Best. State. Ever. Read online

  ALSO BY DAVE BARRY

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  Copyright © 2016 by Dave Barry

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  eBook ISBN 9781101982624

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  To my fellow Floridians:

  Don’t ever sober up.

  CONTENTS

  Also by Dave Barry

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  A Brief History of Florida

  The Skunk Ape

  Weeki Wachee and Spongeorama

  Cassadaga

  The Villages

  Gatorland

  Lock & Load Miami

  LIV

  Key West

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  Every few months I get a call from some media person wanting to interview me about Florida, where I have lived for three decades. The tone of the interview is never positive, or even neutral. The interviewer never asks: “Why do you live in Florida?” Or: “What do you like about Florida?”

  No, the tone is always: “What the hell is wrong with Florida?”

  I should note that these interviewers are not always calling from states that have a lot to brag about. I have been interviewed on the wrongness of Florida by people who live in, for example, Illinois. Not to be picky, but there are a few things wrong with Illinois. For one thing, the voters there keep electing criminals to high office. Illinois constantly has to build new prisons just to hold all of its convicted former governors, who form violent prison gangs and get into rumbles with gangs of convicted former state legislators. If Charles Manson ever gets out on parole and needs a job, he can move to Illinois and run for governor. The voters would say, “Looks like gubernatorial material to me!”

  Also, Illinois has done a poor job of handling its finances, which is why its official credit rating, as determined by Moody’s Investors Service, was recently lowered from “Meth Addict” to “Labrador Retriever.” And this is the state from which a media person called to ask me what is wrong with Florida.

  Florida has become The Joke State, the state everybody makes fun of. If states were characters on Seinfeld, Florida would be Kramer: Every time it appears, the audience automatically laughs, knowing it’s going to do some idiot thing.

  We weren’t always The Joke State. We used to be The Sunshine State, known for our orange groves and beaches and deceased senior citizens playing shuffleboard. People might have seen Florida as boring, but they didn’t laugh at it. They laughed at New Jersey, because it contained the New Jersey Turnpike and smelled like a giant armpit. Or they laughed at California, because it was populated by trend-obsessed goobers wearing Earth shoes and getting recreational enemas. Or they laughed at Indiana, because the people there proudly call themselves Hoosiers even though they have no idea what Hoosier means.1 Or they laughed at Kentucky, for having a statewide total of twenty-three teeth.

  But today all of these states are laughing at Florida. Everybody is laughing at Florida. Mississippi is laughing at Florida.

  How did this happen? As far as I have been able to determine without doing any research, the turning point was the presidential election of 2000. You remember. It was Al Gore against George Bush. On Election Night almost all of the other states were able to figure out pretty quickly who they voted for. But not Florida. Florida had no earthly idea who it had voted for. At first, it looked like maybe Gore had won the state, but then it looked like Bush had, but then suddenly it was Al again, and then it was Bush again. At one point, William Shatner appeared to be in contention. It was insane. By dawn we still had no winner, and network TV political analysts were openly shooting heroin on camera.

  Meanwhile, the morning skies over the state were darkened by vast fleets of transport planes swooping in from Washington, D.C., opening their doors and dropping tens of thousands of election lawyers. Some landed in the Everglades and were consumed by Burmese pythons. But, tragically, many survived, and, without taking time to remove their parachutes, they commenced filing lawsuits.

  This was the beginning of more than a month of intensive 24/7 TV news coverage of the Florida elections. This coverage did not present a positive image of Florida. It featured endlessly replayed videos of deeply confused Florida election officials squinting at Florida ballots that were apparently designed by dyslexic lemurs and then turned over to deeply confused Florida voters, many of whom apparently voted for nobody for president, or voted for two presidents, or used the ballots to dislodge pieces of brisket from between their teeth. Some voters apparently just drooled on their ballots, not that this stopped battalions of Washington lawyers from passionately debating which candidate these voters were drooling for.

  This gruesomely unflattering coverage of Florida ran nonstop, day after hellish day. It finally ended when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in a 7–2 decision, that Florida should be given back to Spain.

  OK, not really. But by then that was basically how the rest of the nation felt. And the nation did not forget. The nation h
ad formed a negative, stereotyped image of Florida as being a subtropical festival of stupid. From then on, every time anything stupid happened here, America rolled its national eyeballs and went, “There goes Florida again!”

  Journalists have built entire careers on chronicling Florida people doing stupid things. Somebody started a popular Twitter account called Florida Man, which consists entirely of links to news items about Florida men doing stupid things: Florida Man Seen Firing Musket at Cars While Dressed as Pirate; Florida Man Poses as Superman on Side of Road While Pantless, Urinating; Florida Man Sets Home on Fire with Bomb Made from Bowling Ball; Florida Man Seen Trying to Sell Live Shark in Grocery Store Parking Lot; Florida Man Slashes 88-Year-Old Woman’s Tires with Ice Pick for Sitting in His Favorite Bingo Seat; Knife-wielding Florida Man Tries to Rescue Imaginary Girlfriend from Garbage Truck; Florida Man Says He Danced on Patrol Car in Order to Escape Vampires; Florida Man Proudly Claims He’s the First Man Ever to Vape Semen; Florida Man Seen Masturbating into Stuffed Animal in Walmart Bedding Department; Florida Man Shoots Sister in Butt with BB Gun Because She Gave Him Penis-shaped Birthday Cake; and on and on and on.

  To judge from the news, there is no end to the stupid activities that Florida men, and women, engage in. Quite often—probably because of Florida’s moderate climate—they choose to engage in these activities naked. In some other state, a person might say to himself, “I believe I shall pose as Superman by the side of the road!” But in Florida, that person is also going to say, “But first, I shall remove my pants!”

  Why do there seem to be so many stupid people in Florida? Is there a scientific explanation?

  Yes, there is.

  A Scientific Explanation For Why There Are So Many Stupid People in Florida And Why This Is Not Really Florida’s Fault

  Imagine several hundred laboratory rats that have been selected at random from the general rat population, so they vary in size, strength, color, intelligence, flea count, etc.

  Now imagine that laboratory scientists scientifically place these rats in the center of a large box that is open on top but has high walls around the perimeter. The box is shaped roughly like a rectangle, but at the lower right corner there is a long, skinny dead-end corridor jutting out.

  The rats are able to roam freely inside the box. Almost all of them, sooner or later, venture down the skinny corridor. After checking it out, they decide to leave. The intelligent ones immediately realize they need to turn around and go back out the way they came in. The ones with average intelligence, or even slightly below-average intelligence, take longer, but eventually they, too, figure it out. But what happens to the really stupid rats?

  That’s right: They elect the governor of Illinois.

  No, seriously, because these rats aren’t smart enough to turn around and retrace their steps, they become stuck down there in the corridor, wandering cluelessly this way and that, unable to figure out how to get out.

  This is exactly what has happened in Florida, except instead of rats we have people, and instead of walls we have the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. People come down here all the time. Most of them, sooner or later, decide to leave, but the stupid ones can’t figure out how to do this. So they remain, and in time are issued ballots.

  The point—and remember that this is not just my opinion, this is a fact, based on an actual laboratory experiment conducted by imaginary scientists—is that, yes, Florida, because of its unique shape and warm climate, does have an unusually high percentage of low IQ people doing stupid things, frequently naked. But most of these people came here from other states, the very same states that are laughing at Florida. Those of us who live here have to contend with not just our native-born stupid but your stupid, too. We are like Ellis Island, except instead of taking the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, we take people who yearn to pleasure themselves into a stuffed animal at Walmart.

  But it’s not just the Stupid Factor that has given Florida its unfortunate national reputation. There is also the Weirdness Factor. Things keep happening in Florida—things that are similar to things that happen in other states except that there is some mutant element, some surreal twist, that makes the rest of the nation nod its national head and think, “Ah . . . Florida.” Here’s a news headline from 2015:

  VANILLA ICE ARRESTED FOR STEALING POOL HEATER FROM A FORECLOSED HOME

  This headline does not mention Florida. But you know that everyone reading it immediately assumed, correctly, that the incident occurred in Florida, because while you might imagine a pool heater being stolen in some other state, you cannot imagine another state where the heater would allegedly be stolen by Vanilla Ice.2 That is what I mean by the Florida Weirdness Factor.

  Here’s another 2015 example: A tractor-trailer blew a tire on Interstate 95 and went off the road into some woods in Volusia County, Florida. The crash resulted in a fatality.

  “Wait a minute,” I hear you saying. “That’s unfortunate, but it’s not weird. Accidents involving fatalities happen all the time.”

  Yes, but in this case, the fatality was a shark. The tractor-trailer was carrying four sharks from the Florida Keys to an aquarium in Coney Island in New York City and one of the sharks was ejected during the crash. Fortunately, it didn’t hit anybody, but the fact remains that there was, briefly, an airborne shark on Interstate 95, and it could have hit a car, which would have been tragic, by which I mean pretty funny.

  The point is, Florida is the only state I am aware of where a shark was killed in a traffic accident.3 Speaking of which: Florida is also the only state I am aware of in which a woman crashed her car because she was shaving her privates. According to the Key West Citizen, this woman was heading for Key West on the Overseas Highway. Technically, she should not have been driving, since her license had been revoked, but let’s not nitpick. She was going to visit her boyfriend, and—in the words of the state trooper who later arrested her—she “wanted to be ready for the visit.” So she decided to shave what is known in medical terminology as her Bikini Area.

  How do you think she elected to do this? Do you think she pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the vehicle? Of course not! That would have wasted valuable time. Instead, she had the person sitting in the passenger seat—who happened to be her ex-husband—steer the car while she shaved. The fact that her ex-husband was in the car is a textbook example of the Florida Weirdness Factor.

  So they were motoring along at 45 miles per hour, the ex-husband steering and the woman operating the accelerator whilst tending to her Area. What could possibly go wrong, right? Unfortunately, the car in front of them—in a one-in-a-million fluke occurrence that nobody could have foreseen—slowed down to make a turn, and Team Steering/Shaving slammed into it.

  The Key West Citizen quoted the state trooper as saying: “‘If I wasn’t there, I wouldn’t have believed it. About 10 years ago I stopped a guy in the exact same spot . . . who had three or four syringes sticking out of his arm. It was just surreal and I thought, “Nothing will ever beat this.” Well, this takes it.’”

  By the way: The driving-while-shaving woman hailed from Indiana. That’s right: She was a Hoosier.

  One more Florida motoring story: In March of 2015, a Tampa resident named Robert Abercrombie pulled his eight-year-old son’s loose tooth. How is this a motoring story? It is a motoring story because Abercrombie pulled the tooth with his Chevrolet Camaro. Yes. He tied one end of a string to the tooth and the other end to the back of the Camaro. Then, with his son standing in the street behind the car, he revs the engine and roars off, yanking the tooth out as clean as a whistle, if a whistle had gums that could bleed. This might conceivably happen in some other state, but the wrinkle that makes this a true Florida Weird story is that Abercrombie is a professional wrestler.

  Fact: More professional wrestlers reside in Florida than in any other state.4

  Abercrombie wrestles under the professional mo
niker “Rob Venomous.” On his Facebook page, under “Personal Interests,” Mr. Venomous lists “Meeting new people . . . beating up new people.” There is only one state where this man would reside and practice amateur dentistry.

  Of course, not every Florida Weirdness story has a feel-good storybook ending involving a clearly relieved eight-year-old with bleeding gums watching his tooth bounce gaily down the street behind a Camaro. There are plenty of Florida tragedies and we should not make light of them, although we cannot help but observe how truly weird they are.

  One vivid example of a Florida tragedy that got national attention because of the weird factor involved the death in 2012 of a man at a Deerfield Beach reptile store. There are many reptile stores in Florida, especially South Florida. I don’t recall ever seeing a reptile store when I lived in the Northeast, but down here they’re everywhere, like Starbucks, except instead of lattes they sell snakes. If you’re the kind of person who frequently remarks, “I wish to purchase a reptile but I don’t wish to travel a long distance,” then this is definitely the state for you.

  But getting back to our tragic yet weird story: Try to guess what would cause this man to die at a reptile store. If you guessed that he was bitten by a venomous snake, thank you for playing, but no. The cause of his death—and here we are definitely in Florida-only territory—was eating cockroaches. The store held a cockroach-eating contest; before that, there was a worm-eating contest, which this man also entered.

  Now try to guess why this man entered a cockroach-eating contest. To pay the mortgage? To defray urgent medical expenses? Please do not be silly. He was trying to win a snake. Yes. First prize was a ball python—which, for the record, the man did not even intend to keep for his personal use. He planned to give it to a friend. Anyway, he won the contest, but tragically the cockroaches did not agree with him. The reptile store stated, on Facebook, that the snake “now belongs to his estate.” So there’s that.