In the Land of Good Living

by Kent Russell

  The thing about paradise is you can’t recognize it as paradise until you’re forced to leave it. Returned now to Coconut Grove, I realized: This is paradise. Sadly, though, I saw there were new condos here, too. It looked as though the Grove was becoming a leafy alternative to Miami Beach for the international set. Like mausoleums stacked with empty, prepurchased niches, these towers had something of the grave about them.

  We walked south and then east and got to my old street, a big cul-de-sac that branches off of Main Highway. Our progress was halted when we discovered that the residents had put up a guardhouse. Not a wooden-arm gate or a buzz-in intercom but an actual air-conditioned hut, within which sat a guy clearly grateful for the job. He admitted car after car but told us to stay put. While doing so, we considered our reflections in the hut’s smoked glass. We appeared to have about us the coiled intensity of the fugitive. We looked, in a word, insane. The tableau caused Noah to crack up. Glenn and I followed suit.

  Even after I showed the guard my old driver’s license, which listed this street as my address, he refused to let us in. He kept repeating, “You don’t want me to lose my job.”

  Which gave me an idea—

  KENT

  There’s a back way in. An amphibious landing along the seawall. We’ll need to buy one of those pool rafts with the plastic oars, is all. And then wait for the tide to come in.

  So that’s what we did. After purchasing our inflatable raft for a cool fifty dollars (Christmas discount), Glenn suggested we pass the time by filming some extra exit interviews. I pointed us to the Bayshore Landing Marina, where we had our choice of backdrop: bobbing cutters, bobbing yachts, or bobbing megayachts. We took a long five to compose our denouements. Then we workshopped them with one another. Noah went first.

  Noah plops onto a bench wearing, as per usual, a preemptively aggrieved expression.

  GLENN (O.S.)

  Try smiling, eh? Like you’ve reached an epiphany and are glad.

  Noah widens his eyes and smile as suddenly as an agoraphobe wrenching heavy drapes apart.

  KENT (O.S.)

  Eeeee.

  GLENN (O.S.)

  Just, at ease.

  Noah clears his throat.

  NOAH

  No, but now I know I gotta commit. To something. Like I mentioned before—a child, maybe. A house. Here on out, I’m having my adventures in my mind. I’d rather go to prison for five years than have to do this again. This was it for me. The last hurrah. Last stand at the Dumbshit Alamo.

  Noah exhales out of the corner of his mouth.

  NOAH (CONT’D)

  That being said, it doesn’t mean I’m ready for this to end.

  I took Glenn’s spot behind the camera while Noah moved offscreen.

  GLENN

  I will say a few things. Number one: I feel like this trip was worth it at least in the sense that I am going home with a really lucid vision of my self. My derangements. Just what rock bottom is. Number two: I am never coming back to Florida. Number three: Plundering Florida for our personal, creative, and financial fortunes like so many before us—I definitely don’t think that is going to work out. I definitely don’t think that is going to happen. What I’ve learned is that what Florida is uniquely good at is taking people’s capital and sinking it into the swamp.

  GLENN (CONT’D)

  Do I have some small glimmer of hope that this film can still be something? Yes. Do I think it’s going to be a smash hit? No. I think it is going to be a first film. With plenty of mistakes. Lots of shitty cinematography. Some scenes where the sound is terrible. It is going to be a first film.

  KENT (O.S.)

  You think there’s gonna be some charm in that?

  GLENN

  What else does it have?

  I took my turn.

  KENT

  Yessir. To piggyback on what Noah was saying: I, uh, understand that I am not an excellent dude.

  NOAH (O.S.)

  Stop the presses.

  KENT

  The good that I desire is not the good that I do. Though maybe what I’ve learned is that there is a good person gestating inside of me? Waiting to be born?

  I let the tape roll for a bit, blinked a few times. I checked the notes in my lap.

  KENT (CONT’D)

  More importantly, now I know. Now I can tell a person, whenever I hear them shitting on Florida: “What you are actually shitting on is the Republic itself.” For what is Florida but an ahistorical sanctuary for the exiled and vagabond? What is it but an experimental home for all those who lost or hated home?

  —

  We portaged the raft to an unguarded street paralleling my own. At the end of it, pavement gave way to spinifex grasses and a mucky littoral zone. “Are you kidding me?” Glenn sighed. He pointed to a yellow, diamond-shaped sign planted near some mangroves. “WARNING: CROCODILES.” “Huh,” I said. “That’s a new one.” Salt-water crocs never swam this far north when I was a kid.

  We took a few minutes to duct-tape garbage bags around the vulnerable parts of our equipment. As we did so, the furnace grate of mangrove roots fired sweat from our noses and fingertips. Off in Biscayne Bay, a speedboat blasting “Holly Jolly Christmas” thudded against the chop.

  I brushed back my wet mullet, put my hands on my hips, and listened to the water. I thought of noting in my notebook: Death is a grinding down of obdurate surfaces, a pulverization of even silica’s will. But why bother with that now?

  “I’ll see you on the beach,” Noah joked, and we three wedged into the raft knees to spines. I navigated at the bow, Glenn filmed from the stern, and Noah manned the oarlocks in between. We paddled northwest on a soft parabola that took us some hundred yards into the bay. Glenn secured the camera in front of his face with all the intensity of a possession receiver catching a fourth-down buttonhook. Otherwise he was calm despite the possibility of our losing everything. Noah grunted with effort—the oars were short and hollow—yet he seemed to be enjoying the view. Shoreward, multitiered alcázares hugged the coast as it curved toward the downtown skyline, which stood glinting in the late-afternoon sunlight like ice stalagmites beginning to melt. Seaward, powerboats and windsurfers plied the mint-jelly-green waters between Key Biscayne and the mainland. Sitting there amid the swing and sway of the tide, spritzes of oar water tickling my cheeks as if from an aspergillum, I had a feeling of my real life being past, and my posthumous existence just beginning.

  We arced toward my street, which was connected to the bay through a narrow canal. That canal had been deepened considerably, to accommodate the pleasure crafts hoisted above it in boat lifts. The seawalls, too, had been raised a few extra feet. Lining both sides now were huge Italianate mansions, most likely the fruits of permissible criminality. Part of me wanted to say to my friends: You shoulda seen this place back when! But I knew better.

  I told Noah to lift his oars out of the water. I wanted to shoot a scene. Delicately, I turned in the raft.

  KENT

  (gesturing to canal sides)

  Being American has always meant being in headlong flight from the world you have made. Being American has always meant trying to outrun the past, outrun history, in order to find someplace new to experiment with the idea of the good. And where, pray tell, has America turned last to run to?

  We tied the raft to a dock ladder. As he took his turn climbing out of the boat basin, Glenn said, “You know how it takes eight minutes for sunlight to reach the earth? And how if the sun stopped exploding, we wouldn’t know for eight minutes?” Noah passed him a bag of gear. “I feel like this place is living in those eight minutes.”

  Ashore, I could hardly recognize the neighborhood. Gone were the sagging old Grove homes, the raised wooden ones built to catch and funnel sea breezes. Every second ho
use was some garish architectural portmanteau. Palms had been planted; the seepage improved; the scrub cleared. It appeared as if the members of the neighborhood association had agreed (if they agreed on anything) that “unrepentant” was the only way to go out.

  “Hey!” I said as we toured the neighborhood. “They drained the field where one of my neighbors got stabbed to death by his lover!”

  And of course Glenn is right. Of course time’s up. The light is dying, as it must. And yet. As always—yet. Hobbling around this gilded cul-de-sac—blue-and-gold macaws crowing overhead—the salt of the rising tide recalling the taste of blood and tears—I’m home. I’m home, where I have no lasting home. The light is dying—and yet this is the light by which I see everything else.

  I backpedaled, my arms thrown wide.

  I am radiating the calm and unconscious double movement of love, taking it in and giving it away in turn. I am inspired.

  We reached the plot of land that used to contain my house. My folks sold it a few years ago when they themselves got the hell out of Miami. They didn’t need Wanless’s maps to apprise them of what decades’ worth of flash floods and storm surges had already made clear. They dealt to our next-door neighbors, Yankee Strangers who lorded over a high, fortified keep they’d built atop an old orange grove. Upon closing, those neighbors promptly demolished our hurricane-damaged home.

  And did little with the lot in the intervening years, I saw. It was, in fact, the only vacant lot remaining in the neighborhood. The pool had been filled in. Tasteful vegetation imported and planted. Judging from the sculptures, cocktail tables, and strings of vintage bulbs threaded through the big oak that once sheltered the driveway, those neighbors had turned my childhood home into spillover space for their many soirees. They fundraise for the Clintons, you know, my dad used to whisper while peeping through parted blinds. I didn’t believe him then, but I guess I do now.

  I took this as an affront at first, standing there, my soul aching like an old wound in bad weather. My history has been razed so that moneyed others could have their walled garden?

  While Glenn and Noah trespassed to get poignant B-roll, I stewed. But the more I stewed, the more ambivalent I came to feel. At least there’s no parvenu Versailles here, right?

  I check the TILTING STONE MAILBOX in front of the lot. Stuffed inside is faded, water-bloated mail, some of it for me.

  ME

  (to self)

  I am absolutely telling the Internal Revenue Service that this is my new address.

  ME (CONT’D)

  (to Glenn, Noah, and camera)

  In the Land of Good Living, let’s call it. It’ll be half Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, half American Movie. It will capture the state that swung the presidential election. It will capture the swamp of self-creation that, for better or worse, leads the nation the way a jutting thermometer leads the infirm.

  ME (CONT’D)

  There will be unintentional humor. Oh, yes. Laugh at us all you want. There will also be wistfulness, fabulism, history. There needs to be history. But it will not be history for history’s sake. It will be history that makes clear Florida isn’t just Weird America—it is Impending America. The further south we walk, the further along the United States’ narrative arc we travel. We move from the stagnant Panhandle, where the worst fears of antebellum whites still obtain. We pass through Central Florida, where there is sprawling modern “civilization,” of a kind. We wind up in majority-minority, wildly unequal, hilariously corrupt, vapid, gorgeous, climate-change-doomed South Florida, where the shallowness serves to reflect the future like a scrying glass.

  ME (CONT’D)

  There will of course be set pieces. Quote, unquote colorful characters. There will also be philosophical digressions. On, like, Publix supermarket sandwiches. Alligators and plume birds. The bankrupt tradition of Romantic walking narratives. The nature and destiny of Man.

  GLENN (O.S.)

  On freedom. The state of freedom! Because who’s freer than us?

  ME

  Now you’re getting it. It seems to me not unimaginable but inevitable that the next great American novel won’t be about America, exactly, and won’t exactly be a novel, either.

  I took my friends to my favorite stretch of seawall along the bay, where the sun was primed to set. Fifty yards distant, birds were diving and skipjacks flitting out of the water. While prepping for our next shot, I scribbled a note: I am feeling homesick at home, and this is the feeling that marks me as a Floridian, and an American, and a human being on this earth.

  We stared out at the sea dazzle. The sky went striated with lines of pink, purple, white, and blue.

  “I guess this is it,” Noah said.

  “I think it is safe to say that we failed in making a documentary that lived up to the one we envisioned,” Glenn said. “The stresses of actually walking everywhere proved too difficult.”

  Noah picked up and frisbeed a leftover terra-cotta tile into the bay.

  I take a few theatrically deep breaths, hold them, exhale them slowly.

  ME

  And yet. What if. What if instead we chose to say Fuck that! and pushed on anyway?

  NOAH

  (voice-over voice)

  Florida: You have one choice—don’t choose this.

  The light smoldered along the horizon line. We watched it while standing on grass from Bermuda, in the deepening shade of a Brazilian peppertree hung with Mexican vine. Off in the distance: the man-made fantasy island of Miami Beach, where the condos are built with flight capital and the white sand regularly trucked in from quarries. Whatever the real once was—it has been superseded.

  Most everything on this peninsula is destined to reappear as simulation. That’s our lone industry: transforming Florida into “Florida.” Make-believe—we do it to survive down here. We think up novel ways to excite cupidity and incite belief. Make you believe; make each other believe; make ourselves believe. Like the very best marketers and confidence artists, we work to destroy the distance between the fantasy and the person who might consume the fantasy. Friend.

  That’s the thing about the Florida Dream. That’s what greases the grift: Its inherent dishonesty and exploitative nature indict you, too. There are no innocents here. Only individuals who wanted waterfront property for pennies on the dollar. Who wanted a consequenceless good time in the sunshine. Who wanted, what? A second home, a retirement paradise, a tax shelter. A duty-free getaway, a noplace without a no, a blank canvas for the unencumbered will.

  You can’t cheat an honest man, as the confidence artist says. The wizened mark—the Floridian—understands this.

  “You know,” I said. “Those used cars in Little Havana were, what—five hundred bucks?”

  “The car, bro,” Noah said. “I been telling you.”

  “Think about it,” I said. “It’s all fresh right now. We know what we need to go and do. To make it what we wished it was in the first place.”

  “We’re already here,” Glenn said, warming to the idea. “We won’t have to buy you a mullet wig like we will in six months’ time.”

  “A fucking do-over,” Noah said.

  “Print this—”

  ME

  You gotta understand: Florida exists in the future continuous tense. Florida will be a personal paradise, yours to own as soon as we fill in this hellish bog. Florida will be growing in perpetuity, so long as we keep persuading suckers to move here. Florida will be saved from the water by the same selfish, manipulative energies that made her, God willing.

  I shake my hair onto my shoulders as I turn to look past the lens.

  ME

  So how do we tell the true Florida story? By revising it. Continuously. Unscrupulously.

  “Let’s get out of here before the crocodiles or the cops come,” Noah s
uggested.

  We got moving once again.

  “History repeats itself, eh?” Glenn said, throwing his arms around Noah and me. “First as tragedy, then as travesty.” Holding us for a few steps, he added, “My wife is going to murder me.”

  “You and me both, brother,” Noah said.

  In the last of the light, I got Glenn to roll film one more time as we approached the guardhouse.

  ME

  What if, for the log line, we go with something like…

  ME (CONT’D)

  “If you’re willing to suspend your disbelief—”

  ME (CONT’D)

  No. How about: “If you’re willing to disregard the sober investment—”

  ME (CONT’D)

  “—in favor of the hyperbolic, the hypothetical, the too good to be true—”

  ME (CONT’D)

  “—well then, friend. I’ve got a swampland to sell you.”

  ME (CONT’D)

  No, wait, better still—

  Time to get fast and loose with the truth.

  Author’s Note

  To the question, “Is this book one hundred percent factual, down to the last syllable?” I answer: This book is about Florida. To write a hundred percent factual book about Florida would be like writing an on-the-level guide to fraud.

  So: some names have been changed. Some chronologies and dialogues have been tweaked. An unreliable narrator has gone somewhere and experienced some things. The preceding is as Florida as can be: the real story built upon the true story.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to everyone who sheltered us, humored us, and avoided us with your car. We’re lucky, and we know it. Thank you to Jim Rutman, Jordan Pavlin, Nicholas Thomson, and all of the fine folks at Knopf.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR