Coleman arrived at his cell in the Hillsborough County Jail in a wheelchair. A long, skinny guy lay on the bottom bunk not looking at him, reading a paperback, The Cockroach Bay Story. The guy slid a bookmark between the pages, turned over and held out a hand. “I’m Serge.”

  Coleman shook the hand. “Hi, I’m Seymour,” he said, “but friends call me Coleman. Enemies too.”

  Locked in the cell with the lights out, Coleman needed a beer; Serge needed his psychiatric medicine. Serge lay on his side in the bunk, propped up on one elbow, becoming manic. Coleman sat cross-legged on the floor next to the bed, listening in awe for hours as Serge recited the unabridged history of Florida.

  From the Calusa Indians to the space shuttle, Coleman hung on every word. Serge told him about great artists and pioneers and carpetbaggers and an entire world just outside Coleman’s awareness.

  The exploding dye pack was about to put Coleman in the headlines for the third time in his sorry, random life. The first time was twenty-one years ago, when he was four. Coleman was born Seymour Bunsen, the puny child of a working mother, and he constantly sought the approval of his unemployed father.

  One Sunday afternoon Mr. Bunsen and the usual suspects lounged in front of the television in the Bunsens’ living room, enduring another football shipwreck of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Full ashtrays and empty longnecks covered the coffee table. In front of the table was a sixty-quart cooler holding a bath of ice water and no more beer.

  Seymour kept coming up to his dad, pestering him with questions about what was going on in the game, tugging on his shirt and pants legs. The Buccaneers fumbled into their own end zone in the fourth quarter, and young Seymour poked his dad in the shoulder. “What’s happening? What’s happening?”

  “Jesus Christ!” Mr. Bunsen screamed. He grabbed little Seymour, stuffed him in the cooler and sat on the lid. His drunken friends laughed and Mr. Bunsen drained his beer and laughed too, and they watched the rest of the game.

  Seymour was blue and near death when he got to the hospital. He spent three months in intensive care, a month more than his dad would spend in jail. Doctors weren’t sure whether psychological trauma or brain damage caused him to withdraw and wither. He seemed emotionally adrift; he would never again seek anyone’s approval.

  The football angle of the child abuse made it a natural for the media. A TV newscaster opened with “The Buccaneers weren’t the only ones to take a beating yesterday….” A sports talk show blamed the Bucs’ poor play as much as Seymour’s dad.

  In Tallahassee, one senator held up a newspaper that said in large letters: “Dad benched for unnecessary roughness.” He demanded the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services take action. Another lawmaker used the attack to try to secure public funding for a new football stadium.

  The story followed Seymour Bunsen from school to school, as he was moved around often in a series of disciplinary transfers for fighting with taunting classmates.

  At every school he was initially nicknamed Bunsen Burner. But as soon as his classmates heard about him being stuffed in the cooler, they responded with the compassion for which schoolchildren are known. The nickname “Igloo” lasted only three weeks. “Coleman” stuck.

  The second time Coleman made the headlines, he was twenty-two. A small-time burglar, he decided he needed a wealthier clientele if he was going to better himself. He bought golf magazines to pick tonier neighborhoods to hit. One night while inside a home on the Palma Ceia Country Club, he fell asleep playing video games. He awoke with a joystick on his stomach and laughing police officers in the room. Coleman jumped over the balcony and ran onto the golf course.

  As he sprinted, Coleman heard cops behind him, still laughing. While burglarizing the house, Coleman had put on the teenage son’s new basketball shoes, the kind with red lights in the heels that flash on each step. The cops followed Coleman’s blinking red lights down a par five and two par fours until Coleman ran into the pin on the number eight green and knocked himself cold.

  The bank robbery was the third-time charm. But it was Coleman’s sentencing, not the heist or dye-pack explosion, that made news.

  Florida had become infamous for its abbreviated prison sentences. Through overcrowding, mandatory gain time and other caveats, prisoners were serving fractions of their terms. This drew a backlash of legislative lip service and ineptly written law.

  The chairman of the senate’s criminal justice committee had been caught up in a sexual harassment case for a year, distracting him from the little work he would have accomplished otherwise. He survived the scandal with a secret hundred-thousand-dollar payment to his accuser diverted from campaign donations. He held a press conference to announce that he had a sex addiction and, therefore, he too was a victim.

  During the scandal, the lawmaker found himself in charge of writing the get-tough legislation against early releases from prison. He never wanted to write such legislation. He just wanted to demagogue in front of the television cameras that he “would personally write the legislation myself!”

  Now, his aides said, there was no way out. He had publicly promised.

  “I don’t have time. I’ve got this sexual harassment case to deal with,” the senator responded, pulling up his pants. On the sofa in his office, his newest legislative aide was sliding panty hose back on. “These accusations are so unfair,” he continued. “I can’t tell you how hard it’s been on me.”

  The aide on the couch, reapplying lipstick in a compact mirror, said, “Let me write it. I’m good with words.”

  “There!” the senator said to the other aides. “She’ll write it. I don’t have time.”

  “But…” one aide started to object and was rebuffed with a cocked fist.

  When hiring the newest aide, the senator had passed on ten more capable applicants before settling on the one with the big tits.

  Coleman’s case was the first to fall under the new law. After the numbers were crunched—the advanced good behavior and federal capacity mandates and parole and the complex formulas the aide had written into the law—the state of Florida ended up owing Coleman time. The judge thought it was a mistake and had his clerk add it up again. Then the judge added it up himself. Each time Coleman came out ahead, and the judge had no choice but to order Coleman’s release. What couldn’t be accomplished in the realm of reality was achieved through legislative fiat. The senator who sponsored the bollixed-up bill went on television to blame liberal, criminal-coddling judges.

  In the first week of October 1962, Serge A. Storms was born at West Palm Beach Memorial Hospital, a Kennedy baby. Just after two in the morning, Serge’s mother was in her room under anesthesia. His father nodded off in a chair in the lobby. The television showed a four-jet formation in the clouds during the national anthem, closing out a broadcast day in Miami. In the distance, a freight train clacked along the rails next to Old Dixie Highway, carrying military supplies to the Keys for the Cuban Missile Crisis.

  They lived in Riviera Beach, in an upstairs apartment near a citrus packing house on Blue Heron Boulevard. The drugstore down the street had a giant bottle of Coppertone on the roof. Serge’s mother was a sales clerk at Burdines, and his father was the worst jai alai player ever to have taken the court at the Palm Beach Fronton.

  His name was Pablo, but he played under the sobriquet “Testarondo.” He made up the name and it meant the same thing in Spanish as it did in Italian, which was nothing. His number was 7.

  Pablo played, as it’s sometimes said, like a man possessed. He’d climb up the jai alai walls to field a shot. He’d roll on the floor and come up slinging the ball. He skidded into the screen at least once a game. The fronton featured Pablo prominently in its TV ads, programs and promotional literature.

  Pablo’s returns were arguably the fastest in the Florida league. Accuracy was another matter. When brute force was crucial, Testarondo was a sure bet. But when merely vague precision was required, Pablo was money down the drain.

  Pablo’s lack of accuracy went beyond not being able to hit the target. Because of the curved basket of a jai alai cesta, even standing behind him was not safe. Pablo’s missed shots were distributed in a 360-degree spray of rock-hard pelota. His dos paredes were frightening, his cortadas a catastrophe, his killshots deadly.

  The other players hated him as much as the fronton managers loved him. In the predictable matches with heavy favorites, the level of betting dipped. Pablo’s presence in a match threw the odds board into bedlam. Pablo never threatened to beat the favorite; he threatened to maim him. The wagering broke records.

  Every Saturday morning, little Serge sat with his mom in the vacant fronton spectator seats and watched his daddy practice. Pablo practiced like he played in real matches, at full speed. The other players went through the motions, but Pablo ran up the walls like an insane man and sent the pelota whistling by their ears. After nearly decapitating another player, Pablo would look for Serge and his mother in the audience and wave. Serge thought his daddy was a huge sports star like Mickey Mantle.

  One night in November, during the daily double, Pablo caught the ball five feet from the back wall and reached back with all his might for a full-court rebote. The other players hit the floor. Pablo let fly. He released late, from his hip, and the pelota flew out in the opposite direction, behind him. It ricocheted off the back wall and struck Pablo in the right rear quarter-panel of his skull. His casket was carried beneath a canopy of crossed cestas; his widow was given a number 7 jersey folded in a triangle.

  For his part, the energetic Serge soon displayed a precocious antisocial streak. At age five, Serge was picked for the studio audience of Skipper Chuck’s Popeye Playhouse, a morning children’s show produced in Miami and hosted by Chuck Zinc, the emcee of the Orange Bowl Parade. Each time something caught Serge’s attention, he’d wander away from his seat, only to be returned by stagehands bribing him with candy. During a segment where four sock puppets played “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” Serge ran up to the puppet window and pulled Ringo by his yarn hair. Ringo head-butted Serge in the chest, and Serge bit Ringo’s face, which wasn’t Ringo’s face but the hand of the puppetmaster, who screamed and cursed and chased Serge around the studio until the show went to test pattern.

  For the next thirteen years, Serge’s well-meaning mom tried to find a suitable role model for the boy and invariably took up with a series of thieves and pawnshop owners. The steadiest was a cat burglar named Henry who tossed pop flies to Serge through two seasons of Little League. The rest of the time Henry ate their food and slept under their roof. When Serge’s mom got on Henry’s back about not carrying his weight, he’d rip off a house in Lake Park or Palm Beach Gardens.

  One night Henry thought he’d finally found his angle. He guessed he could hold his breath a minute, maybe a minute and a half, and he made twenty-six trips into a split-level being tented for termites off Northlake Boulevard. He carted away enough electronics, silverware and jewelry to last them six months. The next morning Serge found Henry mottled on the living room sofa, eyes and mouth agape from a fatal dose of methyl bromide that curled his arms and legs like a dried-up lizard in the garage.

  By now, Serge’s behavior had its own signature. Everything with him was an on-off switch; there was no volume control. Half his grades were A’s, the other half F’s. He began to hang at the Palm Beach Mall. As people walked out of a bookstore, he’d punch them in the stomach and step back in detachment to study the effect.

  This last quirk resulted in Serge being classified as criminally insane by the Palm Beach County Health Department. Serge’s attention-deficit disorder was the first of many hyphens. Obsessive-compulsive, manic-depressive, anal-retentive, paranoid-schizophrenic. He was believed to have been the only self-inflicted case of shaken-baby syndrome.

  Some of the same dysfunctions also made Serge animated, charming, entertaining and sporadically brilliant. Serge was the star of his high school drama club, playing Death in a Woody Allen production. He decided to master the free throw through Zen and five hundred practice shots a day. He set a conference record for consecutive shots, lost interest and quit the basketball team midseason. He was a voracious reader and technologically inclined, with a gadget fetish. He became expert in varied subjects by stalking librarians, teachers, toll-free operators and any other resource with an unending line of questions. Until he obsessed on another subject.

  He became fascinated with the space program, the minting of U.S. coins, submarine warfare, Chinese table-tennis technique, masonry, cryptography, literature of the counterculture. And Florida. The full range of native interests, flora and fauna, art, history, culture, anything.

  After graduating from Suncoast High School in Riviera Beach, he became a world-class drywaller, which paid no more than the ones who smoked joints at lunch. Other than the occasional beer, Serge eschewed drugs and alcohol, not from piety but because they made him berserk. If Serge wanted a recreational drug experience, he would skip taking his Prozac, Zoloft, Elavil and lithium.

  This usually resulted in brief incarcerations for petty mayhem, vandalism and unexplained acts of psychosis like putting on a top hat and tails and shooting up a cemetery.

  As Serge moved into the adult correctional system, a series of underpaid psychiatrists listened to his emerging Florida aesthetic. He launched torrid bursts about the Everglades photography of Clyde Butcher, the written body of Rawlings, Douglas and MacDonald, and the vernacular architecture of crackers. Flipper and Gentle Ben were state treasures.

  Serge would typically arrive at a friend’s house. After five minutes he still hadn’t sat down. “Can I get some water? I need to use the phone. Mind if I change the channel?” Pacing hard. “Where’s your newspaper? Let’s make some coffee. My legs are hot—do you have some shorts I can borrow? I gotta split.”

  One doctor told Serge that he was longing for his mother and seeking the womblike Florida of his childhood.

  Serge mentally aimed a .44 Magnum at the doctor and blew a black-purple hole the diameter of a nickel in his forehead. The doctor asked what Serge was thinking. Serge told him. The doctor spilled hot coffee in his lap. He ran into the hall screaming and grabbing between his legs. Three guards ran into the room and promptly beat Serge with rubber truncheons.

  Psychiatrists controlled Serge, early, with Ritalin, then tricyclics, and later said screw this incrementalism and loosed the spectrum of psychotropic drugs.

  What couldn’t be explained or excused was his un-magnetized moral compass. On broad philosophical issues, Serge was compassionate and stridently moral; on a personal level, he was predatory.

  There was never cruelty; Serge’s conscience just seemed to go blank from time to time. His motto could have been Think globally, act criminal locally.

  Serge functioned more or less normally when he stuck to his medicine, which he refused to do as often as possible. He seemed to know just how far to take the system without triggering a lengthy prison stay. The younger psychiatrists thought Serge was harmless and were uniformly fascinated by his verbal tapestries. The older doctors thought he was sick and would end up killing someone. That’s how differently they interpreted the incident on Interstate 75.

  Serge hadn’t taken his lithium and Prozac for two weeks when he woke atop a green information sign over the northbound lanes of I-75 near the Busch Gardens exit. It was morning rush hour, and cops and TV trucks clustered on the shoulder of the highway as Serge awoke to the locomotive in his head. He looked down at the semi whizzing under his feet and had no idea how he had gotten there.

  The police closed down all lanes. Various emergency lights flickered off the green sign. With TV cameras filming, Serge stood up on the light supports, cleared his throat, and began in an evangelical voice:

  “There was no Disney World then, just rows of orange trees. Millions of them. Stretching for miles. And somewhere near the middle was the Citrus Tower, which the tourists climbed to see even more orange trees. Every month an eighty-year-old couple became lost in the groves, driving up and down identical rows for days until they were spotted by helicopter or another tourist on top of the Citrus Tower. They had lived on nothing but oranges and came out of the trees drilled on vitamin C and checked into the honeymoon suite at the nearest bed-and-breakfast.”

  The crowd grew.

  “The Miami Seaquarium put in a monorail and rockets started going off at Cape Canaveral, making us feel like we were on the frontier of the future. Disney bought up everything north of Lake Okeechobee, preparing to shove the future down our throats sideways.

  “Things evolved rapidly! Missile silos in Cuba. Bales on the beach. Alligators are almost extinct and then they aren’t. Juntas hanging shingles in Boca Raton. Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo skinny-dipping off Key Biscayne. We atone for atrocities against the Indians by playing bingo. Shark fetuses in formaldehyde jars, roadside gecko farms, tourists waddling around waffle houses like flocks of flightless birds. And before we know it, we have The New Florida, underplanned, overbuilt and ripe for a killer hurricane that’ll knock that giant geodesic dome at Epcot down the turnpike like a golf ball, a solid one-wood by Buckminster Fuller.”

  Some who had pulled over nodded in assent that Serge had a point. Firemen unfolded a rescue net under the sign.

  “I am the native and this is my home. Faded pastels, and Spanish tiles constantly slipping off roofs, shattering on the sidewalk. Dogs with mange and skateboard punks with mange roaming through yards, knocking over garbage cans. Lunatics wandering the streets at night, talking about spaceships. Bail bondsmen wake me up at three A.M. looking for the last tenant. Next door, a mail-order bride is clubbed by a smelly man in a mechanic’s shirt. Cats violently mate under my windows and rats breakdance in the drop ceiling. And I’m lying in bed with a broken air conditioner, sweating and sipping lemonade through a straw. And I’m thinking, geez, this used to be a great state.”

  There was a scattering of whistles and clapping.

  “You wanna come to Florida? You get a discount on theme-park tickets and find out you just bought a time share. Or maybe you end up at Cape Canaveral, sitting in a field for a week as a space shuttle launch is canceled six times. And suddenly vacation is over, you have to catch a plane, and you see the shuttle take off on TV at the airport. But you keep coming back, year after year, and one day you find you’re eighty years old driving through an orange grove.”