Florida Roadkill

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 come out of the trees drilled on vitamin C and checked into the honeymoon suite at the nearest bed-and-breakfast. "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 trunpike like a golf ball, a solid one-wood by Buckminster Fuller. "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 ma 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. "You wanna come to Florida? You get a discount on theme-park tickets and find out you just bough 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.

That, and the untended mental health problems. We have all these insane armed hobos coming from the Midwest, usually Ohio. Fuck Ohio.

The television was on Florida Cable News. A gray-haired man behind the anchor desk reported near tragedy at a state motor vehicle office, where a man who had failed the eye exam pulled a gun and fired fifteen shots at the staff, hitting nobody.

What do they mean 'serial killers'! said Serge. (person 1), okay. But (person 2) was self-defence and the (person 3)-I mean, that was the World Series! You can call me a murderer, fair is fair, but as soon as you put 'serial' in front of it, everyone automatically thinks your crazy.

Maybe it was their names, they thought. Stinky, Cheese-Dick and Ringworm.

A strip club is one of the few places where two groups voluntarily come together who have such precipitous contrasts in net worth and familiarity with violence, each group with a head-and-shoulders edge in one category. The basic math of a tropical storm.

Mo’s success was based on demographic research that showed talk radio audiences were predominantly male, bitter, undereducated, untraveled, did not know how to figure percentages and unfailingly blew all major life decisions.

An hour earlier, the occupants of the Lotus had come out of a bookstore/coffeehouse across the street, where Carl Hiaasen was autographing stacks of green books.

When those buses arrive, the last thing I need is some geriatric rumble.” The

Gasparilla is Tampa’s annual heritage festival, and Tampa’s heritage appears to be about alcohol.

Unfortunately they looked like they’d been chiseled by Picasso,

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?!

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.

Ochopee, smallest post office in the United States of America.

Seriously, why do we stay in this state?” Sean asked.

The men sat on a street bench next to a pair of fashionably depressed students from New College, who gave the bikers the creeps. The

Two preppies from the University of South Florida tried to hit on her with cocaine jokes. Sharon

This was the beginning of Tampa,” said Serge. “They built Fort Brooke here in 1823.

This is trash state U.S.A.

Tampa’s Latin quarter, Ybor City. Ybor had been the Cuban-Italian core when Tampa was “Cigar City USA.

South Tampa is the polyp of land that dangles into Tampa Bay like a uvula.

Mount Batten jumped up from his chair and ran yelling across the living room. He broke through the yellow crime scene tape across the front door like a finish line and kept on running.   Sharon

Dolphins like to wear hats,” said Coleman, a joint dangling from his lips as he drove. On his head was one of those afro wigs painted in a rainbow.

Ellrod, like all Florida convenience store clerks, had the Serengeti altertness of the tastiest gazelle in the

couldn’t be scathed. He was the crack in the system

That he was so laconic and circumspect only increased his draw, a distant, self-assured aura everyone wanted to touch.

But that was Key West. It searched out and exploited the hairline crack in each person’s stability and crowbarred it open.