In the mutual-approval symbiosis of celebrity and fan, people constantly approached Boris as he sat motionless: “You’re the greatest, man!” “You’re a genius!” “You tell it like it is!”
Boris never acknowledged them-just continued sitting rigid, arms crossed, staring straight ahead in his sunglasses.
“Man, that is so cool!” said his fans.
It was a different story if it was a young girl. Then Boris broke his pose and whispered in her ear. The girl would yell over to her friends something like “Hey, guess what Boris just asked me! He’s a riot!”
They didn’t get it. They thought it was part of the act. No, Boris would say, I’m serious. I really want you to do that to me.
“You can’t be serious,” replied the last girl. “But you smell.”
“Of course I smell. I’m a piece of shit!”
“Get away from me, you fat freak!”
Boris shrugged and leaned back and crossed his arms.
Johnny Vegas stood next to the wetlands exhibit and said to no one in particular, “Isn’t that Boris the Hateful Piece of Shit?”
“Yes it is,” came a reply. “And you wouldn’t believe what he just asked me to do.”
Johnny turned and gazed into the emerald-green eyes of If, who tossed an empty plastic champagne flute into the otter tank. Responding to ancient genetic memory, Johnny sheep-dogged her over to the bar. The TV was tuned to Florida Cable News.
FCN was in Daytona Beach reporting the phenomenon of college student balcony falls. And it wasn’t just hotels anymore-anything of altitude would do: overpasses, parking decks, scoreboards at sporting arenas. While the FCN reporter spoke, a computer illustration showed the side of a beachfront hotel and a dotted line arcing from the top floor down to a large X on the pavement painfully shy of the swimming pool.
Johnny turned to If. “Did you know that because of Florida, architects have had to recalculate the setback distance of swimming pools from hotels?”
She shook her head.
“It’s true,” he said. “They used to go by standard Mexican cliff-diving clearances and then add a percentage as a deterrent. But spring break queered the whole equation. All the drinking. Everyone’s depth perception is fucked.”
“What kind of yutz would dive from the fourteenth floor?” asked If.
“I’d rather hit something with my speedboat,” said Johnny.
“You have a speedboat?” If asked, her face lighting up.
“Used to,” Johnny said with dejection. “It’s now being raced around Biscayne Bay by Rastafarians smoking marijuana cigars.”
“Oh,” she said, and her smile dropped along with her eyes.
Johnny stared at the floor, too, and idly scraped at a piece of gum with the point of his Italian shoe. Then a thought. He looked back at her and offered tentatively, “I have a Porsche.”
“Not a nine-twenty-four, I hope,” she said with reserve.
“No way! Nine-eleven. Convertible.”
“Airfoil on the trunk?”
“And Luther Vandross on the CD.”
If began to purr, and Johnny tried to picture her in the cheerleading outfit he had in the back of his closet. If said she had to hit a party across the bay-meet a few guys from her office and string them along, purely as an investment in her career. But she’d love to meet him, say, in two hours? She gave him directions, a late-night piano bar in St. Pete, a little walk-down joint below street level on the bay-front.
Johnny glanced back at the TV. The newscast had moved into the weather segment, and he laughed and pointed at the screen. “I love that dog. He cracks me up.”
If looked up and saw Toto the Weather Dog spinning in a ballerina outfit and began laughing, too. “That’s too much! How do they think of this stuff?”
Johnny smiled and bade If farewell, but in his heart he knew she wouldn’t be at the piano bar. It was the classic brush-off.
He’d forgotten about her as he trolled the party without result. Two hours later, with no further success in hand, Johnny hopped in his Porsche and drove for the piano bar, a slave of groundless hope, calling on God in the night air: “Please, please, please, please, please…”
Seconds after Johnny left, Boris cued up “Train” by Quad City DJs. Patrons filled the dance floor, which shook with the nondancelike, orthopedically inadvisable twitching and stomping of rich white people. The aquarium staff lined the sides of the crowd, clapping in rhythm and blowing traffic-cop whistles.
Amid the swirling lights and dry-ice fog, there was a tremendous crash-then a huge cannonball splash in one of the tanks. People looked around, but the loud music and light show aggravated the confusion. Someone glanced up and saw a jagged opening in the middle of the aquarium’s glass dome. It was simple deduction from there. The imaginary path of gravity led down from the dome to the alligator tank, where a large object floated. The staff turned up the house lights, and the crowd pressed against the glass walls of the tank for an underwater view. What was it? Where did it come from? There were no tall buildings nearby and no air traffic patterns overhead.
The waves from the splash lapped against the tempered glass and churned up bottom gunk, hazing the view. Two docents climbed down to the tank from a maintenance ladder. Guests began to make out bits of brightly colored cloth with a floral pattern, a tan Birkenstock, purple fanny pack and Roger McGuinn/Byrds sunglasses.
“It’s…” someone said, then filled with dread, “…a college student!”
J ohnny drove slowly through the empty downtown streets of St. Petersburg, the Porsche jostling on the brick road as he scanned boarded-up buildings for a street address. Johnny wondered how he had been reduced to this: junior nooky cadet, sniffing around a ghost town on poontang patrol. I deserve better, he told himself. I have a trust fund! And he thought about the family business of scamming the elderly into life insurance for which “you can’t be turned down! Your rates will never go up! And there’s no physical! Don’t make the mistake of waiting until it’s too late!”-and then an old woman in the TV ad cries over a checkbook and a photo of her dead husband. Johnny swelled with pride.
As the numbers on the abandoned buildings approached the appointed street address, Johnny heard piano tinklings and eggnog laughter echoing from around the corner. He turned right at the light and pulled to the curb beside an iron staircase railing leading below the street. Standing at the top of the stairs, next to a small red “Piano Bar” sign, was If. She leaned against the wall quite sultry, sipping a jumbo martini. Her eyelids were at half-mast. She slugged back the last of the martini with a whipping action of her neck, took two steps toward the Porsche and threw the martini glass back over her shoulder. It was supposed to smash against the brick wall, but it missed and broke a window too. Things happened simultaneously. If stumbled toward the car. People came running up the stairs. Johnny tried to start the already running Porsche, and it made an expensively bad sound.
Johnny was at his indecisive, fumbling best as If climbed in. “Let’s get out of here,” she told Johnny. “I need to be fucked hard.”
A bouncer ran up and grabbed If’s door handle. Johnny pressed the gas pedal, and the bouncer was left spinning on his back in the street like a break dancer.
If peeled her dress over her head as they cleared the southbound tollbooth for the Sunshine Skyway. The bridge began to ascend, and If unzipped Johnny’s pants with her teeth. He knew he had to hurry. He reached over the top of her head and pressed buttons to call up the exact song he wanted on the stereo. It had to happen perfectly, the right spot of the ideal tune playing at the precise moment they crested the bridge for the maximum view. He punched the controls quickly for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird.” But the part of the song he wanted was the fantastic guitar solos toward the end, and they were almost to the bridge’s apex. Shoot, he thought, it’s all happening out of synch! It’s falling apart! Maybe if I slow below a hundred. He digitally fast-forwarded through the song until finally, almost at the last second, everything was aligned. He wanted to tweak the volume up a little, but If’s increasingly bobbing head made it hard to reach. To make it louder, Johnny would have to mash her face down really hard leaning over her. Screw it, he thought, I’ll live. The song’s guitar triplets screamed from the Alpine speakers, and Johnny scanned the panorama of distant lights from ships and beach towns, and his pre-orgasmic ego said, “My sphere of influence.” Then it was back to shaking and moaning and trying to keep track of the steering wheel.