HURRICANE HIAASEN

Carl Hiaasen is a one-man force of nature, a gonzo columnist and satirical novelist who rollicks through the sleaze of the American psyche. In Strip Tease he storms into Miami's colorful underworld and the sexual politics of topless bars

RON ROSENBAUM

It starts out like routine boilerplate: This is a work of fiction, begins the disclaimer at the opening of Carl Hiaasen's new novel, Strip Tease. All names and characters are either invented or used fictitiously,

the events described are purely imaginary, it drones on, before taking a characteristically Hiaasenesque swerve: though the accounts of topless creamed-corn wrestling are based on fact.

Now, this is a work from the august house of Alfred A. Knopf, personally edited by its elegant and fastidious chief, Sonny Mehta. If they put their imprimatur on the veracity of this report, certainly one can have confidence that somewhere, someplace, naked nymphs are grappling in a vat of Niblets.

And yet there are doubters. Consider for instance the two lingerie-clad dancers Hiaasen and I encounter in a glitzy topless joint in Fort Lauderdale. He's been taking me on a tour of the yuppie topless bars he haunted while researching Strip Tease. One of the many virtues of the new novel, his fifth and the one that's likely to finally break Hiaasen out of cult status, is that it may be the first work of fiction to explore the sexual politics of upscale topless bars—the flashy theme parks of flesh that have recently, uneasily crossed over into mainstream American culture.

Beneath the black-comic plot of Strip Tease and its dark, absurdist tone (Terry Southern meets Elmore Leonard), the nov-

ei offers a sly philosophic disqui-

sition on the political economy of repression and display, on the infinitely manipulable pathology of the male psyche.

It's early evening in the Lauderdale topless joint, shortly before the shift changes, not many customers, just one dancer in an American-flag bikini bottom desultorily swaying to "Hip Hop Hooray," while one fairly intense table dance is going on in the semi-private "Champagne Room" in the back.

Speaking with the dancers, Hiaasen has the earnest demeanor of the good ol' boy as grad student. A youthful-looking 40 in neatly pressed chinos and oxfordcloth shirt, he's the picture of mildmannered stability: 17 years at the

same job, married 22 years to a wife who recently graduated from law school, a son in journalism school. But it's a bit deceptive: his good friend journalist Pete Hamill describes Hiaasen as "kind of like Ted Bundy" in the sense that his open-faced, boyish appearance belies the sensationally dark sensibility that shows up in his fiction.

Hiaasen nods thoughtfully as the two young women explain that this club is a "friction and latex" place, which means that the city commissioners have deemed it acceptable for table dancers to touch, even rub, the nonprivate parts of patrons,

but only if the dancers are not

comPletely naked when doing

so. They show us the way they've adapted to the letter of this Solomonic legislation by painting a thin coating of liquid latex over their nipples. By contrast, they say, the club across the city line, under the jurisdiction of the county rather than the city, permits totally nude, "bottomless" table dances, but no "friction."

"For a while," says Hiaasen, "when I was doing my research they had a real war going on over these issues. When the state wouldn't give a liquor license to the club that wanted to offer bottomless table dances, the owner served cranberry juice and threatened to offer animal acts onstage. Very classy, huh?"

It seems appropriate at this point to bring up the bizarre innovation in topless entertainment that is the signature image of Strip Tease. "This guy," I say to the dancers, "says there's a place around here that offers customers the chance to wrestle with topless girls in a huge vat of creamed corn."

"Creamed corn?" asks the dancer in the red teddy incredulously.

"Yeah, Niblets,'' says Hiaasen helpfully.

"I don't know," says the one in the white lace skeptically.

"There's A clubs, B clubs, and C clubs. This place here is a B club.

But wrestling in a vat of creamed corn—that's got to be a D club, which I've never heard of. ' '

"I didn't invent it!"

Hiaasen insists. "I gotta show you the ad. There's a topless joint in West Palm Beach that does pasta, pickles, and creamed corn. It's like there's no boundary in sleaze now."

A outh Florida as the frontier of sleaze, ¾ as the proving ground, the petri dish, W the playing fields of Eton for the protean genius of the American sleazoid imagination—this is the recurrent theme in all of Hiaasen's work. It's something he's studied more closely, more lovingly than almost anyone else. "Nobody knows this stuff better," says Elmore Leonard, who knows a thing or two about Florida himself.

In part, it's in Hiaasen's blood: he's a native Floridian who has studied his history, knows how South Florida was founded on the theft of land from the Seminoles and has thrived ever after on the vacuuming of cash from suckers from the North.

"The criminals come to Florida for the same reason that everyone else comes to Florida," Hiaasen says. "The weather's great and they blend in with the local riffraff so well."

It's something Hiaasen studied during the boom decades of the 70s and 80s as an ace investigative reporter for The Miami Herald who specialized in exposing the political corruption that sprouted in the fecund mulch of drug money and land speculation. Subjects he's continued to pursue as a high-profile Herald metro columnist who spotlights the bizarre and the drop-dead ludicrous with a sharp eye and a wicked deadpan edge.

All of which feeds into his novels and frequently causes confusion between the baroque reality of South Florida and the baroque imagination of his fiction. In fact, they are as densely entangled as (inevitable metaphor down here) the roots of an ancient swamp mangrove. It's the human swamp Hiaasen specializes in, the vast, murky Everglades of corruption, con-artistry, and criminality that blossoms and decomposes at such a feverish rate in South Florida.

The depraved pleasure he takes in chronicling this palm-tree inferno, the dark antipodes of Disney World's sterile Fantasyland, has made him the object of

If Miami is our contemporary Casablanca, Hiaasen's fiction is something like Rick's place: sooner or later everybody shows up here.

a growing transatlantic cult of readers, ranging from Texas governor Ann Richards, Jimmy Breslin, the Grateful Dead, and P. J. O'Rourke to Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie. In fact, Sonny Mehta says, Rushdie called from hiding to tell him about an extraordinary novel on corruption in professional bass-fishing competition (Double Whammy).

"It's a weird one. I shouldn't imagine Salman has been bass fishing in his life, but he thought it was very good indeed, that Hiaasen's got a real edge to him."

Mehta, who had in fact just snatched Hiaasen away from Putnam, has taken an unusual personal interest in his new prize acquisition, even jetting down to Miami to sip mimosas on a hotel veranda while doing hands-on editing of Strip Tease.

The new novel (which is slated to be the next film by Andrew Bergman, the director of Honeymoon in Vegas) is set in a Miami topless club called the Eager Beaver. Which becomes the scene of a scandal involving a sex-addled U.S. congressman, a beautiful dancer, and a champagne bottle. A collision that triggers a tsunami of cover-up, blackmail, and black comedy in the mucky waters of the South Florida behavioral swamp. A swamp filled with Hiaasen's usual gallery of grotesques, both sinister and comically inept. The most memorable is a massive bouncer named Shad, who is obsessed with surgically inserting roaches and scorpions into unopened yogurt containers, the better to sue the dairy companies for pain and suffering (an uncanny anticipation of the syringe-in-thePepsi-can scam).

If Miami is our contemporary Casablanca, Hiaasen's fiction is something like Rick's place: sooner or later everybody shows up here, every corrupt pol, slimy fixer, scandal-scarred plastic surgeon, Scarface wannabe, bumbling terrorist, sleazy operator of Sea World-type theme parks that feature killer whales with shadowy pasts and homy dolphins who take an avid interest in the tourists who swim with them.

Let's pause for a moment on that last detail: the dolphin sexual-harassment scandal, another phenomenon Hiaasen insists he didn't invent. Native Tongue, the predecessor to Strip Tease, features a spectacular Gotterdammerung at a theme park called the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills, during which one of the heavies is literally, uh, loved to death by an amorous dolphin.

"It happened," Hiaasen swears. "The Herald had run an item about complaints that we euphemistically called 'overly aggressive behavior.' It was sexually aggressive behavior. Dolphins were homy as hell! I checked into it, and a couple of tourists had actually been hospitalized. I interviewed this legal secretary whose boyfriend had bought her a 'dolphin encounter' for a birthday present. This dolphin took a liking to her in a big way. And you don't need to be a marine biologist to recognize the manifestation of dolphin arousal. It's quite a remarkable thing. You're talking about an 800pound mammal. I thought it was my duty as a columnist to warn visitors in as vivid detail as I could," he says with a straight face. "I ran this lead saying, 'As if tourists didn't have enough to worry about, now they risk getting goosed by Flipper.' "

T he dolphin story is the kind of thing I that causes chamber-of-commerce I types in Florida to hate Hiaasen, the kind of thing that's led a Miami city commissioner "to call me, basically, a worthless piece of shit," as Hiaasen puts it.

But Hiaasen is unrepentant. He loves scaring the tourists. If he had his way he'd scare them all off, send them and the winter "snowbirds" packing back North, blaming them as he does for the destruction of the Florida wilderness and wetlands he roamed as a youth. Almost like an Old Testament prophet, he hopes the wickedness of the inhabitants will bring down the wrath of God to scourge the place and precipitate a mass Exodus. "Nothing would make me happier," he says, "than to see a line of cars fleeing north on 1-95 forever."

In fact, the scourging seemed well under way when I touched down at Miami International. Rental-car counters were stacked with scare literature warning tourists about the gauntlet of sniper fire and "smash-and-grab" robbers they were about to face. The city was still recovering from shock and worldwide obloquy in the aftermath of the brutal murder of a visiting German mother.

South Florida was trembling on the brink of renewed racial violence because of the impending Lozano verdict, the local Rodney King case. South Dade County was still a landscape of devastation, debris, and shell-shocked drifters homeless from Hurricane Andrew. Rumors abounded that the wild animals that escaped from game farms during the hurricane had turned rabid with bloodlust and virulent diseases.

And rising, ever rising, above it all as you head south through the hurricane zone toward the Keys is the titanic tower of garbage, filth, and storm debris known down here as "Mount Trashmore," a refuse-built Tower of Babel on the shore of Biscayne Bay.

It would be unfair to say Hiaasen feels happy about all this. But he isn't even shedding crocodile tears. After all, this is a guy whose first novel, Tourist Season, envisioned—indeed, predicted with eerie accuracy—the open season on tourists South Florida has suddenly become. That 1986 novel features a terrorist cell formed by a bitterly angry columnist not unlike Hiaasen who writes for a newspaper not unlike The Miami Herald. A writer named Skip Wiley, who abandons the newsroom to organize the kidnapping, murder, and embalming-in-Coppertone of a chamber-of-commerce type and the random killing of Shriners and snowbirds, the better to create sufficient panic to reverse the influx of people, developers, and sleaze that comes south with the tourists.

"The thought crossed my mind...," I begin saying to Hiaasen the night we meet.

"I'm not responsible," he interjects quickly, denying only the literal aspect of the question—that he personally wasn't shooting up rental cars. But he admits taking some satisfaction in graffiti in an Orlando men's room ("Skip Wiley Lives!") memorializing his murderous metro-columnist character. It wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that there's as much Wiley in Hiaasen as there is Hiaasen in Wiley. Skip Wiley lives in Carl Hiaasen.

He certainly lives in the Good Morning America incident for which Hiaasen is still notorious. "G.Af.A. was down here at a place called Fisher Island,"

'You don't need to be a marine biologist to recognize the manifestation of dolphin arousal. It's quite a remarkable thing."

Hiaasen recalls. "Surfers, pretty girls, the whole routine. Big giant blow job for South Florida. So finally one of the producers calls me at the paper and says, Would you come on and talk as a native Floridian?

"Charlie Gibson was brand-new on the job," Hiaasen continues, "and he starts saying, 'There's a lot of angry stuff in your books. What do you think has gone wrong with South Florida?' And I said, 'Well, you can start with developments just like this one.' And I see the color draining from his face... it suddenly dawns on me that Fisher Island is probably comping this whole deal. I've just trashed the people paying the tab."

At which point Hiaasen chose to up the ante.

"Gibson says, 'What do you think the answer is?' And I said, 'There's nothing wrong with South Florida that a good Force Five hurricane couldn't fix.' "

And how does he feel now that his prayers have, in effect, been answered? Obviously he's not relishing the human suffering. But he does see Andrew in pre-apocalyptic terms, "a brushback pitch from God. A warning."

A warning whose point, he believes, the national media totally missed. He's both amused and irritated at the way the networks and the national press fell for the Big Lie about the big storm—the hurricane hype of developers. By emphasizing the allegedly unprecedented strength of the hurricane, Hiaasen believes, the national media let the real villain off the hook: the sleazy building industry.

"The Herald did computerized studies of which neighborhoods had the worst damage," Hiaasen says. "You had shoddy developments, whole subdivisions broken into toothpicks right next to one of those houses hand-built by Jimmy Carter's Habitat for Humanity that stood up to the same windforce untouched," he tells me.

As a matter of fact, as we speak, a particularly angry, funny column by Hiaasen is rolling off the presses at the Miami Herald plant. This one not only takes on sleazy construction in general but names names. Names a Very Big Name in Florida— a powerful name everywhere: Disney.

DWARFS BLEW WHISTLE ON DISNEY, goes the headline.

The column itself opens with this bitter little Hiaasen jingle:

Hi-ho, hi-ho

It's off your roof did go.

We don't care, if your house ain't there. Hi-ho, hi-ho.

It's the story of high-profile lawsuits filed by devastated homeowners against a number of developments, including one constructed by a Disney subsidiary, builders Hiaasen has dubbed "Lazy," "Dizzy," "Drowsy," "Greedy," "Clumsy," "Careless," and "Sleazy."

"After the storm," Hiaasen writes, "the residents went through the rubble and discovered many bad things about the way the dwarfs had built the homes. There were masonry walls with no steel bars for reinforcement and sometimes no cement! There were wooden posts that hadn't been anchored to the foundations. There were roof trusses that weren't properly attached."

"All kinds of scientists and engineers are lined up to say this was the worst excuse for construction ever seen," Hiaasen tells me. The real story of Andrew was that "the whole system"— not just the builders, but the building inspectors, the zoning boards, the county commissions—"was exposed as bei/ig corrupt and shoddy as could possibly be." They all "ought to be hunted down like dogs," Hiaasen says cheerfully.

This matter-of-factly expressed murderous rage is what separates Hiaasen's work from the pallid crime fiction he often shares mystery-shelf space with. "He's got a very, very fine eye for the ludicrous, but you don't read Carl for the laughs. What gives his work its edge is that whack of anger,'' says Mehta, who sees Hiaasen in the tradition of the British social novelist. The new book, Strip Tease, bears out that social-novelist characterization. While its topless-bar setting and topless-dancer heroine occupy the foreground, the sugar lobby's lust for power and profits lies beneath the surface the way the water-diversion scheme of the super-rich Albacore Club lies beneath the surface of Chinatown.

Still, to portray Hiaasen as only an angry social novelist does a disservice to the sly delight he takes in his slimy villains, the infectious charm they have for readers. That's what impresses Elmore Leonard about Hiaasen's third novel, Skin Tight. "I loved that plastic surgeon," he tells me.

Now, this plastic surgeon, one Dr. Rudy Graveline, is not, at first blush, an easy guy to like. He's an incompetent butcher who preys on the vanity of snowbirds he hopes will be safely back North before they realize the damage he's done. The plot of Skin Tight involves an ever widening circle of malpractice and mayhem as Dr. Rudy doggedly, ineptly tries to cover up the inconvenient fact that he's managed to kill one of his patients during the course of a nose job.

"Yes, he's the bad guy," says Leonard, "but there's a real sympathy for him. And the guy is not very effective. He's always screwing up. Which is the same thing that my people do. The bad guys are screwups. Along the way I've developed an affection for them, despite what they do. I think, Jeez, it's too bad they're behaving that way."

I found that to be true also of Francis X. Kingsbury, a.k.a. Frankie King, the whacked-out villain in Native Tongue, Hiaasen's fourth novel and my personal favorite. Kingsbury is a Mob stool pigeon who has come to Florida after ratting on John Gotti. (South Florida, Hiaasen says, is a catch basin for Mob informers in the Federal Witness Protection Program, where they get a second chance at a life of crime.) After making a mint in fast-buck real-estate deals, he decides he wants to take on Disney itself with a rival theme park featuring stolen endangered species. What's perversely endearing about Kingsbury is his rage against "the Rat," as he calls Mickey Mouse, which inspires him to inscribe himself with a tattoo of Minnie and Mickey engaged in an act that would make Goofy blush.

If Hiaasen has an affinity for the wackily menacing phenomena of South Florida, it seems somehow to be reciprocated. "He's a magnet for danger and weirdness," says a friend, rocker Warren Zevon. "If there's a research center for dangerous animals within a hundred miles of Carl, the attendant is gonna leave the cage open and the radioactive

"Look at the geek parade," Hiaasen snarls. "See that yupster pulling a powerboat? People like that ought to be hunted down like dogs."

monkey and the baby-eating snake are gonna be in Carl's yard by morning. I can't tell you how many stories I've heard like that, and they're all true."

Nine Mile Bank

"This is the last stand," Hiaasen tells me as he pilots his flat-bottomed powerboat through the trickly shallows of the backcountry waters on the gulf side of the Keys. "If it goes, it's all over." Nine Mile Bank is a shallow underwater flat that shelters the unique aquatic ecology of the bay between the mainland and the Keys.

To my untutored eye there's little obvious sign of the peril Hiaasen is obsessed about. The-glorious watery vista spread out before us—one impossibly brilliant shade of blue after another with beautiful pools of neon turquoise and electric aquamarine—hardly looks endangered.

"It's gorgeous but deceptive," Hiaasen says. Beneath the surface, a sinister cloud of microorganisms, the deadly "algae bloom," threatens to kill the beauty above and below forever. "See that greenish-yellow tint we're getting into?" he asks, gunning the engine to skim us over a submerged sandbar. "Look at the different streaks of crud. You begin to see the sickly green and gray now."

What's happened, he says, is that greedy mainland developers and sugar refiners siphoning off Everglades water have reduced the freshwater flow from the swamp into the shallow tidal waters along the Keys, thereby raising their salinity. Which has led to an overgrowth of saltwater algae, billions of which bloom into vast clouds, clouds which then cut off the sunlight and kill the sea grass on the tidal bottoms. The denuded bottoms then become choked with silt, muddying what had once been the world-famous "gin-clear" clarity of the Keys waters, killing off the fishing and diving which have made the Keys so beloved.

"It's like pea soup," Hiaasen says disgustedly. "When I used to come down here as a kid you just never could believe something could be so beautiful, so pure."

It's about this time, out there in the algae bloom, that Hiaasen tells me of the other great loss of his youth. I'd asked him about the source of one of the stranger characters in his gallery of Florida eccentrics, a reclusive, half-crazed old geezer named Skink who shows up in two of his novels. In Native Tongue, Skink is a kind of eco-Lear, draped in weeds and swamp grass, who lives in an abandoned Plymouth station wagon mired on North Key Largo, dines on roadkill, and wreaks guerrilla havoc on those responsible for the destruction of Florida's wilderness.

"The personality of that character," Hiaasen says quietly, "was based on my friend Clyde Ingalls, who died very young—my notion of what he'd be like had he lived. There were three of us who kind of hung out in the woods together. We just spent as much time as we could away from everything, making these expeditions on our bicycles out to the middle of the wilderness. Now there's a Macy's on the spot where we used to go camping."

This idyllic boyhood—he was Tom Sawyer to the wilder Clyde's Huck Finn—was brought to a shocking end when Clyde drove his car deep into the Everglades, ran a hose from the exhaust pipe, and killed himself.

"He was very troubled and very angry," says Hiaasen. "He had threatened a couple of times and he seemed to be better. It was rough. I never really figured it out."

But he's come to feel that some of the anger that turned suicidal in Clyde can be attributed to the paving over of the wilderness they loved. "He was at the end of his rope at that young age, seeing what was happening," Hiaasen tells me. ''And if he could see it now, it would break his heart."

On the surface, to look at Hiaasen out on his boat, idly casting for bonefish in the shallows, there's still a lot of the all-American huntin'-and-fishin' good oF boy. But that death at that age jolted him out of the American consensus. He started to look at Florida differently. Even his own family came under scrutiny, since his father and grandfather were attorneys who had represented some of South Florida's big developers. Hiaasen became one of the best, most aggressive reporters on the Miami Herald investigative SWAT team in the late 70s and 80s, and there's no doubt that behind his success in taking on political and commercial corruption was an abiding desire for payback for his friend and, perhaps, for his family's guilt. In the novels, the anger that turned suicidal in his lost friend becomes vengeful, homicidal.

Mile Marker 88, Route 1 North

"Homicidal" is a word that might also be applied to Hiaasen's driving. It's the way he expresses his anger outside his prose. Jim Savage, the tough-as-nails chief of the HeraldSWAT team, describes Hiaasen as an "angry. . .emotional driver. He's homicidal in the boat too."

But here we are in Hiaasen's Jeep Cherokee heading north to visit the topless clubs he researched for Strip Tease. It's a journey Hiaasen's been resisting, a trip he really hates because it brings him face-to-face with the line of cars heading down the Keys from the north on Route 1, bent, in his view, on despoliation.

"Look at the geek parade," he snarls, pointing to the southbound stream. "See that yupster pulling a powerboat? People like that ought to be hunted down like dogs." Stuck behind a Mercedes he rages, "Jesus Christ, lady, you paid 50 thou for your car and they didn't include an accelerator?"

Ahead of us a guy in a van pulls off the road, opens the door, and leans out to get sick. "Go ahead and puke," says Hiaasen. "Thank you for sharing. Welcome to the Keys."

When we reach the mainland, Hiaasen's foul mood gets worse. "Our new tourist attraction," he says, pointing to

"Mount Trashmore," the volcano-like tower of solid waste rising over Biscayne Bay. " 'What's that, Mommy?' " he pipes up in a childlike voice. " 'Well, that's about 25 stories of shit, Jimmy.' "

From solid waste to Solid Gold, and Pure Platinum too—Lauderdale topless clubs Hiaasen hung out in. He says he was initially attracted to the yuppie topless-bar scene by the dramatic way the new clubs had jumped class lines, by the contrast between the glitziness of the new places and the seediness of the biker bars he recalls from his Florida youth.

Hiaasen evokes the change by recalling a teenage visit to a particularly down-and-dirty strip joint. "First thing I noticed when I came in," he says,

"Only in America would a guy think, I'm in my bowling shirt, and I'm really gonna knock the socks off one of these beautiful topless dancers."

"was a sign on the door announcing one of the dancers had lost her beloved chimpanzee. It was just about as bad a place as you can imagine. There was a sort of trapeze device and a dancer that weighed, you know, maybe 220, swinging over our drinks, and we're covering our glasses, you know. At any rate, in the middle of things the door swings open dramatically and a man is standing there holding a chimpanzee by the hand. The dancer onstage stops twirling on her barber pole and shrieks, which I took to be an absolutely genuine exclamation of joy, and the chimpanzee goes bounding over the tables and over the lewd, leering men, up to this nude woman on the stage, where they had this tremendously passionate embrace. Then the music came on and they started doing their act together. We left at that point.

The new, yuppie clubs are tame and sanitized by comparison, less lust pits than glittery theme parks of sex, where the men in the audience are the chimps. "The real show at the bars is watching the customers," Hiaasen says. "You realize how pathetic the human male is, and what a calculated, predatory scene the bars have set up to exploit their delusions. Only in America would a guy go in and think, I'm in my bowling shirt, and I'm really gonna knock the socks off one of these beautiful topless dancers, she's gonna run off with me. And in about an hour and five minutes he's flat busted, he's spent his entire paycheck on drinks and tips and he's got nothing. And then next week he comes back for more. ' '

It hadn't occurred to me before, but what the yuppie topless bars are really selling is not sex but romance, not just the opportunity to see these women dance naked at your table, but the notion that one of them will see something in you.

It turns out the dancers themselves have a term for this phenomenon, a term we learn later that evening at one of the clubs. A young blonde dancer from Texas tells us it's called "schmo-ing out."

"Schmo-ing out?"

"It's like a guy will come here and he'll be convinced that he's in love with this one girl and he'll spend all his money on tips and table dances trying to get to know her, like she might fall for him— he's a schmo for her."

Hiaasen concedes that even though he knew what was going on he was not entirely immune to schmo-ing out himself. "The girls will tell you the tricks about how they make you feel special—it's just cold-blooded as hell. But, hell, I fell for it. Anybody who wants to muss my hair, that's fine, I'm in love instantly."

In fact, the plot of Strip Tease turns on an extreme case of schmo-ing out. A congressman falls so hard for a topless dancer named Erin that he brings the whole corrupt political economy of the sugar lobby crashing down on top of him. What makes the novel a breakthrough for Hiaasen, Sonny Mehta believes, is that for the first time "he's felt confident enough about his writing" to tell his story from the perspective of a female protagonist.

Erin is an appealingly reluctant performer who has taken the job to pay off the huge attorney fees run up in her crusade to regain custody of her daughter from her ex-con ex-husband, whose latest racket is stealing late-model wheelchairs. Viewing the world through the eyes of the unfortunate Erin—a relative innocent who prefers to dance to Jackson Browne when the Eager Beaver's patrons want bouncier numbers—takes some of the voyeuristic edge off the exploitive setting.

Hiaasen kept his mind on his work, his research, as best he could in that setting. "It's very hard to interview someone with their crotch in your face," he says. But he had no other choice: the dancers are paid to dance, and only make real money on table-dance tips, so they aren't going to submit to searching interviews on their time without compensation.

Hiaasen's views of the yuppie toplessbar scene are complicated. He understands the motivation of the women, many of whom are single mothers, students putting themselves through college or even law school, whose only alternative in this economy is to take a lowpaying secretarial job (where they might be subjected to sexual harassment without compensation).

Compensation, payback for women: in one sense, Hiaasen believes the dancers are enjoying a revenge on the gender that exploited them so long. "I have the same attitude toward them as I have toward the Seminoles down here who exploit the white customers' gambling habits in bingo halls—any kind of revenge they can get is O.K. for what they've been through."

Of course, Hiaasen says, there's a real dark side to the business. ''You can have some nightclub owner come over and tell them he wants them to go get a boob job and here's a card for the plastic surgeon. ' ' And there are moments of sadness and delusion. He recalls a conversation in a lounge with a dancer who was ecstatic about leaving for New York in the company of a guy who told her she had a promising modeling career, once they found the right photographer to put the right kind of portfolio together for her.

Hiaasen clearly envisions the naive young woman coming to a Hogarthian bad end in some predatory porno hell. Or worse, a vat of creamed com.

There's something about the creamedcom image and the way Hiaasen called attention to it in the disclaimer that led me to press him on the claim that it was "based on fact." But the more I asked about it, the more vague he seemed to become. It turned out he'd never actually witnessed the rite himself. "Because when I called they were closed for renovations. They were expanding the pasta pit or something."

Then he said he couldn't locate the ad for the place, couldn't quite recall its name. I was beginning to wonder what the story was. Then, when I suggested we make a detour up to West Palm to try to track the place down, he demurred. "That's a long way to go, just for some creamed com."

But it's not just for creamed com. The image embodies Hiaasen's vision of South Florida as hell on earth: lost souls seething in a wickedly degrading stew of

lust and greed, an almost biblical metaphor for End of Civilization debauchery. Resolving the question of whether the creamed-com wrestling vat actually exists might resolve the larger question of which is more truly depraved—South Florida or Carl Hiaasen's imagination.

And so, after leaving Hiaasen, 1 trekked up to West Palm Beach and found myself on an airport exit road looking for a place called T's Lounge.

The place, when 1 finally found it, looked like a roadhouse on the outside, but inside this was no D club—this was state-of-the-art, all mirrors and gilt, a professional D.J. sound system spinning out echoing techno as a limber young woman named Coral gyrated onstage. Since I'd chosen late afternoon of Mother's Day for my walk on the wild side, there were few customers. "Uh, excuse me," I asked the bartender, "could you tell me if you have creamed-com wrestling here?"

"Well, there used to be," she replied matter-of-factly. "You could have your choice, creamed corn or, let's see, chocolate pudding, baby oil, pickles if you wanted them. But we don't offer it anymore."

"Why not?"

"The neighbors complained about the noise. There was a lot of shouting. But we've got a picture on the back wall if you want to see what it was like."

We proceeded to the back room, the place that used to house the creamedcom vat, where, by a smaller bar, some of the dancers were undressing for work. The bartender directed me to a row of pictures on the wall, and, sure enough, there was one of a naked couple in what looks like a Jacuzzi full of milky fluid. You had to look real close to see the Niblets.

The next week, when I called Hiaasen to apprise him of this discovery, he was more interested in telling me about a discovery of his own. A shocking one coming from him. A hopeful sign. "My son and I were out on the boat," he said, "fly-casting for tarpon when we saw two bald eagles. It's an event to see one. A mated pair is a rare, rare sight.

"They were after an osprey with a mullet in its talons," he said, "just chasing him down until he dropped the fish. Eagles are great thieves, you know."

"You mean our national bird, the symbol of the American character, is. . . "

"They're fantastic thieves," Hiaasen replied. "They're notorious for it." He couldn't have sounded more pleased.