Florida, My Florida

FLORIDA HAS BEEN the scene of many a treasure hunt and most of these quests demanded payment in blood for what was sought in gold. Or, in the case of Juan Ponce DeLeon, rewarded with disease and death when all that he sought were the gentle, regenerative waters of immortality. A small thing to ask, one would think.

I too, have engaged in chases in Florida, no better prepared for the eventualities that lurked there. Growing up within sight of the lighthouse at Ponce DeLeon Inlet, known to locals as Mosquito Lagoon, I remain paralyzed by that romanticism of youth which is more healthily shed. As the lobster ages, he abandons the old shell and there grows a larger suit to fit his larger conception of the world. The waters are too warm for lobsters in Florida.

Enduring that curious flat state of humid thoughtlessness, there boiled within me enough fires of ambition and blind striving to exit the state but there was never enough heat to forge a steel hard version of truth. Perhaps the thrust of my departure propelled me high enough to see what I had been so charmed by and had blindly pursued in the name of fame and love of God as but the echo of an echo. The culture I aspired to see clearly would always by drowned by initial perceptions. Sunk beneath the latest translation and the re-re-echo. The Shangri-La Motel but the third version of an ersat movie. Of course the power of the original story remains and a core of great value transmitted, but this perception is not reality.

SUCH IDEAS LODGE entangled and warped in the eager boy and a diet of such Shangri-Las only feeds on itself. No lifeline is such romanticism, cut off from the very possibility of consistent and linear thought. Yes, lies in boxes stacked one by one along the ocean in a strip twenty miles long. Neon-emblemed inns and palaces, similar as a strip of concrete dolls notched with the original names of romance glowing from pastel tubes. Aku-Tiki, Capri, Ritz, Rivera, Bali Hai, Lodi. Still the ever more poignant essence remained, barely visible to this feeble romantic shell, his timbers charred by the explosion of the last decade and more recently ravaged by the imperative of honesty unleashed by the uncloaking of lies, the blind rat revealed for what he is. The rosy hue of the boy's lens was neither dark enough to have borne watching directly the solar flare during the last eclipses not clear enough to have seen anything very well. The surviving sentiment plays a tinkly tune on the gaudy chandeliers of a roaring optimism which lives only in books about gold-hatted lovers written three wars and two crashes and a depression ago.

With the comet Kahouteck, a new fervor of denial is called for and the bigs cars which once paraded by the ocean's edge are suddenly forgotten in this new age, ashtrays big as bathtubs unfulfilled. The new car aerosol, eau de new car, settles feebly into the floormats, unsmelled. These cars to be remaindered. Their loss to the nation would in a sense be a measure of the boy's unfulfilled responsibility, a symbol of his removal from the social machinery. His capacity to do good for his fellow citizens was as fleeting as the tire tracks on the sand. Foul though it was, he loved the car and sought some sort of integrity in its final purposes.

NOW IN DENIAL of the machine--what price must the nation pay for removing certain men from the assembly lines who once had a purpose in the great conveyor belt of social process--the dignity of being in some small sense midwives with grease on their aprons, unthinking cogs in a linear birth process, yes, but providing indispensable impetus nonetheless for the black tongue belt which spews forth from the belly of the Whale Motor Co. into the bosom of the general public wide track yachts, highway cruisers, gold-plated luxo-boats which drank Arab blood and ferried the rich and damned descendants of the former rootless races--Jews, yes, and Pilgrims too, as well as the sons of slaves! In the funeral Cadillac, all men are equal! What satisfaction for the poor to function in this process as a sacred ministry of leveller priests on the assembly line. Ferrying the executives across the Styx which we call be many names--Hudson, East, Cuyahoga, Detroit, Los Angeles, or Bay; ferrying souls from West Point or the East side or poshest Cleveland or plushest Bloomfield Hills, or from the splendors of Westwood or Nob Bill, ferried in radial punctureproof silence to those lushest immortal gardens of bones which match each heavenly city of America. Whatever the name they are all Forests of Yawns, Kingdoms of Yawns, the end of Dawns. Terminals.

A sad end awaits many a poor man who will be struck down unawares that there was a gap in his armor of a daily game of golf or tennis or jog or swim which fell prey to the arrows of the pies and mixed drinks and steakfat which had contributed to his arteriosclerosis. Just an ordinary coronary, an occluded good bye. Without a chance to ask what he might have done to give flesh to his dreams, the old boy asks when was the boat missed? The brass ring dismissed? The answer lies open for him to see if he can, before the stern challenge issued by the mystic power of language: Speak the truth!

But what truth could the eager boy see through the window of an azure tinted windshield? Cruising through the neon-tinted streets as boy, his life blurred imperceptibly so the '57 Chevy he started out in became that same black Cadillac and he was indeed on the way to Shangri-La.