The Orchid Thief Read Free Page A

through the torture that the character experiences in the movie. I felt sorry for him.
    SO: Is Charlie Kaufman a friend of yours?
    SO: No, he’s not. I met him once, for about two minutes, on the set of
Adaptation
. We were both tongue-tied.
    SO: Does he look like Nicholas Cage?
    SO: No, he looks like Charlie Kaufman. You don’t get it, do you? Movies are movies. Life is life. They aren’t the same thing.
    SO: Is that remark supposed to make me feel stupid?
    SO: No. I’m sorry if I was curt. I am just trying to be clear about what is a movie and what is
reality
.
    SO: So when did you finally see the movie? I can ask you that, right?
    SO: Of course. I saw the movie—a rough cut of the movie—at a small screening in the spring of 2002. I was so nervous I could hardly watch it. I was really happy to see that the movie portrayed the real heart of the book, which is about the pursuit of passion and how it shapes our lives. But it was very strange to watch it that first time. I think the reality of seeing myself as a character in a movie was a little overwhelming, and so was the reality of seeing my book reinvented as a movie.
    SO: So movies are reality sometimes, right?
    SO: [Silence]
    SO: Right?
    SO: Yes, I guess you’re right. In this case, anyway.
    SO: So are you planning to write any more movies?
    SO: You haven’t listened to a thing I’ve said, have you?
    SO: One more thing before I let you go. I know it’s unprofessional of me to ask this, but the next time you’re hanging out with Nicholas Cage, can you get me his autograph?

The Millionaire’s
Hothouse
    John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth. He has the posture of al dente spaghetti and the nervous intensity of someone who plays a lot of video games. Laroche is thirty-six years old. Until recently he was employed by the Seminole Tribe of Florida, setting up a plant nursery and an orchid-propagation laboratory on the tribe’s reservation in Hollywood, Florida.
    Laroche strikes many people as eccentric. The Seminoles, for instance, have two nicknames for him: Troublemaker and Crazy White Man. Once, when Laroche was telling me about his childhood, he remarked, “Boy, I sure was a
weird
little kid.” For as long as he can remember he has been exceptionally passionate and driven. When he was about nine or ten, his parents said he could pick out a pet. He decided to get a little turtle. Then he asked for ten more little turtles. Then he decided he wanted to breed theturtles, and then he started selling turtles to other kids, and then he could think of nothing
but
turtles and then decided that his life wasn’t worth living unless he could collect one of every single turtle species known to mankind, including one of those sofa-sized tortoises from the Galapagos. Then, out of the blue, he fell out of love with turtles and fell madly in love with Ice Age fossils. He collected them, sold them, declared that he lived for them, then abandoned them for something else—lapidary I think—then he abandoned lapidary and became obsessed with collecting and resilvering old mirrors. Laroche’s passions arrived unannounced and ended explosively, like car bombs. When I first met him he lusted only for orchids, especially the wild orchids growing in Florida’s Fakahatchee Strand. I spent most of the next two years hanging around with him, and at the end of those two years he had gotten rid of every single orchid he owned and swore that he would never own another orchid for as long as he lived. He is usually true to his word. Years ago, between his Ice Age fossils and his old mirrors, he went through a tropical-fish phase. At its peak, he had more than sixty fish tanks in his house and went skin-diving regularly to collect fish. Then the end came. He didn’t gradually lose interest: he renounced fish and vowed he would never again collect them and, for that