Tim Dorsey - Hammerhead Ranch Motel

When they hit Daytona, they drove right out on the sand. The early-bird beer-funnelers whistled and catcalled, and City and Country waved back. After the novelty of driving on sand wore off, City drove up Main Street. They parked across from the cemetery at Boot Hill Saloon. A hard-core biker hangout. They walked in and all heads turned. But the girls knew the score-places like this were harmless as long as nobody smelled fear, and the two strolled with reckless attitude to a pair of barstools. They ordered whiskey. It was seven A.M.

“Shit,” muttered an impressed biker three stools down, and turned back to a conversation with a hit man. City studied a photograph over the bar. Three smiling bikers with their arms over each other’s shoulders. Underneath was a plaque: “In memoriam. Stinky, Cheese-Dick and Ringworm. Killed by yuppies.”

The door opened and a flabby insurance type with an untucked polo shirt stood frozen in the doorway with a Tipper Gore wife. Both looked like deer in headlights-one of the moments where someone knows they’re in the wrong place, but they don’t know which is worse, running or sticking it out. They took hesitant steps forward, their feet crunching the peanut shells covering the floor, the only sound in the room. They stopped under the unlaundered bras and panties hanging from the ceiling. Fear stunk up the joint. Several bikers got off their stools. The couple changed their minds and ran.

But there was a difference between fearless and dumb…take the Georgia Tech theology student in a Hog’s Breath T-shirt and the English major from the University of Tennessee, who finished off an all-night drink fest by falling from their hotel balcony. However, their room was on the first floor, and they simply rolled on the lawn, got up, and walked to Boot Hill Saloon. The Georgia sophomore was Sammy Pedantic. The English major in the Volunteers letterman jacket was Joe Varsity, and he was telling Sammy about his thesis comparing the Styron-Mailer literary schism to the East-West rap feud.

“Mailer might do a drive-by?”

“He’s got the temperament.”

“But he can’t do this,” said Sammy, and he stuck a full longneck beer in his mouth and raised it in the air without hands and drained it. Then he opened his mouth, and the empty bottle fell and bounced off the bar.

Three Latin men in sharp suits came in the door, and the bikers picked up their beers and cleared out of the way. The three sat down next to Joe and Sammy, who were trying to balance small stacks of quarters on their noses.

City and Country were getting a little blitzed. They ordered more whiskey and smoked cigarettes like amateurs.

Soon the Latin men left the bar, and Joe and Sammy looked around the place and spotted the two women.

“Oh, no!” said City. “They’re coming over here!”

“Hi, girls! Mind if we join you?”

“Yes.”

Joe and Sammy sat down.

The guys talked nonstop for twenty minutes while the girls faked yawns and tapped their watches. “So that’s the deal,” said Joe. “These three Latin guys are paying us to drive their Lexus across the state, and they’re even throwing in a couple of motel rooms on the beach. We just need someone to drive our car. What d’ya say?”

City talked real slow and annoyed, like she was dealing with the simple. “Why don’t one of you drive the Lexus and the other drive your car?”

“Cuz then we can’t drink beer and party on the way over,” Sammy said like it was obvious. “It wouldn’t be a roadtrip.”

“Who were these guys with the Lexus?”

“Great guys!…” said Sammy. “What were their names?”

City looked out the side window at their Alfa Romeo. A police cruiser drove by slowly, then stopped and backed up.

“Please, you gotta come with us,” said Sammy.

The officer got out and started walking around the Alfa.

“On second thought, it’s not such a bad idea,” said City. “Where’s your car?”

“Right across the street.” Sammy pointed. “When can you leave?”

“How ’bout right now?”

The Diaz Boys had a big shipment of cocaine headed for Tampa Bay, and they decided to try one last time to make a drop at a rented home.

They sat down their newest mole couple, Mr. and Mrs. Ramirez, and told them about all the other couples they had placed in rented homes, only to screw up. The Diaz Boys let them know in no uncertain terms exactly what the score was.

“What’s the score?” said Mr. Ramirez.

“We just told you!”

Ramirez wasn’t really their name and they weren’t really married. They were Miguel Cruz and Maria Vasquez from Colombia, both in their late fifties, who had recently immigrated to the United States with green cards arranged by the Diaz Boys with hefty bribes. They posed as a married couple. To make the arrangement more credible and unassuming, they were accompanied by a sweet great-grandmother, who was actually Margarita de Cortez, the vicious Mata Hari of Venezuelan politics from the 1940s, who was rumored to have been making love to the finance minister when she stabbed him in the heart with the spike of a German kaiser helmet that he had begged her to wear to bed. But now she was just another harmless old lady in her eighties on Florida ’s Gulf Coast -Mrs. Edna Ploomfield, the live-in mother-in-law.

The Diaz Boys repeated what the penalty would be if there were any more mistakes-just in case there was any confusion. The Ramirezes nodded eagerly that they understood and that everything would be fine. Thank you for the opportunity-you won’t regret it. They shook hands and made pleasantries until they noticed Margarita de Cortez sitting silently off to the side. Everyone stopped talking and looked over at her.

“I need a smoke,” she said. “And a drink. And a man.”

M r. and Mrs. Ramirez moved into Calusa Pointe Tower Arms, unit 1193. They couldn’t have been more thrilled about living in the United States. They wanted to be part of the American Dream. They signed up for citizenship classes.

But above all else, Mr. and Mrs. Ramirez remembered what the Diaz Boys had said, and they kept to themselves and were gracious in all social situations. It came naturally. Their enthusiasm for being in the land of the free bubbled over, and they were exceedingly pleasant to all their neighbors, who reacted with surliness and sweeping expostulations. The Ramirezes couldn’t understand how people who had so much could be so bitter. But they figured it was just another facet of American culture they did not yet understand but would soon come to appreciate.

After a few months, the Ramirezes got the odd feeling that things had changed. Their neighbors’ normally crappy outlook had become one of suspicion and standoffishness. One day the Ramirezes were walking back to the unit with grocery sacks when they saw Mrs. Ploomfield standing in her nightgown just outside the door of unit 1193, pointing down the hall at one of their neighbors. “Yeah, you! I’m talking to you, motherfucker!…”

Mrs. Ramirez screamed and dropped her brown bag of vegetables. She leaped over the zucchini squash and ran up the walkway.

Edna Ploomfield was still yelling down the hall at the neighbor as Mrs. Ramirez hustled her inside: “You’re dead! You hear me? Dead!”

Mr. Ramirez brought up the rear and bolted the door. The couple quivered and stared at Edna in disbelief.

“What are you doing?” yelled Mr. Ramirez. “Do you want to die?”

Mrs. Ploomfield spit on the floor with disdain and shuffled toward the kitchenette.

Everyone in Calusa Pointe knew Mrs. Ploomfield and they avoided her. Just the opposite in the bar next door at Hammerhead Ranch, where she made lots of friends. One of her drinking buddies was Guy Rockney, the weatherman for FCN, who owned a penthouse at Calusa Pointe.