WE'RE ALL LIVING IN A CARL HIAASEN NOVEL

In the mangroves with Florida's poet of excess and grift

- Amy Weiss-Meyer

Nothing about Carl Hiaasen's outward appearance suggests eccentricity. I've seen him described as having the air of "an amiable dentist" or "a pleasant jeweler" or "a patrician country lawyer." He is soft-spoken, courteous, and plainly dressed. The mischief is mostly detectable in his eyes, which he'll widen to express disbelief or judgment, or cast sideways to invite a companion to join him on his wavelength, raising his brows for effect.

Every so often, he'll say something that serves as a reminder of why his name has become synonymous with Florida Weird.

We were eating turkey sandwiches at his kitchen table one afternoon earlier this year when Hiaasen told me about Rocky I and Rocky II, the pet raccoons he kept in the 1970s. Raccoons, he told me, resist discipline. "You can't address them as you would a dog," he said, "because they take it personally." Things reached a breaking point with Rocky I when the raccoon climbed a bookshelf and tried to pry from the wall the first bonefish Hiaasen had ever caught, which his father had gotten mounted for him. "I had been at war with the raccoon for a while," Hiaasen said, as though everyone knows what that's like.

"He was fucking with me." Eventually, after chasing the animal through his tiny apartment, Hiaasen found Rocky "pissing all over the keys of my typewriter and looking me right in the eye." To say that something is straight out of a Carl Hiaasen novel is by now only a slightly less clichéd way of saying that truth, especially in Florida, is stranger than fiction. At 72, Hiaasen has dozens of books to his name, virtually all set in the state.