Serge had walked down to the fourth floor when he heard two cops coming up the stairs. He ran back up to seven and down the hall.
When Serge burst into the hotel room with gun drawn, the businessman was sitting on the edge of the bed in a Santa Claus outfit, and the hooker was on his lap wearing altar boy vestments.
“I can explain…” the man began.
Serge cut him off with a pistol whip. “I don’t want to know. Just gimme all your money and ID.”
He had another thought. “And gimme that red suit, too, while you’re at it.”
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.
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