15 Views of Orlando Offers Un-Disneyfied Orlando in Mouse-Sized Bites
by Darrell Nicholson
The aim of the short story collection 15 Views of Orlando (Burrow Press, 176 pp., $15, January 2012) appears deceptively simple: fifteen talented fiction writers set out to paint a literary portrait of the “other” Orlando, the raw un-Disneyfied reality that exists beyond the wall that Walt built. But exploring any swath of urban sprawl through fiction, particularly one as schizophrenic as Orlando-outside-the-turnstiles, requires some sleight of hand. In a realm where the special taxing district called the Reedy Creek Improvement District can (poof!) become the Magic Kingdom, nothing is quite what it seems.
Metropolitan Orlando, like any urban environment, is not so much a place to be painted as it is a labyrinth to be explored, a convoluted space crisscrossed with tunnels that never quite connect. Where, one might ask, does the Orlando of the belly-dancing grandmother, the newly redundant journalist, and the roadside panhandler intersect? In the fast-pass lane at Space Mountain? Nathan Holic, the editor of 15 Views, clearly hopes not. Lamenting the stereotypical view of Orlando that the rest of the world sees in film, television, and books, he asks in his introduction, “Is there anything modern, anything that tackles the city in its contemporary form, the Disney World and Universal Studios theme parks at conflict with Downtown Orlando at conflict with Orange County at conflict with International Drive?”
Holic, whose own fiction is often rooted in suburban Orlando, takes an interesting, if not novel, approach to upending the city’s theme-park image. He assigns the task to 15 different writers, leaving them to connect the myriad tunnels of the city—or not. The book first came to life as a 15-week-long linked-story project on the Internet that allowed each writer one week to come up with a piece of flash fiction, 1,000 words, no more. Each story would be linked to the one before with an image; the link could be as mundane as a 32-ounce Pabst Blue Ribbon beer or as memorable as a blue-haired sylph with a nipple ring. And each story explores a new nook of Orlando's Nether-Nether Land. The web project was inspired by a popular writing exercise directed by the late Jeanne Leiby, an Orlando literary icon and former editor of The Southern Review who taught at University of Central Florida. Supplemented with interviews and essays by the contributing authors, the endeavor provides an excellent template for small presses and writing programs around the country.
In other hands, a tour of the space National Geographic called the “new American metropolis” might easily turn into a commentary on the suburban plagues of shopping malls, fast-food chains, and manicured golf communities. This varied cast of Orlando-linked writers, however, has other destinations in mind: a strip club shaped in the form of two immense breasts, a belly dancing show in a school auditorium, the food line in a hospital cafeteria, and the murky waters of a mall fountain drainage culvert are among the main attractions. It is Orlando Tourist Bureau’s worst nightmare—not a Mickey or monorail in sight.
The stories open with Gene Albamonte’s aptly named “Tunneling,” a first-person story of a reporter-turned dishwasher testing quantum theory by bouncing a tennis ball against the wall outside the Town House Restaurant, where he works with a waitress named Eve. The exercise triggers reflections on his close relationship with Brian, a childhood friend who may not be “coming back in one piece” from Afghanistan. In his memory, old homes are bulldozed to make way for McMansions, grasslands are replaced by malls, and the tennis ball bounces back and again and again. Still he clings to “the happy thought that pieces of the ball—impossibly small—were passing through the wall” and that, one day, the entire ball could pass through.
In the second story, “You Are Here,” Chris Wiewiora follows Brad, the philosopher-dishwasher, and Eve to another familiar Orlando waypoint, Will’s Pub. The two are among several characters who resurface in the collection, seeming to catch their breath as they drift between meta-worlds, seeking but not finding a path to solid ground. This is the world of the mid-life crisis and the coming-of-age-moment run amok, a world where one wonders, as does the narrator in Lindsay Hunter’s “Heart,” if “anyone else feels like the wrapper to the taffy.”
The Brad/Eve thread is momentarily dropped in the third contribution, J. Bradley’s short account of a stone-faced rampage against pop-culture icons at the Fashion Square Mall. The story’s punch line, “Remember the Infinite Mushroom!” will be lost on all but the longtime Orlando residents who remember the landmark head-shop that closed down in the early 1990s, but it has a darkly comic ring nonetheless.
Dan Sinclair, Hunter Choate, Tom Debeauchamp, Jay Haffner, and Ashley Inguanta pump up the middle of the collection with loosely linked stories that illuminate Orlando’s shadow-world and amplify the fantasy-versus-reality theme. Sinclair gives us child-like Indigo, the girl with blue hair and a pierced nipple who wades through a swamp and dances naked through an empty suburban condo development. He also delivers the perfect metaphoric refrain, the sound of sandals traversing a parking lot blacktop, “flip flop,” mirroring the thud of Albamonte’s ricocheting ball. Choate brings us Perkin, the intersection panhandler who spends his earnings on Jolly Ranchers for his daughter and a pack of cigarettes for his wife, only to find she has abruptly abandoned him. Debeauchamp, in a voice that deftly pulls back as his tale grows more haunting, sends Perkin—weighed down with scuba gear—into a claustrophobic nightmare, plunging into a clogged culvert that drains a shopping mall fountain lake where he makes the darkest discovery.
In “Lifting Veils,” Haffner uses the “tainted and ashen” parking lot of a long-gone Albertson’s supermarket to mirror the life of his protagonist Jake, who is revisiting romanticized boyhood haunts—now mostly shattered—with his 12-year-old son, Jack. Jake’s wife, we learn, has had an affair with a 17-year-old son of a friend, finally lifting the veil on the illusion of their perfect marriage. Inguanta’s quirky “Deconstruction” takes us to Little Vietnam and elevates the collection to a poetic realm with Indigo’s dissolution and re-emergence into a future that is “moon-heavy and boombox bright.” Chris Heavener’s “Cons,” offers an irony-rich story of a couple weighing the pros and cons of Orlando, and suddenly being confronted by the most heinous of all cons.
The final third of the collection strikes a balance between unearthing the other Orlando and sketching a resolution. Although a few stories’ narrative veins play out (not unexpected, given the collection’s intentions) their settings serve to fill in blank spaces on our map of Orlando. Christopher Silva’s “The Little Little Death” takes us into the place once known as the Booby Trap, Orlando’s iconic strip-club featuring two giant breast-shaped domes. Lindsay Hunter’s narrator in “Heart” seethes beneath “mounds and folds of flesh” as cafeteria workers at Florida Hospital dish up macaroni and Velveeta. John King’s “Perfection” tempts with the story of a sexually-charged encounter between a 17-year-old photo girl and a maintenance man at Crocodile World, whose throbbing headache feels like “a tennis ball perpetually bouncing off his frontal lobe.” And Mark Pursell’s “Furioso”drops us into the Parliament House, billed as “the world’s largest gay entertainment complex,” which Pursell describes as “a dying star flinging its last desperate scraps of radiation into the night.”
Philip F. Deaver and Vanessa Blakeslee take on the challenge of pulling the collection together with some form of resolution. Deaver’s “Somebody to Love” rejoins Haffner’s philandering Molly, and brings her together with Brad and Eve at Orlando’s original windowless, smoky bar, Tom & Jerry’s Lounge. Indigo makes a cameo. We learn that the narrator, Ned, is Molly’s father. He speaks by cell-phone over the din of Grace Slick to his divorced wife Meg, who frets that “Everything has gone to trash.” She’s right, of course. By this point each author has peeled back another layer of the grim truth: the returning soldier Brian is dead, apparently by suicide. Everything has gone to trash, in a uniquely Orlando way—shrouded in a luminous fog of hope.
Blakeslee reunites the cast of main characters at Lyman High School Auditorium, where Meg, the belly-dancing grandma with whom they are all loosely connected, is performing. In the final scene, Meg, her ex-husband and the others are gathered for dinner near the cascading fountain at the Eden Bar, a fountain reminiscent of the one where Perkins made his ghastly discovery. Finding a seat near the water, Ned declares, without a trace of irony, “You can’t get more perfect than this.” One can almost hear the thud of felt against concrete as Albamonte’s hopeful tennis ball rebounds one last time, and lands right in the reader’s lap.
While people who have lived in Orlando will appreciate 15 Views more than those who have not, lovers of short fiction will have no trouble finding something to feast on. The stories could just as easily have been drawn from any new metropolis where a darker underbelly hides beneath the glow of neon franchise signs. And if good reads aren’t enough reason to buy the book, here’s the kicker: all profits from the sale of 15 Views of Orlando will be donated to Page 15, a local literacy nonprofit that provides free tutoring and creative writing programs to Orlando children. Truly a community effort, 15 Views shows just how powerful a small press can be in elevating art, building a sense of community, and serving the public good.
Metropolitan Orlando, like any urban environment, is not so much a place to be painted as it is a labyrinth to be explored, a convoluted space crisscrossed with tunnels that never quite connect. Where, one might ask, does the Orlando of the belly-dancing grandmother, the newly redundant journalist, and the roadside panhandler intersect? In the fast-pass lane at Space Mountain? Nathan Holic, the editor of 15 Views, clearly hopes not. Lamenting the stereotypical view of Orlando that the rest of the world sees in film, television, and books, he asks in his introduction, “Is there anything modern, anything that tackles the city in its contemporary form, the Disney World and Universal Studios theme parks at conflict with Downtown Orlando at conflict with Orange County at conflict with International Drive?”
Holic, whose own fiction is often rooted in suburban Orlando, takes an interesting, if not novel, approach to upending the city’s theme-park image. He assigns the task to 15 different writers, leaving them to connect the myriad tunnels of the city—or not. The book first came to life as a 15-week-long linked-story project on the Internet that allowed each writer one week to come up with a piece of flash fiction, 1,000 words, no more. Each story would be linked to the one before with an image; the link could be as mundane as a 32-ounce Pabst Blue Ribbon beer or as memorable as a blue-haired sylph with a nipple ring. And each story explores a new nook of Orlando's Nether-Nether Land. The web project was inspired by a popular writing exercise directed by the late Jeanne Leiby, an Orlando literary icon and former editor of The Southern Review who taught at University of Central Florida. Supplemented with interviews and essays by the contributing authors, the endeavor provides an excellent template for small presses and writing programs around the country.
In other hands, a tour of the space National Geographic called the “new American metropolis” might easily turn into a commentary on the suburban plagues of shopping malls, fast-food chains, and manicured golf communities. This varied cast of Orlando-linked writers, however, has other destinations in mind: a strip club shaped in the form of two immense breasts, a belly dancing show in a school auditorium, the food line in a hospital cafeteria, and the murky waters of a mall fountain drainage culvert are among the main attractions. It is Orlando Tourist Bureau’s worst nightmare—not a Mickey or monorail in sight.
The stories open with Gene Albamonte’s aptly named “Tunneling,” a first-person story of a reporter-turned dishwasher testing quantum theory by bouncing a tennis ball against the wall outside the Town House Restaurant, where he works with a waitress named Eve. The exercise triggers reflections on his close relationship with Brian, a childhood friend who may not be “coming back in one piece” from Afghanistan. In his memory, old homes are bulldozed to make way for McMansions, grasslands are replaced by malls, and the tennis ball bounces back and again and again. Still he clings to “the happy thought that pieces of the ball—impossibly small—were passing through the wall” and that, one day, the entire ball could pass through.
In the second story, “You Are Here,” Chris Wiewiora follows Brad, the philosopher-dishwasher, and Eve to another familiar Orlando waypoint, Will’s Pub. The two are among several characters who resurface in the collection, seeming to catch their breath as they drift between meta-worlds, seeking but not finding a path to solid ground. This is the world of the mid-life crisis and the coming-of-age-moment run amok, a world where one wonders, as does the narrator in Lindsay Hunter’s “Heart,” if “anyone else feels like the wrapper to the taffy.”
The Brad/Eve thread is momentarily dropped in the third contribution, J. Bradley’s short account of a stone-faced rampage against pop-culture icons at the Fashion Square Mall. The story’s punch line, “Remember the Infinite Mushroom!” will be lost on all but the longtime Orlando residents who remember the landmark head-shop that closed down in the early 1990s, but it has a darkly comic ring nonetheless.
Dan Sinclair, Hunter Choate, Tom Debeauchamp, Jay Haffner, and Ashley Inguanta pump up the middle of the collection with loosely linked stories that illuminate Orlando’s shadow-world and amplify the fantasy-versus-reality theme. Sinclair gives us child-like Indigo, the girl with blue hair and a pierced nipple who wades through a swamp and dances naked through an empty suburban condo development. He also delivers the perfect metaphoric refrain, the sound of sandals traversing a parking lot blacktop, “flip flop,” mirroring the thud of Albamonte’s ricocheting ball. Choate brings us Perkin, the intersection panhandler who spends his earnings on Jolly Ranchers for his daughter and a pack of cigarettes for his wife, only to find she has abruptly abandoned him. Debeauchamp, in a voice that deftly pulls back as his tale grows more haunting, sends Perkin—weighed down with scuba gear—into a claustrophobic nightmare, plunging into a clogged culvert that drains a shopping mall fountain lake where he makes the darkest discovery.
In “Lifting Veils,” Haffner uses the “tainted and ashen” parking lot of a long-gone Albertson’s supermarket to mirror the life of his protagonist Jake, who is revisiting romanticized boyhood haunts—now mostly shattered—with his 12-year-old son, Jack. Jake’s wife, we learn, has had an affair with a 17-year-old son of a friend, finally lifting the veil on the illusion of their perfect marriage. Inguanta’s quirky “Deconstruction” takes us to Little Vietnam and elevates the collection to a poetic realm with Indigo’s dissolution and re-emergence into a future that is “moon-heavy and boombox bright.” Chris Heavener’s “Cons,” offers an irony-rich story of a couple weighing the pros and cons of Orlando, and suddenly being confronted by the most heinous of all cons.
The final third of the collection strikes a balance between unearthing the other Orlando and sketching a resolution. Although a few stories’ narrative veins play out (not unexpected, given the collection’s intentions) their settings serve to fill in blank spaces on our map of Orlando. Christopher Silva’s “The Little Little Death” takes us into the place once known as the Booby Trap, Orlando’s iconic strip-club featuring two giant breast-shaped domes. Lindsay Hunter’s narrator in “Heart” seethes beneath “mounds and folds of flesh” as cafeteria workers at Florida Hospital dish up macaroni and Velveeta. John King’s “Perfection” tempts with the story of a sexually-charged encounter between a 17-year-old photo girl and a maintenance man at Crocodile World, whose throbbing headache feels like “a tennis ball perpetually bouncing off his frontal lobe.” And Mark Pursell’s “Furioso”drops us into the Parliament House, billed as “the world’s largest gay entertainment complex,” which Pursell describes as “a dying star flinging its last desperate scraps of radiation into the night.”
Philip F. Deaver and Vanessa Blakeslee take on the challenge of pulling the collection together with some form of resolution. Deaver’s “Somebody to Love” rejoins Haffner’s philandering Molly, and brings her together with Brad and Eve at Orlando’s original windowless, smoky bar, Tom & Jerry’s Lounge. Indigo makes a cameo. We learn that the narrator, Ned, is Molly’s father. He speaks by cell-phone over the din of Grace Slick to his divorced wife Meg, who frets that “Everything has gone to trash.” She’s right, of course. By this point each author has peeled back another layer of the grim truth: the returning soldier Brian is dead, apparently by suicide. Everything has gone to trash, in a uniquely Orlando way—shrouded in a luminous fog of hope.
Blakeslee reunites the cast of main characters at Lyman High School Auditorium, where Meg, the belly-dancing grandma with whom they are all loosely connected, is performing. In the final scene, Meg, her ex-husband and the others are gathered for dinner near the cascading fountain at the Eden Bar, a fountain reminiscent of the one where Perkins made his ghastly discovery. Finding a seat near the water, Ned declares, without a trace of irony, “You can’t get more perfect than this.” One can almost hear the thud of felt against concrete as Albamonte’s hopeful tennis ball rebounds one last time, and lands right in the reader’s lap.
While people who have lived in Orlando will appreciate 15 Views more than those who have not, lovers of short fiction will have no trouble finding something to feast on. The stories could just as easily have been drawn from any new metropolis where a darker underbelly hides beneath the glow of neon franchise signs. And if good reads aren’t enough reason to buy the book, here’s the kicker: all profits from the sale of 15 Views of Orlando will be donated to Page 15, a local literacy nonprofit that provides free tutoring and creative writing programs to Orlando children. Truly a community effort, 15 Views shows just how powerful a small press can be in elevating art, building a sense of community, and serving the public good.
