Florida is Hiaasen's weird muse

The state is stranger than fiction, the writer tells a USF audience. He doesn't make this stuff up.

By BABITA PERSAUD, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 8, 2002

TAMPA -- Fans of Carl Hiaasen know the rubber alligator and the hit man whose skin problems could fill a medical textbook. They know the obsessed bass fisherman and the ex-governor who eats road kill.

They know all the crazy characters who pop from his pages.

And they love him.

"He writes about the real Florida," said Lenora Gauthier, who was among the 250 people attending Hiaasen's lecture Thursday night at the University of South Florida.

"He's the king of the wacko Florida genre, him and Jimmy Buffett and Dave Barry," said Matt Penn, a school librarian and USF alumnus.

But where does it all come from?

"The humor comes from a p----- off place," said Hiaasen, who spoke as part of the University Lecture Series.

And it comes from real life, culled from newspapers like the Miami Herald, where Hiaasen still writes two columns a week.

People say to him: "That's the sickest thing I've ever heard."

Hiaasen responds: "I didn't make this up."

Case in point: Native Tongue, his 1991 novel in which Pedro, the sleazy tourist guide, dies after an extremely close encounter with a dolphin.

Hiaasen had read in the newspaper about dolphin encounters and the amorous behavior some dolphins had exhibited toward tourists who paid $250 to swim with them.

So in his book, he sets the scene: Under the shimmer of a Key Largo moon, Pedro, who works at a cut-rate theme park, gets knocked into a pool and is "romanced to death."

"That does not happen in Iowa," Hiaasen said. "That's what is so great about Florida. You don't have to look far for material."

Hiaasen can make fun of Florida because he is a native. He was born in South Florida and lives in Tavernier in the Florida Keys. He graduated from the University of Florida in 1974 and worked at a small daily writing features.

Among his first: garbage man for a day.

In 1976, his stint at the Miami Herald began. He wrote features and investigative pieces, looking into dangerous doctors, corruption, and drug smuggling.

That got him thinking. He soon began spinning fiction from fact. It turned into a highly successful career.

His first book was Tourist Season, published in 1986. The list quickly grew: Skin Tight, Stormy Weather, Lucky You, Sick Puppy.

Strip Tease was made into a movie starring Demi Moore and Burt Reynolds.

His ninth and latest novel is Basket Case.

"It's not autobiographical," Hiaasen said.

He also has another job, he told the audience: "To scare as many tourists away from Florida as possible."

The audience applauded.

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