Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  One night Henry thought he’d finally found his angle. He guessed he could hold his breath a minute, maybe a minute and a half, and he made twenty-six trips into a split-level being tented for termites off Northlake Boulevard. He carted away enough electronics, silverware and jewelry to last them six months. The next morning Serge found Henry mottled on the living room sofa, eyes and mouth agape from a fatal dose of methyl bromide that curled his arms and legs like a dried-up lizard in the garage.

  By now, Serge’s behavior had its own signature. Everything with him was an on-off switch; there was no volume control. Half his grades were A’s, the other half F’s. He began to hang at the Palm Beach Mall. As people walked out of a bookstore, he’d punch them in the stomach and step back in detachment to study the effect.

  This last quirk resulted in Serge being classified as criminally insane by the Palm Beach County Health Department. Serge’s attention-deficit disorder was the first of many hyphens. Obsessive-compulsive, manic-depressive, anal-retentive, paranoid-schizophrenic. He was believed to have been the only self-inflicted case of shaken-baby syndrome.

  Some of the same dysfunctions also made Serge animated, charming, entertaining and sporadically brilliant. Serge was the star of his high school drama club, playing Death in a Woody Allen production. He decided to master the free throw through Zen and five hundred practice shots a day. He set a conference record for consecutive shots, lost interest and quit the basketball team midseason. He was a voracious reader and technologically inclined, with a gadget fetish. He became expert in varied subjects by stalking librarians, teachers, toll-free operators and any other resource with an unending line of questions. Until he obsessed on another subject.

  He became fascinated with the space program, the minting of U.S. coins, submarine warfare, Chinese table-tennis technique, masonry, cryptography, literature of the counterculture. And Florida. The full range of native interests, flora and fauna, art, history, culture, anything.

  After graduating from Suncoast High School in Riviera Beach, he became a world-class drywaller, which paid no more than the ones who smoked joints at lunch. Other than the occasional beer, Serge eschewed drugs and alcohol, not from piety but because they made him berserk. If Serge wanted a recreational drug experience, he would skip taking his Prozac, Zoloft, Elavil and lithium.

  This usually resulted in brief incarcerations for petty mayhem, vandalism and unexplained acts of psychosis like putting on a top hat and tails and shooting up a cemetery.

  As Serge moved into the adult correctional system, a series of underpaid psychiatrists listened to his emerging Florida aesthetic. He launched torrid bursts about the Everglades photography of Clyde Butcher, the written body of Rawlings, Douglas and MacDonald, and the vernacular architecture of crackers. Flipper and Gentle Ben were state treasures.

  Serge would typically arrive at a friend’s house. After five minutes he still hadn’t sat down. “Can I get some water? I need to use the phone. Mind if I change the channel?” Pacing hard. “Where’s your newspaper? Let’s make some coffee. My legs are hot—do you have some shorts I can borrow? I gotta split.”

  One doctor told Serge that he was longing for his mother and seeking the womblike Florida of his childhood.

  Serge mentally aimed a .44 Magnum at the doctor and blew a black-purple hole the diameter of a nickel in his forehead. The doctor asked what Serge was thinking. Serge told him. The doctor spilled hot coffee in his lap. He ran into the hall screaming and grabbing between his legs. Three guards ran into the room and promptly beat Serge with rubber truncheons.

  Psychiatrists controlled Serge, early, with Ritalin, then tricyclics, and later said screw this incrementalism and loosed the spectrum of psychotropic drugs.

  What couldn’t be explained or excused was his unmagnetized moral compass. On broad philosophical issues, Serge was compassionate and stridently moral; on a personal level, he was predatory.

  There was never cruelty; Serge’s conscience just seemed to go blank from time to time. His motto could have been Think globally, act criminal locally.

  Serge functioned more or less normally when he stuck to his medicine, which he refused to do as often as possible. He seemed to know just how far to take the system without triggering a lengthy prison stay. The younger psychiatrists thought Serge was harmless and were uniformly fascinated by his verbal tapestries. The older doctors thought he was sick and would end up killing someone. That’s how differently they interpreted the incident on Interstate 75.

  Serge hadn’t taken his lithium and Prozac for two weeks when he woke atop a green information sign over the northbound lanes of I-75 near the Busch Gardens exit. It was morning rush hour, and cops and TV trucks clustered on the shoulder of the highway as Serge awoke to the locomotive in his head. He looked down at the semi whizzing under his feet and had no idea how he had gotten there.

  The police closed down all lanes. Various emergency lights flickered off the green sign. With TV cameras filming, Serge stood up on the light supports, cleared his throat, and began in an evangelical voice:

  “There was no Disney World then, just rows of orange trees. Millions of them. Stretching for miles. And somewhere near the middle was the Citrus Tower, which the tourists climbed to see even more orange trees. Every month an eighty-year-old couple became lost in the groves, driving up and down identical rows for days until they were spotted by helicopter or another tourist on top of the Citrus Tower. They had lived on nothing but oranges and came out of the trees drilled on vitamin C and checked into the honeymoon suite at the nearest bed-and-breakfast.”

  The crowd grew.

  “The Miami Seaquarium put in a monorail and rockets started going off at Cape Canaveral, making us feel like we were on the frontier of the future. Disney bought up everything north of Lake Okeechobee, preparing to shove the future down our throats sideways.

  “Things evolved rapidly! Missile silos in Cuba. Bales on the beach. Alligators are almost extinct and then they aren’t. Juntas hanging shingles in Boca Raton. Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo skinny-dipping off Key Biscayne. We atone for atrocities against the Indians by playing bingo. Shark fetuses in formaldehyde jars, roadside gecko farms, tourists waddling around waffle houses like flocks of flightless birds. And before we know it, we have The New Florida, underplanned, overbuilt and ripe for a killer hurricane that’ll knock that giant geodesic dome at Epcot down the turnpike like a golf ball, a solid one-wood by Buckminster Fuller.”

  Some who had pulled over nodded in assent that Serge had a point. Firemen unfolded a rescue net under the sign.

  “I am the native and this is my home. Faded pastels, and Spanish tiles constantly slipping off roofs, shattering on the sidewalk. Dogs with mange and skateboard punks with mange roaming through yards, knocking over garbage cans. Lunatics wandering the streets at night, talking about spaceships. Bail bondsmen wake me up at three A.M. looking for the last tenant. Next door, a mail-order bride is clubbed by a smelly man in a mechanic’s shirt. Cats violently mate under my windows and rats break-dance in the drop ceiling. And I’m lying in bed with a broken air conditioner, sweating and sipping lemonade through a straw. And I’m thinking, geez, this used to be a great state.”

  There was a scattering of whistles and clapping.

  “You wanna come to Florida? You get a discount on theme-park tickets and find out you just bought a time share. Or maybe you end up at Cape Canaveral, sitting in a field for a week as a space shuttle launch is canceled six times. And suddenly vacation is over, you have to catch a plane, and you see the shuttle take off on TV at the airport. But you keep coming back, year after year, and one day you find you’re eighty years old driving through an orange grove.”

  Serge’s footing slipped and he fell into the firemen’s net. He made all the nightly newscasts. That Friday, one station aired Serge’s speech in its entirety in the weekly editorial slot. They titled it “I, Floridian.” The station sent an agent to the jail to offer Serge a contract for social commentary.
They’d even build him a set. A giant road sign. He’d be “The I-75 Prophet.”

  Serge looked at him and asked, “What happened?”

  Coleman was released two days after Serge and immediately took him up on his invitation to visit. Serge owned an old cigarmaker’s shotgun cottage in Ybor City, vintage 1918. It had been a condemned crack house; Serge had picked it up for one dollar and a promise to restore it, which he did with materials stolen from three Home Depots. He had dry-walled the interior in one psychotic sixty-hour death march that landed him in the hospital taking glucose. At the curb was a rusted-out ’65 Barracuda. Serge loved its wraparound rear window tapering to the trunk. The car had been green but was now brown.

  Coleman walked up the front steps with a suitcase in one hand and a rainbow afro wig in the other.

  Serge met him on the porch and looked at the suitcase. “I said visit, not move in.”

  Coleman looked sad.

  “Okay, but only a few days. You gotta find a place of your own.”

  Serge flopped on the couch and set his bottle of mineral water on the coffee table, a big wooden spool from telephone cable.

  “Make yourself at home,” said Serge. So Coleman drank all of Serge’s beer and grabbed a frozen pizza from Serge’s freezer. He wanted to microwave it for seventy-five seconds but punched seventy-five minutes on the keypad.

  After finishing the last beer in the house, Coleman lost his balance in the bathroom and snapped a towel rod off the wall.

  He dropped Serge’s favorite souvenir glass from the Dolphins’ 1973 Super Bowl. He found a model Saturn rocket from Serge’s childhood and ran through the house making rocket noises, tripped, and fell on it.

  “Sit down on the couch!” Serge ordered. “Don’t move!”

  Coleman sat down, didn’t move. He set a glass of grape juice on the cushion next to him and it tipped over on the upholstery.

  “What the hell is that smell?” Serge said.

  “My pizza’s done,” said Coleman.

  Coleman said he and the rest of the cell pod had watched Serge’s highway speech on the news.

  “I’m secretly a tourist too,” Serge confessed. “The native tourist. I love Florida cheese.”

  It was late Saturday afternoon. Serge was kneeling over his bed, a naked mattress on the floor. He opened a fishing tackle box and removed the contents piece by piece, arranging them in a precise matrix on the mattress.

  “We’ve got nobody to blame if we prostitute ourselves,” said Serge.

  Coleman nodded, making a wrong interpretation. He tried to detect a trend among the items Serge carefully positioned. Plier-head utility knife, Dristan, micro-TV, duct tape, Alka-Seltzer, windproof lighter, halogen flashlight, surveying compass, hemostats, vitamins and analgesics, socket wrenches, Chap Stick, signal mirror, shatterproof flask, funnel, mini-binoculars, tape recorder, a can of Fix-a-Flat, bottle opener, taser, whistle, gizmos, gee-gaws and gimcracks. He placed a second box on the mattress, a large wooden cigar box with dovetail joints. It held matchbooks, imprinted napkins, coasters, postcards and swizzle sticks.

  “The problem isn’t the tourists. It’s the criminal element,” said Serge. “That, and untended mental health problems. We have all these insane armed hobos coming from the Midwest, usually Ohio.”

  Serge sat back on his feet and admired the configuration on the mattress. He began replacing the items, this time in different pockets, drawers and compartments of the tackle box. The box had a row of stickers around the outside from St. Augustine, Thomas Edison’s House, Bok Tower, the Suwanee River, Fort DeSoto and Daytona Beach.

  “What gripes me the most is all the garbage they give us Cubans. All of that ‘Oh my God, we’re being overrun by rafters!’ Hell, we’ve worked hard to help build Key West and Tampa and Miami,” said Serge. “Forget the Marielitos. What about the Ohio-litos?!”

  “Sounds like you’re prejudiced,” said Coleman.

  “Fuck Ohio,” said Serge.

  He flipped down a panel on the outside of the tackle box, revealing a revolver and an automatic pistol held in place with Velcro straps. He removed both, checked the chambers and cleaned them meticulously.

  “Next time you drive around this city, take a good look at the people,” said Serge. “They have room to bitch about tourists? This is trash state U.S.A. We’re in no position to be calling people Philistines.”

  Coleman nodded again without understanding. He fished in his suitcase and came up with a switchblade comb. He showed it to Serge and offered it toward the tackle box. Serge shook his head no.

  “I take it you wanna party tonight,” Serge said, wiping down the guns. Coleman gave him two thumbs up and a giant smile.

  “Okay,” said Serge, washing his hands in the bathroom sink. “I’m gonna give you The Tour.”

  Serge toweled off his hands and washed them again. Then he closed the drain and filled the sink with ice and water. He got in the shower, opened the cold-water handle and danced and yelled in the frigid stream. After three minutes, he turned the knobs as hot as he could stand it, and then a little more. Steam escaped into the hall.

  He jumped out of the shower and slammed his face in the sink of ice water.

  Coleman watched from a chair by the kitchen table.

  “I like to subject myself to rapid temperature changes,” Serge explained. “Makes you feel alive.” Serge washed his hands again and dressed quickly in jeans and a Skipper’s Smokehouse T-shirt. He grabbed a suit bag from the closet and said the magic words to Coleman: “Let’s rock.”

  Serge was close to no one and in love with Florida. For every corner of the state, Serge had a Julie Andrews list of his favorite things—lists that could only be executed all at once in a hyperactive road rally, pinballing from restaurant to museum to monument. That was Serge, every day of his life.

  They got to La Teresita on Columbus Drive. Businessmen sat at the lunch counter trying to keep mounds of saucy food off ties and long-sleeve white dress shirts. There was a constant patter of Spanish. Serge said it was never spoken in his house growing up, but it still sounded like music. He ordered bistec en cazuela and Coleman the arroz con pollo.

  “This is great!” said Coleman with the chicken.

  “Heaven,” said Serge. “But wrap it up, we gotta go.” He knocked back hot Cuban coffee and savored the afterburn like brandy.

  They raced over to the Hub, downtown on Zack Street, which looked like a corner tavern in downtown Chicago in the forties. A horseshoe bar, drinks to drop pachyderms. Eight bohemian college students pushed two tables together; a pair of toothless people necked at the bar.

  “Kill that drink,” Serge said. “We’re on the move.”

  They drove over to Franklin and Platt streets.

  “This was the beginning of Tampa,” said Serge. “They built Fort Brooke here in 1823. It protected the pioneers during the Second Seminole War.”

  Serge started the car again. He crossed the Hills-borough River at the Kennedy Boulevard Bridge and pulled over by the old Tampa Bay Hotel on the University of Tampa campus. The architecture was nineteenth-century Moorish with crescent moons above minarets.

  “This is where Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders waited before heading to free Cuba in the Spanish-American War. The ride up San Juan Hill and all that jazz.”

  Serge opened the trunk and got out a wooden shoeshine box from the thirties. Inside were four clamps, masking tape, a shock of natural sponge, a pencil, camel-hair and synthetic brushes, eleven metal tubes of color and a round tin mixing tray.

  Serge clamped a thick piece of textured paper to a square of plywood and wetted down the top half. He spread cerulean blue lightly with the one-inch brush. He was going to put down a heavier layer to outline the clouds, but the initial covering had to dry first.

  “Come on, come on, come on!” Serge said rapidly, tapping hard on the edge of the plywood. He held it up at an angle and saw it was still wet. “Screw it!” he said, and threw the watercolor supplies back in
the trunk.

  They got in the car and headed west.

  “Remember Jules Verne? That book he wrote about going to the moon?” Serge asked. “He had the astronauts take off from Tampa—here’s the plaque. But actually, he had them take off from Belle Shoals, a wide spot in the road way out in the eastern part of the country. Early this century, there was a pipe sticking out of the ground out there, irrigation or something. A lot of people thought it was the cannon that fired the astronauts to the moon. True story.”

  Coleman inhaled a Budweiser. “I’m hungry again. And thirsty.”

  “We’re on our way,” said Serge. They raced up Howard Avenue for Cuban sandwiches-to-go at the Fourth of July restaurant and backtracked to the Old Meeting House for creamy shakes from the fifties. They hit the Tiny Tap and the Chatterbox.

  Coleman was halfway in the bag, playing darts, when he nearly hit someone coming out of the rest room, and Serge had to smooth it out with money and a promise to leave.

  The setting sun glinted first from the tail of the silver 727. The reflection ran the length of the jet to the nose as it landed at Tampa International Airport.

  Seven floors up, from the top deck of short-term parking, Serge took photos of the Whisperjet. Coleman popped another sixteen-ounce Bud.

  “Here’s a tip: If you ever want to gauge the status of a civilization, check out its convenience stores and airports,” said Serge. He snapped more pictures. “I saw the SST land here. That’s a French plane.”

  Serge opened the trunk and stowed the camera. He removed his suit bag and slammed the trunk lid. “Saw a night space shuttle launch too. It was going to meet the Mir space station so it took off at a fifty-one-degree inclination thataway”—Serge pointing—“instead of the regular twenty-seven degrees that way. You could actually see it attain orbit and go down over the horizon.”

  Coleman nodded, thinking of food.

  Serge told Coleman to take off his shirt and pants. He threw the suit bag over the roof of the car and unzipped it. Coleman looked around but the only other people were a couple waiting for the elevators.