Sam said he’d drive me over for the opening night conference reception and buffet at the  Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort in an hour and a half, and suggested that I use the time to enjoy the pool, steam room, shuffleboard and other leisure amenities available at Alligator Al’s.

     I dragged my molested luggage to the dingy pastel green door of my cinderblock hut and entered using a key card emblazoned with Alligator Al’s logo: a happy alligator, holding both a drink and a crudely-rendered blonde in a bikini. The room was dank, like only a cinderblock room can be, and smelled of powerful industrial cleansers fighting a losing battle. There weren’t more than three large bloodstains on the patterned greenish carpet. There was a large television that could be seen from all corners of the room, presumably so you could sustain the illusion that you were somewhere else. The bed took up most of the room, one corner had been drywalled off for the bathroom, the toilet had been Sanitized! For my protection, which I appreciated. There was a counter/dresser along one wall with a plastic coffeemaker, a couple plastic cups shaped like oranges, and an ice bucket with a plastic liner. The minifridge below the counter contained a large variety of small bottles of liquor and alligator jerky, with the usual hilarious price sheet.  I tuned in an old horror movie on the TV, and set my suitcase precariously on a flimsy aluminum suitcase stand.

     The bathtub was clean enough to shower in, and the water was lukewarm, so I washed off the flight and drank a couple thin cups of complimentary coffee, then went out to look around the compound. 

     As I left the room the volcano exploded again, as it apparently did every 20 minutes, and I involuntarily flinched at the horrible noise and furnace-blast of dry heat. There were twelve sullen teenagers conspiring in one end of the kidneybean shaped pool, and nine enormous Germans in an adjacent hot tub. Hundreds of small geckos skittered nervously around the ground, picking up cigarette butts, hiding under plastic bushes, sunning themselves on many concrete surfaces. I beat a bitter old lady at shuffleboard, which was fun. It was about ninety degrees and the sun was an angry one, which was great after the snow and bitter winter winds of Michigan. I walked over to the liquor store and bought a can of coffee, as I’d already used all Alligator Al’s complimentary coffee, if that weak brown stuff had in fact been coffee. I got some real cream and sugar, and some fizzy water, and a half-pint of Irish Whiskey for emergencies. Sam was almost due to come pick me up, which constituted an emergency, and so I had a short snort of the whiskey on the way back to the room, then made some proper coffee in the wheezing, decrepit coffeemaker and dressed for the Reception. 

     There was to be a strictly enforced dresscode at the conference/fiesta,  defined mysteriously as “Elegant Business-Smart -no sandals, jeans, or tubetops.” That left a lot of leeway for things like grass skirts or suits of armor, but in the end I got dressed in a pair of  purple leather wingtips that I got at a thriftshop, some black khakis covered with pockets, a subdued grey and olive palm-patterned Hawaiian shirt, and a string tie with a silver cowskull clasp. I combed my unruly mop of shoulder-length dirty blonde-turning-white hair back and trimmed my pointy sideburns carefully, and then Sam was beeping his Cadillac outside. I walked out into the stunning sunlight and dropped into the passenger seat next to Sam, who smelled strongly of a reapplication of his signature Olde Englishe Vinyle Spicede Cologne.

     “Fang, the Taxi-to-Trucking Transportation Industry Convention/Fiesta is a very prestigious affair, Networkingwise. Keep your ear to the ground, and you’ll learn many valuable ways for us to pay our drivers and dispatch staff even less while maintaining lousy service, how to avoid compliance with costly vehicle licensing and inconvenient Government regulations, lots of crafty methods to gouge customers with delightfully unexpected assessorial surcharges…it was at the TTTICF just two years ago that I established my contact with Mr. Lung, who now supplies us with our retro-styled taxidriver uniform kits, which save us $1478 per year now that the drivers have to sew their own uniforms together with thread they have to buy themselves. I couldn’t believe how much cheaper those Korean Uniform Kits were than the wasteful fully-assembled shirts and pants we used to buy. But year after year, I find that my social obligations with other industry leaders take me more and more away from the nuts and bolts of the TTTICF; the seminars, the vendor booths, and so that’s where you come in. I need a discriminating, professional representative of Retro Cab here to dive in and comb the moneymaking meatballs out of this big bowl of transportation-industry spaghetti.”

“That’s me, Sam. There is nothing I relish more than combing spaghetti. Speaking of which, is there supposed to be food at this thing?”