|
 The camp was on the banks of a slow-moving, spring-fed natural river. It was not a large river, but it was constant. It was the life-giving force of the camp, and all knew and respected it for that alone. It was also the path that took them to the shallow saltwater estuaries near the Gulf of Mexico. It was in these estuaries and shallow bays that they took one of their main forms of sustenance, the mullet. Just as the Calusa Indians who lived on these waterways four hundred years earlier, the inhabitants of The Camp, as it was known, lived from hunting and fishing. Other than a small vegetable garden, farming was out of the question. Besides the issue of clearing the thick brush, there was the issue of mobility. The inhabitants of The Camp knew that they might need to pull up stakes and head further into the glades, quite possibly on short notice. Unlike the Calusa, they did not have the free run of the land. They were fugitives, law-breakers and desperados, in the eyes of the authorities. To each other they were a brotherhood bound by the need to survive another day, another week. They were elderly, nearly all of them were over sixty years old. They were all baby boomers, and this was not quite the retirement they had planned on. Nevertheless, they were standing their ground, at least for now. The local news media called them the Baby Boomer Gang. They called themselves the Boomers.
“If you see Doc, tell him we're meeting after dinner,” a wiry thin man known as Vanzetti, spoke quietly to the man standing next to him. Gummy Bear, as he was called, looked over at Vanzetti and nodded. “Yes, it's about that time again. Mullet burgers, mullet soup, mullet quiche, I'd really love a grouper sandwich. Have you got a location?” No one could remember who gave Gummy Bear his name, but it wasn't because he was especially lovable, or cuddly like a teddy bear, although he could be. It had more to do with his missing teeth and his mammoth size, all three hundred pounds and six-foot-seven inches of him. He resembled a North American grizzly bear in appearance, and occasionally in temperament. Vanzetti flicked a twig into the almost motionless water and craned his neck to look up at the Bear. “Yeah, I was up near Punta Gorda last week. There's a Kash and Karry with good access from all directions. I figure we'll need four blockers, the RV, and everyone who can move without a cane or a walker. We'll iron out the details when Doc gets here. He'll be happy to know there's a pharmacy in this one.” The Bear smiled and looked down at Vanzetti, “So, it's the old crash and carry this time. Those are my favorites.”
A “crash and carry” worked something like this. The Boomers would pile into the few cars most likely to make the round trip, park outside the supermarket, enter and fill their carts with food and supplies. After a while, Vanzetti would come flying across the parking lot in an RV and crash through the plate glass windows at the front of the store. Simultaneously, others would stall their cars and block the intersections leading into the plaza. These were not unusual events in Florida, where the average age of the population was well above sixty. It was at this point, in the midst of chaos when Gummy Bear would leap through the busted-out windows and shout something like, “There's a code red terrorist alert…everyone needs to go home immediately.”
The sight of the man-grizzly visibly frightened and panicked would cause the shoppers and store employees to run for the exits. In the mass exodus, the Boomers would empty their carts into their cars and speed out of the lot with the frightened crowd, passing the police on the way in. It was an exercise in timing, and the Boomers had it down. Doc and Vanzetti had dreamed it up, and they were quite proud of themselves, neither of them having any background in criminal activities before they retired.
Doc sat stoically next to the campfire, cleaning the chamber of his Smith and Wesson thirty-eight revolver. “I hope you don't have to use it,” Vanzetti said. “I will, if I have to, but only to get someone's attention,” replied Doc. Doc was a trained physician, had spent his adult life healing people. The Boomers were now his responsibility, and he would do everything he needed to do to keep them ticking. He had retired a wealthy man ten years earlier. He and Loretta, the love of his life, had bought into a beautiful walled golf club community on the coast. It was then that Loretta's rapidly advancing Parkinsons was discovered. Although Loretta would have never approved, Doc spent their savings searching for a cure, ending up in Europe in search of the best therapies available. It was there that his Loretta would receive the only known cure for early stage Parkinsons, a therapy based on gene implantation, made possible by stem cell research advancements made by the European biochemistry labs. The Europeans had long passed the Americans in advanced biotechnology therapies, mostly due to the American government's outlawing of core stem cell research, and its resulting therapies. American scientists had flocked to Europe, Japan and Australia in droves in the wake of the criminal prosecutions at America's leading stem-cell research labs at Harvard and Washington University in St. Louis. The extreme right-wing evangelical nutcases who seized control of Congress fifteen years earlier had effectively shut down the most promising field of study in modern medical science. So Doc and Loretta went to Europe, spent their savings on the only known cure, only to find out that they were too late. Loretta was gone, and Doc wasn't in too good of shape either. That's when Vanzetti found him, net-fishing mullets and living in a run-down shack on the outskirts of Punta Gorda. Soon after meeting Vanzetti, Doc was administering to his new family, the Boomers. He was beginning to forget about Loretta, although her memory did occasionally cause him to drift off into restful sleep.
“I picked up some news on an uncensored internet site from Europe last week. They said that they estimate forty thousand people a month are being driven from their homes in Florida.” Doc spoke loudly enough so only Vanzetti, seated next to him at the campfire, could hear. The unwritten rule in the camp was that negative news from the outside was not appreciated. The spirits of the Boomers had been beaten down for too long and in too many ways to endure more bad news. “Yeah, after privatization ruined Social Security and Medicare was handed over to the HMO's to run, all anybody had left was their home, thanks to Florida's homestead exemption. When that went, man, the floodgates were open.” The Florida state legislation had caved into bribes from the banking lobby and had begun a phase-out of Florida's homestead exemption, on all homes worth less than a million dollars. The credit card companies were also throwing large amounts of cash around, after years of salivating at the prospect of getting their hands on a trillion dollars worth of Florida real estate, which was now fair game. “Hey Doc, did you hear about the new governor, the kid, the surfer from Cocoa Beach?” asked Vanzetti. “Yeah, another Bush, so what?” replied Doc. Vanzetti squared around and leaned over to Doc's ear, “No, this is not one of them, somebody really screwed up big.”
The recent Florida Gubernatorial election had been the strangest ever. What had happened was still a mystery to many, and the pieces had only recently begun to fall into place. In the absence of any opposition party, the ruling party had once again figured on an easy victory. For the first time in memory, the Bush family had not fielded a family member in the race, so Jimmy Turnipseed, a loyal family friend and former firebrand evangelical preacher and mentor to the previous governor, Renaldo Bush, was announced as the candidate. Just before the filing deadline, a surfer from Cocoa Beach entered the race as an independent. His name was, and still is, Frankie Bush, except now it has the word “Governor” in front of it. As it turns out, and to the best explanation from the reporters following the story, it seems that the election computers in Florida had for years been programmed to spit out as the winner whoever was named “Bush”. Frankie Bush, the surfer, had picked up on this possibility and had entered the race on that hunch alone. What probably sealed his victory was the Gallup Poll that came out a week before the election. Gallup pronounced Frankie Bush was ahead by a small margin and looked like the probable winner. As it turns out, Gallup's computers were also programmed to project the winner as being anybody with the last name of “Bush”. At any rate, Frankie Bush was the new governor and after mobilizing the Florida National Guard, he was ready to talk to Florida and the world. At his first speech, outside the Ron Jon Surf Shop in Cocoa Beach, Frankie announced that big changes were on the way. In the newscast, carried around the world, Frankie exclaimed: “For now, enjoy the surf and good rock and roll music. Change is on the way. We've been pushed around by these assholes for far too long. I'm telling you, brother, change is on the way.” Almost immediately, thousands of Florida t-shirt shops began selling shirts in every style and color that read: “God Bless Governor Frankie.”
|
