Tropic of Stupid

by Tim Dorsey

  “Then why were you reading the Bible?”

  “Why not?” Serge stepped over a gopher tortoise. “I think a lot of people get turned off on religion, just because some of the followers use love as an excuse to hate. But they’re just short-changing themselves on some great teachings. Kurt Vonnegut was a self-described atheist or agnostic, depending on which day you caught him, but the Gospels are a strong thread through his body of work.”

  “Are you an atheist?”

  “Nope,” said Serge. “How can you look up at the night sky and not realize that some shit’s going down somewhere? I just don’t have the remotest clue what. That’s why I’ve decided to work on my people skills.”

  They moved on to another trail by the upper lake, chatting, growing on each other.

  “Now I have a question,” said Serge. “When we first met, and I mentioned you probably went through some life-altering events, I saw a shock of recognition. What were they?”

  Before Bobby realized what was happening, he surprised himself by opening up. “. . . There was the priest, Father Al. Someone had stolen my bicycle . . .” He continued at length, right up to the funeral and the letter the priest had left for him.

  “He must have been a truly spiritual guy,” said Serge.

  “That he was,” said Bobby. “And his passing away just happened to come around the time that someone had threatened my daughter.”

  Serge’s feet stopped. “That’s terrible, as close to home as it gets. Is she safe?”

  “Not a physical threat,” said Bobby. “It was political. Her career. But I took care of it.”

  “Glad to hear.”

  “But that’s my biggest regret.”

  “Now you’ve lost me.”

  “When I was younger, building that law firm was all-consuming in every way,” said Bobby. “I got my priorities messed up, and I didn’t spend time with my daughter.”

  “A lot of fathers have to make that sacrifice to put food on the table,” said Serge. “Then they’re too hard on themselves, wishing they spent more time.”

  “You’re missing my meaning,” said Bobby. “I didn’t spend any time. All I could think about was money and what it could buy and chasing women. Then we had to go and make those stupid commercials, and my life became overpopulated with friends who were anything but. My life was full. Full of emptiness. My daughter won’t talk to me. The only communication we’ve had in years is a call I got when her job was jeopardized because of me.”

  “Nothing that can’t be fixed,” said Serge. “Loved ones reconcile all the time.”

  “I think this is pretty unfixable.”

  “Why don’t you let me try?” said Serge. “It would be my chance to make a change in someone’s life bigger than Sea Hunt.”

  “Please don’t take any offense,” said Bobby. “When we met at the picnic table, I had big reservations about you. Now I realize it was an inauspicious first impression. But I still don’t know you well enough to expose my daughter to you.”

  “Say no more.” Serge tossed a cigarette butt into a litter bag. “I’d be just as cautious.”

  Chapter 29

  The Next Day

  A black Lincoln Nautilus pulled up in front of a condominium, and the Uber driver got out to help the passengers because they were ancient.

  The old man had a walker with tennis balls on the ends of the legs, but his wife only needed a cane.

  It was a low-rise condo with lush landscaping that was the product of a professional service who swarmed with loud, gas-powered equipment every Thursday morning. Azaleas, crotons, fan palms. The stucco walls were bright white, setting off the turquoise doors.

  Charlie and Madge Petrocelli, from Kalamazoo.

  Someone at the airport had helped them get the Uber ride, because they didn’t know how it worked. Now, at the condo, the driver opened the trunk and began removing an amount of luggage that could sustain a jungle expedition. He courteously carried it all to the door of unit 7.

  “You’ve been so kind,” said Madge, snapping open her purse for a generous tip.

  The driver left, and Madge looked at her husband. “Didn’t that rental agent say there was supposed to be a lockbox on the door with the keys?”

  Charlie shrugged. “Try the knob.”

  She twisted it. “Locked. What are we going to do?”

  “Couldn’t hurt to ring the doorbell.”

  She pressed a button and heard chimes inside.

  They didn’t expect any result, but the door opened. “Yes, how can I help you?”

  The confused couple stared at an equally confused retired woman in a bathrobe, who was looking down at a massive pile of suitcases on her porch.

  “There wasn’t a lockbox on the door,” said Madge.

  “Why would there be?” asked the woman.

  “Because we rented this place,” said Madge.

  “Paid six months in advance,” said Charlie.

  “You have the wrong address,” said the woman.

  Madge opened her purse again, unfolding a document and handing it to the woman at the door. “That’s our rental agreement.”

  The woman read it. “You have the correct address all right, but there must be some kind of mistake. You can’t be renting this place because I’ve already paid until the end of the year.”

  “How is that possible?” asked Madge.

  “I don’t know,” said the woman. “But I’ll call the property manager and get this straightened out. Probably just a paperwork error, and you’re in a different unit.”

  The manager arrived and looked over the document. She got on the phone.

  Then the police arrived.

  Madge was crying.

  The officers tried to explain the situation as gently as possible: The retired couple had rented the condo off of Quirk’s List. But there was a big scam in Florida spreading like typhoid. The grifters would find a legitimate rental, then copy all the information and even download beautiful photos of the vacation homes in paradise. Then they’d upload all the fake material anonymously in an Internet café.

  “But we paid for six months,” said a sobbing Madge.

  And the officers were correct when they guessed that the payment was through Western Union.

  “These people know what they’re doing,” said one of the cops. “They’re very difficult to trace.”

  The other officer cleared his throat. “What are your plans?”

  “We planned to stay here.” Madge blew her nose in a lace handkerchief.

  The first officer pursed his lips in heartfelt sympathy. “I’ll call and have victims’ services come out, and we can get you set up at a motel.”

  “How much will that cost?” asked Charlie.

  “We can get a discount,” said the other officer. “The important thing is to get you settled in for the night. Then we’ll turn all this information over to the detectives and hope for the best.”

  Madge stowed her handkerchief. “What are the chances we’ll get our money back?”

  The officers knew, and they changed the subject. “Let’s first work on that motel room.”

  Sarasota

  A blue-and-white Cobra pulled up to the guard booth. Serge gleefully flapped his green passport book out the window.

  “Oh, right,” said a ranger named Michelle, grabbing her ink pad.

  “No, I already have the official stamp,” said Serge. “Just wanted to show you that I’m down with the program. You know what Ranger Bobby is doing?”

  “Day off.”

  “Rats. So he’s not here.”

  “No, he’s here. He lives here.”

  “Really?”

  “We got this old building out in the woods that we converted into apartments.”

  “Great, I’ll pay a surprise visit.”

  “Sorry, that area is authorized personnel only.”

  “But I’m really tight with Bobby. We’re almost family,” said Serge. “Could you call him and get us permission?
Of course, it will ruin the surprise.”

  “Give me a minute.” The ranger got on the phone briefly and came back to the window. “He says it’s fine. Here’s the map to get there . . .”

  The Cobra rolled through a canopy of oaks until it arrived at the no-frills building nestled in the trees. Bobby was already waiting at the door and invited them in.

  “Wow,” said Serge. “You really are serious about the life change. You’re living like a monk.”

  “More like Father Al. I arranged it like his room in the rectory. Where’s Coleman?”

  “So-called ‘resting’ back at the motel.” Serge slapped the side of his head. “Crap, Amelia’s back.”

  Uh-oh, thought Bobby. Here we go again, meds not kicking in.

  “Hey, you’re an attorney,” said Serge. “I’ll bet I know something about the law that you don’t.”

  Bobby just smiled.

  “This is really cool!” said Serge. “There was this one firm that did a lot of product-liability defense for big corporations. Of course, the companies are always selling stuff they shouldn’t. I mean, where were the lawyers when they dreamed up lawn darts? On the other hand, there are a lot of dishonest people out there trying to make a fast buck from deep pockets. And from the file named ‘I can’t believe that’s really a job,’ the defense firms hire scientists who specialize in analyzing liability evidence, and they made a wacky discovery in one case. The plaintiff was suing a huge soda company because there was a big dead rat inside the can, way larger than the hole from the pop-top. But here’s what the scientist found out: The plaintiff had a hobby of building ships inside bottles. He had emptied the soda from the can, and dropped a teeny-tiny baby rat through the hole and kept feeding and growing it inside there until it was a big honkin’ rodent, then he opened another can of soda and poured it into the first can, drowning it—that’s the downer part of the story—but isn’t the rest freaking crazy?”

  “I wasn’t aware of that,” Bobby said evenly. Meds definitely not working.

  “Human behavior fascinates me!” said Serge. “The potential daily decisions are equally endless and pointless: A pit bull attacked a family in Tampa when they tried to dress it in a Christmas sweater. That’s not really on topic, but the key to life is ignoring the guardrails. I’ll calm down. Want to go for a hike?”

  “Why not?”

  The afternoon proceeded like the day before. Serge indeed mellowed. The unspoiled nature appeared to affect him and the ranger equally. They stopped on the trail simply to look at the geometry of a spiderweb.

  “Now this is religion,” said Serge.

  “Creation,” said Bobby. “Amazing.”

  “You know how people are always talking about a scene?”

  “Scene?”

  “A spontaneous confluence of people, time and place. Expatriate Paris, fifties Miami Beach, the Tangier Interzone artist movement in Morocco, Haight-Ashbury’s Summer of Love, Seattle grunge. Admittedly not all are equal,” said Serge. “People are always trying to find the current scene, except you can’t just invent them, and when they can’t find them, they look in the rearview at scenes through history that only grow more mythical with time. But my entire youth was a scene: old Florida. All the great unspoiled, uncrowded places with distinct architecture and personality. The Dairy Belle near Blue Heron, the Trylon tower, the Everglades Hotel on Biscayne, Jimbo’s fish camp, the vaulted Clematis library with the picture windows on Lake Worth, and funky independent drugstores with suntan lotion signs, fortune-telling scales and comic book sections. All of them as dead as three-channel TV that signed off the air each night with the national anthem and a prayer.”

  “I know what you’re talking about,” said the ranger. “I once snuck over to the Orange Bowl when I was a little kid, and had to go to confession for that stunt. Years later I saw pictures in the newspaper of a wrecking ball taking down the end zone scoreboard.”

  “Exactly,” said Serge. “I’ve been driving all over the state for a couple of decades now trying to recapture that. Occasionally I’ll find a surviving landmark, but it’s always wedged into a wall of sterile new chain stores that identically repeats itself city after city, coast after coast. No scene. Just horrible drivers racing by without any institutional memory of what they’re missing.”

  “We definitely were lucky growing up when we did,” said Bobby.

  “Then you should clearly remember this iconic childhood memory, as only someone who grew up where and when we did could,” said Serge. “The huge blackouts!”

  “I don’t remember the power going out,” said Bobby. “At least not for very long.”

  Serge threw up his arms. “It might as well have! I’m talking about the Super Bowls in Miami!”

  “Oh yeah,” said Bobby. “People wouldn’t believe it today. I almost still can’t. Super Bowl blackouts.”

  “Allow me to digress, which is my strength.”

  “Can I stop you?” asked Bobby.

  “I just found out a cool story of one of my relatives getting arrested in Miami back in 1968.”

  “What for?”

  “Running onto the field during the Super Bowl, yelling, ‘We won! We won!’”

  “How many others were arrested?”

  “Just him.”

  “That’s odd,” said Bobby. “People are always getting onto the field shouting ‘We won!’ Especially at Super Bowls. They usually let it slide because of the excitement.”

  “Usually,” said Serge. “Except this was before the game. He was yelling ‘We won!’ out of local pride that Miami was hosting its first Super Bowl.”

  “Okay, I get it now,” said Bobby. “But how is that a cool story?”

  “Because most people also don’t remember that back then it wasn’t called the Super Bowl until the third one, when the Jets beat the Colts, also in Miami,” said Serge. “The first game in Los Angeles and the second in Miami, when the Packers repeated and beat the Raiders thirty-three to fourteen, were officially dubbed the AFL-NFL World Championship. And before the second one, my uncle’s getting hauled off in cuffs, still excited and yelling. ‘I feel super! Miami is super! What a super day for the super bowl!’ Next year they changed the name.”

  “I doubt it was because of him.”

  “I’m going with it anyway,” said Serge. “If you don’t make up cool shit about your family, nobody else will . . . Allow me to circle back around: Remember the blackout parties in South Florida?”

  “Who doesn’t?” said Bobby. “Everyone drove north. It was crazy.”

  “You don’t have to convince me,” said Serge. “The leagues didn’t have their acts together yet, and even though Miami’s first Super Bowls—two, three and five—sold out, they never lifted the regular-season television blackouts for the Dolphins viewing area, which extended up through Broward and Palm Beach Counties. I remember having to listen to Dolphins home games all the time on the radio. But Super Bowls? Can you believe that stupidness?”

  Bobby smiled. “At least we got to go to the blackout parties.”

  Serge nodded and smiled back. “Some of my fondest coming-of-age-in-Florida heritage moments. The county line was only ten miles north, and the area’s big employers were RCA and Pratt & Whitney. So for each blackout, dozens of the guys got together and drove up U.S. 1 a few minutes over into Martin County, where the blackout wasn’t in effect, and rented rooms at the Howard Johnson or Holiday Inn. Just for the TVs.”

  “I was only a kid,” said Bobby. “What eye-opening parties.”

  “And how,” said Serge. “It was like episodes of Mad Men, all these old-school guys in short-sleeve dress shirts packing the rooms, smoking Pall Malls and setting up massively stocked wet bars of Canadian Mist and Cutty Sark. Grilling steaks on hibachis in the parking lot. There I am, a little kid looking up at all these professional men shouting with each touchdown and letting me have all the chips and soda my stomach could handle. And by the end, some were falling down, and one needed a butterfly
bandage on his forehead.”

  “It was almost better that there were blackouts,” said Ranger Bobby. “And digression is indeed your strength. I completely forgot what we were talking about.”

  “People are always looking in vain for the current scene,” said Serge. “But I just had an epiphany: It’s been staring me in the face for so long that I feel like an idiot. We do have a scene. A thriving one that’s never gone away: our natural spaces, state parks and preserves.” Serge spread his arms. “This is it.”

  “I agree totally,” said the ranger.

  They stopped and stared in tranquil silence out across a prairie between the bridge and upper lake. It was covered with a blanket of yellow.

  “I’ve stood here a million times taking in this vista,” said Serge. “But this is the first time I’ve seen the coreopsis in bloom.”

  “Tickseed, the official state wildflower,” said Bobby.

  Serge pointed. “And for decades I’ve been watching that same lone sabal palm standing out there in the field. What caused it to stray from the herd? Independence? Rejection? . . . Yes, sir, just stopping and getting in tune with this scene makes it all worthwhile.”

  “I’m with you,” said Bobby. “But you do realize that there’s a big government movement up in Tallahassee to profit off the parks by designating chunks of land to lease for logging, cattle grazing and, if you can believe it, hunting.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Soulless politicians who place no value on just existing in the moment in the real Florida like this. Their scene is dollar signs.”

  “Let me know when they’re on the way,” said Serge. “I may have to chain myself to something.”

  “I’ll be right next to you.”

  “Can I ask you a personal question?” said Serge.

  “Hasn’t stopped you so far.”

  “Why don’t you go see your daughter?”

  “There’s a non sequitur.”

  “Seriously.”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “I’d be happy to serve as the go-between,” said Serge.

  “You promised me yesterday you wouldn’t.”