We were pulling up in front of the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort of Orlando, a huge complex with buildings shaped like giant stucco ice cream sundaes, famous for its opulent dessert-based accommodations.  The fabulously expensive hotel rooms were actually freezers, and each item of furniture was a different flavor of ice cream: the bed was strawberry with sheets of vanilla fondant, the dresser was pistachio with drawers of butterscotch, boysenberry and rocky road, the ottoman was mint chocolate chip, etc. The taps in the bathtub ran with cold soda water and hot chocolate. There were swimming pools full of pink champagne , red pop, cream soda, and hot fudge Jacuzzi tubs. The mostly morbidly obese guests all  were issued oversized thermal PJs with feet and bibs upon check-in, to prevent frostbite and unsightly drips.

   There was, in fact, an obscene lot of food for the conference/fiesta. Great buffet tables made of rock candy in the exquisitely carved fudge forest conference rooms were laden with giant hard candy platters of iced crab legs and shrimp, marinated portobello mushrooms and olives and colorful peppers, cheeses and breads and a guy in a paper hat cutting slabs of beef, ham, nutria and alligator meat. There were 250 transportation industry people furiously, desperately feeding, pirhana-style, and I dove in with enthusiasm. I really hadn’t yet eaten at all, and it was almost 6PM. I had a dicey couple of minutes wrestling but emerged victorious, carrying three plates of food. I rejoined Sam Handwich, who was drinking at a giant steaming mince pie table with a hill-shaped man who was shiny at the summit above one tangled eyebrow , and had either a bad moustache or impressive nosehair. I drew up a slightly delicate pretzel chair and sat down at the pie.

     “Hugo Bfori, this is Fang, my Terminal Manager. He’ll be making the rounds at the Conference/Fiesta, so you and I will have more time for the links!” Sam said. I was afraid for a moment that I had missed the sausage links at the buffet, but then I realised he’d be talking about golf. I nodded and smiled at Hugo with a crab leg sticking out of the corner of my mouth. They kept talking about golf, so I just stayed out of it.

     A waiter unhappy at being dressed like an organ-grinders’ monkey came by and poured me a glass of wine the size of my head. I ate efficiently and with cool determination, and within eight minutes I had cleared the plates except for shells, bones, rinds and the occasional olive. I felt much improved. The sad waiter came and gave me a huge piece of coconut cream pie, or something, and I ate it and a little bit of the table slowly while surveying the vast conference room. Massive pillars of different flavors of fudge had been carved into a forest of trees, laden with marzipan fruit and multicolored transparent leaves made of thinly pressed fruit leather. It was most painful not to have the kids with me in a place like this, of course. They loved climbing trees.

     There were hundreds of people in the room. The average transportation-industry executive was male, 55 years old,  a hundred pounds overweight, deep circles under his eyes, thinning brush-cut, poorly shaved, chainsmoking, tie loosened, and pretty drunk already. They weren’t beautiful. They were clustered in small groups, exchanging business cards and slapping each other on the shoulders and yelling for more drinks from the monkeys.

 I told Handwich I was going to go set up our folding table of rates and services and then “circulate” to “network” with “potential contacts”. Fortunately, he said he was going to a Latvian Prostate Massage Parlor with Hugo and I should find my own way back to Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound. It was only about three miles, so I figured I’d spare myself the cabfare and just walk.

     After they left, I assembled our display table: a loose pile of brochures and some free but mostly inkless pens in the shadow of a standing cardboard photo of a shiny Retro-Cab, with a smiling driver opening the back door.  The driver in the picture was a model. None of our actual drivers opened doors for passengers, or smiled. Then I wandered around for a very few moments, talking to no-one,  and then blew off my first two scheduled seminars: (Billing Me Softly and Sabotaging the Personnel Files of Model Employees that You Secretly Despise) and walked out through a giant swirled peppermint door into the heat and glaring light of a reluctantly setting sun. I could hear the roar and feel an additional furnaceblast of heat from the field of the ten thousand air conditioning units that it took to keep the candy centers of the Hotel and Resort from melting into the asphalt parking lots that stretched interminably in all directions.