Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (126 page)

“I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

THE NEXT MORNING
, a high-performance Bell Jet Ranger helicopter lifted off a rooftop helipad above Miami and headed north along the coast. It traced the condo canyons and hotels from Ocean Drive to Bal Harbor, then headed inland over funky Dania.

FCN correspondent Blaine Crease pointed down at another condo. “Didn’t that use to be Pirate’s World?”

The pilot said he didn’t know.

MARLON
wasn’t getting enough sleep. He yawned at the wheel on I-95. The morning drivers weaved, flipped birds and darted around the
Orange Crush
. Escrow brought a box of letters to the front of the Winnebago.

“And here’s the mail. A hundred dollars from some nobody, another hundred from nobody, another hundred…” Escrow flipped fast-forward through the checks in disbelief. “They’re
all
a hundred dollars! And I’ve never heard of any of these people!” He kept flipping.

“Maybe I’ve struck a nerve with the common folk,” said Marlon. “Maybe that’s all they could afford.”

“Then why are they giving it to the GOP?” said Escrow. “You know the saying—‘There’s no dumber animal than a poor Republican.’”

Marlon hugged the shoulder of the road as a Beemer flew by, shot between two semis and skidded onto the exit ramp.

“And now we move on to your fan mail,” said Escrow. “‘
You suk,’ ‘You suk big time,’ ‘We should call you Hoover you suk so much,’ ‘I think you’re great! Just kidding—you suk!
’ and ‘
Why did you implant the transmitter in my head?
’”

Another car began passing on Marlon’s left. A convertible. The driver raised a pistol at the Winnebago. The other drivers saw it, changed lanes and sipped coffee. The car advanced slowly, moving up along the side of the
Orange Crush
, a convertible red Ferrari with a vanity tag.
DAY-TRADR
. It was nearly to Marlon’s window.

“
THERE
he is!” shouted Blaine Crease. The Bell Jet Ranger swooped down over the morning traffic on I-95, made a hard bank and came up the southbound lanes until it was hovering over the
Orange Crush
. A rope ladder unrolled from the side of the helicopter.

“
LOOK
what I bought!” said Pimento, holding a tiny, pocket-sized TV with a three-inch crystal screen. “Isn’t this an incredible gadget? I picked it up at Wal-Mart so we could watch Marlon’s commercials on the road.” Pimento looked at his watch. “His first should be airing any second.”

Right on schedule, Marlon’s spot opened with a soft fade-in on a playground, followed by a Veterans Day parade and an old woman in a rocking chair looking at a picture of herself as a young girl. There were violins and a mellow flute. A police officer on horseback as sunrise broke through elm branches. Children chasing an ice-cream truck. A church picnic. Finally, a ground-level shot looking up at Marlon Conrad in an Army helmet. The
camera pulled back to show Marlon in a soldier’s uniform with a big-ass medal on his chest that said “Hero.” Behind him a massive American flag unfurling in gossamer slow motion. Fade-out.

“Genius!” said Escrow.

“That’s it? No words?” said Marlon. “Where’s my message?”

“The medium is the message.”

“So get Marshall McLuhan to run the state.”

After the commercial, ABC broke in with a simulcast from Blaine Crease’s helicopter. A news caption read: “Live—Interstate 95.”

“Hey, check it out!” said Pimento, pointing at the tiny TV. “It’s that dude from the debates. What the hell’s he doing? Must be some kind of cool stunt—he’s trying to climb down onto that RV.” Pimento looked out the window at their surroundings. “I’ll bet that’s going on right around here somewhere.”

The red Ferrari gained on the
Orange Crush
and finally pulled even with Marlon’s window, and the gunman stiffened his arm in aim.

“He’s at the bottom of the ladder!” said Pimento, pointing at the tiny TV. “He’s letting go!”

They heard a loud thump on the roof of the
Orange Crush
. They all ducked and looked up at the ceiling. “What the hell was that?” said Pimento.

The sudden noise distracted Marlon, and he swerved left, then noticed he was about to collide with a red car in the next lane, and jerked the wheel hard the other way.

“Uh-oh,” said Blaine Crease.

He was catapulted from the roof of the
Orange Crush
and onto the windshield of the Ferrari, which veered off
the left shoulder of the highway and began bounding down the median.

“Ahhhhhhhhh!” screamed Crease.

“Ahhhhhhhhh!” screamed
DAY-TRADR
.

They crashed through a palmetto thicket and kept going, Crease screaming and hanging on to the top of the windshield with both hands. They finally slowed and sank in wet sawgrass.

Back on the highway, Marlon had overcorrected and was straddling the shoulder, the right wheels bouncing through rough gravel. He carefully eased the wheels back onto the pavement.

“I hate driving in Broward County,” said Marlon.

Pimento remembered his tiny TV. He looked down at the small screen. The helicopter was pulling away from traffic with an empty rope ladder swinging in the wind. No sign of Crease.

“Hey, we never got to see what happened,” said Pimento. “Hope everything turned out okay.”

“Are you guys finished fooling around? Can we get back to business?” said Escrow. He folded over a newspaper and showed Marlon an editorial entitled “Let ’em eat cake!” It endorsed Gomer Tatum’s proposal to execute prisoners on empty stomachs. There was a comparison chart of last meals and school lunch menus.

“But I liked those pizza squares,” said Pimento.

“This isn’t funny,” said Escrow. “The race is getting too close!”

In truth, Escrow didn’t need to worry anymore about Marlon’s dedication to the campaign. He was starting to push himself plenty on his own. The more people he met, the guiltier he felt. It had begun as a lark, but now Marlon
wanted to win more than anything. He soon passed The Point of No Return. He bought a Woody Guthrie tape.

“…
Well I rode that ribbon of highway…and saw above me that endless skyway
…”

Marlon had been putting in eighteen-hour days swimming against the conventional wisdom. He fought fatigue with the idealistic energy of a college student as he went home to home seeing how his fellow Floridians lived, listening to their dreams and fears. He began shunning the closed fund-raisers and political tribute visits and—most terrifying of all to Escrow—refused to select campaign stops based on how they would play to the cameras.

Instead, he went to places that had never seen a candidate: inner cities, rural trailer parks, even a prison, where Escrow kept haranguing him about the political illogic of spending time with people who weren’t allowed to vote. He saw kids in hospitals and AIDS patients in hospices and the bedridden in nursing homes and the homeless at roadside.

“Look at this clipboard! I don’t see any votes anywhere in today’s schedule!” said Escrow. “You’re spreading yourself too thin! Have you seen the bags under your eyes? Thank God we’re not doing any TV today.”

Marlon just smiled.

But even Elizabeth and Jenny were growing concerned. They found Marlon asleep in a running shower one night and again the next day, slumped over a slide-out desktop in the back of the Winnebago with his Guthrie tape still playing.

“…
This land was made for you and me
….”

THE
cell phone rang and Escrow answered. He held the phone away from his ear, and everyone in the RV heard the shouting on the other end.

It was Helmut von Zeppelin, calling from his estate, and he was demanding to know whether the rumor was true—that Marlon had canceled his thirty million dollars of corporate welfare to help him pay for a stadium someone else had already paid for.

“How can you really answer a question like that?” said Escrow. “Words are such tricky things. You’ve got your synonyms, your homonyms, semantics and syntax. And don’t forget the onomatopoeia—”

“Get your pecker outta my ear, boy!”

Escrow held the phone away from his head again for another stream of invective.

He handed the phone to Marlon. “It’s for you.”

“Marlon Conrad here.”

Von Zeppelin introduced himself with colorful language.

“Helmut! Good to hear from you! How’s the team doing?”

Escrow desperately shook his head no, running a finger across his throat in a slashing gesture. Football was a bad subject right now with Helmut.

“Helmut, you’ll have to talk slower. I can’t understand all your threats.”

“You come here right now!” yelled Helmut, pacing furiously in a neck brace from the blimp landing. “My house! On the double!”

“I’m on the campaign trail,” explained Marlon. “Did I tell you I got a Winnebago?”

“You listen to me, son! You turn that shitbox around
right now and drive here as fast as you can and hope my mood improves!”

“No can do.”

“What?”

“I’ll be glad to talk to you if you want to come to one of the debates,” said Marlon. “We usually have a question-and-answer period at the end that we open up to the public. Of course you’ll have to get in line—”

Marlon heard a maniacal screaming, followed by a number of unidentified, inorganic sounds. Helmut strangled the phone receiver with both hands and then started banging it on his desk in the Charlemagne Room. He finally grabbed a medieval mace off the wall and smashed it to tiny phone pieces.

Marlon heard the line go dead. He tossed the phone to Pimento.

“You have no idea what you’ve just done,” said Escrow.

“I’ve got the basic sketch in my head,” said Marlon. “There’s a chance I could lose the election.”

“No, you don’t understand,” said Escrow. “You’ll be lucky if you
only
lose the election.”

“You worry too much,” said Marlon, turning inland. He drove west across Palm Beach County until he got to a migrant labor slum near Lake Okeechobee.

Acting on an anonymous tip intended to embarrass Marlon, immigration officials followed him into the camp and began rounding up illegals. The crowd smelled a double cross and started jeering Marlon, who began shouting at the immigration people and ultimately tussled with two officers. He was arrested.

They took him downtown in the same van as the aliens, right into a nest of TV cameras. He was quickly released
when higher-ups in Immigration were squeezed by the GOP. Marlon was cheered outside the jail by human rights activists and plastered across the nightly news as a champion of the people.

“Damn!” said Jackie Monroeville. “I never should have called in that tip.”

The polls went schizo, and Mason & Dixon had their field people recheck the data. Bleeding-heart liberals were crossing over to Marlon. Self-righteous conservatives jumped to Tatum. The smart business money stayed put. After the dust cleared, Marlon netted a ten-point gain.

The newspapers started picking up on it. There were long debates in the editorial offices. At first they couldn’t get past their skepticism that Marlon was some kind of political genius making cold calculations. No, said the reporters who were observing it on the ground. The guy’s for real. The editors dropped their cynicism. Marlon wasn’t a genius; he was a fool.

They invited him to speak to their editorial boards.

An editor in a bow tie shook Marlon’s hand and introduced the rest of the opinion-makers.

“Why do you aspire to power?”

“To share it with those who don’t have any.”

“What do you want to change most about Tallahassee?”

“The bullshit.”

And on it went.

Marlon’s reputation for goodwill and honesty began reaching such mythic proportions across Florida that it caused many to start remarking, “Someone ought to shoot that motherfucker!”

EIGHTY MILES AWAY
, out in the Atlantic Ocean, the tiny island of North Bimini was dark and quiet. An ocean breeze blew through the coconut palms, and bright constellations filled the Bahamian sky.

The main road on the island is called the King’s Highway, but it’s nothing majestic. Narrow and bumpy with mostly golf cart traffic. As it reached its south end in Alice Town, a raucous noise rose above the surf, and red light filtered through the trees.

It was a modest old wooden bar built in the 1930s, the kind that would be called a roadhouse if it were on a mainland. The door was propped open. Faded photos, yellow newspaper clippings and stuffed fish covered the walls.

There was a sign outside,
THE COMPLEAT ANGLER
, and it was one of the world’s finest dives. It was so secluded and expensive to get to that it had become the perfect hideaway for politicians. They had been making the quick yacht runs and seaplane hops from Florida for years, ever since Congressman Adam Clayton Powell began showing up and ordering his “usual,” scotch with milk chaser. On the wall was an old celebrity photo, Gary Hart on stage doing karaoke, shaking maracas with a nonwife companion. Then there was the literary world. Ubiquitous tropical barfly Ernest Hemingway arrived in 1934 with a Colt pistol and a severe thirst and, with impressive alacrity,
somehow managed to shoot himself in both legs. He waited to heal and left without fanfare.

On this calm October night in 2002, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young was on the jukebox, and Dempsey Conrad and Periwinkle Belvedere were belly to the bar, heads bobbing to half mast from a full day of island drinking. The phones hadn’t stopped ringing back in Tallahassee. Major contributors, captains of industry and special interests wanting answers, demanding to know just what the hell Marlon was up to.

“Relax. He’s a political genius. It’ll work out. You’ll see.”

They weren’t buying. They wanted Marlon to back off his attacks on the “fat cats.”

“But you
are
fat cats,” Dempsey joked.

They weren’t in the mood.

Conrad and Belvedere instructed their staffs to say they were out of town, but that only made things worse. You can ditch the press like that, but donors have ways of finding out where you really are, and they remind you the next time you ask for a check.

It was getting too hot in the cockpit. Time to bail. Dempsey and Perry ordered up a Learjet. Give it a few days to fade away.

They started taking liquid lunch at the End of the World Saloon, which had a sand floor and an elderly woman with tongs pulling conch fritters from an oil vat. They met a waitress who had served Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo.

“Nixon always had the same thing. Grilled ham and cheese, potato salad and a Beck’s. He was real nice. I had a picture taken of him hugging me, but the CIA grabbed the camera.”

Dempsey and Perry discussed the options. Get drunk billfishing in the Gulf Stream or run the table. They decided on the latter, rented a golf cart and made it a mission to visit every bar on the island.

They hit the Big Game Club and the Red Lion and Sandra’s before tipping the golf cart into Porgy Bay. They walked back to Alice Town in the dark, catching occasional whiffs of ganja from the breeze. There was a glow on the edge of the western sky, the lights of Miami Beach fifty miles away, over the horizon. The pair made it back to their rooms at the Blue Water Resort, changed into dry clothes and headed for the Angler.

Dempsey stood at the bar downing a Kalik, and Perry—with considerable difficulty—had acquired a mint julep.

“…
Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming…We’re finally on our own…This summer I hear the drumming…Four dead in O-hi-o
…”

Dempsey and Periwinkle heard someone calling their names over the music. Their Lear pilot had his hand over the phone. “You got a call!”

“We’re not here!” said Dempsey.

“
You
tell him.” The pilot held out the phone receiver.

Dempsey heard the shouting before he got the phone to his ear. It was Helmut von Zeppelin.

“What the hell’s going on? We had a deal!”

“Calm down—”

“Eat me! I’ve given your boy soft money, hard money, everything! Now he’s refusing to even see me!”

“He’s got a plan. Trust us.”

“I don’t trust my mother!” Helmut started strangling the phone and throwing it around the room again, and Dempsey waited patiently until Helmut’s voice came back on the line.

Belvedere watched Dempsey’s face turn grim as he listened to what von Zeppelin said next. Dempsey hung up the phone and threw a pair of twenties on the bar.

“We’ve got to get out of here!” he told Belvedere.

“What’s wrong?”

“We have to find Marlon.”

MARLON’S
Road Warrior act was still topping the newscasts, and the highlights replayed over and over.

At a Federal-style mansion north of Tallahassee, in a pink upstairs bedroom filled with lace and puppets, Babs Belvedere sat on her bed untangling Punch’s and Judy’s strings. She watched Marlon on her bedroom TV. There was footage from Daytona and Vero. Babs zeroed in with missile-lock radar on Jenny climbing aboard the RV behind Marlon in both segments. The tears came in buckets. With wet eyes still on the TV, she picked up her princess phone and called her father, who wasn’t answering because he was in the Bahamas. She left a tearful message on his machine. Then she dialed a few more numbers, the last one for the airport.

She packed a small overnight bag and went down to her father’s gun cabinet.