Hot Damn!: Alligators in the Casino, Nude Women in the Grass, How Seashells Changed the Course of History, and Other Dispatches from Paradise

by James W. Hall

Overview

James W. Hall is the critically acclaimed author of eleven crime novels, including Body Language and Blackwater Sound. He's also published four books of poetry. And several of his short stories have appeared in magazines like the Georgia Review and Kenyon Review.

Now, writing in the spirit of Dave Barry and Garrison Keillor, Hall wins a new kind of reader with this collection of essays that run from insightful to opinionated, funny to wise.

Hall ponders subjects as diverse as his own love affair with Florida which began on a trip after college from which he never returned, to his equally passionate romance with books. He ponders the nature of summer heat, the writing of Hemingway and James Dickey, television, teaching, politics, fatherhood and much more. In the vibrant and elegant prose which characterize his fiction and poetry, Hall now proves himself a master of the essay as well.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312316150
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/16/2003
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.57(d)

About the Author

JAMES W. HALL is an Edgar and Shamus Award-winning "master of suspense" (The New York Times) whose books have been translated into a dozen languages. His novels include the Thorn Mysteries (which begin with Under Cover of Daylight and include Blackwater Sound, Hell's Bay, and The Big Finish) . He divides his time between South Florida and North Carolina.

Read an Excerpt

HOME AT LAST

Every time I see that bumper sticker—Florida Native—a ripple of envy and irritation flutters in my chest. It’s a rare and exotic club to which I will never belong because I’m one of those thousands-a-week folks who have been flooding into Florida for the last few decades. Although they tell us that the tide has slackened to 591 new residents a day, Florida natives are still as scarce and outlandish as manatees. How unfair it seems that even though I’ve lived in the state for well over thirty years (surely longer than plenty of the younger natives), I should still feel like an interloper.

In 1965 on a south Florida winter day much like this one, I stepped off the train at the Hollywood station to attend Riverside Military Academy It had been an incredibly romantic journey, a long rumbling train ride through the brown scraggly fields of Tennessee and Georgia, then into the expanse of green nothingness that was north and central Florida, until finally the palm trees began to thicken, the greens grew lush, and the windows in the train slowly lowered. Suddenly I was standing beside the tracks looking at a sky dense with extravagant birds, white and huge with lazy wings, long orange legs trailing.

I remember taking my first breath of rich subtropical air. There was something sweet and spicy in the breeze—that warm macaroon aroma with an intoxicating undertone of cinnamon that seems to waft directly from some secret Caribbean island. That afternoon I breathed in a lungful of air I have yet to release.

Though I didn’t have the words for it then, I knew the light was different too. Softer than the harsh and unglamorous Kentucky daylight I was used to. It had an almost romantic, twilight rosiness, a quiet light, yet at the same time far more vivid and precise than any I’d known before. A painterly January light. And while I had been on the platform of the Hollywood train station for less than a minute, I knew with utter certainty that I had taken a mortal wound.

Some time later that winter, I dropped the bombshell on my parents. I informed them that I had decided to turn down the Air Force Academy appointment my father and I had labored so hard to secure. I wanted to attend college in this newly discovered Shangri-la, Florida. While the shock of my passing up a free four years of college must have been incredibly difficult for them to absorb, to their everlasting credit my parents let me win that argument.

I never told them that the institution of higher learning I had chosen, Florida Presbyterian College, had caught my eye because the catalog I’d devoured in my boys’ school guidance office had numerous photographs of coeds wearing Bermuda shorts in classrooms. Ah, sweet Florida, what a sensuous and libertine land.

I did four glorious years of college in the charming and soporific Saint Petersburg of the sixties. On holidays I explored the west coast, the Keys, camping at starkly primitive Bahia Honda, building bonfires on midnight beaches, discovering out-of-the-way taverns that served cheap pitchers of beer and spectacular cheeseburgers, bays where fish jumped happily into frying pans, and unair-conditioned piano bars in Key West where writers huddled in the corners and talked the secret talk. I had never felt so at home.

Then I graduated, and after serving a bleak exile in snowy latitudes to collect two more degrees, it was finally time to find a job. I was so determined to return to Florida that I didn’t even bother applying for teaching jobs in any other state. It was a cavalier decision bordering on lunacy, for that was a time in the early seventies when teaching jobs were scarce and terminal degrees plentiful. Every taxi driver had one. When no job offer was forthcoming, I moved back to Florida anyway and put my new Ph.D. to use digging holes and planting azaleas, palm trees, and a host of other landscape plants around the bases of high-rise condominiums. Better to do manual labor in the relentless sun of Florida than to find myself in some university office staring out the window at the desolate tundra of Anyplace Else.

The phone call finally came. A new state university in Miami. The ground floor. A dream job. And then, little by little, all these years happened. But even after all this time, the light is still new and surreal and the air still drenched with spices they haven’t yet named, and the sky is chock-full of the most impossible birds. Parrots squawk across my backyard sky every morning at seven. Garish flowers big as Stetsons bloom in December. Some evenings the breeze is so luxurious I feel like weeping.

I kidnapped a boy from Kentucky and transplanted him in paradise, and he grew up to write books that sing the praises and mock the dizzy and perilous follies of this gaudy corner of the nation. I love this place. I have loved it from the start and have learned to love it more with every passing year—all its quirkiness, its stresses, this simmering melting pot where no one wants to blend.

I have decided we need a bumper sticker of our own—those of us who had the misfortune of being born somewhere else but who made the difficult choices, overcame the fears and complications and the psychic traumas of abandoning the safety of one home for the uncertainty of another. There are 591 stories a day about how we arrived here, and sure, not all of us were as swept away by the sensory treasures of this place as that eighteen-year-old kid on the train platform. Some of us came simply for jobs or to play golf in February or to soothe our arthritic joints, and there are many who find nothing to rhapsodize about in the sumptuous air or rosy light, the awkward, delicious grace of a heron rising into flight. There are many of those 591 who simply ignore or endure what the rest of us cherish. Well, let them get their own license plate. But as for the rest of us, ours should say, Home at Last.

HOT DAMN! Copyright © 2002 by James W Hall. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue. New York, N.Y 10010.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	xi
	Introduction	xiii
	Home at Last	1
	The Names of Things	5
	Florida Trifecta	11
	Nude Woman in the Grass	17
	Back to School	23
	Winning Me Over	29
	Dream House	35
	Two Homes	41
	The Hardy Boys	47
	It's not the Heat, It's the Stupidity	53
	Spring Rites	59
	Hemingway	65
	"Nobody Knows Anything"	69
	After-Dinner Conversation	75
	Guns	81
	Touchy-Feely	85
	Fresh Starts	93
	Car Wars	99
	Disney Virus	105
	Dry Tortugas	111
	The Smallest Christmas Tree	117
	Wooden Tennis Rackets	127
	Dripping Clocks	133
	Tubular Addiction	139
	April is the Cruelest Month	145
	Close Encounter	151
	Hot Damn	155
	Letter to My Father	161
	A Moving Experience	171
	Cabo	179
	A Walk on the Beach	185
	Doggone	189
	Anniversary	193
	Faithless in South Florida	197
	Camping Out	201
	I'd Like to Thank You All for Coming	207
	Hurricanes	213
	Cheeto	221
	Poet Sinks to Crime	225

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"His new collection of 40 brisk, witty essays proves that poet and crime novelist James W. Hall (Blackwater Sound) is one of the region's biggest and most thoughtful boosters."—Publishers Weekly "Laid-back and quite competent ... to be enjoyed in the shade with the sound of the surf not far away."—Kirkus Reviews "Highly recommended."—Library Journal

Editorial Reviews

His new collection of 40 brisk, witty essays proves that poet and crime novelist James W. Hall (Blackwater Sound) is one of the region's biggest and most thoughtful boosters.” —Publishers Weekly

“Laid-back and quite competent ... to be enjoyed in the shade with the sound of the surf not far away.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Highly reccommended.” —Library Journal

From the Publisher

He's probably not the spokesperson the South Florida tourism council had in mind, but his new collection of 40 brisk, witty essays proves that poet and crime novelist James W. Hall (Blackwater Sound) is one of the region's biggest and most thoughtful boosters. Hot Damn!: Alligators in the Casino, Nude Women in the Grass, How Seashells Changed the Course of History, and Other Dispatches from Paradise includes pieces on television, heat waves, hurricanes and, of course, the writing life, all set against the backdrop of his beloved adopted state. Hall confesses a deep-seated envy of Florida natives; traces the epidemiology of suburban sprawl in "Disney Virus"; and recounts his wife's violent carjacking. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In his introduction, Hall mystery writer (e.g., Buzz Cut), poet, and college professor declares that "essays are about as sexy as donkeys." Blaming college composition courses for the form's status, Hall goes on to explain how he came to have a "three-year love affair" with the essay after a newspaper editor asked him to write a weekly column. The resulting collection is flawless. Hall writes about how he first came to Florida or as the locals call it, "Paradise," with a new Ph.D. and no job prospects. Rather than settle for a teaching job somewhere else, he worked as a landscaper until a suitable position came along. Hall wryly comments on the idea that although he's lived in Florida for over 30 years, he'll never be considered "native." The essays cover a wide range of topics, including Florida's culture and climate, what constitutes community, vacationing in your back yard, the writing life, marriage, and American culture. "Letter to My Father" beautifully blends Hall's poetic sensibilities with a discussion of what can remain unsaid between men. Highly recommended. Pam Kingsbury, Florence, AL Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

From the South Florida School of American Literature, home to both Ernest Hemingway and Dave Barry, comes hard-working Hall: erstwhile poet, current thriller-writer, and sometime English teacher here undertaking a new form. For three years, while he kept the action going in his spirited adventures (Blackwater Sound, 2002, etc.), the author also found a friendly format in the short essays he contributed monthly to a Florida newspaper. The collected pieces deal with a variety of subjects, but most are related to the splendor of the Peninsula State, from the myriad shells of Sanibel to the wonderful feeling of sunburn-grade warmth on the epidermis. "We have only two seasons in south Florida, summer and not-quite-summer," he declares. But the sunshine is not unabated. There are the casinos in the Everglades, the feral Florida drivers, the young muggers, and don't forget the Disneyfication. "Before we know it," Hall warns, "we'll be living in a place concocted by cartoonists." But despite his holidays in the hills of North Carolina (that's where native Floridians can be found in summer), the author's devotion to the birthplace of the early-bird special is unfailing. Along with the fright engendered by hurricanes, his musings venture beyond the shuffleboard courts to describe unpleasant dealings with hustling TV producers and humiliating book tours. As seems de rigueur in an essay collection, Hall pays homage to the pleasures of books and reading, as well as offering appreciations of the Hardy Boys and Papa Hemingway. He provides a choice glimpse of James Dickey in action, and a heartfelt eulogy for his late father signals the author's fundamental decency. But does he really go fishing fordolphin? Laid-back and quite competent, if not consistently soul-stirring, certainly well-enough executed to be enjoyed in the shade with the sound of the surf not far away.

Kirkus Reviews