FICTION: THE FLORIDA SHUFFLE BY JAMES MCADAMS

Rehab Alley | July 2022

Gage and I were looking for drug zombies to traffic/broker at the NA/AA meeting in the Victims of Opioids Recreation Center in the office plaza on Swinton & 43rd with the AMSCOT and Great Clips. Gage wore a beanie cap and skater jeans. He had business cards with QR codes, fake sobriety chips, and addiction stories stolen from Reddit and Discord. He was another Ashfield survivor and managed Sea of Recovery the way I was about to manage Turtle Shores.

People in town, meaning people on drugs, off drugs, or selling drugs, referred to us as the as the Lost Boys. Vampiric, night-hunters, solemn but insincere, dressed in black. Brock and Gage had been collaborating together for months. They taught me how to be a Zombie Broker. There was a joke going around that Brock was dad and we were his two (adopted) sons.

A girl named Carly, with sharp raven angel hair and an abraded nose she kept touching, was Sharing Her Context with everyone.

“We slept on couches, park benches, a urine-stained recliner on the porch of a hospice in Valdosta, Georgia. Back seats, hatchbacks, haylofts, high-school gyms. We did it for us. I liked the community. I once slept strapped to the top of the PunkVan, speeding down I-95 towards Richmond, Virginia, waking with a voice like a blender but I killed that gig anyway. We did it for the music and for each other. Bald Goran slept with Neeko, Neeko slept with Miriam, Miriam slept with a teenage fan in Disney World and didn’t remember until being informed by Nallie, who slept with the fan’s sister, with Bald Goran, with Neeko, with anyone who desired her. I didn’t sleep with anyone. I was assaulted, I have walls. And I was sick of the drugs. That’s probably why they kicked me out.”

The other people, the real people, comforted her. They cooed about vulnerability, self-care, healing, said she had her whole life ahead of her, said she was such a pretty thing. They offered remedies—cold plunges, dopamine fasts, ACE theory, sensory deprivation, veganism, keto, paleo diets. They offered reasons—generational trauma, vitamin B or D deficiency, anemia, pernicious anemia, Lyme disease, gluten and whey allergies. Did she dream and about what? These were their solutions.

When Carly said she’d thought about working at Disney World for the summer to reclaim that feeling of being a child, of every new day being full of possibilities, Gage coughed and raised his hand.

“Everyone who works at Disney World is on the run from something,” Gage said. “The law, addiction, spouses, parents, people to whom they’ve sold cars. They start over in communal dorms, washing lavatories and taxiing rich tourists around the grounds. In the end, the only way they get past it is drug use. I’ve been there.”

Gage had shaved my head and I wore Goodwill clothes not that different than what I normally wore. The combat boots made my ankles sore. I kept applying chapstick to fit in. I texted Brock that we’d found another one. I actually agreed with what she was saying, but there were two choices: 1) suicide or 2) get money and get high. I was good with number two.

By now I’d scavenged enough meetings to decipher some truths: 1) the people with the most advice were the most fucked up; 2) the people who talked the most, always telling their stories, their recovery monologues, were closest to suicide or relapse; 3) coffee was a lousy substitute, with some of them consuming fifteen cups of Folgers a night; 4) they all bit their nails—Carly’s actually bleeding; 5) everyone crossed arms across their chest; 6) a bunch of them lamented, and some cried—“I go for walks to town and watch people, and what they do is so easy. Normal is like breathing for them. Why can’t I do it? I could never do it. Do you think it’s my fault?”; 7) the happiest people were the most desperate. They claimed to know loving ghosts.

Like most zombies, Carly had ADHD and would move from one subject to another with no discernible logic. “Is it weird that I want to die when people compliment me?” she asked. “If someone eulogizes me, let it be someone who knows me, someone who won’t take the easy way out and just make an angel out of me and pretend I was the greatest thing that ever existed. My biography must consist of all the lies I’ve told, all the horrible things I’ve done, what a fucking shucker I was. I don’t know what that word means, but I heard it once in Indiana. Shucker. Those things are as much me as anything else.”

There was silence and then everyone applauded. When she smiled, it looked like a grimace.

*

I was taking notes when Brock arrived at the center. These notes were in the form of annotations in the margins around the worksheet Brock had given us for evaluating targets:

  Vivi: self-mutilator, Michigan, one month clean, GREAT INSURANCE!!

  Colin: polysubstance: opiates, indica, Valium, Ketamine, ecstasy, Immodium for withdrawal, daughter (8?) hates him. Insurance N/A.

Carly: singer in punk band. PA? Chuck Taylors with safety pins instead of laces, NIHIL spelled on the knuckles of her left hand, overdose video on YouTube, 423 views, 00:06:11.

  Megan: Mother of two, Chron’s disease, looking for lost daughter. No insurance coverage so No Go.

Brock stood by the Information and Safety tables. Narcan overdose kits, vitamin supplements, CBD-infused green tea, Kratom infusions, QR code-enabled “Are You an Addict?” assessments, magnetized recovery calendars, and Fentanyl testing strips arrayed in stacked towers like Jenga pieces. At the farthest table by the restrooms and water fountains, I watched Brock flick “What You Need to Know About The Florida Shuffle” brochures into a blue recycling bin. Nobody looked at him, his sunglasses oscillating around the room, beaming.

Before the GED instructor made Brock and I study buddies, I’d never heard of Zombie Brokering, Goblin Marketing, Junkie Flunkies, Naltrex Heads, or Narcan Frequent Flyers. Obviously, I’d known there was something wrong with Delray. This was the goldmine of the opioid crisis, Brock explained one night, driving me home from GED class since my license was suspended, pointing at hundreds of sober homes.

*

Gage let me have Carly. He said she’s more my type He’d taught me that it was more efficient to focus on one prospect instead of wandering all over Delray chasing the zombies back to rehabs or their squats on the Gulfstream boats or the tent community under 95. Gage was right, Carly was the kind of girl I always dated—the kind who always died or ran away. So many girls had died on my watch I’d given up, choosing isolation over grief. But they returned in my dreams as ghosts—indifferent, not like the ones in the movies. They didn’t care. They asked me to stop bothering them.

Carly wore tight black jeans and a heavy Goodwill sweater, rare in Florida. The sleeves hid her hands, signs of self-mutilation. Her bangs were self-cut and hung like a waterfall over the left side of her face. The Hello Kitty bag next to her chair had a chain attached and little slogans written in black Sharpie: “Everyone’s A Hypocrite”; “LOVE is just a 4-Letter word.” Her posture, coiled up in the chair with her arms around her knees, making herself as small as possible, suggested a history of sexual abuse and intimacy issues. Brock taught me that.

The back entrance to the Rec Center was separated by a parking lot from a lake polluted from refuse thrown off I-95 and the PHOA runoff. There were dead fish and duck corpses floating between leaves from withered trees. I found Carly looking over the pond of death with her arms crossed, elbows in her hands, distant from the rest of the group wishing each other the best of luck and trading numbers for prayer chains and emergency contacts.

“Was your rabbit really at your intervention?” I asked, referencing one of her mumbled, sarcastic comments at the meeting.

According to Brock, we should blame the PHOA thing for the lack of reproduction in West Palm County. Carly turned to me. “Why are all the fish dead?” She looked even smaller and more vulnerable standing than fetal in her chair.

“You’re not from around here?” I guessed. “It just happens. Algae blooms.”

“Here being where fish die?”

“There’s a lot of toxins. Again, it just happens down here.”

“Red Tide?”

“You could call it that and not be that wrong.”

“So you live here and don’t care?”

Her cigarette had no filter. I could tell she was looking for someplace to throw the butt.

“You can just toss it. The pond’s already dead. Everything’s dead.”

“It’s all good.” She extinguished the butt with her tongue and tucked it back into the pack. She walked away from the pond. I followed her back up to the parking lot. She stopped and leaned against a truck, six feet away from me. “Sarah told me to watch for you.”

“Me? You don’t know me.”

“People, like you. Body brokers, recruiters. How much can you make off me?”

There were sliding scales, I could have told her. As much as $10,000 a month and as little as $500 a month. That was just my takeaway. Once, when Brock was giving me a ride home, he’d taken a call, talking mostly in code, but before hanging up he’d said, “nothing less than half a mil.” Gage had bought two condos and three cars in the last year. The money was massive, untaxed, unsupervised, flowing from Delray to Boca Raton and even as far away as Ocala and the University of South Florida body farm in Pasco County, where the fentanyl and xylazine corpses were sold for the grad students to experiment on.

“You should bring your rabbit down from Philly. It’ll help. My cat helped me get better. Do you have a pic?”

“Places don’t allow it. They want to strip us of everything, of all meaning and context, and once we’re isolated like that, they can help. Or what they call help.”

There’s a picture of us in the parking lot outside the Rec Center that I still have in my prison cell. Brock took it. Carly leaning against the truck and me looking too tall, too skinny, too jittery, barefooted in cargo shorts. Sarah won’t look at the picture anymore. She says everything that happened after was obvious. I was a predator. But at that time I really felt that I wasn’t a bad person, I was just trying to get money. That’s what we’re all doing, right? Money is value. Value is pleasure. We all want pleasure. Does it matter how you get it? Love, crime, drugs, fraud, kids, pets, travel, charity, food, clean sheets.

“I’m just saying, this place helped me, it’s right over there. Sea of Recovery. They allow pets. My cat’s better now too. Do what you want. Doesn’t matter to me.”

“I’m supposed to meet my friend Sarah at another place. We met at a rehab in Boca.”

“This place is better, believe me. She’ll end up there anyway. How many places could there be?”

She’d never guess the correct answer was over a hundred.

“Let me guess. You can pull strings to get me in there? You can get me a discount? And you’re doing this all as Mr. Charity?”

“Exactly,” I said. “You came to a support meeting and I’m giving you support. What could be in it for me?”

“What’s the worst that could happen?” she asked. She was trying to joke but she looked down and grimaced. I remembered that question for a long time.

“My friend runs it. I could get him to sneak in your rabbit for you. I’m a nice guy.”

“Famous last words,” she said, but she came towards me and took a business card.

Thirty minutes later, she trudged away with my directions to Sea of Recovery. She’d been out of rehab one week and had unlimited insurance through her parents. She’d shown me her overdose video as a goof, but I think she was just lonely and needed to talk. I’ve seen enough of them to know they are the most intimate records, more intimate than a sex video for sure. The overdose video meant the sober home manager could blackmail her if she tried to leave, threatening to send it to her family, colleagues, bosses, nieces, nephews, and anyone else in her harried radius. She was a AAA candidate for which I would receive $500 upon admission and $1,000 for each completed month of her stay, all via crypto wallet.

When she left, Brock ambled up next to me, holding his flip-flops because the water by the pond’s edge was dewy with chemical runoff, condoms, syringes, and candy bags. He flexed his tanned biceps as he ran them through his sparkly gelled buzzcut.

“Another one,” I said, nodding towards Carly.

“You’ll be Zombie Broker of the week third time in a row,” Brock said. “Deserves a bonus.”

“How much will she be worth?”

He shrugged, grabbing his money clip and removing hundreds. “Five thousand a month. Give or take.”

“And it’s all the urine tests?”

“Liquid gold, my friend. Physical therapy, occupational therapy, anything can be billed.”

“So why do I only get $1,000?”

He stopped counting. I watched Carly recede up the street, just another girl walking down the dangerous streets of Delray. When she reached Sea of Recovery, she looked back at me like, “Is this the one?”

I nodded and pointed like, “Go, Go!”

She started up the path, then stopped and waved. It was a halting wave, she was trying to come across as careless, but she was scared. I wondered if she was even twenty-one.

“Told you before, we assume all the risk,” Brock said. “You talked to a cute girl, even got a cigarette and her number, and for that you get $1,500 right now.”

“I’m risking stuff too.”

“We’re ahead of the law. What you just did, Jimi, is legal and American.”

“And what you do?”

He winked at me. “That’s the real America.”

~

James McAdams teaches full-time in Purdue Global’s English and Rhetoric Department and adjuncts at the University of South Florida and Ringling College of Art + Design. James McAdams’ debut short story collection, Ambushing the Void, was published by Frayed Edge Press (May 2020). Formerly Flash Fiction Editor at Barren Magazine, he received his Ph.D. in English Literature from Lehigh University. His work can be viewed at www.jamesmcadams.org. Want to read more? A full excerpt of The Florida Shuffle is published in EXCERPT Magazine - No 2