Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (33 page)

“Isn’t that the guy you used to promote?” David asked. “You did his advertising campaign.”

“Don’t remind me,” said Sean.

Mo’s success was based on demographic research that showed talk radio audiences were predominantly male, bitter, undereducated, untraveled, did not know how to figure percentages and unfailingly blew all major life decisions. Research also showed Mo’s ratings spiked when he called homosexuals
“fudgepackers,” which he had to do constantly to fill airtime because he did not possess talent or knowledge.

The problem with Mo’s audience was that it had an incredibly low per-capita income, which is why
The Mo Grenadine Show
was sponsored by Hot-to-Trot Jerky Sticks, Red-Eye Beer ($1.99 a six-pack) and The Galactic Wrestling Federation.

Grenadine, fifty-one, had started unlikely enough as a private investigator specializing in fabricating evidence to deny insurance claims of legitimate and generally poor accident victims, some of whom were now his listeners. Sitting home one afternoon, he had a bad medical reaction to drinking nine scotches. He saw something on TV about a Tampa city council hearing that evening on a gay rights ordinance. Grenadine went out and bought a gay porno magazine and made a hundred Xeroxes of a man giving another man oral sex. On each he drew a red circle with a slash through it. He stood next to the doorway of the city council chambers and handed a copy to each person who entered.

The following morning he was in the newspaper, the next afternoon a guest on talk radio. The next week he was the host of the radio show. And that November, Mo Grenadine surfed a wave of homophobia into the Florida senate, also picking up the overlapping assault-rifle vote.

To fertilize his power base, Grenadine called press conferences to attack AIDS benefits, gay public speakers at the University of South Florida, lesbians
in general and those who wouldn’t date him in particular.

Grendine kept open his private eye practice to launder the bribes of insurance companies with pending legislation.

Then the scandal.

Grenadine and two call girls were in the hot tub at his condo one night and he somehow got his penis caught in the pool pump’s intake valve. His subsequent engorgement left him inextricable. The women fled and in the morning the neighbors found him incoherent and pruney-skinned. The sheriff’s department dive team used rescue equipment to cut into the pool’s wall and remove the entire mechanism in front of TV crews.

“Stick a fork in him, he’s done” was the thinking man’s bet in the newsrooms. In the face of all contrary facts and accounts, Grenadine called a press conference in his hospital room and claimed he’d been attacked by a platoon of perverts who’d molested him in an unspeakable manner because of his courageous, God-fearing work in the legislature. The attack emphasized the need to vote for him and stop the sodomites who break Jesus’ heart. The performance brought convulsive laughter at the television stations.

Grenadine was reelected in a landslide.

On the radio he started calling himself “Holy Moly.”

Sean and David listened from the sidewalk in Ybor
City as Grenadine screamed “fudgepacker!” into the microphone.

On the way home, Sean said he’d gotten a phone call that morning inviting him to a Gasparilla party. One of the social clubs was recruiting him to join.

“Too White Krewe? I dunno,” said David. “They probably think you’re an archconservative because of your work on the senator’s campaign. Are
they
in for a surprise!”

“Let’s give ’em a chance,” said Sean.

They gave ’em a chance and stopped at George Veale’s party, leaving quickly when a parrot was blown through a plate-glass window by indoor artillery fire.

Later that night, when Gasparilla fireworks burst over Tampa Bay, Sean and Karen were standing over the crib in their nursery, smiling at a sleeping baby.

David walked alone and admired Tampa’s skyline from the Ballast Point Pier.

Coleman stumbled along Seventh Avenue on the downhill side of a twelve-beer buzz and stopped to buy curly fries from a man with power tools. Serge took photographs of a historic marker honoring José Martí.

Sharon Rhodes gyrated in George Veale’s lap and thought about absolutely nothing.

Mo Grenadine was passed out in his one-bedroom condo with his pants around his knees, a dominatrix tape on the video, and a plastic novelty device from Hong Kong attached to his penis with rubber bands.

March, seven months before the World Series.

The Florida National Bank branch office sat in an alcove near the rest rooms of the Tampa Bay Mall, and Coleman’s note told the teller no funny stuff, just give him the money.

The teller hit the silent alarm as she filled the bag and yelled bloody murder when Coleman fled around the corner. Next to the bank was the Gold Coast Arcade. Dark and loud, lots of distracting flashing lights. Coleman stuffed the money bag down the front of his pants and climbed in the cockpit of Tail Gunner. In eight seconds, he peeled off his mustache and wig and pulled the red shirt up over his head. He dropped it all inside the Tail Gunner cockpit and retrieved a baby carriage hidden under a pinball machine. The pillow under the blanket looked like an infant.

Cops and security guards flew in from all direc
tions, and Coleman walked through the middle, toward the food court.

The cops formed a perimeter around the mall, and Coleman planned to wait inside, have a little lunch, and head out when the authorities packed it in. Coleman sat on a bench, removing pickles from a Chick-fil-A.

A field trip was in progress. Two nuns led second-graders in their little Catholic uniforms through the mall. As they passed Coleman, two of the children became curious about the baby carriage and tried to peek inside. Coleman edged the carriage away from them.

“Now, now, musn’t wake him up,” said Coleman. One of the nuns leaned over to take the children by the hands.

Suddenly, there was a loud bang in Coleman’s crotch. An explosion ripped open the front of his pants, and a shower of warm red liquid splattered in the faces of the nun and the children. Pandemonium ensued. Coleman writhed on the floor of the food court, grabbing his sore nuts and cursing the bitch who had put the dye pack in the money bag. The nun and kids screamed inconsolably. The closest they could make of it was something they’d seen in a science-fiction movie. Coleman had unleashed The Horrible Dick-Worm from Outer Space.

Two skinheads ran to the screams. They didn’t know what to make of it either, so they kicked Coleman unconscious.

Coleman arrived at his cell in the Hillsborough County Jail in a wheelchair. A long, skinny guy lay on the bottom bunk not looking at him, reading a paperback,
The Cockroach Bay Story
. The guy slid a bookmark between the pages, turned over and held out a hand. “I’m Serge.”

Coleman shook the hand. “Hi, I’m Seymour,” he said, “but friends call me Coleman. Enemies too.”

Locked in the cell with the lights out, Coleman needed a beer; Serge needed his psychiatric medicine. Serge lay on his side in the bunk, propped up on one elbow, becoming manic. Coleman sat cross-legged on the floor next to the bed, listening in awe for hours as Serge recited the unabridged history of Florida.

From the Calusa Indians to the space shuttle, Coleman hung on every word. Serge told him about great artists and pioneers and carpetbaggers and an entire world just outside Coleman’s awareness.

The exploding dye pack was about to put Coleman in the headlines for the third time in his sorry, random life. The first time was twenty-one years ago, when he was four. Coleman was born Seymour Bunsen, the puny child of a working mother, and he constantly sought the approval of his unemployed father.

One Sunday afternoon Mr. Bunsen and the usual suspects lounged in front of the television in the Bunsens’ living room, enduring another football shipwreck of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Full ashtrays and empty longnecks covered the coffee table. In
front of the table was a sixty-quart cooler holding a bath of ice water and no more beer.

Seymour kept coming up to his dad, pestering him with questions about what was going on in the game, tugging on his shirt and pants legs. The Buccaneers fumbled into their own end zone in the fourth quarter, and young Seymour poked his dad in the shoulder. “What’s happening? What’s happening?”

“Jesus Christ!” Mr. Bunsen screamed. He grabbed little Seymour, stuffed him in the cooler and sat on the lid. His drunken friends laughed and Mr. Bunsen drained his beer and laughed too, and they watched the rest of the game.

Seymour was blue and near death when he got to the hospital. He spent three months in intensive care, a month more than his dad would spend in jail. Doctors weren’t sure whether psychological trauma or brain damage caused him to withdraw and wither. He seemed emotionally adrift; he would never again seek anyone’s approval.

The football angle of the child abuse made it a natural for the media. A TV newscaster opened with “The Buccaneers weren’t the only ones to take a beating yesterday….” A sports talk show blamed the Bucs’ poor play as much as Seymour’s dad.

In Tallahassee, one senator held up a newspaper that said in large letters: “Dad benched for unnecessary roughness.” He demanded the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services take action. Another lawmaker used the attack to try to secure public funding for a new football stadium.

The story followed Seymour Bunsen from school to school, as he was moved around often in a series of disciplinary transfers for fighting with taunting classmates.

At every school he was initially nicknamed Bunsen Burner. But as soon as his classmates heard about him being stuffed in the cooler, they responded with the compassion for which schoolchildren are known. The nickname “Igloo” lasted only three weeks. “Coleman” stuck.

The second time Coleman made the headlines, he was twenty-two. A small-time burglar, he decided he needed a wealthier clientele if he was going to better himself. He bought golf magazines to pick tonier neighborhoods to hit. One night while inside a home on the Palma Ceia Country Club, he fell asleep playing video games. He awoke with a joystick on his stomach and laughing police officers in the room. Coleman jumped over the balcony and ran onto the golf course.

As he sprinted, Coleman heard cops behind him, still laughing. While burglarizing the house, Coleman had put on the teenage son’s new basketball shoes, the kind with red lights in the heels that flash on each step. The cops followed Coleman’s blinking red lights down a par five and two par fours until Coleman ran into the pin on the number eight green and knocked himself cold.

The bank robbery was the third-time charm. But it was Coleman’s sentencing, not the heist or dye-pack explosion, that made news.

Florida had become infamous for its abbreviated prison sentences. Through overcrowding, mandatory gain time and other caveats, prisoners were serving fractions of their terms. This drew a backlash of legislative lip service and ineptly written law.

The chairman of the senate’s criminal justice committee had been caught up in a sexual harassment case for a year, distracting him from the little work he would have accomplished otherwise. He survived the scandal with a secret hundred-thousand-dollar payment to his accuser diverted from campaign donations. He held a press conference to announce that he had a sex addiction and, therefore, he too was a victim.

During the scandal, the lawmaker found himself in charge of writing the get-tough legislation against early releases from prison. He never wanted to write such legislation. He just wanted to demagogue in front of the television cameras that he “would personally write the legislation myself!”

Now, his aides said, there was no way out. He had publicly promised.

“I don’t have time. I’ve got this sexual harassment case to deal with,” the senator responded, pulling up his pants. On the sofa in his office, his newest legislative aide was sliding panty hose back on. “These accusations are so unfair,” he continued. “I can’t tell you how hard it’s been on me.”

The aide on the couch, reapplying lipstick in a compact mirror, said, “Let me write it. I’m good with words.”

“There!” the senator said to the other aides. “She’ll write it. I don’t have time.”

“But…” one aide started to object and was rebuffed with a cocked fist.

When hiring the newest aide, the senator had passed on ten more capable applicants before settling on the one with the big tits.

Coleman’s case was the first to fall under the new law. After the numbers were crunched—the advanced good behavior and federal capacity mandates and parole and the complex formulas the aide had written into the law—the state of Florida ended up owing Coleman time. The judge thought it was a mistake and had his clerk add it up again. Then the judge added it up himself. Each time Coleman came out ahead, and the judge had no choice but to order Coleman’s release. What couldn’t be accomplished in the realm of reality was achieved through legislative fiat. The senator who sponsored the bollixed-up bill went on television to blame liberal, criminal-coddling judges.

In the first week of October 1962, Serge A. Storms was born at West Palm Beach Memorial Hospital, a Kennedy baby. Just after two in the morning, Serge’s mother was in her room under anesthesia. His father nodded off in a chair in the lobby. The television showed a four-jet formation in the clouds during the national anthem, closing out a broadcast day in Miami. In the distance, a freight train clacked along the rails next to Old Dixie Highway, carrying military
supplies to the Keys for the Cuban Missile Crisis.

They lived in Riviera Beach, in an upstairs apartment near a citrus packing house on Blue Heron Boulevard. The drugstore down the street had a giant bottle of Coppertone on the roof. Serge’s mother was a sales clerk at Burdines, and his father was the worst jai alai player ever to have taken the court at the Palm Beach Fronton.

His name was Pablo, but he played under the sobriquet “Testarondo.” He made up the name and it meant the same thing in Spanish as it did in Italian, which was nothing. His number was 7.

Pablo played, as it’s sometimes said, like a man possessed. He’d climb up the jai alai walls to field a shot. He’d roll on the floor and come up slinging the ball. He skidded into the screen at least once a game. The fronton featured Pablo prominently in its TV ads, programs and promotional literature.

Pablo’s returns were arguably the fastest in the Florida league. Accuracy was another matter. When brute force was crucial, Testarondo was a sure bet. But when merely vague precision was required, Pablo was money down the drain.

Pablo’s lack of accuracy went beyond not being able to hit the target. Because of the curved basket of a jai alai cesta, even standing behind him was not safe. Pablo’s missed shots were distributed in a 360-degree spray of rock-hard pelota. His
dos paredes
were frightening, his
cortadas
a catastrophe, his killshots deadly.

The other players hated him as much as the fron
ton managers loved him. In the predictable matches with heavy favorites, the level of betting dipped. Pablo’s presence in a match threw the odds board into bedlam. Pablo never threatened to beat the favorite; he threatened to maim him. The wagering broke records.

Every Saturday morning, little Serge sat with his mom in the vacant fronton spectator seats and watched his daddy practice. Pablo practiced like he played in real matches, at full speed. The other players went through the motions, but Pablo ran up the walls like an insane man and sent the pelota whistling by their ears. After nearly decapitating another player, Pablo would look for Serge and his mother in the audience and wave. Serge thought his daddy was a huge sports star like Mickey Mantle.

One night in November, during the daily double, Pablo caught the ball five feet from the back wall and reached back with all his might for a full-court
rebote
. The other players hit the floor. Pablo let fly. He released late, from his hip, and the pelota flew out in the opposite direction, behind him. It ricocheted off the back wall and struck Pablo in the right rear quarter-panel of his skull. His casket was carried beneath a canopy of crossed cestas; his widow was given a number 7 jersey folded in a triangle.

For his part, the energetic Serge soon displayed a precocious antisocial streak. At age five, Serge was picked for the studio audience of
Skipper Chuck’s Popeye Playhouse
, a morning children’s show produced in Miami and hosted by Chuck Zinc, the em
cee of the Orange Bowl Parade. Each time something caught Serge’s attention, he’d wander away from his seat, only to be returned by stagehands bribing him with candy. During a segment where four sock puppets played “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” Serge ran up to the puppet window and pulled Ringo by his yarn hair. Ringo head-butted Serge in the chest, and Serge bit Ringo’s face, which wasn’t Ringo’s face but the hand of the puppetmaster, who screamed and cursed and chased Serge around the studio until the show went to test pattern.

For the next thirteen years, Serge’s well-meaning mom tried to find a suitable role model for the boy and invariably took up with a series of thieves and pawnshop owners. The steadiest was a cat burglar named Henry who tossed pop flies to Serge through two seasons of Little League. The rest of the time Henry ate their food and slept under their roof. When Serge’s mom got on Henry’s back about not carrying his weight, he’d rip off a house in Lake Park or Palm Beach Gardens.

One night Henry thought he’d finally found his angle. He guessed he could hold his breath a minute, maybe a minute and a half, and he made twenty-six trips into a split-level being tented for termites off Northlake Boulevard. He carted away enough electronics, silverware and jewelry to last them six months. The next morning Serge found Henry mottled on the living room sofa, eyes and mouth agape from a fatal dose of methyl bromide that curled his arms and legs like a dried-up lizard in the garage.

By now, Serge’s behavior had its own signature. Everything with him was an on-off switch; there was no volume control. Half his grades were A’s, the other half F’s. He began to hang at the Palm Beach Mall. As people walked out of a bookstore, he’d punch them in the stomach and step back in detachment to study the effect.

This last quirk resulted in Serge being classified as criminally insane by the Palm Beach County Health Department. Serge’s attention-deficit disorder was the first of many hyphens. Obsessive-compulsive, manic-depressive, anal-retentive, paranoid-schizophrenic. He was believed to have been the only self-inflicted case of shaken-baby syndrome.