In the Land of Good Living

by Kent Russell

  I was reminded of why we were here. “Glenn!” I shouted. I pointed to a line of guys receiving lap dances. Smaller bodies were bobbing up and down against larger, stationary bodies; it looked like a strand of oil wells. “We’re gonna need a volunteer.”

  Dakota took Glenn by the hand and led him to a booth. He complied sheepishly. I replaced him behind the camera. “Tarzan Boy” came over the sound system, per Noah’s jukebox request. Dakota was as brisk and practiced as a nurse in her single-serving attention giving.

  “One of my developing conclusions,” Glenn called out while peering around Dakota’s narrow shoulders, “is I’m ready for a salary. Just, an institution. Give me a ladder to climb.”

  “Sure,” I said, zooming in on Glenn’s apologetic expression. “Freedom qua freedom is never an adequate vision of the human good.”

  “What?” Glenn shouted.

  “Problem is,” I shouted back, “neither you nor me’s got any skills.”

  “I’m saying it’s a realization,” Glenn hollered. “This realization opens up new problems.”

  Dakota returned Glenn by his elbow, geriatrically. You wouldn’t know it to look at him—hunched to obscure his enthusiasm—but Glenn had been party to a crime. Technically, the “major contact” Mons is world-famous for is also illegal. Hillsborough County prohibits nude and topless dancers from performing within six feet of customers. The police could rush in at any moment and haul Dakota and Glenn off to the hoosegow. But as we’d soon discover, nobody wants to involve Joe Redner in a juridical dispute.

  By making a show of paying for Glenn’s go-round, I’d inadvertently chummed the water. Independent contractors came circling. They inveigled hard, pressuring us for dances with actual come-hither gestures. Glenn, the father-to-be, could not be made to relent a second time. Like an air-traffic controller, he directed dancers toward Noah using both of his arrowed hands. After each had finished with Noah, she was led to an empty booth by Glenn, where he and I interviewed her.

  As we were doing so, a couple of sockless-loafer-ass goons approached. Upon their prompting, I recited our backstory with the speed of an auctioneer. “Huh,” one said. “You boys wanna film something that’ll really pack an audience?”

  Absolutely not, I wished to say. In fact, the last thing I want to do is talk with you, my russet sir, or film with you in your survivalist hidey-hole. But instead I dissociated behind my professional facade, chewed my lip, and droned Oh, wow! when the man, inevitably, invited us to his sex party. He gave me a date next week as well as an address in Sarasota, an affluent town a little farther south along the Gulf Coast. Sarasota’s where my father grew up; it’s also where the Ringling Bros. Circus used to winter. Weird place. I told the goons we’d consider it.

  A little later, Noah came by to check in with me. “We need more women in the film, that’s for sure,” he said. “But I don’t know if, uh, strippers is gonna be the look.”

  “We can always come back down, film whatever we think we need,” I reassured.

  “We’ll fix it in post!” Noah agreed, blurting our new mantra and turning away as though breaking huddle. Glenn slapped him an attaboy as he passed. Then he picked up the camera and tracked Noah in stride.

  * * *

  —

  We closed down the club and joined a few dancers for a predawn breakfast at Waffle House. They showed us pictures of their kids, explained the majors they were studying at community college. Glenn filmed it all with dour professionalism. He was done celebrating; the full weight of his future was beginning to settle onto his shoulders. Sleepless, we made our way to Joe Redner.

  What followed was the straitest-laced interview with a strip club kingpin you could imagine. We met Redner at his small office located within a larger warehouse complex—property he owned alongside a decent-sized portfolio of holdings around Tampa. The elderly, ponytailed impresario discussed his public-access television shows, his ongoing crusade for First Amendment rights, his many failed mayoral campaigns, his passion for social justice. We might as well have been shooting footage for a Chamber of Commerce jubilee. I had a hard time keeping my head from drooping.

  Redner wore a T-shirt with Ray-Ban sunglasses hooked in the collar. His exposed skin managed to be at once tan and translucent-seeming; it appeared as brittle as an onionskin proclamation under glass. He spoke with a scratchy, adopted drawl and not infrequently referred to himself as a man “who is willing to stand up for the rights of those who are not even willing to stand up for their own rights.” Nine times (and counting) he’s campaigned for the mayoralty on a platform of sustainable development, high-speed rail, and healthier school lunches. He lamented that history will remember him only as the lap-dance king.

  “And what makes a you and not a Donald Trump?” Glenn asked solemnly. I mouthed a yawn.

  Redner gave us his rundown: Born in Summit, New Jersey, in 1940. Dad left when he was just a baby; mother relocated the family to Tampa. Quit school in the tenth grade, started drinking at sixteen. Worked with a carnival operator, where he learned all the classic cons. Later laid terrazzo floors, sold furniture, made tin cans in a factory. In between jobs he hustled pool in downtown Tampa dives. Eventually, he worked his way up to managing go-go bars. One night while driving home from the bar, Redner heard a bulletin on the radio that would change his life as well as the course of Tampa history: In the case of Erznoznik v. City of Jacksonville, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that a Florida drive-in theater could show movies that featured brief flashes of nudity. The justices deemed those flashes to be free speech protected under the First Amendment. Redner figured: “Dance is speech—ballet, the Indian war dances, dances in Africa. Nudity is the content of that speech, therefore it’s got to be protected by the First Amendment. Christ, let’s see if they really mean that.” There was no law in Tampa prohibiting nude dancing—but no one had ever dared try it. Redner tried.

  In order to combat all the legal challenges that came his way, Redner got sober and taught himself law. He pored over the books at Hillsborough County’s Law Library for six to ten hours a day, every day, for ten years. Stoking this effort was his unyielding contempt for politicians, ministers, anyone he considered a hypocrite. “They run my life, and they have no idea what they’re doing,” he said of these phonies. Redner scrutinized officeholders and prelates and, perceiving in not a single one of them any sign of undeniable rightness or superiority, returned to his own rationality as the most obvious and immediate source of truth. With retribution sounding a bugle call in his heart, Redner set himself over and against all that was sanctimonious in the world around him.

  “I’m gay, I’m black, I’m an Indian, a Jew,” he said, echoing the words he used when bringing a lawsuit against the Hillsborough County Commission after it passed an ordinance forbidding any acknowledgment of Gay Pride Month. “I’m everyone and anyone who has ever been oppressed for anything other than their bad character.”

  Redner and his lawyer prevailed in most every one of their cases. They also cohosted a weekly public-access call-in show called First Freedom. During the hour-long episodes, they discussed issues like censorship in rap music, the efficacy of the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services, the immigration woes of professional hockey enforcer Bob Probert, the mistreatment of Haitian refugees, the legality of bungee jumping. Redner positioned himself as reformer and rebel, self-made man and defender of liberty—the Horatio Alger Americans profess to want, not the “real” one we ultimately received.

  “Whenever I see injustice—my self-esteem is tied to it,” Redner told the camera while idly running a finger over a copy of Florida Jurisprudence: Building, Zoning, and Land Controls, second edition, which lay open atop a highlighted printout of Instagram’s decency guidelines. “My basic ethic is built around logic, reasonableness, and compassion. Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t steal. And treat others like you would if the plane was goin
g down—everyone has to put his mask on first, but then he can help others get theirs on after.”

  Redner could help because he’s worth…fifty million dollars? Sixty million? He wasn’t exactly sure. All he knew was he had enough lucre to stuff his cargo pants pockets with “help money,” stacks of crisp blue hundreds still in their TD Bank wrappers. These, Redner dispensed to the needy on the street like a robber baron of yesteryear tossing silvers from his carriage.

  While our local Larry Flynt detailed his charitable contributions, I eyeballed the books on the shelf behind him. I’d read many of them: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. There was some Tom Paine, too, and other works on the American Founding. A motley assortment, yet all of it was of a philosophical piece. All of it enjoined the reader to be free from authority, both the kind of authority that is nakedly coercive as well as the kind that operates through claims to knowledge. Redner’s library argued in favor of the idea that freedom amounts to radical self-responsibility plus the primacy of noninterference. That is, freedom means letting each individual live and die as he or she desires, as though each individual had the luck to resemble no one, as if he or she were a blessed monster that came from nowhere and owed nothing to nada. Leave such monstrous individuals to themselves—this is the American Way. Seek betterment on their behalf, and you will be revenged.

  “You a religious man, Joe?” I interrupted, despite knowing the answer. “Spiritual but not religious, maybe?”

  When he screwed up his face, Redner looked like a sour babushka. “Minister put the cracker in my mouth, I sit there, they all chant this prayer,” he said, explaining his childhood departure from the Methodist Church. “Didn’t change a goddamn thing.”

  “How about a pillar of the community?” I asked. “Would you consider yourself one of modern Tampa’s founding fathers?”

  Again, he seemed taken aback. “No,” Redner said. “Hell no. All those pillars of the community? They just want to tell people how to live.”

  He opened one of the accordion folders on his desk. He rifled through it for a filing pertaining to another embattled adult business. He gummed his lips as he did so, his mouth agitating like an old windfall apple be-wormed. “The courts,” he said. “The court system is the only thing keeping us free.”

  Like all red-blooded patriots, Redner chooses to equate “liberty” with “license.” Personal volition is the thing to be venerated and defended. “Bored Florida Man Uses Private Plane to Draw Giant Radar Penis”—you do you, hero, so long as you aren’t hurting anyone else in the process. Associate Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy more or less codified this principle into law in a 1992 judgment: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

  Neither political party would ever challenge this definition of liberty because neither political party quibbles with it. Individual, autonomous choice is the end-all be-all in the interpersonal realm (D), and it is likewise sacrosanct when it comes to economics (R). This is the American Dream, the Florida Dream, down to the gristle. This is what we have achieved with our experiment: the endpoint of modernity, where the freely choosing self finds meaning nowhere outside of itself.

  As for those other models of liberty—the ones that came out of Athens and Jerusalem? The ones which hold that liberty is not the absence of constraint, but the exercise of self-limitation?

  They can go to hell where they belong! With Redner’s brand of liberty on offer, who is going to choose to adhere to some crusty, millennia-old metaphysics? Who will seek to cultivate the learned and practiced capacity to surmount self-defeating desire in order to become ever more fully what one is? Who’s going to join hands with Aristotle and Aquinas and chant, What makes a thing good? A thing is good when it attains the purpose for which it was created. How does a person attain it? By ordering oneself toward generous and generative relation to the Highest Good.

  Nerds and nobody, that’s who! Not while “Florida Man Drinks Beer and Does Donuts on ATV as He Tells Sheriffs to ‘Come and Get Me!’ ” Not while I can leave this room, walk a couple blocks, pay out two Hamiltons, and have a single mother grind her butt on my clothed boner at 11:00 a.m.—and then convince my heart I did a good thing because I added to her kid’s college fund.

  We wrapped for lunch. Redner took us to a nearby vegan joint, where in a couple weeks’ time he’d be handing out Christmas “help money” to each member of the staff. Over mixed greens, he explained to Glenn, Noah, and me the particularities and loopholes of his newest legal venture: a challenge to the Florida Department of Health’s rules barring individuals from growing cannabis for personal use.

  “Oh, do we have ourselves a case,” Redner assured us, baling quinoa with his fork.

  “You ever think a day will come when filing another lawsuit—when having recourse to these lower courts—won’t be enough to solve your problems?” I asked in good faith.

  Redner looked at me as though I was from another dimension.

  —

  MILE 873 — GOLDEN GATE ESTATES

  BARE IS THE BACK WITHOUT BROTHER BEHIND IT

  Thanksgiving night, we reached Nokomis Community Park. The crickets sang, they stopped at our approach, they resumed singing when we’d passed. As we made for the park’s farthest edge, we cut across a covered basketball court. In the deep shadow, we bumbled into three scabrous dudes. Glenn illuminated them with his phone light: Florida Men through and through, with tattered shorts, ponytails and beards, few teeth, rolling eyes. Each looked like a particular costume designer’s idea of “Robinson Crusoe, except modern-day.”

  They had a certain something in a paper bag so rumpled it was velvety. At first they tried to hide this bag from us; then, reluctantly, they offered it. We demurred. They found this to be quite offensive. “When somebody’s trying to hand you shit, you take it!” the head one was saying. “Nobody’s handing you shit in life! You have a brain—use your brain! Don’t be an idiot! God gave you a brain!” And so on.

  We shrugged, moved along, made camp in a buggy copse next to some mangroves. In time, the shouting subsided. I checked my email in-box and was reminded that I am, in theory, an Ivy League professor. I wrote brief responses to the two students who were seeking letters of recommendation. I drifted off.

  In the middle of the night, Glenn gave me a long, meaningful poke. I cracked an eye, saw that Glenn’s own eyes were opened to a width meant to communicate alarm. I listened. The ten thousand sounds of night had hushed. Except—a rustle. A footfall. Then another. Glenn and I floated into ready positions. I felt around for the retractable baton, then remembered Noah had it last. I prayed that he, too, was getting ready to come out swinging.

  “Fuck!” a voice shouted.

  “Fuck! You!” a second voice added. A third voice sounded—a groan that rose to a keen. It was the Florida Men.

  “Goddamnit,” Noah sighed from his tent.

  The lead Man began to fulminate against homosexuals. I won’t relay the message. Suffice it to say that his hatefulness was raw and inventive, and left me with new gray hairs. His shadow paced our tent-front for all three minutes of his tirade. When he stopped, his shadow stopped. His silhouette just stood there, seemingly peering through the nylon.

  Glenn and I held still. I glanced over at my friend. He glanced back. I half-believed that our high tension was causing our tent to light up like the glass bulb around a white-hot filament.

  That’s when the shadow moved for our flap. I’m pretty sure it moved for our flap. That’s also when adrenaline picked me up and ushered me onward like a piece of heavy machinery caught in a storm surge. Defend Yourself! I thought. I burst through the flap, shrieking incoherently.

  In front of me: Florida Man with the jerkied physique of an incorruptible saint
. I took his ass down. I cinched his legs and drove him into the soft earth. As if waiting for my cue, Noah rushed from his tent, balls-ass naked and zeroing in on one of the Men who was rummaging through Jog-a-bye. With a flick of his wrist, Noah snapped open the baton. He raised it head-high and then brought it down like a large flyswatter, cracking the guy on his shoulder. The queasy thwup—it sounded like a wing being sheared off a raw chicken. The guy crumpled to the ground. Glenn emerged from our tent with a spotlight in one hand and his iPhone filming in the other. He ran up and gave the guy I was wrestling with a swift kick in the ribs. Then he gave him another. Seeing this, the third Man took off running. Noah took off after him.

  “Fuck is you all’s problem?” my guy coughed. He pushed himself into a crouch, buried his head in his arms, and then decided to roll a couple of full revolutions away from Glenn and me. It was as though he was employing every safety maneuver he’d ever learned, one after another. “Fuck is wrong with you?” he asked again as he rolled. I could hear Noah administering a few swift kicks of his own.

  “Don’t touch our shit!” I screeched, still flooded with adrenaline. “Stay away from our fucking shit, man!” I made like I was gonna go after him again. The Man hopped to his feet and jogged backward.

  “You all are fucked up, man!” he said as he retreated. “Wasn’t touching your shit! Y’all are some fucking crazy asses, man. Fuckin’, fucked up.”