“We’re all adults here,” Carl Hiaasen confirmed, more than once, at his appearance on the third night of Festival of the Arts Boca’s Authors and Ideas series Wednesday night. The phrase, repeated like a leitmotif during his hour-long foray into the more baroque byways of Florida idiocy and malfeasance, was as close as this media veteran came to offering a trigger warning that his next story may not be meant for delicate constitutions.
It could involve a gator where a gator shouldn’t be, or a human inside a gator, or perhaps vice versa. It may include a severed appendage absconded from a car wreck by an unscrupulous deputy, or incestuous manatee sex. This is Florida, where, as Hiaasen knows all too well, anything goes. “This is not a story you’ll read in the Des Moines Register anytime soon,” he noted, after one such tale.
The Treasure Coast resident, author of more than 30 books, and former columnist for the Miami Herald came out with linguistic guns ablaze last night, asking the women in the packed Mizner Park Amphitheater audience to “raise your hand if you’ve been impregnated by Elon Musk.” He added that his retirement from the Herald, in 2021, came just two weeks prior to the revelation of the then-Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz sex-trafficking allegations, and that perhaps he gave up his post prematurely. “I sort of miss it everyday now,” he added.
But while the Democratic-majority crowd was on board with Hiaasen’s ideological tenor, he mostly sidestepped politics, regaling us instead with uniting stories of Sunshine State dumb-f**kery—Medicare fraudsters, rogue lawyers and puritanical hypocrites who make news for all the wrong reasons. Delivering these sordid tales in a calibrated deadpan, Hiaasen shared details about a man who “copulated” with stuffed Disney characters at a Pinellas Park Target (The Target P.R. rep should have said, “I can’t believe it didn’t happen at a Walmart,” Hiaasen quipped); and the Miccosukee Casino carjacker who evaded law enforcement in the lake behind the building, only to meet his fate in the jaws of an alligator (Hiaasen: “This is what Darwin had in mind”); and the trailer-park denizen who kept two adult gators in the bed of his double-wide, and even fought for their custody after they were discovered. As Hiaasen knows, in another one of his refrains last night, “this stuff can’t be improved upon” in his fiction. In short, Hiaasen said, “everybody comes here to get in trouble.”
Anyone who’s read Hiaasen’s columns or novels knows he has little love for the right-wing turn of the state’s politics, but his affection for the state was apparent amid all of the barbs and deprecations. In the Q&A, when an audience member asked him to clarify his seeming “love/hate” relationship with Florida, his answer was direct. “I’m still here. … I love Florida, but I stay pissed all the time.” It’s a sentiment many of us know well.
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