Best. State. Ever.

by Dave Barry

  We do that for a while, Judy hearing my parents telling me that they’re happy being dead and they love me, me hearing static. Finally, mercifully, our session ends. I pay Judy and leave with the piece of paper on which she has written notes about canisters, placement, etc.

  As I walk away, I find myself thinking about my parents. They both had excellent senses of humor, and they would have been immensely entertained by the Spirit Box. So I guess in a way Judy did connect me with them. It was totally worth $60.

  I spend the next hour walking around the Spiritualist Camp, which is actually picturesque, consisting mostly of older wooden buildings. It reminds me a little of Key West, if Key West was inhabited by mediums and spirits instead of drunk people and even drunker people. It’s a beautiful day, but even in bright sunshine Cassadaga has a creepy vibe. It’s very quiet and I see zero children. There are signs everywhere reminding you that the main industry here is death.

  I leave the camp and head over to the psychic side of the street, which is a little more lively. I pass a store with a sign that says WE HAVE GHOST HUNTING EQUIPMENT, then see a place called the Purple Rose, which offers, among many other services, psychic pet readings.

  I go inside, where a psychic I will call Rev. Janet (the Purple Rose psychics use “Rev.”) tells me she can do the reading from a photograph. She says this will cost $25. I pay her—the Purple Rose takes credit cards—then find a picture of my dog, Lucy, on my mobile phone. I hand the phone to Rev. Janet, who puts it on a machine that takes a photo of the photo and produces a Polaroid-like print of Lucy with weird colors around her head, representing her aura.

  Rev. Janet leads me into an office, where we sit. She looks at Lucy’s aura photo and tells me what it reveals about her. Here are her observations:

  “She’s very spiritual.”

  “She’s very smart.”

  “She loves her owners very much.”

  “She doesn’t like being alone.”

  “She’s got a lot of passion and energy.”

  In short, to summarize what Lucy’s aura reveals, as seen by a professional in the psychic field: Lucy is a dog.

  After several minutes, Rev. Janet starts looking behind me, the same way Judy the medium did.

  “There’s an older woman,” she says. “Is your mother alive?”

  I answer no.

  “Well, she’s here right now,” says Rev. Janet. “And she loves this dog.”

  My mom is all over Cassadaga.

  Rev. Janet tells me that Lucy and my mom are great friends. “Your mother comes to visit the dog late at night. She plays with the dog from the other side.”

  I am frankly surprised by this. The only game Lucy likes to play is the one where she prances up to you with a filthy, saliva-soaked chew toy in her mouth and you—pretending that you find this disgusting thing as desirable as she does—make a halfhearted grab for it, and she prances away, victorious. This does not strike me as an activity that my mom would visit a dog nightly to engage in.

  Of course, I’m no psychic.

  I leave the Purple Rose and head back to the hotel. I have dinner in the hotel restaurant, a friendly Italian place called Sinatra’s, with decent food, a genial older crowd and a piano player doing Billy Joel tunes.

  After dinner, I go back out for a stroll. It’s dark now and the streets are deserted. I’m the only person walking around. It is extremely quiet. Cassadaga is definitely creepier at night. I’m reassured by the thought that my mom is around to protect me from the other spirits. Unless, of course, she’s down in Miami battling Lucy for the chew toy.

  I wander down the street to the Spiritualist Camp church, which is called the Colby Memorial Temple. I stand in the open doorway, looking in. There are a couple dozen people seated at the front of the church, attending a mediumship class conducted by a man with a hypnotic voice. He’s telling them to picture themselves on a pathway with flowers on both sides. He wants them to decide what flowers to pick. It’s very relaxing, listening to this man. He’s making me realize something, something that I have been denying, but something that I now must face: I’m sleepy.

  I walk back to the Hotel Cassadaga, which at night has lighting that gives it an even spookier aura.

  I pass by the lobby skeleton and enter the creepy hallway with evil entities possibly lurking behind the doors. I quickly enter Room 2 and close the door. I have to leave early tomorrow morning, so I decide to take a shower tonight. I go into the bathroom and look at the bathtub:

  No way am I getting in there. I have seen Psycho multiple times and I am not going to run the risk that I will be standing behind that shower curtain, naked and unarmed, when an evil entity bursts in and stabs me to death or—worse—tosses a lobster at me. I decide to shower in the morning.

  I place my wallet and keys on the dresser, plug my phone into the charger, undress, get into bed and, lulled by the gentle 140 mph breeze from the window air conditioner thirty inches from my head, quickly fall into a deep sleep.

  I wake early the next morning, feeling refreshed. I get out of bed, stretch and glance over toward the dresser. Suddenly, I notice something: My wallet and keys are exactly where I left them. So either the spirits decided not to move them or—we cannot rule this out—they moved them and then moved them back.

  Either way, they have toyed with me enough. I shower quickly in the Death Tub, dress, pack, check out and get into my rental car. At this hour, Cassadaga is even quieter than usual. There’s not a living soul around.

  And then, as I drive away from the hotel through the empty streets, it happens: I hear a voice. I swear this is the truth. The voice is speaking directly to me, guiding me. It is telling me to proceed on the path that I am on and then, in 1.5 miles, to turn left.

  I obey the voice, because it’s coming from the GPS. I do not understand how it works, but I believe in it. It gets me out of Cassadaga.

  I don’t mean to knock Cassadaga: It’s a nice, creepy little town. If that’s what you’re looking for, by all means you should visit, maybe spend a night at the Cassadaga Hotel. Ask for Room 2: It’s windy, but the spirits are reasonable. Be sure to say hi to my mom.

  THE VILLAGES

  I’m driving north on the Florida Turnpike on a quest to find the Fountain of Youth.

  Not literally, of course. The Fountain of Youth is purely mythical, like the Easter Bunny, or edible vegan food. My destination is a real place, a place where—if the stories are true—you can lead a wild, carefree and passionate lifestyle, possibly involving sex, even if you are a really, really old person, defined as “a person my age.”

  What is this place? It’s called The Villages. It’s the world’s largest retirement community and the fastest-growing city in the United States; it now has 115,000 residents, more than double what it had in 2010.

  The Villages has received a lot of publicity in recent years because of the supposed wild swinging lifestyles led by some residents. Here, for example, is the headline of a Daily Mail story written after a widely publicized 2014 incident in which a sixty-eight-year-old married woman resident of The Villages was caught having sex in one of the community’s public squares with a forty-nine-year-old man who was not, if you want to get technical, her husband:

  Ten women to every man, a black market in Viagra, and a “thriving swingers scene”: Welcome to The Villages, Florida, where the elderly residents down Sex on the Square cocktail in “honor” of woman, 68, arrested for public sex with toyboy

  Around the same time BuzzFeed ran a feature about The Villages, calling it “a notorious boomtown for boomers who want to spend their golden years with access to 11 a.m. happy hours, thousands of activities, and no-strings-attached sex.”

  Just about every feature story written about The Villages sooner or later—usually sooner—brings up sex, Viagra and the alleged increase in STDs among the residents. Writers, especially younger writer
s, tend to get freaked out by the concept of old people doing it.

  The legend of wild times at The Villages got started with the 2008 book Leisureville by Andrew Blechman. It’s actually a well-researched, serious work that raises important issues involving aging, retirement and the concept of communities that don’t allow children to be residents. But what everybody remembers about Leisureville is a chapter about the sexual exploits of a retired biology teacher known as Mr. Midnight, which is the nickname he gave to his penis.

  In the book, Mr. Midnight (the man, not the penis) is quoted as saying: “What you’ve got to understand is that there are at least ten women here to every guy. And they’re all hot and horny. It’s wonderful.”

  Far be it from me to correct a former biology teacher, but it turns out that Mr. Midnight’s gender ratio for The Villages is a bit off: It’s more like ten women to every nine guys. As for the abundant availability of sex, I will tell you later what I found out about that. (Spoiler Alert: Nothing.)

  But getting back to my quest. To reach The Villages, I get off the turnpike at the Wildwood (Ha!25) exit, where I stop briefly at the Florida Citrus Center, a store that sells all kinds of things that tourists need, including T-shirts and baby alligators. I’m stopping because I want to take a picture of my all-time favorite Florida tourism sign:

  How many times have you said to yourself, “I want to buy a gator head, but I also want to buy wind chimes, and I don’t want to make two stops”? Me, too. That’s why I’m glad to know that the Florida Citrus Center is there for me.

  I resume driving and soon enter The Villages, where if you tried to put up a sign like the one at the Florida Citrus Center, you would be executed without trial by officers of the Homeowners Association. The Villages—which covers thirty-two square miles spread over three counties—is very, very orderly. The houses are all one-story, all colored some shade of light beige or light gray and all subject to many strict rules regarding decorations and landscaping. The houses are set close together on a vast network of streets with the kinds of made-up names that people come up with when they’re writing bad novels or need a bunch of street names in a hurry—Barksdale Drive, Intrepid Terrace, Paisley Way, Nautilus Lane, Whisper Street, etc.

  Everything—the houses, the yards, the streets, the sidewalks—is uniform in appearance and well maintained. There’s no litter, no graffiti, no commercial signs, no sketchy individuals walking around. In fact, there’s not a lot of walking: Most people are driving, and many of them are driving golf carts. The Villages has more than sixty thousand golf carts; there are special roads, tunnels and service stations for them, and many residents use them almost exclusively to get around. They love their golf carts, in The Villages; people spend thousands and thousands of dollars customizing them. In The Villages, your golf cart, unlike your house, can reflect the real, unique you.

  I arrive at my hotel, the Waterfront Inn, which is in Lake Sumter Landing, one of The Villages’ three commercial areas or “Town Squares.” There are some people checking out a charity Christmas decoration auction in the lobby. Nobody appears to be having sex.

  I check in, then head back out, driving to another Town Square, called Spanish Springs, which has a Spanish architectural theme. Each of the squares has a theme, kind of like Disney’s Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, Frontierland, etc., except instead of rides there are stores and restaurants. The buildings were all built recently, but in pretend old-fashioned style. Weirdly—at least, I find it weird—many of them have “historic plaques” out front on which are written elaborate, made-up histories about the made-up people who lived in this building decades ago, when neither the building nor the town existed.

  Fake historic plaque.

  Don’t get me wrong: Spanish Springs is nice. But it’s nice in the way Disney’s Main Street, U.S.A., is nice. Nice, but fake.

  Standing in a fountain next to the square is a statue of the Founding Father of The Villages, Harold Schwartz.

  Schwartz began what ultimately became The Villages as a mobile-home park in the 1970s. It was a modest endeavor until the early 1980s, when Schwartz brought in his son, H. Gary Morse, an advertising executive; together, they began to create a new kind of development. Instead of selling mobile-home lots, they started building an entire community—not just homes, but also stores, restaurants, swimming pools and golf courses. Many golf courses. They sold a lifestyle to retirees, and it was a nice lifestyle, safe and convenient and fun, and people loved it. The Villages grew like crazy, becoming increasingly upscale; the Schwartz/Morse family became very, very rich.

  Both Schwartz and Morse have died, but the family—people capitalize it, The Family—still tightly controls The Villages and still owns just about everything except the private homes. Critics of The Family see it as secretive and sinister, but most residents of The Villages seem pretty happy with the way things run.

  Every night, in all three of the Town Squares, there is live music. People come to listen, dance and—this is one area in which The Villages is far superior to Disney—drink alcoholic beverages sold from booths at reasonable prices. When I arrive in Spanish Springs, some older musicians (defined as “musicians who are probably younger than I am”) are setting up on a bandstand. They’re called the Caribbean Chillers and they go on at 5. It’s a cool night, but already a nice crowd is gathering, a couple hundred people. They’re taking green plastic chairs from stacks and arranging them around the bandstand. This is a nightly ritual.

  I head to an alcohol booth—I’m the only customer—and order a glass of wine. The bartender looks at his watch and tells me that the two-for-one happy hour starts in twelve minutes, at 5 p.m.

  “Is that what everybody’s waiting for?” I ask.

  “They always do,” he says.

  I tell him I want to start being happy now, so I pay $5 and he pours a generous amount of wine into a plastic cup. I sip my wine and study the crowd. It’s mostly couples, dressed casually; almost everybody’s wearing shorts or jeans, sneakers or sandals. Most of them are sitting on their green plastic chairs, patiently waiting for the music to start. Nobody appears to be having sex. Maybe they do that during happy hour.

  At 5 p.m. sharp, the Caribbean Chillers, who are basically a Jimmy Buffett clone band, launch into their first song, a mellow country tune. There’s not much reaction from the crowd. That changes on the second song, which, you will be shocked to learn, is “Margaritaville.” Immediately, people are up and dancing.

  It turns out that residents of The Villages really like to dance. It’s like being at a wedding or bar mitzvah when the DJ puts on some ancient Boomer favorite like “Sweet Home Alabama” and all the older people, all the aunts and uncles, swarm the floor and start lurching around while the young people watch from the sidelines and snicker. Except that here in The Villages, there are no young people, and nobody is snickering. Nobody here cares at all how you dance. This is one of the nicest things about The Villages.

  The predominant style of dancing is what I would describe as “White Person.” There are three main types of White Person dancers:

  People performing random freestyle moves such as you would have seen in a disco in 1973. This is how I dance.26 You see some of this at The Villages, but you see more of the other two types.

  Couples who took dance lessons and are faithfully executing the steps they learned. These couples tend to dance with serious expressions, as if they are carrying out a set of instructions required to complete a two-person task, such as installing drapes.

  Line dancers. This is by far the largest group. Line dancing is big in The Villages. And I’m not just talking about your simple line dances, such as your Electric Slide. I’m talking about elaborate line dances, complex, multi-step routines that you have to practice before you get out there in the mass of people all moving together, frowning, looking down at their feet, as they run through the steps in their heads: . . . two three now rock fo
rward now back now turn two three now kick and left slide two three now . . .

  The Caribbean Chillers play some more Jimmy Buffett. More people are arriving on their golf carts and lining up for two-for-one drinks. A lot of people are dancing. I watch an elegant-looking, tastefully dressed woman—I’m guessing late sixties, early seventies—walk up to the bandstand, set her purse down next to it and start dancing. She’s a good dancer, fluid and graceful. She does a series of moves from the sixties—the Twist, the Jerk, the Swim—all by herself. The song finishes; she picks up her purse and walks back to her green plastic chair.

  It occurs to me, sipping my wine, that back in the late sixties, when I played in a rock band27 at Haverford College, I might have seen this very woman, or some of these other dancers, gyrating in the strobe light as we belted out anthems of youthful rebellion:

  People try to put us d-down / Just because we get around . . .

  Maybe long ago, behind some gym or fraternity house when my band was taking a break, I even shared a joint with some of these people. And now here we are, nearly fifty years later, talkin’ ’bout my generation, drinking reasonably priced wine and getting around in golf carts.

  At least we’re still dancing.

  The Caribbean Chillers finish another song. The lead singer says, “We’re rockin’ right here, Spanish Springs.” Then the band kicks into “Mustang Sally.” This is a great dancing song, and the Caribbean Chillers are nailing it. A large line dance forms in front of the bandstand. But my eye is drawn to one man who is not part of the line; he’s all alone in front of the bandstand, where the elegant woman was. He’s bald and large. He’s wearing a striped shirt tucked into voluminous shorts, held up by suspenders. He’s dancing like an absolute wild man, spinning, waving his arms around, doing karate moves and being exuberant and just generally not giving any kind of a shit. He’s wonderful. I am falling in love with this man from afar.