John’s Blog

A story, like a dream, begins with the senses, and our senses go to work in a place. Nothing
happens nowhere. You can’t move the earth (or a reader) if you have no place to set your lever.
The locale of the story always colors the events, and often, to a degree, shapes them. Every story,
then, is a regional story, even if that region is mid-town Manhattan. Every story is a story of local
color, meaning the customs, manner of speech, dress or other typical features of a place that
contribute to its character. Philosopher John Dewey wrote, “The local is the ultimate universal,
and as near an absolute as exists.” We come to know the universal through the particular, the
normal through the peculiar. The fiction writer’s job is to look at the world one town, one street,
one home, at a time. Instead of “Once upon a time in Utopia,” better to write, “Just this morning in
Dania Beach a woman who loved her husband realized that she would have to turn him into the police.”

In a recent essay in The Atlantic, Linn Ullmann quotes this passage from Alice Munro’s
story “Face”: “Something had happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only
one place, where something happened. And there are other places which are just other places.”
This in her essay “Before You Write a Good Plot, You Need to Write a Good Place.” Ullmann
goes on to say, “These precious few settings where something has happened are where meaning
resides—they contain the story, they are the story.” Place, then, may well be the emotional center
of a story.

Some of our stories will happen in real places where we have been or where we live,
others in imaginary places. And by place, I don’t mean location. A location is a dot on a map, a
set of coordinates, a Google Maps pushpin. Place is location with narrative, with memory and
imagination attached, with history. A location becomes a place when we tell its stories. Which
brings us to Melancholy.

My place is Dania Beach (Dania until 1998). I’ve lived here for thirty-some years. In that
time, the city’s population has tripled in size. It was once the “Tomato Capital of the World,” but
sat-water incursion put an end to that. It was the “Antique Capital of the South,” but eBay put an
end to that. A dozen or so years ago, Broward County was the pill mill capital of the country
with more pain clinics than fast-food restaurants. Addicts and dealers from Appalachia,
“Pillbillies” flew the Oxy-Express to Fort Lauderdale airport or drove in caravans down I-95 to
replenish their supplies. I first read about Dania in Frank Conroy’s lyrical memoir, Stop-Time,
back in college. “Tobey bent over and picked up a small felt pennant on a stick. DANIA-FLA. on
a background of orange blossoms.”

I could set me story here. Or I could set the story in an imagined place like Oz, Camelot,
or Yoknapatawpha County. This is always great fun, writing away and bringing a place into the
world that did not exist before. A place and its people. And its history and flora and fauna. You
get to name the place, design the town seal, lay out the streets, make up the town’s slogan:
Peculiar, Missouri, “Where the Odds Are with You.” Wish I had made that up, but it’s real. Once
you create the place and populate it, you can be writing about it for the rest of your life. Just ask
Faulkner.

In fact, I discovered Melancholy in a previous book, No Regrets, Coyote. My Darling Boy
is my third novel set there. I’m working on a fourth. Melancholy is transparently based on Dania 
Beach. So why the disguise? you ask. So that I could arrange things the way I needed them to be.
Why “Melancholy”? you ask. Well, Dania was settled by Danes, hence the name, which put me
in mind of Hamlet, the melancholy Dane. And that was it. The Danes who settled Dania came by
way of Chicago, the founders of Melancholy straight from Jutland. And Broward County
becomes Everglades County, which was the intended name in 1915 until the legislature decided
to name it for ex-Governor Napoleon Broward, a man whose mission it was to drain the
Everglades. In 1907, Governor Broward, whose family owned plantations along the St. Johns
River in Jacksonville, proposed that every Black person be physically evicted from the state. I
think you’ll agree that the county deserves a name change.

A mile north of my house across the Dania Beach mangrove wetlands stood the San
Souci Motel on Dania Beach Boulevard (Melancholy Beach Boulevard in Melancholy) and,
according to Google maps, it’s also the Jimmy Buffet Memorial Highway! The whole mile of it.
News to me. When I began writing the novel, the Sans Souci was a going, if moribund, concern.
I walked by it most mornings on my trek to the beach and back. This would be the only home
our darling boy, Cully, would have in Melancholy, a home he shares with two monkeys. And,
yes, there were monkeys at the San Souci then, and there are monkeys in my backyard now. One
day, a cyclone fence appeared and surrounded the place, the scummy water in the swimming
pool was soon drained, and the demolition begun.

The Dania Beach Sans Souci is no more, replaced by blocks-long high-rise apartment
buildings. Where once were trees teeming with roseate spoonbills and wood storks, are now
parking lots crammed with tightly packed cars. But Cully’s derelict Melancholy Sans Souci
remains where it always was, abandoned and crumbling. A block west of the motel was the
King’s Head Pub. My local. Closed now and bulldozed. So I changed its name to Ferrie’s Tavern,

redesigned the interior, and moved it to Main, (Federal Highway) to be near the Dixiewood
Motel where much of the action in the book takes place.

The Dixiewood on Main is modeled after the Kenwood Motel on Federal. It’s a
residential motel now, so I dispensed with the parking lot. As Robbie, the owner, tells Olney, “If
you have a car, you don’t need another place to sleep. You need gas.” Then I replaced the pool
with a lawn and firepit which becomes a nightly gathering place for the unconventional
residents. Olney describes the Dixiewood as a “community of solitaries and free
thinkers—disconcerting and refreshing.” The Dixiewood is not the only motel on Main. There
are dozens of the old-school, mom-and-pop variety. When Olney comes searching for Cully the
first time, he asks his ex-wife, Kat, Cully’s mom, if she knows where he might be. She tells him
to try the Amour Motel.

He says, “Is that a joke?”

She says, “We have a very literal-minded netherworld here in Melancholy. A no-irony zip
code. Rooms are rented by the hour. Corner of Main and Dahlia.” The motel’s name has since
been changed.

Timmy Ferrie’s placenta is buried about where the Melancholy Cut Off Canal meets
Main on the site of what had been Chimp World and a Seminole Village roadside attraction back
in the day. Today it’s an FP&L substation. You can see the Fort Lauderdale airport from there.
And that’s about the northern limit of Melancholy. The beach is due east and so is the
Broadwalk, which everyone from away wants to call the boardwalk. So does Word’s spell
checker. There are no boards, people. The city goes west past the Tequesta Reservation and
Paintball park as far as the Silver Palace casino, a stand-in for the Hard Rock with its guitar-
shaped hotel. And then south to Hollywood Boulevard and Young Circle. That Cut Off Canal I mentioned earlier is also the site of that nasty business between Shane and Jasmine that Cully
puts a merciful if brutal end to.

I left the Intracoastal Waterway and the beach right where they belong. And right there
where Cypress Avenue meets the Intracoastal, beneath the drawbridge, is a secluded cove where
boats are moored, and that’s where Cully stows away, drinks the owner’s Pappy van Winkle,
borrows some clothes, and sleeps in peace for once. Until he realizes he’s on camera. Up the road
a mile at the Melancholy Beach Boulevard drawbridge is Jimbo’s Sandbar where the wounded
and murderous AC and DC, the assault and battery brothers, sail their car through the
restaurant’s parking lot and into the waterside patio dining area before hurtling over the seawall
and into the drink.

Across A1A is Melancholy Beach where Cully meets his love, Pixie Smith. Well, it’s
Pamela Smith. Pamela Ellen Smith, and she glows in the dark. That’s how Cully found her that
night at the beach. She walked out of the surf, naked and dripping with bioluminescent algae. He
couldn’t take his eyes off her. He had several hits of MDMA in a baggie in his pocket, and she
stayed for the party. She told him all she ever wanted in her life was boobs and a fireplace. He
said, You’re halfway there.

Yes, I changed the city, but the city in thirty years has changed even more radically. I
tried to maintain a bit of the small-town atmosphere. I kept the pier and the sea grapes and
removed the Renaissance Condos from what had been Kite Beach. The five new chain hotels on
Main that serve the airport these days are gone to make room for the Pirate’s Inn and Sophie’s
Golden Touch and a half-dozen antique and thrift stores, all here when I arrived. You won’t find
Margaritaville Resort either. And as a parting gesture, I replaced the city’s welcome sign which
reads “Dania Beach Sea It. Live it. Love It.” It’s now “Welcome to Melancholy, Baby.”