Tim Dorsey - Hammerhead Ranch Motel

The problem was that the medication dimmed his wattage. Serge would either hide the pills in his mouth or throw them up later. He didn’t want anything messing with his gray matter; he liked the hum inside his head too much-the free commerce of thoughts and images streaming back and forth, occasional bursts of genius flashing inside his skull like heat lightning over Tampa Bay on a warm August evening.

Serge’s first admission to Chattahoochee came in the early eighties after he was picked up at Cypress Gardens. A night watchman discovered him practicing synchronized water ballet in the Florida Pool, the famous swimming pool built in the shape of the state just north of the water ski ramps.

The police called in a state psychiatric team when Serge refused to come out of the pool, claiming he was Esther Williams rehearsing for the hit 1953 MGM musical Easy to Love.

Soon a crowd of cops and park officials had gathered. Serge lay on his back in the pool and made “water angels.” The theme park wanted to avoid publicity at all costs. They conferred quietly and asked if anyone knew what the heck the intruder was talking about.

“He’s got his facts right,” the park publicist chimed in. “Part of that movie was shot in this pool. But that’s ancient trivia. Most of our own employees don’t even know that.”

A voice from the pool turned the group. “ Cypress Gardens, two hundred botanical acres on the shore of beautiful Lake Eloise. Florida ’s first theme park, established 1936…”

The publicist eventually coaxed Serge out of the pool on the pretext of an audition for Skirts Ahoy!

T rapper Nelson was found dead by his cabin in the late sixties, and all the children whispered it was something sinister. He was shot, they said, maybe suicide, maybe murder.

In 1995, Martin County sheriff’s department and game officials began hearing strange rumors. Trapper Nelson wasn’t really dead. The body they found more than two decades ago was some unfortunate soul who had wandered into Nelson’s camp, and Trapper had since dug in deeper. Canoeists reported a shadowy figure darting about the banks or sometimes in the windows of Trapper’s old cabin. The hermit’s local status eclipsed legend.

A week later, deputies dragged Serge into the sheriff’s station, wearing furs and smeared with dried animal blood. He kicked and he screamed. “But I am Trapper Nelson! Lemme go!”

So began Serge’s most recent stay at Chattahoochee. After two months, prison psychiatrists got together to discuss Serge’s case. He was their favorite, most charming patient, and they couldn’t stand to watch what was happening.

They got a visiting specialist from Austria to put Serge under hypnosis.

Serge babbled and grunted as he lay on the couch. He began pitching violently and they had to hold him down. His mumbling increased to a high-speed torrent of incomprehensible sonic hash.

“Someone get a tape recorder!” yelled the shrink gripping Serge’s ankles.

Hours later, after Serge was back in his cell under sedation, the psychiatrists met with a police evidence tech. He tinkered with the tape recording on a special machine, adjusting the treble and reverb and turning the speed way down. When the tape played at a fraction of its original rate, they began to detect human speech.

“ Florida: literally, abounding in flowers, named by Ponce de León. Statehood granted in 1845, first governor William D. Moseley”-the voice became more excited and angry-“flowing from the waters of the Kissimmee River to Lake Okeechobee and through the Everglades into Florida Bay. Along the way, nurturing a low, flat petri dish of extreme people. The rugged, the hopeful and the damned. Ridiculed as the place with no roots, no native residents and no culture, the land of shuffleboard and the nonregional, TV weatherman accent. But they’re not laughing anymore. Cocaine, Castro and carpetbaggers castrated with grooved grapefruit spoons that say ‘Life’s a Beach’ on the handle. New residents are interned in hot, dusty trailer parks populated entirely by assholes from Illinois. We get hit with storm after storm and walk through the rubble, whistling ‘ Dixie ’ and applying sunscreen. How does that stack up against your commonwealth? We don’t have great potatoes, we’re not the garden state, we aren’t proud to wear furry hats with earflaps and ‘Live free or die!” We’re a twenty-four-hour, dead-bolted, hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck, free-continental breakfast, death-wish vacation of a lifetime, not from concentrate. State motto? ‘Behind you!’

“It’s an experiment in natural selectivity. We’re breeding a hardier genetic strain of American to build on the Forty-niners and Plains settlers in Conestoga wagons. The new Florida Sooners, Jimmy Buffett’s Grapes of Wrath Tour. Thousands come every year but few make the cut. Most are on vacation, but others are on business. And some are simply running toward the light. Men with beaten-dog looks driving carloads of dirty-faced kids. None of this is new to the old-timers. The outsiders just started coming here in big enough numbers to get the word out. But it’s been going on for hundreds of years, ever since the Europeans hacked and diseased the Indians in the name of God and gold, searching for the Fountain of Youth, which was recently discovered in the middle of a roadside attraction in St. Augustine. From the conquistadors and the Seminole Wars to the Civil War Battle of Olustee. The two Henrys-Flagler and Plant-running train tracks down both coasts. The railway that went to sea figuratively in 1912 and literally in the hurricane of 1935. Hemingway stumbling, scribbling and brawling his way through the Keys. German U-boats off Fort Myers. Jackie Gleason with a pitching wedge, launching divots the size of toupees. Cape Canaveral became Cape Kennedy until we said, ‘What were we thinking?’ and changed it back… The ’68 Republican Convention. The ’72 Miami Dolphins. Claude Kirk, Reubin Askew, Walkin’ Lawton. Sinkholes, phosphate, citrus canker, Anita Bryant…the horror…the horror…”

And Serge passed out.

The technician turned off the tape, and the Austrian psychiatrist was stunned. “We must help him!”

The next day the Austrian met Serge for a one-on-one. Serge sat on the edge of the couch, rocking back and forth, listening to his Walkman. The psychiatrist leaned down and took the earphones off Serge’s head and pressed the stop button.

“Can we begin?” the doctor asked with a smile.

The session was unproductive for the first hour. Serge wanted to talk about the fall TV lineup. He said he’d submitted a script to Friends where everyone gets killed, but he hadn’t heard back yet.

“I’m sure it’s a fine script. Now about your childhood…”

Shortly into the second hour, the doctor stopped talking and began looking around the room. He inspected his own hands, front and back, in minute detail. Serge knew it was time. He had scored some acid off a minimum-wage bedpan polisher and slipped the microdot of orange barrel LSD into the doctor’s coffee at the beginning of the session.

“I hope this has been helpful to you,” said Serge.

The psychiatrist looked up from his palms with a question on his face.

“This role reversal,” said Serge, getting up from the couch. He began taking off his patient’s uniform. “I think you’ll make a fine doctor someday. Now, if I can have my clothes back…”

The psychiatrist got up slowly. He took off his shirt and slacks and handed them to Serge and put on the patient’s clothes.

Serge got dressed and adjusted his bow tie and glasses in the mirror, looking spiffy. He slicked his hair with mousse. He looked back at the doctor and saw a quivering mass of Jell-O.

Serge had anticipated the possibility.