Squeeze Me (Skink #8)

by Carl Hiaasen

Squeeze Me is the first novel to which I’ve ever added an epilogue for the paperback editions. It seemed clear to me that the bizarre and menacing real-life events following the recent national election required some satirical attention – an updated coda for the characters in the book, as well as for the readers. I promise it will be the last time I pay a visit to Casa Bellicosa.

He was lanky, silver-haired, seasonally Catholic and steeply neo-conservative. It was Kiki Pew’s commiserative coddling that got him through the Obama years, though at times she feared that her excitable spouse might physically succumb from the day-to-day stress of having a black man in the Oval Office.

We all know people who stayed apoplectic for the entire Obama administration. They’d never admit it was because they couldn’t stand the idea of having a Black president, but the truth was obvious in conversations. I’m sure some of them didn’t make it through Obama’s second term.

Kiki Pew decided to join the POTUS Pussies, a group of Palm Beach women who proclaimed brassy loyalty to the new, crude-spoken commander-in-chief.

Our most recent former president had flamboyant fan clubs like the Potussies in Palm Beach. It seemed natural that Kiki Pew would be part of such a late-stage political sorority.

Angie had been summoned to Casa Bellicosa to unfasten a screech owl from the presidential pompadour, which the low-swooping raptor had mistaken for a road-kill fox.

It’s challenging to come up with any description of Trumpian hair that hasn’t already been used by late-night comics, but I tried to imagine what that thing on his head would look like from a hungry owl’s point of view.

She awoke with renewed certainty that Carl Jung was full of shit. Dreams meant nothing—nonsense farted by a restless subconscious.

Years ago I had a very nice therapist who was into Jung. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a good patient because I hardly ever remembered my dreams. The ones I did remember were so boring that I felt obliged to embellish them in fear of disappointing her.

Throughout the long deep-state witch hunt—the doctored Minsk defecation video, the phony tax-evasion probe, the counterfeit porn-star diaries, the bogus Moscow skyscraper investigation, the hoax penile-enhancement scandal, the fake witness-tampering charges, and both fraudulent impeachment trials—the Potussies had remained steadfast, vociferous, adoring defenders.

When I wrote this passage, Trump had only been impeached once. I wanted Mastodon, the presidential character in the novel, to have a few more seedy scandals under his belt. In the end, of course, it proved impossible to out-Trump Donald Trump, even in fiction.

In a place like South Florida, such heart-bound faith in the justice system could best be described as quaint.

All you have to do is look at what happened to Jeffrey Epstein’s court case in Palm Beach to know that money can buy you more than sharp defense lawyers.

The sitting President of the United States was a soulless imbecile who hated the outdoors but, in Angie’s view, at this point Teddy Roosevelt himself couldn’t turn the tide if he came back from the dead. All the treasured wilderness that had been sacrificed at the altar of growth was gone for all time. More disappeared every day; nothing ever changed except the speed of destruction, and only because there were fewer pristine pieces to sell off, carve up and pave.

This is Angie’s pained riff on what’s happened to Florida, but of course the same forces of commercial exploitation threaten important wilderness habitats all over the country. Some people think it’s a splendid idea to drill for oil in a national wildlife refuge, but I’m not one of them.

The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.

That’s a real quote from Kafka. I thought it fit nicely here, in the context of encroaching pythons.

‘The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.’

Skink’s the only character in the novel that could pull this gem from Ralph Waldo Emerson out of thin air.

Acknowledgment

The paperback edition of Squeeze Me, complete with the new epilogue, hits shelves May 11. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56912930-squeeze-me