Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (55 page)

Half of Boris’s audience was easily titillated teenagers. His trademark was the call-in confession
in which kids graphically described sexual experiences that Boris would grade for arousal and imagination; then he would send them on their way with a plug for God-fearing Americans of European stock. The other half of Boris’s audience was voyeuristic fifty-year-old bigots.

Church groups were enraged, editorial writers had infarctions, city councilmen passed resolutions and then smiled for photographs.

Boris responded with a packed press conference on the steps of City Hall. “It’s First Amendment, baby! I’m an artist!” he yelled, gripping the rubber-ball end of a large brass horn. Dozens of middle school and junior high fans cheered from the sidewalk. Plainclothes Klansmen set up an interactive booth.

Boris pointed at the kids and looked into the TV cameras. “The youth of America will not have their rights trampled. Don’t mess with Boris the Hateful Piece of Sh—AHH-OOOO-GAH!”

Boris’s notoriety exploded, and his appeal began overlapping all demographic lines. If you wanted to draw a crowd to your event, you hired Boris for a guest appearance. And you got your money’s worth, because although Boris was just under five and a half feet tall, he was just over four hundred pounds, most of which was not adequately bathed. Standing still in air-conditioning, Boris perspired like a yak. While songs played, Boris sat like a statue in his DJ chair with arms crossed, wearing dark sunglasses, a beatnik Jabba the Hut.

In the mutual-approval symbiosis of celebrity and fan, people constantly approached Boris as he sat
motionless: “You’re the greatest, man!” “You’re a genius!” “You tell it like it is!”

Boris never acknowledged them—just continued sitting rigid, arms crossed, staring straight ahead in his sunglasses.

“Man, that is so
cool!
” said his fans.

It was a different story if it was a young girl. Then Boris broke his pose and whispered in her ear. The girl would yell over to her friends something like “Hey, guess what Boris just asked me! He’s a riot!”

They didn’t get it. They thought it was part of the act. No, Boris would say, I’m serious. I really want you to do that to me.

“You can’t be serious,” replied the last girl. “But you smell.”

“Of course I smell. I’m a piece of shit!”

“Get away from me, you fat freak!”

Boris shrugged and leaned back and crossed his arms.

Johnny Vegas stood next to the wetlands exhibit and said to no one in particular, “Isn’t that Boris the Hateful Piece of Shit?”

“Yes it is,” came a reply. “And you wouldn’t believe what he just asked me to do.”

Johnny turned and gazed into the emerald-green eyes of If, who tossed an empty plastic champagne flute into the otter tank. Responding to ancient genetic memory, Johnny sheep-dogged her over to the bar. The TV was tuned to Florida Cable News.

FCN was in Daytona Beach reporting the phenomenon of college student balcony falls. And it wasn’t just hotels anymore—anything of altitude
would do: overpasses, parking decks, scoreboards at sporting arenas. While the FCN reporter spoke, a computer illustration showed the side of a beachfront hotel and a dotted line arcing from the top floor down to a large
X
on the pavement painfully shy of the swimming pool.

Johnny turned to If. “Did you know that because of Florida, architects have had to recalculate the setback distance of swimming pools from hotels?”

She shook her head.

“It’s true,” he said. “They used to go by standard Mexican cliff-diving clearances and then add a percentage as a deterrent. But spring break queered the whole equation. All the drinking. Everyone’s depth perception is fucked.”

“What kind of yutz would dive from the fourteenth floor?” asked If.

“I’d rather hit something with my speedboat,” said Johnny.

“You have a speedboat?” If asked, her face lighting up.

“Used to,” Johnny said with dejection. “It’s now being raced around Biscayne Bay by Rastafarians smoking marijuana cigars.”

“Oh,” she said, and her smile dropped along with her eyes.

Johnny stared at the floor, too, and idly scraped at a piece of gum with the point of his Italian shoe. Then a thought. He looked back at her and offered tentatively, “I have a Porsche.”

“Not a nine-twenty-four, I hope,” she said with reserve.

“No way! Nine-eleven. Convertible.”

“Airfoil on the trunk?”

“And Luther Vandross on the CD.”

If began to purr, and Johnny tried to picture her in the cheerleading outfit he had in the back of his closet. If said she had to hit a party across the bay—meet a few guys from her office and string them along, purely as an investment in her career. But she’d love to meet him, say, in two hours? She gave him directions, a late-night piano bar in St. Pete, a little walk-down joint below street level on the bay—front.

Johnny glanced back at the TV. The newscast had moved into the weather segment, and he laughed and pointed at the screen. “I love that dog. He cracks me up.”

If looked up and saw Toto the Weather Dog spinning in a ballerina outfit and began laughing, too. “That’s too much! How do they think of this stuff?”

Johnny smiled and bade If farewell, but in his heart he knew she wouldn’t be at the piano bar. It was the classic brush-off.

He’d forgotten about her as he trolled the party without result. Two hours later, with no further success in hand, Johnny hopped in his Porsche and drove for the piano bar, a slave of groundless hope, calling on God in the night air: “Please, please, please, please, please…”

Seconds after Johnny left, Boris cued up “Train” by Quad City DJs. Patrons filled the dance floor, which shook with the nondancelike, orthopedically inadvisable twitching and stomping of rich white
people. The aquarium staff lined the sides of the crowd, clapping in rhythm and blowing traffic-cop whistles.

Amid the swirling lights and dry-ice fog, there was a tremendous crash—then a huge cannonball splash in one of the tanks. People looked around, but the loud music and light show aggravated the confusion. Someone glanced up and saw a jagged opening in the middle of the aquarium’s glass dome. It was simple deduction from there. The imaginary path of gravity led down from the dome to the alligator tank, where a large object floated. The staff turned up the house lights, and the crowd pressed against the glass walls of the tank for an underwater view. What was it? Where did it come from? There were no tall buildings nearby and no air traffic patterns overhead.

The waves from the splash lapped against the tempered glass and churned up bottom gunk, hazing the view. Two docents climbed down to the tank from a maintenance ladder. Guests began to make out bits of brightly colored cloth with a floral pattern, a tan Birkenstock, purple fanny pack and Roger McGuinn/Byrds sunglasses.

“It’s…” someone said, then filled with dread, “…a college student!”

J
ohnny drove slowly through the empty downtown streets of St. Petersburg, the Porsche jostling on the brick road as he scanned boarded-up buildings for a street address. Johnny wondered how he had been reduced to this: junior nooky cadet, sniffing around a
ghost town on poontang patrol. I deserve better, he told himself. I have a trust fund! And he thought about the family business of scamming the elderly into life insurance for which “you can’t be turned down! Your rates will never go up! And there’s no physical! Don’t make the mistake of waiting until it’s too late!”—and then an old woman in the TV ad cries over a checkbook and a photo of her dead husband. Johnny swelled with pride.

As the numbers on the abandoned buildings approached the appointed street address, Johnny heard piano tinklings and eggnog laughter echoing from around the corner. He turned right at the light and pulled to the curb beside an iron staircase railing leading below the street. Standing at the top of the stairs, next to a small red “Piano Bar” sign, was If. She leaned against the wall quite sultry, sipping a jumbo martini. Her eyelids were at half-mast. She slugged back the last of the martini with a whipping action of her neck, took two steps toward the Porsche and threw the martini glass back over her shoulder. It was supposed to smash against the brick wall, but it missed and broke a window too. Things happened simultaneously. If stumbled toward the car. People came running up the stairs. Johnny tried to start the already running Porsche, and it made an expensively bad sound.

Johnny was at his indecisive, fumbling best as If climbed in. “Let’s get out of here,” she told Johnny. “I need to be fucked hard.”

A bouncer ran up and grabbed If’s door handle. Johnny pressed the gas pedal, and the bouncer was
left spinning on his back in the street like a break dancer.

If peeled her dress over her head as they cleared the southbound tollbooth for the Sunshine Skyway. The bridge began to ascend, and If unzipped Johnny’s pants with her teeth. He knew he had to hurry. He reached over the top of her head and pressed buttons to call up the exact song he wanted on the stereo. It had to happen perfectly, the right spot of the ideal tune playing at the precise moment they crested the bridge for the maximum view. He punched the controls quickly for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird.” But the part of the song he wanted was the fantastic guitar solos toward the end, and they were almost to the bridge’s apex. Shoot, he thought, it’s all happening out of synch! It’s falling apart! Maybe if I slow below a hundred. He digitally fast-forwarded through the song until finally, almost at the last second, everything was aligned. He wanted to tweak the volume up a little, but If’s increasingly bobbing head made it hard to reach. To make it louder, Johnny would have to mash her face down really hard leaning over her. Screw it, he thought, I’ll live. The song’s guitar triplets screamed from the Alpine speakers, and Johnny scanned the panorama of distant lights from ships and beach towns, and his pre-orgasmic ego said, “My sphere of influence.” Then it was back to shaking and moaning and trying to keep track of the steering wheel.

Johnny didn’t see the parked car until it was almost too late. A white Chrysler New Yorker without emergency flashers sat half in the breakdown lane,
half in Johnny’s lane. Johnny screamed and swerved left into the retaining wall. The Porsche scraped the cement barrier for three hundred yards, spraying a dramatic shower of sparks, but it helped slow the car without wrecking. There was no harm except extensive body damage and a socially awkward moment after they stopped when Johnny found If’s head turned a little too far in an undesigned direction and inextricably wedged between the seat and the bottom of the steering wheel.

“Hold on, let me get some tools from the trunk,” Johnny said and hopped from the car.

If tried to wiggle loose. “Hurry! It hurts!”

Johnny lathered the sides of her head with grease used to pack bearings, and her head snapped free with the sound of a finger popping a cheek. They stood for a silent moment of relief, catching their breaths, then realized they had forgotten about the parked Chrysler that had started it all. They turned and looked back up the bridge.

C
hester “Porkchop” Dole was flipping channels on his TV and complaining about the lack of quality programming when he accidentally glanced up at the safety monitors.

He screamed.

Chester dove for the radio and knocked over the microphone. He’d never used the radio in six years at the bridge. He pressed buttons and switches until he got deafening feedback, and pressed more until it stopped. He keyed the mike and begged for help
without protocol. He forgot to release the microphone button to hear a reply. When he heard no reply, he panicked and gripped the button harder. Everyone in the greater Tampa Bay area who owned an emergency scanner turned up the volume.

“Help! Help! I’m at the bridge! Oh, please! Why won’t anyone answer me! Why are all of you doing this! For the love of Jesus! Fuck me!” Followed by long, loud crying.

On the wall was monitor number five, and on the screen a man in a tux and a young woman in a strapless evening dress with a large, dark stain on the side of her head walked apprehensively up the bridge. Ahead was a white Chrysler New Yorker with scorch marks down the side, parked southbound. The Chrysler’s passenger stood between the vehicle and the bridge railing. He flicked a Bic lighter and held it to a strip of rag hanging out of a wine bottle and tossed it in the open passenger window.

A fireball. The car crackled and was engulfed, sending swirls of sparks up into the bridge’s suspension.

As Johnny Vegas watched a lunatic Molotov his own car, he thought the man might as well take a flamethrower to Johnny’s romantic life. He hadn’t lost his virginity yet. Some decent oral foreplay, but that wasn’t official under Queensberry rules. When the Chrysler’s driver climbed onto the bridge railing, Johnny’s heart skipped. Pleeeeeeeease don’t jump. It’s almost impossible to get a woman amorous after something like that. Men, sure. They’re in the mood after mass executions. Literally, there
is
no wrong time. But Johnny knew women were different. He
had been on the business end of enough aborted trysts to know that far less than this can throw a woman’s emotions tottering out of that carefully nurtured trajectory needed to get her through the window of opportunity and into the sack.

A highway patrol car skidded to a stop behind the Chrysler and the trooper jumped out. “Why don’t we talk about this?” he said calmly. Back on the patrol car’s radio, Johnny heard a frantic, sobbing voice: “Oh, sweet God in heaven! Please, somebody answer me! Mother! Mother, where are you! Why did you leave me, Mother?”

Back in the safety booth, horror swept up the spine of Chester “Porkchop” Dole, and a cold, sallow flush hit his face. Dole could handle the drama on the bridge. What unraveled him was the knowledge that the smooth boulder of fate was about to roll over his nineteen years of public service. The safe routine of his job had been varied, the universe altered.

A journeyman state employee, Dole had the bureaucratic survival instincts that told him how to lateral most responsibility, dodge most blame, cover most ass. But there was one error so costly it was to be avoided above all else. It was known as Death-by-Headline. No matter what you do in public life, no matter how gravely you blow it, make sure it’s in a nebulous way that takes a lot of obscure argot to explain. Even if you get a bunch of people killed, as long as they die in eight-syllable words with no convenient puns, alliterations, rhymes or homonyms. There’s nothing worse than screwing up in a way that makes a snappy, pants-around-the-ankles newspaper
headline that wins some poor copy editor the hundred-dollar prize for the month.