Those few months I was home in Calhoun County in the winter of 1988 and 1989, back at the Star, back with my family, run hot and cold in my memory. It was clear now that I had made a mistake, in believing I could somehow fix everything in my momma’s life by my mere presence, in thinking I could just click into place again in that world that had changed without me. In the meantime, I had placed my ambition on hold, but it would be wrong to say that it was wasted time. A wealth of good things happened in those few months. I wrote stories again for people who knew my name and face, which is always more rewarding than writing for strangers. I even got a letter from my ex-mother-in-law, saying she liked a column I did about King, my dog. He had gotten old, weak, and walked around stiff-legged, like an old man with rheumatism, and when he finally passed away I was relieved because I knew he wasn’t hurting anymore. I buried him in the goat pen, because the goats kept the weeds cut down.
I covered a high school football game again because the sports desk was shorthanded, and I got the names right, mostly, although the numbers still evaded me. I did get the score right, which is important. For the first time in years, I was home for Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s Day, and ate my momma’s black-eyed peas, for luck. I even went bird hunting, but all I shot at was the sky. I saw three puppies born, and one of them, to be named Gizzard, would become both the ugliest dog on this planet and my momma’s cherished companion. He was a sickly as well as a remarkably ugly puppy, but Momma kept him alive, feeding him drops of milk until he was well.
I ate breakfast again on Saturday at my momma’s, got to know my kinfolks again. When my car broke down, Sam came to get me, again. “Ricky, if I didn’t buy no better cars than you, I sure wouldn’t move away from home again,” he told me, once, from under the hood of my car. “I ain’t comin’ to get you in Florida.”
But after a few months, it was time to go. I was twenty-nine, and while that seems young to me now, I felt like I was standing on the dock, watching the boat leave without me. I might have been content to stay there the rest of my life, if I had waited fifteen, twenty years. I just came home too soon.
I had a girlfriend, a good woman, who pointed out that I was pacing in the living room late at night like some circus elephant in a pen that was way too small. “Go,” she said. She was about tired of me then, anyway. It had something to do with my attention span.
I called the St. Petersburg Times on the phone and asked if they would still have me. The St. Pete Times was not a big newspaper in circulation—though it was twice as big as any paper I had ever worked for—but it was big in reputation. It was, consistently, year after year, one of the top ten newspapers in America. I would normally have been a little scared of it, of proving myself there. But the editor who hired me, Paul Tash, told me that it takes all manner and texture of people to make a good newspaper, and he would be glad to say he was hiring a reporter from Possum Trot, Alabama. Randy Henderson, my editor at the Birmingham News, had told me that, too. As long as there was at least one such person in every newspaper I went to, I knew I would be fine.
But it was the interview down there that sold me. The managing editor, Mike Foley, had a bust of Elvis in his office. I thought I might fit in, in a place like that. From some floors in the building, you could even see the bay.
On a chilly, rainy afternoon in March, I said good-bye to my momma with two hundred dollars in an envelope. I made sure she knew how to find me in case of an emergency, and told her to call me collect. I told her that Florida is just a quick plane ride away, that I could be home in a few hours if she ever needed me. That might sound silly to people who vacation in Europe and ride planes every week. To my momma, who had never been more than three hundred miles away from home in her life, who had never been anywhere close to an airplane except for the crop duster that swooped down over our house to get to the cotton fields, Tampa Bay was a million miles away. She cooked me some stew beef with potatoes and onions, which is my favorite, and tried not to cry. Before I left she gave me an envelope with a card in it, and told me not to open it until that night. It had a ten-dollar bill in it.
I said good-bye to my girlfriend with some roses and a promise to keep in touch that we both knew was more civility than anything else, and headed south. I got into St. Petersburg about four-thirty, too late to get a hotel room. I went straight to the beach at Clearwater and watched the sun come up, which was stupid because I had forgotten which side the water was on. It only sets over the water, genius, I said to myself, as it rose over my shoulder.
It was an odd place, in many ways. Pinellas County was paved from Tampa Bay to the beaches, pretty much, with all manner of people living elbow to elbow in little pastel tract houses, rambling brick ranchers and bayside mansions. To find the reasons why people ever came here in the first place, you had to live on the edge of it, by that beautiful water, or drive inland, through the sugar cane, to the heart of it. I rented a small apartment near the bay that was perhaps the most peaceful place I had ever lived. At night, when the water in the little inlet I lived on was smooth as glass, you could sit on the ground and watch the mullet jump, and egrets and other wading birds would take pieces of peeled orange out of your hands. I heard the other reporters complain about how slow it was and dull it was, how life was just one big Early Bird Dinner Special, but I loved it. The editors hurt my feelings sometimes, by sending me to do stories that I thought were frivolous, but it was hard to be miserable living by the beach.
The highlight of my time there, at least in the first few months, was the story of Mopsy the chicken. The little bayside town of Dunedin, north of Clearwater, had been the target of a serial killer. It seemed that a bobcat was, night after night, slaughtering the chickens of the retirees. The editor walked up to me, straight-faced, and told me that there had been a bobcat attack the night before but the chicken had miraculously survived, clawed but still clucking. The chicken’s name, he told me, was Mopsy. I said something to the effect that he had to be kidding. Two minutes later, I was motoring to the quiet and peaceful city of Dunedin. I was twenty-nine years old. I had won a whole wallful of journalism awards and risked my life in bad neighborhoods and prisons and hurricanes. I was going to interview a goddamn chicken.
The chicken had indeed had all the feathers raked off its ass, but when I approached it, it went squawking off across the yard. I supposed they would have to get it some counseling. I interviewed its owners instead, drove to a little parking lot by the water, sat in the car for a half-hour and rubbed my eyes. At home, Mopsy would be covered in gravy about now.
I went back to the newspaper office determined to get even. I would write the most overwritten crap of my life, I decided, something so purple and lurid that the editors would feel bad about sending me on the story. I began it this way:
“Mopsy has looked into the face of death, and it is whiskered.”
It ran in the paper that way. All the editors told me what a good job I did, and not too long after that I got a promotion that would, I believed, take me away from stories about butt-gnawed chickens for the rest of my natural life.
The moral, I suppose, was this: Do not, on purpose, write a bunch of overwritten crap if it looks so much like the overwritten crap you usually write that the editors think you have merely reached new heights in your craft.
They promoted me to the state desk covering southwest Florida, including the Everglades, which had an almost magical appeal to me, a boy from the foothills. My first assignment on the state desk was the kind of story that would make your usual well-groomed and well-spoken city hall reporter pop his suspenders, but to me, it was a dream come true. They sent me to cover an alligator hunt.
The state-sponsored hunt was intended to thin the gators out a little bit, and protect a few tourists and dogs that strayed too close to the condominium ponds and pristine rivers. The gators had done well all those years they were protected, so well that the state of Florida decided to hold a lottery that would give a limited number of hunters permission to take them for their hides and meat, and for the sport of it, for two weeks in September. The gators had to be harpooned first, and dragged to the side of the boat, jaws snapping, tail thrashing, before being killed with a bang stick. “By God,” I thought, “that is fishing.”
I arranged to meet with three ol’ boys from south Florida who, having rigged the lottery, allowed us to come along for the ride. The paper sent a long-haired hippie-looking photographer named Joe Walles along, to record the death throes of the gator on film.
The hunters planned to cruise the rim canals of Okeechobee, the source of the River of Grass, the Glades, where the gators had been spotted sunning themselves side by side on the banks like hot dogs in a grill. I had been to Okeechobee before, to fish. Life is different there.
It is a vast inland sea, full of poison mud and fish you would only eat if you had a geiger counter on the end of your fork. At night, it was blacker than sin. Sometimes your boat got clogged in the mass of yellowish muck and duck weed and you had to jump out and push, conscious that it could suck you right down, conscious of the black cottonmouth water moccasins that squirmed along the top of the vile mess.
The people were different. Law did not quite reach Okeechobee. It was there, upon seeing a shoe lying in the middle of the road, I actually got out to see if there was still a foot in it. It was there that I met a fishing guide named Jimmy who never, ever wore shoes, who never noticed the mosquitoes that feasted on him, who talked only when he wanted to and that wasn’t much. I will never forget sitting in a boat with him on one of those pitch-black nights, and hearing him clear his throat.
“I’ve et dog,” he said, unsolicited.
“Why?” I asked.
“It was in my yard,” he said, and that was it for a while.
I am not making any of this up.
But this trip, to kill a gator, was special in every way. It rained as we pulled away from the dock that night, black rain from a black sky on black water. I am not afraid of the dark unless there is something in it that will eat me if I give it a chance. There were countless reasons to be afraid that night. I will always remember the eyes. When one of the gator hunters flashed his light around the canal, there they were, hundreds and hundreds of glowing orange reptilian eyes. The boat suddenly seemed very small.
Then, for the next several hours, we proceeded to piss them off. We took two boats, gliding slowly down the canal as one man stood on the bow of the lead boat, hefting a harpoon. Time after time after time, he gouged, pierced, perforated and otherwise wounded gator after gator, but never got the barbed harpoon in deep enough to stick. The light was the problem, he said. They needed an extra hand in their boat to help, and I volunteered.
They pulled the two boats together so that I could easily jump from one to another, but either I pushed them farther apart when I made my leap or a ripple in the water did it for me, because I dropped like a sack of mud straight down into the black water of the eighteen-foot canal, and knew that I would surely die. I rose up to grasp the side of the boat, scared to death, waiting for one of those twelve-foot monsters to clamp down on my legs and drag me down. I tried to pull myself into the boat, but there was nothing to grab on to except the slick sides, and it was impossible for the little fellows on the boat to dead-lift a six-foot-two, 230-pound dumbass back over the side, to safety.
I know that gators prefer a nice piece of rotted turtle to human beings. I had read National Geographic, too. I know they usually will not attack human beings if there is a poodle anywhere near, but none of that went through my head as I hung there, helpless. It was only for a few minutes, but time has a different meaning when half your body is submerged in black water aswarm with alligators, the same gators your hunting partners had been jabbing with cold steel most of the night.
“Guys,” I said, trying to sound calm, trying to keep my voice low. “Y’all got to get me back in that damn boat.” It was about then that I heard the clicking noise, a click-click-click from behind my back. I arched my neck around in a panic, expecting to see a gator clicking his teeth together in anticipation, but what I saw instead was our photographer taking pictures of me. And I remember thinking, quite clearly, that if I ever got back on dry ground, he was a dead man.
Finally, someone suggested that I should work my way around to the side of the boat and climb up over the engine’s transom, which I did, with the last of my energy. Everybody but me thought it was pretty funny. The photographer, Walles, later explained to me that he felt obligated to cover the news, and for a few minutes I was the story.
I could see the headline:
GATOR EATS REPORTER: ALL POSSUM TROT MOURNS.
Then, a year later:
WALLES WINS PULITZER PRIZE.
The editors demanded that I write two stories, one about the hunt itself, and a first-person story about what happened to me, one that could only make me look like an idiot. The next day at the Page One meeting in the St. Pete Times newsroom, this conversation was overheard and reported back to me.
Editor One: “That gator story didn’t exactly work like we expected, did it?”
Editor Two: “Naw. It was fantastic.”
That luck, that charmed existence that began with an upside-down convertible so long ago, still held. My momma didn’t have any, Mark didn’t have any, and Sam made his, but I could fall face first in a septic tank and come out smelling like a rose of Sharon.
I moved away from my little house on Clearwater Bay, to live on an honest-to-God island. It was called Anna Maria. The city allowed no houses over two stories and set the speed limit at twenty-five, as if it was determined to keep what was happening to the rest of the Sunshine State from happening there. I walked to the beach every morning when it was warm, and it was almost always warm, and swam in water that some mornings was as clear as moonshine. This was no rich folks’ island with mansions and yacht slips, but a place where people came after they worked a lifetime selling insurance in Evansville and aluminum siding in Scranton. This was affordable paradise, and even a man on a reporter’s salary could live close to the beach every evening and bob up and down the water until the sun went down. I remember that the sand had pine needles in it, which is unusual for Florida. Usually, the only shade you get is from the condominiums.
Home, and all the old and new miseries associated with it, seemed a long, long way from this place, where you could sit on Bean Point and watch the lights of the freighters glide under the towering, breathtaking Sunshine Skyway Bridge into the black emptiness of the bay, churning for the Tampa docks. In the daytime I worked in a tiny bureau with just two desks, sharing a rundown office with a middle-aged ad man who had one of the best names I have ever heard, Joe Romeo. On Saturday mornings he would come and bang on the door and take me fishing for trout on the saltwater flats of the bay, and at night he and his wife would cook them up with grits and beets and iced tea.
I lived in a two-bedroom apartment that was two bedrooms bigger than I needed, since I still didn’t have any furniture, but the rent was right and it was less than a block from the beach and the only supermarket anywhere close. I drove a silver 1966 Mustang convertible with virtually no rust. It had a 289 V-8 that scared the pelicans, and a loose front end that scared me. But it was pretty, from a distance.
For supper, on those nights we didn’t fry fish at Joe Romeo’s, there were two choices: a rambling joint for the tourists called Fast Eddie’s that served a good blackened grouper sandwich; and an equally touristy upscale joint called the Sandbar, where you could watch the sunset with your sweetie, if you could find one who was still speaking to you. For breakfast, there was a tiny place called Candy’s right on the water, where you could get a gravy and biscuit and eat it outside. I thought, truly, I was in heaven.
The newspaper gave me time and opportunity to tell stories about everything from poachers in the beautiful, mysterious Everglades to the bizarre case of a woman who had been beaten and brain-damaged by an attacker seventeen years in the past, but it only became a murder case when she finally died from a seizure brought on by her injuries. I wrote about criminals who stalked the elderly, about the last Florida panthers on earth, dying slowly in the Everglades. I wrote about mercury poisoning in the swamps and wetlands, and interviewed a man who married his own daughter and swore, “I didn’t know.” (He also told me that once, when he worked at a bar in Vegas, he used a nail to punch a hole in the belt of Elvis’s jumpsuit, to give the King a little more room to shake it.) But mostly, I was a serious journalist.
I did some stupid things. I believed that because I had grown up the way I did, I was just inherently tougher than my more urbane coworkers, and could get away with more. On the story on poachers, I needed to talk face to face with at least one, to give the story teeth. It is not hard to find a poacher in Florida, just look for a man with an airboat in his driveway. He will know somebody, if he does not have a dozen gator hides curing in his backyard, himself. I arranged not so much an interview as just a quick meeting, a chance to see them, ask a question or two, and then leave. The men I saw were not rustic heroes, just criminals, stealing from nature. They did not see what they were doing as anything wrong; their daddies had been free to take game when they wanted, however they wanted. But they knew they would be fined and maybe even go to jail if they were caught, and I was a risk to that. I was no risk, in my eyes. They did not give me their names. I did not look at their tag number. But as one of them reached behind the seat of his truck and slid out a .22 rifle—poachers like the .22 because it has a softer report and won’t draw the game wardens to them—I thought for just a second that I might die there. I am not trying to be melodramatic. Reporters live for war stories, except the ones who have been so genuinely frightened in so many terrible places that they do not need to scare themselves all over again with their own memories. But for just a second, on that sand road in the middle of the scrub, I knew I had risked my life for five or six paragraphs.
But that was only a second of bad time, lost in the rest. Some people spend lifetimes looking for the perfect fit. I had it for a while, as the South Suncoast bureau chief of the St. Petersburg Times. I worked for an editor named Rob Hooker who defended his reporters and had a light hand when he edited a story, and for the first time in my life I felt like I had found a place where I could stay a while. My momma gave me my first home. The St. Pete Times gave me my second. The editor who hired me, Tash, had called it a place where people take their work more seriously than they do themselves. The work was what mattered, not where you went to school. I could do the work, and even as I did it I learned one agonizing lesson that would make me better at what I do.
I have said a few times that I try to lend dignity and feeling to the people I write about, but that is untrue. All you do is uncover the dignity, the feeling, that is already there. I learned to do that there.
In the spring of 1990, we learned that a woman in St. Petersburg had given birth to twins, joined at the chest, what people usually call Siamese twins. My editors sent me to try and convince the family to write about it. I made the mother a simple promise. I would portray her children as two distinct personalities, as little babies with a complicated medical condition, nothing more. I said I would treat the story, their story, with dignity. I kept my promises.
I spent months on what would be a tragic tale. I followed them from their birth, wrapped in each other’s arms, and through their surgeries, and finally followed their young mother and father through two funerals.
It was as heartbreaking a thing, on a purely personal level, as I had ever done. I will always remember the day I saw them in the nursery’s intensive care unit, the first time I had ever seen so many lives so near to death. To me, it seemed that anything, a faint breeze, a whisper, a loud sound, anything, could take them away. And in the middle of all those tiny, delicate, premature babies were the twins. I wanted to make perfect the way I described that place, those babies, and make other people see what I saw and feel what I felt. Almost all the time, you just paint a picture with the words and let people make up their own minds and emotions, but this time I wanted to force them to feel.
“Nurses on the late shift called the twins Miracle Babies,” I wrote, “but there never seem to be enough miracles to go around. Most babies in the neonatal intensive care unit at All Children’s Hospital are born too soon, incomplete. Some last for a while and then slip away, like beads off a broken string.”
We are taught in this business to leave our emotions out of a story, to view things with pure and perfect objectivity, but that was impossible on this story. I learned that objectivity is pure crap, if the pain is so strong it bleeds onto the yellowed newsprint years, or even decades, later.
The momma and daddy and one of the grandmas thanked me for it, sometime later, and I didn’t know what to say.
Florida really is a magical place, from the wonders of Disney World, where Goofy is really a sweating freshman from Clemson inside a mountain of plastic, to the dark sorcery of Miami, where the canals clog with the floating carcasses of sacrificed chickens and an occasional headless goat. You see some things there that you just don’t see anywhere else in the world, ludicrous things and frightening things and amazingly sad things. I will never forget sitting on the hood of my car on a spring day in 1990, and seeing a swamp fly. (I do not mean that I saw an insect in a swamp, but that I saw an entire swamp, fly.) The DEA and Manatee County Sheriff’s Office had overestimated the amount of dynamite needed to blast some little islands of ganja to smithereens, and when they pressed the button an entire swamp—trees, dirt, water, gators, snakes, turtles and frogs—rose up into the wild blue yonder. I sat there and watched it all rain down again, careful not to let any moccasins drop into my mustang, and went home and wrote a story about it. The next day I got a call from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, asking me if I was incensed by the inhumanity of it. I told him I felt kind of bad for the frogs and turtles but that, no, I felt no remorse whatsoever for the snakes and, to tell the truth, had once had a very bad experience with gators.
There was only one job in the world I would have traded my own for, and that was the one in Miami. It was a reporter’s nirvana, a place where smash-and-grab robbers stalked tourists with chunks of concrete, where whole skyscrapers stood on foundations of drug money, where the Tontons Macoute of Haiti reached across the Florida Straits to kill political enemies, and old men with hatred infusing every cell of their bodies played soldier in the Glades, dreaming of the day they could kill Castro.
Our Miami job came open in my second year at the paper, and I begged for it. I didn’t speak any Spanish or Creole, and what I knew about the complicated geopolitical situation I had read in books. I had never even been there. But the editors decided they would rather have a reporter who could write good stories for their newspaper than someone who could sound good at a dinner party and shift languages like a Lexus changes gears.
The editors put the announcement on the bulletin board in the newsroom, and a friend read it to me over the phone. It was written by John Costa, the deputy managing editor. It said, simply, that I was going to Miami.
“… and one of them, Bragg or Miami, will have to give.”