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.
