Chapter 10: A New Home

“Nadine, I found something to look at. It’s in a foreclosure auction,” Wilson said in a phone call in late March.

“Where?”

“The northernmost part of Little Haiti. Where we wanted. The auction is next week so I’m checking to see if we have a chance.”

The following evening, Wilson had more information about the property.

“This place will work for us. The owner passed away; he had no children. The executor is a half-sister out of state. She tried to sell, got no buyers, so she let the mortgage lapse. The bank couldn’t sell it either.”

“Why not?”

“The property is in a residential zone but had a variance for light industrial many years ago. The owner had a custom furniture shop set up in a pole barn and he lived in a double-wide on the grounds. There’s a rickety shed there too, where he stored the wood.”

“Why do you think they couldn’t sell it?”

“One major problem is the frontage on the road. There’s only fifteen feet of frontage for the driveway which goes 150 feet back, before it opens onto the site. There’s another driveway that goes out the back way; it’s even narrower. The site is completely land-locked and can’t be developed into anything that could make a profit for a buyer and it seems that no one wants to live on a site which used to be, basically, a factory.”

“What condition is it in?”

“It needs lots of work. The double-wide needs a good cleaning and repainting. The wood shed, tear it down. The pole barn is mostly empty, has a few built-in workbenches, but any tools are gone. There’s an a/c unit in it that maybe works. That building can be your ounfò; there’s room for about a hundred chairs. And it looks like we could park fifty or so cars there after the shed is gone.”

“It sounds like this would be a good place. When can I see it?”

“We’ll go Saturday. If we can get it with a low bid, we’ll have the money to fix it up, but I think we might get a mortgage anyway so we don’t use up our entire savings.”

When she saw the site, Nadine thought the place looked appalling, but Wilson assured her that most of what bothered her was cosmetic.

“In fact, since it looks so bad, maybe that will hold off any speculators,” he told her.

That is precisely what happened at the auction; Wilson’s bid was the only one. They now owned a home site. Through his fellow mechanics at his shop, Wilson found someone who could do the site cleanup and a handyman to do some repairs and remodeling in the double-wide, while Nadine found a housekeeping service for the heavy cleanup needed inside.

Tamara had continued with her home schooling while her physical therapy sessions continued. Now that they would have a permanent home, though, the family decided that they would check into schools for her. At eleven years old, she would normally be a sixth grader, but she was far more advanced than any sixth-grade child. They called the school district and found out that to register, the school would need a copy of Tamara’s home-school record and she would need to be tested. The school they chose was Thomas Mann Middle School; it was the closest to their new home.

Sue volunteered to go with Tamara and Nadine to register at the school. When they got there, Tamara and Nadine were stunned to see a number of children at the school who were walking through the halls, totally naked.

Smiling at the look of shock on both of their faces, Sue told them, “Obviously you’re shocked at the nudity here. I’m guessing that this is the first time that you’ve actually noticed any naked kids since you moved to Miami, right?”

They both nodded but Nadine said, “A few times I thought I saw what looked like a naked kid a distance away but assumed it was a very brief bathing suit. But when we lived in southern Hendry County—it’s mostly agricultural—we never saw any naked kids there. What’s this weird thing all about, anyway?”

“Something that the state legislature came up with. In Florida for the past few years, parents can force their children to be naked all of the time.”

“Ahh, so that’s why there are signs at the VA hospital that say ‘Clothing Required at All Times.’ I wondered about that.”

“Right,” Sue said. “At the hospitals—the universities too, they require clothes. But I assumed you knew about that stupid idea to force kids to be naked; it’s called ‘Stripped in Florida.’ I’ll tell you more later, at home.”

“I’ve only been around the apartment and the medical school,” Tamara said. “There aren’t any kids around and I miss seeing kids my age.”

They went into the office and the secretary sent them on to the principal, who greeted them.

“Hello, I’m Grace Lombard, the principal here at Thomas Mann. Who do we have here?” she asked, looking at Tamara.

Nadine answered, “We’re the Alexandres. I’m Nadine and this is Tamara. And our friend here, Susan Gilson, has been Tamara’s home-school teacher since October, when we moved to Miami for her medical treatment.”

“Oh, goodness, Tamara, are you better now?” Lombard asked.

“Yes ma’am, I had a skull fracture. It made my left leg weak, so I was home schooled while I was healing and having therapy.”

“Well spoken, miss. So you are here to register at Thomas Mann?”

“That’s correct,” Nadine answered. “We’re moving to a home several blocks away, when the place is ready. Should be in a week or two.”

Lombard smiled at Tamara. “Do you have your prior school records, Tamara?”

“Yes, ma’am. Sue has them from before I came to Miami and she has a report of my progress when she was teaching me.”

Sue broke in. “I’m a retired teacher, certified in Florida. My license number is on the report.”

“Oh, good. Let me see...” she began reading the paperwork and then sat back.

“Unusual ... no, this is unique. I’m not sure what to make of this. Mathematics, currently studying differential calculus. Science, in physics, postgraduate university; the other sciences, grade twelve, at least—perhaps college level. Language arts—that’s English grammar, reading and writing, spelling, comprehension, et cetera—that varies. Your reading and comprehension are grade 12 plus but the other English skills are closer to ... um ... middle-school-age appropriate. Then I see more eighth-grade-appropriate achievements in literature, history, and civics. Tamara, I’m just guessing here ... you like to read?”

Tamara and Nadine laughed. “Yes, Tamara is almost never seen without a book,” Nadine chuckled. “Even when she just began schooling, she was always reading.”

“And you like science, apparently.”

“Yes, ma’am. Right now, I’m working on a redesign for parts of an MRI,” she told Lombard.

At Lombard’s puzzled look, Nadine chuckled again. “That’s correct. It’s a medical magnetic resonance imaging machine. Tamara’s in a study at the U of Miami medical school that’s using one and she has her own ideas for its improvement. They’ve already adopted one of her design changes.”

“Huh. Seems fitting her in here will be a challenge, I can see. We’ll need to do some testing, Tamara, to see what you need to learn at the middle school level.” She flipped some papers. “This is a final exam from a high school physics class that you took and scored a perfect grade.” Another flip. “Math, here’s a high school senior final. 100%. Chemistry, high school junior, same. Same with biology. There’s no point in testing you on science or math.”

She looked up at Tamara. “Tamara, tell me what you think we should do here.”

“Ma’am, I need to be with kids my age a little before going to high school. Can I just go to school here? I want to learn the social studies topics and get practice in writing too. And if the teachers allow it, I could help other kids learn if they have trouble in classes,” Tamara said.

Lombard smiled. “Young lady, what mature and thoughtful suggestions those are. Are you sure you won’t be bored if the class is working on something you’ve already studied?”

“No, ma’am, as long as I have a book with something new to work on.”

They all laughed.

“Mrs Lombard, to change the subject, I need to ask if the naked kids here cause any particular difficulties in classrooms,” Sue asked.

Lombard sighed. “They do, a fair amount. It’s difficult since they are always a distraction, the teachers complain. I’m not in favor, but we have no choice though.”

Sue nodded. “That’s a major reason why I retired. When they started that nonsense in the Tampa Bay area, it was just a local novelty. Suddenly I had to teach with that major distraction added. Class control became really difficult in my high school classes. I had the opportunity to retire, so I did. But it’s grown and become a state program now. I don’t envy you.”

“Thanks, I think. Well, Tamara, shall we schedule your placement exams? When can you come in to take them?”

After they left the school office, Nadine asked Sue, “So what’s this nudity nonsense about?”

Sue shook her head ruefully. “I’ve got some errands to run now, so I have to leave you. Why don’t you stop by my place at 3 o’clock and we’ll talk then.”

Later that day, all the Alexandres arrived at Sue’s apartment and she invited them in.

“I actually assumed you knew about that nudity program in Florida; after all, you lived here while Tamara was growing up,” she told them.

“Huh,” Wilson began, “I did hear about it...” Nadine nodded, “ ... but paid it no attention. I ... I thought it was something that was happening up there around Pasco County,” he improvised, recalling what Nadine told him about Sue’s comment to Lombard about her teaching in Tampa. “We’ve been so tied up with personal things that Nadine and I haven’t been much for the news here.”

“Okay,” Sue said, “what’s going on here with it is that the state gave parents the authority to strip their kids; when they do that, the kids have to remain naked for their whole childhood.”

Tamara jerked. “Eeep! That’s weird! And stupid! Um, that explains...” She stopped. “Um, Mom, I just thought of something. I’ll tell you later.”

At the same time, Nadine was shaking her head, saying, “Unbelievable,” and Wilson was just shaking his head.

He asked, “Where did this idiocy start, anyway? Do you know?”

“Yeah, I do.” Sue told him. “It actually began in Orange County, but it all happened around the same time in Orange and Hillsborough counties, spreading into the Pasco County area. You know those big theme parks in Orlando?”

“Sure,” Wilson said while Nadine and Tamara looked on blankly.

“So someone in their PR, you know, public relations, or maybe marketing department, got the idea to boost sales by offering a big discount to families who brought their kids there and kept them naked. I heard that the original idea came from the reaction to a large nudist group that rented one of the parks after it closed—they do that to get more money out of the park. The park’s staff saw the naked kids having a fantastic time and thought it was cute. So the PR people thought that they’d try it with mainstream guests. It was a totally weird idea, but they got a bump in attendance, so next, they offered a larger discount if the families could show, with photos, that the kids were naked in public areas for at least three days before they visited their parks.

“I think that it was around the same time that the nudist resorts in Pasco and the surrounding areas got together and got the area counties to allow kids to be naked in public. You know, the Pasco area has the largest concentration of nudist resorts in the country.”

Wilson nodded and the others followed his lead.

“The nudist resorts began encouraging the parents of kids to keep them naked outside of the resorts; they got marketing studies which suggested that they could increase their traffic—get more resort customers—if they did that. In about a year, everyone’s revenues were up, mainly from visitors from out of state. Why this happened is a puzzle, but some newspaper columnists conjectured that it might have been a backlash to a backlash. In all the states north of Florida—that’s the whole rest of the country except Hawaii, there was a developing public backlash against the Naked in School program that’s been going on in a lot of states—oh, you haven’t heard of that either? I see blank looks.”

“I read something in the paper a few weeks ago that mentioned naked kids going to high schools,” Nadine said. “The article said it was a federal program and some schools were starting it. It sounded stupid so I stopped reading it. So that’s a real thing too?”

“Unfortunately it is but it’s not in Florida. So as I mentioned, in reaction to the parts of the Naked in School Program that require public nudity outside school, like requiring kids to go into public places while naked, conservative law-makers were making many public dress codes to become stricter. Then the more ‘liberal,’ I’d guess you’d say, parents who rebelled against those stricter dress codes wound up bringing their kids here where they could visit nudist resorts and have their kids ‘express their body freedom,’ as the promotions were saying. So tourism in Florida got a big boost.”

“So obviously it didn’t stay just in that local three or four county area,” Nadine ventured.

“No. But as I mentioned in Lombard’s office, I retired because I couldn’t stand the classroom management problems that a bunch of naked kids in the classroom caused. You know, puberty, teens, nudity ... take a guess.”

Just then, the door opened and Sue’s husband came in.

“Hi, Sue ... ah, hi there too, Nadine, Wilson, Tamara. What’s up, guys?” John asked.

Sue answered, “Hi, dear. You’re home early.”

“Yup. It was light today and Justine said she’d cover.”

“The Alexandres only just found out about the Stripped in Florida—the SiF Act—today,” Sue told him. “I’m telling them some more about it.”

John sighed and dropped into a chair. “Idiots in the capitol. I’m surprised you didn’t know about it.”

Nadine briefly explained about their meeting with the school principal and the family’s past fabricated history.

“Lombard didn’t seem happy about it at her school either,” Nadine said. “Why do you think it spread from the Tampa Bay area?”

John chuckled. “Money, of course. Bad things always seem to happen when a shortage of money’s involved. Some state officials in Tallahassee, or ‘Tall Hassle,’ as some fantasy author from maybe forty years ago called it when writing about Xanth, which was a fictional metaphor for Florida, took notice of the increased tourist traffic, and the urban legend about it claims that they read some on-line fiction stories about a ‘Stripped in Florida’ program. Since the state is chronically short of money, they looked into using those stories as a template to put together a Florida program like that for real, here in Florida. The problem was that many of the features of the program—the things that made it work in those fiction stories—were total fantasy; the plots were pure fantasy fiction. Not even science because the science in them was impossible. The biggest problem the officials faced was how to monitor and enforce the mandatory nudity that the Florida law was based on.”

“Mandatory? But we saw only a few naked kids,” Nadine countered.

John sighed. “Let me go over the stuff as I understand what happened, beginning from when those dim bulbs in Tall Hassle got started down their rabbit hole. In the fiction stories, that program had two parts, one involving tourists and the other, state citizens. Tourists could have their kids stripped naked for a fee while they were here, just by buying a license to do it. When they purchased it, the kid would have to be naked while they were in the state. On the other hand, state citizens would pay for a license too, but the law mandated that their child had to remain totally naked till the child reached 21 years old.”

Nadine started to interrupt but John said, “Let me finish. You were going to ask how they could enforce that?” Nadine nodded. “That’s where moving the fictional story to reality breaks down. In the story, kids who were stripped had an electronic chip implanted behind an ear. Whenever a ‘chipped kid,’” he made finger quotes, “passed a sensor, it would read the chip, a camera would determine if the kid was naked, and if not, an alarm would sound and police would respond and enforce the law. Now tell me how this could work here in real life.”

“In Miami? Non-emergency? Maybe hours? Likely never?” laughed Wilson. “Like the cops have nothing to do other than chase after naked kids—um, should-be-naked kids, that is.”

John nodded. “So true. A second science-fiction-like part of the stories was the so-called nudity detector camera. There’s no technology which can reliably discriminate between a clothed and unclothed person, and what if the chipped person is in a group? How can the camera tell who in the group has a chip, let alone if that person is clothed or not? Sure, you could have people watching screens. But according to those stories, cameras were at every public building, school, shop, and multiple ones were on every street. How many people would be needed to cover that many cameras? Even then, the detectors are omnidirectional, so picking one chipped kid out of a group is impossible.

“Then the stories had some stupid frills too, one where the kids—boys, that is—were given pills or injections of something like Viagra which made them have permanent erections. Now apparently the state did look into that too. Why, I can’t fathom. Whatever. But that can’t happen. There’s no drug that can cause a permanent erection—or even one that lasts for much longer than about an hour. Back in 1983, a urologist at a medical conference injected his penis with papaverine, a vasodilator, to demonstrate that a drug could cause an erection. It did, but it’s not all that effective. Then Viagra and similar drugs were developed about fifteen years later and they cause an erection but only if there’s active sexual stimulation and even then, their resulting erections last for maybe a half hour, not much more, ever. No drug will case an involuntary erection, other than drugs like alprostadil, prostaglandin E-1, which has to be mixed from a powder and then immediately injected directly into the side of the penis. An erection produced by the recommended dose of alprostadil lasts up to about an hour, max.

“And no one will ever develop such a permanent-erection drug, either. Erections lasting longer than four hours are actually dangerous for the health of the penis and are considered to be a medical emergency, when they are caused by lack of blood flow. The medical condition’s called ‘ischemic priapism.’ With a forced erection—like too much drugs injected directly, or even when using a constricting penile ring, it produces a tourniquet-like effect on the penis. Blood can’t leave the organ—that’s what keeps it erect, but blood can’t enter either, and blood-starved tissues quickly become deprived of oxygen, so they begin dying after just a few hours. That’s the danger of a tourniquet—if no new blood gets to feed the tissues, gangrene may begin to occur in as little as four to six hours. If priapism isn’t treated quickly, the man will never be able to get an erection again, or even may lose the organ.”