In the Land of Good Living

by Kent Russell

  KENT

  Does it help to refer to Jesus in third person? Help it seem not sacrilegious or something?

  RODDY

  No so I finally hooked up with a girl I met at a concert. Using my homelessness as, you know, an excuse to move in with her family. I ripped off her parents. And we took off for the streets. By that time, I was overdosing every few weeks. One of those times I was hospitalized, and she left. I tried to kill myself in a bunch of different ways. Finally, I almost did. Overdose. At the hospital, they didn’t know who I was. I didn’t have no ID. They found me lying in an alley somewhere. The doctors told me afterwards that no one had visited me. No one cared. Full force, I felt the total emptiness in the heart.

  KENT

  But you are Jesus, right?

  GLENN (O.S.)

  (speaking quickly, holding out phone)

  On your Facebook page, it says, look, here, it says: “I am Jesus.” Location: Orlando. “I am Jesus at the Holy Land Experience.”

  RODDY

  Yeah, bro. It’s like, I become him when I go there. You know? I’m just so full of the Holy Spirit when I’m there. Love, bro. I can cast out demons when I’m there, you know? When Jesus is up there performing miracles of healing, I’m like, I can do that too, you know? After the show, I go up to people, and they tell me they have liver problems, they have COPD. I put my hands on them, I feel the love of God go through me, and I say, “I cast you out!”

  KENT

  You ever been to Cassadaga?

  RODDY

  It’s like, I’ve cast a demon out once already, with the help of my Higher Power, right? I am a grateful disciple of God and a recovering addict who just celebrated eight years clean through NA and the grace of God. I live with the mental illnesses of severe depression and schizophrenia. And yes, I’ve been blessed with a very fulfilling life.

  NOAH (O.S.)

  Seriously, guys?

  FADE OUT

  * * *

  —

  Technically, Roddy wasn’t lying. Technically, he does play Jesus at the Holy Land Experience. Just…in an unofficial capacity. If there’s anyone to blame here, it’s Glenn and his shoddy research. But then again, what can you expect from some internet searches conducted after fifteen hours in the sun?

  We turned the gear back on, we interviewed Roddy in what I felt was a very considerate, respectful manner. He told us he’s from Delray Beach but works part-time in food service here. Before that, he lived in Port Arthur, Texas. Before that, Chicago. “I’m from everywhere, man,” Roddy said. “I been everywhere.” He could afford his frequent trips to the Holy Land Experience on account of cast members who slipped him complimentary passes, he explained. He told our cameras that going there gave him the strength and courage to live by the principles when recovery didn’t make sense. “The depression didn’t go away. Instead, it got worse. I heard voices and saw people who weren’t there. And this was me not using drugs, but I was still hallucinating. I was feeling alienated, hopeless, useless, worthless. But then I saw some preachers on TV. It was like a sign from God, you know? I realized I don’t have to walk this walk alone. God had a plan for me.”

  He went on in this fashion for some time, detailing among other things the time rival gang members stuffed him in the trunk of a car. “…And he puts that gun to the side of my head and I heard a pop, felt that heat,” Roddy regaled the cameras. He wasn’t kidding when he said he had seen and done some stuff.

  Roddy winding up where he’s wound up makes perfect sense, though. For Roddy is representative of that most unfairly maligned sociological phenomenon, the “Florida Man.” As you might recall, “Florida Man” was a meme that went viral in 2013 and endures to this day. The idea behind it was simple enough: Aggregate news headlines in which the principal actor is identified as “Florida Man.” “Florida Man Does X.” “Florida Man Arrested for Y.” “Florida Man Found Guilty of X and Y While Under the Influence of Z.” The joke was that Florida Man is the superhero America never asked for but nevertheless deserves. And that joke blitzed across the pop cultural landscape. National Public Radio, The New York Times—a lot of major news outlets picked up on it.

  Florida Man, it would seem, captures something essential about how the rest of the country conceives of my home. The meme gives shape to a sentiment that had long gone unarticulated, at least at the national level. According to it, the archetypal Florida Man can be pared down to three basic qualities. The first is intemperance. Florida Man is almost always drunk, high, or tilting toward some as-yet-unnamed state of chemically altered consciousness. “Florida Man Arrested While Wearing T-Shirt That Says ‘I Have Drugs,’ ” reads one entry in the series. “Florida Man Pocket-Dials 911 While Cooking Meth with Mom,” reads another. “Hallucinating Florida Man Seeing Imaginary Aliens Walks into Store with Large Knives and Asks Not to Be Eaten.” “Florida Man Walks into Bar, Downs $80 Worth of Shots, Sets Fire to Trash Can, Punches Everyone in the Face.”

  The second aspect of Florida Man’s character might have been guessed at already. That is, Florida Man’s truest and only recourse when faced with life’s challenges is: violence. Absurd, hyperbolic violence, the kind rarely given expression outside of cartoons. “Florida Man Says He Had No Idea Beating an Alligator to Death Was Illegal.” “Florida Man Gets into Brick-Throwing Fight with Identical Twin Brother.” “Florida Man Mistakes Girlfriend for Hog, Shoots Her.” “Florida Man Arrested for Hitting Drag Queen with Tiki Torch While Dressed as Member of KKK Now Running for Mayor.”

  One might say that these first and second characteristics flow from and feed into one another. This would be correct. It is also correct of the third and final aspect of Florida Man’s triune character—namely, that he is something of a confidence artist–cum–Quixote. Florida Man dreams big, impossible dreams and, goshdarnit, he cannot help but strive after them. For instance: “Florida Man Accused of Memorizing Stolen Credit Card Numbers in Order to Live at Luxury Disney Hotel, Again.” “Florida Man Arrested for Allegedly Fixing Cars with Play-Doh.” “Florida Man Shows Up to Bank Robbery Drunk, in Taxi.” “Florida Man’s Church Loses Tax-Exempt Status Because It’s Reportedly Just a Nightclub.”

  Florida Man is from somewhere else, Cleveland or Cedar Rapids or Pascagoula, but he drove south down the map into tract homes and accessible beaches. He drove all night and then through the dawn so that he could arrive, take off his shoes, fall asleep on the sand, and wake up to perfectly spaced stars. On the Gulf Coast, the Atlantic coast, in Central Florida, South Florida—Florida Man has woken up all over the state.

  Or else he was born here. Florida Man needn’t be a Yankee Stranger. Florida Man, like the ideal American, is defined not by place or past but by process. Florida Man is forever “becoming,” is always on the make. As such, a person metamorphoses into Florida Man. He arrives here or was born here, he finds out it’s all an okeydoke, and rather than give up or move on, he doubles down. Slowly but surely, he gets filtered through the state’s socioeconomic (and judicial) layers the way a drop of rain hits ground and seeps toward rock bottom.

  You can find Florida Man anywhere along that downwardly mobile trajectory. There he is—clocked out of his job but dawdling in a Caribbean-themed bar, comparing his mortgage contract alongside an Amway brochure. There he is—underemployed, resting against a boardwalk’s piling, wondering if he should commit mail fraud in order to get his car repaired. There he is—self-medicating as Jesus in a Jesus-themed park.

  Some guys learn from their mistakes; all Florida Man knows is to raise the stakes. He’s an American hero, well and truly—a hero who cannot recognize the villain he has become.

  So it was in the spirit of apprentice Florida Men that the three of us tried our damnedest to make this situation work. Ex-junkie as Redeemer of the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. “We can fix the intro in postproduction,” Glenn assure
d. Noah justified it: “Wouldn’t the real Jesus show up as the guy they kick out of the Holy Land Experience, anyway?”

  I agreed. “To the extent that you did it to the least of my ‘cast members,’ you did it to me.”

  * * *

  —

  I could describe Epcot to you, but why? Every year, more people come to Disney’s asphalt-and-fiberglass play places than visit the Eiffel Tower, Taj Mahal, Tower of London, and Pyramids combined. There’s a good chance you’re one of those who’ve been here, done that. And even on the off chance you aren’t—Epcot contains not one referent you haven’t seen or experienced one trillion times already, every day of your life, in the outdoor malls, airports, top-shelf arenas, cruise ships, fast-casual chains, and “revitalized” downtowns of the late-capitalist West. (It is here we should remember that the word “utopia” was derived from a Greek pun for “nowhere.”) If anything, Epcot’s age and relative staidness appear touchingly quaint when compared to the latter-day pleasurescapes it inspired. Much of the fun to be had here is not unlike the fun to be had in a living-history museum: Whoa, check it out, one of the very first “managed experiences”! Lookit how they did it way back when. Get a load of the crude methods they used to cover up every trace of noncommodified, nonregulated, unsimulated, un“real” reality.

  Does anyone really want to know about “Ellen’s (as in DeGeneres) Energy Adventure”? “Mission: Space,” “Imagination!,” or “The Seas”? “Innoventions”—I had to take a break from walking in order to squint at that word on our map. Was it an actual English noun that I knew, or was I suffering through another bout of heat-induced aphasia? Twenty seconds later, I had convinced myself that “innoventions,” like “imagineer,” is not yet a real word, and I moved on to “Living with the Land.”

  “What’re we supposed to be learning here?” Glenn asked loudly during a cartoon screening in which the animals of The Lion King work together to make a jungle resort marginally more eco-friendly. “That if we keep doing what we’re doing, environmental destruction may happen in the future? But since it’s already happening, it’s OK, since we’re also making tiny strides to make it better?”

  Roddy, rapt, shushed him. Unlike Glenn but like most of the other guests, he had merrily and instantaneously adapted to this psychic environment. Roddy was happy to be free from freedom for a little while.

  Back in the sunshine, we walked about and wondered what to do next. Glenn, as always, followed the principle When in doubt, shoot B-roll. He stalked Roddy as he strolled by gray-faced Mouseketeer apparatchiks and rail-thin New Englanders. Past soft little screeching boys and girls so early accustomed to mother love. Betwixt the regardful eyeing traded by brown-skinned families and those wearing Make America Great Again hats. Through the yearning. More than amusement, there is yearning for amusement at Disney. The overheated, despondently mute families trudging along—they appeared to resent the fact that they were not having fun. Not having fun at Disney? Surely this indicates some sort of moral failing on their part?

  In this uncanny valley, I noted in my notebook, it is the disheartened, the ambivalent, and the human that begin to seem unreal.

  “Yo, J.C.,” Noah said, lowering his GoPro camera. “You allowed to drink?”

  “Hell yeah I can drink,” Roddy said. “I can outdrink you, and you, and you. Just don’t gimme no junk, you know?”

  “Around the World with Jesus Christ?” I suggested.

  “Around the World,” Noah agreed.

  “Why not,” Glenn said. “Futurism is dead. Everybody! Just…travel and consume.”

  We entered the World Showcase, a series of elaborate national pavilions set up to exhibit the cultural splendor of human civilization. Really, though, it is a lap of seventies-era themed bars, restaurants, and gift shops encircling a man-made lake. It is intended for those who cannot afford to (or do not wish to) visit the real countries represented therein.

  A dense column of slow-moving tourists threaded the Showcase. I spotted far fewer children here than anyplace else in Orlando. The visitors were mostly young adults. Many were wearing Mickey Mouse Club sweaters or Minnie ears. They were gleefully snapping selfies of themselves eating Dole Whip. They had an air of ironical self-awareness about them.

  “Wait, are all of these countries from the Northern Hemisphere?” Glenn asked, surveying the list of Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Morocco, Japan, America, Italy, Germany, China, Norway, and Mexico. “That’s great,” he said with a laugh on his lips.

  He meant great in that many would find it not great; they would consider it racist and supremacist and yadda yadda. The First World–centricity reflected an indifference to present-day standards of cultural sensitivity. Yet it was this indifference that was “great” to post-tourists like Glenn and the young wisenheimers around us.

  Before we can unpack this, we have to understand something else. The great floodgates of the wonder world have swung open. In 2012, the United Nations celebrated the milestone of one billion international trips taken in a single year. This was a milestone, but one that was in line with the 25 million international trips taken in 1960, and the 250 million taken in 1970, and the 536 million taken in 1995. So many people travel now, and the business of travel has become so intertwined with national (and local) economies, that a country like Thailand can be the world’s biggest exporter of rice while still relying on tourism to be its biggest earner.

  Mass travel has converted the entire earth into capital and her peoples into a consumer base. Everyone everywhere now hankers after difference. Why? Existential modernity, maybe? That is, a modern person travels because he or she (consciously or not) feels rootless or spiritually homeless and believes real reality and genuine living are to be found elsewhere. In the past, or in other, more “primitive” cultures, or purer, more “authentic” lifestyles. Anywhere, really, but where the modern person happens to find herself most days.

  Problem is, as ever more people seek out and consume difference, difference becomes that much harder to experience. Masses of travelers tend to leave in their wake the same hotels, souvenir shops, fast-food joints, Zaras, H&Ms, Starbucks—the “small monotonous world that everywhere shows us our own image,” as tourism scholars have put it. Our relentless drive to ferret out and consume difference causes us to level the planet the way a too-large herd does a commons.

  Into this scarcity step outfits that trade in a type of traveling—to war zones, political hot spots, dodgy locales—that is known as “adventure” or “disaster” tourism. Pick the right outfit, and you can go on a journey into North Korea or Iran. If that’s not to your taste, you can go eat insects at the street carts Anthony Bourdain recommended. Come, the subliminal pitch goes, discover locales that have managed to avoid the infectious monoculture of the contemporary world. Never mind that, like explorers come bearing blankets, we can’t help but introduce pathogens we’ve long since grown inured to.

  Oh well—the market abhors a vacuum. Every place is in the process of becoming a someplace with a sterilized, commodified, and Instagrammable Cultural Experience to be had. Everyone is dreaming up and saving for that next trip, the contrails of our departing and arriving flights coiling tighter around the globe as we hunt down the last of its endangered difference.

  As for Epcot—Epcot used to be different, but now it is not. Now its depictions of difference come across as dated, offensive, and ironically great. Think of it this way. If you were a disenchanted traveler who had trotted the globe twice over, why not go to the ground zero of the phenomenon, photograph yourself appreciating it like the world-weary connoisseur you are?

  The gaucheness of the World Showcase—real live Chinese are wearing queue braids and serving chop suey!—is so cringey and clueless yet primitively earnest that it snakes back around into the realm of different and “authentic” experience. This postmodern ouroboros is a nightmare, I know. But one important to an
alyze if we are to comprehend the hell we have made for ourselves.

  Almost all of the young people at Epcot had come to our same conclusion: Let’s make a game out of despair. Around the World, as this diversion is called, is the most popular unofficial attraction at Disney. In it, you quaff a representative beverage at each of the eleven national pavilions. You douse your anxieties about having fun. You drown out the end-times tinnitus that hums: “…the horizon of the transcendent has been evacuated…an unprecedented absence has appeared at the heart of human experience…the self has been progressively reduced to an isolated node of desire and will confronted by a universe of strictly immanent ends…secularist, relativist, materialist late modernity is a seamless garment, and our voluntarist culture of consumption and disposal is not merely accidentally associated with this “culture of death,” but rather belongs to it essentially…and I, I am contributing to the incessant pollution of soil and water by the heavy metals and other toxins produced by the monstrous consumerist voracity of our way of life…local ecologies despoiled are impossible to recover, and the poor of the developing world constitute the vast majority of immediate victims…only a depraved moral imagination allied to a petrified heart could fail to see this…”*

  “Rod!” I said. “What’s your poison? I’m buying.”

  “Beer, bro,” Roddy said. “I’ll take a beer.”

  Using his French, Glenn ordered four Fin du Monde ales at a kiosk in our first stop, “Canada.”

  “Bottoms up,” Noah said. “Whoever makes it around the world without puking into his hands wins.”

  Following our stop at an Irish pub in “Great Britain,” Roddy and I interweaved our arms round each other’s shoulders. Onward to “France,” where actual European children were swirling two fingers du vin alongside their grandmothers. We availed ourselves of Grand Marnier slushes in plastic martini glasses. We were having fun, goddamnit, and my massive debts were unrealer to me than the Eiffel Tower poking above this Potemkin arrondissement.