Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  Serge and Coleman made their way through tiny backyards and victory gardens until they came out behind the garbage cans in an alley next to the Purple Pelican. In the distance, back toward Duval, they heard sirens and saw several spires of black smoke. They nonchalantly walked around the corner and into the Pelican’s lobby. Serge waved as they walked by, soaking wet, filthy and winded, but the desk clerk showed disgusted indifference and returned to his crossword.

  When Serge flicked on the light, he and Mo Grenadine surprised each other equally and both yelled. Grenadine had a flashlight and burglary tools in a drawstring Crown Royal pouch.

  “Who are you?!” Serge asked.

  “Southernmost Termite. The owner called and asked…”

  “No you’re not,” said Coleman. “I know you. From the radio. You’re Holy Moly! I love your show!”

  Grenadine smiled, but Serge clubbed him to the ground anyway.

  “I can’t believe I’m really talking to Holy Moly in person!” said a starstruck Coleman as he and Serge tied him up in a chair.

  “What are you doing here?” Coleman asked.

  “You dolt!” said Serge. “He’s looking for the money!”

  Serge tied Grenadine’s ankles together and went through his pants pockets.

  “Get your hands off my dick, you fudgepacker!” Grenadine shouted. “Help! Help! Faggot attack!”

  “That’s it,” said Serge and sealed Mo’s mouth with duct tape. He flipped open a pocketknife and cut the ropes except the ones tying Mo’s hands together. “Coleman, give me a hand here. Let’s get him on his feet.”

  Coleman was looking for something for Grenadine to autograph.

  “Coleman!”

  Mo writhed and they sat him on the end of the bed. Coleman held Mo fast around the chest while Serge got the antigravity boots from his gym bag and put them on Mo’s feet.

  “Help me get him upside down,” said Serge. They hung him by the hooks on the boots to the tension rod in the bathroom doorway. Serge opened his tackle box.

  He squatted down and peered into Mo’s inverted face. “You sure like to call people fudgepacker.”

  Grenadine’s answer was muffled under the tape. Serge to Coleman: “Pull his pants down, I mean up.”

  Serge felt around inside the bag and pulled out a small plastic funnel used to change oil, some still coating it.

  “Do you know what you make life like for a lot of people who have far more character and compassion than you?” This time Serge pulled back the tape to let Grenadine answer.

  “Butt-snorkeler!”

  Serge replaced the tape. “I suggest a toast. A toast to Holy Moly!”

  He jammed the funnel between Grenadine’s legs. “It’s a special drink I’ve invented with you in mind. I call it the fudge daiquiri.”

  Serge opened a bottle of rum and poured it carefully into the funnel. “Bottoms up!”

  Half the bottle went into Mo, and Serge corked up Grenadine with a pelican-shaped bar of hotel soap.

  Serge explained to Grenadine, still upside down: “DUI in Florida is point oh eight percent blood alcohol content. At point forty, you’re on your way to a coma, and you’re pretty much dead at point sixty. What I’ve just poured in you should top out around point ninety. By bypassing the liver and going straight into the bloodstream through the intestines, the liquor will hit you in the next few minutes like a rocket sled.”

  Serge checked his watch.

  “Here’s your only hope for survival. And I think you, in particular, will appreciate this. In the next fifteen minutes you need to persuade someone to give you an immediate and massive enema. Your life depends on it.”

  They took Grenadine down from the tension rod and walked him out of the hotel room to the top of the stairs.

  “You’ve heard of The Duval Crawl?” Serge asked, referring to the bar-hopping tradition of Duval Street. “You’re about to become the first person in history to do The Duval Crawl of Death!”

  He cut Mo’s wrists free, took the tape off his mouth and pushed him down the stairs.

  “Rock on with your bad self, Beavis!” Serge called after him, and he and Coleman went back in room 3 and slammed the door.

  The clerk at the front desk heard the rolling crash and sprang back. At the foot of the stairs, Grenadine pulled himself up by the banister. He could see at least five or six clerks at the reservation desk, circling in a kaleidoscope.

  Mo charted a course for the desk, but he ended up moving like a guy in an initiation game after spinning around a baseball bat with his forehead on the handle. He overshot the desk and crashed into a potted croton. The clerk ran around the counter to help him, and Mo grabbed him by the shirt and demanded an enema.

  Mo hit the sidewalk in front of the Purple Pelican on his back.

  “And stay out!” yelled the clerk.

  Even in his stupor, Mo knew time was critical. He stumbled his way across traffic on Duval and into the Charter Boat.

  The Charter Boat was testosterone-rich, pea-brained and about as homophobic a bar as Key West can muster. The bartenders mixed drinks up on a tuna tower welded into the middle of the tavern. Behind it was a teak fighting chair, where patrons strapped themselves in, put their heads back and had margaritas mixed in their mouths. They yanked around with the aftertaste like they were fighting an eight-hundred-pound mako shark.

  Mo careened into two guys on stools, spilling their beers.

  “Help me. For the love of God. They’re trying to kill me. They poisoned me with alcohol…”

  Except it came out in a new, indecipherable language consisting entirely of vowels and drooling. Unfortunately for Mo, his enunciation congealed at the moment he got to the part about the enema.

  Mo was strapped into the fighting chair, a big-armed man pinching his nose and another pouring double margaritas down his throat. Mo kicked furiously against the foot plate. Over the bar he saw an autographed photo of himself, inscribed, “Death to the Fudgepackers! Affectionately, Holy Moly.”

  Soon he was back flat on the sidewalk again, fuming high-proof from both ends. He righted himself on a bike rack and slalomed down the sidewalk, knocking over mopeds and banging into people, who shoved him into walls and lampposts. Duval Street had become an evil fun house, rocking, bending and weird.

  On the sidewalk, he reached into his pants and between his legs without shame, trying to get at the pelican soap, but it was too far gone. He fell through the swinging saloon doors of Sting Rays, a gay dance club. A rainbow of laser beams sprayed the dark interior. Thousand-watt horn tweeters split his eardrums, and the subwoofers shook his ribs. Mo realized he was out on the dance floor, doing Joe Cocker.

  “Bust a move!” shouted the man next to him. His partner smiled and nodded.

  “I need an enema!” he shouted.

  “What? Can’t hear you!”

  “I said, I need an enema!”

  Mo thought: Are those jumper cables?

  The men waved Mo over to a quieter area away from the dance floor.

  “I said, I need an enema!”

  The men laughed. “Don’t we all!” More laughter.

  “No, my life depends on it. I’ve got to have an enema…” He grabbed the jumper cables.

  “Ow, that hurts!”

  Literally, to save his life, Mo couldn’t help himself: “You, you fudgepackers!”

  “Well if that’s the way you’re going to be—” one of them began, but he was interrupted by someone else at the bar.

  “That phrase. That voice. I know him. That’s that fucker from Tampa.”

  “Just one enema, please!”

  Instead he was given the bum’s rush and socked in the jaw three times quick, reeling backward out the saloon doors and falling ass over teakettle into the middle of Duval Street.

  Clang-clang. Clang-clang. Clang-clang.

  Getting louder. Clang-clang. Mo stood up to see about the noise.

  Bam! He was struck and dragged around all the finest points of interes
t in Key West by the Conch Train.

  Twenty-four

  Serge awoke before dawn in room 3 of the Purple Pelican when he heard the pop of a beer top and saw Coleman sitting in front of the dresser and watching it like a TV.

  “I want to go out,” said Coleman.

  Serge was already ahead of him and hopped from bed.

  Reluctant to go last night, Serge was driven to explore this morning. Overnight, the island had begun to metabolize in his system.

  Serge always thought he’d die inside a month if he ever lived in Key West. While the balminess and quirky island lifestyle slowed time and energy for others, it only kick-started Serge’s manicness. His interest in history, architecture, nature and all things Key West made him buzz around the island like a moth on speed.

  Others might burn out on the alcohol and drugs that accompany the Keys’ slothfulness; Serge would fry to a crisp trying to wholly consume its personality. But that was Key West. It searched out and exploited the hairline crack in each person’s stability and crowbarred it open.

  Serge went on a shopping spree and brought the bags back to the room. He pulled out a large backpack and pulled a smaller backpack out of it. He filled it with his native-tourist gear: camera, lenses, extra film, leather-bound journal, gravity-defiant pens, water bottle, the 1939 WPA guide to Florida, coupons, maps, AM/FM radio with weather alarm, a travel-size. 25 automatic pistol and other people’s credit cards. He left one compartment empty to collect more matchbooks, pins, patches and postcards. Coleman added into the bag a few beers, a bottle of bourbon, mixing shaker, to-go cups and a row of joints in a silver cigarette case from Germany during the war.

  The backpack was heavier than Serge expected, so he hoisted it onto Coleman and handed him his beard. The desk clerk was dozing when Serge asked if there was any sign of a short black guy named Sean. The clerk opened his eyes to slits and was going to say no but closed his eyes again. A coffeepot was going somewhere. They walked out the lobby and into the blackness just before five A.M.

  Vagrants lay in alleys and under the poinciana in front of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church; young and old, in scales of life decline, The Evolution of the Sterno Bum.

  The only others up were garbage collectors and fishermen; no sounds except a chilly ocean breeze and the metal doors of newspaper boxes slamming shut now and then. As they walked south on Duval, crossing Truman, the sky didn’t start showing light, just not as pure a black. And Serge introduced Coleman to The Routine.

  He bought a Miami Herald and Key West Citizen and selected sidewalk seats on the elevated patio at the Sapodilla Inn. Breakfast ninety-nine cents. Serge and Coleman each got two. Buttermilk biscuits, sunny-side-up eggs, grits, bacon. Serge spread the yolk on everything. Coleman spiked his orange juice with Absolut.

  Serge read about the baffling World Series murders in the papers as the sun came up in heavy clouds. He mopped up the plates with the biscuits.

  “Let’s rock!”

  “Right,” said Coleman.

  Serge stuffed the newspapers in Coleman’s backpack and dropped a ten on the table.

  They continued south and crossed over to the foot of Whitehead Street. Serge took pictures of the concrete red-black-and-yellow buoy that marked the southernmost point, which he had photographed the night before. What he lacked in photographic training and talent he compensated for with electricity. He lay on the ground, looking through the 28mm wide-angle. Inching around in the road for another perspective that was never good enough, getting himself all dirty. The lens exaggerated the concrete buoy and bent the sky; waves smacked the seawall and shot spray into the air behind the marker, and Serge pressed the button.

  The dawn had come up a battleship gray, and it stoned Serge on a depressing déjà vu he got whenever Key West was cold, empty and overcast.

  “They put up that concrete marker because tourists kept stealing the signs,” Serge explained.

  They moved on. “It’s not even the real southernmost point. That’s on navy property.” He pointed toward a fenced-off area and a bunch of directional antennas aimed at Cuba.

  “See that place?” Serge indicated the Queen Anne residence that’s known as the southernmost house.

  “It’s supposed to have secret trapdoors leading to a hidden basement. The owner put ’em in back in the early eighteen hundreds in case Indians attacked, which they had a habit of doing simply because we attacked them. You think we have a crime problem now? Imagine: You’re in the kitchen baking a pie and arrows start coming through the window…”

  Coleman nodded in feigned attention, sitting at the curb mixing a drink out of his backpack. Serge had them cross over to Simonton Street. They stopped for conch chowder at the lunch counter in Dennis Pharmacy.

  They went to the Salvation Army and the dollar T-shirt rack. Serge whipped through the shirts and grabbed two. “Put this on,” he said, and they changed in the middle of the store and paid the two dollars.

  “We need these shirts to pass for locals. They’ll never be able to tell the difference.” They walked down the street wearing Key West Electric Company T-shirts and fake Hemingway beards.

  They came to the cemetery on the wrong side and climbed the fence. Serge gave Coleman the history of the USS Maine. “It all ties in with that time we visited the old Tampa Bay Hotel.” He took pictures of the verdigris sculpture of a sailor scanning the horizon, where a silver prop plane descended over a row of coconut palms. Serge hurried Coleman into the Key West Island Bookstore and pointed at the signed author photos along the top of the walls. “The Pantheon!” Serge said. “That’s Tom McGuane. And there’s James Hall.” He bought more postcards and rare used hardcovers and stuffed them in Coleman’s backpack.

  They walked briskly down Southard Street to the Five Brothers grocery, for cheese toast and café con leche. They ran over to Faustos, for Cuban salads at the deli to go. They dashed in an art gallery so Serge could show Coleman prints of Winslow Homer’s Hurricane and Stowing Sail. Then they dashed out.

  Serge was practically in a jog now.

  “Hey, slow down,” said Coleman, spilling a drink and trying to light a joint.

  “Sorry,” said Serge. They were crisscrossing the residential interior of Old Town in a grid. The wooden houses inspired Serge, and he pointed and offered an architecture class: “Classical revival…Victorian gothic…Creole…” He indicated ginger-bread trim and widow’s walks and shipbuilders’ influence. “See how the roof comes down over the windows upstairs? That’s called an eyebrow house.”

  Coleman took another puff of marijuana.

  “More pot, eh?” said Serge.

  Coleman: “Pot, grass, weed, dope, hemp, rope, thing, shit, gage, spliff, doobie, joint, number, ganja, blunt, Mary Jane, smoke, blow, roach, bone, jay, toke, hit, Bogart…”

  Serge took the joint away from Coleman and stomped it out on Eaton Street. “That stuff’s turning your brain to swamp cabbage.”

  “We need to stop and rest,” said Coleman. “Where’s a bar?”

  The Bait House, on Garrison Bight, used to be a bait house. Bottles of beer floated in ice water in the old cement shrimp well. The bait pump still worked, and the bottles swam in a circle around the tank.

  Coleman got a draft and Serge a bottle of Zephyrhills. “Finally, a place that has native water,” he said.

  Coleman looked at Serge’s bottle of water. “What happened to the tincture of banana rule?”

  “That was yesterday. I was talkin’ shit.”

  The bar was in front of the bait tank and perpendicular to the door, and it was made of dense, dark lignum vitae wood. It was noon outside and midnight in the bar, only red light. Serge and Coleman took stools in the middle. There was no one between them and the door. On the other side, three stools down, was the only other person in the bar. A Dodge salesman down from Hialeah for a few days. He moved to the stool next to Serge.

  “What’re you drivin’? Cuz I bet I can put you in something better, and for a price you can’t
beat!” He smiled and thrust a hand forward with blind, hapless confidence, “The name’s Archie Wallace.” He handed them each a business card. Archie had full, droopy Deputy Dawg jowls and a forty-weight Dixie accent. He dipped a wad of tobacco into his lower lip.

  “Damn, the Hurricanes had a butt-ugly season this year. I’m partial to the Crimson Tide myself, but when in Rome, ha ha ha. What’re you boys drinkin’?”

  Serge pointed to his water. “I’m fine.”

  Coleman, a beer sitting in front of him, smelled a free drink. “Dewar’s!”

  “Get the man a Dewar’s!” Archie hollered to the bartender. “Shit, man, I love the Keys. Hopin’ to get me a little something on the side if ya know what I mean. The women are damn fine! Hear the fishin’ ’s not shabby either. You fish? I’m a regular bass expert myself. Say, what’s the deal with all the fairies down here? Bartender, where’s that drink for my buddy!”

  The front door flung open with a bang and Serge and Coleman shielded their eyes from the sunlight. Three men in dark suits walked in. They wore marksmen sunglasses and each had a small wire running out of his collar to an earpiece. Standard FBI/Secret Service haircuts.

  “Shit!” whispered Serge and turned his face away from the men, looking at his water. He reached down with the hand opposite the door to the gun at his waist. He stared ahead at the mirror behind the bar and raised the water to his mouth with the other hand.

  Coleman was sweating and fidgeted. “I’m scared,” he said to Serge.

  “Keep it in your pants,” Serge whispered back. “We’re not caught yet. Maybe I can talk our way out.”

  The agents looked in all directions as they walked unhurriedly through the bar. In the mirror, Serge saw they were three stools down from him, and he clicked the safety off his pistol.

  When the agents were directly behind them, Serge began to rotate on his stool, thinking he’d say something disarming, possibly “How’s it goin’ today, fellas?”

  He was a quarter way around, about to open his mouth. Two of the agents jumped back into wide shooting stances, pulled guns from armpit holsters and screamed, “Freeze, motherfucker!”