The Orchid Thief (30 page)

As much as I marveled at Laroche’s devotion to the things he was devoted to, I marveled even more at his capacity for detachment. For instance, my account of the tribal fair and the new nursery barely registered with him since he had now completely renounced the Seminoles. For two years he had been absorbed by them. He had sunk himself deep. I could understand that he was angry with the tribe for firing him and stung by realizing he was never part of it and never would be, but it was something more than that—for him, it was as if the tribe had disappeared from the face of the earth.

He had also completely renounced the kingdom of plants. He hinted that he was fed up with the orchid world when I had first talked to him about the powwow, but I hadn’t believed him. But that is just what he had done. He was no longer devoted to the ghost orchids he’d poached from the Fakahatchee or the hoyas he’d tried to wheedle out of his friend at the nursery or the
Cattleya
mutants he had created in
the microwave or the collection of exceptional bromeliads and orchids that he’d been assembling since his first collection was wrecked in Hurricane Andrew or the plants he’d saved from being bulldozed at construction sites or the rare ones he’d traded for or had nearly gone broke to get his hands on. He had forsaken them all. When we first met, he had told me that this kind of finish was his style, but I had never pictured that his transit from one passion to another would be so complete. “Done,” he said to me the day after the powwow, after I’d been going on for a while about Chief Billie’s band and the fried alligator. “I told you, when I’m done, I’m done.” From the first time I’d heard of Laroche, I had been fascinated by how he managed to find the fullness and satisfaction of life in narrow desires—the Ice Age fossils, the turtles, the old mirrors, the orchids. I suppose that is exactly what I was doing in Florida, figuring out how people found order and contentment and a sense of purpose in the universe by fixing their sights on one single thing or one belief or one desire. Now I was also trying to understand how someone could end such intense desire without leaving a trace. If you had really loved something, wouldn’t a little bit of it always linger? A couple of houseplants? A dinky Home Depot
Phalaenopsis
in a coffee can? I personally have always found giving up on something a thousand times harder than getting it started, but evidently Laroche’s finishes were downright and absolute, and what’s more, he also shut off any chance of amends. He had the same emotional pitch as the kind of guy who would permanently misplace his ex-wife’s phone number, which as a matter of fact Laroche had done: he had no idea of where his ex-wife was living and no clue of her phone number and he claimed he didn’t care. He really seemed to mean it, although he made a habit of insulting her favorite flowers whenever we saw them at orchid shows.

How this came up was that the South Florida Orchid Society Show was scheduled shortly after the Seminole tribal fair, and I assumed that Laroche and I were going to go together until he informed me that these days he couldn’t care less about orchids and orchid shows and therefore wasn’t planning to go. He had a new preoccupation. In the time between his dismissal by the Seminoles and the powwow, he had taught himself everything there was to know about computers and was now making money by building websites for businesses and, as a private sideline, posting pornography on the Internet. He was in love with computers. He even loved the pornography part of his computer work. This was not because he loved pornography; it was because being an Internet pornography publisher was, in his mind, another opportunity to profit from human weakness, something he especially liked to do. He said that he couldn’t believe people were paying him to post pictures of naked fat people on the Internet, just the way he couldn’t believe people had paid to buy the worthless guide to growing marijuana he was selling when we first met. “People spend a fortune on this junk, and I just keep charging them more and more,” he explained to me one morning on the phone. “Maybe at some point it will dawn on these shitheads that they’re wasting their money posting these lousy pictures and they’ll cut it out. I’m doing them a favor by helping them realize how ridiculous it is. That’s why the more I charge, the more helpful I’m being. Anyway, in the meantime, I’m making a
shitload
of money.” He happened to sound awful that day, as if he were dying, but he assured me that it was just kidney trouble from his pesticide poisoning and that he’d been sick for about four months but was probably getting better. Anyway, he said, he was in a great frame of mind. “Look, the main thing is, the Internet is cool,” he said. “It’s not going to
die
on me, like
some plant, and it’s not going to fuck me over like the Seminoles.” He worked building legitimate businesses’ websites for a company called NetRunner. His Internet alias was Sabercat. I found his website one day, which said: “Some of you may know me as Sabercat: Lord and Master of the now dead SaberSpace.… If you’ve called the NetRunner office and spoken to a somewhat arrogant and ‘different’ individual, that would be me. Unlike most of the ‘strange’ characters you may run across on the Internet, I am not strange
because
of the anonomity of the Internet, I’m just bizarre, period.”

We talked for another few minutes, and once again I raised the idea of our going together to the orchid show. He wouldn’t change his mind, but he finally agreed that I could keep him posted about my plans and that he might meet me for a few minutes if I was really desperate for his company. That’s the way it was with Laroche. Everything with him was extremes. The regular world was too modulated for him. It wasn’t enough for me to merely want him to go, the way an ordinary person might want another ordinary person to do something. On the other hand, if I was really
desperate
, then perhaps he would keep it in mind.

—

Except for Laroche, nearly everyone I’d met in Florida was going to the show, including Martin Motes, Tom Fennell, Bob Fuchs, Frank Smith, and all the American Orchid Society people I’d been introduced to at the gala. The South Florida Orchid Society show is the biggest show in Florida, and except for the orchid show in Santa Barbara, California, it is the most important one in the country. I didn’t have much hope that it would finally afford me a chance to see a ghost orchid in bloom, but I still wouldn’t have missed it for the world. A few days after my conversation with Laroche I called my vanda-breeder friend Martin Motes and told him
how Laroche was bucking my invitation, and Martin said I should forget about Laroche and come hang out at the show with him instead. I knew it would be fun to go with Martin in spite of my recent unhappy experience with his dog, because he had always shown me interesting things. Besides, he swore that lately the dog had been in a better mood.

I went over to his house the next day. “Bless my heart, I have a million things to do,” Martin said in greeting. He and his wife, Mary, had been English professors before devoting themselves to orchids; in fact, Martin returned from a senior Fulbright lectureship in Yugoslavia in 1976 to set up Motes Orchids. Even in the greenhouse, dressed in his worn-out khakis, up to his knuckles in moss and vermiculite, he looked like a man who would be at ease in front of a chalkboard spinning theories about Yeats. His house, his yard, his wardrobe all were academically shabby. His one nonprofessorial accessory was a BMW sedan. It was a Benlate BMW. Martin, like many other Florida orchid growers, lost a lot of plants after using the Du Pont fungicide Benlate, and even though Du Pont still insists that Benlate was not responsible, it settled with hundreds of growers for millions of dollars; the company’s payments were almost $400 million in Florida alone. Martin had a droll attitude toward catastrophe. When he bought the BMW with his settlement money, he put a bumper sticker on it that said
BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY
. Du Pont is still settling Benlate claims. Orchids are risky business. In some cases, Benlate settlements have been far more remunerative. Some growers took their Du Pont money and retired on it, and it was rumored that people were selling half-used bags of the fungicide to growers who might or might not have actually used it but wanted credible-looking evidence to present to Du Pont.

Since my last visit to Martin’s dozens more of his orchids had bloomed. Blue and lavender buoys bobbed in the dark
green sea of leaves and stems. Beside them, a row of creamy pink ones, like a set of Wedgwood teacups. “I have an errand to do this morning, pronto,” Martin added. “We will be visiting a prince of the tropical fruit industry, should you care to come along.” I did, so we climbed into a van with his
VANDA1
license plates and headed down his driveway onto the road. “I’m going to visit a gentleman by the name of Gary Zill,” he explained. “I’m doing this because I believe a man should really find a way to have avocados seven months a year, preferably from his own tree.” Gary Zill owned many avocado trees. Martin said he was going to trade budwood from one of his plum trees for one of Gary’s avocados. The pieces of budwood were in soggy Baggies on the front seat of the van. There were many times in Florida when I felt I was in another world, and this was one of those times: I was in another world in which fruits and vegetables and budwood are legal tender—a plum bud is the market equivalent of an avocado tree and bananas are down sharply against the orange. Martin pulled up past a sign that said
ZILL HIGH PERFORMANCE PLANTS
and parked. As soon as he stepped out he got excited and said there was a tree on his side of the van that he wanted me to see. “It’s a Cuban fruit, a
Niamey Colorado
,” he said, pulling a leathery, roundish fruit off a branch. “They retail for about twelve dollars apiece. They’re so valuable that no one grows them anymore because they always get stolen.” He bit into the fruit. The flesh was the color of brick. “My dear neighbor has twenty acres with these growing and he’s selling off all of them,” Martin said after he swallowed. “Even with full-time security he couldn’t keep them.”

Gary Zill had come up behind the van while Martin was eating the mamey and had opened the back doors and seen the hundred or so orchids Martin had in the van. “Ohhhhhh, what a gorgeous cross!” Gary yelled. “Martin, what the hell are these?” In a moment, he materialized beside us. He was
as blond as a surfer and was holding a clipboard in one hand and another fruit I’d never seen before in the other. This one was bulging and olive-drab and about the size of a baseball. When he bit into it, he tore away a piece that was as red as a wound. He saw me staring. “Bullock’s heart,” he said, gesturing with it. “It came from the Yucatan. I ate one down there about fifteen years ago and saved the seeds. I didn’t really know what to expect when I planted them here.”

“We saw them down there once, too,” Martin said. “
Huge
fruits. Size of a young child’s head.”

Gary squinted up at the sky for a moment and then said, “Martin, we should try propagating these. I brought a species back from Guatemala last week and it was bright orange inside, and it was just
beautiful
. We’ll even name it for you. We’ll call it the
motes reticulata
. We’ll make a fortune.” Martin tilted his head like a sparrow. “Ah-ha,” he said. “Bless its bright orange heart.” Just then, one of Gary’s nurserymen came up to talk to Gary. He was a slight, shy man with a Hebrew name who said he had been born in Michigan and grew up in Brazil. It was not a very ordinary personal history, but nothing here seemed ordinary. The fruits were alien. Everyone and everything had an exotic pedigree. Sometimes in Florida you feel that you are on the edge of the world, and that the rest of the world sloshes in as regularly as the tide and produces strange and peerless things—for instance, a Hebrew Brazilian Michigander raising salmon-colored Guatemalan fruit. I talked for a while with the nurseryman, and Gary and Martin began discussing their avocado-for-plum trade and headed down the path from the tropical-fruit nursery to Gary’s house. He said he had about twenty thousand plants at home, mostly orchids, and he wanted Martin to take a quick look at them before we left. “They’re a mess,” he warned us. “The computer that controls the watering system
got hit by lightning the night I left for Costa Rica to collect mango seeds.”

“I can imagine,” I said.

“Martin, listen, if you’re interested in any pollen, help yourself. There’s plenty. Just help yourself.”

Martin smiled. “Yes, well, life is short and art is long. Perhaps we can cook up something artful.” We stepped into Gary’s shadehouse, walking under a canopy of orchids growing in latticework boxes, some drooping over like seasick sailors, some upright as soldiers and wearing hot pink or hot yellow or cool purple blooms. “Ain’t it a caution,” Martin said, glancing from plant to plant. He stopped in front of a cobalt-blue
Vanda
and gave it a long look. Gary watched him. “I do believe,” Martin said. “Oh yes, I do believe that I made this plant twenty-five years ago. How does it come to be in your home, Senor Zill?”

“I got it from my aunt,” Gary said. “And I think my aunt got it from Mona Church.”

“Ah-
ha
,” Martin said. “And
I
myself gave it to Mona.” He rubbed a leaf between his fingers. “And it will live long after you, Mr. Zill. The marvelous plant world. We are but visitors in it.”

—

That evening, Martin drove up to the Convention Center to start building his display for the show. Miami was celebrating its centennial that year, and that was the orchid show’s theme, which meant that the displays were supposed to illustrate something about Florida history. Martin said he was going to build a swamp scene with lots of vandas and a child-sized wooden dugout canoe. “It doesn’t have much connection to reality,” he said. “But then again, what does?” Martin’s display area was a smallish square in a back row near Tom Fennell, Jr.’s, and around the corner from Bob
Fuchs’s. Martin’s assistant, Viv, had covered the floor of the display with two inches of beach sand before we arrived. “Very attractive,” Martin said to her. “But, Viv, we do need a little negative space here.” He started raking some sand out of the way. He had trucked in nearly three hundred vandas and cattleyas to use in the scene and had a few special hybrids that he particularly wanted to show off. He and Viv began placing the plants and then patting sand around to cover the base of the pots.