بعد زيارة شتى وجهات اخرى نعثر تصادفاً على مطعم السوشي المفضّل من طفولتي وهو واحد هذا مطاعم السوشي حيث يُختار الطبق التي تمر بك على خزام ناقل  وتمر بسرعة وهي اسرع مما أتذكر ورامة تصرّ على  اختيار القطعات التي تشمل الـاوناجي (ウナギ) ولستُ قادر على تحمل مشهد كل هذه الاسماك التي تتحرك كالبرق أمامنا فأطلب طاسة الارز البسيط ورامة تسمّيني   يامابوشي (山伏) وتطلب أقدام الدجاج التي توجد بطريقة ما على مينو سري واتقيأ من جديد بالحمام.

 

جلدي غير متكيف للعيش في هذا الموطن. يتنفخ من القيظ و يحمر من الرطوبة ويتشقق من الوهج كأنني خنزير على الشواية. ما يسمى الجلد الأبيض، علامة النبل لاجدادي الذين غزوا شبه الجزيرة امواجاً—أوباش هتماء البيدمونت ، إرهابيين كونفدراليين، ومغفلي إعلام زائف البطاقة التذكارية—بالواقع يميل في هذه الظروف إلى لون لب الكريفون والسمكة منزوعة من أحشائها.

 

My skin is not adapted to life in this habitat. It swells up immediately in the heat, and in a few minutes it’s covered in sweat. Another hour out here and it will begin to crack open and seep under the sun like a pig on the spit.

 

It’s hard to believe my ancestors did any better. They lived back before they had drained the swamps or invented air conditioning.  They must have all looked like hell, coming down here to conquer this peninsula in waves—toothless Piedmontese riff-raff, runaway Confederates, and pale, straw-hat marks taken in by the picture ads they saw in the Sears catalogue. The natives must have thought they were all diseased. Who is this white man they speak of? We haven’t seen anyone come down here with white skin. The freaks streaming down here to steal our land all look bright pink, like a peeled grapefruit or a disemboweled fish.

هيليوفايت

ولكن جلد رامة متكيف مثالياً.

 

 

but Rama’s skin is perfectly suited for it. It glistens حِنْطِيّاً. Like a pitcher of iced tea. I watch aghast from underneath the safety of the metal awning as she sways back and forth in the middle of the road taking it all in. The sunlight catches the light fuzz on her forearms. She has a look of tranquility, like a happy tropical fruit, both cheeks lit up as she stares directly up at the full Florida sun. She stretches out her arms to expose more of her surface area. She is ripening quickly in the humidity. She takes off her sweater and ties it around her waist.  Samrati al-jamilah.

She walks over into the grass median and for a moment it looks like she’s going to lay down and sunbathe right there in the parking lot. But the grass looks bleached and patchy so she settles for taking off her shoes and socks. The grass also doesn’t belong here. I can see it being overtaken by various species of weeds, It’s even growing in the cracks in the sidewalk. I wonder what species exactly. I feel around in my bag for my loupe and the field guide I got from the library. I haven’t tried it out yet. Utopias, Vaccinium, venereal disease, Venice of the South, Volcanoes, Walt Disney, here we go Weeds.

 

Weeds are a derisive misnomer. Blooming opportunistly amongst the poisoned lawns of Florida, they should not be thought of dismissively as mere “weeds” but as the resilient and rightful inheritors of the landscape. Oftentimes they were the ones here first!

What kind of a field guide is this? I skip ahead and try to identify this one large-leafed plant bursting up out of the drainage ditch by its toothy leaves. It takes me a few minutes but the inflorescence is a giveaway. Iva frutescens, the field guide was right, it’s not a weed at all, it’s a native shrub.

I look closely at the elongated array of many small flower heads, closed up like little berries, with the loupe. Up close they look like the legs of a hermit crab that has taken up shelter in an artichoke.

 

Suddenly the whole scene goes dark. I come back out of the warped microscopic world of the loupe. It is Rama is standing over me.

Doing some farming already? She asks.

Haha, no, just a little botanizing. This is Iva frutescens, commonly known as Marsh Elder or Jesuit’s Bark since the missionaries promoted drinking it for its medicinal properties.  But I wouldn’t drink this stuff, this lawn is all probably covered in herbicide. Looks like it’s killing those palm trees too, they’re all being stilted. She gives me a thumbs up.

All of a sudden I feel embarrassed and get up from the ground. I don’t know why, all Rama does is talk to me about her obscure hobbies: Don the Beachcomber, tent revivals. And I’m an attentive listener. I was so caught up in her telling me the political history of the 1964 World’s Fair that I missed the only M train coming for an hour. And it’s not like she doesn’t know I’m into plants, she finally got me to agree to come with the promise of all the tropical botanical gardens we could visit. I brush the grass off my jeans and take one last look at the Marsh Elder from a distance. Good luck little guy. 

It’s just that I feel something for Rama, something urgent and embarrassing. And I’m thrown off because I have no idea how this is going. It’s not following the usual chain of events. I can’t tell if that’s because she’s being coy or if it’s because i’m not reading some intercultural signals. All I know is We haven’t even kissed yet!

I was so flustered when she first came into the Rat, hiding in the back secretly looking through the old stained cocktail guide to make her the vintage drink she said had been invented at the bar. Maybe it’s all of her questions, her endless and intrusive curiosity, including of me, which is both flattering and unnerving. When she showed up unannounced to the community garden, saying she wanted to see if my other job really was being a farmer, all the kids laughed at me. It was clearer to them than anyone else when someone has a childhood crush.

I go back under the metal awning and put the loupe back in its little velvet bag. I’m already working up a sweat and it’s February. God I hate this place. Rama draws the back of her hand lackadaisical across her forehead, flitting away the slightest bit of perspiration. God. I’m going to do worse things for her too.  I haven’t been honest that I’m sober, well that’s an understatement, I’ve been making my own drinks or asking for a “Roy Rogers”. Usually I won’t shut up about it.  I’ve been doing all kinds of things that are out of character.  I went to that poetry reading and didn’t understand a word. But afterwards she explained it all to me in her way, making it understandable without having to explain it. I came away checking out that Iman Mersal book from the library . You know, it’s fine, for her I’ve come back here. For her,  I will even debase myself completely: for her, I will become a tourist.

She turns to look at me in her cat eye sunglasses (نظارات شمسية بإطار عيون القطة). I have to keep it cool, can’t be caught gawking at her. But now that we’re in this tropical sunshine she has shed her Northeast clothing, she takes off another layer and now, God, she’s wearing a spaghetti strap T-shirt. The full view of her shoulders and back is overwhelming. She pulls her sunglasses and looks at me standing in the shade. I am fussing with my backpack, trying to put the field guide back in.

-Is that all you brought? She asks.

 

  Homo Floridus هومو فلوريدانسيس

 

Rama takes breaks from basking in the sun to check her phone. She is impatient for the rental car guy to show up. She is eager to get out there and explore. She had heard so much about this place, its reputation precedes it.

 

Florida Man Finds Boa Constrictor in His Car Engine

 

Florida Man Finds a WWII Grenade, Places It in His Truck, Drives to Taco Bell

 

Florida Man Claiming People Were “Eating His Brains” Leads Police on Insane Golf Course Chase

 

I honestly don’t know what I’ll be able to show her. To me, growing up here, I thought this was the most boring place on the planet. It’s not like we’re going to see a bar fight or a house trailer on fire. That’s just the stuff they show on tv. In reality it’s just the same suburbs they have everywhere else. She may be the foreigner, but I’m the one being exoticized.

But no sooner do I think that than slowly pulling up in a tiny car from Exposition Rent A Car, comes a Florida Man. His chopped up and brightly dyed hair and face tattoos are barely contained by the little picture frame of the car window. In fact, he is actively leaning out of it taking a look at Rama standing in the sun. He blinks his eyes in exaggerated astonishment, holds his palm against his forehead like he’s about to faint, and licks his lips like a cartoon wolf. It’s like He is my id come to life. Rama has her face turned up directly towards the sun again and tosses hair off her shoulders to let them get sun too. She doesn’t notice how she’s now preening for the benefit of the clown car doing laps around her.

Florida man parks and steps out of the car while rubbing his hands together. He is wearing the uniform of the rental car company in a letter-of-the-law kind of way and carrying his clipboard loosely like he’s trying to create plausible deniability about his place of employment. Now on foot, he continues to orbit around her, whistling and rubbing his hands together. She is too smitten with sunlight to notice. Or maybe she thinks it’s me who’s taken to whistling, trying to commune with birds. He’s harder to ignore once he starts singing.

She looks down and is startled, laughing awkwardly and shielding her eyes to try to get a better look. She looks around for me, have I transmogrified into the Florida man? He is not dissuaded, getting to the chorus of his improvised ballad. I can’t hear any of the words, but it’s clearly a love song he’s improvised for her. She must think it’s hilarious. She holds her hands together over her stomach waiting for him to finish. He does, victoriously, with a chivalric curtsy. After a respectful pause to be sure he has finished his mating dance, she then says something in reply and all of a sudden Florida Man goes stiff. She has said something brutal.

I walk out from under the shade of overhang, no longer to save Rama but to save Florida Man.

-Hey, is this our rental car? I say pointing to our rental car.

-Oh shit, it’s waladudah! No way

-Who? Rama asks.

-Damn man, that’s crazy, how’ve you been? Florida man pats me on the back. I squint at him in the sun

– Oh wow, it’s Bryan, hi… Bryan. I’m too taken aback to be more excited and friendly. I was worried we might run into some people from high school, but I thought we’d at least get out of the airport first. Damn, he looks like hell, shriveled up in the sun. Must be the drugs too.

-How are you doing man, long time no see. I ask him.

-You got that right, shit when was the last time I saw you?

I have no idea.

– You always went so hard, I just assumed you died, but here you are on a nice little vacation with your girlfriend, no disrespect.

-I’m not his girlfriend, Rama corrects him, but we are on a date!

-Y’all are on a date at the airport?

-No, this trip is the date, we just came from the big city.

-The Big City, oh really?

Bryan really wants to talk. He certainly doesn’t want to get back to work. He asks why we would possibly want to come here on a date when we live in the greatest city in the world?

Rama explains that a couple nights ago we’d had a few drinks, and one thing led to another and we sort of dared each other to do a multi-stage tropical vacation together.

-we’re also going to Disney and then Puerto Rico to visit some of my friends and family,  but first I wanted to see where this guy was from.

I point around to the parking lot.

-Ta-da

It was less of a dare and more of a game of chicken. Just the night before last Rama was keeping me company while I was working the closing shift at the Rat and she was telling me about the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow and I mentioned I was actually originally from Florida. That piqued her interest. She had a million questions. I told her I didn’t see why, Florida sucks, it’s not like it’s someplace exotic like where she was from. Rama had scolded me, how could I say such a preposterous thing? Florida is the id of the entire country, the skeleton key for unlocking America’s ambivalent relationship to modernity! She had followed me out front to dump trash bags on Canal while explaining it as the land of homesick conquistadors, swamp guerilla wars, and gilded age railroad tycoons. I was cleaning out the dishwasher as she went on about jet-age land speculation, wax-mannequin millenarianism, and segregated glass-bottom boats. By the time we locked up she was already looking at flights on her phone. I bet I can prove you wrong, that there’s endlessly fascinating things to see and do. For God’s sake this is where the theme park was invented!

Bryan is trying to atone for his mating dance by pulling her luggage over and trying to convince Rama to upgrade to a suburban. He could get it to us for free. I don’t like the idea of renting a car in the first place. He asks if we want theoretical insurance.

-What’s that?

-It’s to insure you in case of theoretical accidents.

-What about real accidents?

-I’d have to check with my manager.

I take Rama’s luggage from Bryan and put it in the trunk of the car and the  put my bag in the front seat and Bryan asks me to sign a form assuring the car has no damages.

-what about that? I say pointing at a large scratch across the back bumper.

-Oh shit, yeah let me mark that.

He scribbles a blob over the back bumper of a car illustration on his clipboard on the form. He looks at the mileage and says something about numerology. Then he gets out and hands me the keys to the car. I hold up my hand to refuse. I motion over to Rama, I don’t drive.

He asks us if we need any other amenities during our visit. Man, he really wants to keep talking to us. I ask if he has a paper map

-Shit man, they don’t even make any of those anymore. But no, like, do you guys need some amenities to help you enjoy yourselves? You look a little tense. How was the flight?

It was hell, being packed in an aluminum tube with dough people on their worst behavior.

لا أزال أشعر بالاندهال من فظاظة أهل المطار.  لا أعرف ما هو بهذا اللامكان الذي يمنحهم  بالتحشف والشراهة جهراً، ولكن بدلا من ذلك أقول فقط انني سعيد جدا لأكون هنا في الجنة.

 

لا أزال أشعر بالاصطدام ناتج عن التعرض على كرنفال الفظاظة في المطار: التمطط والترهل، التثأوب والتملل، الشحن والتسوق،  والاسترخاء والرقدة ، التحشف واللمباذل، السعال والثرثرة، العطس والخنخنة، التصفح والتفرج، الالتهام والتحسي، الغفل والتبلد، التسديد والدلف.

 

I still feel the shock of being exposed to the carnival of airport rudeness: stretching and slouching, yawning and fidgeting, loading and shopping, relaxing and lying down, slouching and strutting, coughing and chattering, sneezing and sniffing, browsing and watching, gorging and sensing, obliviousness and numbness, paying and slipping.

But I don’t mention any of this, I lie and tell him I’m afraid of flying.

-Well, if you need any amenities to help take the edge of, I’m sure we could negotiate something in addition to the contract?

-Drugs, he’s trying to sell us drugs.

-Oh. Ohhhhh, oh no thanks Bryan. I appreciate the offer.

-Okay man, just enjoy yourselves then.

-We will. Thanks.

-have a great time, say hi to your dad for me, he says sticking his tongue, this may not be the greatest city in the world, but we have a lot to see and do.

-see? Rama says elbowing me.

-thanks Bryan, We’ll enjoy our time in paradise.

-Yeah, well, I don’t know about that. Maybe It would be paradise without the people.

 

I close my door gently on Bryan and take another look at him. I don’t remember almost anything about him but am still sad to see him go. Rama adjusts the seat closer to the steering wheel and I notice that this is the first time that we’ve sat next to each other in the front seat of a car. We are always walking down the sidewalk or sitting next to each other on the subway. I enjoy this cozy, domestic feeling, like we are family. Woof, I’m getting carried away.

She plugs her phone in and puts it in the middle console.

-Where to, my native informant?

I feel an immediate panic. Native informant? Shit, I haven’t actually put anytime into thinking what we should actually do while we’re in Tampa. I was just so excited to get to spend the time with her, to do something bold enough that we could decide whether or not this was leading someplace serious. I didn’t think that we’d have to actually be tourists. I panic and search my memory. Only one word comes to me. ‘Shangri-la’ it’s the restaurant where we used to hang out when I was a teenager.

-Shangri-La, she says with exotic intonation. She puts it into the guidance and she starts driving.

 

Shangri-La

 

Oh this is amazing, Rama says as we park, look at the “googie” architectural features! She stands in the middle of the parking lot to get a good look at it. They don’t make them like this anymore, this is a relic! All I can see is the surrounding landscape: box stores, strip malls, and parking lots. Parking lots. Parking Lots. I hate this place as much as the day I left.

I hold open the door for her and she tells me she thinks I’m so lucky to have been able to spend so much time in high school in a classic american diner, ohhhhh, they haven’t remodeled the inside either, it’s a living museum!

There is nobody at the host counter and Rama bides her time looking into the display case.

– look at these commemorative Kennedy dining plates in that glass shadow box, and these matchbooks! It looks like they haven’t updated since the early 1960s. I’m going to take a couple extra as a souvenir, she says dumping the fishbowl of them into her bag.

An overworked host in a wrinkly white shirt waives at us from a booth she’s cleaning telling us to come over.

-oh wow.  The drop ceilings look original , Rama goes on about Particleboard made from Sugarcane Bagasse (ثقل القصب), and ohhs and awws at the hanging ball lamps.

The hostess tries to greet us but Rama is too busy telling me that diners may now be bourgeois, used for rightwing television set pieces, but they have working class origins. I nod to acknowledge the hostess. Rama says she just saw a talk at the American Studies conference where someone had explained their history:  prefabricated diners arose from horse-drawn lunch carts which prowled factory districts at night in the late nineteenth century. The hostess just leaves the menus on the table.

-The only good architecture left these days are those things that have been preserved through neglect! What are those things? She asks pointing at a shelf lined with coozies.

-Those? Those are coozies.

-Yeah, but what are they?

– Oh, it’s like a sleeve, a foam sleeve you put around your beer can. You’ve never seen a coozie before?

-Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, what do you use them for?

-To keep your drink cool, or to keep your hand warm, depending on who you ask. Growing up, you basically couldn’t drink a soda without having one, it would be like eating out of your hand.

-Why are they called coozies?

-Hmmm, I don’t know.

-You don’t know?! You used them your whole life and you’ve never once thought about why they’re called coozie?

-I don’t know, Why is a rock called a rock? I don’t know, they were everywhere.

-Maybe it’s like a portmanteau?

-A what?

-Like a portmanteau of cool and cozy.

-Oh shit, yeah, duh, it’s a combination of the words cool and cozy. Damn, I’d never thought of that before.

-Weird, I can’t believe I’ve been in America for two years and never seen one before.

Poor Rama, she’s spent all this time during her program on the one little American island that is nothing like the rest of the country. We pick up our tombstone-sized menus. Rama lets me know You can get breakfast all day. Oh they do a Surf and Turf, classic. Holy shit! Look at these prices.

I look at the prices. Holy shit look at the prices, how is all of this so cheap. Last week we went out to a Filipino restaurant in Nolita and a single eggroll cost as much as the rack of ribs they have here. I look up. Rama has a sultan’s grin. Were going to eat like kings, she says.

She also wants to see what everyone else is ordering. She looks around with detached, anthropological curiosity. In the booth behind her, she looks over the shoulder of a man eating pancakes (breakfast all day). She reads the gothic lettering circling the skull on his leather jacket out loud.

 

Tampa Blue Knights Law Enforcement Motorcycle Club

 

The man tries to look back over his thick neck to see who’s reading his jacket and she’s a pretty woman. His scowl turns to confidence.

-a Boot licking outlaw, isn’t that a contradiction? She asks the man’s jacket. The scowl returns. He tries to defend himself, saying something about a fraternal order, but Rama is practicing what anthropologists call ‘active non-intervention’ and turns back to me without acknowledging him. She instead tells me that she shouldn’t be surprised that American subcultures wouldn’t make any sense. They’re ultimately condensed manifestations of the specific ideological contradictions of the historical conjuncture. In the case of pro-cop bike gangs, they’re actually a skeleton key for understanding the Paranoid Style in American Politics.

She keeps saying educated things that I don’t know how to respond to, it makes me feel self-conscious, like I’m not holding up my half of the conversation. When she asks me which subculture I belonged to in high school all I can do is respond with a Descendents lyric.

 

I wanna be stereotyped

I wanna be classified

I wanna be a clone

I want a suburban home, suburban home

Suburban home

Suburban home

 

Complaining about the suburbs, singing punk songs in a diner booth, this diner is bringing back my high-school era twerpish attitude. She asks me what years I went to high school, I give her the dates and she says that I was probably sitting in this diner while she was being bombed by the Zionists. I don’t know how to respond to that either. Luckily, we’re interrupted by the sound of a ship bell.

I had forgotten about the special they have here. It’s the middle of a weekday but multiple tables have ordered it. Everytime they do, someone has to ring a bell, and someone has to carry it out with sparklers stuck in it and everyone has to look. And before that, some poor employee has to put it all together on a confectionary assembly line while tourists take pictures. It’s all so degrading.

Rama has a macabre curiosity and as soon as the waitress dressed in candy cane stripes tells us she’s going to take care of us, Rama asks about the special. The woman with faded hair gives her automaton speech, Rama gives her full human attention. It seems decadent (baadhikh), maybe Rama will come to her senses and we can just get lunch.

-We’ll get two!

-Two? Me and the waitress ask together in disbelief.

-Two Kitchen Sinks! Rama declares with regal decisiveness. I mean come on, look how cheap this is. We can each get our own.

-Yeah we can, but that doesn’t mean we should. I think you’re getting carried away, there’s no way we’ll be able to finish even one, much less two!

-I mean, if you eat one by yourself, you do get your picture taken for the Wall of Fame. The waitress points over to a wall covered with pictures of people dazed, their mouths slathered in cream and spittle, giving the thumbs up.

-That settles it. Rama says. Two kitchen sinks please.

The waitress tells us she’ll also get us some waters and walks off. Rama asks me what the big deal is.

-I just don’t like food waste.

-Well that’s up to you. I plan on finishing mine!

I sit back in the booth and sulk a little. I’m also mad that of all the places in Tampa my mind went here. Back in high school we used to only ever order coffee. I look around in disbelief at everyone dressed in their pajamas (بمَباذِلهم). Well this may not be the best first impression of my hometown to show Rama, but it certainly is authentic.

-You know, everyone can see you looking at them with disdain.

-I don’t think they can see out over their plates of food.

I try to look around less judgmentally. Is anyone else from high school here? Maybe that lady with the screaming kids, she looks familiar. But who can tell. A couple booths down I see a group of people all dressed in green. I squint. Oh, it looks like someone is having a Publix themed birthday party.

-What’s Publix?

-The local grocery store, people are really into it.

-They’re having a supermarket themed birthday party? Whatever happened to, like, Princesses and superheroes? That’s psychotic.

-Why? People really like Publix here, it’s a local pride thing.

-Local pride about a supermarket chain?

-You know, it’s the local supermarket, it was started in Lakeland.

-That’s sad. Americans have a bizarre sense of what constitutes cultural heritage.

That I do have a lot to say about, but I’ll end up sounding like a twerp (فلعوص) complaining about the suburbs again, so I ask her about her heritage, I’m sorry, Lebanon? I don’t know much about it, she said at one point her family was a religion whose name I didn’t recognize. I am genuinely interested but I don’t want to ask stupid or insensitive questions.

But Rama appreciates my attempt, and explains something about the religions in Lebanon without using any grad school words.

-Man, that country sounds fucked up.

-You got that right!

The bell is rung. It rings for us. A couple of the other waiters join a conga line to deliver our order. Two high school boys are conscripted to carry over the enormous kitchen sinks, holding them by the pipes.

-Oh, they’re literally kitchen sinks.

-Yeah, what did you think?

The waiters set the literal kitchen sinks down, a large metal basin completely overflowing with an ice cream sundae. Rama blows out the sparklers. Everyone claps. She clinks her spoon to mine and says bon appetit. Before they leave, the waitress asks if we want to have any bacon bits grated on top? I wince, no thank you. Rama asks me how long I’ve been a vegetarian. Since high school.

I poke at my sundae and ask Rama if she had a place like this where she used to hang out after class. She talks about the shawarma at restaurant Barbar. She asks me if I was always interested in agriculture and botany. I tell her I wanted to be a veterinarian but I didn’t have the grades. We’re settling into a comfortable, candid rhythm. Or is this all supposed to be ironic. I can’t tell. In any case, it’s my turn. I ask Rama what kind of student she was in high school. She says she was diligent.

-What?

-A good student, she clarifies.

-No, I say, I mean what clique were you in, a jock, a mean girl, a theater kid?

-We have enough sectarianism, we didn’t need to add subcultures to the mix.

-So no Restaurant Barbar themed birthday parties?

-Ha, no. Oh and I was in Model UN, so maybe like a nerd? (نَحِّيْت دِرَاسِة) my parents always instilled a love of reading. My father filled my life with poetry, everything, Abu Tamam, Aragon, Etel Adnan.

Rama asks me about the values my parents taught me. Hmm, that’s an interesting question. I don’t really know how to answer. Values? That sounds so antiquated. I think about it for a second as Rama eats one of the frozen banana halves from the sundae. Did my mother teach me anything other than ordinary, common sense values?

-You know, I’ve never thought about it like that. Nothing out of the ordinary I guess. My mom taught me a love for animals maybe?

Rama seems underwhelmed by my answer. As for my father, the only thing he stood for was the pursuit of money and a vast indifference to truth or beauty. But I don’t say any of that.

It’s my turn again. The Lebanon religions questions went okay, so I’ll I’ve finally ask her about her family. She seems pleasantly surprised, like she’s been waiting a long time for this prompt, until now frustrated in her attempts to tell the long, sweeping narrative of her identity. It’s a complex epic, wars and exile, grandparents at the polytechnique and great aunts in the Caribbean, and she only takes breaks to scoop ice cream into her mouth. She’s making good progress. I pay as much attention as I can, trying to have my ignorance of demographics and history come off as thoughtful follow-up questions. She tries to keep from indulging herself, but can’t help but be proud and excited to tell it all. Her family is everything to her.

Her phone rings. Speak of the devil she says. She answers the call and says the same set of  unintelligible words that I have begun to recognize. I guess Arabic has lots of different ways to say hello and how are you. She’s speaking to her father, probably telling him that we have arrived. Or is she telling him she’s on a trip at all? Has she even mentioned me? Hard to tell. It seems as though they have these conversations 3 or 4 times a day. It’s a strange ritual.

I take the opportunity to get up and walk over to the entrance of the restaurant where they have a rack of brochures for local attractions. The aquarium, the Zoo, the Children’s Museum? God this is dire. I am going to fail this test. What did I think we were going to do once we got here, just make out on the beach? The Official Downtown Tampa Ghost Tour? Busch Gardens, oh yeah that’s right, the Salvador Dali museum, why do we have a Salvador Dali museum in Tampa? Being a tourist is so weird, suddenly becoming a person compelled by the need to see a shark in a tank or ride a rollercoaster. It’s absurd. I would be perfectly content to botanize in a salt flat, but I don’t think Rama would be into that. She wants to find the skeleton key.

I can see Rama is finishing up her call, so I grab a brochure for a dolphin cruise just in case and walk back to the table.

Rama finishes her call in the same way she started it, repeating a few phrases over and over again, what must be different ways to say goodbye. I have no idea really but it seems to me like the entire conversation is made up of different ways of saying hello and saying goodbye.

-Hi she says.

-Hi

-So what about you?

I ask what she means.

-Where is your family originally from? I shrug.

-White american, who knows what constitutes my cultural heritage, I could be from anywhere!

This was not the right thing to say. She looks at me as though this has invalidated all of my patient listening, as though confirming I think everything she’s just told me is nonsense. The waiter comes back and encourages Rama to keep going, she’s over half way done eating the Kitchen sink. I’ve only had a few bites of mine. Rama says she’s done with the ice cream, but that she would like some waffles.

-Waffles? The waitress asks in disbelief. I want to be a good sport, so I tell her we’ll both have waffles even though I’m about to throw up.

-That also comes with hash browns, sausage or bacon, and two eggs your way

Rama asks for sausage, and two eggs scrambled.

I say just the waffles for me please.

Rama asks, don’t you even want the eggs?

I shake my head no, and thank the waitress. Rama insists, why don’t I eat eggs? I usually evade giving an explanation, but we’re in a sharing mood, and it’s a topic I actually know something about. I tell her some of the basic facts I have memorized about CAFOs, that The U.S. chicken industry also breeds and slaughters about 9.5 billion chickens each year, which is about 26 million birds per day. I should have quit there, but the high school twerpness has come out and I am talking about confining chickens in crates, stuffing them in windowless barracks, the hundreds of male chick crushed in cogs every minute, unable to lay eggs, the broiler chickens bred for their oversized breasts, too heavy to walk, their short path to full-growth which ends with the stunning and electric buzzsaws and the heat death of armies of birds.

I’m only cut off by the delivery of our waffles. She looks down at the steaming eggs, moral abomination abstracted into gelatinous yellow mush. Rama just crosses her arms. I ask her if everything is okay. She says well now you’re making me feel bad.

-Oh no,  don’t worry about it, this isn’t the first time you’ve eaten eggs around me.

-What the hell?

Offf, I shouldn’t have said anything. Now I’m self-conscious. Rama surgically moves the waffles away from everything else on her plate. She looks down at them, cuts them all up into perfect little squares, and tells me you know not everyone can get as much pleasure out of being ascetic as you do, before taking a bite. She passes me the maple syrup. I go to refuse, but she looks at me angrily. I laugh and feel myself being supervised as I pour a modest amount of maple corn syrup in the corner.

 

Los Gusanos

 

As the car inches closer in traffic, I recognize this as the old Shuffleboard courts. Rama asks me what that is. Shuffleboard, (لعبة دفع الأقراص معرباً) is a game you play with a long pole, pushing disks down a narrow lane. I don’t really know the rules, but when I was a child you would see it being played at all of the country clubs and private pools that my dad would take me to. During adult swim, bored and restless, I would watch elders playing in the heat of the sun, their floppy hats and slimy sunblock cream smeared on the sails of their noses, doing shuffleboard like some obscure religious ritual dying out.

Biding her time in traffic, Rama looks it up on her phone. Oh this looks like it could be fun, a cute little game for us to play with your high school friend. She shows me the old postcard of this same court from the 1920s someone is selling on on e-bay; people in skimmer hats and drop-waist dresses playing in front of a white stucco clubhouse. A respectable, good time.

The crowd filing into this Shuffleboard club now are all decidedly more casual, most of them wearing black shirts and ripped jeans. أهل المباذل. They crowd around the entrance as a bouncer (طارد) with an enormous mohawk checks IDs. As we inch closer in line I can see he’s drawing enormous black x’s with a sharpie marker across the back of minor’s hands. The muffled sound of some preliminary screaming and a frenetic, unadorned drum beat is heard. Rama asks me what subculture this is. I’m starting to suspect Molly didn’t invite us to play Shuffleboard.

 

Worm Boy!

 

Molly had become a beautiful woman, her arms and neck covered with tattoos and enormous breasts swinging on the sides of a low-necked shirt. She runs to me and buries me in them. I feel a sense of relief, not at being squeezed between her breasts, which is great, but because her immediate physical familiarity with me makes it seem like we’re old friends, not just some random person I went to high school with who I’m trotting out to not seem like I’ve just emerged from my pupal stage (المرحلة خدارة).

Behind her comes an older man in slacks and a polo shirt, who I can only assume this is her father. I wonder why he’s here, he seems terribly out of place amidst the darkening clouds of what is soon to be this hardcore show. A pair of high school kids with septum piercings scoff at him while walking to the bathroom. He gives me a firm, businessman handshake. It is then time for Rama and Molly to exchange greetings, and I wonder how Rama might navigate around this effusive hugging, but Molly doesn’t give her the chance to make any decisions, thrusting her head into the tattooed expanse of her chest. After suffocating her, Molly holds her at arms length to give her a good look. Molly shouts, Oh, wow Waladudah, she is really beautiful. Bravo to you.

We walk around to the back of the same white stucco clubhouse from the postcard to where they have the shuffleboard courts out back. We step over the little gutters between the shuffleboard lanes and avoid groups of teenagers.  More and more teenagers are filling up the space, standing in groups on the long green cement lanes, constantly tripping over the shallow gutters where the disks fall, venturing up into the metal and wood bleachers (probably original) to make out. There are cute little string lights hung up over every lane. This place must be rented out for weddings, I wonder if that is what they said this concert was going to be when they reserved the space. The man dressed in a full suit and a skimmer hat who’s frenetic pacing around the space can only mean he’s the manager realizes as much right about the time we arrive. But it’s too late, the kids are here.

Molly then asks how long we’ve been in town, what we’ve seen so far, did I take her to try a plantain hot dog at Shangri-la yet, and do we like sailing. She does not wait for the answer to any of these questions. She instead grabs Rama by the arm and leads her arm in arm over to the little wooden picnic table that Molly has found for us. It is completely covered with alcohol. Buckets of beer, a bottle of white wine chilling in a wine chiller stand, a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of some clear alcohol. Kids eye it all left there unattended like seagulls.

We didn’t know what you wanted so Chuck just ordered a little bit of everything, we’ve got a little VIP section over here.

Chuck acknowledges his own munificence with a wave of his hand, but continues to not say anything. We all squeeze in around the table and Molly starts counting the beers in one of the buckets and then looks up and scans around. She gets up and whacks a kid in parachute pants on the back of his head.

Give me that you little twerp (فلعوص). She finishes the undrunk half right there on the shuffleboard court and tosses it in the trashcan where it shatters. Satisfied, she pulls a packet of cigarettes out of her back pocket and lights three up between her lips. She hands one to Rama (ladies first), hands one to Chuck, who smokes it with entrepreneurial intensity, and leaves the last one in her mouth as she winks at me and says I bet you still don’t smoke waladudah, Mr. goodie two-shoes (جودي الصغيرة والحذاء).

Without us asking, Molly tells us about the latest drama. She stands over us, licking her lips as she smokes, inviting Rama and I to follow along with the torrent of her thoughts. Iggy (Chuck introduced us) the investor who owns a boa constrictor, that bitch Janet with the shaved eyebrows, the Skull King. We don’t know any of these people but it becomes very clear very quickly even though she’s the one telling the story that it’s Molly who is the problem.

Excuse me, you all can’t smoke here.

The manager in the skimmer has come to scold us. Molly immediately tries biting the hand he has placed on her shoulder. He pulls it back and stares in disbelief.

We’re not all smoking, Molly corrects him, he doesn’t smoke, She says pointing at me. The manager pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe the sweat beaded on his upper lip, and is about to attempt to muster some authority when he sees someone climbing up a light pole. He runs off.

Good climber. One time at school Waladudah climbed all the way up a tree on campus to avoid going to class.

I was staging a protest! I suddenly remember that happening, I haven’t thought about that for a long time.

He climbed up too high, nobody noticed. He spent all day sitting on a branch unnoticed. So how did the two of you meet? Molly asks pointing at Rama and me, but before she can ignore the question and continue her stream of consciousness, she is cut off by the sound of screaming and distortion.

 

GOOD EVENING MIRROR LAKE SHUFFLEBOARD CLUB, WHAT THE FUCK IS UP?

The crowd all suddenly comes to attention, their random movements coming to a standstill.

WE’RE DEATH CAP (قبعة الموت) FROM ORLANDO, WE HOPE YOU’RE FUCKING READY

And just like that, the crowd is ready. It starts slowly expanding, moving outwards to the edges of the shuffleboard court, tripping over the gutters and mounting the benches and climbing up into the bleachers. In between the gaps you can see that a pit has indeed opened up, a bald guy wheeling his arms around, a few frowning kids pacing around like a lion in a cage, someone in a Knocked Loose t-shirt doing roundhouse kicks. Crouched on the ground are four guys without their shirts on, playing a game of leapfrog.

WHEN WE KICK IN, LET’S SEE SOME FUCKING MOVEMENT, YOU BETTER PUSH SOMEONE

Rama looks at me in white-eyed excitement

LET’S OPEN UP THIS PIT

A deafening screech of guitar and drums. On the signal, the entire crowd collapses inward like there’s been a fusion explosion. Punching, kicking, spinning, shoving, jumping, tripping, screaming, nodding, laughing, tripping, kneeling, screaming, tripping. The shallow gutters at the edge of each shuffleboard court are immediately causing a problem. Everyone keeps tripping. Someone trips and doubles over a bench. This is the first mosh pit I’ve ever seen take place in an obstacle course.

But the thing that really makes me laugh is the band. High School kids, doing their  best to dress like a classic 1980s Crustpunk band. Adorable little punks in their pointy gelled hair, pale faces, leather jackets and face piercings. Are those clip-on piercings? Their singer is using a fake English accent. They’re so innocent, it’s adorable. God, is that what we used to look like?

They’re also fucking terrible,  or is that the schtick? It’s a shame too, because we can hear every note. One of these kids’ parents must have bought them a professional sound system. Above the crowd, the old-fashioned lamps and string lights begin swaying like we’re in an earthquake. The manager has his skimmer hat under his arm, looking in disbelief, trying to find anyone of legal age to berate, but the pit has already become a force majeure. God I’ve missed this.

Through all of it, Molly keeps talking. Rama is close enough to hear her, and they continue getting closer to one another. I am thankful to the music for getting me out of having to make small talk with Chuck. He’ll want to give me investment advice or something. How’s he doing with all of this? I look over, but he’s right next to me, sitting right up next to me at the picnic table. I give him a friendly wave. He says something I can’t hear. I make an exaggerated shrug. He leans over and says into my ear

It’s like a kids bop version of Antisect.

Ha! That’s funny. I love Antisect, how does this guy know about Antisect?

I saw them, you know.

Saw who.

Antisect. He is speaking directly to my ear drum.

No shit, yeah, I really wanted to see them when they did their reunion tour.

No, I saw them in ‘85 when “Out from the Void” first came out.

No shit!

No shit, look how how old I fucking am.

Haha. He tells me about his time squatting in Birmingham in the 80s.

No shit, what were you doing in Birmingham?

Lots of fucking cocaine. One time he did lines with “Rainy” the bassist from Discharge. I nod along and watch as the singer thrashes around on the stage, looking for a good place to jump into the mosh pit. Another kid trips over a shuffleboard lane and skids across the floor like a bowling ball, knocking over three other people. Chuck tells me Molly says we used to be in a band together, what kind of music did y’all play. I tell him some of our influences—Earth Crisis,  Chain of Strength, Minor Threat — as the kids figure out that the bleachers are an ideal place to jump off from into the crowd.

Oh ok, straight edge?

Yeah, straight edge, damn this guy knows his stuff.

Rama has a fresh cigarette in her mouth, nodding along to Molly, undisturbed by the noisy chaos. Molly strokes her hair. Rama catches my eye and smiles, threatening to burst into laughter. She starts holding hands with Molly. Molly cups her hands to make it clear that she is telling Rama a secret. Rama looks over at me with feigned outrage, shaking her head in disapproval. I am so distracted that I don’t realize that Chuck has also gotten intimate with me, this middle-aged man whose slack-clad knees are intertwined with mine. He has his arm over my back and is telling me a story about seeing Jello Biafra at the laundromat. The singer is inviting anyone in the pit who wants to take turns screaming into the mic. I ask Chuck to repeat his previous statement and he puts his nose up against my cheek.

Jello asked if I had any quarters.

 

WE ARE DEATH CAP FROM ORLANDO, THANK YOU ST. PETERSBERG, HERE’S ANOTHER ONE CALLED STRIP MALL HOLOCAUST

 

The young singer spits a mucous bound spit glob into the air and, upon catching it between his wet lips, proceeds to death growl. He’s young, but he’s got charisma.

While the manager in the Skimmer hat pulls off a kid’s sneakers while trying to get him down off a lamp pole, I  watch Molly mouth indecipherable words across from us. All of a sudden she is familiar. I recognize her mannerisms, how often she sneers, her enthusiastic nodding, she has traveled through time to be here now. I was being cynical, I do in fact know her. Vague but potent memories return from thin air. It is nice to see her again.

Molly stands up suddenly like she has just remembered something, and grabs Chuck’s hand, standing him up and away from his position curled around my body. We’ll be right back, she announces. She drops her half empty beer bottle on the ground and it shatters all over the concrete floor. Fuck. Don’t step on that, we’ll be right back. Molly and Chuck skirt around the mosh pit, barely missing a flying plastic cup of liquid, and disappear into the women’s bathroom.

I waive at Rama and smile. She sticks a berating finger out at me. Does she actually hate this? She gets up and comes and takes Chuck’s place, her knees entwined with mine. She brings her face close enough to say something serious. I’m keeping a secret from her and she wants to know if I planned on telling her. She digs her nails into my thigh.

Oh no, even though she is thoroughly enjoying their company, she has nonetheless discovered the thinness of my shared history with Molly.  No that’s not it. She wants me to be honest: When was I planning on telling her that I used to be a skipper?

Fuck. Of course Molly told her. Rama can tell from my reaction that it’s true.

I can’t believe you. This whole time I’ve been going on and one about Animatronics and Imagineers and the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow and you were just going to keep pretending you didn’t know what I was talking about? Is that why you were so cagey when I asked if you thought I should change my dissertation project to be about Orientalism in the Magic Kingdom? I can’t believe you have never mentioned you used to work at Disney World.

I tell her I had mostly blocked it out. My mom was staying with her sister for a few months so we lived in Orlando for a while and it was just a summer job. Imagine acting out the same skit 50 times a day, debasing myself in front of hordes of tourists, pretending to navigate the riverboat around animatronic elephants and bushmen.

Well I hope you don’t mind doing it one more time for me, on our own private tour, God I could spend the entire week at the Magic Kingdom.

Okay, well, if we only have one say I do recommend the classic one-two, Magic Kingdom in the morning Epcot in the afternoon, there is a canonical route we can do to maximize our time and your experience.

She squeals, my native informant! This is going to be great, she kisses me on the cheek. She keeps looking at me, I smile at her. We kiss on the lips. She opens her mouth and I taste the cigarette. Yeah, this is what I want.

I put my arm around her as we both look out at the crowd, now fully parted around a tall shirtless man wearing a skimmer hat who seems to have shoved and pushed his way into the spotlight. Wait, is that the manager’s skimmer hat he’s wearing? For once, Rama doesn’t ask me what’s going on, which is good, because I have no idea where moh pits come from.

When Molly and Chuck come back out of the bathroom the moshpit has expanded again and now blocks their way back to the table. Molly holds out her elbows just like she used to, and charges through the crowd. For his part, Chuck uses his seeming appearance as a middle aged business man to avoid being shoved or pushed. Molly makes it through the crowd, but just before she makes it back to our table she winks at us, turns around, and goes back for more. As she leaps to punch a stranger in the head, the music stops with the last growl of the teenage boy. The first band has been precise and violent, and their set is over in less than 15 minutes. Molly screams at them for being cowards, and then comes over to the table and takes a shot of whiskey with Chuck out of a condiment cup. Now that the music has stopped I can hear my ears ringing.

They’ll be here soon.

Who will be here soon?

Molly tugs at her nostrils and ignores my question. You guys making out?

Rama asks, so, you and Molly were friends in high school?

Molly looks coy, yes, unfortunately yes. Just friends.

Why unfortunately? I ask. Did I do something wrong, Molly must remember things differently.

Oh Waladudah, so innocent, so naive. You think I came to listen to you play all those times because I was a huge Gusanos fan? I was trying to get you to fuck me. Or, well, let’s be honest, to fuck you.

More vague but potent memories. Her telling me I could touch her breasts if I wanted to during the middle of a science lab. Helping her into a friend’s car after she overdosed. Maybe we really were friends.

Oh man, I suddenly remember something else, Molly, do you remember that one time when we stole my dad’s car and you me and Bryan drove all the way to Orlando to see Thursday?

What do you mean we? I was the one who stole his car.  You couldn’t even drive then. He still can’t! Rama offers

Waladudah what are you doing to this girl? Is she your chauffeur? Like I was when Bryan brought those shrooms , you both were worthless, remember how I tried teaching you how to parallel park and you almost crashed into a fiberglass egg? Haha, I do remember that.Wow, look at us, rehashing old memories, we’re being so normal.

Who’s Thursday? Rama is trying to keep up with our stream of consciousness.

Oh just some embarrassing  post-hardcore band we were both into in High School.

Wait, what’s post- hardcore? I can’t keep up with all these genres.

Waladudah, Waladudah, does this poor girl even know about Los Gusanos?

What’s Los Gusanos?

His band.

No fucking way

Molly punches me in the arm, Waladudah was the singer, he was fucking wild, I saw him one time get his head split open in the middle of a show and he scooped the blood from his foreheard into a jar and drank it.

What?!

Molly nods , her pupils dilated to the corners of her eyelids.

And why do you call him Waladudah?

We’re saved from any more embarrassing stories by the next set. The group of five take the stage in matching green jumpsuits, and begin playing what sounds like four different frantic songs at the same time. I take a look to offer my veteran judgement. it’s a real variety show these kids are putting on, whole different vibe than the last band, this is new weird shit. Truly unpalatable. I look over at Chuck, he motions with his shoulders to say he thinks they sound okay. The mosh pit loves it though, renewed energy. Two pairs of kids are playing shoulder wars. Some other kids have found out how to access the shuffleboard disks and have started launching them with hands down the lanes. They’re bumping into people’s feet and knocking people over. A light breaks.

Molly looks at her phone, they’re here!

Who’s here?

Without answering she charges back through the crowd.

There is a kind of distorted breakdown, where the bass guitarist cuts one of his strings off with a saw which is still plugged in. It’s so fucking loud. Instead of death growling the singer makes ape sounds. She pounds her chest, tears stream down her face.  They’re apparently working in fake crying into sets now.  Rama’s brows are furrowed.

Molly was telling me this is called hardcore music?

Well, technically I would call this noisegrind, but yeah sure.

Jesus, that’s a good name for it. I am not a noisegrind head.

Ha ha, me either.

Unbothered, Chuck opens up the mysterious bottle of white alcohol. As he pours more shots into condiment cups he explains what it’s called, where it’s from, how much it costs, and how much it’s likely to get us fucked up. Rama and I can’t hear a word he says.

In a short reprieve, while the lead singer growl recites a chapter from Moby Dick , Molly comes back and says okay we’re next.

 

Who’s next?

But before Molly can answer, which she wouldn’t have anyway, the band comes back in with the guitarist stomping on his guitar. It makes pure splitting distortion. I rip off some pieces of napkin from the table and make them into little earplugs for Rama. She thanks me with a kiss. I make some for myself too.

Unable to converse, Chuck just keeps refilling our condiment cups. and Molly keeps wordlessly bullying us to drink, causing the bottle of clear alcohol to disappear quite quickly. It also doesn’t taste like anything, not even like alcohol. That’s a bad sign. I can’t feel myself getting drunk, I can’t even hear myself think.

A heavy-set kid trips over the last shuffleboard lane and comes skidding in underneath our table. In surprise Rama knocks over the bottle of whiskey and it tumbles over and quickly pours through a hole in the table onto him. We all look on glassy eyed and laughing as the kid, pinned underneath the table, gets soaked. Rama eventually stands the bottle upright and then Molly turns it back over to get out the last bit. Chuck laughs. Once saturated, I help pick the kid up and give him a brotherly pat on the back. You get back out there, you hear! I say, standing him up, like I’m coaching youth sports. But stay away from anybody who’s smoking, you might spontaneously combust!

I watch him disappear into the crowd like an animal I’ve released into the wild, and laugh at the image in my mind. Then I almost fall over myself from standing up, I’m drunk.

As the guitarist gets switches instruments, having shattered the one he was stomping on, we finally get a short break. Molly now refers to Chuck as Captain Chuck, laughs at his boat shoes, dares him to go into the mosh pit, and says if he doesn’t we’re not going to come out on his boat with him. What are our plans this weekend, we could all head down to Sanibel Island, Waladudah isn’t making you wander around vacant lots is he? Rama tells her that she actually quite liked the Crab Kingdom.

Well don’t follow him into any bramble, it’s not what’s you think. He’s not going to try to fuck you in there, he’s just looking for snakes. I am trying to keep myself from spinning. Oh I’ve really done it this time. I think this is where it came out.

What’s wrong waladudah? You’re not drunk already? come on help us finish this bottle, don’t tell me you’re still fucking straight edge.

Rama’s eyes light up, what is straight edge? Like someone who’s sober?!

Molly rolls her eyes,

-oh no it’s worse than that, it’s a whole sanctimonious order. He was a complete pain in the ass about it.

Rama keeps looking like she needs the full explanation.

-So, like, we were in the hardcore scene, I guess you don’t have a hardcore scene in Egypt, but then there was this annoying subsection of the hardcore scene that emerged, well it has been part of it since the beginning with Minor Threat, of fucking dorks like Waladudah who thought what was really cool was self-control.

She makes a sign with her hands or masterbating an invisible penis.

-Self control?

-NO drinking, NO drugs, NOOOOO casual sex, ughhhhh, and then the truly self-righteous ones were all vegans.

-Oh my God, Rama is shaking her head, it all makes sense, you ARE straight-edge.

-I am not! I haven’t been since I was in high school.

-But you were!

-Old habits die hard waladudah, look at this poor girl, what have you done to her?

Rama shakes her head, how did I not put this together before? It all makes so much sense, the aescetism, your disdain for normie culture , your being such a lightweight. Rama starts laughing. Wow, the skeleton key, you’re a straight-edge guy, that’s what I was missing.

I think that’s how it went. I remember Rama wasn’t mad or anything, we started making out at that point, maybe under the melodramatic influence of the next band, a screamo band from Jacksonville whose drummer is dressed up in a dinosaur costume. They announce all of the names of each song between songs.

This is called you’re crushing me with your enormous hoof, your love has left me brontosaur

This one is called, My heart is bleeding because you’ve stabbed with with your beak, why are trying to ptero out my heart?

These goofy ass kids. Molly looks mad and storms up to the front. I tell Rama we used to have a song called “The big corporations are dumping something in the water that’s turning everyone into an asshole.”

What did you all sound like?

Ummm, I guess like vegan edge metal mixed with surf rock.

Ha, I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Okay, NOW, we’re up next, Molly reassures us. I don’t even bother asking anymore. She starts badgering us again, trying to convince us between each song to go out on Chuck’s boat. She promised we’d see lots of birds. You’d see a lot of mangrove forests if you come out with us on the boat this weekend. Right Chuck, you’re not going out on it with your fucking wife and kids this weekend are you? Chuck seems unphased and opens us all up another round of beers. Rama asks what kind of a boat Chuck has but before he can answer the Screamo band begins their next song with a 30 second acapella scream. The mosh pit claps in admiration. The kid is going to fuck up his voice if he keeps singing like that.

When he finally starts singing in Earnest, the band’s singer is not actually singing about dinosaurs, he’s singing plaintively about lost love, the end of the summer, losing control, being a fool for you, it’s practically romantic, and Rama and I start kissing right there in public, it’s like I’m right back in high school, she is putting her hands on my neck and the back of my head and lets me run my fingers down her neck. I guess it was me who was being the coy one After all. the melodrama is also working on Molly and Chuck. Molly starts sexually rubbing Chuck’s inner thigh, and he starts pretty flagrantly playing with her tits. At one point he pulls her breast out of her shirt and squeezes her nipple. Nobody cares. Molly gets up laughing and stuffs her tits back into her shirt while walking away into the crowd.

I look over at Rama and she is intently staring at an iphone map of the Western Coast of Florida. She is intent on this boat trip. She keeps zooming in and out, and putting in directions to judge distances. She asks Chuck something and he points things out to her on the map. They both look like they’re plotting something. If we get on a boat I’m going to definitely throw up. Rama sees me looking and tries to tell me something but I can’t hear over the music. Then all of a sudden it stops and we hear a familiar voice on the microphone.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN AND VARIOUS OTHER FUCKOS, MAY I PLEASE HAVE YOUR ATTENTION, FOR ONE NIGHT AND ONE NIGHT ONLY, WELCOMING BACK TO ST. PETERSBURG ITS UN-PRODIGAL SON, PLEASE GIVE A WARM WELCOME TO LOS GUSANOS

I look up. Fuck. It’s Molly on the stage, standing next to Josh and Tristan, and Kyle, all aged but all recognizable.

WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU WALADUDAH.

Rama nudges me, I think she’s talking to you.

WALADUDAH, WHERE ARE YOU?

I stand up as the mosh pit turns to look at me. I am drunk. I have the protective cloak of drunkenness around me. I look down at Rama, she is starting a chant

WA-LA-DU-DAH, WA-LA-DU-DAH, WA-LA-DU-DAH

She smiles at me. She chants louder. The mosh pit starts echoing her chant. She laughs and holds out her arms to them, encouraging them to chant louder. She gives me a wink. It’s just that I feel something for Rama, something urgent and embarrassing. And so I’ll do it. For her, I will debase myself completely: for her, I will become Waladudah.

I charge into the mosh pit with my fists held up, I goosestep, I do a somersault and a roundhouse kick, fall over into the shuffleboard gutter, am helped up by a guy in a viking helmet, promptly chest butt him to the ground, and then leap up onto the stage. We start our set with “Manatee Massacre”. I don’t remember many things about high school, can barely remember where Los Gusanos ever played, don’t remember Josh or Tristan or Kyle’s last name, but I remember every goddamn word of “Manatee Massacre.” I sing:

SCARS ON YOUR BACK

FROM THE GASPARILLA NAZIS

THEY INVADE YOUR HOME

AND KILL YOUR BABIES

The band, our old band, plays fast and furious, I take my shirt off and dance around the stage. The band plays the opening to “Gargantuan pile of shit called Tampa” and I remember those words too. Me and Kyle smash our heads into each other. I do an old school death growl, to show the kids how it’s done. Tristan stops in the middle of a song to push the manager off the stage. He gets back on the kit and starts playing the opening for “taking shots of DDT” and I sing the words while sticking my finger into the corner of my mouth, my signature fish on a hook gesture, and I stick my tongue out like a worm. The crowd loves it but it immediately triggers my gag reflex. I was already so close to the edge that the vomit comes immediately. It splashes on the ground in front of the stage. Everyone backs up. The band stops as I fall to my knees. Tristan stands up from behind his kit to see if I’m okay. Without looking up I sing

TAKE THIS FUCKING SHOT OF DDT

The band starts again. The mosh pit starts again. Some kids start running down the first shuffleboard lane and sliding into my vomit like it’s a waterslide. People are laughing, other people are vomiting. We do our cover of Too Drunk to Fuck by the Dead Kennedys.

 

Went to a party

I danced all night

I drank 16 beers and I started up a fight

But now I am jaded

You’re out of luck

I’m rolling down the stairs, too drunk to fuck

I’m too drunk to fuck

You’re too drunk to fuck

Too drunk to fuck

I’m too drunk, too drunk

Too drunk to fuck

 

I’m too drunk to remember who I am. I’m too drunk to remember what else happened. Everything else is vague but potent. Hugging the other band members, promising to go on tour. We get off the stage and I climb a light pole. Molly is sitting on Chuck’s lap, pushing her breasts into his face. Molly throwing a bucket of ice on the manager. Chuck leaving to take a phone call and Molly comes and sits on both of our laps to tell us something. She put both her arms around us to tell us, something about what it was like to grow up with me, something tender and perceptive, then, as if emerging from the chaos of her feigned behavior into a person with insight and wisdom, saying something revealing and shockingly true. I just can’t remember exactly what that was.

I remember It happened on one of them Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah days. Now that’s the kind of day when you can’t open your mouth without a song jump right out of it.

I remember a hardcore version of the Disney song Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah. I’m thinking to myself that’s an odd choice, and I turn to look at the band.

I remember three musicians in blackface, standing in front of a pair of confederate flags on poles on either side of the drum kit.

I remember Molly and I saying WHAT THE FUCK in unison.

I remember the mosh pit unsure how to respond to what appears to be the world’s first Minstrelcore band.

I remember the pit no longer being fun, a decidedly aggressive feel to it. I remember seeing someone throwing punches.

 

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay

My, oh, my, what a wonderful day

Plenty of sunshine headin’ my way

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay!

 

I remember Molly and I standing up and charging into the crowd.  I remember Molly spreading her arms, jumping over the lanes, flying through the whole crowd straight up to the stage, I remember punching somebody, people cheering, crawling up on the stage, boot polish on our hands, smearing it on the confederate flag, punching someone else, us singing

 

Nazi Punks

Nazi Punks

Fuck Off!

 

crawling over the drum kit but, the bassist holding up his bass guitar like an enormous axe, I remember kicking him off the stage with his boat shoes. The manager and the police, the confederate flag on a pole, a lance, Molly’s ankles, someone’s hands, Chuck’s stomping, running up bleachers, stage diving, lights torn down, police in the mosh pit, flood lights come on, grabbing Rama’s hand. Run. I remember Chuck taking the other flag pole and javelining it into the middle of Mirror Lake.

Kissing in the back of a car

Eating at a diner.

Standing on the deck of a ship moored in a fancy marina

moonlight on the water

Kissing on the back of the boat

singing “Nazi Punk Fuck Off”

howling at the moon

 

 Treasure barrier island

 

As we drive back towards the ocean over a series of causeways, we see a gang of pelicans resting on a cement balustrade. Sometimes a gull briefly matches our speed. From some vantage points you can look out on a landscape of sailboat and small islands and errant tropical vegetation and I get an inkling of pride, that maybe this habitat of mine is special and beautiful.

Landing back on the island, we pass by a lot with a flimsy lumber frame erected in the middle. Depending on the shell they give it it will be a bank or a pharmacy or a fast food restaurant. We stop at an enormous intersection, 6 lanes one way and four the other. It’s big enough to be a ceremonial plaza or a parade ground.

Then the light turns and we continue down the stroad. We park in a lot next to a hot pink apartment building, and can see the aquamarine miracle of the ocean just out beyond a low-slung ridge of sand dunes. The ocean! Rama exclaims, I was wondering if we were ever going to see it.

For my speech this time I won’t make Rama suffer through standing in a parking lot. I do, however, make her pause and appreciate the sea grapes (Coccoloba uvifera) as we march out on a wooden boardwalk that passes in between the sand dune bramble! The lone native fruit of Florida. Stumbling through the sand, I tell her that sea grapes are impressively drought-tolerant. She takes off her sandals as I tell her they can withstand hurricane force winds. I struggle to take off my boots while telling her they don’t mind salty soil or salt spray. Their fallen leaves create a carpet of brown discs in the general vicinity of the tree, making their own mulch. I roll up my pant legs and tuck my head inside of my shirt. The beach sand is bright white, blinding, it’s not just the sun I need to shield myself from. Rama stands with her hair blowing in the wind, arms outstretched, a sandal on each end, soaking in the sun.

We walk right up to the edge of the water, where the sand becomes damp and compact. The sprawl and development here becomes a harmless line on the horizon, dwarfed by the sky and the ocean. Rama smiles at me through her cat eye sunglasses. I move up close to her, we both face the ocean.

No wonder people make such a big deal about it, it’s amazing to look at. We’re so close to the ocean in the city too, but you never get to see it. It puts things in perspective. It makes me lose my train of thought.

I dig my foot into the sand and draw a line parallel to the surf. It fills with water. Rama asks if that’s the groundwater, or else what is below. Oh that was it. I tell her that scientific analysis indicates a basically transgressive Holocene sequence with lagoonal sediments occurring seaward of the islands. Underlying the lagoonal deposits in all areas is a 1 m thick relict Pleistocene unit that has been flooded, reworked and vegetated by intertidal to subtidal organisms.

 

Haha, you dork!

 

She bends down and starts making drip castles at the edge of the hole I’ve dug with my foot. I sit down next to her and start to help. When she was a kid, she could never dig too deep when making sandcastles on the beach. Water always seemed to fill the hole. Is it because of the limestone groundwater? What’s actually below us here?

I tell her it’s an interesting question. Even at the beach, we can’t help but ask questions. It’s also the topic of the next stop on our tour. Funny how it works out that way. Basically, we’re sitting on a large bar of sand. Far below it is the limestone shelf, but yeah this whole island is basically made of sand.

That’s crazy!

It is crazy, but basically your intuition as a child was right, you could keep digging down into sand for a long time. That is if the water didn’t seep in. But it seeps in because the water table is so high. Or because we are so low.

Our little sand city city starts to take form. I am making a castle with turrets and Rama is making a tasteful suburban development with detached single family sand homes. She says that the sand is beautiful, so clear and white and fine. I tell Rama that this specific sand, the powder white sand of the western coast of Florida,  is made up of quartz crystals, produced by the weathering of continental land masses like the Appalachian mountains and washed down rivers into the Gulf of Mexico. Combined with the sparkling quartz crystals may be shell fragments, coral limestone fossils and organic matter, silt and clay coming from the rivers, and muck and peat derived from local decomposition of organic matter. Every beach tells a geologic story!

 

Look at you, Rama says, when you get going you can be a real know-it-all.

Haha, well I don’t know it all, and neither do scientists. Like, for example, we know what’s beneath us if you keep digging, but we don’t know how this all got here in the first place.

 

What do you mean?

 

You might not have noticed, but we are actually on an island now, a long narrow barrier island. A thin trip of land that runs parallel to the mainland. (جزيرة الحاجز) The one we are on is called treasure island. Florida is home to the most diverse and interesting barrier island system in the world, they are a huge reason why Florida has such great beaches, and such great areas for resorts. They are lined up along these long barrier islands with water on both sides. But the weird thing is we don’t really know how they come to be formed.

 

We don’t know why?

 

We don’t! Based on the areas of the world where they’re formed, we can guess that they form in places that are tectonically stable, and around smaller marine basins such as the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. We also know that they occur where there are relatively small tides and ample sand supply, just like here.

Scientists have different theories: offshore bar, spit accretion, and submergence. No single theory can explain the development of all barriers, which are distributed extensively along the world’s coastlines. Scientists accept the idea that barrier islands, including other barrier types, can form by a number of different mechanisms.

I want to keep going. I tell her that although we aren’t sure exactly how barrier islands form, scientists are certain that these barrier islands are bound to change, and to disappear. They shift, and grow, and disappear. On their own, they are mutable as the tides.

We turn to face the horizon of buildings again. A line of silent development spreading across the entire horizon. Nowadays the barrier islands of Florida have almost all been heavily developed. Hotels, condos, once upon a time Aquatariums. The sand has been drilled into with foundational pillars, covered over with cement. But underneath it all is really just sand. Maybe the engineers know something I don’t, but it seems pretty tenuous to me.

Tenuous?

Like, it all seems so eternally drab, like the condos and the streetlights have always been here, but I have to imagine with one good storm, the whole island would disappear underneath them.

You’d love that.

Love what?

Oh you know, the destruction, mankind paying for its prolificacy.

Ha. I mean I wouldn’t miss it. But it’s not so much the destruction of the human that I care about, I’m interested in the renewal of the natural. Every sign of it is a reassurance. If you think about it outside of the scale of the present, outside of the world we’ve built to try to block it all out, nature is relentless.

 

والعالم لا ينقض بل يتجدد بالنار

 

I have been letting myself indulge in science needing out in front of Rama, now she’s listening to me indulge in philosophy.

A big wave comes and destroys our drip castle city all at once. We stand up quickly to keep from getting wet. As the wave washes back out I stop a piece of debris from washing away with my boot. I reach down and pick it up and hand it to Rama. It’s a crab claw.

 

رفقائي

Rama had some more questions about barrier islands, but what she really wants to know about are these friends I’ve promised to introduce her to. She keeps asking me about them as we both keep our eyes out for the giant pelican. Perhaps not the world’s biggest, but worthy at the very list of a picture. I don’t remember exactly where it is but it’s somewhere on this quick flowing road zipping down the middle of the barrier island.

Rama asks me when I met them.

-Who?

-Your friends?

-when I worked at this place in high school. It’s around here somewhere. We pass by various apartment buildings and multi-colored resorts, an outdoor bar, a seven eleven.

There!

Rama is able to quickly find a turn-around and pull us into the small parking lot wedged in between two apartment buildings. All of the spots are filled, with several people milling about, a man carrying a pet carrier, a woman with a cardboard box. Rama strums her fingers on the driving wheel in impatience. She eyes the handicapped spot. A woman comes out with a cardboard box and a clipboard, and unlocks her car with the key fob. Rama turns on her blinker, the woman drops the stuff off in her SUV and heads back inside. Rama groans. She eyes the handicapped spot.

Rama, that’s for disabled people.

Well, you have a bad sunburn.

She pulls in and takes the spot.

Before we go in, Rama wants a picture with the giant pelican. First Rama has me take her picture wearing my pith helmet, and then asks to get one of me as well. I climb up onto the little stone hill where they’ve perched the enormous fiberglass pelican.

Did you go to the same high school?

No

I can’t see the whole thing, get closer to the pelican.

Where did they go to college?

Like me, they never went.

The pelican doesn’t share much of its base, so I have to hug onto it as I mount its cement dias.

Okay, say cheese. Okay, one more, look at the camera, trying to maneuver around the fiberglass bird’s gullet, I knock my helmet off.

Rama picks it up and asks if they work here.

My friends? No, they live here full-time.

We walk back towards the main building, but the side gate is open so we can walk straight to the back. The yard is crowded with a collection of wooden sheds and huts. It is filled with screened-in huts and large enclosures made out of chain link fence. We stop in front of the first one and Rama looks in at an enormous Bald Eagle, sitting on top of a wooden post. It looks lazily at us. Rame reads the sign.

 

 Roosevelt is an American Bald Eagle who came to the Seaside Seabird Sanctuary with a deformed wing due to an old gunshot wound. As a result, Roosevelt can’t fly strong enough to be released back into the wild. 

 

 

Hi Roosevelt!

This is a different Bald Eagle than the one I knew when I worked here, that one’s name was Calvin Coolidge. But they have the same dignified bearing of a war veteran.

Looks like one got out, Rama says pointing at a night heron looking down at us from a roof.

Oh no, they just hang out here.

Rama holds out the pith helmet. She wants the official explanation.

Okay, so back when I was in high school, one weekend while exploring St. Joe’s Creek, I came across a Great Blue Heron. I knew there was something wrong as soon as I came up on it. Usually when you sneak up on a Great Blue Heron it will let out a loud croak and take off flying, letting you know it’s upset that you’ve discovered its prime hunting spot. I kept getting closer to it through the tall grass and it didn’t move. Its feathers were matted, and its wing was hanging as though it was broken. It was barely able to move. I don’t know how it had gotten all the way there in the bramble, far from the beach and the water, maybe it had been washed back up the channel during a rainstorm or high tide. 

As I walked up onto the cement side of the ditch to look down on it, I thought it was already dead. It had its eyes closed, maybe even accepting death. But when I got close enough, it opened its eyes and looked up at me. I jumped over the fence of a storage facility and found a used cardboard box and took my shirt off and draped it over the Heron and picked it up. It was so surprising to feel a Heron in my embrace, they are such large birds, but birds are also so nimble. I put it inside the box and covered over it and took it home and put it in the car. My mom looked up where to go and drove us here. This hospital for injured birds and sanctuary for birds who can no longer make it in the wild.

 

A freely wandering egret strolls by us. Rama tries to pet it but it zooms away.

 

I remember very clearly the feelings I had the first time we came here to drop off the Heron. The nurse on duty took the box back into the examination room for a few minutes, and when she came back, she let us know they’d be able to fix the wing and rehabilitate the bird. I felt overwhelmed with joy. A type of newly permanent joy. The nurse told us the heron would stay here for a few months until it was fully recuperated and then be released back into the wild. I was overcome, I teared up in the reception room. I didn’t have any money for a donation, but I immediately asked if I could volunteer. My mom was surprised to see my like that. 

 

We stop in front of a Turkey Vulture holding its wings out wide. Rama tells me Ruby is a Turkey Vulture that has been at the Sanctuary since 2016 and was unable to be released due to a previously healed shoulder fracture. We both wave back.

 

        She was even more surprised when that next summer I volunteered to work at the clinic. Until then I had never really shown much interest in anything, as a kid I was mainly just rebellious and checked out. She could barely recognize me as I spent 4 days a week biking here and helping at the avian hospital, cleaning the cages of the birds that stay here in captivity because they’re too injured to survive on their own. I would even answer the phones. I had never felt so much enthusiasm. Not just being around the animals, the people here were the first I’d ever met who cared about nature. Before them I thought I liked St. Joe’s Creek just because it offered a chance to escape suburban life. Once they taught me about the scientific names for plants, and concepts like ecological succession, I began to love the creek itself, and any other bits of nature I could find. Before working here at Seaside, my only heroes were Ian MacKaye and Jello Biafra. One summer here, and I suddenly wanted to become a scientist.     

 

We move over to a large sandy lot at a couple of Pelicans milling about. I point out one of them I recognize. From his wing. That is Mr. Jingles. Mr. Jingles is an Eastern Brown Pelican that cannot fly due to a fused elbow and wrist in his left wing. I continue.

 

The other volunteers were all studying to become environmental scientists or veterinarians. They were enamored with the older full-time veterinarians who worked there performing surgery on birds. These were successful people, but successful for caring for nature. I realize now thinking about it for the first time in many years that it was all so influential because it was the first time I had a model of success not rooted in just making money.

 

We greet a number of parrots and other birds who don’t have anything physical wrong with them. They were kept at pets and don’t know how to survive in the wild. One is a bluejay called “Curious” George.

 

I was inspired, but unfortunately, it was a little late for me. I suddenly went from being a student who didn’t give a shit in high school, to thinking the whole thing was a joke,  to one who suddenly was taking all of the honors courses in biology and chemistry. I did great in all of my classes, but it was too late. Because I had been so checked out for the other three years, my GPA was too low to change. I only had one year of good grades to show. And like so many ambitious kids find out, you really can’t just become a veterinarian, it’s intensely competitive, even more competitive than becoming a doctor. You kind of have to go to a good school to even be considered for a veterinary program. Or at least that’s what my dad told me once the rejection letters from colleges arrived.

 

Bacardi, the green non-native parrot, screeches at me in sympathy.

 

So I was mad that my enthusiasm made to seem ridiculous. It also left me without any plans for the fall. Everyone else went off to college, or was never going to do anything with their lives anyways. And then there was me. I felt like a failur. I escaped by moving to the big city, first working in the kitchen, and then as a waiter, and now a bartender, service industry royalty. I’ve never stopped being interested in biology, but I feel like an amateur. I don’t know things like you do.  Giving lessons at the community farm to kids is a nice part-time gig, and let’s me keep in touch with nature, I check out books from the library, but to be honest with you, I still feel embarrassed. Embarrassed that I never went to college.

-Embarrassed? You shouldn’t feel embarrassed about that. Rama hugs onto my arm. Some of the stupidest people I know are college professors.

-Ha. It’s just that, you know, I still have, I guess, some resentment, an inferiority complex about college. I don’t have the resources, or the social position, to now go back to school after all this time, and maybe that’s okay. But I still, like, get embarrassed being around your grad school friends. And, well, I guess around you.

-Oh they’re truly all idiots. And none of them have the curiosity that you do, and that’s all that really matters.

But then she chooses to be serious and honest too.

-But I hear you. It’s really helpful to hear you say all of this. To be honest, I have thought that there are some real class differences between us, but I wasn’t sure, I didn’t know your background. I haven’t known how to maneuver around them. Most of the time I forget you never went to college, I take it for granted that people don’t use words like ontology every day, but honestly if you never said anything I’d never know. But maybe that’s classist too.

She thinks about it for a second with the help of the ocean.

-But it’s not about what you know. It’s about how you care. You pay me such attention, you care about the weird things I’m into, but also you pay attention and watch out for me, around people I mean. And you’re into weird things too, you’re picky and judgmental, but it’s in the service of things you care about. You have your own moral code I think, and because you didn’t just inherit it from your parents you’re protective of them. Maybe being self-effacing is one of them, but I care about the things you’re into too, I mean I want to be. I want to know who you are because I like you. You’re a cool guy. Look, Janet agrees.

We look over at Janet looking back at us. Rama reads the sign.

 

Janet

Janet is a Sandhill Crane that is missing 3/4 of her lower mandible (beak). Due to this, Janet is unable to eat on her own in the wild and requires a specially designed feeder at the Sanctuary in order to eat on her own.

 

 

 

تيكي گاردنز

The sun has descended from the liver of the sky down to the pot belly of the horizon, belted by the single row of houses that now separate us from the beach.  We pull into a gated beach access parking lot, a place where the public can park their cars to go to the beach. The parking lot itself is partially shaded by palm trees planted in the grass median. They cast long spindly shadows on the cement. I park us at the far end, looking out on a thicket wall of Silver buttonwood (Conocarpus erectus) and greenbrier vines and scrub palmetto and invasive pepper trees. But as Rama would say, the thicket is merely the veil from behind which the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckons to the flâneur. I narrate.

And now, as we finish our day, we come to the former site of what I believe is the platonic ideal (المثل الافلاطوني) of the mom-and-pop tourist trap. Indeed, started by a pop Frank and a mom Jo Byars who operated this place from 1964-1986,  it typified the entrepreneurial eclecticism and middle-brow whimsy of the great American roadside attraction. Frank and Jo met in Tampa and got married at a beach motel, and soon Jo was selling her handmade jewelry out of a little souvenir shack right here where the parking lot still stands. Frank was there to support her, and he was the right man for the job, his motto was “Nothing happens until somebody sells something” and so it wasn’t long before the shack expanded into a house, a multi-roomed shopping center they called the signal house. But that was just the beginning

Rama peers into the brush. Yes, but what was it?

It was everything! The entire exoticizing imagination of the mid-century made real.  In order to keep shoppers hanging around, Frank would start building a garden out back, which soon exploded into an entire tropical dreamscape of lagoons, volcanoes, and lots and lots of Tiki Gods. As this place became one of the most popular tourist attractions in Florida, Frank would add a bar, a restaurant, a miniature zoo, and even a floor show. 

Rama is frustratingly looking into the brush. I console her.

But let us travel there ourselves, following along one last time with Ross B. and his family. They visit at just this time of day, decades ago. The sun looks over their shoulders as they pull up in the station wagon to a building made up of three pitched roofs, each gable (جملون) jutting out above them like the bow of a ship. Ross has never seen this style of building before. Maybe on television. He’s certainly never seen a building with a shield-shaped face like that painted on the side of it. Big orb eyes, gritted teeth, flanked on both sides by bamboo spears.

Ross looks out the windows of the station wagon to try to make sense of where it is that they have arrived. Next to them is a large plastic yellow sign, lit up like a lantern,

its letters resemble Chinese characters.

 

TIKI GARDENS      

Florida’s South Seas

Island Paradise

 

 

I hand Rama the brochure, she grabs it from me. She tears it open like a Christmas morning

Present.

 

 

TRADER FRANK’S RESTAURANT

With Entertainment in the WikiWiki Lounge

 

THE SIGNAL HOUSE

Truly a phantasmagoria of shoppers’ delights!

 

 

 So much to see, Frank and Jo have made a fantasyland for all ages. Ross’ parents are just as excited as he is. There is shopping, there is entertainment, they don’t know where to begin. His mother yearns to go see the various handbags and accessories in the Bou-tiki. There they can buy Tiki Gardens branded neckties, Tiki-topped cocktail drink stirrers, or a pineapple shaped wooden serving platters. She peers into the illuminated windows of the Polynesian complex as they walk towards the entrance. She squeezes Ross’ father’s hand. She tells Ross he can also find a souvenir here! Ross can’t believe his luck.

For his part, Ross’ father wants to check out what drinks they have in the Peacock Bar. They pause in front of a advertisement board just outside the front door and he reads the description next to a Tiki headed-mug 

 

Kanaka Kapu – a chief’s delight

Tart and rich

Keep the mug to remember us by $2.50

 

Ross’s father squeezes ross’s mother’s hand. He tells Ross that he too can come to the peacock bar, they will serve him a tropical Roy Rogers. Ross just hopes to see some real peacocks. They also say there are parrots and monkeys! 

They walk into the front entrance and are greeted by an enormous stone head, bubblegum light emanates from its gaping mouth. What is that, Ross asks timidly. Ross’ father says that that is a Tiki God. What is a Tiki God? The father reads the explanation posted on a sign (written by Frank himself) to his son.

 

“The legend of these giant Tiki God, worshipped by the natives of Easter Island and other Polynesian areas, is that big boned white men, reputed to be Danes, came to the islands centuries ago and were thought to be gods by the natives. These Tiki Gods are still in existence in Easter Island and other Polynesian Islands. Hence the name “Tiki Gardens.” 

 

Hmmmm, well that doesn’t make much sense, Ross’ father thinks to himself, well we will have to just go see them for ourselves. 

 

The polynesian complex is a maze, but they follow a young beautiful woman in a flower dress who shows them out to the gardens out back. There she shows them the entrance to the “Polynesian Adventure Trail.” But in order to enter, the family must first pass through the mouth of Oro, the Wind God. His furrowed shotcrete brow looks down on young Ross as he holds onto his mother’s hand. They all take a step forward, Oro doesn’t move. They continue walking, they  make it through! And they have crossed Oro’s path without being swallowed. Or have they been? They are immediately consumed by darkness, is this the end? No this is merely the black lagoon and the mangrove swamp, the first obstacles on their perilous path. Past the Maori burial ground they can see open water, and continue along the seaside mangrove path to the Hukilau shack. White sands, mangrove knees. 

 

At this point, I reach into my bag and pull out another map. It looks likes one that Rama would draw, the little points of interest as cartoon icons. She gives it a pirate’s’ scrutiny.

 

Okay, where is the Hukilau Shack?

Here, number 3 on the map.

And where is that in relation to this parking lot?

Just out there where the bramble meets the waters edge.

Let’s go!

She grabs the map and orients us by her phone GPS map, and we walk through a gap in the bushes where the exposed sand has allowed a little marsh elder to grow. We immediately disoriented as we bushwack through more bushes, but Rama keeps track of our little dot on the map on her phone. I roll down my sleeves to protect my forearms, and hold branches taut so that Rama can pass through. We get to the water where it cuts in in a narrow muddy canal.

This must have been the lagoon! I take a look at the map to remember, then begin to narrate again.

 

 

A slight pause before surmounting Fire Mountain – the highest promontory in Pinellas County! Ross and his parents mount the shotcrete crag and Ross wishes he was tall enough to see down into the smoking crater to see the glowing lava but his father is lost in thought. Is he in awe of Ku the War God. No, he is entranced by the incantations of the Peacock Bar. He can’t wait to try the Tiki Typhoon – A delightful Blend of Luscious Island rum and imported juices. For her part, Ross’ mother is thinking of their visit to the Treasure House, where she will pick-a-pearl and where Ross will be able to choose his own souvenir from the buckets full of sand dollars and conch shells and cowrie bells by the pound.

 

In the present, Rama and I push through some sea grapes and some more buttonwood to try to keep up with Ross’ family. I see a mutant hydrangea growing in the much and point to it. Probably a leftover artifact from Tiki Gardens! I continue to narrate.

 

Ross and his family are interrupted in their thoughts by coming upon the Sun Temple – Ross looks up in awe, he’s never seen a shrine before, they’ve only ever been to church. It is a small trapezoidal altar emblazoned with a sun design. A woman in a bright flower dress stands in silence. Should they pay their respects? Ross walks up the miniature staircase festooned with flower offerings up to the altar laid out before a golden bearded god-face. Decorated earthenware, conch shells, and a few spare American coins from roadside visitors. Ross takes out the plastic necklace he got from Treasureland and lays it carefully on the altar.

 

Where the Sun Temple once stood is now, as best as we can figure, a Sabal Palm. Rama puts her palms together and bows. We then skirt around a shallow pond up against the edge where the parking lot meets the bramble, and then back into the overgrowth. We try to keep up with Ross and his family as they walk out onto what is in the present an eroded, overgrown canal.

 

 Ross and his family walk out onto the first islet of a Tiki God occupied archipelago. Long Ears, the Picture God, the Fishing God. Each one snarling and scowling and baring their teeth. But Ross is not afraid anymore, he has made his offering to the Sun God, and their path is now blessed.

 

Ross jumps up and down as he sees the parrot bell tower in the distance, each rung adorned with rainbow-colored macaws. As Ross’s mother thinks about whether a collectable spoons, a souvenir plate, or an an oversized matchbook will best serve as souvenir, Ross looks ups at the avian tower as the Macaws look back. They look at the pigeons and the harlequin birds and the toucans and Ross’s father answers questions about their beaks and wings and thinks of how he’ll reward his paternal wisdom with A Banana Delight – an unforgettable creation with Hawaiian rum and Crème de Banana.

 

They come to a clearing where there is a cutout board for taking souvenir pictures. Frank and Joe are there to meet them. Ross’ dad wants to shake the hand of the people who built this whole place themselves. How did Frank build all of these Dickey Roofs and shotcrete totems himself? Ross’s mom inspects the festooned wrist of Joe Byer. Frank invites Ross’ parents to take their picture in the face cut-out board. Ross’ father hands him the camera and shows him how to use it. When he looks through the viewfinder his father has become a strong man, and his mom is a luau dancer. Frank and Jo ask Ross’ parents if they’ve made a reservation at Trader Frank’s restaurant yet? And don’t forget to make a cash offering to the God of Fortune on your way back to the Tahiti Hut for South Seas shopping! 

 

All of this used to be where the parking lot is now, and I help Rama climb over a short chainlink fence so she can stand in its approximate location as we finish the summoning of the family tour.

 

 Before finishing their tour, they pay their respects to one last God, the God of Fortune. Ross’ looks up at the snarling face and reinterprets it as a smile. Ross’s father presses his palms together and makes a ceremonial bow. Ross does the same. Then, from behind the statue, stalks a bird with a long tail drawn behind it. 

Oh look Ross! It’s a peacock.

The enormous bird swings its tail around behind it, looks at the family, now blessed with fortune, and it opens its tail, an enormous fan of color, illuminated in the last rays of twilight sun.

 

It is now twilight in the present as well. I tell Rama, it is time for all of us to join the Torch lighting ceremony. We walk back over to the car and brush the leaves and twigs off of ourselves and get back into the car. You can no longer hear the distant roar of the ocean. It’s silent. I reach into my backpack and I pull out the tape recorder, and set it on my lap. Written in sharpie on the cassette tape is “exotic sounds of Tiki Gardens.” I hit the play button.

 

“Aloha and good evening ladies and gentlemen it’s now twilight time here at Tiki Gardens and again it’s time for torch lighting so all of you folks in the various shops if you care to join with us in our ceremony  if you will kindly step out into the little garden we’re about to begin.”

 

This is the voice of Trader Frank, echoing through a crackling microphone from his spot in the broadcast booth. His voice carries the past in it, he speaks like an old Vaudeville MC, a way of speaking that has also gone away.

 

“Now the peacocks have come over they are perched atop the various buildings you can hear them in the background.” 

 

Through the car speakers we hear them, peacocks perched atop totems, towers, palm trees.

 

“So to get you in the mood for your trip to the south sea islands here’s Ernie playing for you a medley of beautiful Hawaiian tunes on the Wurlitzer and here’s Ernie.” 

 

Suddenly the slow, melting, haunting sound of a wurlitzer comes on, interrupted only by the occasional call of a peacock.

 

“Your best vantage point to witness our ceremony will be on the dock facing this broadcast booth. All the activity takes place right in the center of the garden facing the broadcast booth.”

 

I look over and Rama has closed her eyes, transporting herself, a smile on her face.

 

“Aloha ladies and gentlemen we are broadcasting live direct from beautiful exotic Tiki Gardens right here from the heart of the Gardens from our broadcast booth here’s Ernie Shreez on the Wurlitzer bringing you a beautiful medley of Hawaiin tunes we’re bringing  torch lighting we do this each evening at twilight so we extend to you a most cordial invitation to join us just as the sun goes down right here at beautiful exotic Tiki Gardens when we bring you the ceremony of the lighting of the torches Aloha.”

 

The wurlitzer continues to play, and I close my eyes as well. I see Ross, sitting at his parents feet on the dock, a conch shell in his lap. His mother sways back and forth to Ernie’s  instrumental version of the popular Hawaiian song “going to a Hukilau.” She sings softly to herself.

Oh we’re going to a hukilau

A huki huki huki huki hukilau

She makes the dance with a brand new pearl bracelet on her wrist. Ross’ father dances too, one hand clutching onto his Kanaka Kapu souvenir mug. The young beautiful women in flowery dresses slowly stroll across the grass with torches in hand, lighting up the garden in a fiery glow, the Tiki Gods coming back out of the darkness, Oro and Ku and Kin Ka Jou.

Princess Karloa singing the unforgettable Hawaiin wedding song. She begins to sing in a trembling voice. 

“This is the moment I’ve waited for. I can hear my heart singing soon bells will be ringing.”

 

She sings from the past, she sings in the present. My eyes are closed, I don’t remember when we are, I don’t remember where we are. I am in the wurlitzer ether, I am in Polynesian paradise. I only come back to the present when I feel Rama’s breathing on my upper lip as she leans towards me and places her lips on mine and kisses me slowly in the still air inside the car.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

St. Joe’s creek

We stand at the ugliest parking lot yet. It services a warehouse where they sell laundry equipment. Behind a sagging chain link fence topped with barbed wire there is another lot with vans and trailers, all bordered by a thicket filled ditch.

I pull out a copy of a Citizens Title and Abstract Company

map of Pinellas County from 1925 and extend it to the length of my arms. Rama studies

it from behind my shoulder. The grid on the map is mostly a surveyor’s wishful

thinking. If you look closely you can see that most of what is actually there

is sinkholes and and swamp. This was back before the Euclidian mindset had

won out, and all the creeks and wetlands had been straightened and squared and

dredged and drained and canalized.

I point to one of the many lakes.

We are here.

I then look at Rama’s phone to orient myself, yes, the creek starts here and meanders towards the West.  Creek may be too generous of a term. From here where it starts, it is a sun-bleached drainage ditch with a little rivulet of algae-green water trickling down it, encased on either side by sickly grass. We walk over to the featureless culvert that passes over the ditch. I can already see a white ibis, its football shaped body and long orange beak, carefully walking down the green rivulet, looking for something to eat.

 

We stand now at the headwaters of a once mighty waterbody,

Welcome to St. Joe’s Creek! Back when this map was made, this part of the

peninsula was all still pine savannah, with just a few dirt roads leading down

to the town of St. Petersburg farther south. Where we’re standing wasn’t even

farmland, just untamed swamp. St. Joe’s Creek ran free back then, so free you wouldn’t

even recognize it as a creek, like the underground aquifer, the movement of

surface waters was interconnected, extensive, and wild. back then, you couldn’t

quite say at any given time where the land ended, and the water began. But it

was perfect for someone like Joe Silva, a 19th century trapper who would come

to hunt turtles. Think of him now, a haggard, sunburnt settler, long white

beard and a straw hat, stomping around in the muck, he would have had the whole

place to himself!

Over the years, as more Anglo settlers arrived, the city would began to encroach, more cabins, more farms. At the turn of the century the creek still acted as a drainage basin for a large part of the peninsula, fluctuating in size according to the seasonal rains and meandering out of its banks. It wasn’t until the 1940s when engineers would finally imprison its path in this cement enclosure. Once entrapped, the city was free to grow according to the grid the city’s first planners envisioned. Housing subdivisions, shopping centers, highways, could all colonize and criss-cross over the area that once all belonged to St. Joes Creek. By the last decades of the 20th century, not only was the Creek deprived of its nourishment and freedom, it would be relegated and forgotten as merely an ugly sewer drain back behind people’s houses and places of business. If ever mentioned, it would only be for serving its transactional, municipal function as a drainage basin for channeling storm water. 

But much is preserved through neglect. Forgotten by humans, St. Joe;s Creek has been able to eke out its own ecological freedom. In a place like suburban Florida, ditches and medians and empty lots are the only places that don’t get sprayed by herbicides or mowed by lawnmowers. Forgotten by civilization, most of St. Joe’s Creek has become a thick, narrow jungle, overflowing with trees and plants and reptiles and birds. It is untamed, mutant wilderness. When I was a kid, St. Joe’s Creek ran right behind my house. I could jump over our short fence and suddenly be in the middle of a forest. To me St. Joe’s Creek was heaven. Any day after school I could come back here and find new things. 

 

 

We drive back on a road running parallel to the creek until we find another spot where it crosses over the creek. Here the mowed grass has given way to haggard palm trees which have escaped captivity. Look Rama, I point out over the chain-link fence, at the border of the ditch. It’s one of your compatriots! She looks confused. I’m referring to that palm tree. Don’t let it fool you, it’s not native to Florida at all. It’s a Date Palm, native to the Middle East. One of its dates, planted in front of somebody’s mansion or golf course, was eaten by a bird most likely, and the seed ended up here, free to grow wild with all these other plants and trees.

We

continue on and I use Rama’s phone to find the next time the creek crosses

under an avenue. This time, when we stand on the bridge overlooking it, the

entire drainage ditch has been taken over by a dense thicket of palmetto,

Silver buttonwood (Conocarpus erectus), oak, Giant Leather Fern (Acrostichum

danaeifolium), and all other kinds of vines and ferns and grasses I can’t

identify. It even comes up out of the ditch and overhangs the cement bridge,

protecting us with its thick bramble shade.

 

If you really want to see where I grew up, it wasn’t a house

or a high school or a movie theater. The formative site of my childhood was

this drainage ditch, where I was able to sneak between the crack of civilization and disappear. You

could follow the course of this little creek for miles and miles, capture anole

lizards in your hands, find groups of frogs convening inside a used tire, wildflowers growing in the muck. I would collect debris and garbage, dragging planks of wood and plastic debris to make forts and hideouts. Now if we were to walk through here, and I’m not saying we should, but I could show you all kinds of things, a fascinating mix of mutant exotic plants and animals, pet store snakes and ornamental orchids and civilizational flotsam. The field guide has a great passage on novel ecosystems. 

But what I could also show you is the secrets hiding place that the creeks reprovides to look back at the so-called civilized world. The backyards of houses and seeing the back of businesses that aren’t meant to be seen, we could follow the creek and travel through the tunnels and engineering infrastructure, the bowels of water treatment plants, stand underneath of cloverleaf of highways and grasp truly what a monstrosity they are. At one point the creek passes by the county jail. Hidden from respectable society’s view, this carceral capitalist castle can be clearly seen from the bramble. Imagine , in turn, what a refuge this little thread of wilderness must provide for the people who look out on it from inside.

When I was a kid, every year that I got older I could venture a little father, be a little more daring, get closer to the coast. One long summer day, I just kept going, past the Go-Kart track and the plant nursery, past the trailer park and the water treatment plant, where other streams and creeks fed into it and I had to walk alongside an increasingly wide and deep river, where the thicket alongside it grew wider too, harder to push my way through, from grass, to a dense thicket, to impenetrable brush. By the time I couldn’t go any further, the city was no longer visible. All I could see was mangrove forest. I didn’t make it to the open water that day water, but I did get to where St. Joe’s Creek was once again interconnected, extensive, and wild.

 

Rama spends a while looking out at the thicket.

مدها متان

She holds her arms

behind her back pensively. You know, this landscape really is beautiful. It has

a wild tropical pastoral quality. She says it looks like a redneck version of a

Martin Johnson Heade painting. Sometimes she makes references to American

culture that I don’t understand as well.

 

اكواتاريوم – aquatarium

 

We park at the base of a tall apartment tower block, blocking our view of the ocean.  The only movement is an old couple in the tennis court next to us, dressed in matching white outfits, languidly pop a tennis ball back and forth to each other.

 

It is a day of surprises and wonder for our young explorer Ross B. He would have been content if the day has been spent travelling through time to witness dioramas of the golden age of piracy. But the penninsula has so much more amusement to offer. His father brings him the station wagon down  to the water for yet another magical roadside attraction. This time he is transported to another mysterious realm, that which lives underwater in our vast oceans. Welcome to the former site of the Aquatarium.

I pull the old brochure from my backpack and read directly from it.

 

The Aquatarium is located on the Gulf of Mexico at beautiful St. Petersburg Beach. Opened officially in June, 1964, the main structure houses the largest aquarium tank in the world. Whales, porpoises, turtles, stingrays and thousands of marine fishes live as they do in the open sea. Through dozens of picture windows, set in two level, visitors can study and observe these sea dwellers close up with all the drama of the struggle for existence in the areas of the world that occupy nearly four sevenths of our entire globe. Under the Golden Dome of our spacious amphitheater of the main aquarium tank, showtime is hourly every day. A snack bar, gift shop and film shop for your convenience. No visit to the Sunshine State would be complete without seeing the St. Petersburg Beach Aquarium. 

 

I hand over the brochure to Rama so that she can take a look. She groans nostalgically at the Jet-age modernism. Two large interlocking circular structures, one is two large cement ring stadiums surrounding a bright green pool of water, the other a smaller golden geodesic dome. Oh no, what are you doing to me?

She then turns the brochure over at half a dozen color photographs with captions.

 

Colorful reef fishes against a coral background form settings of beauty for any visitor’s camera.   

 

Under the Golden Dome trained sea lions and educated porpoises entertain.   

 

Wow, that text. It communicates more about the earnestness and excitement of that age (يعبر عن حماسهم الناصع). It’s pure poetry, Rama says. Next you’ll be telling me about Alph, the sacred river, which runs through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea.

 

في زَنادو* أصدر قبلاي خان
قراراً ببناء قبّةِ ابتهاج فخمةٍ :
حيث جرى النهر المقدَّس، ألفْ،**
خلالَ كهوفٍ لا يستطيع إنسان إدراكَ مداها
أسفلَ إلى بحرٍ لا تطلع عليه شمسٌ

Haha, some other  strange reference.

Earnest people from another age, unspoiled, who could be enraptured simply by a fish in a porthole.

Yes, so you can imagine the surprise of young Ross B. pulling up in his station wagon to the Aquatarium on that sunny day. First an enormous pirate ship, and now this time as he pulls into the parking lot it looks as though they have arrived at a space station, or a sea base. Imagine Ross waiting timidly by the side of his father as he waits in line for a ticket.

I point at another spot on the brochure.

You can see in this picture the large shotcrete grotto built above the ticket window, an underwater ferryland inhabited by mermaids and sea creatures. Ross staring up at what would be for him a gargantuan diorama of fantasy. A shark framed by fake concrete, snarling down at Ross, the scaled tail of a mermaid propped up sitting on the edge of the rock shelf, so close Ross can almost touch it. He hides behind his fathers leg, clutching onto his pants, hiding from the glassy  glare of Poseidon staring down from atop his shotcrete throne.

Once out of the blinding sunlight of the parking lot, Ross’ family would be greeted by a night’s sky of aquamarine nebulas, as their eyes adjusted it would be become clear that these were not nebulas but rather a hallway of windows looking in on bright coral aquariums, filled with hundreds of kinds of technicolor fish, gawking and puckering their lips back at young Ross. (الشاب روس).

 

Undersea “picture windows” on two levels enable visitors to view panorama of life below. 

 

The family enters a curvilinear hall, two stories with a balcony, all along the outer wall is a gallery of windows looking out at various aquariums, including the big central tank where the main show takes place. Ross visits each one, gazing up on the assortment of fans and spiny rocks and swaying sea grass. His eyes are transfixed, feeling like he has submerges into the depths of the ocean, he forgets to breathe. This is what the waves conceal in its depths, its hidden crustaceans and urchins and curtain tailed fish and manta ray who slowly beats its enormous wings and coasts by. A fish with clown yellow sides turns around behind a fork shaped rock and looks him directly in the eye. The fish stares back.

I can’t believe my eyes! He says to himself, a stranger next to him chuckles.

Ross! Come look at this! He breaks the stare and looks across the curvilinear hall. His mother is pointing at a window looking in on the main aquarium tank.

 

Dancing girl skin divers feed the porpoises and other marine species. 

 

Out in the hazy green ether (أثير), he sees something moving. It’s a woman! Ross can faintly make out the figure of someone in a banana yellow swimsuit with a little flailed skirt, breathing with scuba gear, being circled by an assortment of every size of fish. Grouper, Saw Fish, Tortoise, cobia (سكل). They close in and snatch things from her hand. Bubbles steam out of the side of her face and fish swim through the airy curtain. She’s feeding the fish! Ross’s dad hoists him up onto a small ledge they’ve installed so that he can get a better look. He can’t believe his eyes! (العيون لا تُصدق) The diving girl waives at the window, Ross waives back. He sees behind her another dark figure approaching, it has a fin, is it a shark?!

Watch out! He wants to tap on the glass to warn her. Ross’ mother pulls his hands away, no Ross it’s okay, that’s a porpoise.

 

Porpoises, most intelligent of the creatures of the sea, are genuine crowd pleasers. 

 

An announcement comes on the speaker in the curvilinear hall, it is time for the main attraction! The crowd makes its way to the stairs and Ross takes his father’s hand. They emerge out into a stadium where men in fedoras and crisp white shirts, taking it all very seriously, take their seats in the grandstand. Women in triangular sunglasses and belted dresses, taking it all very seriously. Ross tries looking down into the pool to see the scuba diving woman, but can’t look down into the tank from where he’s sitting. A man dressed in all white wearing a milkman hat struts out with a metal bucket of fish and takes the microphone. He explains some facts about the tank, that it’s 100 feet in diameter, 22 ½ feet in depth, containing 1 ¼ million gallons of filtered sea water, which is circulated at the rate of over 1,900 gallons per minute.

 

and then before you know it it’s time for the

 

“Flipper Stand.” The Aquatarium’s family of sea lions bag of tricks is endless at showtime. They seem to enjoy the show more than the crowd does. 

 

Ross can’t believe his eyes, these enormous man-sized creatures clapping their paws and listening to the instructions of the trainer, who communicates back to them. They seem to smile, their whiskers upturned at the corners. They mount some type of striped cylinder and lift their flippers into the air. They line up and each receive a fish. One hoists its back end up rests it on the other, creating what the trainer calls a “sealbarrow.” Ross laughs and laughs and tugs on his mom’s shoulder to make sure she understand the joke as well. The seals line up and each receive a fish and then dive back into the water so that the next sea creature can take its turn. There is the fin again, but Ross knows better this time. The porpoise sticks its head up out of the water and speaks in chirps. Ross gasps. This creature communicates too. The man in white tosses an orange ball and the animals starts pushing it along the surface of the water. It leads the ball over to another edge of the pool and then pops it up into the air. It goes through a hoop! Then the trainer fetches a large ring attached to a cross beam and brings it close to the water. Everyone starts clapping and cheering as the fin zooms around the circumference of the tank, picking up speed, and then leaping out of the water and through the hoop.

 

“Thor,” one of the Aquarium’s educated porpoises likes traveling in the “best circles.” 

 

Ross looks up at his father, also wearing a Fedora, and he smiles down at him. He is impressed as well. But now look at this.

If this wasn’t enough the man in the milkman hat walks over to a mechanical crows nest, which is hoisted up high above the middle of the pool, where more fins circle. One is bigger than all the rest, it zooms around the circumference of the tank, picking up speed, and then leaping out of the water, it is a whale!!

 

“Jonah,” 1600-lb. whole, leaps for food. 

 

As I finish narrating the water show, I reach into my backpack to pull out the bright red view-master. (فيو ماستر) and hold it behind my back. I tell Rama to close her eyes. It is now time for us to submerge and explore the depths of the ocean ourselves. I hold the viewfinder over my eyes and click until the wheel of images has moved to one of the hall of windows. I take it and hold it gently over Rama’s eyes, she can feel the lenses against her face and she opens her eyes. She squeals!

OMG it’s 3-D.

She reaches out her hand as if to try to touch the fish. What is this? She reaches her hands up to the contraption being held up to her eyes and takes hold of it.

Oh! I remember seeing these on tv when I was a kid. I didn’t realize this is what they did. This is incredible.

I tell her I have other reels of tourist sites, a big ream of them from my grandfather’s collection. She narrates what she can see through the view-finder. A porpoise in mid-flight, it’s Jonah! You can see the splash coming right for you.  A genuine crowd pleaser. A porpoise bouncing a ball off its nose, right into the lens. Another image is of the shotcrete grotto overhang above the ticket window to the Aquatarium. Wow, you can see the stiff, vacant looks of the stone mermaids, it’s like I’m really there!

With her eyes in another decade I can look unabashedly at the rest of her. I like how she looks. I like how she dresses. She flips the dial on the viewfinder and is swarmed by seat turtles and sea stars. She lets out a little laugh. I like the little sounds of excitement she makes, not like she can’t control them but that she isn’t trying to suppress them. I like how she is curious and uneasily satisfied. I like the color of her skin and the color of her hair. I like how an uncertainty about whether or not she likes me is giving way to a certainty that we’re having fun together.

She sets down the viewfinder and smiles back at me.

I can’t believe my eyes!

 

Driving test (تَشَدَّقَ)

 

We pull into the parking lot of the DMV. It is almost full so Rama expertly parallel parks in a corner of the lot. I applaud her. She says nothing can compare to trying to park in Beirut.

 

Let me get it all out once and for all. We’ve done a lot of driving the last couple of days. The car is a technology which has allowed us to see so much, to travel to the far corner of this city. I guess city is too generous a word, something implying a unitary logic or structure. We’ve travelled all across this sprawling metropolitan area, this undifferentiated and generic patchwork of scatterized living and superfluous shopping, this metastasizing construction site. But every place we’ve travelled, in general, looks like everyplace else. Nicer and worse variations of the same drywall and plywood construction. It seems to go on forever. 

It reminds me of being a young kid, looking out the window captive as my mom drove me someplace, to the supermarket or the home goods store. I could never tell from looking out the window how far we had gone, or how much farther we had to go. It all looked the same back then even when I was living there everyday. Whenever I tried to go off and explore on foot or by bicycle in middle school I was often cut-off before too long travelling in any direction by an avenue or a highway. My friends lived too far away to get to by myself, and so I continued being reliant on my parents for rides. Rides. Getting rides. Your whole life a series of getting rides. As a species we evolved to stand up off of our hands and walk on our back legs, conquering the entire world’s habitats with our opposable thumbs and stalking gate, but now here in the era of decadence we’ve devolved and now need a ride to do anything. A ride to get to school. A ride to see a friend. A ride to buy a carton of milk. We’ve built ourselves a civilization of self-willed invalidism.  

I wouldn’t have been able to find the words to express it back then, but as a kid I knew something was wrong.  The way we’d set everything up. Even though I was born here, it felt like something was off. That sense of injustice and the absurd is channeled, in apolitical american cultural production, into a more nebulous hatred and railing against the suburbs. Half of punk music is complaining about it. But this confuses the symptom with the cause. It’s not the box stores and the ranch style homes which make the world into a scatterized hellscape, if they were all closer together, you could just walk between them. That would be nice actually. It would certainly give you more room for other things, like mangrove forests. No, what makes the landscape so inhospitable is the cars!     

And I knew this in high school, I just didn’t know how to express it. Cars are a religion, cars are the water we’re swimming in. So my way of expressing things was to be a pain in the ass. I was always bumming rides from friends, or showing up an hour late because I insisted on taking the bus. The one thing I refused to do was drive myself. It was the principle of the thing. It was as though I wanted to prove that a normal human being, left only to their natural appendages, couldn’t navigate this habitat. 

When I think about it, now that I have the words, that’s the real reason I left. People move to the Big City to become famous or to become successful, city of dreams and what have you. Working at bars I’ve met a million aspiring movie stars. But I didn’t come to the city to be successful. I just wanted to be in a place that was scaled and built for the human, not the car. A city inhabited by pedestrians and organized around public transportation. Where you can walk to a park and sit in a park. Even though it’s the farthest thing from nature, it still feels more natural than being in this sprawling, low-slung junk yard of cheaply built chain stores and tract housing. I just love living in the city because I never have to get into a car. 

More than anybody, my dad hated all of this. He wanted me to be a normal person and drive a car like anyone else. He loved cars, he had two or three that he kept as playthings. Whenever he’d pick me up for his visits, it would be in a convertible. It was completely beyond his comprehension how someone could see cars as anything but manifestations of the American dream: luxury and convenience!  Eventually, as I got closer and closer to finishing high school as a cripple in his eyes, he was fed up. I imagine so were many of my friends who acted as my chauffeurs. I could only put up a fight so long before my youthful aspirations for a simple and moral lifestyle were ignored, and like everyone as a rite of passage I took Drivers Ed and had to take a driver’s test in order to get my license. Sitting in the classroom felt like being in a reeducation camp, forced to listen to enemy propaganda. Once the course was over, there was nothing left to do but take the final exam.

 But whereas the real estate test I purposefully flunked the test, when I came here to this DMV and actually took my driving test, I earnestly flunked. I sat in the driver’s seat with the examiner in the passengers seat, just like in the movies. He has his little judgemental clipboard and kept furiously writing notes as I tried my best to remember what I had learned in class and during practice. But my instincts took over. I failed to yield while entering the highway, I ran through several stoplights, and I almost rear ended a dump truck. And failed utterly at being able to parallel park. 

My dad was furious, he said I failed on purpose. He didn’t believe me when I said I just couldn’t do it. But it was the truth. There are things in life that you can find of such little value, so useless that you refuse to participate, that when you’re finally forced to adopt them, blackmailed by the normal maintenance of modern living, that you have so much antipathy towards them that even when you try to take it seriously your instincts fail at them. You’re physically unable to comply. 

Anyways, that’s why I can’t drive.    

My eyes are closed, but I am awake. As much as I’d like to go back to the dream, get another chance to peek at Rama, it won’t let me play it back again.  I want to savor my erotic dream (ihtilam) I want to see her naked, but instead I’ll have to be forebearing (halim). What a strange dream, what is the key to its connected meaning?

I reach out to her but again she’s gone. I sit up and look over at the ottoman. It’s empty too. I don’t want to fail this test. We have two more whole day’s to fill and all I’ve come up with is a power plant and going to play shuffleboard with a random girl I went to high school with. I’m failing this test. Rama obviously wants to learn more about where I grew up, but I can’t even remember most of it, all I have is rawasib al-dhakira. And she certainly doesn’t want to hear me continue to go on complaining about parking lots. I should take a page from Dick Pope. If he could sell the swamp, I can too. I need to find my own “thematic thrust.”  But first I need some coffee. This drinking is going to kill me.

I sit at the island in my uncle’s kitchen and fidget with the stupid plastic coffee maker. I can’t seem to turn it on. I look around to see if there is a part missing, looking through the drawers. Dozens of wine glasses, empty cabinets, I look around the island. Next to the stand mixer is an enormous espresso machine. You’ve got to be kidding me.

It grinds fresh beans, it smells delicious, it pours a beautiful looking shot. Halleluiah, I say out loud. I look nervously but my uncle has already shut himself into his home office to do his normal evil day of work. Where is Rama? I start wandering around the house but I can’t find her anywhere. Not in the movie theater, not in the ballroom. This espresso is so good I immediately make myself another. She’s not in the exercise room, not in the breakfast nook. Did she flee in the middle of the night? I wouldn’t blame her.

I wander outside to help myself to a banana, the only real food in the house. The wide artificial plane of green out in the golf course beyond is glistening (gad) in the morning light, the artificial green continues down the slope into the artificial pond which is covered with a layer of green algae from all of the fertilizer sediment (rasb) that is used to keep the grass so green. I hear a splash. There she is. She is doing laps.

Rama, in her bathing suit, is a squiggly figure underneath the water, swimming down below the surface. I watch her squiggle shoot across the middle of the pool, pushing off the wall with her legs, and then moving her hands like a frog once she’s run out of momentum. Halfway across the pool she dodges a long plastic tube which is attached to the pool vacuum at the bottom, a little robot on wheels sucking up leaves and dead bugs and other rawasib from the curved tile bottom.

I sit in one of the reclining chairs and take the last sip of my espresso. I look down at the bottom at the dregs rawasib, trying to read my fal. We’re having a good time, but I can sense some disappointment with her. I’m not giving her what she wants, we came here to see where I’m from, what I actually need to find is my skeleton key.

Good morning. This time she is talking to me.

Good morning, how’s the water?

Amazing. I’m just finishing up my laps.

How long have you been awake.

About an hour or two, your uncle and me had a nice chat, shared a conciliatory smoothie. He told me that your story ended up proving him right.

Ha, how’s that?

It proved that you would have made a great commercial real estate agent. Not only do you know about preemption, you found a way to intercede (shafa3) between us.

No thanks, that was one test I was happy to fail (rasib).

Oh My God, that’s it.

What’s it?

I know what we’re going to do today.

The Bridge

We go over an enormous bridge in the morning light, up in the sky, blue like the screen of a television when you first put in a VHS tape. The water is deep blue as well. The Florida continental shelf somewhere out there in the ocean, the cold Manatees huddled in in the channels, the now 100 year old scars of trawling work, the floor of the shallow bay covered in muck, and plastic beads, and old boat motors, and pelican skeletons, and PCBs and beer bottles and citrus crates and railroad spikes and out-of-service telegraph cable, and Spanish doubloons and Tocobaga fertility statues and mastodon tusks and cretaceous-era fossils.

 

البوعة  – sinkhole

 

When we arrive on the scene, it is still roped off in police tape. We park on the far side of a casual dining restaurant parking lot (مطعم غير رسمي سريع) to make sure we aren’t the next victims, and walk through the drive through and around the building over to the crime scene. We avoid attracting the attention of the police and creep up and try to peer down into the enormous black hole that has formed. It has sucked down a circular piece of the parking lot, and taken a few stop lot blocks along with it, maybe there is even a car down there. Probably nobody got hurt, but we can’t help but laugh at this frozen black tar whirlpool, something a cartoon character would fall into. We crane our necks but, without going past the caution tape, we can’t see to the bottom.

It only took 5 minutes perusing the unread local newspaper left on my uncle’s front lawn for me to find news about the latest incident. It’s a daily occurrence these days, as frequent and normal as a car crash or a mass shooting. Sure enough, on page 23, next to an article about a hamburger and classic cars festival, was a short story about the latest sinkhole.

Rama looks at me confusingly and I tell her ah yes an explanation. I look through my backpack, now filled with a file folder filled with papers and brochures and maps and my field guide and a couple old souvenirs and a tape recorder that I found rifling around in my uncles garage. I stand out in the parking lot and she sits on the hood of the car. Rama looks at me, I’ve created a sense of anticipation. I’m ready, ready to debase myself, to Sell the swamp. I pull out the pith helmet (خوذة بيث) I used to wear when I was a skipper on the Jungle Cruise from the bag. Now I am the Native informant.

Thank you for being here, er, Welcome to the Tampa Metropolitan Area Parking Lot Grand tour.  Egypt has the pyramids, China has the Great wall. The great American landscape is distinguished by the ubiquity of its parking lots. Parking lots for everything and everywhere. Parking lots for churchs, parking lots for markets. Parking lots for forests.  But as we will see today, many parking lots are not what they seem. They are merely the asphalt veil from behind which the historical city as phantasmagoria beckons to the flâneur. Oftentimes they can cover wonders of nature, or may be haunted by long-gone wonderlands. Sometimes they may look featureless, but they can be the site of important personal dramas. We may build parking lots to store our cars, but other things (tatarasib) settle there as well.  

The great Dick Pope, the amusement park prophet, taught us that we don’t need some elaborate fantasy to be entertained, we can luxuriate in the world that is already there. All that is needed is the right theme to organize our amusement, the skeleton key for understanding where I grew up. And so may I welcome you to the world’s first parking lot themed open-air amusement park:  A place I like to call Rasab-Land. A place where you can find rasab and rawasib and rasoob and tarsiib and tarasib, a land where things sink to the bottom,  remain fixed or stuck, and where people  fail. And so, naturally, our first destination is a sinkhole!

 

I gesture at the hole. Rama tries looking in again. Its blackness has piqued her interest.  She can’t see what’s down there, but I can tell her, I have read all of the descriptions of Karst formation and Hydromorphology in the Field Guide.

 

If we are thinking of the theme of sinking, then let’s sink down to the very bottom of everything: geology! What is below us? Where does that hole go? Where are we now? A parking lot, it’s true, but also on the Florida peninsula, and what is the Florida peninsula, not physically or politically, but as a fact of physical reality. It is first and foremost a porous plateau of karst limestone sitting atop bedrock that first emerged. What is Karst? Karst means, basically that Limestone, a type of sedimentary rock, that is filled with holes and fissures and fractures and caverns and aqueducts. We’re in fact standing on an enormous piece of Swiss cheese! 

But where do all of these holes come from you ask? As rain falls, it pulls CO2 from the atmosphere, creating carbonic acid, which has the characteristic of dissolving limestone rock. After every rainstorm, which here in Florida are legion at least going back to the last Ice Age, CO2 laced water seeps underground and slowly erodes the limestone underneath, creating underground holes and caverns. Thousands and millions of years and these holes get bigger and bigger, they become interconnected, eventually forming enormous underground rivers and lakes and caverns. They link up and form one subterranean water body that we call an aquifer. As the water flows and pools, it creates even more erosion. When the time is right, without warning, the hole will reach the surface of the ground, and collapse. As the ground collapses into the limestone chambers below, it pulls in whatever civilization there might be built above it down with it. Suddenly your Elementary School, your Chicken Wing Hut, your convention center, is cast down to the depths, made another sediment layer before its geologic time. 

She asks about where all the moving water goes. I reach into my backpack and pull out one of my dad’s old geological survey maps. It shows the Western coast of Florida with the different types of ground cover, current paths for underground water heading from upland down to the coast, and bright red dots for reported sinkholes. Rama loves a map. She points out the concentration of dots around Tampa Bay. I think it’s working.

 

Actually, Tampa is ground zero for sinkholes, it’s no wonder we haven’t been swallowed up ourselves. Pinellas County  leads the state in sinkhole claims. Growing up, not a month passed without some neighbor having their car sunk, or a baseball game being cancelled because the field suddenly had a crater in the middle of it. But sinkholes are more than just a routine annoyance, a small-scale disaster leading to insurance claims and home remodelings. They represent, along with their peril, the hidden element that makes Florida a wonderland in the first place. Southern Belles in the rose garden, the human kite, all made possible by sinkholes.  See for yourself.

 

I pull out one of the old brochure for Weeki Wachee Springs. Smiling mid-century face smile from inside the litter of a glass bottom boat.

Oh my God, where did you get this brochure?

It will be explained all in due time! What is important now is that many of the most successful water-themed attractions in Florida owe their existence to the underground aquifer created by the karst system! Take, for example, the fountain of youth that we visited yesterday. It was “discovered” that is to say created when someone tapped into the pressurized underground aquifer while building a fishing pier. Other famous springs, Weeki Wachee Spring and Tarpon Spring and Silver Springs, places where tourists flocked to see water shows nd where the manatees sought refuge in warmed waters, were all natural manifestations of this simple underlying hydrogeological reality. Indeed, it is responsible for the pockmarked, lake-ridden landscape which sparked Dick Pope’s imagination. A simple gardener transformed by the aquifer into an imagineeer, a modest botanical garden turned into the Water Ski Capital of the World. What made Cypress Gardens the wetland paradise it once was, along with countless other Florida attractions, were the many lakes and springs which were, in reality,  merely sinkholes that had filled in, overtime, with water.  

I tell Rama to turn the brochure over to see an aerial image of the park. There is the same glass bottom boat, puttering around the center of a perfectly round lake.

 

 

 

تريجرلاند – treasureland

We arrive at another parking lot, this time one belong to a pawn shop. Rama gets out of the car and takes an excited look around, but there is nothing to see. Not even a hole in the ground. Everything of interest here must be conjured. Luckily I have the right incantation to be able to do it. I pull out another brochure and read directly from it.

 

An exciting adventure in piracy awaits you as your galleon sails through lifelike animation in the swashbuckling world of the buccaneers. Stroll through an authentic early-Florida fishhouse and enjoy our fine marine museum. Thrill to our stirring theater show aboard Jose Gaspar’s own flagship. All for one low admission. 

 

Rama looks at me confused. The cement, the parked cars, the dying grass, the manicured bushes, the stucco exterior of the pawn shop, it all looks like the dull present to her. She says she doesn’t get it. I begin to conjure.

 

X marks the spot (“إكس” يحدد الموقع), but in order to find our treasure, we will need more than a shovel. The natural world leaves its history in sediment, but for this chapter of Florida history we only have a few rawasib of the past. We must imagineer the rest. So let us imagineer. Imagine this same barren parking lot 50 years ago. Let us summon the memory of a young boy named Ross B., who has traveled here with his mom and dad in the back of a station wagon, sweating underneath his coon-skin cap, dreaming of alligators and pirates. So far the drive has been flat and boring, the same landscape of billboards and ornamental barns that we see today. But then, suddenly, the family station wagon turns off of Busch avenue and there, floating magically on the asphalt of an enormous parking lot, is a pirate ship! 

 

I hand Rama the brochure. She can see the pirate ship, moored in the asphalt.

Ross B. a young boy born in another age, one not saturated everywhere with middle-brow  entertainment, whose cultural commons had not yet been fenced in by existing IPs, and so he’s never seen anything like this. His heart races, he can’t wait to leap out of the station wagon. The ship’s gangplank is dropped right onto the cement, its towering white masts blowing in the breeze, the word “Treasureland” emblazoned in red letters across the main sail. 

Without pausing Ross runs right up the gangplank into the ship, not even waiting for his family. So he is caught all alone when he first comes face to face with Jose Gaspar himself. He cries out in surprise. Although from our vantage point in the present we can see this is just a teenager on his summer job wearing cheap makeup and some baggy pants, Ross’ heartbeat quickens. He looks back into the blinding sunlight of the parking lot to try to find his family. Gaspar reaches out towards the boy with this cheap metal hand hook, and the boy runs into his mother, who has just made it up the gangplank, and wraps his arms around her legs for protection.

The family comes back together and walks through the narrow, glass-buoy and hemp rope festooned hallway to make it to the main attraction. Another pirate, also with hook hand, waves his hand towards a smaller pirate ship, the size of a VW Beetle, that is slowly moving by in a line of other pirate ships on a track. The family all quickly get in and sit down. Ross has no idea what to expect, he’s never been on a dark ride before, never heard anyone talk about them, or seen them represented on television or movies. So it is absolutely captivating as it creeks into the darkness to the pre-recorded sound of sea shanties, towards an illuminated room in the distance. This turns out to be a travel through time, back centuries, to the golden age of piracy. Suddenly Ross finds himself as a fellow conspirator, two pirates drink ale out mugs at an inn in Port Royal, counting their doubloons and pearl necklaces. The pirate in the bright red coat, continually raising a toast to his partner in crime, who is consumed in sorting through his pile of treasure. Ross is terrified that his family will be discovered by the bloodthirsty bandits and shot at with muskets or taken captive. This he has read about in his comic books. But the pirates pay them no mind as Ross’ family wheel by under the cover of darkness. They roll along to the next diorama.  

If we were there now sitting in the pirate ship cart immediately behind Ross’ family, accustomed to the world class imagineering of Disney World, we would have to muffle our laughter at this badly misshapen and stiff wax mannequins, capable of making only one repetitive motion, eternally stiff and frozen in their dioramas, pillaging a caribbean town, getting drunk in a tavern, engaged in a naval battle with a rival ship, and then finally a simulated underwater scene of the sunken ship as mermaids and various undersea creatures played with the pirates treasure. 

 

Rama looked intently at each of the photos in the brochure, tiny glimpses of another time and place.

 

But for young Ross B. Treasureland’s centerpiece dark ride was just as the brochure promised, a thrill to his young heart. We can learn from young Ross ourselves, let ourselves be thrilled by a procession of dioramas, windows into reanimated distant worlds, driving around in our little car. 

 

While Rama reads the information about the gift shop, I reach into my backpack and pull out the small cotton purse I found in my uncle’s garage. I look out on the parking lot and point to a point where the parking lot spaces come together. X marks the spot! I tell Rama, and toss the bag onto the ground.  She reaches down to grab it and pulls out a plastic bead necklace, a faded plastic chalice, and a handful of plastic gold coins. Each of them are marked with the faded insignia of Treasureland.

 

 

 الوارث

We pull into the entrance of the parking lot, an attempt at an ornamental boulevard, flanked unevenly by date palms on one side and live oak saplings on the other. Rama drives past a few divider medians planted with a few sickly crepe myrtles, and then parks in a spot between two supersize trucks. Rama gets out and takes her spot on top of the hood of the car again to listen to me speak. I squint to make sure there aren’t any super size truck owners inside of the supersize trucks, then put my helmet back on. It’s actually nice to have the shade. I should probably buy a real hat. I may look like I’m on Safari but at least Rama thinks its funny. I squint to see her, no she’s being serious, she giving me a docent’s reverence.

I take a deep breath and steal myself. The geology and the mediumship were the easy part. The hard part is what I’ll do next, something I never do, but something I’ll do for her. For her, I will talk honestly about my family’s history and my values.

Greece has the Amphitheater, Rome has the Coliseum. The great American theater is the parking lot! Triumphs, heartbreak, political intrigue, it’s all happening here in the parking lot. Ummm…I say losing the bit…and that’s true for me as well. I thought I would show you a few parking lots that were important in my own life as well. In keeping with the theme, they are parking lots where I failed tests. This is Manatee Technical College. About ten years ago, I failed a test and failed my family.

It goes all the way back to when my grandfather came to Florida in 1960, in just one of the many waves it has seen of European conquest and white settlement. He, like others, was lured to Florida by its promise of opportunity. What he found was a motorists paradise. He found it newly paved in parking lots and parkways. Alongside every inch of these roads he found a small-business paradise: motor courts and shopping centers and diners and of course, your beloved roadside attractions. Everybody was making money and selling trinkets. But my grandfather didn’t just want to open up a pancake hut or an alligator house. He wanted a real piece of the peninsula, he wanted the land itself. And it wasn’t long before he had surveyed the area, learned the surveyor’s business, and gathered the necessary tools of the trade. In just a few years he was ready to open his own business. An immigrant’s gumption. And he obtained all of these things not a moment too soon because as soon as my Grandpa had started his own commercial real estate company, he must have learned about the most important real estate deal the state had ever seen. In 1971, Disney World opened.

It’s funny. You’ve talked so much about roadside attractions, even before you gave me your taxonomy I knew what you meant. I already knew what they were from experience. There were a few ones still left here or there when I was a kid, but you could also tell that the glory days had passed. I had never really put it together, but that must have been how my grandpa made his money. Or at least that’s how the timing must have worked out. I never really thought about how my Grandpa’s business benefited from the end of the Golden Age of Florida mom-and-pop tourism. But it makes sense.

It definitely seems that way from everything he left behind. This morning while you were doing laps in the swimming pool, I went into my uncle’s garage because I remembered he had a lot of stuff from not only my childhood, but my dad and uncle’s as well. The american pathological predilection for hoarding. I thought he’d have some ‘Floridiana’ artifacts you’d enjoy, a couple cool maps, but I couldn’t believe just how much he actually had.  An enormous collection, souvenirs, brochures, insurance maps, topographical surveys, cassettes and video tapes. I thought he was just an amateur collector, but I realize now he must have been driving around scouting out the territory. When he could sense their time was coming to an end, its parking lot empty and its signs no longer illuminated, I imagined he would make his move. Not to save and preserve these places, but to buy the land they sat upon, and then to promptly resell them to the hotel chains, and pawn shops and storage facilities. Remodeling an entire world out of existence. I can only assume that’s what happened. What I do know is that he made a fortune.

He would eventually pass on his business to his two idiot sons, one who you’ve met, and one who was my father. Growing up, I never really understood what any of them did for the living, but we all understand more or less what’s going on. Whatever it was, I knew it was morally dubious. And I mean morally in terms of our morals, in terms of being committed to the work of taking something historical or local or natural and turning into something new and generic and ugly. I could just tell. They had a kind of villain’s pride. My uncle and my dad were proud of their wealth, speaking of their business like it was an empire, so I assumed whatever they thought to be proud of must by definition be evil.

I intentionally stayed away from learning the details. But it wasn’t for a lack of trying on my dad’s part. He was always trying to brag about the latest deals he had going on, speaking about small businesses going into bankruptcy like they were marks, explaining how smart the financial mechanism they had come up with to make money on the deal. Words like preemption and foreclosure and liens. It went over my head, but I could just understand that none of the stories ever had to do with making something that somebody would use, or doing something for someone that would help them. In his stories my father was the only hero and the only other character was money itself. Sometimes while driving around he’d point out some construction site, or some new development, and tell me that was him that did that. But he wasn’t going to be the one building it, and he wasn’t going to be the one working there, so I thought he always meant was that he was the one responsible for the overall uglying of the world. And I was more or less right.

It’s kind of a crazy coincidence, you know. We’re lucky there are any UFO Strip clubs or Morris the Cats left! You’ve been staying in the house that the destruction of Roadside America built, it’s not that I’ve been keeping it a secret or anything, I honestly just hadn’t put it together. Here you are, yearning for the golden age and all the while you’re riding around with one of Genghis Khan’s kids.

Which brings me, finally, to this parking lot. My dad of course wanted me to join the family business, he basically assumed I would follow in his footsteps. He didn’t worry or pay attention to what actually interested me, or what was becoming my own moral view. In order for him to help me pay for college applications, he made the deal that I also had to study and take the real estate licensing test, a requirement for becoming a commercial real estate agent in the state of Florida. I took the deal. Studying was a breezee. Licensing, Property Ownership. A dog could pass that test. On weekends when my father had visitations, he’d take me out to steak houses and quiz me. I got all the answers right. He had never been so proud. I wish I had known before then that was all it took.

And I was more than happy to grant my father’s wish and come take the exam. And I did right here at Manatee Technical College, which was a test center. He drove me here and sat in this parking lot where he gave me some pep talk about my future, about building wealth and becoming independent, and about having a grind mindset. I listened to every word. He gave me a patrimonial handshake and saw me off to the test.

As promised, I sat down and took the test. I knew the answers to every question. I made sure to avoid each one on the scantron. I didn’t even get a question right by accident. 0%. The results came in the mail on a little print-out certificate. 0%. But it was too late for my dad, he’d already paid for my advanced placement tests and the SAT, all the college apps. He came at me furiously with the cheap little diploma, screaming at me, and I calmly explained to him, with a villain’s pride, that I did everything he asked. Though it may be a  deceitful interpretation, I stuck to the letter of the contract. I studied, I took the test. He never said I had to pass. He didn’t know what to say. I told him he should be proud, that type of shady business dealing I learned from him.

 

 

My uncle looks so strange, almost fully reclined on the marble table top in the middle of his outdoor kitchen. His arm is twisted under his chest to support him and, with his little paunch and fiendish little grin, he looks like one of those little baby angels on an Italian marble fountain. He is careful to perch his wineglass on the table in front of him, but in his excitement he threatens to bump into the bowl of fruit behind him as he wriggles over the marble surface.

Trying to tamp down his giddiness, he tells Rama immigrants deserve to be jailed because they committed a crime, that it would have been better if they had stayed in their countries and tried to improve their homeland instead of sneaking into this country in order to take advantage and live off of what we built. He tells her that they do not share our values, that they want a free offering and, in a gesture of direct incitement, he implies that they carry diseases.

But Rama is the one who is actually calm. She never interrupts my uncle, even when he begins to repeat himself, because she knows that trying to  interrupt him would constitute an emotional reaction. Rhetorical weakness. Instead, she lets him get carried away. So much so that everytime he says something truly vile, he  deflects by saying that he appreciated that she has a sense of humor. You know your generation can’t take a joke anymore, but you know I’m mostly joking. Mostly.

As for me, I’ve retreated into the rhetorical corner. Partially overwhelmed by the enjoyment of getting drunk for the second time, this time on something that tastes good, and partially unsure how to navigate between two people who, honestly, I don’t know very well. I can’t believe I thought it would be a good idea to bring Rama to stay in the house of my dad’s even more cretinous sibling. What a weird thing to do. Rama said we’d stay with her great aunt in San Juan, I thought, I have relatives too, I didn’t emerge out of a cocoon.

The sun has set and the pool has turned into an illuminated white box and casts an upside-down shadow on our faces, making all of our facial expressions indecipherable. My uncle is smiling and talking about a tv news segment he saw about migrant caravans and Rama is frowning and matter of factly calling him gullible. They’re both being increasingly direct, and increasingly vicious. I’m becoming increasingly quiet. But I’m the one who started it.

It all started with my naive question. I had sort of half expected a boring, civil evening. Rama and I had both had an understanding that we would be nice and listen to him talk about all of his possessions and trips to Europe, but that we wouldn’t give my uncle what he really wanted, a chance to spar with his ideological enemies. Everyday I’m sure he spends hours watching cable television, the pundits riling him up as they argue out loud with themselves, showing again and again how to win in an argument against the democrats and the feminists and the cultural Marxists with cool disdain. Facts over feelings. What he really wants, but can’t buy. There are no cultural Marxists at the pool club. Instead, he gets my out of the blue request for me and Rama to stay with him, and now I know why he was so welcoming, he is hoping to goad us after a few bottles of wine into talking about politics.

I could see that Rama loved the challenge, peaking out despite that look of hers when the conversation is beneath her intelligence, she assumed it would be easy to play the game. And she would keep her cool because There were no stakes in convincing some rich guy out in the suburbs of anything. Not like a grad student was going to barge in and use her skills leading seminar sections to overcome a lifetime of experience of corporate media and privilege. But I think she underestimated what it would be like to have an argument on two completely separate wavelengths.

I watched it happen slowly, through the empathetic clarity of my own drunkenness. The last time they spoke the same language was in his above ground wine cave, perusing the stacks. My uncle asked if we preferred red or white, and Rama said it depended on what the red was and what the white was, he laughed and mentioned some different French and Italian words (names of grapes? Names of places?) and she knew what each of them meant. They leaned into this shared vocabulary. But I could see the look of frustration for the first time on  her face when she asked which of the wines were natural, and he answered well they were all natural. It was all downhill from there.

My uncle poured each of us a fish bowl of red wine, and we clinked our glasses together. Here’s to a respectful conversation, he said with a grin, like announcing the start of a wrestling match. He immediately began by asking sooo, were we were mad that the primary was rigged against our candidate. I looked at Rama. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. Our candidate? Rama didn’t know either, or maybe she just didn’t let on. She was very clear to me about being above electoralism. That was a share for my uncle, because his concept of politics was informed entirely  from watching cable news. The presidential election was all a ruling class distraction. To Rama the election was the only thing that was in fact unpolitical. It was instead everything else, highway construction and housing tax credits and the public financing of golf courses, that was political.

So she didn’t mind spending most of the first bottle of wine having the Iowa Caucus explained to her. To be honest, she just hadn’t been following closely. I had been busy for the last month thinking only of Rama. Our candidate was doing great, but they were going to steal it from him. Our candidate? My uncle clarified that he meant Bernie,  we were going to vote for Bernie weren’t we, your generation loves Bernie right? We both agreed that we probably would.

My uncle’s eyes lit up, he had found his in. Off he went on his prepared speech, asking us how we could vote for a socialist when communism has failed everywhere it’s been tried. Socialism is evil, and even more than that it’s stupid. It only works until you run out of other people’s money. Human nature is inherently selfish, trying to go against human nature leads to the gulag. You of all people should know that, he said pointing to me. Rama looked at me mildly confused, but didn’t say anything back. My uncle asked us how we’d like having to share all of our possessions with the state? To this Rama gave a simple, unsatisfying shrug.

My uncle realized he was striking too early, and did a tactical retreat by offering us another bottle of wine, apparently something really good and expensive this time based on how Rama squeezed my leg under the table.  Instead of proceeding, right back into politics, he asked me how I liked life as a farmer. I laughed obligingly and told him it was going well. It was more of a teaching job, showing kids where their food comes from. We were going to get the beds ready soon, but we weren’t planting anything at the moment, it’s much colder up in the big city than here, no growing citrus up there, but that I was looking forward to a school group project in the spring, teaching students about incorporating local fruits and vegetables, things they could even grow at home.

Rather than ask about any of that he used it as another opportunity to ask why, if I was so interested in biology, I hadn’t become a doctor. You’re so bright, you could have gotten into a great school, your dad was so disappointed. I used Rama’s same deflective shrug.

There was a pause. We used it to each take a thoughtful sip from our fish bowls. This next bottle of wine tasted expensive, well did it? I don’t have any idea. All I know is I wanted to slosh it around in my mouth longer before swallowing, I felt its complex flavor on my tongue once I had swallowed it, certainly an improvement from the SEXUAL ALLIGATOR. Rama asked about who the winemaker was, but my uncle answered by instead telling us how many cases he had bought of it. Even unable to see her facial expression, illuminated by upside down pool light, I could tell how much that annoyed her.

I stood up to feign admiring the pool area and looked out again at the golf course to look for any birds perched for the night, or any nocturnal animals that might be wandering around. My uncle said they had recently caught and killed an alligator in the golf course pond. I said that was terrible. He agreed, he said it made it dangerous to golf. I meant that it was terrible for the alligator, killed in his own home. Rama said I should tell my uncle all about the plans for the Florida Wildlife Corridor, the one I had just been enthusiastically telling her all about in the car. Now she was the one trying to goad me.

It’s great really, environmental institutions are trying to link up conserved land to create a contiguous belt of conserved land. Once they get the last land purchased and conserved, it should be possible for a Florida Panther to walk uninterrupted from the Florida Keys to Pensacola without being stopped by cars.

No more alligators killed in their own homes, Rama says, trying to rile up my uncle.  It ended up riling only me up. I finished my fishbowl and poured myself another. I am not good at pouring and leave a ring of blood traced by the bottle on the table. I think about the vultures, their freedom, I want to be like them, I am no longer talking to my shithead uncle, Im no longer being judged by him, I’m talking to the animals. Think of it, shut down a few sugar cane farms, stop one or two tract home developments, and we could have 1.7 million contiguous acres of high-priority conservation, and the need for new acquisitions to combat the arrival of between 900 and 1,000 people in Florida each day. Every new car, every surface, and irrigated lawn represents a new barrier against the genetic diversity and survival of 131 endangered animals and 567 endangered plants. Save the beauty of Florida from the squalor of sprawl and scatterization. I realize where I’m getting this attitude from.

My uncle sets down his glass and coughs. This could have been the start of an epic fight, a screaming match over land use, degrowth, industrial agriculture, but none of that was legible as politics to my uncle. After coughing he just said he hoped there’d still be places to golf. Rama has A big upside shadow of a frown. She tries out her own provocation. Golf courses are pesticide-poisoned status symbols for the privileged. She too sounds like the field guide. But she said it with a slightly teasing voice, plausible ironic deniability, like she was also coming around to the idea that a good-spirited fight with my uncle might in fact be fun. He laughed, undisturbed. You’re right, golf is a status symbol, it takes a lot of pesticides to make the grass look good, what’s your point?

My point, she said, is that the land would be better used as literally anything else: a library, public housing, restored habitat for pumas.

My uncle asked her who should get to decide how the land should be used.

Rama said it should be determined democratically.

My uncle said he remembered voting for mayor and city council and that he was pretty sure they decided who got to build the golf course.

At this point She was stuck . Rama couldn’t counter this without being critical of what was meant by democracy, how limited and impoverished his conception of it was, an explanation which for her would most certainly require her to use the term ‘bourgeois democracy,’ which would be dismissed, fairly, as silly. They were at a standstill.

Looks like we could use another bottle. By my count, that would work out to each of us having drank an entire bottle ourselves. My uncle gets up and Rama follows him. Rama tried out teasing my uncle again, saying what she actually meant but pretending it was a joke. She told him she could come along to supervise, she couldn’t trust his taste. He replied by saying I’m sure there’s nothing in here you wouldn’t end up drinking. That is supposed to be an insult, but it doesn’t quite make sense, it actually sounds kind of lecherous, but he laughs loudly over our trying to make sense of it. I also get up to supervise their interaction, which is quickly becoming hazardous. I don’t know what I can actually do. They stand in the wine room talking about wine, now using obscure adjectives rather than foreign names. They seem to be having fun again, but I stand just outside in the hallway trying to keep my ears on them. My eyes fall on an enormous triptych painting, abstract, hanging in an adjacent room. It’s beautiful. The way  certain pattern of color repeats in complementary colors, how a terse arrangement of angles works itself out to a generous synthetic loop by the third panel, I sip the dregs of my glass, and sigh in pleasure, it’s like an abstraction of history itself, a landscape over time, modes of production.

Rama comes out with a bottle under each arm, looks up at me and winks. I have no idea what the wink is in reference to. My uncle comes out next, he also winks at me. There sure is a lot of winking going one.

Are you okay?

Yes, I just, these paintings, I’m overcome, they’re so beautiful, who made them?

Which paintings?

I point into the other room.

Oh, he stares along with me with a look of unfamiliarity.

You know I have no idea, the designer put those up. He pats me on the shoulder and walks back out to the patio.

When I make it back outside he is showing Rama the grilling station and the second refrigerator for his outdoor kitchen, and I asked him if it had to work twice as hard keeping food cold when it spent all day out here in the Florida sun. He opened it up and waved his hand around inside as if to show that it was nice and cold. This is where he mainly kept his breakfast stuff anyways, he liked to have his breakfast milkshake each morning outdoors. I peered into the fridge, and it was a wall of milk jugs on the bottom and thickly packed bananas on the top. America’s pathological predilection for hoarding.

As he hoists himself awkwardly up on the outdoor kitchen counter, I asked why he had both whole milk and skim milk. Which is for the milkshake?

Both!

It turns out he mixed him together to get the right consistency. Rama covers the laughter coming out of her mouth with her hand. Like he’s telling me a business secret, my uncle explains how he pours one half of each jug down the drain and then combines the two half empty jugs. I look down to see a trashcan filled with empty milk jugs. Jesus.

Reclining on the marble, sliding his wine glass in front of him, he admits that he usually didn’t get through a whole jug of that either. But that’s okay, it was all going to support the dairy farmers! And I even recycle them!

This makes me notice another black trashcan. It is filled with uneaten, blackened bananas.

The bananas? Don’t worry about the bananas, my uncle says trying to console me. They’re so cheap, you can get them in 3lb bunches for $1.50 at Costco. And you know, helping out the farmers.

I was genuinely surprised. Wow, how are bananas so cheap?

Rama perked up from her stool on the outside bar. Well it’s certainly not the Latin American farmers getting any of that money.

My uncle loudly scoffs, here we go.

Rama scoffs right back. Do you think there are family farms somewhere down in South America earnestly making these bananas? I bet you have some fantasy in your mind of a family farm, a dairy cow and a pig pen just like some old Looney Toon cartoon. It’s an illusion you no doubt hold onto because it justifies your wasteful lifestyle. This all sounds genuinely aggressive, no covering laugh, no scoff.

But she doesn’t want to miss this opportunity. Instead, she sets down her glass and takes on another tone, one I’m more familiar with but which would not serve her rhetorically.

She says that Bananas were a cash crop at the moment they were introduced, rural communities in Central America had their land bought up, and they become ruthlessly exploited by the American fruit magnates in a state of near-slavery!

No irony, no detachment, She can’t  help herself. She just knew too much about the topic and was going to go for it. She was going to try to bridge the gap between his conception of politics and hers. She was going to try to talk about the political economy.

And she was well prepared for this moment. She had taken a history of the American Overseas Empire in Grad School as part of her research on Tiki Bars and the United Fruit Co. played a leading role. She had all of the most specific and accurate facts to draw on from memory: statistics, dates, names of Gilded Aged Fruit barons and congressional tariff  laws, export volumes. My uncle took sips of his wine, practically lying down on the marbletop, giving  a coy smile as Rama went on triumphantly about hurricanes and fungus, rusting equipment and the moving of production between the Atlantic and Pacific coast, stranded assets and babies born with birth defects. She never raised her voice, having come into possession of a confident and even pace of speaking. My uncle nodded along, as if receptively, as she quoted verses from early 20th century Parnassian poetry, makes reference from a Miguel Ángel Asturias novel,  and is merciless in pulling up her phone and reading a long selection from the memoir of Dartmouth-educated and genocidal madman Victor M. Cater’s term “banana farming and negro management.”

My uncle seems tense, his even tempered release of fake laughter was trailing off as Rama becomes increasingly confident that she has cornered my uncle, playing on his field of facts over feelings. She has so many facts. But her deeply researched analysis of the global banana supply chain was only useful for the conversation she wished she was having. Because once she had finished making a point about how industrial agriculture methods had exhausted the soils and led to waves of migration away from ancestral lands, my uncle finally responded to the one word he picked out for which he had a script.

He says that immigrants don’t know how to take good care of their land, ruin their own farms, and then sneak into this country to do the same here?

Wiggling around on the marble counter, he says well, that just sounds like smart business practice. Maybe if some of these Central American companies had a little more sense and ran good businesses like the people who made this country, like those people,who went to Dartmouth and learned business management instead of being lazy and waiting around in the jungle waiting for handouts. But those people prefer to breed like rabbits. Bad breeding.

My uncle pauses and a glint of anger flashes across his cherubic face. A show of aggression to back up his revelation, admitting that ultimately, despite the corporate media spin, racism hasn’t changed since the gilded age.

One of these wine glasses is about to be smashed.  I have to step in, but I don’t have any facts to offer myself. We don’t grow bananas on the urban farm, it’s all Mid-Atlantic crops, I’m usually teaching kids about the health benefits of brussel sprouts or blowing their little minds by showing them peanuts grow underground. But if I don’t say something soon Rama might try to shove my uncle into the pool. On the other hand, I can’t cut her off, that would be an even worse defeat, wrangling and silencing my woman, what a predictably paternalistic denouement, my uncle would love that. Or, worse, I could concede any point to my uncle. What’s there to concede that isn’t pure dark fantasy?! Nothing of what he’s saying or referring to exists in the real world, it must be nice to be able to draw an argument from that.

Well, what’s to say I can’t. Rather than contradict him, why don’t I exceed him. I’ll make things up too. My uncle is about to say that the images of immigrant children in cages is fake when I stop him, blurting out something without any idea where it’s going:

Have you  heard of the Mosquito Coast Flotilla.

 

Both him and Rama look surprised at me, slumped in my patio chair. My uncle sets his wine glass down. He says he hasn’t, looking over at me surprised and annoyed.

I say You haven’t? I’m surprised, it was just on the news. You didn’t see the big sea caravan?

No, he hadn’t, but he immediately sounds concerned.

Some people are saying it’s a large exodus, a boat lift (هروب ماريل الجماعي) like the ones back in the 1980s, but others are calling it an invasion.  We actually saw some of it today from this nature trail observatory we went to.

We did? Rama asks. Yes, remember the farmland we saw planted at those villas, that’s all part of it. Rama thinks I must be drunk or have lost my mind.

We went up to the observation tower today and while we were looking around we saw these villas on the water, but it looked like they were abandoned, they were covered in banana trees and corn plants, they looked more like a farm than someone’s house. So we asked the park ranger about what the deal was and she told us that those houses had been preempted.  (إكتساب بالشفعة)

Preempted, my uncle asks, sitting up straight on the kitchen island.

Preempted I said.  It’s this crazy scheme that someone figured out. There is this guy, I think he’s from Nicaragua, I think anyways he was running a landscaping business for a long time, cutting people’s grass, trimming hedges, and one day he figures out, he must have a nephew or  something in law school or doing Florida history, he tells him about the Swamp Land Premption Act of 1833, which allows settlers to claim the title to swampland if they would agree to drain the land and turn it to productive, agricultural use. The thing is, almost all of the time there were native people’s living there, but it didn’t matter, as long as the land could be considered to be being used unproductively, the government would legally recognize it as the settlers.. As long as the colonist used it to grow crops, it was theirs.

I don’t get it, my uncle says. I can see that Rama is starting to get it though.

Well this landscaper and his nephew look it up, and apparently the law is still on the books. And it’s written vaguely,  the law states that any settler has the right to lay claim to any land originally surveyed as swampland as long is not currently being used for the production of food. So many of those housing developments built on the bay were all originally swamp, so it’s all applicable to this law, because there may be people living there, but they aren’t using the land “productively” so it doesn’t count.

Just as the law intended! Rama chimes in.

It’s crazy, because the way settler is defined in this law, it only refers to someone coming to Florida, not someone already here, so this is something only immigrants can do. And that’s what many of them have been doing. This landscaper gets an old map, finds out which areas of Tampa were originally labeled as swampland, and gets a bunch of his cousins together, and they gets jobs landscaping in these developments, but instead of cutting the grass, once they unload their equipment they get to work digging up the lawn and planting beans and squash and bananas and mango and when the owner gets upset and calls the police, the nephew is there and shows them the law, and not only do they get to keep the yard, they kick the owner out of his house too!

What?! That’s insane, I haven’t heard this, my uncle says.

Well, lots of other people have, in fact, the news has traveled back to Nicaragua. A cousin told a cousin told a cousin, and now they’ve put together this flotilla, and they plan on all landing at the same time so that nobody can do anything about it.

Well, I’m the coast guard will have something to do about it.

No, here’s the genius part, I say as the idea comes to, they’re planning on all coming over right when it coincides with the Gasparilla Parade, they’re going to dress up like pirates and invade Tampa like they’re part of the parade!

 

My uncle looks at me, red in the face, like he’s going to get up and strangle me, but then he starts laughing. Hysterical, unabating, cherubic laughter. He laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs.

 

The Devil’s Bargain

 The animals that we saw in those lands were three kinds of deer, rabbits and hares, bears and lions and other wild animals, among which we saw one which carries its young in a pouch on its belly. While they are small they carry them in that manner until they can get their own food. If they happen to be out of the pouch searching for food when people approach, the mother does not flee until she has gathered them all in her pouch. 

We’re getting out far enough from the city center, the margins where the religion gets weirder. Christ bleeding on a billboard, cowboy churches.  I see a sign on the side of the road: Ecclesiastes 4:4 written in marquee letters on the inside of an enormous clam shell.

Whenever we slow down at a light we can again that the yards of rich people have people in them. Gardeners. Almost all immigrants from Central and South America. Holding weed whackers, swaying back and forth with leaf blowers on their backs, armed with enormous scissors shaping topiary that nobody will look at. Yards and gardens nobody will sit in and nobody will stroll through.

Someone is up in a palm tree, wearing a holster around their pelvis, hoisted up on a pulley system. He is cutting free the browned fronds that gather at the base of the canopy. A pair of gardeners stand over a brown patch of bermuda grass, talking about which chemicals to add to it to make it grow back.

Were driving in silence for the first time. I look over at Ramas eyebrows furled underneath her cat eye glasses. I don’t let her see where we’re going, holding the phone with the directions in my lap. Now we’re out here on a highway in the exurbs, and Rama is driving like a madwoman.

Despite our speed, I know that the brown spots on the side of the road are what remains of an animal carcass. Maybe a rodent, definitely a mammal. I consult the Field Guide, which doesn’t show how animals look as roadkill, but does say that the only native species or rodent is the Florida mouse (podomys floridanus). I wonder what they would think of all of the other introduced rodents, the ones that came with us, would they think of them as any less invasive, I bet a Florida mouse would think that norwegian rats were a species more similar to humans than them, living in our walls and crawling spaces and remaking the landscape in their image as well, made indefatigable and immune to the vagaries of weather and the food chain by feasting on the endless bounty of human trash.

I wonder what they think about other species, ones that were once local, but were eventually seduced by the same bounty, the engorged racoons and dumpster diving bears, the flocks of birds which swell from turning their main source of calories to nabbing under table french fries and slicing open black bags of garbage. The devil’s bargain.

I look out at the tree line and I see the black mass on a branch. vulture. I wonder if the population of vultures actually increased when we built all these highways. That is exactly the kind of question my prescient  field guide would be good at answering. Venereal disease, Veterans, Venice of the South, Volcanoes, Vultures.

 

While the advent of agriculture has been apocalyptic to bird species overall, causing a loss of nearly one quarter of the global bird population has been lost since the advent of agriculture, two avian species that have seemingly benefited from human landscape modifications are turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) and black vultures (Coragyps atratus). At night vultures roost communally on transmission tower in groups exceeding hundreds of birds,  thermal air currents created by paved surfaces make for easy flying, and the wholesale transformation of the landscape into a dense lattice of superhighways has given them a veritable smorgasbord of dependable carrion.  

 

Huh, well how about that. I say out loud. No reaction from Rama. She has sped up to 90. The silence in the car is getting awkward so I turn on the radio. I bet Rama will think something on AM radio is interesting.  Fizz immigrant tuba music fizz a jingle for a mattress company Fizz a preacher who sounds almost in tears discussing Joshua 14-21.  He is speaking to a live audience, to whom he asks questions and to which they respond. Does God expect faithfulness? YES! Does God forget his promises? NO! I start answering right. Does God still conquers evil and provides rest? YES! I explain. I wonder if they have a horse there in the church. Rama asks me if I’m really already so bored from driving. I scan through the channels and there is a staticky news report. It’s about the proposal to build a wildlife corridor, especially for panthers, and the last puma in the eastern United States.

The panther neared extinction in the early 1970s, dwindling to about 20 animals. State and federal wildlife agencies and private partners helped bring the population back to an estimated 120 to 230 wild adults and sub-adults, according to the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge. Even still, the panthers are limited to a single breeding population in South Florida on less than 5% of their historic range, according to the refuge. The vast majority of panther deaths are due to vehicle collisions, with 26 vehicle deaths in 2018; 23 in 2019

I look over at Rama, she doesn’t react. I stare at her, and stare at the odometer. She finally looks over, without any reaction. The odometer starts to go down.

 

نارنجاوات

It was a nine-day journey from Apalachee to Aute. When we arrived we found all the people of the village gone, the village burned and much corn, squash and beans, all ready to be harvested. 

After another red light, Rama starts to speed up, but about a mile down the road I see two hispanic farmers standing at the back of the truck.  The truck bed looks like it’s holding a motionless bonfire. That’s right, I hadn’t even thought about it, we’re here right at the perfect time, everything is in harvest now, I ask Rama to please stop.

I get out of the car first and greet the men, each in straw hats, who in turn give me the thumbs up.

Buenos Tardes 

They tell me they grow this all themselves in their free time on their own lots, it’s all very fresh. They start to pronounce the english names of the varietals in a thick accent.

Fallglow and Robinson tangerines

Satsumas

Ruby red and flame grapefruit

Orlando tangelo

Key lime

Clementine

Pero nada es mas dulce que tu  

They are looking past me, at Rama whose curiosity has overcome her annoyance. I laugh and she looks at me confused.

guess they think you’re hispanic.

Yeah, I get that a lot. I start sorting through the truck bed and say

cuidado, si pudiera entender lo que uds dijeron sería amarga como un limón.

The men laugh and one whistles. They start picking through as well and hand me over things they think we’ll like. Soon we have two garbage bags full of fruit. Rama picks out a tangelo and starts to peel it. One of the men holds up their fingers, signalling for her to wait. He climbs up into his truck cabin and looks up smiling through the back window. I give him a thumbs up. Rama groans, oh God, this is so good.

Yeah, amazing what a piece of fruit tastes like when it’s in season.

The man in the straw hat comes out smiling with all of his teeth except the one that’s missing, and holds out something for Rama to grab. She opens her palm and in it drops a small green lime.

Para que hagas una limonada 

She says gracias and I say o mas bien una margarita She understands that and we all laugh. They ask her in broken English where she’s from. She tells them exactly, which is more geography than they understand. I tell them in Spanish that she’s from the Holy Land. That they understand. I pull out some cash and pay them, it costs almost nothing for all of this fruit.

We both sit in the front seats of the car waiving in silence out my window at the men in the straw hats.

I don’t get it, she says, breaking her silence.

I tell her working in restaurants for the last ten years you basically learn some spanish by osmosis.

No, not that. I don’t get how you can be so misanthropic and also so nice to people.

 

Big Bend Station

After resting there for two days, the Governor asked me to go find the coast, which the Indians said was very near. We walked until the hour of vespers, when we reached an inlet where we found many oysters, which greatly pleased the men. And we gave great thanks to God for having brought us there.

We see the smokestacks pouring out smoke over the thicket. All the electricity we’ve been using on this trip was made there, the jukebox at the Tiki Bar, all of the lights my uncle leaves on at his house, the charge of this iPhone. I see a red-tailed hawk flying over the chimney, taking advantage of the heated updraft to climb higher into the sky.

You’re taking me to a power plant? We’ve got one right in Brooklyn.

No, you’ll see.

We see a sign for the parking lot and turn in, but then are stopped immediately by a car idling. The parking lot is full and so we join the line of cars waiting for spots to open up. Rama is immediately impatient and picks up her novel that she’s been keeping in the car door pocket. I can see the park office and the observation deck but we can’t get out until a spot opens up. Everywhere we go we’re imprisoned in this car.

We slowly snake around the parking lot in the line of cars as spots open one by one. Once it’s our turn for a spot we begin idling in front of a woman standing at the opened hatchback of her minivan, deeply engaged in some activity. She doesn’t acknowledge us. We inch forward. She is changing a baby’s diaper as it squirms on the ground of the van.  The back of the woman changing her baby’s nappy begins to bead with sweat, and her shirt becomes bunched up and caught on her bra, and she continues wrestling with the baby to get its diaper on. The one thing she does not do is acknowledge our presence, waiting in anguish to take her parking space. But I guess we’re all really just waiting for the baby to cooperate. I don’t know how much control any of us have in this situation. I don’t know because I’ve never changed anyone’s diaper. I’m about to feel sympathy when all of a sudden the diaper changing is over, the woman throws the baby over her shoulder, closes up the hatchback, and begins walking back to the visitor’s center. Rama and I both groan loudly.

So much of the lives of the people out here are spent like this, driving to and waiting for parking. How do they do it? Rama and I have both almost lost our tempers and it’s only been 10 minutes. She tries reading her novel again but can’t concentrate, she keeps looking up to see if someone is going to give up their spot. I’m getting so claustrophobic, I feel like I’m strapped to a hospital bed, how do people live like this? To try to pass the time, I ask Rama what her book is about. It’s a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel about a super-empathetic prophet who creates her own religion. This should buy some time.

When I finally spot an old couple hobbling towards the enormous truck parked right in front of us, Rama is describing what she means by hyper-empathy, the condition that the protagonist in the novel has, the uncontrollable ability to feel the sensations she witnesses in others, particularly the abundant pain in her world. The man unlocks the car with his keys and the bumper lights blink. This is it. The man opens up the rear passenger door of the truck and pulls out a stepping stool. He walks around to the other side of the truck and puts it at the feet of the old woman. I nod at what Rama is saying. The old woman steps up one by one, holds onto the handle next to the door, and with great strain, pulls herself into the truck. Rama is talking about empathy more generally and about her friends who describe themselves as “empaths.” The man picks the stepping stool back up, walks around the back of the truck, slides it on the ground of the back seat of the truck, closes the door, and climbs up into the drivers seat. I have no empathy.

Finally out the car, We cross the parking lot, and now people who haven’t parked yet watch our every movement from their car windows. A man lowers his window to ask if we’re leaving, and I shake my head. He insults me as the window lifts back up. I don’t blame him. We cross the street between the parking lot and the visitor center office on the comically small crosswalk they have built to protect pedestrians. The office is a visitor center made up of mobile buildings on stilts next to a platform overlooking an industrial canal which separates the tourists from the enormous rusting power plant on the opposite shore. At the base of the plant are the square exhaust ports which rush out hot exhaust water into the canal. Rama asks if I want to go ito the visitor center, they have a nature exhibit all about mangroves. But I am caught looking at the power plant, entranced. It looks terrifying, its pipes and tanks resembles a rib cage, and its spewing smoke and dumping discharge straight into the canal, and somewhere deep in the innards of this evil metallic whale carcass is a blazing furnace of coal. But you can’t smell anything and the plant is completely silent.

We pass a crowd of people as we head into the visitor center. They are surrounding a square pond and all putting their hands in the water. Inside the pond a number of manta rays swimming compulsively in circles. The rays do not react when a child’s little fingers draw lines down their backs, or try to grab their tails. I always try to minimize the idea, whenever it comes to me, that the lived experience of animals and humans are that different. I am fairly certain that  rats and toucans and sharks understand, more or less, what’s going on. And pain must be basically identical. But at the same time I can’t bring myself to imagine myself as one of those Manta Rays right now,  driven insane pacing back and forth in a suspended box of water, all the while being tickled by fingers which continually manifest from the rippled glass ceiling.

I ask the kid next to me what it must be like to be a manta ray and without a beat he says it must suck. We all understand more or less what’s going on.

The exhibition at the visitor center is disappointing. There are no park rangers or guides to teach anything. And the wall-text is paltry. Nothing about the Sabkha, the Fiddler crabs, or the bay estuary ecosystem and its floral-fauna interactions, nothing about plant assemblages. Rama laughs, this is meant for children. Why? These kids aren’t reading anything, this is just a toy store for them. The animals are drawn on the walls as cartoon versions of themselves, and we hear a recorded voice broadcast from a loudspeaker explaining that these special animals’ are extremely sensitive to cold, and so they spend the winter right here, sheltering inside the man-made canal because the hot water that flows out from the power plant after cooling the turbines. See, I tell Rama I thought she’d appreciate the irony.

The recorded voice boasts of the Power Plant company’s actions to preserve the local environment, including the establishment of this park. It then goes on to explain ways we, the visitors, can help protect the environment. Have you tried turning off the running faucet, buying an electric vehicle, or helping out by cutting the rings of six-packs so that they don’t get caught around turtles’ necks? I imitate the voice to Rama, have you ever thought of industrial sabotage? Or self sterilization?

We move along with the crowd of whiny children and retirees towards the outdoor viewing platform. We join an even larger crowd spread out along a boardwalk parallel to the canal. The power plant dwarfs us all. Everyone is milling about until a gray-haired man shouts that he has spotted the couple. We all follow the direction of his finger to a bump in the water, which is hard to spot in the murky water. But there it is, a tiny gray scarred island.

 

سلرطانات

 

The manatees don’t move much, content to slowly hover above the seagrass. The water is murky from the turbulence of the power plant exhaust so you can’t see them unless they come up for air. One of their backs will emerge for a minute or two, and then disappear back underwater. I fill in the spaces between their emergence with more Manatee facts. I know what you’re thinking Rama, how can they all be so chubby and not just float on top of the water! Manatee bones are dense and solid which allows them to act as ballast and promote negative buoyancy. Isn’t that fascinating. How about this? The major conservation organization for Manatees was started by none other than Jimmy Buffet! Mr. Margaritaville wasn’t all just drunk piracy, he took Manatee advocacy seriously and is arguably the most important single figure in saving Florida’s manatees. None of this is written anywhere, so a few people start listening to me. Most Florida manatees depend on localized warm-water refuges in the southern two-thirds of Florida to survive winter; about 60% use outfalls from 10 power plants like this one, whereas 15% use 4 natural warm-water springs. But those have become overrun with development and tourism. What’s going to happen to them? A child asks me. Well we have to decide, we need to gradually wean manatees off plant outfalls since we plan on eventually closing these dinosaur carbon-intense power plants, so we need to either do better return the flow of springs now used by manatees and restrict use by humans, which will never happen, so what we’ll probably do is create new thermal basins to retain warm-water pockets able to support overwintering manatees. Like Manatee hot-tubs? Yes, like manatee hot-tubs. An older woman asks me if I work here, she wants to know where there is a diaper changing station.

Rama tries taking a picture of the manatees for social media, but it doesn’t come out well. You can’t tell what you’re supposed to be looking at. The audience on the boardwalk is soon disappointed that this is all we’re going to get, that the Manatees aren’t going to be performing tricks, and it disappoints me to see Ramah lose interest as well. I am failing this test. I don’t think she even thought it was very ironic. Old couples continue their conversations, a few kids are crying or screaming, and the coal smoke continues to pour out of the smokestack. Rama, reluctantly, asks me if I also want to go see the crabs.

We follow a gravel path into the brushy area behind the parking lot, a nature trail built by the electric company on land that was once a palm plantation. The sign at the front claims that the trail will highlight a number of coastal ecosystems and that it will eventually lead to a watchtower. I don’t have high expectations, but on this one little piece of reclaimed land, nature thrives. The trail is surrounded by thick walls and tangles of vegetation. Rama has decided to continue telling me the plot of the Octavia Butler novel, about how in the climate-change induced dystopian world the main character lives in a gated community, and how society outside the community walls has reverted to chaos due to resource scarcity and poverty.  She does not realize that I have stopped walking.

I look intently into the thicket. Rama turns to watch as I remove my field guide from the pocket and begin to thumb through it.

 

While the Tampa Electric Company may have set aside a paltry lot of land in its environmental PR stunt, it nonetheless excels in preserving a precious and rare ecosystem. Gulf Coast Salt Marshes were once protected from man’s development onslaught by its unproductivity as land and by its insect sentinels the mosquito. But with the invention of DTT, and a merciless campaign of infilling throughout the 1930s and 1940s, much has been lost. That is why this small but mighty coastal habitat trail is so special: it winds eight-tenths of a mile through saltern, coastal high marsh and coastal strand habitats. A patient observer will be treated to the dramatic sweep of the transitional zone from ocean life to terrestrial uplands, beginning with the estuarial mangrove forest and smooth cord grass (Spartina alterniflora) at the water’s edge,  to the irregularly flooded Needlerush (Juncus roemerianus) up to the barren salt flat where Fiddler crabs reign, and finally to the maritime marsh-elder (Iva frutescens ) and upland pines (Pinus palustris). Here is the sensory symphony of biome transitions, each plant assemblages determined by tide, soil content, and the presence of symbiotic faunal relationships rather than the irrational whims of bad horticultural taste and invasive plants that typify our contemporary suburban landscape. 

 

Yeah!  That’s what I want to see. I want to see everything all together where it belongs.. Rama says she thinks that might be a little hard here. A couple in athleisure wear pass us by on the trail, exercising with little speakers on their belt and power walking. Techno music Doppler effect.

Undissuaded I begin staring out at the landscape. Green, low-lying bramble. I look more closely. I look for details. I see a whole field of familiar inflorescences. Well look what we have here. Rama looks up from her phone.

Rama, you might not recognize them in their native habitat, looking so healthy and well-adapted, but it’s our friend from the airport.

Bryan?

Who?

Your friend Bryan?

No! I mean Iva frutescens. Remember? Jesuit’s Bark? Two curious people stop to see what I’m discovered. They must think i’ve found a fox or a rattlesnake. One of them has a dog which is furiously barking around my knees it sticks at snout into the Bramble, and also tries to find what I’m looking for. Rama tells them that I’m looking at weeds. Confused, they leave.

Oh Rama, look down here at this little succulent. Batis maratima: also known as turtle weed, saltwort, or crabwort.

 

I thought we were going to look at the crabs.

Yes, sorry one minute, let’s see, oh wow, will you look at that, a succulent shrub that forms dense colonies in salt marshes, brackish marshes, and mangrove swamps, bingo! Right where it belongs.

Oh here Rama, you’ll think this is interesting. Its leaves are sometimes added to salads in Puerto Rico where they are used as an aromatic herb, purée, and pickled food. Its beans can be added to the salad. The seeds are added to salads, and can be roasted or “popped” like corn.

Speaking of, we need to start heading to your uncle’s for dinner.

 

You’re right.

We continue briskly down the pathway and I’m having the time of my life, transitioning from the upland bush to the salt flat.  I try to not be distracted by a man who passes us tethered to two dogs bred to be misshapen,  he holds onto their taut leashes likes he’s water skiing. The salt flat opens up before us and we step onto a boardwalk to avoid walking on the soggy sandy soil. I tell Rama that I hope we’ll get to see a Fiddler crab in its native habitat, but as soon as I say that we come upon them: hundreds of them. An enormous salt flat completely covered in Fiddler crabs. They are small, red and orange, and the male crabs have one arm bigger than the other. They mill about on the flat surface of the salt marsh, an entire crab civilization. They seem completely unphased by us watching from the boardwalk, they are too wrapped up in their own life world. One of them is building his hole, and two of them are fighting. Another group is gathering, as if plotting a conspiracy. Hundreds and hundreds of crabs. They disappear into the mangroves beyond. Rama finally has something to take a picture of.

As Rama looks for the right angle, I ask her to use her super empathy, what must be like to be a Fiddler crab, do they feel a permanent imbalance in their body because of the one bigger claw?

Of course not.

What must it feel like to live in a vast crab society, does it have crab interpersonal drama? Are there crab politics?!

Of course.

 

 

The trail ends at a wooden observation tower overlooking the edge of the water. As we go up the stairs Rama finishes telling me about her dystopian novel, or at least as far as she’s gotten. I’m excited for the view, the chance to take in the entire transitional zone at once, but I can’t help but notice once we’re up there that the nature trail area is completely surrounded by private development villas. The field guide is right, the salt marsh is almost all gone. In its place is an endless pattern of housing developments, just like my uncle’s, rows of identical Venetian villas on large, sun-bleached lawns, with their own stupid little docks. America’s pathological predilection for hoarding.

I tell Rama those villa owners are fighting a losing battle with their grass lawns. A rug of Bermuda grass being inundated with salt spray and the Florida sun. No matter how much the landscape guys come, the Mangroves will pop up from the salt water below us. They might try to use pesticide to poison what they call weeds. They’ll call in a landscape design expert to help when a colony of fiddler crabs creates infertile patches in the lawn. But before long they’ll have long lead pine saplings competing for space with their ionic columns,  baccaris halumfloria crowding out their pansies and other English garden plants. I don’t know Rama.

Don’t know what?

The future.

What about the future?

Maybe it won’t all be bad.  It could also be a climate disaster induced paradise.  Just think about how this will look in even just a few hundred years.  It will be so hot and prone to flooding that humans will have given up their investments and moved north, all these villas will be covered in moss and vines. The boat docks will disappear into the tangle of mangrove forest. All the wood rotted and disintegrated turned back into silt, to be fed on by crabs. The manatees will love the heat, they’ll emerge from their hiding place and return to the depths of its bay, now quiet without the incessant roar of boats’ engines. Hawks and vultures strutting over the empty highways. The night sky will be filled with stars and the Milky Way, the amphibians will return to their circadian rhythm and chirp with one voice at dusk.

Rama comes over to my side of the observation deck and gives me an unexpected hug.

I like that.

Like what?

I like when you use your imagination.

We look at each other in the eyes, but then pull apart as we hear a family fighting their way up the stairs. We crowd into a corner and the family scatters out onto the platform. One of the children drops a large drop of chocolate on the railing and puts the rest into his mouth for safe keeping. The mom tells the daughter to get off the railing. They don’t acknowledge us, or acknowledge the landscape. The father looks at his phone. The mom tries to catch her breath. They head right back down the stairs, asking each other about what kinds of pizza they want.

I look at the salt flat one more time, and Rama takes some photos. As we walk towards the stairs I see a caravan of ants that have found the melted chocolate mountain on the railing and are working to carry it back to their home.

Sunken Gardens

It is a short drive to the first destination on her list, the Sunken Gardens. She says, wow, this guy sounds like your kindred spirit,  and then reads from her phone.

 

In 1902, George Turner, Sr., purchased 4.1 acres of land in the newly incorporated City of St. Petersburg. Using his skills as a plumber, he drained a sinkhole on the property and began growing tropical fruit trees like papayas, mangoes, bananas, and guavas in the fertile, mucky soil.  George and his wife Eula sold their abundant harvest at the family’s fruit stand.

Rama parks the car in between two charter buses, parallel parking without a pause in reading.

Eventually, George retired as a plumber and began gardening full-time, expanding the variety of plants in his backyard garden, and adding colorful scallop-patterned walkways for visitors. The family started charging 15 cents for garden visits and strolls and by 1936, Turner’s Sunken Gardens was officially open as an attraction.

 

But there is really only one thing I am interested in. I want to recreate this photo. I look at her phone screen, the same dimensions as the old postcard projected on it.

 

Don’t you love it, the incongruence, those two ladies nonchalantly standing in front of what looks like the gates of hell. Those cartoonish, caveman letters. I want to get our picture taken here too. Fake caves are one of the foundational monuments of modernism.

We pass underneath a bougainvillea archway from the parking lot into the gardens. Oh I think I’ve been here before, on a fieldtrip maybe. I don’t think I remember seeing the fake grotto. But I could be wrong.  I’ll help her find the grotto. This is the first time she’s asked to have us both be in the picture.

Rama says that in its heyday, the park hosted crocodile wrestling matches and a Christian wax museum, and that there were preliminary plans to turn it into a nudist colony. I would have remembered a nudist colony.

Towards the entrance we pass by a closure crowded with flamingos. Everyone is talking and pointing at the flamingos and they, in turn, seem to be arguing with one another. It’s a racket. ٍIn a dramatic way, Rama clears her throat (tanHam) and I look at her like she’s about to say something. Huh? Nihaam! Rama says. (نحام)  What’s Niham. They are. Get it? I don’t get it, it must be the Arabic word for Flamingo. A flamingo starts shaking its head like she’s told a bad joke.

Like everything else we’ve seen, this garden is a lot smaller than I remember it from my childhood. We we have to move to the side of the sidewalk for a couple doing a photo shoot with their baby. The photographer adjusts the train of the baby’s  white gauze outfit, looking like a victorian doll. They have her perched on top of an urn of roses. Rama looks at them out of the corner of her eye as she explains the differences between plaster, concrete, rebar, faux wood are what the French call faux bois, shotcrete and gunite. The baby reaches out to touch one of the roses and pricks its finger. It begins to cry. Rama in unphased, too busy extolling the virtue of imitation rock,  there is something truly modern about being able to imitate rock, to no longer crouch into the cave you come upon, but to turn into whatever you want, a Montmartre cabaret, a Coney Island tunnel of love. Artificial concrete is totemic, phantasmogoric, plasticine glory.

We pass over a little bridge but are blocked from getting off by a couple taking selfies. They are being affectionate, stopping between shots to make out. Yeah, that’s what I want. We just got to find this grotto first. While we wait patiently to pass I look over the railing at the fish in the little pond below. Rama climbs up and sits on the railing of the bridge, talking to me with her mouth making exaggerated toothy phonemes. What is she doing? Is she looking down at the koy fish? She is telling me something about Parc des Buttes Chaumont, a quarry and a garbage dump turned into a grotto complete with faux stalagmites and stalactites and a cascading waterfall. Ulf Strohmayer argues that the park’s design, a “landscape full of simulacra…modeled on repetitions,” was a triumph of humankind’s capabilities. To be able to reproduce the grandeur of the natural world was to play god.

The couple casts us a glowering face as we lose our patience and force ourselves by. We only get a little ways down the narrow, plant-crowded pathway before  immediately get caught behind a multi-generational family looking at a big red flower. An acceptable reason to be caught in traffic.

We get closer and I can see that the flower is attached to a long vine, hanging all the way down from the tall tree above.  Rama laughs, apparently this one is called an African sausage tree, pointing at the sign. The grandparents start lining up, each one holding their grandchild’s hands. They are each going to get their picture with the grandkid  in front of the sausage tree flower. We’ll need to wait for them too. Rama pushes behind the family to get closer to the sign and reads some more African sausage tree facts while we wait.  The fruit of the African sausage tree is poisonous if not prepared properly, but many African cultures have found ways to safely utilize many parts of the sausage tree. She is speaking in that strange exaggerated way again, gesturing up with both of her hands at the long hanging vine. The deep red flowers open at night to attract bats and insects that act as pollinators for this species. She curls her fingers like they’re claws and sticks out her tongue. Traditional uses include: roasting the fruit and seeds for safe consumption, fermenting the fruit to create an alcoholic beverage called muratina, drying the fruit into a cosmetic skin treatment, or hollowing the tree trunks to make canoes.

That’s cool I say. The grandmother of the family says something under her breath and holds onto her grandchild as we finally nudge our way by. Rama points through the artificial jungle at a piece of bulbous concrete sticking out from behind a banana plant. She almost pushes over another child running over there. It turns out to be a modest waterfall. False alarm! she calls out.  We keep walking.

At one point the thicket opens up and there is a group of about twenty people doing yoga in a grassy clearing. A sign invites us to learn more about renting the “wedding lawn”. Very pleasant, everyone is having a nice time. Except for Rama, this is all so normal nad pleasant, where’s the phantasmagoria?!

We walk underneath a trellis draped (mutahadil) with more exotic plants. Rama eyes a family, waiting close by them, and then when the father takes out his camera she starts reading me another sign like she’s a dinosaur struggling to speak.

Behold the Indian Clock Vine. It  is an evergreen vine that sports uniquely shaped flowers of deep red and yellow. The father scoots around to another angle. Rama does the same amount of scooting. He tries backing up. She steps forward. Oh now I see what she’s doing.

Cut that out!

No!

This is how I achieve a lasting legacy, recorded for eternity in a hundred strangers family archives. Maybe I’ll make it onto a Christmas card . She keeps reading the sign as the father gives in and takes his photos.

This species (Thunbergia mysorensis) is not an orchid, but its intricate blooms are no less stunning. I shrug.

What’s wrong, Rama asks, I thought specifically you’d be into this place?

It’s nice!

But?

But these are all exotic plants.

tropical exotic plants, what’s wrong with that?

African sausage tree, Indian clock vine, none of these plants belong here,

Wow, I didn’t know you could  fascist about plants!

Haha, botanical gardens were cool if we were Victorians, but now you can see this kind of stuff anywhere. It has no relationship to the local environment. I stop myself from explaining anymore, have we checked over there yet?

We look everywhere but can’t find the artificial grotto, why don’t we just ask somebody I ask. No! Rama is despondent. I should have known better,  it was most likely taken out long ago, shotcrete is easy come easy go. And the whole garden has been de-kitschified, ya lil-khasarah. Rama frowns. why does everything have to be so mundane? Can’t there be any romance or style anymore?!?! She covers her face with banana leaf.

 

Oh come on, here, I’ll show you something that hasn’t been removed. I have seen it through the thicket several times during our perambulations. We walk and stand by a few parrots leashed by their feet  to a pole and I tell her to look up. It’s an enormous, gnarled tree, with massive branches stretching out in every direction, vines race up its trunk, mosses grow on its branches parallel to the ground,  like it’s protecting the entire garden in a paternal embrace.

Now I read from the sign. Southern Live Oak (Quercus virginiana)

In 2019, arborists estimated the southern live oak in the Oak Pavilion to be approximately 150 years old with a limb span of over 150 feet. In 1977, the National Arborist Association recognized this historic specimen, commending those who had the vision and foresight to preserve it. This oak shaded the homestead of our founding family after they built it in 1931.

 

Rama says, hey this is like the one at your old house. She likes the tree’s mien, it looks ornery. I keep reading

 

Southern live oaks are native to Florida and provide more food and habitat for birds and pollinators than most other trees. 

 

Now you see, this is what I mean, these trees are native. It’s not just an aesthetic preference, an certainly not a xenophobic thing. It has a scientific basis. Lots of species of insects can only live on specific plants, because they evolved to depend on them. The African sausage tree? It gets pollinated by African bats and moths which have also evolved to be immune to its poison, its phytochemicals.  Same thing with Quercus virginiana.

I open up the field guide and show her the picture of the moth and its caterpillar version

.

At dusk the females lay eggs in large groups on the underside of oak leaves. Fully-grown caterpillars pupate and overwinter in shallow underground burrows. But they can only live in oak forests, and based on their range, only oak forests in Florida. They’ve been here for millions of years, depending on the Southern Live Oak in an ancient relationship, long before humans even evolved in Africa.

I’m embarrassed, I’ve said too much. Rama stops looking at me, and moves around to stand next to me. She’s had enough. No, she looks behind her to make sure the tree is in the shot, she holds up her phone and I can see both of us on the screen, underneath the embrace of the Live Oak. She takes our picture.

 

Morris the Casino Cat

 

Now we’re in Gulfport, standing in the sun behind an old WWII-era A Quonset hut made out of avocado green bricks. Sitting atop one of the handrails we find it.  A rough blob of orange and pink concrete, like a melting piece of coral reef. Resting here for evermore, with bleached blue eyes and a red collar, Morris the Casino Cat.

 

Rama reads from her notebook

 

For 15 years Morris was the unofficial animal of Gulfport. His favorite spot was the city’s beachfront casino, and when he died in 1985 his ashes were entombed in a custom-made mini-mausoleum that stands between the casino and the beach.

 

This is what these tourist attractions are all like, I never know whether we’re supposed to be reverent. Paying our respects to a sherbert-colored cat statue.

She reads the plaque “In memory of Morris the casino cat. His ashes rest here beside his mansion by the sea 1970-1985.” I can picture the type of guys who would have made this, they don’t exist much anymore. Hawaiian-shirt retirees, playing dominos in plaid lawn chairs while listening to the game on radio and agreeing to chip in a bit of their retirement cash for something nice for Morris, he was always twirling around your ankles, lying asleep on the billiard table. It was probably all a well-natured joke amongst the guys.

 

Rama says jokes become running-jokes and then running-jokes become rituals and then rituals become religions. Maybe it was the same with the ancient Egyptians. A simple love for cats lounging in the temples, twirling around the funerary columns, lounging in the lap of Horus, weaving in through the crowds of worshipping slaves, maybe someone joked that they came to be worshipped and they simply obliged, a running joke keeps being funny and then eventually your entrails filled canopic pots in the shape of a cat.

 

عفريت أزرق

 

While applying more sunscreen in the vanity mirror, I get a text message on my otherwise silent phone.

-Hey Waladudah, Bryan says you’re in town, no running away from me now, let’s meet up while you’re here.

It is from someone my phone has saved as Molly, it takes me a moment to remember who she is. a girl I went to high school with. I vaguely remember. I think she was in the scene.

I don’t know. On the one hand, I feel like I should have more to show for my childhood more than one estranged relative. Rama seems so social, everytime we go out we’ve run into someone from her program, or from her cultural events. The whole reason for coming here was for her to get a glimpse of my background. If we don’t meet up with a single person I went to high school with, she’ll think I emerged out of a cocoon.

As Rama drives I use her phone to do some snooping. I type in Molly’s full name and her social media accounts pop up. She has blue hair and is covered in tattoos, including some stretching across her neck.

Rama asks if our turn is coming up. I switch apps and see we just missed it.

-Oh I’m sorry, here just take this next exit and we’ll loop back.

-you know it doesn’t count as you being an ascetic by having an old-fashioned phone if you just use someone else’s whenever you need to google something. That’s just being cheap.

I look over. Is she teasing me or being annoyed?  I sit for a moment with her phone in my lap looking out the window. But I’m too curious, I look back at her phone as soon as Rama’s point is no longer in the air. Molly has posted some pictures of her at the opening of an art exhibition, a picture of her with blood flowing from her nose, taking a pose for the camera while she is nude but covers herself in a fur and a necklace made of a rabbit skull. Thank God, she’s eccentric. Rama will love her. I text her back on my phone.

 

山伏

 

After a couple more stops by chance we see my old favorite sushi restaurant and pull over, the one where you pick trays off of a conveyor belt, which seems to move by a lot faster than I remember, and Rama keeps choosing rolls with Unagi and can’t bear to look at all the fish whizzing by and end up ordering a bowl of plain rice, and Rama calls me a Yamabushi and orders chicken feet, which are somehow on a secret menu, and I puke in the bathroom again.

World’s Largest

Rama tells me for this next attraction I should just stay in the car. Or I can come look for birds on the boardwalk. She just needs a few minutes. She’s acting suspicious. We’re at John’s Pass, a tourist trap beach-themed hell hole. What object of interest could possibly be here.

She parks me at a wooden railing alongside a bunch of other doughy tourists, and says I’m sorry, just stay here, I’ll be right back. Look, you can hang out with your friends, pointing out to a line of pelicans perched on a railing out in the water. I’ll be RIGHT back. She darts up a flight of wooden stairs next to an ice cream shop.

I try my best to be zen, to concentrate on the pelicans, and a heron that flies overhead, but this place is chaos. Ugly people are milling about and looking at their phones and eating treats and making all kinds of noise. The pelicans glance over disdainfully. Another few take off and fly away. People keep coming out of the store with enormous ice cream cones, and plates of fried food. Dough people. I wince as a young child begins screaming when a seagull flies by and steals a french fry from their plate. My tylenol is wearing off. Out in the channel a boat full of dough people chug by, taking pictures of the people on the boardwalk. The people on the boardwalk wave and take pictures of the people on the boat. Tourism is idiocy (ان السياحة بلاهة)

What is taking Rama so long? Where did she go, she’ll take me to see a stuffed two-headed cow, but she doesn’t want me to see this? I start wandering up the stairs. There she is, having her picture taken by a group of bikers. She looks at her phone that she’s handed them and gives them some artistic direction. Is this a fucking Hooters? I walk up the rest of the way to the top of the stairs. Now I can see. She’s posing like a fisherman, standing under a cross-beam, with an enormous bright red fiberglass hunk suspended on a fishing hook. One of the classic types of roadside attractions is the “largest”. Largest ball of twine, largest pistachio. Last week Rama asked me if I had any interest in renting a car to go to Edison, New Jersey to see the world’s largest lightbulb. There she is, giving the peace sign, looking adorable in a fisherman’s hat, standing under the world’s largest chicken wing.

 

Gone with the Wind

I doze off in the car for what only feels like a few minutes, but when I wake up and look out the window to look where we are, all I can see is a gigantic confederate flag.

Jesus.

Don’t get too excited, Rama says, it’s only the world’s *second* biggest confederate flag. It’s only 50 ft by 30 ft. The title of world’s biggest goes to some morons up in Virginia who supposedly have one that’s 51 by 31 feet.

I hope you’re not planning on us going there. I have absolutely no interest in the confederacy.

Oh, well then you might want to stay in the car again. You can go back to napping.

Wait, where are we going? I sit up straight in the car seat and look at the highway signs.

Jesus, Plant City?! How long was I asleep? Rama, where are we going? She grits her teeth. Look, I know this is a little bit of a detour, but it’s the one extant piece of the original Cypress Gardens. It used to be an attraction there! Our one chance to resurrect the glorious past. Also! It’s the world’s largest collection of its kind.

Of what kind?

Rama says oh look we’re already here, taking the exit.

Rama, of what kind?

Rama grits her teeth…World’s Largest Gone with the Wind memorabilia Collection.

Pffffft. NO thanks. That’s going to be where I draw the line. I’ll wait in the car.

But I miscalibrate. Through my grogginess and headache that comes off sounding genuinely annoyed, not teasing.

Rama drives as fast as she was on the highway down a long stroad and then goes past a used car lot and then becomes a two-way road as the trees all disappear. Then we’re driving past warehouses and empty grass lots and what looks like an unused fair ground. She keeps checking her phone. It should be right around here. A meat market, an empty field, a lot filled with cargo trailer, and empty field. She’s getting frustrated.

Rama, did you check the website.

She grits her teeth, they don’t have a website.

Did you check their Facebook.

They didn’t have a Facebook page…

I’m getting frustrated. I’m going back to sleep.

 

 

Fountain of Youth

 

Our world used to be build out of stone and wood and cloth. In my grandmother’s village you can look into the grooves of a wall and see the horsehair used to bind the mortar, the rocks themselves are the same ones as the fields outside. You stare up at night at the rafters and it’s the same trees that grow in the village. Not like this, this featureless geography of abstract glass and concrete and steel.

Rama is losing her radical optimism. The great American landscape is wearing on her. We’ve gone too hard today. The water tower shaped like a cake, The UFO house on top of a strip club, the Sphinx of Tampa. There was no trace to be had of the Gone with the Wind museum.

We had parked the car close to what she said would be a culmination of the day, a roadside attraction that distilled the history of Florida as a promised land: victorian sanitariums, post-war resorts, cable tv miracle cures. She is rambling and losing steam as we circumambulate a parking complex on foot. A surface parking lot surrounding a parking garage. We should have stopped after seeing the two-headed cow.

I feel bad, she’s had to do all the driving, and I’ve gotten in several naps. I think I’m starting to get my second wind. Towards the back of the parking complex we butt up against the enormous glaring poison grass expanse of a baseball field. It’s got to be around here somewhere.

Rama, if you don’t tell me what we’re looking for, I can’t help. But she wants it to be a surprise. I might not make it, i’ve recovered from the sexual alligator, but I still might get sun poisoning. I pull my shirt up over my head to protect my face from the sun. A car honks at us mockingly as we cross a long stretch of sidewalk that borders some sort of treeless park, a wide terraced field of low-cut grass. We are heading towards a pair of geodesic domes. Rama is rambling on about some guy named Buckminster Fuller.

Oh, this is the Salvador Dali museum, weird why is there a Salvador Dali museum in Florida? I don’t have a good answer. I do tell her I went as a kid, they don’t have that melting clock painting, but I do remember they have this enormous painting called The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, thinking she might like that since it goes with the theme of new world explorers getting lost. She rolls her eyes. I’m relieved she has no interest in going.

As we round the curve of the road, on the opposite side of the street is an even larger grass field. We’re on the grass field tour. Out far across the cement and dead grass I can see a few small aircraft. Jesus what is an airport doing in downtown st Petersburg? This place makes no sense. I’m getting agoraphobia. I’m getting a sunburn. Rama, come on, what are we looking for? She goes on, slightly out of breath, talking about how St. Petersburg, was once known as “Health City,” a veritable Mecca of health quackery, about how Industrialist Edwin Tomlinson discovered the aquifer spring while digging a well in 1889, how he bought the property and opened a spa, how it became a popular stop on the tourist circuit as people came on a daily basis to fill up their jugs with the smelly drink, how the resort hosted count statues of Ponce de Leon before its final closure in 1975.

Rama, what are you talking about? What are we looking for?

We’re searching for the Fountain of Youth.

I thought that was in St. Augustine, but leave it to Florida to turn it into a franchise.

Or didn’t nobody ever find it

I tell Rama that there used to be a stone sign near my house when I was a kid indicating the site of the indigenous village where Cabeza de Vaca arrived and from where he set out as the first white man to discover the Americas. This only makes things worse. What kind of Eurocentric nonsense is that, to claim to be discovering a new continent when you’re just a colonizer wandering around starving in someone else’s backyard. Oh, she’s actually in a bad mood.

I try to make things better by asking some of those historical speculation questions she likes. How did the first explorers do it do you think? Couldn’t have been too comfortable tromping around the bush in a clunky metal helmet. Hiking up their medieval frocks. The sidewalk ends and we have to start walking in the street. More cars pass by us honking. She doesn’t answer. I nervously just keep talking.

Well I used to love this book about his travels when I was a kid, it had all of these maps of Florida from the 1500s, with a little dashed red line showing Cabeza de Vaca exploring the Bay.  So many of the things he saw and then later wrote about, it is the very  record of it.

Rama responds to this. There was a whole civilization living here, until Europeans obliterated it.

Okay sorry I mean the first extant written description of Florida, maybe indigenous people wrote about it too, but we don’t have any surviving records, but when Cabeza de Vaca got back he wrote up the whole thing,  the first description of the Mississippi river, being held on an island as a slave in Texas, in his own account I always tried to imagine where exactly he was wandering around lost, is it a Publix supermarket now, a Harbor Freight?

 

When the brigantine departed, we went inland again, this time with a few more people, skirted the shore of the bay we had found. Having gone four leagues, we took four Indians and showed them corn to see if they were familiar with it, since we had not yet seen sign of it. They told us they would take us to a place that had some. So they took us to their village at the head of the bay near there, and there they showed us some corn, which was not yet ready to be picked. 

 

I ask Rama what the first explorers must have thought of all of this space, it must have mostly all been a Long Pine Savannah back then, before the Europeans got here Pine forests once towered over nearly 90 million acres, when Cabeza de Vaca landed in 1528 on the shores of Boca Ciega Bay they called the spot “Punta Pinal,” or point of pines. That’s why the county here is called Pinellas County. I can’t imagine going through millions of acres of empty Pine forest just to find some gold.

It wasn’t empty, it was filled with people, it says it right there in the journal, filled with villages, with agriculture, the original inhabitants, planting native plants just like you like, in harmony with this land before the white man showed up. It has been that way forever until they came and burned it all.

Well…

Well what?!

Rama stops in the street and glares at me. Go on, well what?

Well technically the Tocobaga Indians only arrived in Tampa Bay in the 900s. And the corn…

What about corn?

Well you said corn is a native plant, but it’s not native to Florida.

Oh jesus.

It was most likely traded for with other tribes. Corn was the cornerstone crop for all of Mesoamerica, and had spread during the precolumbian era all over North America. From its origin in central Mexico it became the currency in a continental trade network between indigenous peoples, from the Southwest desert to New England. Even here in Florida. And it was domesticated corn, not native at all… I’ve said too much.

She scrutinizes my face, hiding from the sun inside my shirt. She then turns and starts walking own the sidewalk alone. When I finally catch up to her she is huddled underneath the sparse shade of a crepe myrtle (Lagerstroemia indica). Ok, Google maps says it’s right at the end of this block. If we get back to the baseball field we’ve gone too far. I follow behind her sheepishly until we arrive at the end of the block. We’re back at the Baseball field. Rama growls. Wait, Rama, is it this? I point to a small white cement kitabe in fake Gothic script “the Fountain of Youth.” It is a tiny concrete dias  hidden behind a slightly raised curb at the edge of a parking lot, a modest Italianate water fountain. Rama doesn’t even have the heart to drink from it.

Looking at Rama so glum, I get an idea. A place I remember loving as a kid. I tell her I have an idea, I want to take her to a real fountain of youth.

Waking up

 

-Good morning.

I’m about to reply but then she says it again in Arabic. She says it a few different ways. She’s not speaking to me.

My head is throbbing, tropical fruit ooze must be leaking out of my ears. I don’t remember how we got back to my uncle’s house, or if Rama and I slept in the same bed. I don’t remember the question of us sleeping in the same bed even coming up.

I open my eyes to check and she’s gone. I am in an empty bed, maybe she took one of the other bedrooms.  I sit up and see she’s sitting on the huge ottoman in the corner of the room on the phone with her father. She says the whole retinue of goodbyes, pauses, and then says them again. Then she sets down her phone inside her notebook.

-My dad says hi.

I sit up in bed, now I really am confused. But before I have time to think Rama lets me know the plan for the day.

-So!

She holds up her notebook to reveal an illustrated treasure map of Tampa Bay and the remaining artifacts of its tourist traps and roadside oddities. Oh, why didn’t I think of that. She’s obsessed with these places, they have a whole atlas online. On our second date I thought we were on our way out to Flushing Meadows for hot pot but it turned out to be a pilgrimage to see the Whispering Column of Jerash.

-But first! Let’s go see your childhood home.

I give a thumbs up signal but I have no idea what that even means. Does my childhood home mean the one I first lived in, my dad’s house, we wouldn’t be able to get past the security gate in any case. or one of the many places me and my mom moved to when she and my dad got divorced? None of them seem particularly more meaningful than the other.

But I don’t say any of this. I’ll just pick the one I think remember how to get to. we’ve already passed over St. Joes Creek a few times, I should be able to navigate us there. I just need to throw up first.

 

 Pleistocene

 

We drive straight south on an avenue flanked by a phone store, and a subway sandwich chain shop, and a gas station, and a pharmacy, and a burrito chain story, and a local surf shop, and while we do that, Rama lists the name of the some of the Florida roadside attractions lost to time:  Bongoland,  Weeki Wachee Spring, the Atomic Tunnel, Citrus Tower, Coral Castle, Midget City, Parrot Jungle, Moonshine Still, Skull Kingdom, Mai-Kai Gardens, Waltzing Waters Aquarama, Marineland. We drive by a perfectly circular lake. We pass by an empty drainage ditch. Rama tells me about diving board horses and elephants on water skies, how the mid-century Florida roadside attraction is a sort of skeleton key for unlocking the political economy of consolidation in the tourism economy since the 1970s.

We pull into a shopping center and Rama goes into the pharmacy to buy some things for the trip that she had forgotten. I sit in the car in the parking lot and feel like I’m going to throw up. I need to distract myself. I look up at the marquee where a fiberglass caveman drags a fiberglass cavewoman by the hair. There were never any cavemen in Florida! Well, I guess that depends on what you mean by Cavemen.

I close my eyes, but all I can see is the wine dark sea, that makes me even more noxious. I look around the car, what is this book Rama put into the car door pocket? Parable of the Sower? She always has a book with her. Oh yeah, I brought a book too. Rama parked the car underneath some sort of oak tree, and I try to identify it. Maybe a willow oak (Quercus phellos), young but doing well stranded here at the edge of a parking lot. What else is there to look at. A bunch of stupid crepe myrtles (Lagerstroemia). Haha, the field guide refers to them as “trees for dullards with no imagination.”

I wonder what it has to say about cavemen in Florida. I sit in the car and look up Pleistocene in the index of my field guide.

 

Pleistocene geology of Tampa Bay

 

As you gaze wistfully upon this devastated landscape, its habitable areas filled with sprawl and scatterization, and you try to picture in your mind the Pleistocene Arcadia it must have been prior to ecocidal motorization, you may make the mistake of imagining it centered around more or less the same contours of the Bay as it exists now. But that would be a mistake! When the last ice began to come to an end about 17 thousand years ago, the Gulf coast of west-central Florida would have been about 120 miles west of its current position. By the time of arrival of humans (which can only be approximated by the sudden and precipitous extirpation of megafauna) Tampa Bay was more or less a freshwater savannah-like swamp. When you imagine your ancestors here, on the pitiless hunt for a diverse megafauna that included mastodons, giant armadillos, and saber-toothed cats, you may lament the lost indescribably rich paradise that once was one that was perhaps slightly dryer from the one you reflexively imagine. 

 

I guess I haven’t imagined it at all. Florida, Paradise, without the people. The Milky Way reflected across a shallow lagoon, a flock of birds settling onto the canopy of long pine, the brushing sounds of enormous creatures migrating through the grass.

Rama seems to be taking a while. There is nothing left in the parking lot to identify so I read more about the bay.

 

Anthropogenic Changes to the Bay and its Watershed

But we can also mourn the Bay as you may have initially imagined it. As environmentally destructive as the native genocide of the megafauna and the 19th century dredging of wetlands for sugar cultivation may have been, nothing could compare to the changes that the Tampa Bay watershed would begin to see starting in the late 1940s and early 1950s. To support rapid post-war coastal urban development, dredge-and-fill techniques removed sediment from shallow parts of the bay, depositing them on-land to create an artificially well-defined shoreline. Onland, regional urbanization has also affected the ecological and hydrologic characteristics of the watershed, through the removal of natural upland and wetland habitats and their associated plant and animal species, and the construction of roads, parking lots, sidewalks, rooftops, and other impervious surfaces. As the watershed as it existed as a system of natural filtration and stormwater channeling has now essentially been destroyed, water now falls over a toxic and impervious urban landscape, soaking up a cocktail of petrochemical products and microplastics and spraying them out over the now sterilized and scarred bottom of the bay, creating a thick sludge layer in which will serve as the only record of our wasteful era preserved in the sediment.    

 

Rama gets back in the car and hands me a bottle of iced coffee and a single packet of Tylenol for the headache. That’s nice of her. Then she hands me a bottle of sunscreen.

-Here, this will help.

I open up the vanity mirror to see my face bright like a tangelo.

-Shit.

She tells me that while she was bored waiting in line she was reading about Webb City, “the world’s most unusual drug store.” where the owner James Earl “Doc” Webb, a patent medicine man, used to sell dollar bills for ninety-five cents and shot the Flying Zacchinis out of a cannon in the parking lot.

-Can we go visit it?

Rama sighs, no, it’s long gone.

As we pull out from the dappled shade of the oak tree I tell her she shouldn’t feel so melancholy about mid-century America, it hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s all still here and will be forever encased in the fossil record.

 

childhood home – منبت

 

After crossing a few bridges, we are in the part of the city that feels familiar. My sense of orientation kicks in and I can remember how to get home. I recognize a shopping center whose identical box stores are arranged in the specific order that makes it my local shopping center. I see the Publix we used to shop at, the Burger King where I went to several birthday parties.

Rama drives while holding her cell phone on speaker, speaking to her father again. Cornhole, Gusanos, Coozies, Parrothead.  Because of the words she is unable to easily translate I can tell she is recounting last night’s adventure.  Or she’ll say the word, and then translate it piece by piece. She has to resort to switching between English and Arabic, she keeps asking for my help. A foam sleeve for keeping your beverages cool. A game where you throw a small cotton bag of rice into a slightly inclined board with a 6” hole in it. Man, when you describe it like that, it sounds so strange.

She has a harder time trying to describe parrothead. Sometimes you can’t describe a subculture, you just have to see it. And even the name, those with the heads of a parrothead? No it’s more like metalhead, deadhead is like a fan of a type of music. Deadhead? Yeah, like the Grateful Dead. So parrotheads are like tropical deadheads. She just continues to just say Parrotheads.

It’s surprising whenever a gap appears in Rama’s seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of American culture. The rare moment when she pronounces a word in English incorrectly. She once said aluminum as though she’s only ever seen it written. Her imported cultural memory, Her turing test English.

هر تورنغ تيست انكلش

We exit the highway and turn onto a wide car avenue, five lanes of traffic in either direction. We come to a red light. I see a lot where I used to explore and build forts out of old sheets of discarded metal and wood, hidden and remote in the bramble. The lot has now all been mowed down and half of it converted into a long-term RV parking lot. We cross over an irrigation ditch and I recognize it immediately, it is St. Joes Creek. The house must be right around here.

The  neighborhood is smaller and closer to the ground than I remember it, seriesa  of low-slung ranch style houses separated by ornament strewn lawns. Everyone gets their own ugly little sculpture park. Sports team flags, religious wind vanes, concrete dolphins and manatees and metal wire herons and all the other animals that were pushed out to build these houses.

But We pull up to an enormous thicket. Vines crawl up big heaps of broken branches gathered in piles, young pine trees act as tent poles holding up sheets of leaves. I look across the street to confirm, and I see the enormous Salt Life Shrine our neighbor built. Yes, this is where my house used to be. We step out of the car and I stand in front of the tangled wall of vegetation.

They look familiar, they’re the plants I grew up with, familiar but nameless leaf shapes and textures. I pull out the field guide.  The ground is covered in a patch of Largeleaf Pennywort (Hydrocotyle bonariensis). the Australian Tuckeroo tree (Cupaniopsis anacardioides) my mom planted a long time ago has gone feral, clusters of red and yellow fruit rotting on the branch.  a beautiful patch of Spanish needles (Bidens Abla), an escaped Lantana. It’s botanical chaos.

And a bog cheeto! I say crouching down next to a puddle. I remember these. I pull out my loupe and examine the orange flower, which is really a bouquet of even smaller little flowers. They sparkle like a piñata.

-Bog Cheeto? That doesn’t sound very appetizing

-That’s the common name, I flip to the color-coded flower chart. Orange. you know what’s cool about these? This is a type of Milkwort and is maybe the only plant in this whole neighborhood that actually belongs here, its native habitat is pine-barren depressions and swamps in coastal areas of the southern and eastern United States.

I stand up.

-That’s what this all used to be. I only ever used to see them in abandoned lots and drainage ditches. Bog Cheetos. I wonder what the actual scientific name is. It’s called a Polygala lutea.

– How come you care so much about the Latin names for things?

-How come you care so much about the Arabic translation for things?

Ha.

-Naming things makes them richer, you remember them like friends and then you recognize them in the wild.

Looking into the darkness, holding the entire knotted structure up,  I can see our old Live Oak (Quercus Virginians) buried alive. It used to spread its wide, curling branches across this entire yard, the Spanish Moss that draped down, making the whole yard look like it was inside of a Green circus tent. The neighbors hated it for some reason, thought it looked unkept.

Rama stands next to me and puts a consoling hand on my shoulder.

-I’m sorry about this, I wonder why the new owners abandoned the place, so sad.

-Sad? Are you kidding, this is the best thing that could have happened!