State by State

by Matt Weiland

  “By this time these oil companies had all hired law firms in Delaware and they started really to beat on me. All the unions were upset. How irritated were the unions? The electrical workers union was celebrating its sixtieth anniversary and asked the governor to come and make some comments. It was a great big room, round tables, ten people at each one, except right below the podium was a table for ten with nobody seated there. I wondered what the hell that was for.

  “The president got up to introduce me and said, ‘He’s the one who blocked all these jobs for us down there.’ The crowd booed me and booed me. I got up to make my few remarks and they got up and booed me even harder and then there was a blast of trumpets in the back of the room and in came my opponent for election with nine of his people. The whole crowd jumped up and applauded and those ten marched down and sat at that table right in front of me. That’s hard politics.

  “We had a real knock-down, drag-out battle and we got our bill through the legislature by one vote. The final vote, the records show, was won by more than one vote but the real battle was over an amendment that the oil companies had written. So we won that battle. One vote.

  “When little Delaware started to take on these oil companies, which were a damn problem all over the world, environmental groups in other parts of the world kept watching what was happening in Delaware. The National Audubon Society and the Sierra Club were all watching what was happening here in little Delaware. A month after I signed that bill into law the World Wildlife Fund had its big convention in New York City at the Waldorf-Astoria. They gave me their gold medal and when Prince Bernard of the Netherlands presented that medal he said, ‘This is the first time in the world any community had won such a battle against the oil companies.’

  “Over this item I lost my bid for reelection. The business community worked against me. The very community that played a role in me getting elected. After all, I came from the DuPont company. But I felt comfortable. I was right. I had the conviction, see? Damn do-gooder, they called me. I used to say to groups: ‘Put all the people in the world in three piles. The do-nothingers over here, the do-badders over there, and the do-gooders.’ I know what pile I want to be in.”

  I went to Massachusetts at thirteen,” says the Hotel Handyman in downtown Wilmington. He’s seventeen, soft-spoken, and ever present in the building. His hair is pulled back into a tidy ponytail. He painted the walls of the hotel for free as an intern. He fills in at the front desk when they need him. He does dishes in the kitchen when they call out his name. “I was surprised by Massachusetts back then. The streets were longer, the air was different. You get this creamy air in Massachusetts. Some states have got rich air. You get that misty air feeling in Pennsylvania. The air here, people get accustomed to it. Some say pollution, I don’t believe it.

  “The taxes were different in Massachusetts. I didn’t feel too comfortable. Here something is five dollars—cheap. There it’ll be $5.15, or something. It’ll be $6.18. I’m like, huh? I’m like, I’m going back to Wilmington. I’m going to buy a Big Mac in Wilmington.

  “Here’s my phrase: ‘Wilmington always has a hold on you.’ You may leave but you come back. You live a sweeter life here. I’ve lived here all my seventeen years. Mom moved from Puerto Rico. She’d heard about it from foreigners. People on vacation said they were from Wilmington. My dad went to college and spent thirty-four years at DuPont. Those were his golden years. They gave him good work. Dad got a house, got everything going. I thought about DuPont, but they said they wanted a degree or a high-school diploma. I’m getting that. I’m a GED—in Delaware they call it a Good Enough Diploma.

  “I do maintenance but I’m also doing music. The music’s about putting Delaware on the map. It’s about telling it as it is here, about the parties but about the place economically as well. You’ve got Westside on 4th Street. That’s the Hispanic street. They pervade over there. Riverside—guys trying to be big shots. Northside—they rap about how fresh they are. It’s about making money. You hear people say I can get money by hustling. Sure, you can make money by hustling but here you get more money from work because it’s more secure. We got big banks here. We’ve got people here rapping about a stable job. If anyone it’ll be me rapping about sales tax. If I’m rich I would not move out because of taxes, see? I wouldn’t have to.

  “I’ve got a lot more motivation these days,” the Hotel Handyman says. “Because I’ve got a baby on the way. I can’t wait to hold that baby. I’ve been saving money like crazy. I got a bank account now. It’s hard for a seventeen-year-old to get a bank account in other states. In Delaware I got an account like no problem. It’s smooth. The management is nice. I met my girl at elementary school and I’ve been with her on and off since we were ten. She’s been by my side. At first I was like, a baby? Man. But now I’m saving. I’m looking toward the light.”

  FLORIDA

  CAPITAL Tallahassee

  ENTERED UNION 1845 (27th)

  ORIGIN OF NAME From the Spanish Pascua Florida, meaning “Feast of Flowers” (Easter)

  NICKNAME SunshineState

  MOTTO “In God We Trust”

  RESIDENTS Floridian or Floridan

  U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 25

  STATE BIRD mockingbird

  STATE FLOWER orange blossom

  STATE TREE sabal (or cabbage) palm

  STATE SONG “Suwannee River”

  LAND AREA 53,927 sq. mi.

  GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Hernando Co., 12 mi. NNW of Brooksville

  POPULATION 17,789,864

  WHITE 78.0%

  BLACK 14.6%

  AMERICAN INDIAN 0.3%

  ASIAN 1.7%

  HISPANIC/LATINO 16.8%

  UNDER 18 22.8%

  65 AND OVER 17.6%

  MEDIAN AGE 38.7

  FLORIDA

  Joshua Ferris

  We came down to Florida from Danville, Illinois, in 1985 on the matrimonial whim of my mother and stepfather. She had three kids, the youngest just over a year old, while he’d been a bachelor for half a dozen years. Freeze-frame on the two of them feeding each other wedding cake, then cut to a U-Haul without air conditioning and the white Volkswagen behind it leaving small-town USA for Key West, where Dennis had been hired by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to work narcotics. They are still married today, but I believe the full impact of what he’d done hit him for the first time only when we made that trip together full of bicker and demands, the hot wind blasting through the open windows of our U-Haul. We did not know much about bladder control and my stepfather is a man who likes to drive straight through.

  Anyone who knows Dennis knows he is law enforcement through and through, but before hitting US 1, where the massive stucco seashell warehouses, the fishing resorts, and roadside bars of the Florida Keys begin, I knew so little about him that it would not have come as a surprise if he had stopped at a Texaco, emerged from the men’s room with newly dyed hair, and returning to the U-Haul told me to call him Breaker.

  We knew nothing about Florida living. One of our first hurricanes taught us that quickly enough. You know the shaky-camera footage of palms bent in half by the wind and street signs pulled out of the ground and water coming fast down the street. We watched such a show from our front windows. When it was over, my sister and brother and I went out and played in floodwaters three feet deep. We swam in the street as if it were a swimming pool. The storm had passed and an eerie stillness had taken hold of the air. I couldn’t make sense of the charged but breathless atmospherics as the bruised skies hovered overhead like the end of days. Calm prevailed absolutely. My mother supervised while we played and swam in those dubious waters. No one joined us. Not a soul emerged from the neighboring houses to assess the damage or sigh with relief. We continued to play when the rain and wind started up again. Finally, a man came out of his house and shouted across the street to my mom.

  “You know it’s the eye, right?”

  “The eye?”

  “Of the hurricane.”

&
nbsp; She hurried us inside just as another two hours of battering winds and swift waters out of the Caribbean resumed their assault.

  Our house on Cudjoe Key was elevated on stilts to protect against such flooding. It was essentially a three-bedroom apartment pitched twenty feet in the air. I was spellbound at first sight of it, a typical frame house magically elevated into the treetops. And our backyard terminated with a canal that ran out to the bay. To give a rural boy his own body of water is to give him the grace necessary, at least in part, to forgive the adults responsible for relocating him. The canal was unwalled and tree lined, fifteen feet deep and sludge bottomed, the water amber colored and scummy with white flotsam, really ugly. I jumped in every day. I didn’t care that jellyfish stung my body up and down. Standing at the boat ramp, I fished the canal and caught snapper and grouper and an evil-looking mother called the toadfish I didn’t even bother taking off the hook. When I caught a toadfish I just cut the line. I would have tossed the whole pole in before touching a toadfish. I canoed out to the bay. I snorkeled practically the entire coast of the Gulf of Mexico. I paddled under the bridge and later when I had saved enough to buy a small motorboat I raced across the blue shallows. I camped in historic forts. Dennis knew members of the Coast Guard who ferried us seventy miles west to the Dry Tortugas, where we stayed three days, parched from lack of planning and eaten alive by no-see-ums. My friend Michael Jones and I once saw in the distance a blue shark thrashing hard in the sand after the tide had receded; it was bigger than our eight-foot canoe. Michael jumped into the water to drag the canoe toward the shark because he thought in the shallows that was faster than paddling, and we were just dense and wild enough to think we could land an agitated shark from a canoe with line and reel. I sailed on schooners and I swam with dolphins. I tickled lobster out of holes regardless of eels. I came eye to eye with a man-sized barracuda in water so clear I could count its teeth. With my friends I egged cars on US 1 and then dove into the canals to elude the drivers who stopped to chase after us.

  But water leisure 24/7 bored me after a while and I began to mow lawns and pull weeds on behalf of any paying neighbor for three bucks an hour. I collected about twenty clients up and down Cudjoe Key. Some jobs were deathly boring and others were bizarre. My stepbrother and I helped a guy build a private beach on his ocean-front property one summer. He was a cheap bastard who paid us only a buck-fifty an hour to do the Cool Hand Luke labor of shoveling massive quantities of sand from the truck down to his denuded yard and gradually into the water. He thought it would sink and stay, but within three months his quixotic dream had been washed out to sea along with a major investment in sand and Tiki lights and our two months of accumulated buck fifties. You can’t make a beach where the ocean doesn’t want one.

  I started working at a Godfather’s Pizza franchise a few months later. My mom knew the manager. Law enforcement has a hierarchy of its own and includes a code of snobbery. Probation and Parole is often snubbed as chump change in the penal circles, but my mother had taken a job there and she did it with diligence and commitment. Her Volkswagen Jetta was so well known in Bahama Village, a few blocks off Duval where the drugs flow—it’s a short step in Key West from the vendors selling Panama hats made of palm leaves to the vendors selling crack in the daylight—that she couldn’t park down there without having her tires slashed. Her reputation was such among the criminati of Key West that when Judge Fowler went easy and sentenced someone to house arrest, if they knew anything they’d ask, “You gonna make Patty Haley my probation officer?” And when he said he might, they said, “Then just send me to prison.”

  Almost all of her community controlees worked the tourist trade. As part of her job she had to stop in their places of employment to make sure they were where they said they’d be, and in that way she got to know the area restaurant managers and owners. I was paid under the table at Godfather’s to wash dishes on the weekends. By the time a district manager down from Miami paid an unexpected visit, I was preparing ingredients and making the pizzas. So among other violations, the DM found an eleven-year-old pulling pies out of the oven, which we did with a pair of slip-joint pliers. The franchise closed soon after. It’s now a scuba shop.

  Next I worked at The Galley Grill on Summerland Key, one mile-marker east of Cudjoe. Before my shift started, I swept and mopped the floor for an additional five bucks and then I did the dishes in the kitchen next to a bulky ex-hockey fanatic turned biker named Charlie who didn’t appreciate my company. He came and went on a Harley and kept his long hair in bandannas. He tolerated me enough to teach me how to properly peel and fillet a shrimp and how to cook a killer scampi.

  The owners of The Galley Grill were a married couple. I remember little about them. They, too, paid me under the table. I was in love with their middle daughter who worked nights as a waitress. When she came into the kitchen with dirty dishes I tried looking down her blouse as she bent to the sink and my success rate was high because she wore loose clothes with no bra, which is pretty standard dress code for the Keys.

  The walk to The Galley Grill from our house was a mile of mangroves along a steep dropoff from US 1 so that as I walked along I could hardly see the passing cars. I stumbled on a man once taking advantage of this obscurity to masturbate in his car. I startled him as I approached and he startled me. I saw a flash of some pornographic rag as he frantically tried to zip up. I started running and he gunned the car and roared up the slope.

  Eventually the daily drive into Key West became too taxing on my mom and Dennis and we moved off Cudjoe, which put The Galley Grill out of reach and I had to quit. But living on the island itself expanded my options. I started working for a place called The Eatery, which had a popular breakfast buffet. We ate there after church sometimes, depending on how well we’d endured the sermon.

  What had been a beachhead hosting a steamship pier in the Gulf of Mexico was by 1985 the setting for a breakfast hotspot for tourists at the southern end of Duval. By then the beach had been reduced by condos and hotels to a small strip of sand that hardly deserved an official name, nevertheless called South Beach. Diners happily looked upon this sandbox and thought it paradise.

  The Eatery’s owners were a husband and wife named Bill and Gail. Bill had a bulbous gut on a very skinny frame, so bulbous and independent of the rest of his body it seemed he should be able to detach it and set it on the counter next to the cash register. He was rumored to be an alcoholic and never let anyone touch the till, nor did he ever say hello when I arrived on weekend mornings. I showed up at seven and he just looked at me with his full-moon eyes and the darker half-moon bags under them. I went in back, put on an apron, and took a broom out to the flagstones in front of the restaurant. Overnight the sand had drifted up and the departing tide left a curvy line of brackish seaweed on the beach. The light was still dim at seven and so I might find two beach bums not yet run off by Bill, having sex under a palm. I’d hardly sweep the flagstones for watching them; I was twelve and that was the Big Show. But half the time as the light came up I’d discover it was just two men and lose interest. When I came in from sweeping, Bill sent me out for café con leche some Cubans sold out of a shack down the street.

  When he warmed up to me, Bill showed me his Taser gun. The two blue electric pincers looked innocuous enough, but their terrible sound when triggered implied the worst possible death. “Know what this is?” he asked. “Know how many times I’ve been broken into? More than forty times. Count that,” he demanded. “Forty.” If he caught someone breaking in again, his plan was to torture and kill them. “This isn’t the half of what I’d use,” he said ominously.

  During tourist season the morning rush at The Eatery ended around two in the afternoon. Then the waitresses sat for the first time in six hours in a small covey of two-tops half partitioned by latticework. They smoked and counted their tips, stacks of ones a foot high and much smaller stacks of fives and tens.

  Hazel was an old hippie with a bitter edge and wicked laugh who u
sed to describe her acid trips to me. She looked her age, which was probably forty, but a hard, used forty, the sort of forty that says no dental insurance, terrible luck with men, estranged children, and dogs waiting for her at home. She taught me over and above anything else that a long drag on a Camel at the waitress station can make heading back to the dining room with a coffee pot somehow bearable. I visited her at home once for a reason I can no longer remember and found her sunbathing on a cheap chaise longue, and while I was not attracted to her much, my pubescent urges begged her to seduce me.

  Rhonda was more maternal. She called me sweetie or honey and offered a world-weary smile that seemed to strive for something grander. Her body was plumply huggable. It had an expansiveness that seemed to invite anyone in need to nuzzle her bosom in a nonsexual way. I never had any Hazel-like fantasies about Rhonda. A small mole, red as a ruby, was set in the curve of her cheek. She was alone in providing for her two young kids.

  Billy Ray was the only waiter. He could not have weighed more than a hundred pounds and ten of that was mustache. He was rumored to be dying of AIDS. When he came out of the closet, he turned around and burned the closet. He sexually harassed me, as it can only be described, in an over-the-top, John Waters sort of way, with lewd innuendo and outright propositions, but then he did this sort of thing to everyone, including Rhonda and Hazel and even Bill, who responded only by staring in silent revulsion. This taught me pity. Billy Ray told crude jokes about fags. This taught me tolerance.