And Twilly said, Forget I even mentioned it.
On the eve of Twilly’s eighteenth birthday, Little Phil drove him to a banker’s office in Tampa, where it was explained to Twilly that he was about to inherit approximately $5 million from a man he had met only once, Little Phil’s father, the late Big Phil. Big Phil Spree made his fortune off copper mines in Montana, and had retired at age sixty to travel the world and play golf. Not long afterward he dropped dead in a sand trap on the sixteenth hole at Spyglass. His will left a third of his money to Little Phil, a third in trust to his only grandchild, Twilly, and a third to the National Rifle Association.
As they walked out of the bank, Little Phil threw an arm around his much taller son and said: “That’s a shitload of dough for a young fellow to handle. But I believe I know what your grandfather would have wanted you to do with it.”
“Let me guess. Oceanfront?”
“You’re a smart one,” said Little Phil, beaming.
Twilly shook free. “Mutual funds,” he announced.
“What?” Little Phil was aghast.
“Yep.”
“Where’d you hear about such nonsense?”
“I read.”
“Look around, boy. Hasn’t real estate done right by us?” Little Phil rattled off all the fine things in their life, from the swimming pool to the ski boat to the summer time-share in Vermont.
Twilly said: “Blood money.”
“Uh?”
“What Grandfather left me is mine, and I’ll do what I please with it. That’ll be no-load mutuals.”
Little Phil grabbed his shoulder. “Lemme see if I understand. I’m offering you a half partnership in a two-hundred-and-twenty-room Ramada at Daytona, beachside, but you’d rather stick the cash on that insane roulette wheel otherwise known as the New York Stock Exchange?”
“Yep,” said Twilly.
“Well, I always knew you were playing for the wrong team. This ices it,” said his father. “Did I mention the motel comes with a liquor license?”
A few months later Little Phil ran off to Santa Monica with a secretary from a title-insurance company. Despite her son’s unease in structured settings, Twilly’s mother beseeched him to enroll at Florida State University, in the state capital of Tallahassee. There Twilly majored in English for three semesters before dropping out and moving in with a poetry professor, who was finishing a doctorate on T. S. Eliot. She was a dynamic and intelligent woman who took a fervid interest in her new boyfriend, particularly his inheritance. She encouraged him to use the fortune to do good and noble deeds, beginning with the purchase of a snazzy new 280-Z for her garage. Eventually Twilly was spiffed up and presented to the dean of the English department, who proposed the funding of a resident Poet’s Chair to be named in honor of Twilly’s late grandfather, a man who wouldn’t have known W. H. Auden from Dr. Seuss.
Twilly said sure, what the hell, but the gift was never made; not because Twilly welched but because in the interim he was arrested for assault and battery on a state legislator. The man, a Democrat from Sarasota County, had been written up in the news for blocking clean-water reforms while at the same time accepting illicit campaign donations from a cattle ranch that was flushing raw manure into an estuary. Twilly had spotted the legislator in a restaurant and followed him to the rest room. There Twilly shoved him into a stall and lectured him for forty minutes on the immorality of water pollution. In fear the legislator feigned contrition, but Twilly saw through the act. Calmly he unzipped his jeans, pissed prodigiously on the man’s Bally loafers and said: “There, that’s what your pals on the ranch are doing to Black Drum Bay. How do you like it?”
When a sanitized version of the incident hit the press, the dean of the English department decided it would set a poor precedent to accept grant money from a deranged felon, and broke off contact with Twilly Spree. That was fine with Twilly, for although he enjoyed a good poem, he felt subversion was a worthier cause. It was a view that only hardened as he grew older and met more people like his father.