Hammerhead Ranch Motel

11

Welcome Miami Vice fans!” read the pink-and-aqua banner over the hotel entrance on Miami Beach.

In the lobby, dealers sat behind dozens of card tables, doing brisk business. Jan Hammer CDs. Philip Michael Thomas 8×10s. Ferrari Matchbox cars. Board games, coffee mugs, police badges. There was a line of people with luggage waiting to check in at the front desk, wearing Ray-Bans, pastel T-shirts and white Versace linen jackets.

Later that evening in the auditorium, a man who did not look remotely like Don Johnson was onstage playing Sonny Crockett. A woman dressed like a prostitute played Gina.

Suddenly, “Gina” ripped off her wig and threw it to the ground.

“I didn’t get my GED just to play a prostitute!” she yelled.

Don Johnson grabbed her wrists and said he loved her.

The audience whistled and applauded.

It wasn’t part of the script. The woman ran out the side door of the hotel, and the man followed.

He found her sitting and crying in his convertible parked on a side street off Ocean Drive. It was a pink Cadillac Eldorado. Running the length of the car down to the tail fins was an airbrushed Miami Vice logo and the words Lenny Lippowicz-The Don Johnson Experience.

Lenny Lippowicz was the pride of Pahokee, Florida. He dropped out of high school and bounced around as a spot welder in the shipyards and Ploeti petroleum storage compounds of Jacksonville, Tampa and Fort Lauderdale. He did a little bartending, worked a carnival in Margate, and stinted as an unqualified dive operator off Boca Raton.

He got fired from the dive boat after a bad head count left a never-found tourist behind at sea, and he drove west across the swamp. He stopped at an authentic Indian Swamp Village, where he bought authentic tribal garb woven by authentic Chinese political prisoners. When he got to Fort Myers, he put on the colorful Indian outfit and walked into the administrative office at Sunken Parrot Gardens and applied for alligator wrestler.

“What are your qualifications?”

“Look at this fantastic outfit!”

He was hired on the spot.

Lenny figured the trick to gator wrestling was keeping them fat and happy, and he fed them so much they lay around the pond drowsy all the time like a living room full of uncles after Thanksgiving dinner.

Lenny arrived in the morning and moved the red plastic hands on the fake clock that said, “Next show at…” He got into his Indian costume and dragged annoyed alligators around by the tail. He picked the frailest and tucked the end of its jaws under his chin. He stuck out his arms-“Look, Ma, no hands.”

It was a pleasant life and Lenny started to like the costume. Then he was fired again. One of the alligators got away while Lenny was smoking a joint behind the serpentarium, and it ate one of the parrots, which wouldn’t normally have gotten Lenny fired except it ate the only one that could roller-skate.

The next day, Lenny went to the newsstand down the block from his apartment and saw a small article in the local paper about the alligator eating the bird.

A few days later Lenny stopped by the same newsstand and noticed a London tabloid with a vibrant cockatoo photo on the cover. A big story with a giant headline: “Gator Chomps Miracle Bird in Florida Feather Fest!”

The Weekly Mail of the News World had lots of dramatic details and described the parrot roller-skating for its life down a handicapped ramp at the gift shop with the gator in hot pursuit. Lenny knew the sensational details were all made up. But it was great copy.

“I can do this!”

Lenny launched his new career as freelance Florida correspondent for the sleazier side of Fleet Street. He wrote a fake résumé and exaggerated stories. He struck oil. The Brits went ape for anything Florida. The stories the tabloids wanted most: tourists attacked by narco-criminals with machine guns, alligators, the Everglades stinkfoot, old-time gospel preachers caught with transvestites, tourists attacked by alligators, tourists attacked by stinkfoot, flesh-eating bacteria in Jacuzzis, and coconuts found growing in the likenesses of the royal family.

Lenny had a beat-up yellow Cadillac, and he headed down to Miami. He called it the newsmobile. He got a roll of two-inch masking tape and taped the word PRENSA across his windshield as if he were driving around war-torn Latin America, which he was.

He grabbed a plastic milk crate behind a Publix in Pompano and used it to organize his files and maps on the passenger seat. He let the Herald, Sun-Sentinel and Post bird-dog his stories and then he’d swoop in with the newsmobile to add the profitable details. He soon found he didn’t need embellishment. The truth already stretched credibility. He covered the sheriff’s deputy who hid in the closet videotaping his prostitute wife with public officials; the federal agent who broke up an exotic animal smuggling ring by dressing in a gorilla suit; the man found floating off Miami Beach surrounded by twenty bobbing bales of coke-said his boat sank and then these bales just came floating by. The fisherman in Islamorada dragged from the shore and drowned because he refused to let go of the rod after hooking a large fish. The Miami supermarkets that fought shoplifting with cardboard cutouts of police officers, instructing employees to move them to different aisles every hour to create the impression they were patrolling. Lenny dutifully tucked the newspaper clippings in the plastic crate at stoplights on A1A.

Then he got too bold. He started staging events. He illegally fed wild gators in retention ponds and canals until they were sluggish. He flipped them on their backs, tied them up and threw them in the backseat of the newsmobile. Then he released them at shopping plazas and busy intersections, taking photos of the resulting mayhem and filing prewritten stories.

He got caught. The newsmobile was impounded, and he lost his fake press credentials.

Lenny was allowed to wear his Indian costume in jail on religious grounds. He bribed a guard to take his photo through the bars. The Weekly Mail of the News World published a story about a Native American from the swamp who was arrested for protesting European encroachment by releasing alligators in populated areas. Lenny used the money from the story to pay court costs and get the newsmobile out of impound.

Lenny was living the Florida Dream. He knew the state well and he’d find safe, isolated roads and sleep in his car. Another sunrise and another day of journalism. He bought a laptop for a hundred dollars from a junkie on Biscayne Boulevard. He collected facts during the day and typed stories into the laptop at night in the bars. Over the course of the evenings, between the rum and the joints in the parking lot, the amount of writing became increasingly lean.

One night Lenny picked up a flyer left on the bar. He had been chatting with the woman on the stool next to him-said her name was Angie-and she looked over his shoulder at the pamphlet. The first annual Miami Vice convention in the art deco district on South Beach.

“I love Miami Vice,” she said.

“You do?” he said with a smile.

Lenny had his newest rap.

He bought a loose white Italian suit and Gucci loafers. He took the newsmobile in for an off-the-books pink paint job. He turned it into a convertible with a demolition saw and glued strips of packing foam over the jagged metal along the top of the windshield and where the side window posts had been. He stuck pink and blue neon tubes under the chassis.

The Miami Vice convention started well enough until Angie broke down onstage. Out in the car, Lenny managed to get her to stop crying and he got in and started driving to their next gig in Tampa. She gave him the silent treatment all the way across the Everglades and up I-75. When he got to Tampa Bay he pulled off at the fishing pier, hoping maybe if he could get her alone in a romantic setting and turn on the Johnson charm…

T he fresh salt air stung Lenny Lippowicz’s nostrils as he gazed off the end of the fishing pier and into Tampa Bay just after midnight. He looked up at the Sunshine Skyway and the flashing red and blue lights of the emergency vehicles bunched together at the top of the bridge.

He turned around and watched Angie’s angry hips in red-leather hot pants as she walked barefoot away from him under the row of crime lights running down the pier, toward shore. She had a pair of bright green spiked heels in her right hand, and he colored her gone.

Lenny sighed with a hard exhale through his nose and watched her, now tiny at the foot of the pier. He listened to the waves. He rolled the end of a filterless Lucky Strike in his mouth, gripped it with his lips and didn’t light it. The cold ocean wind blew through his hair.

Lenny leaned against the concrete retaining wall at the end of the pier and looked into the blackness. The pier used to be the old Skyway bridge until a ship hit its supports in a storm in ’80 and collapsed the middle span. When they built the new Skyway next to it, they ripped out most of the old bridge except the ends and converted them into fishing piers. Lenny looked up again at the emergency lights flashing on the bridge and wondered what had happened. A Coast Guard helicopter arrived and hovered with a search beam aimed down into the water.

Lenny was alone on the pier. Waves plopped against the cement supports in the darkness thirty feet below. He pulled a joint from his pocket but he couldn’t get it lit in the breeze from the bay, so he crouched down behind the concrete wall and fired it up.

When he stood again, another head popped up simultaneously from the outside of the retaining wall. Lenny screamed in surprise and the other man screamed too, and the man lost his grip and fell thirty feet, splashing back into the bay. Lenny leaned over the railing and saw the man climb back out of the water again and up one of the pylons like a telephone repair man. A Santa Claus cap floated in the water behind him.

The man pulled himself over the railing, turned around and reeled in a soaked black parachute trailing behind him. He wrung out the chute and bundled it in his arms.

“Don’t hurt me!” Lenny said, and covered up his face.

“I’m not gonna touch you,” said Serge, and he threw the wet chute in the backseat of Lenny’s Cadillac. Serge walked to an oil-drum garbage can in a corner of the pier and retrieved a small brown paper sack hidden down in the garbage. Serge unpacked the contents: khaki shorts, sandals and a short-sleeve yellow shirt with an M. C. Escher pattern of angelfish turning into juvenile delinquents. He changed into the dry clothes.

Lenny slowly lowered his arms. “Who are you?”

“I’m the messenger,” said Serge. “The one you’ve been waiting for.”

Lenny took another slow drag on his joint. “Far out.”

Serge climbed into the passenger side of the Cadillac and Lenny got in behind the wheel.

Serge pointed down the pier, back toward land. “Step on it, toke-meister.”

And Lenny hit the gas.

O n the edge of the Hillsborough River, in a large open room on the second floor of the Tampa Tribune Building, the skeleton night crew tapped away at computer keyboards.

A young copy editor just out of college named Kirk Curtly worked the rim. He opened a computer file from the directory containing stories that needed headlines written. Kirk had been gently prodded by his supervisors to be more specific in his headlines. On the other hand, he was roundly praised for never having incurred a dreaded correction, which he achieved through inspired vagueness. Kirk tapped his chin with the Montblanc pen he’d gotten for a graduation gift and never used, since everything was done on computers. He typed the headline “Panel Studies Plan.” He looked at its structure and rhythm on the screen. He smiled with satisfaction and sent the story along to the typesetters. He called up another story and tapped his chin again. He typed “Official Mulls Options.” Curtly had a mental Rolodex of short, bureaucratic terms that were perfect for narrow headlines over one-column-wide stories, and he searched for such thin articles in the headline directory to show off his arsenal. It went this way for much of his shift. “Board Picks Member,” “Senate Takes Flak,” “Gov Eyes New Trend,” and his proudest effort: “Pols Nix Proxy Prexy Tap.”

Shortly after midnight, a late news story wormed its way through the Tribune computer system until it came to the headline directory. Kirk looked around. All his colleagues were writing heads on other stories. Only one story left that wasn’t being worked. It wasn’t one column. It ran in big type all the way across the top of page one. Kirk’s hands were unsteady as he opened the file. He read the story. A man in a Santa Claus suit had jumped off the Sunshine Skyway bridge. He began typing. He finished, sent the story along, got up and walked into the men’s room, where he suffered a forty-minute failure of nerve.

The story and headline moved with the speed of light to the copysetter, who was overworked and had exactly eight seconds to proof everything before pressing a button in the upper right of his keyboard, which fired electrons through the building and made the story spit out on a roll of silver-nitrate paper from a machine in the blue-collar section of the building. The page composers, who had exactly six months before their jobs would be sucked out of them by microprocessors, ran it through the waxer and slapped it on the master page, which was photographed by a giant camera, burned into a metal plate and clamped on the huge rollers of the printing press, and hundreds of thousands of copies rolled down conveyor belts to trucks waiting at the loading dock to bring the news to you.