16 Tiger Shrimp Tango (15 page)

“I crawled under a table and stole all the deviled eggs . . .”

“Women’s lib!” said Serge. “Except they didn’t realize it at the time, so they still wore long, elegant white gloves.”

“. . . Got a tummy ache.”

“Who were these pioneers? you ask. Why, Brownie Wise and her troops,” said Serge. “Earl Tupper invented the product but had trouble moving it in department stores. Then he noticed all these huge sales orders coming in from a single person in Florida, and he’s, like, what incredible store is this? And Brownie says, ‘No store. I hold parties in homes.’ What? Just one woman roaming the Orlando area and chatting in living rooms? That’s impossible. But then all the top executives triple-checked her sales figures, which surpassed some of the largest department stores in the country, and they practically shit in every piece of Tupperware in the office.”

Coleman giggled. “The gelatin mold.”

“Let’s not push the metaphor too far,” said Serge. “Anyway, here’s the key part: Back then, a lot of men would condescend to women and say, ‘Don’t hurt your pretty little heads thinking about business stuff. That’s our work.’ But Brownie had already recruited a multi-tiered marketing force of latter-day Rosie the Riveters. They went wildcat around the male world, creating their own business model, ordering the product under the radar, and just did it. By the time everyone noticed, it was a stunning success that couldn’t be denied.”

“Serge, you don’t mean to say . . .”

“That’s right, the Tupperware party was invented in Florida!” said Serge. “And not more than a stone’s throw from right here.”

“Tupperware’s got my respect,” said Coleman. “And all the stoners, too. Plastic burp lids may not be our bag, but stoners
know
from parties, and we have to give a major nod to their munchy spreads. My old group had a couple heads who knew how to cook—not too many, because the rest of us compared notes and found products in the supermarket where you could open the package, stick your hand in, then stick your hand in your mouth. That was our version of cooking. But a few of the guys actually did all that unnecessary stuff and whipped up some boss nibbles for after the weed guy finally arrived except the weed guy was always late, and everything got too cold or warm and started drying and looking funky, and you called the weed guy and said, ‘You’ve fucked up the burritos again, dude’ . . .”

“Coleman—”

“But the best stoner munchie layout isn’t in the ballpark of even the weakest Tupperware party. Deviled eggs were just the beginning: You had your celery with cream cheese, tomatoes stuffed with tuna salad, olives with toothpicks, Ritz crackers and Velveeta. That’s real food.”

“It was a magic time,” said Serge. “They made me go to bed, which just made me want to stay up. So I snuck down the hall and watched my mom preparing with the local rep, stacking lettuce tubs in perfect pyramids on top of a card table in front of the Magnavox. And I couldn’t believe my eyes: I’d never seen the tube off in the evening. Tupperware was even bigger than TV!”

“Like the Beatles and Jesus . . .”

“And later the party got so effective that it spilled into our backyard with mosquito torches and Harvey Wallbangers, and I spied on the adults by sticking my head through my bedroom curtains and watching the rest of the night as they continued drinking, buying more and more Tupperware and lighting the wrong ends of cigarettes. Except back then, God knows why, they made some bedroom curtains with tiny pieces of fiberglass in the fabric, and all the next day my neck itched like a bastard. Same as now whenever I go to the barber and they put on that whole bullshit charade of wrapping the paper strip around my neck and sprinkling talcum powder and finishing off with that home-plate-umpire brush, and I say, ‘Let’s dispense with this Cecil B. De Mille production once and for all. We both know a bunch of little hair pieces will get down in my neck no matter what you do, and it’ll itch like crazy. So the sooner I pay, the sooner I can go jump in the ocean like I always do.’ And the whole time I’m thinking of Tupperware.”

“You’re a complex person,” said Coleman.

“And yet I’m content with the simplest things.” Serge reached in a pocket and smiled as he unfolded the one-dollar drawing from a bearded guy.

A cell phone rang. Serge checked the display and sighed.

Mahoney.

Chapter Seventeen

DOWNTOWN ORLANDO

T
he hallway ran past offices with giant windows and massive banks of TV monitors.

The rooms were dim; colored lights blinked on vast control panels that looked like they belonged in launch control at Canaveral. Red digital numbers flickered to measure whatever they were measuring in thousandths of a second.

The hallway continued past the offices until its carpeting abruptly ended in dust at the entrance of a dingy corridor with a plain concrete wall. Across from the wall was a barrier of unpainted plywood held up with two-by-fours. It was the framework of an illusion. Backstage.

On the other side of the plywood: the cheerfully bright television studio of Live Action Eyewitness Orlando News 12. But it was just after ten
A.M.
, so there wasn’t any action or news, just the local mid-morning feel-good show,
Feel Good Orlando!
A lone anchorwoman sat behind a clear acrylic anchor desk that was internally illuminated with fiber optics. It was specially designed for high-def, because good feelings were better in digital. She read introductions off the teleprompter before tossing the show around to a series of mini-sets located throughout the studio’s plywood maze, where the various segments featured a middle school math team, a doctor who used lasers on unsightly veins, someone demonstrating how to get your neighbor’s dog to stop barking with an ultra-sonic transmitter disguised as a birdhouse, and a trainer from the local zoo with a misbehaving hedgehog that got loose and ended up in the fake kitchen where viewers would soon discover guilt-free cheese cake.

Past the studio, the illusion faded into conventional administrative offices.

A phone rang.

The person who answered it was unimpressed at first, but then began taking copious notes.

He hung up and went to another office, where an assignment editor dispatched a video crew to a run-down motel near the Orange County line.

It was about telegenics. The footage would lead the next day’s show.

T
he next day’s show:

The entire half hour was dedicated to a pair of guests who had phoned the station in desperation the day before. They didn’t know where else to turn. They called Orlando News 12 because of the station’s consumer hotline motto: “When you don’t know where else to turn!” The station hung up on most of the callers.

A tearful father was led onto the set and took a seat in front of the cameras. Next to him sat his son. The small boy had no hair. As they often say,
pediatric
and
cancer
are two words that should never go together. But this case went far beyond the expected heartrending narrative.

The father had spent so much time taking care of his son that he’d lost his job. Which meant the family lost their insurance for the boy’s care. So he paid out of pocket, letting all other bills slide until they were evicted from their home. The father had thought that since their house was all paid up, state homestead laws protected it from being seized for other debts, and he was right. Except for one exception. Property taxes.

Their asses were on the street, where they now lived in a series of roach motels when they weren’t living in their car. Oh, and the mother was killed last year by a drunk driver.

It couldn’t possibly get any worse, right? Just watch Channel 12: The father sold his car to afford a “desperate” program of treatment for his son. The program was designed to help people precisely in his situation. If the family qualified, the father would pay what he could—a tiny fraction of the cost—and a network of foundations would pick up the rest of the tab. He found the program on the Internet.

The son never got treatment. The program was all a scam, devised to prey on the parents of terminally ill children.

The TV station had never seen such an extreme combination of sympathetic victims, hateful villains and great video. It was the perfect storm of tragedy for
Feel Good Orlando!

By the end of the show, the station’s switchboard lit up until it crashed. The community was coming through. They wanted to do whatever they could for the family—and kill the people behind the scam.

A bank account was set up in their name. Donations flooded in.

So did ratings. The show’s producers had the family back the second day, when the interviewer got their names wrong. “Paul, I mean Phil. Sorry . . . So, Paul, how has the generosity of our station changed your life, because we’re here
when you don’t know where else to turn!
”

The father dabbed his eyes. “I can’t thank you enough . . .”

A week passed. The station’s editors held a meeting to determine upcoming programming. One item was a no-brainer: Get that father and son back again. Their previous two segments had garnered the largest viewerships in months. And get some more footage from that depressing motel to juice the ratings. A TV van was sent out. It had a giant eyeball on the side.

The crew arrived at the dump. A hooker propositioned the cameraman as he strapped on the battery packs, but he said he was working. The reporter slipped into a bright blue jacket and grabbed a microphone.

“How do I look?”

The cameraman gave a thumbs-up.

“Good morning, Orlando. This is where the desperate father and terminally ill son have been forced to live . . .”

They went to the door and knocked.

And knocked. And knocked.

It finally opened. The father looked like he’d been dead asleep. Except not. The cameraman caught a startling glimpse and forced the door open. The video was beyond the wildest dreams of the
Feel Good
executives: openly scattered bottles of booze, drug paraphernalia and cash. The cancer-stricken child covered his face from the camera lights. He was wearing a bra.

What the hell?

The initial shock wore off quickly as reality quickly revealed itself: The boy was actually a petite twenty-six-year-old woman who had shaved her head. It was all a sickening, elaborate scam. The community had been ripped off for thousands of dollars. One of the saddest plights on earth exploited by sociopathic crooks and non-verifying journalists.

The TV reporter was giddy with elation. He had an excellent scandal to report, and he hammered away with hardball questions as the couple scrambled to gather up cocaine and cash.

“Are you the worst people to ever live? . . .”

The TV people ran outside as the grifters jumped into a red Camaro.

“Do you think you’ll burn in hell? . . .”

Six hours later, on the station’s main anchor set:

“Good evening, our top story tonight: a shocking scandal that is still unfolding in an exclusive report that you will only see on Live Action Orlando Eyewitness News 12. An unidentified couple has perpetrated one of the most heinous scams . . .”

The broadcast highlighted footage of earlier interviews and repeatedly expressed outrage that its viewers had been duped out of large sums of money because the TV station hadn’t checked any facts. Except they left out that fact.

What the station did learn was that the bank account had been systematically emptied in $9,500 increments—deliberately under the $10,000 trip wire for IRS reporting—until there was nothing left.

The switchboard lit up again. Where had these assholes fled? Would they be arrested? How were the viewers going to get their money back?

One group of viewers intently watched the report on a flat-screen TV in a luxury high-rise hotel overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway. The report ended, and the celebration began. A cork flew from a bottle of bubbly. South Philly Sal raised a glass to toast the newest members of their team.

“To Omar and Piper, who brought in one of our biggest hauls ever.”

Indeed, $36,000. And as they said in
Goodfellas,
they did the right thing. They shared it with Sal, because he had recruited them and concocted the scheme down to the last detail, including monitoring local TV coverage for the station with the least accurate reporting.

They partied into the evening. Except for Sal, who had stopped drinking after his first, nominal glass of champagne. He sat alone on the far end of the suite, writing at a desk. Addresses, names, known routines of targets broken down into twenty-minute blocks. Sheets of paper were folded and slipped into separate envelopes. Each of the party’s guests would be given their next assignment upon departure. Fun was fun, but there was more work to do.

ORANGE BLOSSOM TRAIL

A black ’78 Firebird peeled away from another budget motel and raced south. The trailing remnants of a metropolis gave way to open pastures, which in turn became bulldozed acres of upstart suburbia. Then more fields and an expressway overpass.

Serge hit a blinker for the left lane. “You know the difference between Floridians and everyone else in the world?”

“We drive around all day and get totally baked?”

“Alligators,” said Serge. “We’re so used to them we don’t even notice anymore. And TV drops our guard even further. Local news can’t grasp economic stories any more complex than the price of gas, and an ‘in-depth’ investigative report means chasing the owner of a pet-grooming salon across a strip-mall parking lot, demanding to know why all the poodles went bald. So in Florida we’re left with perpetual loops of the same cheap video: aerial footage of anything on fire, legs of surfers with shark-teeth marks, ground-level footage of anything on fire, anything weird that beaches itself, a retiree with a jumbo American flag fighting the homeowners’ association . . .”

“And alligators?” asked Coleman.

“Any alligator not in a swamp, because all of this
was
their swamp, and now they’re living alongside us, using our swimming pools and golf courses and shopping-mall fountains until both sides have grown accustomed to the arrangement.”

“You mentioned the rest of the world?”

“At the mere sight of these modern dinosaurs, foreign tourists spaz out with disposable cameras. Especially the British. I love watching the British go gaga over gators. Last year, I was driving across the glades on the Tamiami Trail and saw all these cars pulled over and people gaping at the roadside canal, and I thought that maybe another sightseeing van had rolled into the water. So I stopped and noticed a single gator had crawled up on the opposite bank, and dozens of people in shorts and dark socks were snapping a million pictures. Their reaction was priceless, like a small boy finding his penis for the first time.”

“Ahhhhhhhh!”

“Did I bring back a bad memory?”

“No!” Coleman pointed. “I’m getting a second rush wave! Those gigantic alligator jaws coming toward us. Please tell me it’s a hallucination!”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but it’s definitely real, like ten or twelve feet high.” Serge pulled into the parking lot. “But luckily it’s historic Gatorland, with the huge landmark fake jaws at the entrance to lure tourists off Orange Blossom Trail and into the venerable 1949 roadside attraction. The fantastic part is they dropped anchor just south of Orlando long before Disney ever saw the possibilities. But Gatorland did!”

“The jaws are snapping,” said Coleman. “Concrete can snap, right?”

“No, that’s a hallucination.”

“Mescaline.”

“What?”

“I finally remembered what I took . . . Or was that another time, or another person?” Coleman leaned toward the windshield and the snapping jaws. “Whew! Definitely mescaline!”

“How can you tell?”

Coleman urgently opened the passenger door and doubled over on the ground. Serge heard the ever-familiar sound of his pal sending a high-pressure spray of stomach contents onto pavement. Coleman climbed back into the car. “Excellent stuff!”

Serge just stared.

“What?” Coleman wiped the back of his mouth with his hand. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Puking is excellent?” said Serge.

“I keep telling you it’s the best, man. Always look forward to it.” Coleman picked a couple things off his T-shirt that made Serge wince, then flicked them out the window. Except the window was closed, and they stuck to it.

“Got it under control,” said Coleman, wiping the window with his forearm but just making it smear.

Serge grabbed his own stomach and covered his eyes. “Please fucking stop it. I have to eat again this century.”

“I’m surprised,” said Coleman. “You usually want me to keep your vehicle clean.”

“Just tell me when you’re done so I can open my eyes.”

Coleman continued rubbing. “Don’t be a buzzkill. I told you I always look forward to throwing up. All the heads understand this.”

“You enjoy getting sick?”

“It’s like that Carly Simon ketchup song about anticipation. After taking a dose, the first half of the trip is a lot of work, getting yourself situated to the effects, and that can be some serious heavy lifting if you’re in unfamiliar surroundings: distinguishing what’s moving and what’s stationary, the difference between solids, liquids and gases. See, the whole key to a mellow and enlightening mescaline trip is not to ram your head through something solid like a TV set, just because you wanted to meet the people inside. That takes a lot of responsibility . . .”