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Lucky You is delightful
Book Review
By Derryll White
Hiaasen, Carl (1997) ‘Lucky You’
Carl Hiaasen is a very cheeky, in-your-face columnist for the Miami Herald. If one reads some of his columns the thought of law suits, charges of slander and criminal prosecution come quickly to mind. But Hiaasen continues to stay out of jail, continues to write, continues to joust at the very real facts of environmental degradation and unbridled capitalism unleashed in southern Florida. His books can be hit-or- miss for some readers, but I think this one is delightful. Hiaasen’s disdain at the very beginning of this novel hints at what is to come – irreverence, environmental ideals, heavy-handed commerce.
Anyone who has lived and worked in Florida knows the characters that Hiaasen carefully constructs. In many ways they are almost incomprehensible to northerners, caricatures of depravity, disrespect and dishonesty that we write off as “white trash” or the “Trailer Park boys.” Unfortunately, Hiaasen is an artist at exposing a chasm of humanity that most people today choose to deny. Bode Gazzer and Chub (Onus Dean Gillespie) are too real, too present in south Florida and their attitudes permeate up the food chain into marginal strip mall businessmen and law enforcement.
Carl Hiaasen has the touch. He keeps the reader chuckling with one laughable situation after another. And he keeps all of his cast in character while doing it. A racist who cannot say the “n” word, a reporter who does an interview nude ina bathtub – I love the entertainment factor. But Hiaasen leaves me thinking “My God, we have to cut that development-at-any-cost mentality out of our town.”
Both the comic energy and rampant racism are sustained throughout the novel. It is a good read and I learned a little more about the present state of the American nation. Most readers will have fun with this one.
Excerpts from the novel:
DISCLAIMER – Pearl Key is an imaginary place, although the indiscriminate dining habits of the blue crab and the common black vulture are accurately portrayed. However, there is no approved dental use for WD-40, a trade-marked product.
LOSER – Bode Gazzer was five feet six and had never forgiven his parents for it. He wore three-inch snakeskin shitkickers and walked with a swagger that suggested not brawn so much as hemorrhoidal tribulation.
WHITE TRASH – It was inevitable that the poacher and the counterfeiter would bond, sharing as they did a blanket contempt for government, taxes, homosexuals, immigrants, minorities, gun laws, assertive women and honest work.
MILITIA – “You mean like what blowed up that courthouse in Nebraska?”
“Oklahoma,” Bode Gazzer said sharply, “and that was the government did it, to frame those two white boys. No, I’m talking ’bout a militia. Armed, disciplined and well-regulated. Like it says in the Second Amendment.”
LOTTERY – So they began playing the state lottery, which Bode asserted was the only decent generous thing the government of Florida had ever done for its people. Every Saturday night, wherever they happened to be, the two men would pull into the nearest convenience store, park brazenly in the blue handicapped zone, march inside and purchase five Lotto tickets.
FRAUD – As it happened, the hate movement in which Bode had taken an interest strongly espoused fraud as a form of civil disobedience. Militia pamphlets proclaimed that ripping off banks, utilities and credit-card companies was just a repudiation of the United States government and all the liberals, Jews, faggots, lesbians, Negroes, environmentalists and communists who infested it. Bode Gazzer admired the logic.
ECONOMY – The downsizing trend that swept newspapers in the early nineties was aimed at sustaining the bloated profit margins in which the industry had wallowed for most of the century. A new soulless breed of corporate managers, unburdened by a passion for serious journalism, found an easy way to reduce the cost of publishing a daily newspaper. The first casualty was depth. Cutting the amount of space devoted to news instantly justified cutting the staff.
RACISM – He was ashamed to admit the truth, that he couldn’t speak the word “nigger”. He’d done so only once in his life, at age 12, and his father had promptly hauled him outside and whipped his hairless bare ass with a razor strop. Then his mother had dragged him into the kitchen and washed his mouth out with Comet cleanser and vinegar…. He’d also never forgotten the ghastly caustic taste of Comet, the scorch of which still revisited his tender throat at the mere whisper of “nigger”. Uttering it aloud was out of the question, which was a major handicap for a self-proclaimed racist and militiaman. Bode Gazzer worked around it.
FASHION – He said, “I ain’t wearin’ no camo.”
“Why not, goddamnit!”
“”Cause it makes you look like a fuckin’ compost heap.”
PEOPLE – JoLayne found it interesting that so many of the local racists owned small, neurotic, ill-tempered breeds of dogs. The women favored toy poodles; the men, grossly over fed Chihuahuas. In Dade County, where JoLayne grew up it was German shepherds and pit bulls.
PERSPECTIVE – All this time there’d been a heavy boot on Shiner’s neck and he hadn’t even known! Out of ignorance he’d always assumed it was his own damn fault – first quitting high school, then crapping out of the army. He’d been unaware of the larger, darker forces at work, “oppressing” him and “subordinating” him. Enslaving him, Chub added.
INCOME TAX – “Like the Boston Tea Party,” Bode had said, invoking his favorite historical reference. “Those boys were against taxation without representation, and that’s what you’re fightin’, too. The white man has lost his voice in this government, so why should he foot the bill?”
SUPERIOR? RACE – They debated until closing time, with Bode holding to the position that militiamen should have carnal relations only with pure white Christian women of European descent, lest the union produce a child. Chub (not wishing to limit his already sparse opportunities) insisted white men were morally obliged to spread their superior genetics near and far, and therefore should have sex with any woman who wanted it, regardless of race, creed or heritage.
“Besides, it’s plain to see,” he added. “Amber’s white as Ivory Snow.”
“Yeah, but her boyfriend’s Meskin. That makes her Meskin by injection,” said Bode.
MEN – It amused JoLayne that men were forever trying to figure out how they’d managed to get laid – what devastatingly clever line they’d come up with, what timely expression of sincerity or sensitivity they’d offered. As if the power of seduction were theirs whenever they wanted, if only they knew how to unlock it.
RACISM – He handed each of the men a booklet distributed by the First Patriot Covenant, an infamously disagreeable cell of supremacists headquartered in western Montana. The First Patriot Covenant lived in concrete pillboxes and believed blacks and Jews were the children of Satan; the Pope was either a first or second cousin.
CHANGE – JoLayne Lucks hadn’t been to the Keys since she was a small girl. She was amazed at how much had changed, the homey and congenial tackiness supplanted by franchise fast-food joints, strip malls and high-rise resorts.
IDAHO – Lately Bode had been thinking a lot about Idaho, lousy winters and all. From what he’d heard, the mountains and forests were full of straight-thinking white Christians…. Bode was sick and tired of walking on eggshells, whispering his true righteous beliefs instead of declaring them loud and proud in public.
NEWSPAPERS – The managing editor explained that the job of newspaper reporter no longer carried the stature it had in the days of Watergate. The nineties had brought a boom in celebrity journalism, a decline in serious investigative reporting and a deliberate “softening of the product” by publishers. The result, he said, was that daily newspapers seldom caused a ripple in the communities, and people paid less and less attention to them.
POLITICS – Politicians were caught in a bind. Those who’d never lost a moment’s sleep over the fate of the white bird now waxed lyrical about its delicate grace. Privately meanwhile they reassured campaign donors that – screw the birds – Big Agriculture would still get first crack at the precious water.
