Florida Man: Battle of the Five Meth Labs: A Love Story
Nature is a tropical swamp in sunshine, on whose purlieus we hear the song of summer birds, and see prismatic dewdrops—but her interiors are terrific, full of hydras and crocodiles. — Ralph Waldo Emerson – “Moral Sense,” lecture, March 18, 1860
To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything. — Albert Camus – “Betwixt and Between,” 1937
The sun, too, penetrates into privies, but is not polluted by them. — Diogenes – 4th c. BCE
I love the sun but don’t have the time to get a good tan and keep it year-round, so I am a huge fan of tanning products. — Kim Kardashian – Sometime After 1980
Preamble
The sun, in all its undulating, plasmatic brilliance and set merely at mid-life, despite its eons, has pronounced more to humanity about creation than any other natural phenomenon. Having birthed countless chariot-driving solar deities the planet over—the judicial Utu of the Sumerians, arbiter of righteousness, virtue, and truth; the Norsemen’s Sól, with her moon-sister, Máni, chased by wolves to mark the days and years; for the Greeks, Helios was the ruler of incantations; for Rome’s Julian the Apostate, he was the unifier of all things. For our purposes, which could never become too poetic or philosophic, the Egyptians probably nailed it when their sun god, Ra—who worked in power, the sky, and kings—was reduced to a ball of shit during the New Period, as the sun became associated with the sphere of dung rolled by a shiny, industrious beetle of those parts. Sure, dung is the manure—the literal, stinking mana—that feeds the earth from which all life springs. But, ultimately, a ball of shit is a ball of shit.
No civilized person would be caught dead sun worshipping today—hardly even in the form of tanning, which is more likely to be done artificially, and either way, you’d be bucking the Down with Melanoma trend. Vitamin D and Seasonal Defective Disorder be damned. No, no tanning, let alone veneration or devotion, an appreciation of the sun’s life-giving properties, or at base, that the planet would die without it. It’s too hot. It’s getting hotter, and those chariots are on fire. But this isn’t about all of that, not exactly.
The sun and its sunshine inhabit a number of cultural contexts—happiness, enlightenment, the aforementioned creation myths, and the very heaven which we all aspire to reach, literally or figuratively. One might think it no wonder the sun shunned Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, impure by way of the adultery so antithetic to her Puritan neighbors, it retreated from her presence whenever she moved to bask in it—indifferent to her lamentations that she had no sunshine to give to her poor daughter, Pearl. One might also be inclined to think adultery pretty low on the list of unpardonable sins when considered amongst such exploits as biting off your neighbor’s ear over a cigarette, attempting to start a race war near Disney World, and getting arrested for fighting a drag queen with a tiki torch while dressed as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, then having the gall to run for mayor. Yet, in 1970, the Florida state legislature adopted the nickname for which it is so well-known today—the Sunshine State.
Here, the sun shuns no one, and, in fact, it could be said to spare no one, from both its electromagnetic radiation and its pharmaceutical reach—with 1960s Sunshine, you could take a trip with LSD, and, if you were in the UK with “Sunshine in your pocket,” you were holding—Hester’s empty stock of sunshine for her daughter would certainly read differently in this context. Or, more menacingly, there is the synthetic Mephedrone—4-methyl methcathinone, or 4-methylephedrine—also known as White Magic, Meow Meow, Bath Salts, and of course, Sunshine. There are, as one can imagine, a thousand different tickets to heaven, or, wherever it is one wants to get to. This Sunshine made a man eat another man’s face off in Miami, giving him a one-way ticket to Death-By-Coptopia. The mind boggles.
Ah, but the Sunshine State—swaying palms, white sandy beaches, enough meth, perhaps, to build a causeway to Cuba, and, of course, the beautiful sunsets—our life-giving and life-taking star of raging chaos eaten by the horizon and the planet’s indifferent and inexorable rotational crusade, to help or hinder peoples on the other side of the Earth. If there are Florida Men and Women here, there’s a good chance, they’re everywhere. And you could be one of them.
One
Rupert is a big man sitting on a floor. He is also a scientist—a self-taught social entropologist, to be precise. Despite holding no academic degree above high school, his brilliance on the subject of entropy had landed him a position with the prestigious Spliphsonian Natural History Museum in Washington, DC, studying and working out his theories on how society is going to pot. Pretty impressive considering he’d applied for a janitor’s position. Entropy, in broad terms, is to be deficient on order or predictability, a steady degeneration into chaos. It’s very complicated. You’ll hear more about it later, because Rupert is fairly fixated upon the subject. Or rather, it will engulf you, as it has Rupert, and you’ll cease to notice it, and only gradually arrive at the nauseating conclusion that your life is but an exercise in falling apart, from birth till death, until you yourself have disintegrated, rotting into nothingness. For Rupert, it begins from the time he wakes up and collapses bit by bit throughout the day until he gives way into bed a mental-emotional scrap heap—every day a microcosm of his life, and his life, doubtless, a microcosm of the inescapable commotion of Universal entropic activity.
Right now, though, Rupert is not in DC, but, ironically, he is in a janitor’s closet. It is nine o’clock at night and the Solar Shore Polytechnical High School janitor’s closet in Sarasota, Florida, is sensory-deprivation quiet. It is dim and dingy, though the rest of the school is immaculate. Here, the walls are grey until about four feet up, and then it’s a grimy Breast-Cancer-Awareness pink from there to the ceiling, which is dropped-tile and stained. It reeks of often-used mop heads that have never been cleaned; or, dogs that have been used as mops and never cleaned. Towels dried stiff hang on screws impact-drilled into the cinderblock wall. An outdated vacuum cleaner stands next to a floor polisher, both wrapped with what looks to be about 372 feet of electrical cord. A pile of mostly-unidentifiable high school-related items sits in one corner, while bottles of cleansers, large and small, cluster beneath a chipped porcelain sink, huddled around its rusty U-pipe. Finally, there is a banked drain on the floor in another corner for emptying the beat-up rolling mop pail with the least amount of spillage.
Atop this pail sits a woman Rupert met about a half an hour before. Her jogging pants are pushed down around her ankles and her greasy black hair is pulled into a tight ponytail that sits almost on top of her head. She wears bright orange, mirrored sunglasses and too many picked scabs to pass as merely an acne problem. Her t-shirt has an American flag on the front with the words: “If your offended, I’ll help youpack!”
Rupert sits on the cleanest patch of floor available, against the wall between the sink and the banked drain. His six-foot-ten-inch frame squeezes uncomfortably into the space, knees pulled up, cement floor cold and hard. In the preceding months, his hair and beard had gotten a little nappy. He is multi-racial, like everyone else, but specifically, Rupert is biracial, born of a Caucasian house-husband and an African American Enthnosociobiologist who studied the precise use of turnip greens—the least utilized species of greens—in African American Soul Food, which no one outside Rupert’s immediate family unit ate. That he was aware of. Her articles were long; her career was short. She also preferred “black” to “African American,” because, “boy, damn, that’s a mouthful.”
His biracial upbringing should have made him a better, more well-rounded person—if popular conception is to be believed—relating equally to both races, but because both of his parents were completely dysfunctional and self-absorbed, the subject of race, racial issues, and how to navigate the social clusterfuck that is American culture was never addressed. Rupert had to figure this out on his own, without adult supervision. And, as we all know, kids are stupid. In the end, he felt he truly related to no single aspect of his composite parts and his biggest handicap was an almost complete inability to recognize the more subtle forms of racism—a chronic condition common amongst most white people, but a skill most black people become rather proficient in by the time they reach puberty. Overt forms were fairly easy, but he got hung up on the vaguer methods, which put him constantly on guard, often mistaken, and unable to speak the social language of either whites or blacks. In this age of hyper political correctness and the rule of identity politics, this put Rupert at a considerable disadvantage, and he felt uncomfortable laughing at his own offensive jokes that never even left his head.
Rupert is lighter than his mother, who would not pass the paper bag test. Rupert would in the dead of winter and notices a distinct difference in his privilege as the seasons change. Summers are more difficult to deal with. Here, in this closet, in this light—one fluorescent bulb shaded by a filthy plastic cover—he is a pale taupe. Like a retired wealthy couple’s bedding set in their bungalow by the sea. He is nothing if not versatile.
He can see himself reflected in the sunglasses of the woman on the pail.
“Surely you can wait,” Rupert says, sighs.
“We could be in here for days,” she replies.
He has no idea what her name is. They’re only together to get high, here in this janitor’s closet, which they have inadvertently locked themselves into.
She presses buttons on her cell phone as she relieves herself. Rupert realizes that she is not draining the tank, like he’d figured, but is in fact releasing a brown trout into the bucket. He’s not sure why he’d expected the former. Always assume the worst.
He sighs again, deeply, then regrets it as the inhalation was, to him, like eating floating microscopic pieces of shit.
“Who are you calling?”
“911,” she answers and farts. “Oops. There’s goes the Tasmanian Barking Spider. Better watch out, I think it got loose.” Shit Pail smiles with what’s left of her Cristy-wrecked teeth.
“Christ,” Rupert puts his head in his hands. “You know they won’t come.”
“Never know.” And now she’s peeing. “You gotta poo first. Then pee. Don’t want to get splashed with pee as the ol’ whoopsie snake hits the water.”
Snake. Trout. It’s Mutual of Omaha’s Shit Kingdom in here.
“There is no water in that bucket.”
“Hmm.” She now checks her text messages.
He listens to her phone beeping and booping, chiming sometimes, which sounds pleasant, but then a waft of fecal fetor assaults his nasal passage as the invisible stench cloud makes its way around the tiny enclosure in what appears to be a circular, lapping fashion.
This scenario might seem like it can’t get much worse, but it does. Shit Pail left the pipe and meth, which she keeps calling “Crink” because it sounded cute, in the glove compartment of her rusted-out, yellow Chevette. Rupert had barely fit in it. He barely fits anywhere. They don’t even make that model anymore. He feels he should have considered it a poor omen when she referred to his canvas cross-body bag as a “man purse.”
Shit Pail reads something funny and laughs without parting her lips, but when she’s not laughing, she sucks on her teeth, which makes a sound that Rupert refuses to process, and so, he makes conversation. This is not his forte.
“So,” he begins. “Tell me about yourself.”
He looks at her and, again, instant regret. This can’t be anything good. But then, he’s not exactly President of the United States either, though the dignity of that office has occasionally been called into question.
After a few seconds she looks up at him and clicks off her phone. Shit Pail, her pants still down and having made herself comfortable, sighs and leans her chin on an elbow/knee-propped palm.
“Not much to tell, really. I use a lot of Shard and Crank. When I’m feeling mellow, and poor, I like a Candy Blunt.”
She thinks some more.
“This one time I was ballin’ and some Buffer Bitch got all agro up in my shit . . . ”
Rupert gives Shit Pail a vacant look. What?
“I got in a fight. I grabbed her right between her tits, got her bra through her shirt, so I could get a good hold, you know, while I’m laying into her face. Bitch musta got that bra in the Buck Bin ‘cause that shit ripped right off. Her shirt came with it. I’m standing there with a hand full of this broad’s topsies and she’s buck-ass nekkid.”
Rupert can at least smile at this. “Funny.”
Shit Pail’s smile disappears. “Why don’t you tell me how great you are, Klingon?”
“Is . . . what did you . . . is that racist?”
Shit Pail thinks about it for a moment. “No,” she says. “It’s like a Crackhead.”
“I don’t smoke crack.”
“Oh, well let’s get you a fuckin’ trophy.” She pauses. “Never?”
“Never.”
“Except that one time.”
“What one time?”
“That one time.”
“What?”
“Nevermind.” Shit Pail grins, then waves her hand, bidding him to begin.
Rupert sighs, inhaling the tiny particles of this woman’s recent evacuation then makes a mental note to stop doing that, which he forgets as soon as he thinks it. He’s not been so sharp these days.
“Go on,” she says, and settles onto, almost into, the bucket. “What’s your deal?”
Lee Harper Oswald 
Sock it to me...