Dave Barry

In case you’re wondering how the local political establishment feels about a strip club operating in the middle of the main tourist area, here’s a fact you may find helpful: The owner of the Red Garter is Mick Rossi, who is a Key West city commissioner.

Arthur, compelled by masculine instinct, leaned over and frowned at the contents of the case, exactly the way countless males have frowned at household appliances, plumbing, car engines, and all manner of other mechanical objects that they did not begin to understand. (Chapter 5)

Inside the family room, Arthur Herk was methodically, relentlessly changing channels. He was doing this partly because the instinct to change channels is embedded deep in the male genetic code, and partly because he knew his wife and stepdaughter hated it. (Chapter 2)

• Florida’s government is divided into three branches: the executive, the judicial and the criminal.

He is a tall, trim, sinewy man with a full beard, a deep voice and a handshake that would crush a coconut. He could be a testosterone donor.

There comes a time in a man’s life when a man must man up and be a man by summoning up his manhood and doing something manly.

Miami turned out to be a great market: It seemed as if everybody here wanted things that went bang. You had your professional drug-cartel muscle people, who needed guns that shot thousands of rounds per minute to compensate for the fact that their aim was terrible. You had your basic local criminals, who wanted guns that would scare the hell out of civilians; and your civilians, trying to keep up with your local criminals. You had your hunters, who, to judge from the rifles they bought, were after deer that traveled inside armored personnel carriers. You had your "collectors" and your "enthusiasts," who lived in three-thousand-dollar trailers furnished with seven-thousand-dollar grenade launchers. You had an endless stream of shady characters representing a bewildering variety of revolutionary, counterrevolutionary, counter-counterrevolutionary and counter-counter-counterrevolutionary movements all over the Caribbean and Central and South America, who almost always wanted guns on credit. (Chapter 5)

The remote control had 48 buttons. No resident of the Old Farts Senile Dying Center knew how to operate it. They were the Greatest Generation, men and women who had survived the Depression, defeated the Nazis, built America into the greatest nation the world had ever seen. But this damned gizmo had beaten them. (Chapter 4)

Once, when the bar was slow, he told her about things he'd found in his clients' pools. Alligators, for example; he'd encountered at least a dozen. Also the occasional snake. Hundreds of frogs. These were to be expected in South Florida, which as far as the native wildlife was concerned was still a swamp, no matter how many houses got built on it. (Chapter 7)

Key West, the end of the road, the most flamboyant, decadent, debauched and pungent place in the Florida.

Key West is Florida’s Florida—the place way down at the bottom where the weirdest of the weird end up; the place where the abnormal is normal.

Suddenly, I noticed something: my wallet and keys are exactly where I left them. So either the spirits decided not to move them or—we cannot rule this out – they moved them and then moved them back.

This genre of music is called Electronic Dance Music, or sometimes Club Music, or sometimes just Loud Unimaginative Absurdly Repetitious Boring Music, because—follow me closely here—it sucks. That is only my opinion, of course; taste in music is subjective. It is possible that you like Electronic Dance Music, in which case you are wrong because it sucks.