For years, Carl Hiaasen has tried to dream up the most ludicrous, extreme examples of Florida craziness for his satirical novels. But in case after case, something even more extreme has happened in real life.
Tuesday, at a sold-out luncheon sponsored by the Library Foundation for Sarasota County, Hiaasen reeled off examples of truth being "Stranger Than Fiction," his speech topic for the day.
There was the pitbull in "Double Whammy" that latched onto the arm of a burglar and then wouldn't let go even in death; after the novel was published, someone sidled up to Hiaasen at a signing and said, "OK, how'd you hear about the pitbull?" and told him about the dog that grabbed the neck of his golden retriever and wouldn't let go with a bullet in its head. Or the woman who came up to Hiaasen after a reading and said she'd named her cancerous tumor after the character in the book, and showed him the scar where she'd successfully had it removed.
"I'm the only writer in America who's had a malignancy named after a character," he said.
There was the world's worst plastic surgeon in "Skin Tight" who months later popped up as "Dr. Lips" on billboards around Florida and then became famous when "as they say on Fox News, something when terribly wrong" in a head-to-toe plastic surgery on a South American actor who wanted a redo of everything from his nose to his genitals, with lethal effect.
Or the recent case of the wife of a Miami Dolphins quarterback who left an assault rifle in the back seat of a rental car.
Or a man in a small Florida town arrested for "dating a goat." It took five years for the Florida Legislature to outlaw such behavior, said Hiaasen, who continues to write a weekly column for the Miami Herald in addition to his best-selling novels and books for young readers.
"You cannot improve upon the truth," he said. "Everything comes true eventually. You pick up the paper the next day and it's worse" than you could even imagine.
"We live in a truly extraordinary place," he said, describing Florida as a "vortex of weirdness" that has a particular draw for the rich and famous. "Doom comes to everyone who ventures into South Florida if you're famous."