10

Serge A. Storms was the native.

Born and raised.

Serge thought Florida in the sixties was a great place and time to grow up. He mythologized his childhood. All the objects in his memory had bright, shimmering outlines and they bloomed against backdrops of perfect cerulean sky or aquamarine sea. In his memories, there was no sound except a hot, melancholy wind. As a young boy, he wandered footloose around beaches and causeways, stomping through mangrove bogs, pretending they were the La Brea Tar Pits. He climbed the Jupiter Lighthouse on a field trip. He broke into JFK’s boarded-up bomb shelter on Peanut Island in the middle of Lake Worth Inlet. He dangled mullet heads off the Singer Island drawbridge with a cane pole, making sharks jump for dinner. Sometimes he fished from atop pier pilings on the Loxahatchee River. He always looked upriver, to the bend where it disappeared. All the kids knew better than to go up the Loxahatchee. That was Trapper Nelson territory. Nelson came to the area in the 1930s and built a primitive cabin on a remote bank of the river, where no road could reach. He made a living skinning furs and made a reputation as the Wildman of the Loxahatchee. To the adults, he was a crazy old hermit, but to Florida schoolchildren who repeated his story over and over, he was the Maximum Boogeyman.

One day when Serge was eight, he stole a rental canoe and paddled up the river. He entered a tree canopy, and the eyes of alligators bulged from the water like knots on cypress knees. He lifted his paddle and glided silently, listening. He came around another bend and the cabin appeared. Serge was still and quiet. No Trapper. He paddled with stealth, hugging the far bank, craning his neck for any sign of the wildman.

Serge heard movement behind him, and he turned to the near bank. There was Trapper, silent, with a slaughtered boar.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” Serge yelled, and paddled like a mad bastard back to the boat launch.

The undetected canoe theft was Serge’s first taste of the criminal life. Twelve years later he began a series of short jail terms for petty larceny and simple assault, and a year at Starke on a coke charge. He avoided anything longer by reason of insanity. It was an easy call. Even expert state witnesses hired to rebut defense psychiatrists would spend five minutes interviewing Serge, then go back to the prosecutor and say, “Are you kidding? I can’t testify this guy’s normal.”

Serge’s face was inviting and intense. It betrayed his surplus of energy and told you he was completely alive every waking moment, fully engaged in life, gripping it with white-knuckled fists. He would invariably end up back at Chattahoochee, the high-security state mental hospital for the criminally insane.

There was nothing mean about Serge. In fact, there was an abundance of compassion. He had empathy for any living thing, felt its pain and joy as his own. It was just a problem of wiring. His overload of energy caused him to get a little too excited at times and he would fritz out. It short-circuited his conscience and he would perform horrific acts in a detached manner, as if he were watching it all on a TV set at the other end of the room. In the same five minutes, he could be exceedingly tender and frighteningly brutal.

The better psychiatrists in the Florida correctional system loved Serge. They recognized the pathology, just hadn’t seen it to this degree. A mixture of schizophrenia and attention-deficit, with a dash of dissociative. It was simply a matter of fine-tuning the chemicals in his brain, like the tracking on a VCR. It generally took a cocktail of four antidepressants and psychotropic drugs to even him out. When he was leveled, he was like an enthusiastic, sweet little kid.

The problem was that the medication dimmed his wattage. Serge would either hide the pills in his mouth or throw them up later. He didn’t want anything messing with his gray matter; he liked the hum inside his head too much-the free commerce of thoughts and images streaming back and forth, occasional bursts of genius flashing inside his skull like heat lightning over Tampa Bay on a warm August evening.

Serge’s first admission to Chattahoochee came in the early eighties after he was picked up at Cypress Gardens. A night watchman discovered him practicing synchronized water ballet in the Florida Pool, the famous swimming pool built in the shape of the state just north of the water ski ramps.

The police called in a state psychiatric team when Serge refused to come out of the pool, claiming he was Esther Williams rehearsing for the hit 1953 MGM musical Easy to Love.

Soon a crowd of cops and park officials had gathered. Serge lay on his back in the pool and made “water angels.” The theme park wanted to avoid publicity at all costs. They conferred quietly and asked if anyone knew what the heck the intruder was talking about.

“He’s got his facts right,” the park publicist chimed in. “Part of that movie was shot in this pool. But that’s ancient trivia. Most of our own employees don’t even know that.”

A voice from the pool turned the group. “ Cypress Gardens, two hundred botanical acres on the shore of beautiful Lake Eloise. Florida ’s first theme park, established 1936…”

The publicist eventually coaxed Serge out of the pool on the pretext of an audition for Skirts Ahoy!

T rapper Nelson was found dead by his cabin in the late sixties, and all the children whispered it was something sinister. He was shot, they said, maybe suicide, maybe murder.

In 1995, Martin County sheriff’s department and game officials began hearing strange rumors. Trapper Nelson wasn’t really dead. The body they found more than two decades ago was some unfortunate soul who had wandered into Nelson’s camp, and Trapper had since dug in deeper. Canoeists reported a shadowy figure darting about the banks or sometimes in the windows of Trapper’s old cabin. The hermit’s local status eclipsed legend.

A week later, deputies dragged Serge into the sheriff’s station, wearing furs and smeared with dried animal blood. He kicked and he screamed. “But I am Trapper Nelson! Lemme go!”

So began Serge’s most recent stay at Chattahoochee. After two months, prison psychiatrists got together to discuss Serge’s case. He was their favorite, most charming patient, and they couldn’t stand to watch what was happening.

They got a visiting specialist from Austria to put Serge under hypnosis.

Serge babbled and grunted as he lay on the couch. He began pitching violently and they had to hold him down. His mumbling increased to a high-speed torrent of incomprehensible sonic hash.

“Someone get a tape recorder!” yelled the shrink gripping Serge’s ankles.

Hours later, after Serge was back in his cell under sedation, the psychiatrists met with a police evidence tech. He tinkered with the tape recording on a special machine, adjusting the treble and reverb and turning the speed way down. When the tape played at a fraction of its original rate, they began to detect human speech.

“ Florida: literally, abounding in flowers, named by Ponce de León. Statehood granted in 1845, first governor William D. Moseley”-the voice became more excited and angry-“flowing from the waters of the Kissimmee River to Lake Okeechobee and through the Everglades into Florida Bay. Along the way, nurturing a low, flat petri dish of extreme people. The rugged, the hopeful and the damned. Ridiculed as the place with no roots, no native residents and no culture, the land of shuffleboard and the nonregional, TV weatherman accent. But they’re not laughing anymore. Cocaine, Castro and carpetbaggers castrated with grooved grapefruit spoons that say ‘Life’s a Beach’ on the handle. New residents are interned in hot, dusty trailer parks populated entirely by assholes from Illinois. We get hit with storm after storm and walk through the rubble, whistling ‘ Dixie ’ and applying sunscreen. How does that stack up against your commonwealth? We don’t have great potatoes, we’re not the garden state, we aren’t proud to wear furry hats with earflaps and ‘Live free or die!” We’re a twenty-four-hour, dead-bolted, hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck, free-continental breakfast, death-wish vacation of a lifetime, not from concentrate. State motto? ‘Behind you!’