Best. State. Ever.

by Dave Barry

  Every once in a while, an alligator gets a bee in its bonnet and verrrry slowly moves forward maybe three inches. Then, not wanting to be branded as too much of a go-getter by the others, it resumes being motionless.

  While strolling on the boardwalk over the alligator ponds, I come across a Mold-A-Matic machine that will make you a souvenir alligator toy right on the spot in just thirty seconds, except that the machine, in keeping with long-standing Mold-A-Matic tradition, is out of order.

  Seeking action, or at least movement, I head over to Panther Springs, which features two endangered Florida panthers, Neiko and Lucy, brother and sister, who were born in a rescue center and, according to a sign, “brought to their gorgeous new home at Gatorland to help educate our visitors on the peril of the Florida panther.” They’re in a large landscaped enclosure with a glass wall on one side. One of them—Lucy, I believe—is sleeping under a bench, but Neiko is doing slow circuits of the perimeter, prowling around and around and around and around and around and around and around, looking for a way out that is never there no matter how many times he goes around and around and around. Each time he passes the glass wall, his powerful body just inches from tourists taking pictures of him, I get the feeling that he’s thinking some panther version of If I could just get through this invisible thing, I would definitely educate these visitors.

  Neiko looking through the glass.

  Leaving Panther Springs, I check out the pythons, who are motionless, as are the giant tortoises, and The Snakes of Florida, and the rare white alligators, and the various other specialty and/or celebrity alligators, all of them exhibiting the same level of activity as a fire hydrant.

  One of the celebrity gators is named Chester. The sign on his pen says:

  “CHESTER” The Big Dog Eater!

  This big fellar’s name is Chester and he loved eating dogs in Tampa, FL. At 13½ feet long and 1,000 pounds, he could put away some “hounds.” We saved him from trappers who wanted to make a suitcase out of him. He don’t get along real well with other gators so he gets this cool bachelor pad with private pool.

  Chester is lying motionless in his pool, staring ahead with a stoic expression, perhaps dreaming of the days when he roamed free in Tampa, chowing down on Labradoodles.

  Near Chester is an exhibit of parrots, who, to their credit, sometimes turn their heads. Also there’s a petting zoo—excuse me, pettin’ zoo—where one of the posted rules is NO EATING THE ANIMAL FOOD.

  A little past that is the Upclose Encounters outdoor theater, where several times a day wisecracking Gatorland guys put on a comical show in which they display venomous snakes and freak people out by such antics as putting tarantulas on their heads. For the grand finale they have some tourists stand in a line, facing the audience and holding out their arms, with orders not to turn around. Then from backstage the Gatorland guys bring out, and swiftly drape across the victims’ outstretched arms, a ten-foot tapeworm.

  Not really, although that would make for a truly entertaining Upclose Encounter. What the guys place on the tourists’ arms is an albino Burmese python, which the tourists hold nervously while the Gatorland guys make wisecracks about being swallowed.

  The Burmese python is the brand of snake that is taking over the Everglades by eating all the other animals. This has led to the creation of one of my favorite Florida government programs: The Python Challenge. This is a contest run by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which invites the public to hunt pythons and offers cash prizes to whoever brings in the most pythons, or the longest python, dead or alive. Basically, the theme is: Florida—Come kill our snakes!

  I think this is a great way to remove pests, and would like to see Florida adapt the concept to other invasive species, such as New York Jets fans. I’m not suggesting that we kill them, of course. I’m suggesting that we trap them humanely, put them in trucks and release them back in New York. If they come back, then we should kill them.32

  As I leave the Upclose Encounters show, I have an exciting upclose encounter of my own when I behold a sight I never expected to see in my lifetime—a sight so unlikely, so implausible, so impossible, that I almost question my own senses. I blink several times, but it’s still there, incredible as it seems, right in front of my eyes: a Mold-A-Matic machine without an out-of-order sign apologizing for the inconvenience. MAKE YOUR OWN GATORLAND WRESTLER, it says.

  I approach the Mold-A-Matic cautiously, fearful that I will spook it into suddenly being out of order. Carefully I insert two dollar bills. I watch in amazement as the Mold-A-Matic wheezes and whirs, then produces the toy, which is a replica, made of what appears to be radioactive mucus, of a hat-wearing man who appears to be having sex with an alligator.

  As I am photographing the toy, a father and his young daughter stop to look at the Mold-A-Matic. I hand the girl the toy, which is still warm, and tell her she can have it. She is delighted. The father thanks me, though he seems less enthusiastic.

  My next stop is the Gator Wrestlin’ Show. A big crowd has gathered, sitting on bleachers around a sandpit surrounded by water containing several dozen motionless alligators, every single one of which is thinking: Please, please, PLEASE don’t pick me.

  The show, like Upclose Encounters, features two wisecracking Gatorland guys. After some introductory wisecracks, they have a member of the audience select an alligator. One of the guys grabs this gator—which is thinking: NOOOOOO—by the tail and drags it onto the sand, where he commences wrestlin’ it, by which I mean sitting on it. I have seen alligator “wrestling” many times, and I have never seen an alligator make even the slightest effort to resist. The gators display the same fighting spirit as a Barcalounger.

  The Gatorland guy keeps up a stream of comical patter while performing the standard gator-wrestling maneuvers, including prying the gator’s mouth open. For his grand finale, he holds the gator’s mouth open with his chin while everybody takes pictures. The gator submits to all of this stoically, although it is clearly thinking: Why? In the name of God, WHY?

  From the Gator Wrestlin’ venue, I head over to Pearl’s Smokehouse for lunch. While waiting in line, I study the menu; the most expensive item, at $10.49, is the Gator Nuggets. That’s right: In addition to rescuing alligators, Gatorland serves them deep-fried. It is a full-service gator facility.

  I decide to try the nuggets. Apparently, I’m the only one ordering them; the cashier says they’ll take a few minutes. But it’s worth the wait when the nuggets arrive piping hot from the fryer with a festive presentation featuring toothpicks.

  I select a nugget and take a small bite, which I am able to successfully swallow after approximately forty-five minutes of chewing. I honestly think it would be easier to eat the Mold-A-Matic toy. I decide to pass on the remainder of the nuggets. My hat is off to whatever kind of animal is able to eat alligators in the wild, uncooked.

  I head back toward the entrance of the park, because it’s almost time for the signature event at Gatorland, a show that, in my opinion, is one of the best things33 you will find at any attraction in Florida or the world in general: the legendary Gator Jumparoo.

  A big crowd has gathered around the Jumparoo pond for the show, which stars two Gatorland guys pretending to be subliterate overalls-wearing hillbillies named Bubba and Cooter. After some comical preliminary hijinks establishing that they have the IQs of yogurt, Bubba and Cooter get down to the heart of the Jumparoo, which is going out on a platform and dangling chicken carcasses over the water. This, at last, is something that the alligators consider worth moving for. They swarm toward the platform and lunge out of the water, snapping their jaws.

  The tourists, who have been divided into Team Bubba and Team Cooter, cheer when one of the gators on their side snags a chicken carcass and gulps it down. I’m on Team Bubba and I am definitely cheering. I find the Gator Jumparoo to be a lot more exciting than, for example, professional baseball.

&nbs
p; The show ends and I head for the exit, because I know nothing will surpass the Jumparoo. It has been an enjoyable half day for me, except for the Nugget Encounter. Gatorland has a lot to see, even if most of it doesn’t move, and I like the fact they don’t take themselves too seriously. Also they get major bonus points for having a working Mold-A-Matic, which is ironic because it results in my decision to award Gatorland, using the Florida Tourist Attraction Rating System, 4 out of a possible 5 out-of-order Mold-A-Matics.

  I get into my car and exit the parking lot, looking for a place to eat. I’m starving and I know exactly what I want to have for lunch.

  Chicken.

  LOCK & LOAD MIAMI

  There comes a time in a man’s life when a man must man up and be a man by summoning up his manhood and doing something manly. For me, that time is today. And the place is Lock & Load Miami.

  Lock & Load is a shooting range that offers a “Machine Gun Experience”: You pay them money and they let you shoot actual machine guns emitting actual bullets. The Lock & Load website boasts that they offer “the nation’s greatest variety of fully automatic firearms with over 25 fully automatic machine guns available for use in packages and a la carte.” The packages include the 007, the Special Forces Eastern Bloc, the Special Forces Israel (which includes an Uzi), the Boss (a.k.a. “El Jefe”), the Scarface and others. For enhanced manliness, you can augment your package with handguns.

  I am here with my friend and cousin-in-law Ron Ungerman, who is visiting Miami with his wife, Sonia. They originally had other plans for today, probably shopping, but when I asked Ron if he wanted to go shoot machine guns instead, he responded, quote, “Fuck yes.”

  Sonia was less excited about it, as was my wife, Michelle. I am a huge fan of females as a gender, but they tend to display a baffling lack of enthusiasm for violent destruction. Show me a group of individuals who are spending a Sunday afternoon entertaining themselves by using explosives to blow up, say, major appliances, and I will show you a group of males. Any females in the area will be holding their fingers in their ears and saying, “Why?”

  That was how our wives felt about the Machine Gun Experience. I tried to discuss my shooting-package options with Michelle ahead of time, and it went like this:

  ME (looking at the Lock & Load website): Whoa. You can shoot a .50 caliber!

  MICHELLE: They just give you a machine gun and let you shoot it?

  ME: That’s a really big caliber.

  MICHELLE: What if you shoot somebody?

  ME: Would you think less of me if I didn’t get a .50 caliber package?

  MICHELLE: What if somebody shoots you?

  But, as I say, a man has to do what a man has to do, and so, on this Tuesday morning, Ron and I, without our wives, pull into the parking lot of the Lock & Load building. It’s located in Miami’s Wynwood District, an area that used to be seedy and crime-ridden but has been gentrified and hipsterfied to the point where the biggest danger today is that you might accidentally purchase non-artisanal food.

  The Lock & Load building is painted gunmetal gray and decorated with silhouettes of people holding guns. Next to the entrance, as a fun decorative accessory, is a missile.

  Inside, Lock & Load is more inviting—bright, spacious, cheerful and modern, with lots of tables and chairs. It looks kind of like a restaurant, except that the menus on the tables explain the shooting package options and there are machine guns mounted on the wall.

  We’re greeted by an attractive young woman Sales Associate in a Lock & Load T-shirt. She explains the menu and says we can check out the guns on the wall, if we want, because they’ve been modified so they can’t fire. She leaves, telling us she’ll be back to take our order. As we ponder the menu, I overhear the conversation at a nearby table, where a father and his two teenage kids are discussing their package options with another attractive young female Sales Associate.

  “I would stay away from the Eastern Bloc,” she is telling them.

  After some mulling, Ron and I make our decisions. He’s going with the $179 Scarface package, and I’m going with the $209 Special Forces package. The packages involve different weapons, but in both cases you shoot four different machine guns, twenty-five rounds each. (Round is a manly word for “bullet.”) Ron and I both add handguns to our packages, at $29 each. Ron selects the Baretta. I go with the Glock, not because I know anything about handguns but because my daughter, Sophie, and I have a running joke about the lyrics to a song called “679” by a hip-hop recording artist34 named Fetty Wap, who at one point says, “I got a Glock in my ’rari,” meaning he has a Glock in his Ferrari. Sophie and I like to indicate how “street” we are by sporadically declaring that we have Glocks in our ’raris. I will never own a ’rari, but I’m thinking it might be fun to say I actually fired a Glock.

  The Sales Associate comes back and takes our order, then tells us it will take about ten minutes to load our packages. Ron and I pass the time by photographing each other posing with some of the deactivated wall-mounted weapons. Neither one of us has ever fired a machine gun before, but as soon as we pick up these superbly engineered firearms, feeling their heft as we cradle them in our arms, we undergo a subtle change—a transformation, if you will—from a couple of ordinary, non-threatening civilian guys into a pair of world-class douchenozzles.

  If Ron and I were ever to, God forbid, find ourselves holding machine guns in actual combat, our only hope of survival would be that the enemy was laughing too hard to aim properly.

  Finally, it’s time for us to shoot. I’m starting to feel quite nervous. As you have probably gathered, I know basically nothing about guns. I’ve never owned one, unless you count the Daisy BB gun I had when I was a kid, which—although it could put out somebody’s eye, as my mother reminded me repeatedly—was not a lethal weapon. I know this because I shot my brother Phil with it at fairly close range and he did not die. In my defense, I had a good reason for shooting Phil; namely, I wanted to find out what happens if you shoot somebody with a BB gun. (Answer: He tells your mother.) But mainly I used my BB gun for target practice, by which I mean shooting out every streetlight in the greater Armonk, N.Y., metropolitan area.35

  In other words, I have not had any meaningful experience with real firearms in my entire life. And now, as Ron and I head toward the firing range, my excitement about shooting machine guns is turning into nervousness and fears of inadequacy. These fears do not subside when we meet our Firearms Specialist, Nick Gulla. He is a tall, trim, sinewy man with a full beard, a deep voice and a handshake that would crush a coconut. He could be a testosterone donor. He is wearing a camo-patterned ball cap, a red Lock & Load polo shirt, tan military-style pants and a sidearm. He makes me feel like I’m wearing a tutu.

  Before we go into the shooting range, Nick goes over some basic firearm-handling rules with us, the main ones being (1) always treat the gun as if it’s loaded, even if you think it’s not; (2) don’t put your finger on the trigger until it’s time to shoot; and (3) try not to poop your drawers when the gun goes off. (Nick leaves Rule 3 unspoken, but I definitely hear it.)

  Nick then has us hold a dummy machine gun and practice our shooting stance. You’re supposed to lean pretty far forward to counteract the gun’s recoil, which Nick simulates by hitting the muzzle of the gun with the palm of his hand. Both Ron and I have trouble with the stance; we tend to topple forward, which of course would violate another important rule: Do not fall down while shooting a gun.

  Eventually, with Nick’s patient help, Ron and I master the art of standing up. Nick gives us safety glasses and ear protectors and we go into the shooting range. There’s a line of shooting positions separated by steel dividers. Suspended in a wire frame in front of each shooting position, maybe twenty-five feet away, is a paper target displaying the shape of a male torso from the waist up.

  The target has no facial features, but I like to imagine that he’s the guy—let’s ca
ll him Doug—who always sits near me in airports and has many important calls to make on his mobile phone. Somehow Doug has not yet figured out—despite the fact that we have had mobile phones for decades—that the people on the other end can hear normal conversational speech so THERE IS NO NEED TO TALK LOUD. Doug communicates at the same decibel level as a leaf blower. It does not trouble him, if he is even aware of it, that everybody around him hates him more than Hitler, who, for all his flaws, is at least dead.

  Am I saying that I would like to shoot Doug in the head with a machine gun just for talking loud on his phone? Of course not! I would like to shoot Doug in his center mass, which is represented on the target by a red oval in the middle of Doug’s chest. This is what you’re supposed to aim for.

  Ron and I take turns shooting. The procedure is, Nick tells the shooter a little about the gun, then shows him how to load and fire it. When the shooter is shooting, Nick always stands very close behind him, almost touching him, presumably so that if the shooter were to try to do anything stupid, such as turn around, Nick could take corrective action in the form of breaking the shooter’s spine like an Olive Garden breadstick.

  Neither Ron nor I do anything stupid, which is a miracle because at this point both of us (we discussed this later) have so much adrenaline swirling around inside us that we have the functional IQs of cantaloupes. When Nick explains a gun to me, I’m nodding thoughtfully, but my brain is screaming, OHMIGOD I’M ABOUT TO SHOOT A MACHINE GUN OHMIGOD I’M ABOUT TO SHOOT A MACHINE GUN OHMIGOD I’M . . . and so on. The result is, I’m hearing Nick’s voice, but I’m not really understanding what he’s saying. To me, it sounds like this: