Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (122 page)

THE DEBATE LED
all newscasts for the next cycle.

Marlon was on the move.

Escrow freaked out in the back of the RV. “You’re out of control!”

“I’m having fun,” said Marlon.

“Fun’s important,” said Pimento.

“No, it isn’t!” said Escrow.

“What’s the map say?” asked Marlon.

Pimento ran his finger down the chart in his lap. “Castillo de San Marcos.”

“We can still go back to Tallahassee,” said Escrow.

No response.

“You’re having a midlife crisis,” said Escrow. “That’s okay. Perfectly understandable. Most guys get Corvettes. You get a Winnebago…. Let’s go back.”

“Tunes!” said Marlon.

“Check!” said Pimento, finding an FM station.

“Is everyone on drugs?”

“…
You say you want a revolution, well you know, we all want to change the world
…”

BACK
in Tallahassee, the press was in disarray. Nobody knew where the candidates were. The flak lines at the campaigns went unanswered. Reporters stared in speechless torpor at empty press-release slots in the mail room of the Capital Press Center.

A columnist for the
Tampa Tribune
yelled down the hall, and the others came running to a television set. A news helicopter had picked up the Winnebago on A1A south of Jacksonville and was cutting in live. TV correspondent Blaine Crease shouted above the whap-whap-whap of helicopter rotors about the ultimate Capitol insider turning outlaw with a Bolshevik charge down the coast in an RV.

Blaine Crease was the star correspondent of Florida Cable News. He had been selected moderator of the gubernatorial debates because FCN, the lowest-ranked network in the state, was the only one that would agree to telecast the traditional ratings-killer. But now that Marlon had apparently gone off the posttraumatic deep end, the rights to the debate were an unexpected gold mine, and Crease smelled a shot at national stature. A former stuntman, Crease had made his name with the newsman-as-fearless-participant feature story, and he regularly placed himself in needlessly dangerous situations that were constantly getting the network sued.

Hovering just feet above the Winnebago as it cruised down A1A, Crease ordered his pilot to get even closer, and he would hang out the helicopter with the TV camera for a better shot. Crease opened the door and activated his microphone.

Back at the press center, more reporters crowded around the TV.

“Is Governor Conrad on some kind of renegade crusade, fighting the system, or is this just another cheap political trick we’ve come to expect from that same old crowd in Tallahassee?” said Crease. He zoomed in on the driver’s window. “God only knows what kind of high-risk, high-stakes discussion is going on inside the Winnebago!”

“School bus!” Marlon called out, sliding a little plastic window over a square on his highway bingo card.

“Fire truck!” said Pimento, sliding his own window.

A massive object suddenly swooped across the windshield.

“Whoa! What the hell was that?” yelled Pimento. “Looked like a helicopter!”

Marlon jerked the steering wheel, and they went off the right shoulder of the road. He corrected, but the RV’s high center of gravity took them all the way across the highway and off the left shoulder.

The helicopter pilot did an emergency pull-up.

“The Winnebago’s gonna crash! The Winnebago’s gonna crash!” Crease yelled on-air, still filming as the
Orange Crush
kicked up clouds of sand, careening from one side of A1A to the other, rocking perilously on its suspension.

Marlon fought with the steering wheel and finally brought the RV back under control.

“Wow! That was incredible!” said Crease. “Marlon Conrad has survived the first major test of his breakaway campaign! But who knows what harrowing obstacles still lie ahead?…”

The TV audience loved it. Calls poured into the network from around the state, viewers wanting more. The network stayed live for almost an hour until the
Orange Crush
entered a thunderstorm and the pilot refused to fly any farther.

In a Jacksonville motel room, Jackie Monroeville and Gomer Tatum sat on the end of the bed, watching saturation TV coverage of the
Orange Crush
. Jackie grabbed Tatum by the collar and shook him. An éclair went flying.

“He’s stealing your momentum! You gotta get out ahead of this thing!” she yelled. “We have to reinvent you!”

“How do we do that?”

“We’re hitting the road!”

THE
miles below Jacksonville are mostly undeveloped, the highway running along the shore. The thunderstorm let up, and Marlon and Pimento resumed sightseeing. There were a few clouds left over land, but it became a clear day on the Atlantic, warm and blue. An occasional cabin cruiser with deep-sea rigs popped over the horizon.

Two state troopers on motorcycles pulled them over near the Guana River State Park. “Governor, please wait here until a security escort can arrive.”

“No!” said Marlon. “No escort!”

“You have to have an escort. We’ve been given orders.”

“No! I’m the governor, the chief law enforcement officer in the state, and
I’m
giving you an order: no escorts!”

“Please stay here,” said the trooper. “This is over my head. I’m going to call it in.”

The trooper phoned headquarters in Tallahassee, where the head of the department—a political survivalist—in turn knew where to call.

The phone rang in the lobbying office of Periwinkle Belvedere.

“I see,” said Perry. He held his hand over the phone and called to Dempsey. “It’s the troopers. They say Marlon’s refusing escort.”

“What about the Rolling Stones people?”

“He fired ’em in Jacksonville.”

“Tell him to put Marlon on. I want to talk to him.”

Perry handed Dempsey the phone.

“Son, this is a bad piece of judgment. They still haven’t caught the person who killed Todd Vanderbilt.”

“So?” said Marlon.

“You
do
know what happened to Vanderbilt, don’t you?”

“I read the papers.”

“That’s right, you’re one of those
readers
now. So you know a bomb went off right where you were debating not an hour earlier. That’s too close for comfort. We need to find out what’s going on.”

“Sorry.”

Dempsey looked at Perry. “Won’t budge.”

“Remember what we said?” replied Perry. “No interference.”

Dempsey held his breath a few seconds, bulging his cheeks, then let it out. “Yep, ‘No matter how crazy it seems.’” He told Marlon to put the trooper back on the line. “Let him go. No escort.”

THE
motorcycle trooper stood in the gravel and waved as the RV pulled off the shoulder and back on the highway.

Marlon drove the speed limit and was passed constantly on the two-lane road. Someone threw a bag of trash out the window, and it blew apart on the edge of the pavement next to a crying Indian. In Marlon’s rearview, a red Ferrari weaved erratically around other vehicles until it was on his bumper, then blew past at ninety. It had a vanity tag:
DAY-TRADR
. Speedboats and Jet Skis roared along the shore, flushing wading birds into the air.

They began to detect development on South Ponte Vedra as they hit the outskirts of St. Augustine. There was no bridge over the inlet, so A1A took them on an inland detour.

The shadow of a blimp crossed the road in front of them.

Marlon stuck his head out the window and looked up; he saw a TV camera pointing back down. They followed a winding route along the Intracoastal Waterway and into the heart of St. Augustine.

“There’s the fort!” said Pimento. “Castillo de San Marcos! It’s made of coquina!”

Marlon pointed at two old statues. “And there’s the Bridge of Lions!”

“Look!” said Escrow. “There’s an election slipping away!”

Pimento turned around. “Did the other kids not play with you when you were a child?”

They pulled over at Flagler College and got out with cameras. Marlon and Pimento took snapshots of the Spanish Revival architecture at the old Hotel Ponce de León built by Henry Flagler. Then they got back in the
Orange Crush
and whipped around town visiting the oldest
everything
.

“St. Augustine was founded in 1565, but did you know Pensacola is actually older?” said Pimento.

“Really?” said Marlon.

“It’s true. Pensacola was founded a few years earlier, but there was a break in the occupation, so St. Augustine gets the crown as longest
continuous
U.S. city.”

“You realize there’s absolutely no way to make any money off that information,” said Escrow.

“The governor needs to know that sort of thing,” countered Pimento.

“Does not!”

“Does too!”

“Knock it off!”

They ended up at dusk atop the St. Augustine Light
house. Marlon and Pimento stood on the caboose-red porch wrapped around the lamp, taking pictures of the ocean and the inlet. Clouds moved in and the wind picked up with an invigorating nip and stinging raindrops. Escrow brought up the rear. He panted and grabbed the balcony railing after taking the last of the two hundred and nineteen steps up the tower. “This is ridiculous! What does all this sightseeing have to do with an election?”

Marlon raised his camera for another picture. “You’re gonna have to be more cool if you want to hang out with us.”

As they emerged from the lighthouse’s base, a blimp was putting down in the parking lot, and the cabin door opened.

“We want more debates!” said Blaine Crease, hopping out. “Normally they’re a ratings write-off, but this new
truth
thing of yours—it’s hot!”

Marlon stowed his camera.

“We caught Tatum a few miles back at a Dairy Queen,” said Crease. “He’s agreed. We booked the speedway for tomorrow. What do you say?”

“We want to negotiate ground rules,” said Escrow.

“We’ll do it,” said Marlon.

Hours later, after sunset, the Winnebago rolled south along the ocean. It was dark inside except for the green instrument lights. Escrow was asleep in back. Marlon and Pimento sat up front talking quietly. There were no other cars on the two-lane road.

“Know what I remember?” asked Marlon. “My playpen. We were on vacation and my mom set it up on the beach under a big green umbrella.”

“No kidding.”

“That vacation is my earliest memory,” said Marlon. “I
remember this sign with an alligator wearing a sombrero pushing a shopping cart.”

Pimento snapped his fingers. “That’s at the Grator Gator grocery on Singer Island! We used to go there when I was a kid.” Then: “How’d I remember that?”

“Weird what sticks with ya,” said Marlon.

The moon had just risen over the Atlantic, and they rolled the windows down to hear the surf.

SHORTLY
after the campaign got under way, a time-honored journalism ritual resumed. News vans and satellite trucks were dispatched to a modest neighborhood of ranch houses in Tampa.

Not all the state’s reporters could be assigned to the most important, diamond-hard news stories. A certain percentage worked the feature beat. It was the most vicious beat in Tampa Bay. There were only so many ways you could write about giraffe births at Busch Gardens and the oldest cigar roller.

But elections were different. They were spaced far enough apart so that veteran reporters had no problem dusting off their clip files and going back to the same well over and over.

It started ten years ago with one reporter and one feature story. Her name was Patty. She was assigned the “man-on-the-street” article for the election. It would be a challenge. There had been many memorably forgettable men-on-the-street from years past. The old guy in the barbershop getting a crewcut, complaining about the Beatles and kids “all hopped up.” The farmer in Mom’s Diner eating meat loaf and blasting Saddam Hussein, wearing a baseball cap with plastic shit on the visor that read, “Damn pigeons!”

In a brilliant stroke, Patty grabbed a telephone book and discovered that there really was a local resident who had the misfortune of walking through life with the name Joe Blow.

Patty went out and interviewed Joe. She learned he had a wife, two kids, a cat, a dog, a high school education, a three-bedroom house with a big mortgage, and two cars (one paid off). He drank sixteen gallons of beer a year, mostly on a sofa watching 3.4 hours of TV a night. He lived within a hundred miles of where he had grown up. He had read no books in the last twelve months, during which time he had eaten seventeen meals at McDonald’s and nine at Burger King, with the rest of the chains eating up the remaining slice of the pie chart. In politics, he favored Republicans for president and Democrats for local office, although he didn’t vote more often than he did. He had never won anything, but the Blows had once been a Nielsen family.

Joe had answered all of the reporter’s questions faithfully and with good humor, and he eagerly awaited the article in the paper the next morning. He had no idea what was coming.

A decade later, it had long since ceased to be amusing. Every election, more and more reporters showed up and camped out in Joe’s yard like he was the Rosetta stone.

In a way, he was. That first reporter had unknowingly tripped over something. But after enough articles were written, the pattern became clear. Everything, absolutely everything, Joe Blow was or did in this lifetime was completely, invariably average. Not just within the standard deviation, but dead-on-the-money mediocre. It started to get to him. The incessant articles only confirmed Joe’s
notion that he would never achieve anything of note. On the other hand, he wasn’t such a bad guy.

Joe looked like…well, it was kind of difficult describing Joe. The more reporters thought about it, the more they realized it was impossible. He had no distinguishing features whatsoever. It was like interviewing robbery witnesses who didn’t get a good look. “Average height, average build, really don’t remember anything about him—just like a million other guys on the street.” If police ever asked people to create a composite of Joe’s face with a computer program, they’d point at the original generic mug the computer started with. “That’s him!”