Hammerhead Ranch was the only one left. The others were all gone, demolished one by one to clear the path for the advancing column of condos that would become the City of Beverly Shores.
One of the condominiums had a twin, curved design like a W; one was stair-stepped. There was traditional Mediterranean, a towering spaceship and another that looked like the Watergate. One was a rhombus.
Half had the word “Arms” in the name. Total, nine hundred fifty units, average cost, six hundred thousand. Population: spite.
The residents were exceedingly fortunate and comfortable, which brought them to the inescapable conclusion that they needed to be pissed at someone. They were mad at people who drove down the public street in front of their condos, and swimmers who swam in their public ocean and beachcombers who combed their public beach. The phenomenon was so pronounced across Florida that such residents had a nickname: “Condo Commandos.” The particular residents of Beverly Shores took it to a new level.
A nine-year-old overthrew a Frisbee behind one of the buildings, and it sailed a few yards across the city limits of Beverly Shores. A woman manicuring a shrub picked up the plastic disk, cut it in half with pruning shears and threw the two unaerodynamic pieces wobbling back at the boy.
The residents put aside a few hours each day to complain about being screwed by welfare mothers.
Every fall the storm season washed the beach at Beverly Shores out to sea, and every spring the Army Corps of Engineers sent in barges to dredge sand off the bottom of the Gulf and pump it back to shore. It cost millions of dollars and, coupled with their federally subsidized flood insurance, made the residents of Beverly Shores the biggest welfare recipients in the state. All the government required in return, to legitimize spending tax dollars on beach restoration, was public access to the already public beach.
It was an outrage.
The residents planted small trees to obscure the beach parking signs at the tiny access areas. When people continued showing up, they stole the signs at night and blamed outside agitators. They presented a united front of frosty stares at anyone who parked in the small public lot between their buildings; the mayor yelled at them if the parking job was out of alignment, and he yelled if it was not. The residents drove golf carts everywhere, with loud horns.
They were the luckiest people on the island, and they filled days of endless leisure in paradise by being petty, quarrelsome, obsessive and vindictive. They woke up difficult, had a whiny lunch and went to bed not backing down for shit.
When nobody from the outside world was doing them wrong, they turned on each other, and the courthouse brimmed with lawsuits and unfounded criminal complaints. Florida Cable News regularly rifled the legal briefs for a dependable stream of feature stories. There was the condo association that wouldn’t let the disabled vet hang an American flag on his balcony for Memorial Day. And the child in the wheelchair sued for running over a sprinkler head. And the arrest of two women on the beach for breaking the beverage prohibition by drinking coffee during a morning stroll. Florida Cable News cameras were live in the courtroom for the weighing of Muffins, the not-so-miniature poodle who had eaten herself right up to the condo’s fifteen-pound pet weight limit. But Muffins became nervous under the camera lights, and her shaking produced a range of readings from fourteen pounds fourteen ounces to fifteen pounds two ounces. Muffins then relieved herself in the scale, triggering motions from both lawyers on whether the bonus should be included in the weighing. The judge ordered a continuance and stomped off the bench in a huff. The stories were so frequent that Florida Cable News had an on-screen logo-“ Beverly Shores 33786.”
Almost all the incidents at Beverly Shores were minor. There were exceptions. One resident was watering the flower bed outside his ground-floor unit, and the resident upstairs, his archenemy and nemesis Malcolm Kefauver, the mayor of Beverly Shores, came up and needled him about the shade of blue of his wife’s hair until Malcolm got a face full of hose water. The soaked Mayor Kefauver ran back in his condo looking for a weapon and grabbed the first thing he found. The man with the garden hose saw the mayor return, and he took off running.
It was an impressive shot. At a range of thirty feet, the fleeing condo owner was nailed in the derrière with a lawn dart. He went down to his knees like a rhino hit with a tranquilizer gun, then fell face first in the Bermuda grass. They both filed civil and criminal complaints, which brought out the TV people again.
And so went the golden twilight years at Beverly Shores.
5
C. C. Flag stared out of his third-floor office in Los Angeles. He daydreamed and squeezed a small exercise ball with one hand; with the other he held binoculars to ogle a woman on the eighth floor of the landmark Capitol Records building across the street. He relit a cigar and stuck the antique gold lighter in the breast pocket of his elephant hunter jacket. Got to cut down, he told himself, and blew smoke rings at the ceiling.
The office appeared more spacious than it was from the paucity of furniture. Like someone was moving out, only it was supposed to be taste. Flag sat in an ultramodern chair that looked ready to buckle. It had a thin frame of shiny alloys invented on the space shuttle and was covered with a film of polymers. His desk was a triangle of safety glass atop a giant golf tee. The only other furniture was the retro bar and antique Coke machine. The floor was oak parquet. Ceiling tracks of boron spotlights emphasized the framed photographs of Flag covering the walls. Flag with Buddy Holly, Flag with The Who, Flag with Hendrix, all carefully cropped, just before security grabbed Flag and his personal photographer.
For his sixty-four years of unhealthy living, time had not been unkind to Flag. He was a large, husky man, but his paunch was modest. His hair was thick, his complexion bent toward ruddy, and he always dressed as if he were on his way to Mayan ruins. Thick pants tucked in the tops of high, rugged boots. Double-stitched shirt, wide-brimmed hat, riding crop.
C. C. was making a comeback from obscurity after his heyday as “ America ’s Daddy-O of Rock ’n’ Roll.” Flag gave himself the nickname because no one else would. Dick Clark was much more popular. Flag had tried everything: jokes, cash giveaways, sexy women, on-location dances. Nothing worked. Then he stumbled on a gimmick that would forever vault Flag into the rock ‘n’ roll pantheon of distant also-rans. One Saturday afternoon in 1958, Flag became the first person in rock music history to destroy musical instruments at the end of a performance. He just forgot to tell the band ahead of time. It was a melee.
News of the brawl boosted viewership the following week, when Flag and three stagehands beat the crap out of the crooning group the Wind-Breakers. After that, the show was forced to adopt an all-record format. But the brief excitement was enough to keep Flag’s career from dwindling out for another three years.
Flag’s elbowing personality hadn’t been heard from in decades until the mid-1990s, when he turned up at four A.M. on the ex-celebrity infomercial circuit. He was still recognized by the same demographic burp that had watched his dance show as kids and now was the target audience for advertisers of denture adhesives, confidence-inspiring undergarments and term life for the near-dead.
His phone rang. Flag pressed the button that activated the speakerphone, which he prized for its irritation value. His secretary said someone was here to see him. Then he heard his secretary yelling out in the hall. “Stop! You can’t just barge in there!”
Flag’s office door flew open and slammed into the wall. A courier from Insult to Injury Process Servers stormed into the room and tomahawked a subpoena into Flag’s chest. “Consider yourself served, defendant-boy! Have a nice fucking day!”