Ten years ago, Noah was fresh out of the Marine Corps and I was his college-boy neighbor at a run-down apartment complex near the University of Florida named, what else, the Ritz. The Ritz was a favorite haunt of junkies and armed robbers. It also was dirt cheap and had rooms to rent month to month. Most importantly, it's where Noah and I became fast friends. Though seemingly different as different can be, the two of us discovered we were complementary. Noah was a standoffish loner and a tough guy, a legitimate one, having finished more bar fights than he'd started. I was less dweeby bookworm than incautious Kerouac wannabe; this half observer, half shit-stirrer who hovered between worlds while dwelling for the most part in the one of my own fashioning. Noah grew fond of me in the manner of a big brother. Whereas he to me represented this original source I'd been too long and too far removed from. We fit together and dangerously so, like a motorcycle and its sidecar. What kept us connected was the ability to articulate self- and world-loathing in a way that made the other laugh. So we'd crack wise over old horror movies or while tossing around a football. Some nights, we'd have what you might call "adventures." Other nights, we'd sit in silence in front of the Xbox as Noah cultivated the remote and private air of a man who had seen some shit . Midweek, we'd suffer through our "Wednesday Night Throwdown," wherein we housed suitcases of beers before squaring off in the courtyard and charging one another like rival rams, shouting "Defend yourself!" all the while, Noah slap-boxing as if hoping to knock the timidity out of me like dust from a rug. Fast-forward to 2014, when I was hosting Noah in my Brooklyn apartment. "Hosting" being maybe too euphemistic a word. Noah was deep in student-loan debt and without a place to stay after (1) graduating from a criminal-justice master's program in Manhattan, but (2) breaking up with the girlfriend he'd moved to New York to be with. He had sold his pickup truck to fund the initial relocation, so he couldn't even live out of that. Owing to our history at the Ritz, I offered Noah an air mattress on the floor of my "home office." Temporary, like. After he'd stabbed that Coleman GuestRest to death--in his sleep, with his Ka-Bar knife, during some kind of PTSD-inflected night terror--Noah received a cot. Months later, jobless still, he got his own bed. Noah spent his days applying to jobs online. His nights he spent drinking hard while blasting Poison's Open Up and Say . . . Ahh! from my stereo. His employment history read as such: dishwasher, fry cook, USMC artilleryman, apprentice carpenter, assistant medical examiner, security guard at an Alabama island for millionaires. Lots of jobs, yet Noah lacked a coherent skill set. He could bench-press three-hundred-plus pounds but could not touch-type. I asked him what his ideal job would be, and he said, "Hasn't changed since I was thirteen years old. Front man in a cock-rock band. Failing that-- professional wrestler." Thus did we find ourselves one evening in my apartment: Noah was unemployed, I was between freelance assignments, and together we were whiling away the hours watching a Little League World Series doubleheader on TV. It was serendipity, perhaps, that we were many Coorses deep by the time a commercial for the film adaptation of Cheryl Strayed's Wild came on. "Dude," Noah said. "There it is." "Only if you're buying the tickets," I drolled. "The answer, dude." He placed his beer on the coffee table, knuckled himself upright on the couch. "You need to find something to write about, right? I need to find something to occupy my time, lest I blast myself and others. We both need to get rich, and quick." "Agreed on all counts," I said after emptying my beer. "So . . . ?" "So?" Now, once he'd worked out of his . . . funk, let's call it . . . post-Iraq, Noah used his G.I. Bill benefits to study history at his local University of West Florida. At UWF, he became enamored of Walkin' Lawton Chiles, our former governor and senator, the cornpone "He-Coon" who is remembered as one of Florida's favoritest sons. In my apartment that evening, Noah muted the TV and explained it: In 1970, Chiles was an electoral nobody--only 12 percent of Florida voters recognized his name--so he decided to canvass the state on foot, county by county, town by town, on a "walking-talking and listening campaign." Some 1,003 miles later, Chiles had captured the imagination of the state and launched a high-profile political career that lasted until his sudden death in 1998. "No one's sure if Lawton really, actually did it," Noah said, "or if he took rides in the support trailer behind him. All we have to go on is his journal, which spends about a third of the time describing the meals he ate." "Huh," I said. "So you're saying-- try it again fifty years later ." I hopped off the couch, began to pace the apartment. I got a little worked up, I must admit. I pattered aloud about how Florida is absolutely bereft of mythic infrastructure. How it is symbolically impoverished, how it has no hallowed grounds besides golf courses and no great cathedrals outside of adventure parks. Florida, I said, is the only megastate in this union--is in fact the most important place in America --that has never defined itself. Florida has always been construed by outsiders, has been typecast by those with allegiances to elsewhere. "Imagine New York without its media or literary champions," I said. "Or California without Hollywood." Florida is spiritually unclaimed, was my point. It's never had a hero of history like the cowboy or frontiersman for its people to rally around. That night, Noah and I resolved to become those heroes. We'd be the native sons who created the grandest, funniest, most far-ranging, depth-plumbing, tear-jerking, je-ne-sais-quoi-capturing work of art ever to emerge from the rank morasses and mirage metropolises of our beloved home! " Vanishing home," Noah pointed out. "Climate change. Rising tides. Place is sinking back into the water, don't forget. There's our timeliness peg." It was decided. We'd give Florida the elegy she deserved. We toasted ourselves. Of course, we toasted ourselves many times more that night. When we came to the next afternoon, our plan had curdled somewhat. Spoiling our excitement was the sour taste of real-life exigency. (For one thing: the lactic acid we would have to expend.) Over the course of days, then weeks, then months, our plan fell out of focus. We hadn't consciously rejected it so much as recognized it as fantasy. We'd love to see it through, yet it was practically impossible for us to imagine taking the time necessary not only to plan such a trip but to carry it out. Noah found a job--at JPMorgan Chase, of all places. Something about billions of dollars in fines levied by the U.S. government, and Chase needing to hire more veterans as part of their penance. Noah settled in as a client investigator. He found and promptly married a young bride, whose extended, very Polish family understood four or five syllables of my best-man speech. He moved to Queens and climbed slowly out of debt. I, meanwhile, puttered apace. I adjunct-instructed a handful of undergraduate courses at Columbia University, where the six grand they paid me in no way remunerated my efforts. I authored several hacky magazine features, for which the dwindling cents-per-word rates were no better. In lieu of updating my résumé, I revised my bio whenever a publication I had written for folded. Day jobs--I had a few. But traditional employ does not agree with me. Mostly what I did during this period was worry that my shallow wellspring of story ideas had been exhausted by my first book, which was a commercial catastrophe. Nevertheless, while Noah thrived, I kept on keeping on, at least in terms of being a moody, difficult, irresolute fellow plagued by tensions and contradictions. My hypos got the upper hand of me, as they say. I drank deeper and deeper of the bottles of Old Overholt I bought every week. Then every five days. Then every two. I put on records by that good Catholic boy Ronnie James Dio and staggered about my apartment, medicine in hand held steady as a gyroscope. Without Noah there, I was free to kick about my piles of remaindered hardcovers like a stinko dragon circling the worthless ingots in its den. I ordered delivery nonstop. I lost weekends to actions that felt newly taken but were in truth the original action acted out over and over again. I went to Sunday Masses trashed, so that I might meet my maker while buoyed with Dutch courage. Here I will cop to the fact that I had no mortgage payments and no outstanding student loans. No health crises, car accidents, run-ins with the law. Nor parents, siblings, or children in dire financial straits. Yes. Seemingly blessed in most respects. And forasmuch as I would like to wax pedantic about how it takes greater virtue to bear good fortune than bad--don't worry. In due time, fate's fickle hand shot me the bird, which arrived in the form of a letter from the government. According to this certified letter, I was beholden to something. Ho ho. I owed $37,000 in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service. For you see, when you are granted an advance on a book prior to its publication, the check you receive has none of your federal, state, or city taxes deducted from it. It's one big lump sum, like the number stamped on an oversized game-show check. And cashing such a ludicrous check, I can assure you--it induces a kind of stupor. Witnessing your ATM balance wink from three integers to six, you can't help but shush the small inner voice that warns: You know that check was worth about half of what it said it's worth, right? So if one were to, say, blow through all of one's advance? After improperly reporting said advance on one's tax return? One might discover that one owes Uncle Sam the dregs of one's savings account. And then some. And then then some, garnished wages and all (if one had wages to garnish), since Uncle Sam had been attempting to bill one at one's old address back in Manhattan, compounding interest as he went. I had to go on Noah's walk now. Hastily I educated myself, reading every walking narrative I could find. But in absorbing walking narrative after walking narrative, I came to realize that I loathed walking narratives. I loathed their epiphanies. Their treacly sentimentality. Most especially, I loathed their tropes. Like, the walk-as-exorcism. The walk-as-self-sanctification. The walk as fast shuffle of stale experiences. As through line between me-as-I-was and me-as-I-am. Walking and confessional writing have been convoluted for centuries, basically since the time of Rousseau, who noted: "Never did I think so much, exist so vividly, and experience so much, never have I been so much myself . . . as in the journeys I have taken alone and on foot." What Rousseau started, the Romantics popularized. Their peripatetic heroes walked and pondered, walked and pondered. They jotted down the discursive links between their thinking and their strolling in "nature" (some footpaths around a country estate, usually). By turns maudlin and peevish, these fancy boys sounded out their selves with each step. Like the Sierra Club after them, they sought to repair their sense of lost unity by hiking through pretty scenery. And, Christ--bourgeois origins notwithstanding, America loves this hero. Why should this be? Maybe it's because "the soul of the [pedestrian] journey is liberty, perfect liberty . . . to think, feel, do just as one pleases," as Hazlitt wrote. Maybe it's because "Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, / Healthy, free, the world before me . . . Henceforth I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune," as Whitman wrote. Maybe it's because the road is supposed to be the American's home, and movement his means of expression. The only way I can truly pursue happiness is if I take off after it down that American Way. And so on. Yeah, I wanted to write about none of that. Neither self nor scenery nor old, dusty trail. The only state I wished to chronicle was Florida. Understanding and then making credible my birthplace-- the peninsula that stupefies, sickens, infuriates, and finally embarrasses the rest of the nation--was task enough for me. But how best to capture it? I marinated on that. Wily as I judged myself to be writing-wise, I felt I lacked the chops to match up against my home. Almost daily it tossed up villains and tragedies that were the envy of any novelist, to say nothing of a reality artist in desperate need of quick bucks. Then I asked myself: Wait a minute, does one describe an advertisement? A franchise? A souvenir store, gated subdivision, drive-in church? Of course not! These are all signs, and one does not describe signs. Words slip from these as though they are Teflon-coated. No, signs you take pictures of. Dreamscapes, you film. So we'd make a gonzo documentary! Duh! We'd go it alone, sleep anywhere, interview anybody, live on almost nothing, eat and drink whatever, befriend strangers rich or poor, sane or not. We'd brave the worst that heat and sun, mishap and blister, officialdom, prejudice, and politics could do to us. Most crucially, we'd film nonstop. Altogether sui generis, behaving just as we pleased, we would do what the Chamber of Commerce has always encouraged: Come on down to Florida, and exploit her! Use her resources to satisfy your wants. I pitched Noah. He thought the idea excellent. What especially excited him, he told me, was the prospect of quitting his corporate- greed-enabling gig at Chase. "I felt less bad shooting at people during the siege of Fallujah," he said. Problem was, neither of us knew anything about documentary filmmaking. So the plan stalled again. A couple of weeks later, out of the blue, I received a Google Chat message from a guy I'd studied writing with--Glenn. From our limited time together in New York City, I'd known Glenn to be an affable Ottawan, a genuinely sympathetic guy who had been socialized within a functioning family in a functioning democracy. An excellent youth tennis player and camp counselor, like. The kind of progressive international who betrays no anguish over, say, a God-shaped hole. Who believes the best lack all conviction. That's the Glenn I palled around with: the near-ideal product of a tolerant society. We were as much fascinated by each other as we were repulsed. While we studied "cultural reporting and criticism," whatever that could possibly mean, Glenn and I engaged in epic weekly drinking bouts. Friday nights at dive bars across the city, we two contraries roared like men who had carried a confrontation with each other to its distressing limits before suddenly safely passing those limits. Bit by bit, I learned that Glenn had been born in Malawi to a diplomat father and an accountant mother. At age four he returned with his parents to Canada, where he was treated to the aforementioned idyll in suburban Ottawa. Nothing much to report, Glenn contended. He wasn't even that rebellious of a teen, since the idea of rebelling in order to gain identity requires that you have something to rebel against . Canada is . . . post-liberally humane. To a fault. Mostly there was the basilisking glare of television, of mall movie theaters. That's where Glenn's filmmaking enthusiasm was stoked. The screen gave him something to crane his neck toward, like a plant in a hothouse with a single bulb above. After receiving his English degree from McGill University in Montreal, Glenn spent a few gap years tramping around Africa with the woman who would become his wife. He freelanced news stories to Canadian outlets. When those didn't kick-start a whirlwind career, he became the tiniest bit depressed. Depressed enough to consider entering the field of nonprofit development, I should clarify. Traveling around the continent, Glenn became fascinated by the ways in which systems break down, noble intentions go awry. He decided to involve himself in some real white-savior stuff: water purification projects, mobile financial networks for informal economies-- you know the type. Then he realized he had no future in any of that. Aimless and listless, Glenn made the mistake of applying to a writing program in New York City. Which was where "our destinies became commingled," as he put it. On Google Chat, Glenn caught me up with his life. Turned out, he had abandoned the writing thing four years ago, when he moved to Toronto. Turned out, he was working in documentary film--first as an assistant, now as a producer. Mere days ago, in fact, he'd finished shooting a couple episodes of a Vice Media television show. But he was having something of a thirty-three-and-a-third life crisis, he told me. "I'm tired of being a do-boy for tattooed chefs getting drunk in Copenhagen" was how he phrased it. What he wanted to do, he confessed, was direct . "So," Glenn typed. "I need a project. And I thought maybe it'd be fun to come up with something together." "Boy," I replied. "Wouldn't it." Excerpted from In the Land of Good Living: A Journey to the Heart of Florida by Kent Russell All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
