“Check out these great photos!” he said. They were in old wood frames mounted on the wall running down to the restrooms. The earliest were ware era, group shots of people at tables in sailor and soldier uniforms. There was a close-up of a whiskered chief petty officer next to a teenage recruit, both smoking cigars. Most of the women in the photos looked like the Andrews sisters. There was raucous swing dancing and an old Bally jukebox that was later mothballed for twenty years in a warehouse in Dalton, Georgia, and now sat restored under a tenth-floor apartment window overlooking Central Park. The photographs were arranged chronologically. Lots of fishing snapshots and local parades; Hank Aaron and Stan Musial during spring training; and a party photo with a banner, “Happy New Year 1959.”
Next was the memorial photo corner dedicated to some local photojournalist named “Studs” Allen, 1921-1971. Serge didn’t need to read the captions.
“This is a young Cuban baseball pitcher sitting at a lunch counter on Tampa ’s Kennedy Boulevard, before the president’s assassination, when it was still called Lafayette Boulevard. He was in town raising money to oppose Fulgencio Batista. His name was Fidel Castro.”
Serge moved a step sideways and the girls followed. “This is an angry shot of beat author Jack Kerouac at the Wild Boar lounge on Nebraska Avenue in Tampa… Here he is again, a little happier this time, standing outside his home on Tenth Avenue North in St. Pete, where he lived from 1964 to 1966… And this is a photo of a St. Petersburg Junior College student named Jim Morrison performing at the Beaux Arts Coffee House in Pinellas Park.”
Country whispered something in City’s ear, and City came up with some kind of excuse to leave.
Country turned back to Serge. “Did I hear you have some kind of moon rock back in your room? I’d love to see it.”
Three minutes later they were back in the room: Country kneeling on the foot of the bed, eyeing Serge-Serge completely missing the point, sitting in the middle of the bed, wrapped up in his storytelling. Country’s gaze intensified, and she began to feel wet. Serge waved the rock around in the air, making rocket sounds.
“Did I ever tell you that Dade Country was supposed to be named Pinkney County?”
She shook her head no.
“It’s true, the Florida legislature was forming the new country down in Miami and they had the name all picked out. It was 1835. About the same time, Major Francis Lanhorne Dade began leading one hundred and ten soldiers from Fort Brooke in Tampa up to Fort King near Ocala. We had just screwed the Indians over but good, trying to ship ’ em out West, so they attacked Dade’s men. It was Florida ’s version of Little Big Horn. Only three survived…”
Anyone else would have understood the look in Country’s eyes. But Serge was on, well, Planet Serge.
“…Word got back to the legislature, and they changed the name of the new country to Dade. Here’s a cool epilogue. Some of the maps at the time placed Dade County north of Tampa because some of the mapmakers mistakenly thought the county was where the massacre had taken place… Anyway, so now we’re all pissed at the Indians, and we started the Second Seminole War. But their leader is the brave Osceola-for my money, possibly the greatest Floridian of all time. And the Indians are playing hit-and-run out of the Green Swamp, which feeds the river that runs through Tampa. All the European colonists take refuge at the fortified coastal installations, which is why today we have all these cities with names like Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Fort Pierce…”
Country could wait no longer for Serge to come around. She pounced and pulled his pants off. Then she pinned his shoulders and got on top, wiggling down onto him with a chirp.
“…Finally, General Thomas S. Jessup offers a flag of truce to Osceola to talk about peace. When Osceola arrives in St. Augustine, Jessup has him imprisoned, where he died in a year under brutal conditions. The attending physician cut off Osceola’s head and took it home, and whenever his young boys would misbehave, he got out the head and hung it on their bedpost…”
Country was sliding up and down rapidly, mouth open, breathing hard. A shock of blond hair on each side of her head swung back and forth in rhythm, brushing Serge’s cheeks.
“…Everyone wanted something done about the Indians, but not like this. There was no honor to it, and everyone told Jessup he was a rat the rest of his days. Finally, it all came full circle. An Orlando-area legislator took up Osceola’s cause, and years later when they were naming a new county-you guessed it! And that’s how Florida got a Dade and an Osceola County…”
Country’s breathing became increasingly shallow. Then she stopped breathing altogether, bowed up and quivered for ten seconds like she’d been harpooned-and collapsed on Serge’s chest.
“…Did I ever tell you Winston Churchill once stayed in Tampa as a young journalist?…”
Lenny and City were outside the room with their ears pressed against the door.
“What’s going on in there?” whispered City.
“I don’t know,” said Lenny. “I think they’re watching the History Channel.”
S erge awoke the next morning to find a naked Lenny sitting in a chair with a toy squirt gun in one hand and his cock in the other. He had them pressed together, end to end.
“Jesus Christ!” yelled Serge. “What kind of sickness is that!”
“I’m squirting a cocaine solution up my urethra,” said Lenny.
Serge shrugged. “I’ll never understand the drug culture.”
A half hour later, Serge was at the writing desk, playing with a Junior Wizard chemistry set he picked up at Toys “R” Us during the previous day’s supply run. Different-colored liquids and powders filled the beakers and flasks and a rack of test tubes. In the middle of the desk was a glass distillation chamber over an unlit Bunsen burner.
Lenny asked to borrow the magnifying glass to examine his dick because “something’s not right.”
Serge didn’t answer. He concentrated on tweaking the ratios of isotopes he had extracted from household cleaning products and fast food. Sodium palmitate, paraffin, naphthene hydrocarbons. Then he poured in a test tube filled with Bacardi 151.
“What’s that?” Lenny asked as Serge added another test tube containing a clear, unidentified syrup.
“Eleven herbs and spices.”
He lit the burner, and the solution began to boil and snake through a coiled glass tube into the condensate vapor trap.
Lenny sniffed the air. “Smells like bananas and coconuts.”
“Then I must be close,” said Serge. He looked out the window and saw the sun setting, so he killed the burner and let the solution cool. He grabbed his camera bag and a thick three-ring binder from one of the desk drawers and headed out the door for the water.
Zargoza sat near the shore in a cheap beach chair with frayed straps. He still wore his business suit, but his shoes were off and his toes deep in the sand. He was blinking and swallowing fifty percent more frequently than the average person, and his blood pressure made his head feel like a thermometer bulb. His left thumb had developed a slight involuntary shake. He drank haughtily from a large tumbler decorated with scuba flags, trickles of fluid running out each side of his mouth. The tumbler was filled equally with rum and Coke, and Zargoza constantly checked his watch, impatient for the alcohol to take effect and deliver him from the anxiety attack. It was a half hour till sunset, and he was as far up to the water as the fluffy, dry sand went. In front of him was the damp, packed sand of the littoral and the beach’s pedestrian traffic. The day crowd was gone, the young body-watchers and pickup artists and beer guzzlers. This was the sunset club, a slightly higher sensibility. Beachcombers in their forties and fifties, joggers, people setting up camera tripods and long lenses. They walked down from their beach houses and condos and rentals and motel rooms; most had light jackets or sweat pants rolled above their calves.