by Tim Dorsey
They came off the bridge into Islamorada.
“Serge.” Coleman aimed his joint out the window. “You’re passing the Hurricane Monument. You never pass the monument; I always have to stop and wait for your photos.”
“No time.” Serge hit the gas. “I need to find a shopping center on Key Largo with a Target or Kmart.”
“What for?”
“It’s the beach season! I need to buy a ton of surfing music and every beach-movie DVD they’ve got.” Serge reached under his seat and pulled out a camcorder. “I’ve totally rededicated my life to complete immersion in the beach culture. We’ll get jobs raking sand before dawn behind the resorts, rubbing lotion on aristocrats and selling tropical snow cones behind the boardwalk.”
“What boardwalk?”
“We’ll build one. That’s how dedicated I am.” Serge turned the camcorder toward Coleman. “And through it all, we’ll record every last second for my new smash-hit reality show. We’ll be famous! . . . Let’s rehearse.”
Serge began filming his pal as they drove.
“Okay,” said Coleman. “What am I supposed to—”
“Shut the fuck up!” said Serge. “You do this every time! You ruin every single vacation with your bullshit!”
“But I didn’t do anything.”
“Oh, right!” Serge turned the camera around to film his own face. “Act all innocent, like I don’t know what you’ve been up to behind my back! Pitting one side against the other so one day you can rule the whole beach. You’re a scheming little bastard, and I’m here to stop you! Your glory days in the sand are over!”
“Serge, you’ve never talked this way to me before.” Coleman was on the verge of tears. “I thought we were best buddies.”
Serge put the camcorder on pause. “We are. But we have to pretend there’s all kind of brooding tension on the beach about to boil over any second.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a reality show. You have to fake a lot of stuff.”
Serge resumed filming out the driver’s window at a giant roadside mermaid, a giant lobster, a giant conch shell.
Coleman settled his nerves with a flask of Early Times. “You mean reality shows aren’t real?”
“Of course not,” said Serge. “Reality’s boring. Especially the realities they pick for these shows. People repairing stuff or the daily life in a tattoo parlor. You know what daily life in a tattoo parlor is? Sitting around and smoking with no customers. Then, after five hours, bells jingle at the front door and someone finally comes in. ‘Yeah, give me something on my face with a flaming skull, an inverted pentagram and lots of swastikas. I want to impress my boss.’ ”
Coleman emptied the pint. “That is boring.”
“But easily fixed, and always with a feud. Reality shows are required to have them,” said Serge. “Take the most painfully mundane situation, add some nasty spats, and everything is forgiven. In the middle of a five-hour dry spell with no customers, the hotshot new tattoo artist walks over to the minifridge. ‘Okay, who the fuck took my pudding cups?’ ”
“Now I’m into it,” said Coleman.
“Me, too,” said Serge. “Feuds have a way of cheering up the viewing public. Or humiliation.”
“Humiliation?”
“The new tattoo guy can go next door in the strip mall to the health spa where they’re filming the reality-show contest on people trying to lose a hundred pounds. ‘Oh, so you like pudding, eh? Then take this!’—mashing tapioca up the nose of a fat chick.”
“Who could not watch that?” asked Coleman.
“We are a proud people.”
“The sign said ‘Key Largo.’ ” Coleman pointed with a cocaine tooter. “And there’s a shopping center up ahead.”
Serge cast a glare sideways. “You still into that stupid crap?”
Coleman flicked open the access hole on the small plastic tube for a quick snort. “Just on Tuesdays.”
“It’s Wednesday.”
“Then I’m late.” Another snort.
Serge rolled his eyes. The shopping center came into view, and a turn signal blinked.
Coleman hung his head out the window. “I don’t see a Target or Kmart.”
“But there’s another big place near Winn-Dixie that’s sure to have everything we need.”
They parked, and Serge fleetly went inside to canvass the media section, filling his arms with a harvest of Beach Boys and Annette Funicello.
“There’s a Gidget movie,” said Coleman. “Gidget, Gidget, Gidget . . .” Uncontrolled giggling. “That’s messed up. Gidget, Gidget, Gidget . . .”
“Coleman, you’re acting really weird.” Serge grabbed a Baywatch boxed set. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.” He turned and bent over. Snort.
“Jesus!” Serge’s eyes shot around for any onlookers. “We’re in a big store. You can’t be doing coke!”
Another giggle. “Coke, blow, flake, fluff, snow, marching dust, weasel powder, white death, white lady, wings, yeho, nose-candy, donut glaze, gutter glitter, Charlie, Chippy, Belushi, Foo-foo, Merck, mojo, movie star, Mayan mist, Bolivian blizzard, Inca telegram, California cornflakes, lay lines, cut rails, hitch the reindeer, chase the dragon . . .”
Serge slapped himself on the forehead.
Then a lightbulb went on. Serge reached in his shoulder pouch for the camcorder. “From the top!”
“Coke, blow, flake . . .”
A few minutes later, Serge finished checking out at the registers and paid with fresh twenties.
“ . . . Roxanne, pimp, sugar, thing, cotton, girlfriend, Big C . . .”
Serge gathered up his bag. “Come on, Coleman, follow me.”
“Where are we going?”
Serge led him over to the back of a long line stacked up at the customer-service desk.
“I don’t understand,” said Coleman. “You just bought those and now you’re going to return them?”
“No,” said Serge. “I just need some customer service. Except for some reason, I always have trouble at customer service. Even though it says ‘Customer Service’ on the sign, it usually feels like I’m getting the opposite. I’ll give it one more try, because I’m into hope . . .”
On the Other Side of the State
Arnold Lip was an ordinary doctor in Tampa who ran a modest private practice that had fallen on hard times because he wasn’t a very good doctor. He was forced to move his office several times, down descending strata of square footage and facility maintenance. Until he ended up in a professional building that was a two-story converted crack motel. He specialized in diseases that medical journals described as the most likely to go away on their own.
One day just before lunch, he walked through his empty waiting room. The only receptionist had been let go. He stepped outside and looked over the balcony railing, wondering what he was going to do. He looked around the office complex. No cars in the parking lot. None of the other professionals doing any business either, not the forensic accountant, maritime insurance agent, empty office-space broker, Ventures Limited, or something called the Lone Wolf Group. The outsourcing firm next door had been replaced by an office in a converted motel in India.
He strolled toward the end of the balcony with the stairwell, thinking of the sandwich shop across the street. He stopped. What were all those cars doing on the other side of the parking lot? He watched throngs of people flowing toward one particular office on the first floor. He jogged halfway down the stairs and read the sign by the door. What was a personal injury attorney doing in such a run-down business complex? Those guys can afford full-page ads on the backs of phone books.
At the end of the day, Arnold made a point of taking the same stairs. And waiting. All the cars were gone except a Porsche 955. A young man with German features and a Lance Armstrong haircut was
the last to leave the building. He folded his jacket neatly in the backseat of the coupe and sped off, punching the car through its gears.
A week later, Arnold Lip sat in his empty office. He was behind the reception desk, eating a tuna-salad sandwich that he had made at home with extra chopped celery because he liked the crunch. The sliding translucent window to the waiting room was closed.
The office’s front door opened. Arnold observed a silhouette approach and stop on the other side of the pebbled glass, like a priest hearing confession.
A hand knocked.
Arnold slid the window open, still chewing. “Yes?”
“Is Dr. Lip in?” asked a young professional with a short haircut. He leaned slightly through the window, looking around for other signs of life in the office.
Arnold wiped his mouth with a napkin. “I’m Dr. Lip.”
“Oh.” A gaze that had been straining down the hall dropped down to the man behind the desk. “My name is Hagman Reed . . .” He pointed generally toward one of the walls. “I’m an attorney from the other side of this building.”
Arnold took another bite. “I recognize you from the parking lot. Porsche 955.”
Hagman looked around the office again at stacks of old US magazines. “But you are a doctor, right?”
Lip nodded. “How can I help you?”
“I have a business proposition . . .”
THE NEXT DAY
Arnold opened the door to the waiting room. He looked down a clipboard with a grid full of names and times. “Mr. Euclid?”
He had to raise his voice because the waiting room vibrated from a loud din of conversation, mostly on cell phones. The rest of the overflow clientele flipped through magazines and photo spreads of Angelina dragging Brad Pitt around the third world. The new patients sported a variety of neck braces and casts.
A man with crutches got up and did a three-legged stroll behind Arnold and into an examination room. He was out in two minutes.
Lip stood in the door again. “Mrs. Lambright? . . .”
And so it went the rest of the day. And the week. And the month. You could almost see the waiting line picking up speed.
The attorney’s business proposition had kicked in.
The reason lay on the unattended reception desk, the morning edition of the Tampa Tribune. A small article below the fold on page fifteen. Physician arrested for insurance fraud.
It wasn’t unexpected. Florida had long been plagued by a burgeoning scam industry, making the state the national leader in staged auto accidents. The faux-fender-bender capital was Miami. Until law enforcement cracked down in a big way. And like any other species of scheme in Florida, it was simply a game of Whac-A-Mole. Those who escaped the dragnet just pulled the tent stakes and drove three hundred miles up to the west coast.
Tampa officially became the new U.S. capital of insurance rip-offs. We’re Number One!
Authorities rolled up their sleeves and clamped down again. The arrest that was announced in that morning’s paper was the sixth in less than a month. But this one was different. He was the physician in league with Hagman Reed.
The doctor faced an eighty-six-count indictment, but Hagman was in the clear because he was a lawyer.
Except it still left him without a conspiring doctor. And twenty more cars had already been smashed up. What about those people? It wouldn’t be fair to them. So Hagman had paid a visit to Arnold Lip, because Lip wasn’t a good doctor. He could have gone to a good doctor, but that would mean no kickbacks and, most lucrative of all, no documentation for imaginary pain and suffering.
Which brought us to today. Mrs. Lambright sat on the edge of an examination table.
Lip stood over her with a manila patient file. “Where does it hurt?”
“It doesn’t.”
He hit her in the leg with a triangular rubber hammer.
“Ow.”
Lip talked to himself as he wrote: “Hyperextended knee.”
Then he set down his folder and got her in a headlock. He twisted.
“Ow.” She pushed him away. “Stop that.”
He picked up the folder. “Delayed neck pain . . .”
Chapter Three
KEY LARGO
In the back of a crowd at a customer-service desk:
“Look at this line,” said Coleman. “Why isn’t it moving?”
“Because the customer at the counter is telling her life story from the delivery room,” said Serge.
Five minutes later: “ . . . Now, this other person doesn’t have ID or a receipt, but wants cash . . .”
Another five minutes: “ . . . He’s explaining that he only wore the underwear a single time on a camping trip . . .”
Five more: “ . . . She’s holding up a finger for the service rep to wait while she takes a cell-phone call . . .”
“Serge,” said Coleman. “I’m impressed.”
“By this parade of rudeness?”
“No, by your reaction. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you can be a little impatient.”
“A little? I’m superimpatient,” said Serge. “But trying to improve. That’s the whole problem with society: We detect countless faults in others, but never work on ourselves. And behavior in long lines brings out the worst. Take the nicest people you’d ever meet, stick them in an ultralong line that’s moving like molasses, and it’s as if they were bitten by a werewolf. Some sweet old lady who volunteers to read to the blind: ‘Look at this dickhead with eleven items in the express lane.’ Supermarkets bring out the worst.”
“Supermarkets?”
“I’ve spent hours with calibrated instruments charting the phenomenon. When the national fabric finally tears itself apart, they’ll trace the first rips to grocery checkouts, where all registers are jammed, and suddenly two shoppers with overflowing carts spot the one register with a slightly shorter line. And the rival customers are exactly the same distance away from the register in opposite directions. They both want to get there first, but need to maintain the social facade of not rushing to cut the other one off, so they do the supermarket dance. Happens a million times a day.”
“What do you mean, ‘dance’?”
“They both speed up, but in a special, highly trained way that creates the illusion they’re actually slowing down. It’s an amazing thing to observe in nature, like the moonwalk. And the key is to deliberately not look at the other shopper, but track their progress with peripheral vision, and responding appropriately by speeding up or slowing down, depending on their velocity and how many people are around who might recognize you from church.
“And this whole pas de deux continues with one woman tracking the other out of the corner of her eye, thinking, ‘She’s deliberately not looking at me and watching out of the corner of her eye, so under the rules I’m allowed to speed up and cut a tighter angle past the promotional pyramid of Honey Grahams.’ And it goes back and forth like this until they arrive at the same time, and suddenly it’s the biggest surprise: ‘Oh, I didn’t see you.’ ‘I didn’t see you either.’ ‘Go first.’ ‘No, you go first.’ ‘No, you.’ ‘No, you.’ ‘Okay . . .’ And the second one is like, ‘She took advantage of me because of all these people that I know from church, goddammit.’ ”
“And you’re going to change all that?” asked Coleman.
“It only takes one person to begin,” said Serge. “As of this moment, I’m rededicating my entire life to patience. It’s the least I can do for the common good. From now on, I’ll always let the other person by first, like this woman behind me with her arms full and a crying kid . . . Excuse me, ma’am? Please go ahead of me, and I don’t even go to a freakin’ church, because this is my church. I mean, not this store specifically, but I just rededicated my life a few seconds ago. The evangelicals say good works can’t get you into the Kingdom, but then they go telling you what to do. Wha
t’s that about? The devil tempts me not to let you ahead in line, but I tell Satan to get the hell out of my happy place and pound sand . . . Please, go ahead of us . . .” He turned and smiled big at Coleman. “You’ve just witnessed the start of the country turning around.”
“But, Serge, she’s not going ahead of you,” said Coleman. “In fact, she went to an entirely different line.”
“And cut another shopper off in the process.” Serge sighed. “Fixing the country will take more time than I thought. Screw it, life’s too short.”
“Dedication to patience only has to last a minute?”
“You’re right,” said Serge. “I need to adopt coping mechanisms for stress. I’ll control my breathing and think Hindu thoughts.”
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure,” said Serge. “I don’t know any Hindus. So I don’t know what they’re thinking about when they’re in long lines and trying to get their heads centered. But I’m guessing they’re imagining round things . . . I’m going to think about circles.”
“We’re number two in line,” said Coleman. “That woman’s still on her cell phone.”
“Must be an important call, too, because she’s not conducting any business. Let’s listen . . .”
Coleman stuck his head forward next to Serge’s. “I think she’s mad at her sister-in-law for stinking up the trailer with burned possum . . .”
“I’m thinking of ovals now.”
Coleman strained to hear more. “ . . . And Bobby Jean’s new hairdo caught fire in the bug zapper.”
“That’s it,” said Serge. “Time for action.”
“I thought you were working on patience.”
