In the Land of Good Living

by Kent Russell

  “Don’t either of you remember?” Noah asked. “Last night?”

  I consulted my memory. I recalled: coquina walls covered in lime wash. Cypress columns rooted in flagstones and sawdust. Lagers in incongruous steins. Balconies, grilles, shutters. Solid surfaces and delicate screens; wide bright courtyards and deep shadows. A guy named Duane who sold us coke. After that, things grow darker and more fluid. The echo, the splash, the boom, and the roar of fast currents sink this memory under the rush of liquid.

  “Nope,” I said. “Got nothing.”

  Glenn demanded that we stop for espressos before venturing any farther. We sat for several minutes on sticky patio furniture outside of a gelato parlor, blowing on paper thimbles. A single fritzing nerve caused my left eyelid to flutter as I watched members of a bachelor party guffaw their way to a distillery tour. Snatches of the previous evening flickered to life in my mind’s eye. The shame I felt then rhymed with the shame I felt the night before.

  “Google says the Teller’s up there, just past the Florida Cracker Café,” Glenn said, yawning. “I guess we should hurry this up. My body is really committed to not being awake.”

  We approached a cedar stall, no bigger than a tollbooth, and found the Teller in the window: top hat, pencil mustache, black suspenders, black string bow tie like Colonel Sanders’s worn over a mint green dress shirt straining against a muscular torso. The Teller smiled when he saw us, his eyes sinking into his crow’s-feet like change lost to an old leather couch. “Lookit these three assholes!” he called out. His smoke-cured Carolina accent was of the type in which “pen” is whittled into “pin.”

  “You boys decided to take me up on my offer?” he asked, leaning out of the booth. “Make me the next big reality star?”

  Last night’s flickering frames sped up. They resolved into memory: The so-called “American Tall Teller” arrived at the bar to much fanfare following his last ghost tour of the evening. He glommed on to the same bachelor party we had glommed on to. I don’t remember much about these celebrants other than that they were replacement-level dudes. They fell back on movie quotes in lieu of actual dialogue. They originated nothing, could keep the routine going—that’s all.

  And they took to the Tall Teller like pigs to slop. For them he recounted stories that unfolded as easily as deep-creased maps. He rehashed his days living in the woods and bathing in a creek while doing street magic in Virginia. Then it was on to the decade spent as a backup dancer. “Wait a minute,” Noah interrupted, squinting. “Aren’t you Wildcat Jerry?”

  “Correct you are,” the Teller said, a tequila in his left hand while his right was positioned as if to sprinkle a secret ingredient. “I trained under Wahoo McDaniel and Swede Hanson. Wrestled in the WCW.”

  “They debuted the crossover Japanese wrestlers against you,” Noah said, nodding harder. “They kicked your ass.”

  “The craft, I conquered,” the Teller lamented. “The craft’s politics, I could not conquer.”

  That image is then replaced in my mind’s eye by a technical difficulties test pattern. When the picture returns, we’re at a crappy duplex, presumably the Teller’s. The bachelor party had come with us, unfortunately. A dough-faced broheim wearing a lacquered shako, of the Prussian style, ralphed off the balcony. That I recall. Also: the Teller passing around a framed picture of himself in which he’s shaking hands with Jimmie “J.J.” Walker.

  While the bachelor party waited for the Teller’s drug dealer to arrive, the man himself put on a VHS copy of Cutthroat Island, in which he had a small role. Noah, Glenn, and I were ushered into a spare bedroom full of Bob Marley posters. “Look, boys,” the Teller said, “I’m a big fish in a small pond here.” He lowered his voice. “Anybody can tell some assholes a story, but it takes a special person to entertain. What I’m proposing to you is a reality show. A reality show where the Tall Teller searches America to find out what the best ghost story, tall tale, or legend is.” He noticed our eyes icing over. His hand gestures became more emphatic. “I’m talking genuine historic tales, tales that have been with us for hundreds of years. We’ll examine these stories, spin ’em, and determine if it’s a true tale or a conjure-up. What do you say?” He cracked open a laptop, played us some poorly edited test footage. “It’s History 101—if somebody don’t tell these stories, you don’t keep the ghosts alive.”

  I snapped to in front of his booth. “You really don’t remember, huh?” the Teller asked me. “Well, I know who got your stuff. I’ll take you. I’ll even only charge you half price, since you told me you used to hustle tourists, too.” He played my ribs like a xylophone with his elbow.

  Evenings, the Teller plied his trade as a ghost tour guide. But during the day, he worked as a hansom-cab driver. We climbed into the Teller’s open carriage, and he hee-yawed us through the tourist district. We rolled past the 540-room Ponce de León hotel, which now is home to Flagler College. “Named of course for Henry Flagler,” the Teller relayed. He told us that this hotel was the very first to be poured entirely out of concrete and wired for electricity. “Same New York architecture firm that did the big library in Manhattan?” he said. “They did this hotel first. And Tiffany’s—she did all the stained-glass windows.”

  Opened in 1888, the Ponce de León was a monumental success, drawing the likes of President Teddy Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and Babe Ruth. It was so successful, in fact, that Henry Flagler built the Hotel Alcazar directly across the street in order to house the guests who couldn’t get a room at the Ponce. This gangbusters business convinced Flagler that he needed to develop the Atlantic coast of Florida into something like an American Riviera.

  It was to be his second act. Henry Flagler had already conquered the business world, rising from relative Connecticut obscurity to amass a mind-bending fortune as one of John D. Rockefeller’s partners in the Standard Oil Company. Reasonable people expected Flagler to retire to a life of leisure. Flagler, however, was something less than reasonable. Instead of playing out his string yachting or whatever, he relocated to Florida’s sandbox in the late 1800s. And he brought his checkbook with him.

  After building the Ponce and opening the less pretentious Alcazar, Flagler purchased nearby short-line railroads. He rebuilt them to accommodate heavier and more frequent traffic. He conglomerated the whole thing into the Florida East Coast Railway, and he extended it from St. Augustine down the hitherto unvisited shoreline. By the time Flagler died in 1913, it was possible for a socialite in New York City to hop on a train and head straight for Key West.

  Flagler did to Florida what other millionaires and developers had already done to the West: He tamed it in reverse. He built infrastructure in advance of, not in response to, the people and the cities that infrastructure would serve. Before any demand existed, Flagler imposed his transportation system, his ideal landscape, his totalizing vision. If I build it, the people will come, he figured. (He was right.) And because Flagler was sole owner and architect of his designs, he was also the sole beneficiary of their revenue, since Florida collected no income tax. (It still doesn’t.) The state never saw a penny from Flagler.

  “You boys really ought to jump out and get some shots of me explaining this,” the Teller said over his shoulder.

  “We would, Wildcat, if we knew our shit was safe,” Noah said.

  “Duane’s got your shit!” he responded. “C’mon, the shot’s perfect.”

  The Teller framed himself between the Ponce de León’s twin 165-foot towers. “Tourists weren’t called ‘tourists’ until Flagler got here,” he told the camera. At first, they were called “strangers.” As in “Yankee Strangers,” since most came from the Northeast. To class up Flagler’s undertaking, the term “tourist” was imported from Europe. “Noblemen touring around the great cities, that kind of thinking,” the Teller said.

  But there were as yet no great Florida cities to tour. The first strangers came on the recommendatio
n of their physicians, who for some reason thought the fartgas atmosphere would do consumptives good. These tuberculars—as well as those with jaundice, dysentery, diarrhea, gout, syphilis, and ringworm—were ordered to take the waters in Central Florida’s natural springs. “Consumptives are said to flourish in this climate,” poet Sidney Lanier reported. As you should by now suspect, he wasn’t being completely honest. Lanier had been hired by a railroad company to write a guidebook in which he rhapsodized about Florida’s recuperative powers, describing “cadaverous persons coming here and turning out successful huntsmen and fishermen, of ruddy face and portentous appetite, after a few weeks.”

  Regardless of actual medical outcomes, this idea of Florida as site of renewal and rejuvenation persisted as a powerful metaphor. The state began to attract healthier Yankee Strangers who arrived via Flagler’s railroad in search of agreeable weather as well as geographic novelty. These Yankee Strangers especially enjoyed the exotic flora and fauna. They liked to buy rides on paddle-wheel steamers, so they could chug up pristine rivers and shoot whatever stirred on the banks. A few were self-styled entrepreneurs who made for the Everglades, where they hunted alligators for their hides and wading birds for their fashionable plumes (some of which were worth their weight in gold, thirty-two dollars per ounce, back in New York City). Colorful tree snails they harvested to extinction.

  In the course of a few decades, Florida—the wonderland lauded for its difference from the rest of the nation—became less diverse, less natural, less original. In order to keep people coming, the state pivoted from the living aesthetic that had been so central to its selling of itself. Florida turned to the artificial. It began to look and feel like what businessmen thought such a place should look and feel like. From there, it was only a matter of time before every two-bit developer was trying to pull a Flagler and transform some stretch of Florida into their imagined paradise.

  On Valencia Street, a flock of Spanish tourists, here to see what they were vaguely responsible for, I guess, stopped to photograph us. We prodded the Teller back to his driver’s seat.

  “You boys want me to swing you around the Fountain of Youth Park?”

  “No,” we said in unison.

  We rolled to a combination tourist tram station / mini golf course. There, a short man dressed as a jaunty pirate was singing sea chanteys for a queue of indifferent elderly.

  The Teller whoaed his horse. He called out to the pirate: “Dee! Fellas wanna have a word.”

  Noah hopped from the carriage. He strode briskly at this pirate. “Where’s our shit, bro? What happened to our shit?”

  “Hey, hey, easy,” the pirate said while stealing a glance at the elderly.

  This is where it gets embarrassing, friend. More embarrassing, I should say. It was I who purchased the cocaine from Duane at the Teller’s. That much became clear. However, what also became clear was that in purchasing this half ounce—stocking up as we left, you see—I came to realize I did not have any cash. “Was y’all that proposed it,” Duane said, pointing at me. “Y’all said you’d hock your gear. Good thing you came back, too, because I was gonna sell this shit soon as I was done here.”

  “What the fuck, Kent?” Glenn said. “You told us you paid for it!”

  Duane rooted around in his weathered shoulder satchel. He produced our drives, our mikes. “That’ll be three hundred fifty, y’all.”

  My friends decided not to join me at the Hilton, where I withdrew $350 for Duane and $100 for them from the lobby ATM. After that, we said goodbye to the Teller, giving him a few last minutes of camera time and making reality-show promises we had no intention of honoring. On our way back to our motel, I tried to laugh the matter off. But Glenn and Noah weren’t having it.

  “I was about to kick that man’s balls off,” Noah disclosed.

  I told them I did not remember the transaction, which was true. Furthermore, I told them, I was sure I mentioned my intent. They were probably just as far gone themselves. Anyway, let’s hook up the camera to the TV. The tape will out.

  —

  INT. SMOKY, DREARY, CARPETED APARTMENT—EARLY MORNING

  The AMERICAN TALL TELLER crouches next to his bulky, convex television. From this position, he telestrates his old magic shows for the bachelor party–goers.

  TELLER

  I started incorporating dancing into the magic, you see.

  The frames fast-forward. Now the Teller has put on his old wrestling videos.

  TELLER

  I remember that guy well. He really taters you.

  The Teller can hardly be heard over the raucous hum of male confabulation. The shot drifts through the room, settling momentarily upon a man in the corner who appears to have gone cataleptic. The corpse-rigid legs extending before him are all that keep him in his chair. The camera then locates Kent and Noah, who are quite obviously in the bag. Noah is watching the wrestling, as rapt as a drunk man can be. Kent’s face, however, reflects a dimming light.

  TELLER (O.S.)

  Yeah, my turn now. You want some? I’ll give you some!

  Kent looks for the camera, finds it, moves for it. His body accompanies him in lagging sections.

  KENT

  (spreading arms)

  I got this text from my super, telling me the mailman keeps looking for me. Sign a registered letter. That’s from Uncle Sam, Glennzo. Thirty-eight grand now. At least.

  Noah lurches off the wall, moves from background to foreground. Kent’s eyes are blank. Consciousness’s stylus is no longer etching wax.

  KENT

  We need to get real, man. Shift gears.

  Offscreen, there is a burst of shouting, jocularity. The camera pivots, zooms in on DUANE THE PIRATE as he enters. If they could, the bachelors would lay down a path of palm fronds for him.

  FADE OUT

  FADE IN:

  INT. SMOKY, DREARY, CARPETED APARTMENT—HOURS LATER

  Filling the frame is Kent’s face. A thin band of iris rings each of his dilated pupils like the stone lip of a deep well. You can practically hear the blood hissing through his veins—a sparked fuse.

  KENT

  Harken unto me, you dipshits! The footsteps were accidental yet the destiny could be no other. We’re not gonna soften now. Oh, no. We’re gonna intensify what we are! This is the one and only ticket—intensify.

  Sequins flash in his eyes.

  KENT (CONT’D)

  Art is not documentation but transformation.

  He moves to a nearby end table and beaks deeply of the bachelor party cocaine.

  KENT (CONT’D)

  Said it before and I’ll say it again: Florida was founded by artists! The people who came here—artists! They added artifice so that suckers’d think there was less artifice. Dredge a canal half a mile inland, boom, that’s waterfront property. No one can argue it’s not. And if history’s taught us anything, which it hasn’t, it’s that fantasy, advertising…fucking…salutary fraud have shaped this place far more than truth ever could.

  Behind closed lips, Kent’s tongue moves over his teeth.

  KENT (CONT’D)

  If we don’t stumble across what we need—fuck it, we’ll mock it up. Because that’s what the place was founded upon. Faking it till you’ve made it. Convincing people it’s real—people who want to be duped, mind you, who want to believe—

  NOAH (O.S.)

  (screaming at television, everyone)

  PINFALL, CACTUS JACK!

  Kent’s eyes widen. His train of thought crashes off a cliff.

  FADE OUT

  —

  MILE 510 — STATE ROAD A1A

  HAVERING TO YOU

  To celebrate our crossing of the five-hundred-mile mark, we played The Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” on our Bluetooth speaker and said not one
word to each other.

  —

  MILE 560 — CASSADAGA

  CATCHING THE SPIRIT

  After Daytona Beach (the less said, the better), we turned toward the interior of the peninsula once again, moving southwesterly into first-generation suburbia: brick-and-mortar homes, modest and reasonable, shaded by oaks. We were headed for the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp, the largest such community in the South and the only year-round Spiritualist camp in these United States. Cassadaga is made up of fifty-five homes on approximately fifty-seven acres of land. Those who reside in it have chosen “to share in a community of like-minded people where they can live, worship and work in harmony with their beliefs,” as Cassadaga’s promotional literature puts it.

  These Spiritualists have faith in a higher power. Call it what you wish: “Great Spirit,” “Universal Energy.” Like Protestants, they believe that no man or institution can mediate an individual’s experience of the Higher Power. Unlike Protestants, they recognize no particular savior. Spiritualists believe that all of the major prophets have been inspired by the Higher Power throughout the course of history. According to them, these prophets bore the same message: the Golden Rule. “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.” Problem is, the followers of these individual prophets organized themselves into corporate structures, into religions. These rival religions then overlaid dogma and tradition upon the Golden Rule, eclipsing its simplicity and obviousness. Petty dissensions led to war, war to general human misery, et cetera and so on.

  Nothing too controversial, right? It jibes with the syncretic, humanistic theology embraced now by about a quarter of this country, a belief system that sociologists in the mid-aughts classified as “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” A few core tenets were identified:

  A Higher Power exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.