It was a difficult stagger back to Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound, because I was extremely drunk. I do recall falling painfully from the top of  a concrete wall behind a stripmall. I paused for a moment to assess the damage, lying on my back next to a dumpster, and gradually became aware of five ancient prostitutes chainsmoking out behind their massage parlor and glaring at me through narrowed eyes.

     I looked at them, they looked at me, and then the one packed uncomfortably into a purple corset said doubtfully, “You lookin’ for a good time, Sweetie?”

     “Parm me,” I said, “Tearbly nishe of you…ladiesh…but I have a preshing gagement elshwhere. Rilly musht be goan. Mosht regretble,” I lurched to my feet and started walking uneasily backwards, bowing like some kind of imbecile.

     “He’s a drunk! Let’s roll him!” yelled the one with the big yellow feathered panties. They were on me before I could turn and run. One of them held each limb while the fifth one, the one in the latex lederhosen, went through my pockets, until she found my wallet and found it empty, tossed it back to me and contented herself with taking my promotional pen. Then she kicked me once in the stomach and the five of them filed back into the back door of the massage parlor. I threw up a little, which was probably all for the best after all the drinks and the awful dinner, and crawled off.

7.

 I don’t remember the rest of the trip back to my room at Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound, but I must have made it because that was where I found myself when I woke up in the morning, lying facedown on the coffee table wearing one sandal and my boxer shorts. A trail of ruined clothes, torn and muddied, led across the dismal anciently-stained carpet from the door. My head felt like it was two feet wide and fuzzy around the edges. I had one bloodied knee and a slightly blackened eye, probably from the police officers’ slap. The sun was pouring through the window, and the digital clock on the nightstand next to the bed I hadn’t used read 8 AM, so I was too late to make the Conference/Fiesta breakfast, but I’d been planning to skip out on the Conference/Fiesta until dinnertime anyway.

     I had a warmish shower and shaved my giant face. I made some coffee and ate a grapefruit and felt a little tiny bit better. I tried to call home but no-one answered, so I set off to try to make it over to the ocean. From Orlando you have to drive a little over an hour either East towards Daytona Beach or West towards Tampa to get to an ocean. I’d heard that Tampa was known for its stripclubs and adult entertainment, so I decided to head East, because my stomach still hurt from the prostitutes’ kick.

     Morvis Spontaine had picked Sam Handwich up in one of Mac Asquith’s big purple limousines, which left  Sam’s rented gold-fleck Cadillac sitting lonely outside his Delux Bridal Cabana, which had a sliding glass door on the second floor balcony, which Sam had not secured, which allowed me to obtain his rental car key ring from the table in the dining nook, which is where I found them after a quick run through five of the seven luxurious rooms of the cabana.  I was thankful to be able to avoid the spooky-looking white lace bridal bedroom, designed for soothing deflorations, and the indecently pink plastic bathroom, where every surface was heaped with Sam’s yellow prescription bottles and embarrassing hygiene/medical devices.

     With the car keys catburgled, I vaulted neatly back over the balcony rail and then wished intensely that I’d lowered myself gently, because I can’t take those fourteen-foot drops the way I used to when I was in my twenties. I had to lie in a shrubbery for a few minutes clutching my knee and swearing, while small multicolored geckos surveyed me suspiciously.

     I lurched to my feet and stumbled to the Cadillac. The hot tub had steamed up the windshield, so I rolled the windows down and I rolled away from Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound. I took the Driveway to a Parkway to the Freeway, and after a half an hour I had cleared Orlando’s asphalt and was heading East, with swamps and tropical foliage on either side of the Freeway. It was a great relief to see that not all of central Florida had been paved. The ride was uneventful, save for the hot tub sloshing over a little on curves. I drank a lot of lemonade and enjoyed the hot blast of air coming through the windows. I found a crazy mariachi station on the radio. The sun shouldered its way out of the greasy haze that hovered around the city and beat down on the gold Cadillac.  I did not turn on the air conditioner, but absorbed the heat. I’d need it back in Michigan for the remaining five months of winter.

     Once I began to approach the coast, the asphalt came back. I think I was near the ocean when I got to Daytona Beach, but you couldn’t see it because of the solid wall of continuous hotel that had been built, fourteen to thirty stories high, all along the beach. I drove South, following the road that the map showed as running along the coast, and waited for a break between the buildings, but it never came. I considered attempting to bluff my way through a hotel lobby to the beach, but all the parking lots were gated and guarded for registered guests only. Across the street from the great wall of hotels was a repeating stripmall of the same twenty-seven chain businesses, cycling over and over again like the moving backdrop of a Hanna-Barbera film.

     I drove for mile after mile down the coast, trying to find some public access. Finally, a battered sign pointed me toward the city beach. Again, I couldn’t park because the beach had gated, guarded, paid parking only, but I could see the beach from the street, and it wasn’t appealing. A massive packed parking lot, then thirty by seventy feet of beach and a similarly-sized  rectangle of ocean buoyed off. There were fifteen hundred people miserably milling around, shoulder to shoulder, overseen by screaming life guards in tall chairs with megaphones. Large, armed hotel security men were stationed on either side of the public beach to keep the public from straying over onto the clean white empty private hotel beaches that stretched to the vanishing point on the horizon in either direction. I kept driving South. Now and again the street would turn away from the ocean and I’d have to find my way back, but whenever I approached the ocean the wall of hotels would loom up, visible from miles away. I was about to give up when I realized that I had just traversed a two mile interval of raised freeways where no roads cut off in the direction of the coast.

     I stashed the car in a grocery store parking lot and ran across the freeway, then jumped the rail and went down an embankment, into a swamp filled with ejected debris from the cars that passed overhead. Fast food wrappers, cans, bottles, televisions, styrofoam packaging forms, sheets of plastic, air conditioners, dishwashers, scraps of clothing, disposable diapers made an impromptu landfill of the area for about a mile and a half beyond the Freeway, as I squelched East and the sounds of traffic gradually faded behind me. After a while, trees started to rise out of the swamp, and the litter was replaced with fragile greenery. The ground was soft, sometimes I sank to the knee, but I was able to keep out of the deep water. Occasional alligators cruised slowly through the open channels of water, and various long-legged birds stood around looking tense. I followed a slow-moving river for about a half an hour and found myself emerging onto a beautiful beach of  white sand, where the river emptied into a horseshoe-shaped lagoon of clear, deep water.

     I looked up and down the coast. Rocky promontories bracketed the lagoon on either side, and the now lush swampy jungle rose up behind me. There was no sign of human habitation except for one human, a shaggy-looking woman in a fringey dress who was sitting on the beach with her back to me, feet in the small surf, looking out at the flat line of the horizon. I didn’t want to startle her, so I cleared my throat gently, which made her leap to her feet, whirl around, scream at the top of her  lungs and crumple forward onto the beach in a dead faint.

     I had some time to look at her more closely as I dragged her into the shade of a palm tree and waited for her to wake up. She was about, I don’t know, 38-48 years old. I was pretty sure she had at least a couple of years on me. Her hair was blondish, matted into scruffy dreadlocks, and her nose had been broken at some point, and healed crooked. Her dress was, upon closer examination, a large cloth coffee bag with strings of small shells in decorative patterns. Her skin was tanned to a point approaching beef jerky. Her eyes, when they snapped open with horror, were very light blue.

     “Oh, fuck!” she said.

     “Hi!” I replied cheerfully. “Nice beach! Sorry if I startled you.”

     “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to kill you,” she said ruefully, and produced a huge serrated military-surplus hunting knife for my appraisal. I took five steps back.

     “I think you don’t. What, you need to be alone with your beach?”

     “It’s not supposed to be here,” she said, “If this beach was here, there would be fifty hotels here. When the new Freeway was put in, thirty years ago, they never built a planned exit ramp and access road, because my father, who worked for the road commission, smeared jelly from his donut across that part of the blueprints when nobody was looking. The competing hotels on either side of the lagoon each think the other’s property starts just around the cliff and have big barbed wire fences to keep their guests from climbing around. And so I have to kill you.”

     “I assure you, you should not kill me. I’m remarkably trustworthy. I have two kids and a lovely wife who would be unhappy if I didn’t return. I have always hated hotels and highways both. All I wanted was to see the ocean. I can keep your secret. So you can step back, a little,” I had her at the kids- I could see her flinch when I mentioned them. Frankly, her threats lacked all conviction from the beginning. She dropped the knife in the sand. I offered her a bottle of lemonade, and she took it.

     “It’s a rubber knife anyway. It would have been really hard to kill you with it. It’s just…this might be the last unfucked beach in Florida. I’ve lived here ever since they finished the freeway. My father’s buried right over there.” She nodded in the direction of a simple marker, adorned with seashells, sheltered in  a small stand of palm trees. “This was his retirement plan, and now I’m just seeing how long I can hold out before they come in with the bulldozers and the nondairy frozen confections. Have a swim, if you like. I’m going to be working on a macramé hammock.”

     We introduced ourselves- her name was Susie. I admired her macramé politely, and took her up on her proposition. I stripped to the trunks I had under my shorts, and rode the gentle warm current from the river into the cooler center of the lagoon and spent an hour clumsily swimming back and forth in the salty crystalline water, with the fat sun beaming down on me like everything was OK. Then I laid on the beach for awhile, then went out for another swim, and I felt completely great. 

     I was just heading back towards shore, swimming in deep water with foot-high waves when I saw a large dark orange mass in the water, drifting with the tide toward the beach. At first I was afraid it was some kind of monster jellyfish, as it had an uncertain and tentacular outline. As it got nearer, I could see that it was some kind of garbage- a hairy fabric, mottled with blotches of purple and green on a background of orange, and it reminded me of something but I couldn’t put my finger on it until two bleary red eyes turned to regard me and the Bob said, “Help, Fang, tow me to shore. I been fuckin’ swimming since fuckin’ yesterday, and carpets ain’t made to swim.” He coughed pathetically. I grabbed a chunk of him and dragged him through the surf up on to the beach, where he crawled up on some rocks to dry off.

     I had to say, the Bob had never looked better in all the time I’d known him at Retro Cab. The long swim had shampooed much of his thirty years worth of accumulated ashes, coffee and dirt out of his shag, and as he dried, his colors, though still in muted tones of marmalade vomit, were much brighter. Susie dropped her macramé and came across the beach to where the Bob sat, wheezing and snuffling. “What the hell is that?” she asked.

     “Susie, the Bob. He’s a carpet. The FBI had arrested him for Terrorizing Lulu Bricious. What happened with that, the Bob?”

     “Fuckin’ Feds. They beat me and kicked me for hours. They poured water on me. They threw me to the floor and stepped on me repeatedly. They wanted me to confess to being Al Qaeda. They burned me with cigarettes. Fortunately, I’d gotten used to all that stuff at Retro Cab. I spat in their lousy cop eyes. To hell with Lulu Bricious.” He said viciously,  “She’s making a mockery of rugs everywhere with her fascistic merkins! It’s my fuckin’ first amendment thing that I should be able to protest, right?  Then these other guys came in- C.I.A. They said they were takin’ me to fuckin’ Guatanamo to meet some specialist with a lot of small scissors. I was in the plane for four hours, and there was four C.I.A. guys playing cards, when one of them reached into his pocket to get his wallet, and he pulled it out along with out the fuckin’ pin of a grenade- I recognised it from my time in ‘Nam-, and everyone looked at the pin of the grenade dangling on his finger and wondered where the grenade was for a couple seconds. Then he exploded. I got sucked out of the hole in the side of the plane, and parachuted down into the fuckin’ ocean,” he coughed wetly again. Susie looked at him sympathetically.

     “Does either of you have a cigarette?” he asked, desperately. We didn’t. “Jesus. It’s all over for me. They’ll track me down again, I just know it.”

     “Stay here if you want,” said Susie. “No guarantees on how long it’ll last, but nobody except Fang and you have come to this beach for decades. You’ll have to build your own hut, over that way somewhere. You play badminton? I haven’t had anyone to play with since my dad died.”

     The Bob looked at Susie through eyes suddenly filled with tears, “I’d love to play badminton with you. And don’t worry, I won’t be underfoot around here. Look at me! I can walk! I can walk!” indeed, the Bob reared up and stood now, like a shaggy orange haystack, swaying back and forth. It really agreed with him to not be nailed down. He shook out his folds, and several large fish flopped onto the beach. Susie got a fire going, I killed and cleaned the fish and we cooked them over coals on the beach, and we all sat around eating and talking for awhile until I had to get Sam’s car back and attend the dinner in Orlando.

The last time I saw the Bob he was building himself a teepee out of driftwood, waving an orange tentacle in farewell. “Fight the power, Fang!” Susie escorted me along a better path back to the grocery store parking lot, said a quick goodbye and disappeared to forage in one of the grocery store dumpsters. As I drove away in the gold Cadillac, I could see her running back across the freeway toward the swamp, waving goodbye with a large bunch of beets.