by Dorsey, Tim
The clerk then looked around the store suspiciously. He took off his baseball cap embroidered with “Crazy Charlie’s” and replaced it with one embroidered “Private Collector.” He picked up the gun Art had selected and stuck it inside his jacket. He looked around again and then cocked his head toward the back door. “Let’s take a walk.”
They ended up behind the clerk’s car parked in the alley. He handed Art the gun, and Art felt the weight, liked the balance. But he shook his head and handed it back. “I only have credit cards.”
The clerk opened his trunk and took out a magnetic credit-card swiper and plugged it into a cell phone.
“That’ll be six hundred.”
“But it was only five hundred in the store!”
“I’m a private collector! I can’t compete with those prices!”
Art sighed and he forked over his Visa. Then he caught a cab for Beverly Shores. They were just about done building the stage. Art cased the place. He asked someone what time Boris the Hateful Piece of Shit was supposed to arrive. The nearest accommodation was the Hammerhead Ranch Motel next door. Not exactly the luxury digs he had intended, but this was business.
He checked in with a Diners Club, tuned a radio to Boris the Hateful Piece of Shit and began cleaning the Colt.
25
The next morning Serge cut across the grass to the sidewalk in front of room one and turned the knob. Before he had the door open, he smelled strawberry incense; Buffalo Springfield was on the radio. Inside, the beds were pushed against the walls to create a large expanse of carpet. Everyone was sitting cross-legged on the floor. City held her breath and passed the alligator bong to Lenny, who did a double-clutch toke and passed it to Country, who then passed it around a circle of eight guys that Serge didn’t recognize. They represented all races and creeds. There were coats on the beds: kabuki robe, Nehru jacket, dashiki. On top was a turban.
“What the hell’s this?” said Serge. “Get High for UNICEF?”
“It’s the International Olympic Committee,” said Lenny. “They’re here scouting for 2012. I wanted to do my part to bring the games here.”
The men looked up and smiled at Serge and ate potato chips and salted almonds and passed the Lucite alligator.
Serge shook off the scene, then held up a videocassette with satisfaction. “I found The Cocoanuts, the first Marx Brothers movie. It’s about the Florida land boom back in the twenties. Groucho plays a Miami innkeeper who tries to rip everyone off.” He nodded toward the delegates. “We-Are-the-World can stay, but only if they obey the theater rules.”
By now Serge and Lenny had the routine down, and they began moving like a precision drill team. Serge sealed the windows with tape, and Lenny zipped around the room moving chairs and rationing out snacks. The circle of guests fanned into two rows, for optimum viewing. Serge hit the cooler, grabbing a grapefruit and mineral water. Lenny was by the TV, and Serge turned to throw him the videocassette.
“Lenny! Catch!”
“What?”
Lenny turned with the bong as the cassette zinged past his ear.
There was a scream. The videotape hit the Burkina Faso delegate in the left eye, and he grabbed his face and jackknifed in pain, right into a globe lamp. Now there was broken glass, blood and panic. A stoned Lenny picked up the videotape, stuck it in the VCR and started watching the Marx Brothers. People ran around the room in an international commotion. Groucho flicked his cigar: “Why, when I came to Florida three years ago, I didn’t have a nickel in my pocket. Now, I have a nickel in my pocket….”
Serge’s jaw fell. Then came anger. “Everyone out! Now! Come on, let’s get!”
Serge held the door open as they filed by, smiling, bowing and thanking Serge.
Serge looked over at City and Country, who were back into the pot.
“’Ere,” City said without exhaling, handing the smoking bong to Country. “This is some nuclear weed!”
“You, too!” Serge yelled. “Be gone, young dope fiends!”
Country didn’t leave. Instead she sidled up to Serge with a whimsical, sexy swagger.
“How ’bout it, big boy?” She was feeling mischievous and wanted to toy with Serge—see him go slack-kneed. But she saw something entirely different in his eyes. Serge took a step forward, and it was Country who went invertebrate. Serge whisked her up in his arms like he was carrying a bride across a threshold. She put her arms around his neck to hold on, scared but feeling his energy.
Serge marched quickly to the bed and threw her on her back, and she bounced a foot and a half. He turned to Lenny and City. “Would you excuse us?”
It was not tender lovemaking. It was the kind of vigorous workout described in brochures for expensive isokinetic machines. Country was noisy in bed. She moaned and yelled and screamed. Lots of “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Soon they were drenched in perspiration, bodies sliding all over. They were going so hard that Serge was constantly in danger of sailing off the bed like a luge taking a turn too fast. Country writhed with her eyes closed and whipped her head side to side, her golden hair a damp mop, and it matted on her cheeks and fell in her mouth.
Suddenly she reached up and grabbed Serge by the back of the head. Breathing hard, she rocked her hips into him, parted her wet lips and gave Serge a predatory, squinting look that would send most men’s prostates flying like a tee shot.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked, hyperventilating.
“Pioneer landmarks, historic graveyards, Andrew Jackson…” he said, keeping pneumatic rhythm. “…East Martello Tower, Pigeon Key, Stiltsville, the Don Shula Expressway, Larry Csonka…”
“Csonka? You gay?”
“I’m not picturing him naked. I’m imagining him splitting the linebackers in the Orange Bowl.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of guys thinking stuff like that to prolong sex.”
“I’m not,” said Serge. “I’m trying to accelerate it.”
Country started to give him a weird look, but Serge thrust again and hit pay dirt, and Country’s eyes rolled back in her head. Then her eyelashes began to flutter. They reached simultaneous peaks, and Country surprised herself by making a squeaking sound like someone repeatedly stepping on a cat toy.
Serge arched up. “Remember the Maine!”
And they collapsed together in an exhausted, panting tangle.
Serge became something of a guru to City and Country. They were mesmerized by his patter on All Things Florida, especially when they were high. They started following him everywhere like ducklings, and Serge accommodated with a running commentary as a kind of Florida docent-at-large.
The next day, about noon, he led them into The Florida Room, and they walked around the inside of the place at museum pace, taking inventory of the stuff on the walls. Dominant were the trophy fish. None of the taxidermy work looked newer than fifty years—chipped, faded scales and yellowed eyes. Serge identified the largest over the bar—blue marlin, swordfish, sea bass and mako shark—and the midsized stuff on the north and south walls: sailfish, tarpon, white marlin, wahoo. Then, above the western windows facing the water, the “small” fish: bull dolphin, king mackerel, barracuda, permit.
“Check out these great photos!” he said. They were in old wood frames mounted on the wall running down to the restrooms. The earliest were ware era, group shots of people at tables in sailor and soldier uniforms. There was a close-up of a whiskered chief petty officer next to a teenage recruit, both smoking cigars. Most of the women in the photos looked like the Andrews sisters. There was raucous swing dancing and an old Bally jukebox that was later mothballed for twenty years in a warehouse in Dalton, Georgia, and now sat restored under a tenth-floor apartment window overlooking Central Park. The photographs were arranged chronologically. Lots of fishing snapshots and local parades; Hank Aaron and Stan Musial during spring training; and a party photo with a banner, “Happy New Year 1959.”
Next was the memorial photo corner dedicated to some local photojournalist named “Studs” Alle
n, 1921-1971. Serge didn’t need to read the captions.
“This is a young Cuban baseball pitcher sitting at a lunch counter on Tampa’s Kennedy Boulevard, before the president’s assassination, when it was still called Lafayette Boulevard. He was in town raising money to oppose Fulgencio Batista. His name was Fidel Castro.”
Serge moved a step sideways and the girls followed. “This is an angry shot of beat author Jack Kerouac at the Wild Boar lounge on Nebraska Avenue in Tampa…. Here he is again, a little happier this time, standing outside his home on Tenth Avenue North in St. Pete, where he lived from 1964 to 1966…. And this is a photo of a St. Petersburg Junior College student named Jim Morrison performing at the Beaux Arts Coffee House in Pinellas Park.”
Country whispered something in City’s ear, and City came up with some kind of excuse to leave.
Country turned back to Serge. “Did I hear you have some kind of moon rock back in your room? I’d love to see it.”
Three minutes later they were back in the room: Country kneeling on the foot of the bed, eyeing Serge—Serge completely missing the point, sitting in the middle of the bed, wrapped up in his storytelling. Country’s gaze intensified, and she began to feel wet. Serge waved the rock around in the air, making rocket sounds.
“Did I ever tell you that Dade Country was supposed to be named Pinkney County?”
She shook her head no.
“It’s true, the Florida legislature was forming the new country down in Miami and they had the name all picked out. It was 1835. About the same time, Major Francis Lanhorne Dade began leading one hundred and ten soldiers from Fort Brooke in Tampa up to Fort King near Ocala. We had just screwed the Indians over but good, trying to ship ’em out West, so they attacked Dade’s men. It was Florida’s version of Little Big Horn. Only three survived….”
Anyone else would have understood the look in Country’s eyes. But Serge was on, well, Planet Serge.
“…Word got back to the legislature, and they changed the name of the new country to Dade. Here’s a cool epilogue. Some of the maps at the time placed Dade County north of Tampa because some of the mapmakers mistakenly thought the county was where the massacre had taken place…. Anyway, so now we’re all pissed at the Indians, and we started the Second Seminole War. But their leader is the brave Osceola—for my money, possibly the greatest Floridian of all time. And the Indians are playing hit-and-run out of the Green Swamp, which feeds the river that runs through Tampa. All the European colonists take refuge at the fortified coastal installations, which is why today we have all these cities with names like Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Fort Pierce….”
Country could wait no longer for Serge to come around. She pounced and pulled his pants off. Then she pinned his shoulders and got on top, wiggling down onto him with a chirp.
“…Finally, General Thomas S. Jessup offers a flag of truce to Osceola to talk about peace. When Osceola arrives in St. Augustine, Jessup has him imprisoned, where he died in a year under brutal conditions. The attending physician cut off Osceola’s head and took it home, and whenever his young boys would misbehave, he got out the head and hung it on their bedpost….”
Country was sliding up and down rapidly, mouth open, breathing hard. A shock of blond hair on each side of her head swung back and forth in rhythm, brushing Serge’s cheeks.
“…Everyone wanted something done about the Indians, but not like this. There was no honor to it, and everyone told Jessup he was a rat the rest of his days. Finally, it all came full circle. An Orlando-area legislator took up Osceola’s cause, and years later when they were naming a new county—you guessed it! And that’s how Florida got a Dade and an Osceola County….”
Country’s breathing became increasingly shallow. Then she stopped breathing altogether, bowed up and quivered for ten seconds like she’d been harpooned—and collapsed on Serge’s chest.
“…Did I ever tell you Winston Churchill once stayed in Tampa as a young journalist?…”
Lenny and City were outside the room with their ears pressed against the door.
“What’s going on in there?” whispered City.
“I don’t know,” said Lenny. “I think they’re watching the History Channel.”
Serge awoke the next morning to find a naked Lenny sitting in a chair with a toy squirt gun in one hand and his cock in the other. He had them pressed together, end to end.
“Jesus Christ!” yelled Serge. “What kind of sickness is that!”
“I’m squirting a cocaine solution up my urethra,” said Lenny.
Serge shrugged. “I’ll never understand the drug culture.”
A half hour later, Serge was at the writing desk, playing with a Junior Wizard chemistry set he picked up at Toys “R” Us during the previous day’s supply run. Different-colored liquids and powders filled the beakers and flasks and a rack of test tubes. In the middle of the desk was a glass distillation chamber over an unlit Bunsen burner.
Lenny asked to borrow the magnifying glass to examine his dick because “something’s not right.”
Serge didn’t answer. He concentrated on tweaking the ratios of isotopes he had extracted from household cleaning products and fast food. Sodium palmitate, paraffin, naphthene hydrocarbons. Then he poured in a test tube filled with Bacardi 151.
“What’s that?” Lenny asked as Serge added another test tube containing a clear, unidentified syrup.
“Eleven herbs and spices.”
He lit the burner, and the solution began to boil and snake through a coiled glass tube into the condensate vapor trap.
Lenny sniffed the air. “Smells like bananas and coconuts.”
“Then I must be close,” said Serge. He looked out the window and saw the sun setting, so he killed the burner and let the solution cool. He grabbed his camera bag and a thick three-ring binder from one of the desk drawers and headed out the door for the water.
Zargoza sat near the shore in a cheap beach chair with frayed straps. He still wore his business suit, but his shoes were off and his toes deep in the sand. He was blinking and swallowing fifty percent more frequently than the average person, and his blood pressure made his head feel like a thermometer bulb. His left thumb had developed a slight involuntary shake. He drank haughtily from a large tumbler decorated with scuba flags, trickles of fluid running out each side of his mouth. The tumbler was filled equally with rum and Coke, and Zargoza constantly checked his watch, impatient for the alcohol to take effect and deliver him from the anxiety attack. It was a half hour till sunset, and he was as far up to the water as the fluffy, dry sand went. In front of him was the damp, packed sand of the littoral and the beach’s pedestrian traffic. The day crowd was gone, the young body-watchers and pickup artists and beer guzzlers. This was the sunset club, a slightly higher sensibility. Beachcombers in their forties and fifties, joggers, people setting up camera tripods and long lenses. They walked down from their beach houses and condos and rentals and motel rooms; most had light jackets or sweat pants rolled above their calves.
Behind Zargoza were two goons/bodyguards, also in street clothes, sitting on a beach blanket playing poker.
The goons saw someone violate their no-fly zone, and they went for rods inside their jackets. Zargoza turned when he heard the commotion. “It’s okay. Let him through.”
Serge pulled up a stray beach chair and sat alongside Zargoza. He stuck his camera bag under the chair and set the three-ring binder in his lap.
“What do you have there?” asked Zargoza.
“My sunset album.”
“Hmmmmmm.”
“The pictures are arranged geographically,” said Serge. “That’s up in sawgrass at Yankeetown, and these are the flats off Homosassa. Here, the sunset reflects in the bayou at Tarpon Springs, and here it is from the Hurricane bar just down the road. This is over Lido Key, and here’s Siesta Key and Boca Grande through the sea oats….”
Zargoza was looking, not listening. He felt spiked walls closing in.
Serge beg
an pulling all the photos from their slots and rearranging them chronologically and then alphabetically, then by hue. He took them out again and shuffled them and stuck them back in the book under some other criteria. He looked at it, shook his head, and started pulling the photos out again.
Zargoza reached over and slammed his palm down on the book. “Stop it! Just stop it! I’m nervous enough as it is!”
“No problem,” said Serge. He put the book under his chair and pulled out his camera bag. Five minutes to sunset, the beach foot traffic slowed and then stopped. They produced binoculars and camcorders.
Serge aimed his camera at the sea and focused. He didn’t like the lens. He changed it, then changed it back and refocused. He adjusted the aperture. He tried the camera body vertical and horizontal. Then tried it both ways again with the other lens.
Zargoza didn’t even turn to face Serge. He hissed through his teeth: “Just take the picture or so help me I’m gonna hammer-throw that fucking camera in the ocean!”
Serge pressed the shutter button. Click. Again. Click. Advancing the film. Click, click, click, click, click. Zargoza closed his eyes and strangled the armrests of his beach chair.
26
The next day, Boris the Hateful Piece of Shit was wrapping up his morning shift in the heavily air-conditioned broadcast studios of radio station Blitz-99. “Remember, don’t let your parents give you any crap, because they don’t know squat! This is Boris the Hateful Piece of Sh—AHH-OOOO-GAH!”
As he stepped into the station’s parking lot, he pressed a button on his keychain and his new Corvette beeped that it was unlocked. Boris planned to head over to the beach and the Proposition 213 rally, where he was scheduled as the main speaker that evening. Boris was not political, but he latched on to the Proposition 213 spearhead when he found it was a great way to score with bigot babes, who tended to be easier.
Because of his bulk, Boris could only get into his Corvette through a deliberate, time-consuming insertion like Wally Schirra. It was at least a fifteen-minute effort, and that was with the custom detachable steering wheel that snapped back on the column once he was in place. Boris didn’t mind. The Corvette’s sleek lines and sharp, bullet exterior concealed the gelatinous lines of Boris’s decidedly parabolic fuselage. He had the driver’s seat rigged extra low, with as little of him visible above window level as possible. Once inside, Boris the Hateful Piece of Shit became Boris the Disembodied Head in a Sexy Sports Car. He pulled out of the parking lot. His bumper sticker read: “It sucks to be you.”
