by Dorsey, Tim
“What are your qualifications?”
“Look at this fantastic outfit!”
He was hired on the spot.
Lenny figured the trick to gator wrestling was keeping them fat and happy, and he fed them so much they lay around the pond drowsy all the time like a living room full of uncles after Thanksgiving dinner.
Lenny arrived in the morning and moved the red plastic hands on the fake clock that said, “Next show at…” He got into his Indian costume and dragged annoyed alligators around by the tail. He picked the frailest and tucked the end of its jaws under his chin. He stuck out his arms—“Look, Ma, no hands.”
It was a pleasant life and Lenny started to like the costume. Then he was fired again. One of the alligators got away while Lenny was smoking a joint behind the serpentarium, and it ate one of the parrots, which wouldn’t normally have gotten Lenny fired except it ate the only one that could roller-skate.
The next day, Lenny went to the newsstand down the block from his apartment and saw a small article in the local paper about the alligator eating the bird.
A few days later Lenny stopped by the same newsstand and noticed a London tabloid with a vibrant cockatoo photo on the cover. A big story with a giant headline: “Gator Chomps Miracle Bird in Florida Feather Fest!”
The Weekly Mail of the News World had lots of dramatic details and described the parrot roller-skating for its life down a handicapped ramp at the gift shop with the gator in hot pursuit. Lenny knew the sensational details were all made up. But it was great copy.
“I can do this!”
Lenny launched his new career as freelance Florida correspondent for the sleazier side of Fleet Street. He wrote a fake résumé and exaggerated stories. He struck oil. The Brits went ape for anything Florida. The stories the tabloids wanted most: tourists attacked by narco-criminals with machine guns, alligators, the Everglades stinkfoot, old-time gospel preachers caught with transvestites, tourists attacked by alligators, tourists attacked by stinkfoot, flesh-eating bacteria in Jacuzzis, and coconuts found growing in the likenesses of the royal family.
Lenny had a beat-up yellow Cadillac, and he headed down to Miami. He called it the newsmobile. He got a roll of two-inch masking tape and taped the word PRENSA across his windshield as if he were driving around war-torn Latin America, which he was.
He grabbed a plastic milk crate behind a Publix in Pompano and used it to organize his files and maps on the passenger seat. He let the Herald, Sun-Sentinel and Post bird-dog his stories and then he’d swoop in with the newsmobile to add the profitable details. He soon found he didn’t need embellishment. The truth already stretched credibility. He covered the sheriff’s deputy who hid in the closet videotaping his prostitute wife with public officials; the federal agent who broke up an exotic animal smuggling ring by dressing in a gorilla suit; the man found floating off Miami Beach surrounded by twenty bobbing bales of coke—said his boat sank and then these bales just came floating by. The fisherman in Islamorada dragged from the shore and drowned because he refused to let go of the rod after hooking a large fish. The Miami supermarkets that fought shoplifting with cardboard cutouts of police officers, instructing employees to move them to different aisles every hour to create the impression they were patrolling. Lenny dutifully tucked the newspaper clippings in the plastic crate at stoplights on A1A.
Then he got too bold. He started staging events. He illegally fed wild gators in retention ponds and canals until they were sluggish. He flipped them on their backs, tied them up and threw them in the backseat of the newsmobile. Then he released them at shopping plazas and busy intersections, taking photos of the resulting mayhem and filing prewritten stories.
He got caught. The newsmobile was impounded, and he lost his fake press credentials.
Lenny was allowed to wear his Indian costume in jail on religious grounds. He bribed a guard to take his photo through the bars. The Weekly Mail of the News World published a story about a Native American from the swamp who was arrested for protesting European encroachment by releasing alligators in populated areas. Lenny used the money from the story to pay court costs and get the newsmobile out of impound.
Lenny was living the Florida Dream. He knew the state well and he’d find safe, isolated roads and sleep in his car. Another sunrise and another day of journalism. He bought a laptop for a hundred dollars from a junkie on Biscayne Boulevard. He collected facts during the day and typed stories into the laptop at night in the bars. Over the course of the evenings, between the rum and the joints in the parking lot, the amount of writing became increasingly lean.
One night Lenny picked up a flyer left on the bar. He had been chatting with the woman on the stool next to him—said her name was Angie—and she looked over his shoulder at the pamphlet. The first annual Miami Vice convention in the art deco district on South Beach.
“I love Miami Vice,” she said.
“You do?” he said with a smile.
Lenny had his newest rap.
He bought a loose white Italian suit and Gucci loafers. He took the newsmobile in for an off-the-books pink paint job. He turned it into a convertible with a demolition saw and glued strips of packing foam over the jagged metal along the top of the windshield and where the side window posts had been. He stuck pink and blue neon tubes under the chassis.
The Miami Vice convention started well enough until Angie broke down onstage. Out in the car, Lenny managed to get her to stop crying and he got in and started driving to their next gig in Tampa. She gave him the silent treatment all the way across the Everglades and up I-75. When he got to Tampa Bay he pulled off at the fishing pier, hoping maybe if he could get her alone in a romantic setting and turn on the Johnson charm….
The fresh salt air stung Lenny Lippowicz’s nostrils as he gazed off the end of the fishing pier and into Tampa Bay just after midnight. He looked up at the Sunshine Skyway and the flashing red and blue lights of the emergency vehicles bunched together at the top of the bridge.
He turned around and watched Angie’s angry hips in red-leather hot pants as she walked barefoot away from him under the row of crime lights running down the pier, toward shore. She had a pair of bright green spiked heels in her right hand, and he colored her gone.
Lenny sighed with a hard exhale through his nose and watched her, now tiny at the foot of the pier. He listened to the waves. He rolled the end of a filterless Lucky Strike in his mouth, gripped it with his lips and didn’t light it. The cold ocean wind blew through his hair.
Lenny leaned against the concrete retaining wall at the end of the pier and looked into the blackness. The pier used to be the old Skyway bridge until a ship hit its supports in a storm in ’80 and collapsed the middle span. When they built the new Skyway next to it, they ripped out most of the old bridge except the ends and converted them into fishing piers. Lenny looked up again at the emergency lights flashing on the bridge and wondered what had happened. A Coast Guard helicopter arrived and hovered with a search beam aimed down into the water.
Lenny was alone on the pier. Waves plopped against the cement supports in the darkness thirty feet below. He pulled a joint from his pocket but he couldn’t get it lit in the breeze from the bay, so he crouched down behind the concrete wall and fired it up.
When he stood again, another head popped up simultaneously from the outside of the retaining wall. Lenny screamed in surprise and the other man screamed too, and the man lost his grip and fell thirty feet, splashing back into the bay. Lenny leaned over the railing and saw the man climb back out of the water again and up one of the pylons like a telephone repair man. A Santa Claus cap floated in the water behind him.
The man pulled himself over the railing, turned around and reeled in a soaked black parachute trailing behind him. He wrung out the chute and bundled it in his arms.
“Don’t hurt me!” Lenny said, and covered up his face.
“I’m not gonna touch you,” said Serge, and he threw the wet chute in the backseat of Lenny’s Cadil
lac. Serge walked to an oil-drum garbage can in a corner of the pier and retrieved a small brown paper sack hidden down in the garbage. Serge unpacked the contents: khaki shorts, sandals and a short-sleeve yellow shirt with an M. C. Escher pattern of angelfish turning into juvenile delinquents. He changed into the dry clothes.
Lenny slowly lowered his arms. “Who are you?”
“I’m the messenger,” said Serge. “The one you’ve been waiting for.”
Lenny took another slow drag on his joint. “Far out.”
Serge climbed into the passenger side of the Cadillac and Lenny got in behind the wheel.
Serge pointed down the pier, back toward land. “Step on it, toke-meister.”
And Lenny hit the gas.
On the edge of the Hillsborough River, in a large open room on the second floor of the Tampa Tribune Building, the skeleton night crew tapped away at computer keyboards.
A young copy editor just out of college named Kirk Curtly worked the rim. He opened a computer file from the directory containing stories that needed headlines written. Kirk had been gently prodded by his supervisors to be more specific in his headlines. On the other hand, he was roundly praised for never having incurred a dreaded correction, which he achieved through inspired vagueness. Kirk tapped his chin with the Montblanc pen he’d gotten for a graduation gift and never used, since everything was done on computers. He typed the headline “Panel Studies Plan.” He looked at its structure and rhythm on the screen. He smiled with satisfaction and sent the story along to the typesetters. He called up another story and tapped his chin again. He typed “Official Mulls Options.” Curtly had a mental Rolodex of short, bureaucratic terms that were perfect for narrow headlines over one-column-wide stories, and he searched for such thin articles in the headline directory to show off his arsenal. It went this way for much of his shift. “Board Picks Member,” “Senate Takes Flak,” “Gov Eyes New Trend,” and his proudest effort: “Pols Nix Proxy Prexy Tap.”
Shortly after midnight, a late news story wormed its way through the Tribune computer system until it came to the headline directory. Kirk looked around. All his colleagues were writing heads on other stories. Only one story left that wasn’t being worked. It wasn’t one column. It ran in big type all the way across the top of page one. Kirk’s hands were unsteady as he opened the file. He read the story. A man in a Santa Claus suit had jumped off the Sunshine Skyway bridge. He began typing. He finished, sent the story along, got up and walked into the men’s room, where he suffered a forty-minute failure of nerve.
The story and headline moved with the speed of light to the copysetter, who was overworked and had exactly eight seconds to proof everything before pressing a button in the upper right of his keyboard, which fired electrons through the building and made the story spit out on a roll of silver-nitrate paper from a machine in the blue-collar section of the building. The page composers, who had exactly six months before their jobs would be sucked out of them by microprocessors, ran it through the waxer and slapped it on the master page, which was photographed by a giant camera, burned into a metal plate and clamped on the huge rollers of the printing press, and hundreds of thousands of copies rolled down conveyor belts to trucks waiting at the loading dock to bring the news to you.
12
It was a hot, clammy afternoon in Biloxi. Keesler Air Force Base was dead. There were no missions for the Hurricane Hunters and no wind, and the air sat heavy on the town. The Prop Wash Bar only had ceiling fans.
Ex-Lieutenant Colonel Lee “Southpaw” Barnes filled his mug from a pitcher of draft and looked across the bar at the group of airmen sitting around two tables near the dart boards. It was the crew of the Rebel Yell, the fierce rivals of Montana’s plane. The crew stared back at Barnes and his colleagues, and a few began to chuckle derisively.
“I hate those fuckers,” said Barnes. “They think they’re hot shit.”
Marilyn Sebastian leaned up against the jukebox, wearing flight pants and a tight combat-green tank top with a large oval of perspiration between her shoulder blades. Her fiery red hair was out of its usual ponytail and fell over her shoulders. She punched up a Patsy Cline tune and swayed with faraway thoughts. She wrapped her lips around a longneck beer and took a hard pull.
One of the members of the Rebel Yell made a wisecrack and his table broke up. He smiled and stood and strolled over to Marilyn with the cockiness of the oxygen-deficient.
Both crews watched as the airman whispered something to Marilyn, who continued staring into the jukebox. He leaned a second time and whispered something else. Without warning, Marilyn had him by the forearm, with leverage behind his elbow, and smashed his face into the front of the jukebox.
“Bitch!” the airman shouted from the dusty floor.
Both crews sprang out of their chairs. Ex-Lieutenant Colonel Barnes grabbed a whiskey bottle by the neck and smashed it against the bar, cutting tendons in his favorite hand.
Suddenly, the air base’s claxons sounded, and Montana’s crew was all business. They grabbed their gear and sprinted in formation across the tarmac. The wheels of the Hercules were off the runway in eight minutes.
Four time zones ahead, Hurricane Rolando-berto began to sputter. The cooler waters of the mid-Atlantic sapped its strength, but the National Hurricane Center wanted visual reconnaissance before they downgraded it. It did a loop-de-loop more than a thousand miles due east of Montserrat and languished in random, constantly changing directions, its tracking chart looking like someone with DTs got hold of an Etch A Sketch.
Weather officer “Tiny” Baxter bandaged the ex-lieutenant colonel’s damaged hand. Montana took a wide swing at twenty thousand feet around the storm system. Miami was right, he thought, no longer a defined eye. It was becoming completely unorganized. Milton “Bananas” Foster radioed the report back to Florida; then he began screaming “Mayday!” until Barnes wrestled the microphone from him.
Armed with the report, the books at the National Hurricane Center were officially closed on Rolando-berto.
Back in Aristotle “Art” Tweed’s hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, lived a man named Paul.
Paul was passive.
He was built for it. At five foot four, he never weighed more than a buck-ten—a small, rumpled man in a similar suit. He had thin gray hair that he kept covered with a black fedora, and his voice was hesitant, barely above whisper. Paul’s was the soft face of the full-time victim. All his features were on the small side, and the fifty-eight years of aging did not etch harsh lines and cracks, but gentle folds. Pink webs of capillaries and other blood vessels were visible on his cheeks and chin. His complexion was extra pale, not quite sickly, but you wouldn’t be surprised if he fainted at any moment.
Paul was a nice guy, to a fault. He was a shy, considerate, deferential, rule-following worrier. He was worried about lawsuits and IRS audits and madmen. He drove slow in the right lane, never took a pen from work, ate extra fiber and overfed parking meters. He was obsequious to telephone solicitors.
When Paul walked by, people thought: The meek shall inherit the earth, but only if their parents were ruthless bastards.
Paul had worked the past twenty-three years as a claims adjuster at Fidelity Insurance, which was trying to cheat on Paul. Even with paltry two percent annual raises, Paul’s salary had grown to a decent level, and Fidelity wanted to replace him with a younger, cheaper worker.
They gave Paul a six-month buyout, which killed his pension in the fine print. Fidelity didn’t mention that the buyout put the company on dicey legal ground and he had every legal right to refuse, which most of his co-workers did. The gracious offer was designed to take advantage of people like Paul, who rolled over on command.
Paul soon found the six-month buyout was based not on his current salary, but on a mathematically suspect twenty-three-year index, and in today’s dollars Paul received the equivalent of two paychecks. He went to work selling shoes at the Mega Mall.
Paul’s wife was not passive. She wa
s a thirty-six-year-old loud bottle blonde with qualified good looks, possibly sensual, but not elegant. Put it this way: She’d be the best-looking woman you could expect to find at ten A.M. in a bar, which was where she went every day after Paul left for work.
They were newlyweds, and they hadn’t had sex since the wedding night, which she only did for tax reasons.
She married Paul because he owned his house outright, and her lawyer/lover estimated the shortest possible time she had to stay married to Paul to have a realistic legal shot at getting half. It was a modestly priced place when Paul purchased it in the sixties, but the area had become exclusive Cloverdale, and the house had appreciated wildly.
On the first day Paul’s wife was in the eligibility zone for a fifty-fifty split, she asked for a divorce, and for the first time in memory, Paul said no.
On the second day, Paul came home and found her naked on the dining-room table, her lawyer riding herd. “Well, if it isn’t Mr. I-won’t-give-my-wife-a-divorce. How was work today, honey?”
She got her divorce.
Paul was forced to sell the house and move into a cramped apartment on the Atlanta Highway, closer to the shoe store.
Since he was a teen, Paul found refuge during difficult times in the pages of hard-boiled mystery novels. He read Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. He watched Robert Mitchum on the big screen. A private detective—it was all he ever wanted to be. He fancied his life a dog-eared twenty-five-cent paperback, a dame, a shot of bourbon and no regrets. But he never followed his passion because he found out it might involve confrontation.
After the divorce, he began plowing through Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer. He drove to the shoe store imagining he was cruising through the City of Angels in the fifties. At work, he pretended every woman customer was a floozy with a hard-luck story who only needed a good slapping.