling, backing out of his grasp.

  “Stockholm syndrome,” Glenn said. “It’s a beautiful thing.”

  “I’ve learned to love the little things about you guys,” Noah added, “since all the big things, no one could possibly love. It’d be wrong to.”

  Everything was forgiven, everything was the same. In the space of one long weekend, our gall had turned gilt.

  Redoubling our good mood was our discovery of a wooded bicycle path running parallel to the eastbound highway. It was wooded enough that, for the first time, we neither saw nor heard traffic. We were not blown about by autos, and we were shielded from the murdering sun ball! What a difference it made. We could pick shapes out of the fenland clouds. We could listen for the thrum of deep, generative energies.

  Mostly, we walked side by side in a coterminous solitude, as happy as could be.

  Sooner or later, the day began to relax its strain. The sky rouged. The mosquitoes rose. I noted in my pad, Friendship is like metaphor: So long as it is still living, friendship—like metaphor—is inexhaustible and not fully explicable.

  Shadows solidified. The horizon split evenly between SweeTart pink below and artificial raspberry blue above. As we had encountered no one else along this path, we decided to pitch camp in the leaf litter adjacent to it.

  Noah propped a spotlight, and Glenn set the camera on its tripod. A light breeze beat up the sound of palm fronds collating. Leisurely, we erected our tents.

  A large brown anole scampered onto Glenn’s and mine. The lizard fanned its dewlap once, twice. “What is that,” Glenn asked flatly. “I am assuming it is about to jet me with black goo from a sac.”

  “They don’t bite,” I assured. I looked to Noah, who winked at me. “You can just grab it by the tail and fling it into the trees.” Glenn reached for the anole’s tail carefully, with thumb and forefinger, as if selecting a canapé from a tray. The moment it was pinched, the lizard’s thick tail was jettisoned—its signature defensive maneuver. While Glenn took a couple seconds to scream, the anole scurried into the underbrush.

  “What did you do?” Noah kidded.

  “What you told me to do!” Glenn cried.

  “It’s still moving!” I said. At this, Glenn lifted the detached tail to eye level and saw that it was writhing like an unattended fire hose. He blurted the rudiments of a swear before attempting to fling the tail into the underbrush while simultaneously hopping away from it. In the process, he tripped over a tent spike and went down in a heap. Noah sprang to his feet in a state of great concern. He rushed toward Glenn, hopped over him, and checked to see if the camera got all of that.

  Once I’d swallowed the last of my laughs, I said, “It’s an invasive species,” as if this would console Glenn. “That’s why it’s got that Jurassic Park escapability.”

  “Silver lining,” Glenn said, dusting himself off, “is I’m starting to think there’s no such thing as being out of place here.”

  “That one didn’t go into the can,” Noah said, looking with vexation at the camera’s digital panel. “Wasn’t recording.”

  “How long do you think it’s going to take you to go through this footage?�
� I asked Glenn.

  “The rest of my life,” he said.

  “You could hire an assistant,” I suggested. “Someone to catalog, transcribe.”

  “I would have to make them sign a nondisclosure agreement. Lest they see how we are the most unsympathetic characters in the history of story and alert the Twitter mobs. It’s problematic, to say the least, when the resolution of every scene is either ‘This sucks dick’ or ‘We’re some bitches.’ ”

  “It’s transgressive,” Noah said.

  “Clearly, it doesn’t bother me,” Glenn said. “But in terms of the no-sympathy stakes? I think we’re sweeping them.”

  “Disconcerted Glenn is funnier than regular Glenn,” I said.

  “Disconcerted Glenn is just Glenn.” He got up and replaced Noah behind the camera. He rolled film.

  GLENN

  (disconcertedly)

  We’re not spending most days in interesting places, or particularly beautiful places. I guess if where we were walking was truly beautiful…I probably wouldn’t worry as much about the footage.

  KENT

  A mountain range, however sublime, can never produce a plate of riblets.

  GLENN

  Seriously, though. I’m afraid we aren’t getting the real Florida. Right now we are just drifting through towns barely scratching the surface.

  NOAH

  But really getting to know gas stations and maniacs.

  GLENN

  I’m failing as a journalist and filmmaker.

  NOAH

  Of course we’re not getting the real Florida. I couldn’t tell you what that is—but I do know you don’t get to it by being, like, rigorous professionals.

  KENT

  He’s right. You wanna get Florida? OK, well—you get Florida by inventing an interpretation of it. Preferably a for-profit interpretation. Think of, like…Seaside. Seaside got Florida by substituting its own simulation “Florida” in the place of Florida.

  NOAH

  We’ve talked about the bikes, but lately I’ve been straight-up fantasizing about buying a used car. Just some beater. Then we drive it around, and we actually have time to find weird stuff, hang around, stage things, film. And nobody’d know we’re not walking.

  KENT

  I’m down.

  GLENN

  Right. So you’re saying that actually doing this straight is the least Florida thing we could be doing.

  —

  MILE 475 — ST. AUGUSTINE

  DISASTER TOURISTS

  Lining our approach into St. Augustine were more and more Hefty bags filled with waterlogged trash. Mattresses, strips of insulation, large appliances, and pestiferous living room sets had also been curbed in Hurricane Matthew’s wake. I was forced to slalom Jog-a-bye around this detritus as well as heaps of branches and brown fronds that had been massed chest-high on the sidewalks.

  We entered North America’s oldest city in the brassy glare of late afternoon. Glenn got many nice magic-hour shots of the Castillo de San Marcos, a masonry fortress shaped like the starry compass in a map’s legend. Although the Castillo has presided over the St. Augustine Inlet for more than four centuries, it can do little to protect the city from the Atlantic floodwaters that have been encroaching with alarming frequency. Governor Rick Scott has put aside the task of combating sea level rise because he’s skeptical of man-made climate change; he has forbidden bureaucrats from even printing the term “climate change” in official documents. Planning efforts at all levels of government have been thwarted. Florida’s environmental agencies under Governor Scott have been downsized and retooled, even as waters rise across coastal Florida at rates faster than previously measured. In addition to more flooding at high tide, these heightening sea levels mean massive surges during tropical storms and hurricanes.

  The tourist core of St. Augustine had been drained and tidied by the time we showed up. Visitors were mobbing the Castillo as well as the olde tyme simulacrum of Spanish Florida that abutted it, no waders necessary. Though by the look of things, frozen drinks in plastic whale bones were categorically necessary. We endeavored to join these visitors. But first—a motel, and showers.

  It seems like a cop-out, I know, yet the fact of the matter is: The more developed an area, the more difficult it is to camp there surreptitiously. Simpler to take turns shelling out the hundred or so bucks for a Red Roof Inn. And I don’t even mind the cost, since it’d take something like twenty nights of hotel stays per month to match my Brooklyn rent.

  No, all is roses when we enter the exquisite sameness of a motel room. The air is unscented. The bed corners are hospital tight. The TV remote waits on the end table like a suicide pistol. Part of me wants to weep then, weep like someone who has suddenly found solace and can hardly conceive of the darkness to which he’d been confined.

  We plopped onto the beds, we checked our phones, we performed the Dutch drudgery of bailing out the day’s flood of news, notifications, and #content. We sniffed out every single electrical outlet, plugged in our gear. We backed up our footage, we planned our route. We decided that we deserved an evening on the town.

  * * *

  —

  I less “woke up” than got ejected, gasping, into the morning’s bladed light. Was there a dusty thudding inside my head? There was. Did my mouth taste like a desert sin? It did. Was I positive that I just saw—for one lucid second—leering over me—against the whirling backdrop of the motel room walls—a demon? We’re all adults here, friend. We know from the physical chastisements of a hangover.

  Brittlely, I pushed myself upright. I tottered to the bathroom. My torso ached deeply and all over, as though I had undergone an operation to remove a vestigial organ. I felt lighter but also hollower. I’d ditched some ballast.

  For reasons unclear to me, Glenn and Noah were supine on the carpet, as motionless as limestone kings carved atop tombs. “Guys,” I croaked. “Guys, what’d we end up doing?”

  I dug through Glenn’s bag, looking for the camera. I found it but not the memory cards, the external drives, the remote mikes. Below my heart, panic lit a stove flame.

  “Get up!” I shouted. “Glenn, Noah—up! Our shit’s missing!”

  We ransacked the room but found nothing. Well, nothing aside from a greasy bag of cocaine. “Easily three eight balls left,” Glenn adjudged. Noah had a slightly firmer grasp upon the previous night’s events. “Let’s talk to the Tall Teller,” he suggested. “He’ll know what happened.”

  That suggestion made no sense to me. I went along with it anyway. Glenn bought a memory card at a nearby CVS and began recording as we dipped into the stream of foot traffic on St. George Street, the ancient main drag that was now bracketed by faux-Spanish villas, wooden barracks, crystal shoppes, and “authentic” tapas bars.

  Down the chintz chute we went, shouldering past honeymooning couples and families sporting plastic conquistador helmets. These throngs were here for the history. And there is history here, to be sure, but it is obscured by the Pirate Soul Museum and the Fountain of Youth Spa & Laser Center. St. Augustine’s history has been refurbished in much the same way that a prized game animal is refurbished by a trophy hunter. That is to say: It has been neutralized, stuffed, and mounted. St. Augustine today is a taxidermied approximation of its former self (with flattering if absurd flourishes embroidered here and there, for presentation’s sake).

  Accuracy? Accuracy’s got nothing to do with it. History qua history matters only to the extent that it can be monetized. That it can be disarticulated into a series of attractions—a competitive advantage. Loads of other coastal towns have white-sand beaches and umbrella cocktails, but where else in Florida can you visit a building that is more than seventy years old? This is what the tourism industry boils down to: difference. Tourists aren’t necessarily searching after historical purity, or lux
e pampering, or simple R & R; they want difference. They want something they can’t get elsewhere. Something that might change them. Ultimately, ideally, tourists are looking to experience something so different and so transformative that they just might return home improved versions of the persons they were when they left.

  Is that going to happen for many tourists in St. Augustine? Almost certainly not, no. At least not if they’re Floridians like me and Noah. We came of age within touristic infrastructure; more of the same will not be granting us opportunities for personal renewal. If they’re tourists from Latvia, on the other hand? Sure, why not. The haunted Huguenot cemeteries and faithfully reconstructed galleons might do something for them.

  The lure and blur of the real. That’s what St. Augustine’s had to work with. That’s why the city developed into a historical fiction like Colonial Williamsburg, except with even fewer fucks to give re: verisimilitude. Does that make St. Augustine a less-than-authentic attraction? Lord, no. St. Augustine is as real as the taffy pullers along St. George Street. St. Augustine is a real place run by actual citizens who work the tourist core but live far outside it, who pay authentic taxes and support genuine schools and hospitals, and who day after day conjure the fantasy of difference which tourists come to experience. This-all is as real as the stakes involved. Because if St. Augustine ever fails to convince people to visit? That’s it. Once outsiders stop buying into the illusion, St. Augustine ceases to exist.

  If that sounds like the dictionary definition of a Ponzi scheme—well, it is. No one here disputes this. St. Augustine in particular and Florida in general exist only so long as ever more people show up, buy land, build homes, pay sales tax—or at least drop a few thousand bucks during their stay. If the fiction ever dies—the reality dies with it.

  “I don’t know how much longer I can take the smell of caramel,” Glenn said as we pushed upstream against the tourists. “How much further is this guy?”