EDIT: This started as a project where my friends would suggest a topic, and I would work it into a short story revolving around a freelance reporter from Miami. My friend suggested "Mixed Pickles." This is the result.
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Alligators are the most dangerous thing at these speeds. From a distance it’s impossible to tell if they are dead or merely absorbing the incredible heat until your right on top of them. Usually the bastards snap at you, which can send a motorcycle and it’s rider bouncing down the hot Florida tarmac like a ragdoll injected with high velocity rubber.
Better to give the animals a healthy berth and let them lie wherever they damn well please. The twist of it all is spotting them. Once you see the beasts, at sixty mph you have roughly four long seconds of reaction time before a very heavy doom set in. But the rented Kawasaki was now deep into the high end of fifth gear, screaming down Florida State 90 a ball-busting hundred forty-two. I would be lucky if I got two seconds, and all I could think about were the god-damn pickles.
Twenty minutes earlier I was comfortably perched at Club Duce nursing a Cuba Libre and trying ignore Genevieve long enough to collect my notes on alligator handling. Genevieve is a handsome transvestite of the less convincing breed, who was currently going on about her trip to India between long pulls off her Malibu and Dole pineapple juice. I had made the mistake of mentioning that I was covering some mad Indian con artist, a hustler who earns his living placing his head into the tooth lined jaws of a saltwater crocodile without nature taking over and turning the whole thing into a deeply gruesome sideshow. I suspected heavy tranquilizers were at play, the criminal doping of the great lizard… but it would be impossible to confirm anything from the observation deck above the pit where the whole grusoeme prduction went down. Apparently the croc's name is Bruce.
Earlier I had called my editor and suggested we drug test the reptile, put its charlatan handler out of work and on the streets where he could nod off on his own supply. Justice for mother earth and the thinking man, and so on. He wasn’t interested, and from the nature of his reaction gave me the harsh impression that the South Florida State Board of Tourism didn’t give a damn about a stoned Crocodile as long as the depraved spectacle kept drawing hot seas of blood-starved crowds every summer, which it did. So Bruce was out of luck and capitalism marches on.
Genevieve’s conversation had moved off of India, swung wide at some dark place, and turned into an intense vortex of excitement and deep paranoia regarding the now ever-present tourists from up-state. Half listening, I reached deep into the jar of David’s Kosher Sour Pickles the owner left on the counter to keep the local drunks calm. Whatever nightmare I bit into though could barely be called a pickle, Kosher be dammed. Some depraved lunatic had booby-trapped the pickle jar with those sickeningly sweet sandwich pickles made for Miracle whip and the all American picnic. One of those horrifyingly wholesome family scenes plucked straight out of a Joe McCarthy wet dream.
Not even the straight shot of the jaw-grinding house bourbon I frantically pulled from the bar hose would burn out the taste. What strange and sadistic homoerotic urges was this madman suppressing which would drive him to distribute a jar of mixed pickles to an unsuspecting public? He was obviously dangerous, and would have to be dealt with when I got back from the animal farm. Sweet Jesus… those damn pickles.
