Versimilitude on the Venereal Peninsula -- Prologue (Setember, 2002)

Florida ... what is it? The bipolar sunshine dominion now and no doubt reigns as the undisputed crime capital of the Western hemisphere, the pivot of universal weirdness, center stage for myriad acts of dysfunctionality perhaps heretofore unsung in the recorded histories of homo sapiens. No cry of foul will be acknowledged in rebuttal of this assertion. Hell, you can see it read it every day on television, the internet, and in newspapers. As a notable Miami writer does declare, "I am not making this up." Florida is way beyond grand funk squared, able adventurers. It has its own insane spiritual mathematics, spun out of wobbly chaos. Florida is Trickster Heaven, where the dim and dynamic collide, grow, and thrive under the influences of swamp gas, odorous blooms, and the subtropical sun. When it comes to evil, grandiosity, and schmaltz, Florida has it all — in spades, hearts, clubs, and diamonds. Cases in point include, yet are not limited to: Ted Bundy, that Gonzalez boy, toxification of the Everglades under government supervision, mutant birth of the femme moronica (Katherine Harris), flight schools for terrorists, illegal drug traffic thicker than Jim Beam at a Klan rally, illegally or foolishly introduced exotic species — both animal and botanical — that are destroying native populations (an allegory there maybe), Jeb Bush, Janet Reno, more Viagra prescriptions than free AOL CD ROMs, more golf courses than schools. Oh, the symptoms just go on and on and on. Heaven and earth, must I remember!

Indeed the politics and felonies of Florida are screwball and frightening, lunatic and alluring, a Given outlined by Michael Paterniti in his New York Times piece, "America in Extremis" (April 21, 2002). So darkly surreal is it all that transplant Florida poet Campbell McGrath queries, "Why here? Why psychopaths and terorists, upside-down elections and general weirdness? Is it the unrootedness of people, the extraordinairiness of the landscape, the lack of seasons that untether you from the past? You do begin to wonder, Is it something in the air?" (quoted from Paterniti).

Leave it to a person of letters, particularly a poet, to ask the right questions. Whether there are right (or left) answers to the enigma, though, is the eternal rub. But don't think we were not warned, AND WARNED OFTEN, about the intoxicating beauty and contagious bestiality of Florida. For over a century, American writers of stature have engaged the sunshine state in aesthetic skirmishes that left their pens dry and impotent, their typewriters dead in the water, or their word processors ironically frozen.

Ralph Waldo Emerson visited St. Augustine in the winter of 1827 to recover from consumption. Generally put off by the rampantly lazy pace of life there — in contrast to his flakey Puritan work ethic — he left Florida after a few months, nevertheless fully recovered.

Stephen Crane went to Jacksonville in 1896, took a doomed ship bound for Cuba, and nearly drowned off the coast of St. Augustine ... hence his famous "The Open Boat." He spent the last three years of his life in Jacksonville, living with Cora Howorth Taylor, proprietor of the Hotel de Dream, actually a world class bordello.

There are others; Ring Lardner, who found the Gold Coast — and particularly Palm Beach — to be prime satire country; Ernest Hemingway, who set out to plunder the gulfstream's gamefish population, or rid the bars from Key West to Havanna of all self-proclaimed pugilists; Margeaux Blanche-Keats, who resigned a Target management position in Columbus, Ohio in 1991 to follow her epic muse down to Homestead to try to finish the thousand-page North American Buttocks ... she was never seen again after Hurricane Andrew, as she refused to evacuate her bungalow near the military air base, despite the howling storm.

However, the reality of Florida — what it is, and a sense of how this Mother of All Swamps beguiles and besmirches the human animal — does not truly strip tease its way into American literature until an insurance company executive out of Hartford, Connecticut begins to visit the Keys somewhat regularly in 1916. Yes, Wallace Stevens, in a smattering of his poems, is the first American writer to intuit that Florida means big trouble, not pretty flower. But the balmy impressionism that riddles his poetry mutes, if not masks, his warnings. The farcical horror of it all is submerged under that celebrated miasma of otherwordly imagery, most of the time. Florida is Stevens's coy mistress whose slow-chapped power sends him finally bolting back to New England to languish his life away amidst the northern smog.

Another tourist of sorts who spent enough time in Florida to catch an epiphany, then escape, is the novelist Thomas McGuane. In the 1960s McGuane briefly roomed in Key West with then struggling songwriter Jimmy Buffett ... you know, of "Margaritaville" fame and shame. Born in Michigan and educated at Michigan State and Yale, McGuane has owned a ranch in Montana since the early 1970s. Think about it. Also in the early 70s he published the first of his three novels in that decade which are set mainly in the Keys. McGuane's protagonists are deranged and self-absorbed young men who behave strangely under the influence of Florida. Cause and effect analysis, however, is rarely a denouement component of a McGuane story, not that it should be. He writes marvelously and spins a fine yarn. But one comes out of McGuane's tales believing that those crazy, subtropical crap shoots — operating under the vascilating auspices of Murphy's Laws and Freud's Follies — can only rise up in Florida, that the sunshine republic is somehow to blame. The books are more warnings largely ignored.

Lastly but not finally are novels by Tim Dorsey, of Tampa, whose first book — Florida Roadkill (1999) — conjures comparisons to Carl Hiassen, James T. Hall, Elmore Leonard and other masters of a genre variously tagged Florida crime, Florida noir, twisted travel guides, and Juvenalian satire deluxe. Murder and mayhem abound in Dorsey's pages, striking with such glitter, vulgarity, and hilarity that it takes time for a reader to realize that maybe she is being advised, albeit subtextually, to stay home, keep out, or turn back. For in Tim Dorsey's novels (There are four now, with a fifth coming in February, 2003.) the absolute decadence of The Peninsula Perverse is accepted and embraced. Perfect depravity struts across the pages as so many cockroaches creep beneath the counters of no-stars diners. Epitomizing this is Dorsey's errant principle throughout his works, Serge A. Storms, eccentric genius, homicidal maniac, and Floridiana maven whose charm, menace, and ingenuity could only come about through a transporter merger accident (look it up in your Star Trek concordance) involving the Marquis deSade, Groucho Marx, and Marilyn vos Savant. Dorsey's tales don't just sit there and wonder, fret, or speculate as to why Florida creaks to a beat out of sync with the Outlands. Nor do we get the formulaic, obligatory existential bile of those postmodernist novelists come hither from noted writer's workshops. The proverbial towel has been thrown in. What the hell, anyway? And we can hear faintly something like the greeting of the dark figure who addresses Goodman Brown on that fateful night in the woods: "Welcome, my children, to the communion of your race! Ye have found, thus young, your nature and your destiny." Indeed, there is a motto fit to adorn the southbound welcome signs at the Georgia/Florida state lines of I-95 and I-75, you see. I may be wrong, but I doubt it.

 

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