The Orchid Thief (31 page)

They muttered to each other as they worked: “I think I’m going to use this little bamboo fence, even though it’s a new concept for us.”

“Oh, Martin, this
Oncidium
is beautiful, but it’s too red.”

“It
is
too red. Use this white one. It’ll blend if you play it against the canoe.”

The vast, hollow Miami Convention Center was now full of other growers building their displays, hollering instructions to their helpers; it brimmed with the clang of hammers against metal frames and the groan of boxes being dragged across the floor and the faint brassy smell of dirt and the fresh sugary aroma of flowers and the squawk of truck tires in the loading dock. Martin mentioned that his display contained about forty thousand dollars’ worth of flowers. There were about sixty displays being put up that night, some with twice as many plants as Martin’s, which meant that the total value of the displays in the Convention Center might have been as much as $4 million, and I thought to myself:
I am standing amid millions of dollars’ worth of flowers
. I breathed in deep and held my breath while I swung my head so that the $4 million of flower colors smeared like lipstick. It was in the nature of Florida, this kind of abundance, the overrichness of living things—so many of everything that all of it blurs together and you have to decide whether to be part of the blur or to be a distinct and separate being.

Martin and Viv worked for about an hour, and all around were other orchid people and their assistants working for hours. When they had positioned the last plant, Martin stepped back and surveyed the display, his index finger resting on his nose. His face settled into broody deliberation. “Viv,” he said, finally, pointing at an especially big and bright orange
Cattleya
, “we should take that big honker out of there. I do fear that it’s a little like nuclear overkill.”

All around the Convention Center, people dropped by to see how other people’s displays were doing. They borrowed sphagnum moss and bamboo fencing and loaned out four-inch ferns and filler plants. A nurseryman from Hawaii who was building a huge display stopped by to say hello to Martin. “I’m not doing the New York show this year,” he said. “I got all showed out. When you have a minute, come see this new electronic mist generator I’ve got.” Martin took a break and wandered a few displays down to the South Florida Fern Society. The man working on it was named Jack. In the center of the display was a six-foot-long alligator. “That’s a good alligator, isn’t it, Martin?” Jack asked. “He’s concrete. I’m calling the display ‘Dangerous Attraction.’ That’s a good name, isn’t it?”

The next display, from a nursery called Grow-Mor, had been made to look like a Victorian sitting room. It included a gilded fireplace, two armchairs, an antique mantel, a French side table, and two good-quality oil paintings. “The furniture’s all from our home,” Mr. Grow-Mor told Martin. “We tore the mantel out of our dining room because we thought it would look great here. Damn it, Martin, can you believe my best Toledo Blue isn’t blooming? It’s about two weeks off. Oh, by the way, Martin, do you have any extra moss?”

“We have three boxes of Spanish moss, help yourself,” Martin answered. “It’s from a very good commercial-moss business in Kentucky. I’d like to think that somewhere
they’re raping the mossy banks of pristine forest streams for this stuff.” We walked by the bottom half of a mannequin dressed in period Florida pioneer clothes, and then a two-hundred-pound stuffed crocodile sitting on a ten-foot-high Styrofoam replica of a famous place called Portrait Rock. “I roughed it out with a chain saw,” the man at the display said. “It’s amazing what you can do with Styrofoam and acetone.” We passed displays named
ORCHIDS OVER MIAMI
and
RAINBOW OF LIVING DIAMONDS
and
THE MAGICAL ORCHID CITY
and
GATOR TRAIL
and
PARADISE LOST
. Martin said he thought quite a few orchid people were really crazy. Right after that he introduced me to an orchid grower with wild hair and wild eyes named Waymon Bussey, who had just flown in from Mexico.

“What am I doing these days, Martin?” Waymon hollered when he saw us. “I’m doing
great
. Life is great. I’m growing mini-cymbidiums at an altitude of six thousand feet in Mexico.” Martin raised his eyebrows. “Plus I just recovered from a killer-bee attack,” Waymon went on. “They got me when I was out rescuing plants. I was rescuing orchids. Wild orchids. They were screaming out to me, I swear, Martin, The bees were swarming all around them. I
had
to help those orchids. I wasn’t poaching! I was on a rescue mission!”

Martin twirled his beard. After a moment Waymon said, “Martin, I want you to know I’ve given up nicotine, alcohol, and fornication. The only addiction I have left is orchids.”

“It was said of Dante that he always had time for lechery,” Martin said, nodding solemnly. “Don’t disappoint me, Waymon.”

Waymon turned to me and winked. He had a fevery, cockeyed grin on his face. “Hey, do you want to know something?” he asked me. “Do you know that I’m only forty-one years old and I’ve already seen
two
flying saucers?”

—

Around another corner we came upon Bob Fuchs. Bob was famous for doing grand R. F. Orchids displays. This time he had erected a nearly full-size Florida cabin circa 1886. The cabin was trim and had a small porch and a little peaked roof, and orchids hung from the railings and covered the little front lawn and lined the cabin’s winding stone path and wrapped around the cabin’s foundation. There were flowers of practically every single natural color. The cabin itself was authentic-looking 1886 brown. Bob greeted us, and Martin said he would leave me with Bob. “I need to go back to the Motes territory and add mulch,” he said. “ ‘The time has come, the walrus said, to speak of many things/Of shoes and ships and sealing wax’
and
mulch. My accountant said he would come assist me in the process.” Martin and Bob always looked for excuses to stay away from each other. Martin nodded at Bob and turned on his heel.

A lot of orchid growers don’t like each other, just the way a lot of people don’t like each other, or more precisely, the way a lot of family members don’t get along. They like different orchids or they have different philosophies about breeding; for instance, Bob wanted to breed bigger and more gorgeous vandas, whereas Martin wanted to breed vandas that looked more as they had when Carl Roebelin first discovered them in the Philippines. Or one grower thinks his or her plants are better than anyone else’s and are not sufficiently appreciated, or better than anyone else’s and therefore the object of bitter envy, or some growers just rub one another the wrong way. This year, no one at the show hired bodyguards, as they did the year of Bob Fuchs’s indictment, but you could still feel the kind of prickly tightness between certain people, as if they were about to make each other break out in a rash. If I had ever doubted whether the orchid world was really as much a world, a culture, a
family
as I imagined it was, this
antagonism was perfect proof. The orchid world had the intimacy of a family and the fights of a family. Like a family, it provided a way to fit into the world, to place yourself inside a small and sometimes crowded and sometimes bickering circle, and that circle would be surrounded by a bigger circle, and then an even bigger circle, and then finally by the whole wide world; it was some kind of way to scratch out a balance between being an individual and being a part of something bigger than yourself, even though each side of the equation put the other in jeopardy. This has always been a puzzlement to me, how to have a community but remain individual—how you could manage to be separate but joined, and somehow, amazingly, not lose sight of either your separateness or your togetherness. The two conditions go up and down like a teeter-totter, first one and then the other tipping the balance back. If you set out alone and sovereign, unconnected to a family, a religion, a nationality, a tradition, a class, then pretty soon you are
too
lonely, too self-invented and unique, and too much aware that there is no one else like you in the world. If you submerge yourself completely in something—your town or your profession or your hobby—then pretty soon you have to struggle up to the surface because you need to be sure that even though you are a part of something big, some community, you still exist as a single unit with a single mind. It is the fundamental contradictoriness of the United States of America—the illogical but optimistic notion that you can create a union of individuals in which every man is king. I envied the orchid people all around me in the Convention Center, and all the orchid people who were going to swarm in here tomorrow, and I envied the Seminole tribe members for the same reason, for having found and fitted themselves into a small and crowded circle, and if any of them had moments when they had to step outside it and
vouch for their independence from it, they seemed to be able to do it and then step happily back in. I even envied people like Laroche and Lee Moore who belonged to the cult of not belonging, which is its own small and crowded circle that gave them a shape for their lives, even if it was in bas-relief.

—

People often show up early at orchid shows; serious orchid people, people who want to scoot in and find the best plants before anyone else. They line up early, armed with shopping bags and wire baskets, locked on their targets.

“I want a white
Phalaenopsis
with a one hundred percent red lip. I already have one, but it has a little white mottling on the exterior of the lip
which I do not want
.”

“I want a
Paphiopedilum concolor;
it’s a specific one, it’s a ‘Walter’ crossed with a ‘Krull’s Fat Boy’ and it’s the color of butter with maroon speckles.”

“I have to wear handcuffs to these shows because I want everything.”

“If I haven’t been to a show for a few months I just
have
to go.”

“I hear that cymbidiums are falling out of favor.”

“I would spend ten thousand dollars on a single plant if I liked it well enough. If you see something you like and you can’t get it, you get crazy.”

“I love these! I want these! I brought a whole bunch of these back from Jamaica in my bra, but most of them died.”

“I want a really good-sized
magnificum
. This one’s pretty good-sized, but I am not leaving here until I get one that’s
really
good-sized.”

—

I wanted a Fakahatchee ghost orchid, in full bloom, maybe attached to a gnarled piece of custard apple tree, and I wanted its roots to spread as broad as my hand and each root
to be only as wide as a toothpick. I wanted the bloom to be snow-white, white as sugar, white as lather, white as teeth. I knew its shape by heart, the peaked face with the droopy mustache of petals, the albino toad with its springy legs. It would not be the biggest or the showiest or the rarest or the finest flower here, except to me, because I wanted it. In the universe there are only a few absolutes of value; something is valuable because it can be eaten for nourishment or used as a weapon or made into clothes or it is valuable if you want it and you believe it will make you happy. Then it is worth anything as well as nothing, worth as much as you will give to have something you think you want. It saved me all sorts of trouble knowing I wouldn’t find a ghost orchid here, since then I didn’t even need to look. It was a relief to have no hope because then I had no fear; looking for something you want is a comfort in the clutter of the universe, but knowing you don’t have to look means you can’t be disappointed. It just so happened that a few days earlier, I met a man who said he’d been to a street fair in Lake Worth and that one of the vendors was selling macramé baskets, and inside the baskets were jumbles of roots growing on chunks of wild wood. He was sure that the roots were ghost orchid roots, but at the time none of them were blooming and the vendor claimed he had no idea of what the plants were, he’d just gotten them from some guy who had gotten them from some other guy. I didn’t expect to see any macramé baskets of anything at the show. I saw books like
Bishop’s Interim List of Orchid Hybrids Registered during 1991–1994
, and
Descriptive Terminology for the Orchid Judge
, and
You Can Grow Cattleya Orchids
, and
You Can Grow Phalaenopsis Orchids
, and orchid sweaters and T-shirts and earrings and ties. There were orchids for sale, for one and two and three and five hundred dollars, a madhouse of orchids in every color, in every shape,
with wide leaves and skinny leaves and no leaves at all, with fat jutting lips and lips cupped like thimbles, and with blackish-red hoods and freckles, with ruffles, with pleats, with corkscrew curls, big as fists, small as fingernails, smelling of honey, grass, citrus, cinnamon, or of nothing, not a smell at all but just the heavy warm quality that air has after it has been sitting inside a flower.

At Martin’s booth a man was squawking. “Hey, I got a bad plant from you last year!” he said. “It was a mutation. It’s in the car. I’ll go get it.”

“I believe you,” Martin said. “I don’t need to see it. Why don’t you choose another beauty for yourself?”

“Hey!” another man at the booth said. He held up one of the lavender vandas. “How much salt will this take? I mean, how much salt can it handle? And is it called Mood Indigo or Indigo Mood? And should I water the hell out of it?” Martin conferred with him while wrapping the plant that the man with the mutant had chosen. Another man, tall and bemused, wandered by. “Beautiful,” he said to Martin. “Absolutely beautiful. By the way, Martin, you need your teeth cleaned.”

“Lord,” Martin sighed, “you can never hide from your dental hygienist.”

Martin’s canoe scene hadn’t won anything in the display competition. In fact, the show committee clerk confided to me that the judges hadn’t liked it at all. “In fact,” she whispered, “they
hated
it.” She told me that the judges thought Martin’s plant labels were homely and that overall the display was too cluttered, and that when it came down to giving awards they hadn’t even given Motes Orchids a second thought. I asked her about the other displays. The Hawaiians they liked, she said, but they didn’t like the moss on top of the orchids, and one display called
YESTERDAY
they loved because
“they loved the fake water.” The Victorian sitting room failed because Mr. Grow-Mor had used an ugly white backdrop and the colors of his plants didn’t flow. It was a long, critical list. On the other hand, the judges did like Bob Fuchs. All the major awards went to the R. F. Orchids Florida cabin—the artistic trophy, the five-hundred-square-foot-display trophy, and the ultimate award, the show trophy. It was a matter of pride, of professional respect, of personal satisfaction, to win at a show, and it was a matter of money, because plants with show ribbons command higher prices, and also it was a matter of something unimaginably profound—it was a matter of shaping evolution, because plants that win in shows become popular, and other breeders will use them as parents for new hybrids and as a model for the kind of plants they will try to produce on their own. Winner take all, including the future. All day, the first day of the show, every time I turned around I saw Bob’s orangey hair and luminous pale face and the cool bright composure on it of someone who knew he’d won.