In the Land of Good Living

by Kent Russell

  The Villages is an extreme example of isolationism, certainly. But it’s not as if the peregrine elderly have been embracing civic-spiritedness elsewhere in Florida. Senator Bob Graham dubbed this the “Cincinnati factor”: Old people physically move to Florida, but emotionally they’ve never left Ohio. Why raise my taxes to pay for schools, parks, roads? they wonder. These aren’t my people. This isn’t my home. These recent immigrants have refused to assimilate, you could say.

  “Florida,” columnist John Rothchild wrote, “has not become a true home of those residents, but merely the penultimate resting place, a warm way station in which to relax and play golf, the blessed limbo between Cleveland and the Pearly Gates.”

  He’s onto something. Florida’s retirees have forbidden the past and future to bear on their present. They’ve snipped off today at both ends, like a coupon. They’ve abolished time in any form other than a flat collection or arbitrary sequence of moments. Their individual existences run like drag racers at a quarter-mile track: Florida → acceleration → death.

  The idea of delay—especially delay of gratification—loses all meaning down here. What rules of thumb there are, are negative ones. Do not get too attached to this place; you are not long for it. Do not get too attached to the nice couple across the street; the less you invest in them, the less costly it will be when they (or you) go. In fact, do not think of your current resources as capital. What would be the point of fiscal responsibility in your last, golden years? You’ve got to rush to get rid of this foreign currency before your boarding number is called and it’s time to depart.

  When you get down to it, the retiree’s rules of thumb are not much different from Florida Man’s. Or the tourist’s. The lot of them do what they do “in order to,” and rarely if ever “because of.”

  OK? OK. This is acceptable, right? This is as it should be? The animating spirit of our great nation is, after all, a classically liberal one. Centuries ago, we decided to substitute the value of choice (as exercised by free and autonomous individuals) into the place formerly occupied by fealty to God or shared blood. We founded the first country in which the government arises only through the consent of the governed. We centered our political processes on the free choices of individuals; we venerated and defended the fragile institutions that make free choice possible. And, as a result, we Americans are expected to reject the past as a source of wisdom and counsel, of caution and limits. Every subsequent generation is made to understand that they must create the country anew through their choices. Who wants to receive or leave an inheritance? (A nonmonetary inheritance, that is.) The inherited is the unchosen. And the unchosen is anathema to America. Our only inheritance is the Constitution, and even that is perennially up for debate. Yes, yes.

  These Yankee Strangers chose to leave an old world behind. It’d be un-American of me to fault them for that. What I can be upset about, I think, is the flip side of their animating spirit. What becomes of The Villages fifty years from now, after the current residents die out? Will it be sold off and torn down? Reimagined for contemporary tastes and chosen anew by a fresh batch of oldsters? What if Floridians like me never chose to come of age amid these plastic antiplaces, completely cut off from any history, community, or tradition I might like to know?

  Even if I wanted to, I will never be able to gain admittance to the precursor heavens these strangers built. By the time I’m eligible for it, Social Security will have run out; the very mention of “retirement” will elicit wry smiles from my Chinese debt collectors and/or my robot overlords. The opportunity to do what these retirees have done—retreat from the world I made, ensconce myself in a secure zone of efficacy and intelligibility—I won’t have it.

  Most developments like The Villages are classified as belonging to an unincorporated area. This means a few things. It means the planners and residents chose not to attach themselves to any nearby municipality. Implicitly, they rejected the idea that towns and cities are where we maximize our collective potential to better solve current and future problems. Implicitly, they subscribed to a more Jeffersonian, a more neo-Lockean view of property and mutual responsibility. To them, an unincorporated area is a realm in which individuals just happen to exist proximate to one another. It is where those individuals (or the associations they choose to join) can live free and die decentralized, all while exercising their God-given right to develop their property as they see fit.

  Very American. Incredibly Floridian: As early as the 1990 census, it was determined that more Floridians resided in unincorporated areas than incorporated ones. The trend has only accelerated.

  And though it is the fourth most populous county in Florida—though at 1.5 million residents it is larger than ten American states—Hillsborough County (county seat: Tampa) is largely unincorporated. The sprawl is such that Tampa’s modest downtown housed fewer than one hundred residents until a few years ago, when a pair of towering condos went up. It needn’t be said, but: Everyone here drives. Intentional pedestrians are hard to come by. What few there are get hit by cars at a rate only slightly behind Orlando’s, earning Tampa the number 2 spot in terms of most dangerous places to walk in the country.

  Fortunately, we made it through unincorporated Hillsborough in one piece. We kept our heads on swivels; we walked lengthy, shadeless streets full of identical houses. Our isolation was deep, and the residents’ suspicion—palpable. Through smudged living-room windows, children kept their eyes trained on us while remaining still as things trapped under ice. Occasionally, a homeowner burst through their front door, strode to the edge of their lawn, and scrutinized us as though memorizing a description for the police.

  Their reactions were not unjustifiable. During the housing bubble of the mid-2000s, a lot of these cookie-cutter homes around Tampa were gobbled up by people from elsewhere—by shady real estate firms, by drug dealers looking to launder money. Unscrupulous foreign investors moved many of these properties into and out of their portfolios at the speed of three-card monte dealers. For these flippers, the American Dream had nothing to do with stable home ownership; it had everything to do with trading disposable commodities the way horses were bought and sold along the frontier.

  Banks didn’t care either way. They were rubber-stamping loans without so much as glancing at the fine print. Mortgages couldn’t be churned out fast enough for poor people with patchy credit histories. Everybody was getting well, from the day laborers and working-class tradespeople at the construction sites; to the lower-middle-class bank tellers; to the middle-class real estate agents, title insurance agents, and civil engineers; to the upper-middle-class land use attorneys and architects; to the crème de la crème developers.

  You know what happened next. Money got too cheap. The sexy investment opportunity cooked up by whiz kid financiers in which high-yielding (yet completely safe!) assets were magically concocted out of pools of risky mortgages—investors finally started to wonder if these magical bundles of mortgages were really worth what they were supposed to be worth. Gradually and then suddenly, people doubted the reality of this perpetual-motion money machine.

  When the bubble burst, a lot of unincorporated boomburgs transformed into foreclosed ghost towns. These came to be populated (if at all) by the desperate and the unsavory. By 2010, unemployment in Hillsborough had surpassed 12 percent. The residential housing market was dead. The commercial real estate market was shrinking. Formerly middle-class families were applying for what scant social services the county could provide. The less fortunate slept in cars. Growth came shuddering to a halt. It appeared as though the doomsday scenario had arrived for Tampa and the rest of the Ponzi State.

  The solution offered by politicians and their real estate cronies was: double down. Hillsborough county commissioners slashed regulations and lowered impact fees in hopes of spurring new construction. Let there be more of the same! Give us helter-skelter development, or give us death!

  Th
e insane jury-rigging…worked. The market rebounded. Home buyers started trickling into town, lured by the Florida Dream. It was almost as if this perpetual-motion machine could never truly break.

  The bad times—I guess we reminded some property holders of the bad times. For that reason, we stuck to the main drags whenever we could. There, we marched under billboards for home loans, car dealerships, accident attorneys, mortgage refinancing, cash-4-gold. We passed strips of vacant land. Countless strip malls with retail space available. Strip clubs as well. Oh so many strip clubs. Tampa is sultry like that, more debauched than the rest of North and Central Florida anytime outside of Spring Break. Its sex appeal isn’t like South Florida’s—spritzed with intrigue and jangly, rose-gold exoticism. Tampa’s is more of a grunting, All-American, silk–Tommy Bahama–shirt-open-at-the-neck kind of sex appeal.

  Ahead of the 2012 Republican National Convention held in Tampa, outlets like the New York Daily News hailed the city as the Strip Club Capital of America. It is not. That honor goes to New York City, or possibly Las Vegas by now. It just feels as though Tampa is the capital, because there are strip clubs packed into its incorporated and unincorporated areas alike. And to be fair, Tampa’s not far off the lead: the forty-three clubs in its bay area place third in the United States per capita.

  Name any tickle ’n’ slap predilection you can think of, and the Tampa Bay area has got you covered. There are more than 120 erotic businesses within the incorporated city limits alone. Smut kings Seymore Butts and Dirty D call Hillsborough County home. Series like Tampa Bukkake, Glory Hole Girlz, and the ever-popular Crack Whore Confessions are shot here. The Magic Mike film franchise is set in Tampa for a reason: an XXX theater, swingers’ bar, fetish club, massage parlor, or adult bookstore crouches in the corner of almost every stucco mini mall. It has been so since Life magazine dubbed the city the “Hell Hole of the Gulf Coast” in 1935. For the Midwesterners who settled Tampa, the unburdening of generations’ worth of sexual prohibition, which had theretofore pickled their people like lutefisk brine, was apparently a big part of the appeal.

  That, and Tampa boasts a legit pioneer: Joe Redner, the entrepreneur who “invented” the lap dance. “That’s who you want,” Noah told Glenn as we reached the Westshore business district long after nightfall. “Humble-beginnings-type mogul, always running for mayor. Sort of Tampa’s answer to Donald Trump.”

  I agreed. It was settled. We found a Starbucks, and we set up shop, fronting like journalists.

  * * *

  —

  Glenn’s going to be a dad!

  We learned this while seated around our command center in Starbucks the other night. Glenn received a call from his wife, walked outside, walked back in with a hand to his forehead and a smeary smile on his face. “We’re not sure yet,” he cautioned. “Jess has had some negative tests before this positive one. So.”

  “Ho-lee shit!” Noah said. “Talk about ‘from the annals of a dude not thinking through the timing of his actions.’ ”

  Glenn kept his hand to his brow as if taking his own temperature. “I am having a Gainesville baby,” he stated flatly. “I guess now I really do have to decide what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.”

  “And we’re gonna have to get you home safely, homie!” Noah added, brightening at the prospect of additional duty. “We’re gonna have to deliver you through the gauntlet, like in the classic Clint Eastwood vehicle, The Gauntlet.”

  “This is the death throes of my youthful masculinity,” Glenn said, looking to me. “How do you feel about that? You’re getting the bachelor party of my prefatherhood.”

  “Some party,” I deadpanned. I slid papers around the tabletop. “But as for the task at hand—you know, instead of waiting for his response, we could just go down to Redner’s right now. Even if he doesn’t want to talk then and there, we could still film some B-roll, right? Kill two birds?”

  * * *

  —

  At thirty-five years old, Mons Venus is the oldest extant gentlemen’s club in Tampa. Each year, a quarter million patrons pass through its doors. Some of those patrons are subscriber-connoisseurs of the Ultimate Strip Club List, which hails Mons as tops in the country. (Much lauded is the “major contact” with dancers.) Mons has been featured on the likes of 20/20, The Daily Show, the documentary Strip Club King: The Story of Joe Redner, as well as Wyclef Jean’s patron anthem “Perfect Gentleman.” Truly, it is as close to a UNESCO site as these things go in Tampa: a windowless hut set back from a six-lane highway originating at MacDill Air Force Base, where U.S. Central Command carries out all of our Mideast adventures. Mons’s small marquee (shaped vaguely like the female pubic mound the establishment is named after) is dwarfed by the signs of adjacent big-box stores.

  Just as simple is its interior: The octagonal main stage is surrounded by chairs, padded booths, and the odd table or two. Low black lights, neon scrollwork accents, and a mirrored ceiling joined to mirrored walls combine to create a dizzying sense of lurid infinity. No booze—Tampa law prohibits alcohol in full-nude clubs. No DJ, either—the dancers play their own songs from a jukebox. Celebrities get no special treatment here, and Redner forbids any kind of champagne-room shenanigans.

  “You couldn’t put on closed-toed shoes, man?” Noah asked me as we paid our twenty-dollar entry fee. “You know that’s the first thing they look at, right? To see who’s got money?”

  “Then I am doing them a favor,” I said.

  Mons’s stable of dancers is hundreds strong, with eighty or so working most nights. Women come from all over the country to dance here, we learned. Some stay for more than a decade; many of those who leave for greener pastures return. This is because Mons is a libertarian’s dream workplace. Laissez-faire as all hell. A dancer can work seven nights a week or just one. Whatever she wants; there is no fixed schedule. She can take a break for months or years and still come back, so long as Redner adjudges her to have kept up appearances. No advance notice is necessary—just stride on into the dressing room, slap on whatever accoutrements are necessary, and hop onstage when it’s your turn. The rules are there are no rules. (Except: a three-hour minimum shift; no drugs on premises; no leaving the premises and then returning all coked out; and no probing of orifices, be they the customer’s or the dancer’s.)

  We talked with the house madam at the front of the room. She informed us that Redner had left for the evening. Minutes later, though, Redner responded to Glenn’s emails. Told us we were free to meet with him tomorrow, and that we could film in his club to our hearts’ content, so long as we blurred the face of anyone who wanted the consideration.

  Like the finely honed team we’d become, we deployed our cameras and mikes in two shakes. Only then did we allow our heads to bob about like birds’, ninety degrees at a time, to take in the fatty excitement. We filmed what we could in the submarine gloom. Eros. Dust. Graying dads strumming the bodies of young women as though they were mere instruments. Glenn lined up artsy shots of mirrored surfaces and handsy reflections. I tried to keep my rawboned counterpart out of the frame.

  That wasn’t what Glenn intended. With an eye to the camera, he used his free arm to usher me forward like a parent guiding a child to the lip of a pool. He wanted me in the corners of these shots, he said. For the comedic dissonance.

  It was funny, I gotta say. In the black light, I looked like a hobo’s ghost. Quite the contrast to the lissome women whose faces went vacant the moment they took to the stage, or a man’s lap. While Glenn arranged me, I watched them, and I couldn’t keep from thinking: Few of them could do this. Could safely hit the road and chart their own pilgrim’s progress. Through no fault of their own, I mean. It’s just that the foremost narrative possibility our culture affords unaccompanied women on the side of the highway is not liberation, desire, quest—but rather rape, death, some combination of the two.

  Glenn, Noah, and I don’t worry too
much about our presence “provoking” strangers. We are free to be obtuse. Rarely if ever do we fret about finding ourselves in a situation where we’re, say, screaming into a man’s palm. (Maybe Glenn does.) But deep inside Glenn, even, is the unshakable certitude that obstacles will melt if we white men but whistle. Each of us takes it for granted: I am no one’s prey.

  “I was just thinking about how many of my friends are just deep in it now,” Glenn said, shouting into my ear to be heard over the music. “Fully jobbed up, one or two kids, a cottage they go to, savings in the bank.”

  “Well, that can be you soon enough,” I shouted back.

  “I used to have this desire to be, like, ‘Sellouts!’ to those people. Like, ‘You’re too cowardly to be on the road!’ When, in fact—the road sucks, dude! When, in fact—they’re doing the far scarier thing.”

  “Good luck convincing them that after they’ve changed their ten thousandth diaper. Good luck telling yourself that,” I said, giving him a nudge as if to say, Look where we are.

  There were no distractions at Mons. No TVs, no food, no smoking, no drinking (though many patrons kept pinging between the parking lot and club, to partake of sneaked refreshment). The enterprise was free and pure: self-employed entrepreneurs willingly supplying a service for eager consumers. Rates for lap dances were negotiable—somewhere between twenty and thirty dollars per. Unlike many other clubs, which require a Mickey Mouse currency be used by customers and cashed out by strippers at the end of the night—Mons’s transactions are one-to-one. Aside from a voluntary tip out, the dancers keep every dollar they make.

  We learned much of this from Dakota, a slight blonde who was entirely nude apart from the hair extensions that extended to her butt. (In exchange for this information, she demanded a copy of the footage Glenn had shot of her contorting herself into cuneiform along the pole.) According to Dakota, a dancer can earn anywhere from five hundred to two thousand dollars a night. The house, meanwhile, collects its profit from cover charges plus whatever they make off the Red Bulls they sell. Money’s good here, Dakota said, better than anyplace else—but most dancers tap out after seven years. “They go to school,” she said of those who hang up their Lucite heels. “And then, if they want to, like, pay for a private preschool, they’ll come back a few times for extra money.”