All Florida books are crazy; each Florida book is crazy in its own way.
Any time a book has “Florida” in its title (or even hints at the inclusion of the Sunshine State on its flap copy), I’m immediately hooked, and not just because I grew up in Sarasota. There’s just something about Florida, a certain je ne sais quoi that lends itself to engrossing crime fiction.
No doubt you’ve heard the phrase “a sunny place for shady people” used to describe Florida.
In fact, the real quote reads, “[t]he Riviera isn’t only a sunny place for shady people.” [Emphasis mine.] The saying belongs to W. Somerset Maugham, who was writing about the French Riviera, that other sunsoaked den of hedonism, in his 1941 nonfiction collection Strictly Personal.
And I think the same can be said of Florida Palms. Time and time again, whether by tales of face-eating zombies under the influence of bath-salts or, well, just about anything involving human-alligator relations, Florida has a tendency to become flattened under the weight of its own myths. But Florida, as Joe Pan shows us, isn’t just a sunny place for shady people.
Florida Palms tells the story of Eddy, Cueball, and Jesse, recent high-school grads from the Space Coast who get sucked into a biker gang’s drug-running operation at the height of the Great Recession. The drug in question? “Shank,” a fictional mash-up between ecstasy and meth. (That the word “shank” can also be used to describe a makeshift knife is perhaps no coincidence.)
Without giving anything away, let’s just say that teenage boys + drugs + all-night drives up and down the Eastern seaboard + toxic masculinity on the part of the older generation = all-but-certain betrayal and/bloodshed.
Populated by a memorable cast of characters (including Del Rey, a philosophizing Berkeley dropout-turned-biker), Florida Palms is gritty and heartbreaking in equal measure and will appeal to Floridians and non-Floridians alike.
If Florida Palms doesn’t have all the makings of a prestige television series, I don’t know what does. And luckily, HBO is currently working on a small-screen adaptation! (I already have a dream cast in mind, including one man-of-a-certain-age who I think would make an excellent Del Rey, but for legal reasons, I’ll stay silent on that front.)
Florida Palms is the fiction debut of Joe Pan, author of five books of poetry. He’s also the founder of Brooklyn Arts Press (one of the smallest independent presses to ever receive a National Book Award in Poetry!) and publisher of Augury Books, which was a finalist for a 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry.
A Space Coast native, Pan now calls Los Angeles home. We chatted about Florida Palms over Zoom.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
*
Lizzy Steiner: I want to chat a bit about your background in poetry and how that informed Florida Palms. I noticed a lot of lyricism within the novel. Everything is so vivid and visceral, from the “loam-pungent woods” to “the pupil in an ocular swarm of insects.”
As someone with a background in writing and publishing poetry, what brought you to fiction, and what do you see as poetry’s influence on Florida Palms?
Joe Pan: I’ve been writing poetry and fiction my whole life. Historically, I would write poetry until I couldn’t do it anymore, and there was the tug of narrative [pulling me] back.
The truth is, I’ve always been drawn to language. Poetry, for me, is a real searching for language or whatever subject the language will bring to the forefront.
Versus fiction, you kind of start with a subject, and then you have to invest time listening to those characters who have their own language. So poetry is searching for a subject through language and fiction has always been searching for a story.
Poetry is searching for a subject through language and fiction has always been searching for a story.Some of my favorite writers stylistically write lyrical work, like Denis Johnson, Cormac McCarthy, and Toni Morrison. They have these really tight sentences that open up.
William Gass used to say, “Once language changes, consciousness changes.” I’ve always kept that as a guide. If I’m presenting an event or the inner life of a character and I want to get closer in my point of view, I tend to go toward more poetic language. So, it’s a way for me to develop character.
LS: Speaking of characters, Del Rey was my absolute favorite. He’s very much the wise-fool philosopher type, someone along the lines of The Fool in King Lear. At the same time, he’s a bit like Iago from Othello. I almost wanted a whole book that’s just him and his adventures.
JP: This is so funny. Somebody once asked me, “If this had a spin-off, who would be the character?”
LS: Del Rey!
JP: When Del Rey began speaking to me, one of the questions I had was, “How does a biker come to be such a philosopher?” And my answer is, “Well, there are a lot of poor philosophers.” Like, how many wealthy philosophers do you know?
LS: What was the genesis of your idea? How long had you been thinking about this story?
JP: The first chapter is largely based on a real event in my life when I was a teenager. I went to a biker party. Two of my friends’ parents were bikers.
Though I started off with this event, all the characters are fictionalized, and they all grow out of inspiration, which tends to be like either an image or a place or a person that I met. It just so happened that all these characters were at this one party I was at a long time ago. There was a philosophizing photographer for biker mags. There was a supposed hit man with fake teeth, hence Gumby. He had filed one of his eyeteeth into a fang.
My friend’s father was a biker who had been to San Quentin and got out and was trying to get away from the drug stuff and started his own carpentry business. And then there’s just your general display of kind of like freaks and leathernecks. It was a wild party.
I didn’t necessarily know I was ever going to write about them [the people at the party] because I was writing a lot of horror short fiction in those days. Big Stephen King fan. But really, when I go back to it, there were just so many wonderful characters and inspiration to draw from that I started just pulling from there.
There are events that happen in the book that have their origins in things that happened to me in real life, including the pistol-whipping. He [a biker] got into a fight with somebody who had said something about his girlfriend. He left and came back with a gun and started shooting at us, which was terrifying. We were all sitting at a bonfire.
So, there are some stories [in the book that] have origins in real events, but they’re all changed by the nature of the characters who are just completely different from the people I had known. I just like characters. They evolve themselves. They speak for themselves. They have dynamic interior lives that you try to bring out.
LS: What kinds of research did you do to write this book? You mentioned having friends whose parents were bikers. What was it like growing up around them? How much time did you spend with them?
JP: Five or six years. I’ve known various bikers throughout my life. But I’ve known a lot of poor people. This book is kind of less of a biker book and more about people dealing with difficult circumstances and poverty.
Florida Palms is basically a coming-of-age novel about three friends who get pulled into a drug-running operation during the Great Recession. I didn’t grow up during the Great Recession, but it’s very similar to my time when we were living in poverty. It’s all about brotherhood and desperation and trying to hold on to humanity when the world is asking you to give it up.
When you talk about The Space Coast, people always think about NASA and rockets. But it’s not just that exactly. I wanted to write about characters who grew up just a few miles away [from Kennedy Space Center] who are just barely scraping by. These [NASA] engineers were making a good amount of money. My father was a construction worker and a prison guard, but my grandparents all worked for NASA in some capacity.
I wanted to write about kids who are trying to survive in a system that gives them very few good options. So, in terms of research, I had lived through a lot of that. A lot of my family members are still living through that, and I just felt like it was something that hadn’t been written about.
In terms of other forms of research, I’ve been working on this [Florida Palms] for two decades, and when I first started, the drug [in the book] wasn’t shank, this made-up cocktail designer drug. It was meth.
[Back then], it was still somewhat in the youth of the internet, and you couldn’t get a lot of information about what these types of drug cartels looked like because they were different from the old cartels of Mario Puzo. Or they were creating super labs. They were getting ingredients from all different kinds of places.
And so I just had to do a deep dive, which you see, and I explicate a little bit with Seizer’s cartel.
LS: Yes, I loved that. Hearing how shank was made, what Seizer’s origin story was. I love explication. [Ed. note: Seizer is a rather important character in Florida Palms, but to avoid giving anything away, I won’t say anything else about him beyond that. Suffice it to say, his origin story is fascinating!]
JP: I’m glad you do. When I had readers read this, one of the things that I was asked was, “Is this too much explication?” I was like, “Well, was it for you?” And they’re like, “No, one of my favorite parts of the book is that it slowed down.” This is a slow-burn crime fiction story. It’s not the kind of fast-paced thriller where you’re just trying to find out whodunit.
I put a lot of stock in character creation, and I believe that the language and the character find their own plot. I’m much more of a pantser than a plotter. I like to dig into the interior lives and motivations of these characters and let them tell me where they’re going.
I wanted to write about characters who grew up just a few miles away [from Kennedy Space Center] who are just barely scraping by.And so I researched a lot of this. I would go down to Miami, stay down there for a week, talk to friends that live there, and figure out places to eat, things to do.
There was a kid that disappeared from one of my classes at Palm Bay High and showed back up in Miami as part of a gang in a kind of top-tier [position]. So, there are a lot of autobiographical elements in [Florida Palms]. But just in terms of research, there’s so many things. When you learn about an airboat, and I grew up around airboats, you’re like, “Oh, yeah, it’s an airboat, but how does it function?”
LS: And you explained exactly how airboats work! I loved that. So, in addition to your own personal experience, was it a lot of internet research? Were there any specific books you read?
JP: I took a ride on an airboat and talked to a guy about airboats. There’s a good amount of hands-on research because my family still lives down there for the most part.
You can go down there and drive ten minutes outside the city and be on the Saint Johns River, which runs all the way up to Jacksonville. You can get out into the weeds really quickly. There are a lot of people who make their living off giving airboat rides. So you find those connections, you talk to the people.
But the internet is a great resource too. Not to downplay that at all, but, my God, Google Maps helps me out tremendously.
LS: I use Google Maps all the time when I’m writing. It’s so helpful!
I want to go back to that biker party you went to as a teenager. How long after that party did you get the idea for Florida Palms? Did you start thinking you wanted to write about these things as you were experiencing them?
JP: During that party, the head biker who was throwing the party sat me down. We were eating this boar that was being cooked in a halved oil drum. He grabbed my knee and said, “One day, you’re gonna write about me.” And I thought, “Oh God, here we go again.”
Even then, people were asking me to write about them. When people hear you’re a writer, they have a story to tell. Everybody has a story. [At the time,] I thought, Maybe I’ll put you in a short story at some point.
I ended up going to the Iowa Writers Workshop for poetry. While I was there, I was writing a lot of poetry, but I also started writing a lot of fiction. I had placed some stories in magazines and contests.
When you get down to what it is you’re going to write, you’re waiting and listening for characters to start talking because they’re the genesis of everything. They’re going to create their own sense of urgency, their own tension, their own dynamism.
I realized the characters that were talking [were people] I knew to some degree, not only because of things that happened in my past, but [because] they were part of me. I realized that each of my characters is part of me, and had I been born in a different time, place, or whatever, I could have been them. I might have been them.
So my job felt like to understand them as much as possible, because, in part, they were so interesting, but also I recognized early on that in order to make characters empathetic to readers, they have to be vulnerable, and in order for them to be vulnerable, they have to be truthful with the reader to some degree.
I recognized that this particular story had so many different characters who readers may not want to know about immediately. Not everybody wants to read about a biker gang.
And honestly, in this political climate, some people want to hear nothing about them. Some people want to know why they [bikers] vote the way they do. You’re looking at them as a voter block, and you’re trying to think of, like, “What’s making people think or act this way?” and “What’s going on in flyover country or in Florida?”
And so my job isn’t to forgive their [the bikers’] idiocy or inadequacy or their wrongs. My job is to explore why it’s happening. What they’re trying to live through. How they’re trying to live through it.
None of these young kids in my stories set out to be drug runners. It’s just the option available to them in this time of few options. Eddy has to pay for his mother’s mortgage because she’s run off. This is where he lives. There’s a loyalty component where he loves his best friend Cueball, and Cueball’s family is getting sucked into it. So there’s that safety and loyalty, that instinct to take care of people in your circle.
LS: Yes, I feel like each character, even minor characters, had this care aspect to them. For example, Corey Buffalo has his son. And Duke has Lisbon.
JP: That was important to me, in order to have the characters be lifted off the page. And the truth is, this is what happens in life. People aren’t just doing things randomly. They have their reasons. A lot of times, when you get into their reasoning, their suffering and their struggle, you understand why.
If we were in their situations, there’s a really good chance that we’d react like them. When pushed up against the wall of survival, you’re going to do what you can to survive, right?
LS: Florida very much becomes its own character in the novel. I was particularly struck by the following passage, when Del Rey says of Florida:
You cross that river from Georgia, you’re freed of any sense of shared moral certitude. Forget your old life, this here’s a different kind of promised land, populated with the fodder of Late Capitalism—from child thieves to condo colonizers to serial killers….A whole town of carnies? We got that. Mermaids in a tank? Sure ’nuff. Visitors catch a whiff of orange blossom and something in them chimes atavistic.
How were you thinking about Florida as a character as you were writing Florida Palms? I’ve definitely read Florida writing that’s very trope-heavy and feels more like caricature, but that’s not how Florida came across in your novel.
JP: In the passage you mentioned, Del Rey sees Florida as a kind of fallen Eden. Earlier on, he talks about beasts being set loose in the garden. For him, Florida is a place full of carpetbaggers and serial killers and people just trying to get what they can.
It [Florida] can be seen as a caricature, but the truth is, there’s a reason for the hashtag #floridaman. It is a wild sort of place, a place where people go to hide and create new lives and take their money and run. It is a place where toothy creatures stalk each other into extinction.
This actually goes back to how I decided to write this book. Everybody is looking for Florida. Carl Hiaasen does this, and so does Dave Barry. I kind of learned it from them, but I also learned it from Korean horror movies.
You take the caricature and you feed that to the audience immediately. Then you bring in this pathos and drag all of those stereotypes down to reality. You present that reality, and in doing so, you can see where the caricature comes from, but you also see the human experience behind that.
What they [Korean horror movies] are doing is moving from caricature into the human. You get the levity at the beginning, and then slowly it becomes darker, and the humor becomes darker, and everything becomes darker. Because you’ve invested time in these characters, it’s more difficult to see them as just characters. You’ve grown that sense of empathy in the reader, and that’s the real hook for me.
I wanted people to see this not as a biker story but as a story of the human condition as played out during the Great Recession, when people were really struggling. This book is about lack of options, how we venture into the world with what we’re taught by those within close proximity. It’s about generational violence and what masculinity means.
LS: At one point, Del says of Florida kids, “They just grow up faster here.” This idea (that Florida kids grow up faster than those raised in other states) is one I’ve encountered before in films like The Florida Project and Wild Things and books like Eleanor Kriseman’s The Blurry Years and Dizz Tate’s Brutes.
Do you think kids raised in Florida grow up faster? If so, why?
JP: Del is speaking about Florida, yes, but also his particular locale, the Space Coast. Part of me also thinks Del is building out the mythology he wishes to inhabit, that lost mythos/code/ethos he was lamenting in the book’s beginning.
But I’m also deeply familiar with the reality of how tough-living makes kids grow up faster, because there’s more responsibility that suddenly invades and permeates and flattens their childhoods. Harsh truths aren’t helicoptered away by loving parents. The quicker a kid can face common realities, the better choices they might make, in theory.
I wanted people to see this not as a biker story but as a story of the human condition as played out during the Great Recession, when people were really struggling.Problem is, a child can get jaded as quickly as any adult, and so you see a lot of hope drained out early on—the dreamlife imaginary replaced by practicality.
It’s not just a Florida thing, though—that’s our own mythologizing. But, oddly, it may sort of be true because our culture associates Florida with a rough-and-tumble weirdness, and in doing so, makes allowances for Floridians we may not make for kids from elsewhere—say, Connecticut.
And that might empower Florida kids to weave their own sad set of circumstances into a larger, recognizable mythos. A totally spurious claim on my part, for sure, but I do recall, after leaving Florida at eighteen, how few people my age elsewhere had the kind of bizzarro stories I had, how tame their stories were by comparison.
***
