Special Edition
Notes toward a natural history of the Sunshine State's most resilient predator — himself.
Florida is not an aberration. It is a control group. Strip a population of winter, of consequence, and of the faint social pressure that cold weather imposes by forcing people indoors and into clothing, and you are left with the American character in its purest expressed form — sunlit, unsupervised, and absolutely certain it can take that alligator. What follows is not mockery of a place. It is a taxonomy of a recurring specimen. The blade aims only at the confidence, never at the unlucky.
There is a man — there is always a man — who looks upon an apex predator with millions of years of evolutionary refinement behind its jaws and concludes, on no evidence whatsoever, that he is the more formidable animal. He has not trained. He has not planned. He has merely decided.
The verdict: Nature spent eighty million years perfecting the alligator. He spent four beers deciding he could improve on the result.
He regards the emergency line as a customer-service desk for his appetites. The order was wrong. The establishment closed early. Someone has, intolerably, stolen the very drugs he illegally purchased. He demands the state intervene, and is genuinely affronted when the state, arriving, takes an interest in him instead.
The verdict: A man who calls the police to report a crime committed against his crime has, at least, an admirable faith in institutions.
Stripped of his license, he is undeterred, because he has identified a loophole only he can see: the riding lawnmower, the motorized cooler, the golf cart. It is not technically a car, and he is therefore, in his own jurisprudence, not technically drunk-driving as he weaves down the highway at the stately pace of a man mowing nothing.
The verdict: The law did not anticipate him. The law never does. That is his single, durable advantage.
He has come into possession of a live alligator, and rather than ask the obvious question — why — he proceeds directly to the next one: where shall I deploy it. Into the drive-thru. Into the convenience store. Through the ex-girlfriend's window. The animal is variously a weapon, a gift, and a closing argument.
The verdict: Most men, handed an alligator, would set it down. He saw a logistics problem, and solved it.
He films the crime. He narrates the crime. He uploads the crime, with his face, his voice, his location, and a request that viewers like and subscribe. He is then astonished — sincerely, woundedly astonished — that the felony he broadcast to the public was witnessed by the public.
The verdict: He wanted an audience and a clean getaway, and could not understand that these were, on some level, opposed.
He is discovered, mid-afternoon, serenely undressed in a setting that allows for no innocent explanation — the highway median, the fast-food play area, a stranger's roof — and offers one anyway, an account so confidently delivered and so wholly insane that the responding officer is briefly the more disoriented party.
The verdict: Shame is a learned behavior. Somewhere along the way, in the heat, he unlearned it.
The Category 4 hurricane is named, mapped, and bearing down, and the evacuation order is unambiguous. He responds by carrying a cooler onto the porch to ride it out personally — not in ignorance of the storm, but in defiance of it, having decided that the weather, like the alligator, would benefit from being shown who is in charge.
The verdict: He confused a hurricane with an opponent. The hurricane did not return the courtesy of noticing him at all.
He has undertaken, in a motel bathroom or a borrowed kitchen, the home manufacture of something volatile, on the theory that the warnings about such substances apply to less careful men. He is discovered in the usual way: when the volatile substance does the one thing volatile substances can be relied upon to do.
The verdict: Chemistry is the most egalitarian of the sciences. It humiliates the confident and the cautious with exactly equal enthusiasm — but only the confident insist on the demonstration.
The specimen is not stupid in the clinical sense. He is frequently resourceful, occasionally ingenious, and always, fatally, certain. What unites the wrestler and the chemist and the man on the porch with his cooler is a single conviction held without foundation: that the rule which governs everyone else — the alligator wins, the hurricane does not negotiate, the chemistry does not care how you feel about it — has, in his particular case, agreed to make an exception. It has not. It never does. And the sun comes up tomorrow on another one.
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