Insane City (15 page)

to be honest, a legal risk. Technically, you’re harboring a criminal, Seth. She has to go.”

Seth stared at her for a few seconds. “Wait a minute. You’re worried that I’m breaking a law?”

“I’m just saying that, technically, that’s what you’re doing.”

“The way you were at the airport with Meghan’s weed in your suitcase?”

“That’s hardly the same thing. That’s an idiotic law.”

Seth thought about that, then said, “OK, remember the time we were going to the Giants–Redskins

game?”

That stopped the conversation for a moment, Tina and Seth both remembering. It happened right after

they got engaged. A friend had given Seth a pair of tickets to a Giants–Redskins game, great seats. Seth, a

passionate, lifelong Giants fan who rarely got to see his team play live, was pumped. He and Tina were

walking to the Metro, Seth in his vintage Lawrence Taylor jersey, exchanging some mostly good-natured

smack with Redskins fans also heading for the game, when they came upon a protest demonstration at a

bank branch that had an ATM lobby open Sundays.

There were about a dozen protesters, mostly youngish males, their attire traditional urban protest

scruffy, in some cases accessorized with bandannas. They had signs and a bullhorn and were chanting

slogans critical of this particular bank, which according to them was exploiting The People.

The protesters were blocking the entrance to the lobby, which did not make them popular with

several local residents who wanted to get inside and use the ATMs. Particularly unhappy was a fiftyish

woman, who, as Seth and Tina paused to watch, was trying to push her way past the line of protesters.

“Let me through!” she shouted. “You people have no right to block this door!”

“This bank has no right to
exist
,” said the bullhorn holder, speaking through the bullhorn despite the

fact that the woman was perhaps eighteen inches away. “Do you know how this bank does business?”

“I don’t care! My money is in there and I want to take some out.”

“Let me explain something to you about the foreclosure practices of—”

“I don’t want you to explain anything to me! I want you to get out of my way so I can get my money!”

The woman lunged forward; the protesters closed ranks. It was getting ugly. A police car arrived and

two officers emerged. This was when Seth said, “Let’s go, Tina,” and Tina replied, “Just a minute.”

The officers waded in, told the protesters they had to let the woman use the ATM. The protesters

said no. The police told them they had to step aside or get arrested. Four of the protesters locked arms in

front of the door; the rest whipped out cell phones and began recording video. The police got on their

radios and called for more police. That was when Seth said, “Tina, we really have to go if we’re gonna

make the game,” and Tina again replied, “Just a minute.”

Ten minutes later, she was on her way to jail. She’d gotten into it with the cops, and they’d told her

to step aside and she’d told them they couldn’t tell her to step aside. She wound up getting arrested along

with the Armlock Four, and Seth wound up going to the police station, where he waited uselessly until

Tina, with the help of her father, was released. She got out fairly quickly, as these things go, but nowhere

near quickly enough for Seth and Tina to make it to the Giants–Redskins game.

Outside the police station, Tina told Seth she was sorry but she hoped he understood why she had to

do what she did. Seth told her that, to be totally honest, he did not understand. Tina explained that

sometimes you have to stand up for what you believe in even if it was inconvenient, and she was not going

to just walk away and let the police run roughshod over a bunch of people who were trying to make a

difference by fighting against injustice. And Seth, who usually did not argue with Tina about issues, or

really about anything, but who had just missed his first chance to see the Giants live in
fifteen fucking

years
, said that it didn’t look to him like they were fighting injustice, that it looked to him more like they

were a bunch of self-righteous punks with expensive phones who claimed to care about regular people but

were in fact keeping regular people from getting their own money out of an ATM. And Tina said, yes,

maybe some people were temporarily inconvenienced, but the protesters were creating public awareness

of a greater injustice. And Seth asked who, exactly, the protesters were creating this awareness
in
since

the only people watching the protest were the police and the people trying to use the ATMs, all of whom

clearly thought the protesters were assholes. And Tina, whose cheekbones at this point were deep red,

said that was
exactly
the kind of cynical thinking that prevented anything from ever getting changed and if

Seth truly felt that it was more important to go to some stupid football game than to stand up for what you

believe in, even if it meant getting arrested, then maybe he would be happier being with somebody else

because she, Tina, did not ever want to be the kind of person who would just walk away. And Seth, who

was still trying to get used to the idea that a person as hot and smart and sought after and (usually) funny

as Tina was willing to commit herself exclusively to a guy like him, elected at that point to back right

down, telling Tina that he was sorry and that he respected her for standing up for her convictions and

getting arrested. Tina asked if he really meant that, and he, not one hundred percent sincerely, said yes,

and she said she really was sorry about making him miss the game, and he said, again not one hundred

percent sincerely, that it was fine, and that night they had
unbelievable
sex.

Now, on the balcony of her suite, Tina said, “I remember that.”

“And remember what you told me outside the police station? About doing the right thing no matter

what?”

A pause, then a soft “Yes.”

“OK. I’m just trying to do the right thing here.”

Tina nodded. “OK,” she said. “But you have to
swear
to me you’re not going to screw up the

wedding.”

“Teen, I swear.”

“This is really, really important to me, Seth. And my family.”

“I know, baby. Me too.”

“If you would just let my father . . .”

“Baby, no. I made a promise.”

“OK. But I’m serious: Don’t screw us up.”

“I won’t. Laurette will find her sister, she’ll leave, we’ll get married. It’ll be great.”

“You swear.”

“I swear.”

“OK. Now, get out, because I have to get my hair done for the rehearsal and the dinner. And you

need to get cleaned up, OK? Because for a good-looking guy, you look like complete shit.”

“Thanks.” Seth leaned over and kissed her, this time getting something in return. On his way out of

the suite, he passed Meghan, who was sitting on a sofa, rolling a joint.

“You lovebirds all patched up?” she said.

“I think so.”

“So Daddy won’t have to kill you?”

“I’m hoping not.”

“I’m kidding. He wouldn’t kill you. He’d have one of his thugs kill you. Still kidding. Sort of.” She

held up the finished joint. “Care to join me?”

“No thanks. I got into enough trouble doing that last night.”

“I don’t know,” said Meghan, lighting the joint, inhaling. “Seems to me if you hadn’t done this last

night, those people could have drowned.”

“You were eavesdropping on me and Tina?”

Meghan exhaled. “Of course. For the record, I think you’re right, and I admire the way you stood up

to her. People usually don’t.”

“Thanks.” Seth headed for the door. “See you at the rehearsal.”

“Be careful,” said Meghan.

Seth stopped halfway out. “Of what?”

“There’s a reason people don’t stand up to her.”

“I know, but in this case I think she really agrees with me.”

Meghan took another hit. “Sure she does.”

Seth hesitated a second, then closed the door.

14

Primate Encounter was the kind of tourist attraction that traditionalists loved because it was

old but that tourists generally shunned because it was old.

It was started in the twenties during one of Florida’s land booms, way out in the southwest Dade

County Redlands near the Everglades. Its founder was a man named Dan Seckinger, who was drawn to

South Florida primarily because of its distance from Duluth, Minnesota, where he was wanted for passing

bad checks, bigamy and assault with a hockey stick. Seckinger, in the great Florida tradition, was looking

for a way to get money from people without doing a great deal of work and hit on the idea of running a

tourist attraction.

His first enterprise was called Snake Village. It was a roadside hut with a dozen small cages inside;

for ten cents, tourists could gawk at a variety of snakes, all of which, according to the signs Seckinger had

made, were EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. This was highly inaccurate: All of the snakes were harmless. Several of them,

in fact, were dead. Seckinger found them on the roads, squashed by cars; he cleaned them up and put them

in the darker cages, posing them so that the tire marks didn’t show. When tourists asked why these snakes

didn’t move, Seckinger explained that they were “night feeders.”

Snake Village enjoyed modest success, prompting Seckinger to dream bigger. He changed its name

to Reptile City and added lizards, turtles and alligators to the menagerie. All of the new additions were

alive; the problem, from a showmanship perspective, is that most of the time they were no more animated

than the roadkill snakes. The alligators were especially disappointing. Although Seckinger’s signs

described them as FEROCIOUS MONSTER LIZARDS OF THE SWAMP, they spent days on end lying inertly in the muck like logs, but

less animated.

In an effort to liven things up, Seckinger brought in Chief Brave Savage, billed as “A Noble

Seminole Indian Warrior, Raised in the Darkest Heart of the Vast Trackless Everglades Swamp.” In

reality he was a Cuban immigrant named Carlos Penin, who took the job to earn tuition money so he could

study civil engineering.

As Chief Brave Savage, Carlos would wrestle an alligator four times a day on weekdays and six

times on Saturdays and Sundays. This required him to wade into the pen and engage in what Seckinger

billed as a “Death Struggle with an Alligator,” which required considerable acting on Carlos’s part

because the alligators were not at all interested in wrestling. They were interested in the same activities

they had been interested in for millions of years: eating and, very occasionally, mating. But since they

were fed regularly, they had no desire to eat Carlos, and they definitely did not find him sexually alluring.

Thus the wrestling show consisted of Carlos dragging an extremely reluctant alligator around in the

muck, looking less like a man engaged in a Death Struggle than like a man moving a roll of waterlogged

carpet. Meanwhile Seckinger, from the crowd, sought to add drama by shouting warnings such as, “Watch

out, Chief! He almost got you there!”

The Death Struggle, with a succession of non–Native Americans playing the role of Chief Brave

Savage, carried Reptile City for several decades. But by the seventies, business had slacked off badly.

Tourists wanted the spectacular flash and dazzle of Disney World, where they could see semi-lifelike

animatronic alligators; they weren’t going to stop at some run-down roadside shack to look at real ones.

In the eighties, Reptile City, now operated by Seckinger’s descendants, tried to revive itself by

capitalizing on the popularity of
Miami Vice
by obtaining two chimpanzees, dubbed Crockett and Tubbs.

Costumed in tiny pastel sport jackets, they starred in a show wherein they shot toy guns, and occasionally

flung real feces, at actors portraying drug dealers, while the PA system blared Phil Collins wailing “In the

Air Tonight.”

The
Miami Vice
craze ended, but Crockett and Tubbs stayed on, and over time were joined by a

variety of monkeys donated to Reptile City by naïve South Floridians who had thought they were bringing

home a fun family pet, only to find themselves sharing their home with a hyperactive, poo-flinging

banshee. By the nineties, Reptile City had again reinvented itself, this time as Monkey Adventure, which

became, in the environmentally sensitive twenty-first century, Primate Encounter, its signage now rife

with buzzwords such as HABITAT, RAIN FOREST, ECOSYSTEM and SUSTAINABILITY, although it was still basically a roadside shack