“What kind of a crazy motel is this?” asked the cop. “Is there anyone here who’s what they’re supposed to be?”
“I am,” said Serge, raising his hand. “I’m a one-hundred-percent, made-in-Florida, dope-smugglin’, time-sharin’, spring-breakin’, log-flumin’, double-occupancy discount vacation. I’m a tall glass of orange juice and a day without sunshine. I’m the wind in your sails, the sun on your burn and the moon over Miami. I am the native.”
And with that he grabbed two of his special bags and dashed out the door.
The remaining guests unlatched the shutters and propped them open. It was getting light out as sunrise approached. The air was still and cool and sandpipers scurried along the edge of the water. A dorsal fin moved offshore in the calm surface. The generator still had plenty of fuel, and, like at all good parties, everyone eventually ended up in the kitchen. They raided the refrigerator to cook breakfast.
The mother of the boy Art saved continued to profusely thank him. Said her name was Sally and it was so hard raising a boy alone. Tommy Diaz started the CD jukebox and picked the Rolling Stones, Let It Bleed, cuing up the whole album. “Gimme Shelter” boomed through the bar, making everyone jitterbug and jive as they walked around.
E mergency-management officials set up a triage center at the old Coliseum in St. Petersburg to handle an unusually large number of cut and bruised old men found wandering the streets in a confused state in the wake of the hurricane.
About half were ultimately identified as nursing-home patients who had apparently strayed from their facilities. The other half were members of an entertainment troupe who had parachuted out of a WC-130 shortly before the storm.
Five Look-Alikes were sent against their will to geriatric care at Vista Isles, where they were soon placed under psychiatric guard and sedated with Thorazine for demanding they be allowed to travel to Pamplona. Five Alzheimer’s patients went on a tour of Europe and performed flawlessly for the centennial celebration of Ernest Hemingway’s birth.
T he heavy rain from Rolando-berto filled the Myakka River to flood stage as it wound through Sarasota County. Johnny Vegas had taken his four-by-four into the state park. He was on an idyllic bird-watching hike deep into the hardwood hammocks and palmettos with a pretty twenty-two-year-old nature mama. For once, it was a constructive activity for Johnny, an educational experience, a communion with the environment in the company of a wholesome, healthy woman. Johnny had met her on-line, in the Horny Hot Singles Chat Room.
They were eight miles down the trail when the woman and Johnny began exchanging silly double-entendre small talk. Hot damn, thought Johnny, I’m gonna be in those tight beige L.L. Bean hiking pants before you can say-he checked his Audubon field guide-man-o’-war frigate bird.
Johnny started buttering her up. “There’s just such a fresh, open-meadow feeling about you.”
She giggled and threw him a coy glance.
“You’re like a field of lilacs.”
She gave him another look. Was she touching her breast like that on purpose?
“You’re like little kittens and all-natural ice cream.”
She stopped on the trail and started taking off her backpack. At last he had arrived at Score City.
“You’re such a refreshing change from all those loser girls these days with tattoos…”
She froze in the trail. Oh no, thought Johnny. He gave her a fast up and down and saw just a tiny bit of green ink peeking out from under the right side of her shorts. “Did I say tattoo?”
“Yes, you did! And you’ll never see this one,” she said, slapping the right side of her ass. She reversed direction on the trail, angrily marching past Johnny in high gear back toward the four-by-four.
“Poop!” Johnny said to himself. Not only am I not scoring, but now I have to walk eight miles back to civilization in stinging silence.
A phone rang.
Johnny pulled the cell phone off his hiking belt. “Talk to me.”
It was If. “Oh, hi there!” said Johnny. He never thought he’d hear from her again after the night they got stranded on top of the Sunshine Skyway bridge.
They had a nice convivial confab. Turns out, If was just her nickname. Her real name was Inez Fawn Rawlings-I. F. Rawlings in her Tampa Tribune byline-a Vassar grad, Northeastern intelligentsia, rising reporter. She thought that Johnny, though not too mature or bright, looked dreamy in his tux that night at the aquarium. She would make the other women sick with jealousy when she showed up on his arm at the annual Tampa Bay media awards banquet. She told Johnny she had been nominated for the area’s highest journalistic honor, the Hubert Higgins Memorial Award, named after one of the area’s finest local writers, who was killed protecting a teenager from a mob attack on a lunch counter sit-in during the sixties. Actually, it was the former Hubert Higgins award. It was supposed to be named after Higgins in perpetuity, but in response to a tremendous outpouring of grief over a recent tragedy, it was changed this year.
I ’m up for the Toto!” If told Johnny as they entered the banquet hall at the Performing Arts Center in downtown Tampa. She wore a sheer black dress, backless, almost down to her divide, with the thinnest of straps. She held Johnny’s arm tight and waved and smiled at her friends, trying to get their attention, make them mad. She leaned up to Johnny’s ear and whispered: “Winning journalism awards gives me better orgasms.” She gave the center of his ear a quick poke with her slender tongue. Johnny’s legs went to rubber, and he almost went tumbling, but If caught him and they made it to the table with their place cards.
The lights went down and the four-ounce portions of boneless glazed chicken were served. After dinner, the sea of faces turned to the podium, where master of ceremonies Blaine Crease worked his way through a prodigious list of honors.
In the late twentieth century, a new corporate philosophy to all but blow the shareholders had ravaged newspapers and TV stations, bleeding off staffing, experience and standards until what was left of the profession was a karaoke rendition of itself. The Old Guard of journalism came to the rescue by increasing the number of awards and self-congratulatory fetes until journalism officially passed bowling for most trophies per calorie burned.
Crease was deep into the “best lighting on a weekend anchor desk” stretch of the honor roll. An elegant woman came up to If and whispered, “You got the Toto! I was backstage. I saw the engraving in the trophy.”
Johnny thrust a fist into the air in front of him. “Yessssss!”
Crease built his pace. Only one more category before the climax of the night, the Toto. If and Johnny leaned forward in anticipation. Crease moved into the copyediting awards, announcing the best headline on a breaking weekend news feature.
Rookie copy editor Kirk Curtly heard his name called out and arose with his Montblanc graduation gift clipped securely in his jacket pocket. He walked up to shake Crease’s hand and accept the solid-gold-plated trophy.
Up in the closed-off balcony was recently terminated state safety officer Chester “Porkchop” Dole, a Remington.30-06 scoped rifle, and one of those bottles of Jack Daniel’s with a handle. He drank the bourbon out of a filthy coffee cup that read, “Ask someone who gives a shit!”
Everyone in the banquet hall heard a clear-as-day but enigmatic phrase yelled from the direction of the balcony. “Write this headline, motherfucker!”
Shots rang out and the podium was strafed. People screamed and scattered. Others dove under tables. Dole leaned over the railing to get a better angle on the fleeing Kirk Curtly, who was now three Kirks in Dole’s rifle scope, thanks to the miracle of modern alcohol. Dole leaned too far and went over the railing, doing a half-gainer onto Johnny’s and If’s table, collapsing it. If began crying and threw down her napkin. “My special night is ruined!” And she ran away.