6.

     I’d gone to sleep around 8:50, so I was fully awake again by 5:30 in the morning. The Conference/Fiesta didn’t kick off until breakfast service at 8 AM, to be followed by tightly scheduled meetings with vendors, then seminars until around 7 PM.

     Sam Handwich was scheduled to be somewhere off Tampa with Morvis Spontaine on an exclusive charter fishing boat, hunting manatees and dolphins with grenades. So I had about an extra hour free besides the walking time back to the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort. I walked out of the driveway of Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound and up the dirt shoulder of the boulevard street, up about a half mile to a stripmall. There was a Mo’ Nuts Donuts, a Sloppy SlurpDawg Drive-Threw, a PhatBurgerz, a Family Tub, a Ye Bacony Grille, a Pinkly-Shrinkly Weight Loss Klinic, and four musty gift shops that all offered the same nine trademarked items for sale at the same price. I looked for a funny postcard, or a tin of canned sunshine, or a good rubber alligator or something, but everything was overpriced and covered with revolting corporate logos for awful products and uninspired cartoons. I bought nothing, and was despised for it. I  climbed the cinderblock wall behind the stripmall and cut across a long dead block of dirt, broken cement and dying weeds where something like a parking garage had been demolished. There was a narrow, muddy creek that cut diagonally across the lot at the bottom of a ditch, and as I leapt over it I saw a dead alligator, floating belly up. There was a dead armadillo on the shoulder of the next interstate that I had to run across, and a dead flamingo on the grill of the truck that narrowly missed me as I ran across it.

     I was returning to the Ice Cream Indulgences! Hotel and Resort from a different direction than I had come yesterday, through some dry culverts under stripmalls and roads, which took me into a shadowy dead place, at the extreme end of  the bustling service docks for the amusement park Piggleyland,  underneath multiple layers of freeway overpass, looping overhead, supported on monumental legs of white concrete. I bent back a loose corner of the wire fence, topped with razorwire, to cut through a field of boxcar-sized storage containers and rusting machinery that took up an area of about four city blocks , behind the dumpsters. There were about a thousand dumpsters, each the size of a dump truck, and a steady stream of dump trucks were hauling away the garbage, and returning with empty dumpsters, as hundreds of pink golf-cart sized garbagetrucks swarmed out of the park, filling the dumpsters the day’s first binfuls of waxpaper wrappers and plastic bags and bottles and half-eaten Breakfast Pouches and Bacon Dunkerz.

     I took pains not to be seen, as Piggleyland was legendary for its fascistic security, but the trucks were driven by people in pink pig costumes, as were the workers on the distant loading docks, so their vision was impaired anyway. I was more concerned about the pole-mounted security cameras that twitched and rotated here and there around the vast yard.

     By the time I had dodged a quarter of the way across the field, I realized I’d made a mistake. I was sorry I hadn’t tried to walk the extra mile-and-a-half around. There were times when I was totally exposed when running from storage container to storage container, and everyone else working in the vicinity was dressed as a pig. Plus, when I got to the other side, I’d have to get through the other side of the fence.

     Piggleyland started as a chain of Piggleyland BBQ Pit & Play Trough restaurants, owned by the American Pork Consortium, that served only pork: porkburgers, pork fries, milkshakes made with real pig milk. The restaurant and their marketing concept of a village of cute cartoon pigs with disturbing cannibalistic tendencies, perpetually scheming to eat one another, salivating excessively over the luscious hams of their neighbors and coworkers, had really resonated with the American public, and there were now tens of thousands of Piggleyland BBQ Pit & Play Trough restaurants and four theme parks.

     I almost stumbled out right in front of three huge swine with tophats who were wrestling a huge plastic display ham out of a storage container, but I dodged back and hid behind a rusting forklift until they carried the ham away, grunting and swearing in their hot, heavy pink pig suits. They had left the storage container door open, and I took a quick look inside. There were piles of gears, a slightly smaller plastic display ham, bags full of plush stuffed hams and small ham pendant necklaces and earrings. Also, back in a corner, there was a dingy pink lumpy pile that turned out to be a discarded cowboy pig costume, in some disrepair. I zipped myself into the mildewed coverall pigsuit and leather fringed vest and chaps, and regretfully lowered the huge spidery pig head over my own. I clumped out of the storage container on clumsy cloven feet and tried to look natural as I sauntered on towards the distant fence. The head obscured all peripheral vision, and it was awfully hot immediately. I made it within a hundred yards before a quartet of hogs dressed like ballerinas passed by, with wheelbarrows full of bacon, and looked me up and down with some suspicion. My costume was filthy, with smears of black oil on the belly and tangles of spiderwebs under the arms and between the legs. I tipped my dusty cowboy hat at them nonchalantly and continued on, walking faster while trying not to look like I was walking faster. One of them yelled something after me, and I clicked my pig heels together in a devil-may-care fashion and kept going. With my limited vision, I now noticed that several of the security cameras were moving to point in my general direction, and I broke into a full-out run as a siren began howling from the vicinity of the loading docks. 

     The suit probably added 60 pounds to my weight, so I doubt that the run appeared graceful. My cowboy hat flew off as I climbed up onto the roof of a storage container in hopes of leaping over the twelve foot fence from there, but  it was too great a distance to the fence. Three Jeeps full of tough-looking Security Warthogs were now speeding towards me from the docks, more and bettter sirens were going off, and pigs were running everywhere. I ran down the length of the container and jumped the six foot distance to the next one, then the next,  then the next, until I found one where I thought I could make the leap to the top of the fence and climb down. It was a jump of about nine feet, which would have been easy without the pig suit, but I did it with the suit, which was hard. I was happy to be wearing the pig suit once I had jumped into the razorwire, because it kept me from being sliced to ribbons. I climbed/fell down the other side of the fence and jumped up running again. The Jeeps pulled up on the other side of the fence, but the Security Warthogs didn’t attempt to scale the fence, they just yelled at me and into ham-shaped walkie-talkies.

     I figured they’d have more pigs coming for me, maybe in pink helicopters or something, pretty quick, so I made haste to get away, dodging behind the concrete freeway support pillars and sticking to the black shadows cast by  the endless swirls and ramps of freeway layered above me. The pigsuit was now dirty and shredded by razorwire, but I didn’t want to take it off yet so that I wouldn’t be identifiable if seen.