Michael Ludden's Blog, page 5

Bike Week — Daytona Beach… it’s us vs. them…

Bike Week in Daytona Beach. Thousands of guys and their hogs. And their bikes. This is about as much fun as you will ever have.

Leather, fumes, dope, beards, boots, swastikas, tattoos, roaring exhausts, people staggering, people yelling, people taunting.

I am with a guy who has a reputation for saying exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. For outdoing himself. This will be a significant factor in the day.

Right now, we are talking to people, taking pictures, taking it all in.

We come upon a custom Harley that is the finest of the custom Harleys that crowd the street. It’s gold and chrome and tricked out like you wouldn’t believe. It is stunning. My friend is taking pictures of it.

Along comes a woman. I can tell this because she has practically no clothes on. She says it’s her bike, actually, her man’s bike. She climbs aboard and proceeds to display herself across the handlebars and the seat. She’s had a few drinks. She’s feeling pretty good. And warm. She’s feeling very warm.

She begins to remove the last of her clothing. Turns to the camera. Smiles.

My gracious and well-mannered associate proceeds to tell her to get her large unappealing derriere off the frickin bike while he’s trying to photograph it. He does not say it nicely.

He sees only the bike. I see a guy.

He’s mebbe 6’5”… 350. And he’s coming fast.

I grab my buddy. We run, pushing our way into the Boot Hill Saloon, the most famous biker bar in the city.

You thought it was intense on the street.

My buddy soon decides the best picture is a wide-angle from above; in this case, from a vantage point atop the bar. It seems like a great idea, the only objections coming from the bartender holding the Louisville Slugger, the two guys my friend has just drenched in beer and the women whose pitcher my friend dumped on the aforementioned guys. And all the pissed-off drunk bikers who are now calling him names.

You think he’s gonna take that kinda grief? Hell no. After all, he’s got me. And there’s only 200 or so of them. So he cusses em out. All of em.

I tell him he’s on his own and bolt for the door. He follows.

Not completely under his own steam.

It was so horrific, the jurors were holding their hands over their ears…

Kind of a tossup to decide who was the nastiest guy behind bars in Florida. But a lotta votes would go for Freddy Goode.

Freddy molested a couple of little boys and murdered them. There were other assaults too, over the years, but it was those killings that got Freddy the electric chair.

Freddy sent gruesome letters to the parents, describing in detail what he’d done. He told the judge he was glad to be sentenced to death, because, if they let him out, he’d grab more youngsters.

Freddy liked pushing people’s buttons. At his trial, he insisted on handling his own defense. That was just so he could brag some more, taunt some people.

Some of the jurors held their hands over their ears.

Lot of people despised him. They put him on death row at Florida State Prison, not only because he earned it, but because he’d be safer there.

Freddy’s dad once told me it was obvious the kid was a nasty wackjob early on.  His third grade teacher sent a note home, calling the kid “frightening” and asking what would happen if he committed horrible crimes someday and got off by pleading mental illness.

Third grade.

Freddy spent time in hospitals and rehab. People kept letting him out. Then one night, his dad was watching tv, saw the news about a local kid who’d been raped and murdered. He stormed into his son’s room and accused him of it. He was shouting so loudly, the next-door neighbor heard it and called 911.

That’s how Freddy got caught.

He gleefully told the cops… “You can’t do anything to me… I’m sick.”

I wanted to make a surprise visit to the prison one time. Ordinarily, newspaper people had to ask for permission. I didn’t want to give them time to dust off the place. So I called Bobby Brantley, a state legislator, asked him if he’d ride up there with me, so we could just stroll through the gate.

We’re walking down the hall on death row. Freddy spots the guy and yells out to him. He’d recognized his face.

“Aren’t you that state lawmaker?” he says. “You can do anything you want, right?”

Brantley wasn’t real comfortable talking with Freddy, but he walked over to the cell when Freddy said there was something urgent he needed to tell him.

Freddy whispered.

“Can you get me some little boys? Maybe just one? For a little while?”

Now Brantley’s walking away, shaking his head.

“You don’t understand…” Freddy yells after us.

“I’m stuck in here.”

How to tell when politicians are lying…

This post first published on Jan. 19…

It’s when their mouths are open.

This is in Beaufort, South Carolina. Folks here are begging Georgia Democrat Jimmy Carter to stop by. Carter ‘s running for president. He can’t make it.

But Walter Mondale can come. Not long from now, this senator from Minnesota will become the vice president. Folks here are pretty excited, so they lay on a big shrimp boil. Mondale’s late arriving, but he makes up for it with sirens.

Pictures. Handshakes. Pictures.

Finally, Mondale gets to sit. People address him as Mr. Vice President. He smiles.

Now… we haven’t had an election just yet, he says.

Then… disaster.

You can picture us all sitting there, frantically looking back and forth at each other.

Did I just see what I thought?

The senator is putting shrimp right into his mouth and crunching down on em. I say crunching because Mr. Mondale ain’t peeling the shrimp. He’s just eating em. He’s working his teeth over THE TAILS! Looking around to see if it’s ok to pull the tails back out of his mouth.

Delicious, he says.

Mighty fine.

Who’s gonna handle this!?

Local politico – mighta been the mayor, or mebbe it was the head of the local Democratic party — quietly taps the senator on the arm.

Sir, he begins. Just one moment… please. The senator pauses.

Those shrimp. Those shrimp are unpeeled, sir.

The man was not prepared for this. Frankly, neither man was prepared for this.

Aah, says the senator.

In a few moments, an eager diplomat across the table has instructed him on shrimp peeling. Two swipes, once you get good at it. Mr. Mondale carefully peels his first shrimp. Puts it in his mouth.

Aah, he says.

Very good. I like em even better this way.

You’re about to lose an arm…

This post originally published on Nov. 29, 2013…

Another story from that circus that was holed up for the winter. This was in the boonies in Central Florida. The Clyde Beatty show.

I’m out walking around among tents and cages, tigers roaring, monkeys chattering. I’m looking for a good story. Amid tractor trailers, railroad cars, scaffolding, I see a guy sitting on a bench, wrangling with a wrench on some kinda broken gimcrack. Next to him are two rows of cages. Inside, buncho tigers. Big ones.

There’s an aisle between the cages about three feet  wide. I’m talking to this guy. He’s one of these guys who takes some time to think about what he’s gonna say. Then he takes some time saying it.

I just wanna know where the people are who run the place, the people who decide when it’s time to let the lions and the tigers and the elephants and the monkeys sit still.

He’s telling me who, where to find em, what it’s like being off the road. What it’s like being on the road.

Then, casually… ’’You’re about to lose an arm there, fella.”

I’m standing next to a tiger, Bengal mebbe. About the size of a Jeep. I’m looking at the tiger. He’s looking at me.

“We don’t walk between the cages,” he says. “We go around.”

Says the tiger is real fast. Pretty sure the guy’s laughing at me, or he should be.

Either way.

Write your obit before you leave…

 

This post first published on Nov. 22, 2013…

It was a court proceeding in a weird drug case. Woman loved to get high on coke, especially by injection. Problem was, she had an intense fear of needles.

So she’d go out with some friends. They’d hold her down and shoot her up. And the hold her down part was for real. She would put up a fight with everything she had.

A judge was gonna decide whether the fact that she died after one of these little parties was purely an accidental overdose, or whether her buddies oughta be charged with manslaughter.

Their defense: It was what she wanted. Prosecutor: This is some nasty stuff and somebody needs to go away for awhile.

Judge agreed. The party gang got held over for trial.

So I write about what a sinister thing it is for a drug to be so enchanting that someone would subject themselves to their worst fear to enjoy it. And keep doing it.

I get a phone call the next day from a guy who says the dead girl was his sister. And he does not appreciate the fact that I held up her dirty laundry for everybody to read about. He’s pretty pissed. Says he’s gonna shoot me with his new deer rifle.

He proceeds to tell me what kinda car I drive and where I live. He is correct on both counts. At the time, I lived a good ways outa town, no listed phone, etc. Mebbe he’s been following me.

I try to reason with him, no luck. So I hang up. Guy who sits next to me has overheard some of this, asks what it was all about. I tell him.

Then I go to lunch. When I get back, my boss calls me into his office.

What’s this about a death threat?

Not a big deal, I say. Guy’s pretty upset right now. It’ll blow over.

But my boss is totally pissed off. Don’t you ever get a death threat without telling me about it, he says.

No big deal, I say.

I’m not concerned about your frickin safety, he says.

I want you to write your obit before you leave.

Take us to some voodoo

This post first published on Jan. 8, 2014

Spent the day talking to bureaucrats in Port au Prince about the plight of the Haitians, about why somebody with zero education would try to climb into a leaky homemade boat the size of a bathtub and try to make it to Florida. Wind, waves, sharks, heat.

And, if you get caught trying to leave, mebbe a bullet. One for you. More for anyone in your family.

Everywhere, there are kids hawking carved dolls, jewelry and trinkets, moms carrying baskets of brightly colored cloth on their heads. Dads pissing in the street.

Stench. Despair.

Long day.

It’s dark. Two of us. We come out of the hotel. Lots of guys offering lots of things. But one guy’s got a big Chevy Caprice. We hand him a twenty.

Take us to some voodoo.

He drives through town, outa town, long past the paved road. Now we’re just meandering through the woods, no road, we serpentine around the trees. Long time goes by. Then, we can hear the drums. A clearing near the water.

A guy walks out.

What do you want?

We open our wallets. He smiles.

We’re sitting around the circle. It’s made of fine sand. There are six guys, totally ripped, hitting clubs on hollowed logs. Faster than you can count, harder than you can imagine. They are indescribably impressive. Most guys I know could do this for about three minutes. These guys may never stop.

Women sing, dance frenetically across the circle. Pass rum. One appears to bite the head off a live chicken. Not sure, though. Could be some kinda stunt. But this is real: A couple guys are tearing burning coals from firebrands with their teeth.

In the midst of it all, a young girl is making an intricate design in the sand, pouring salt between her thumb and forefinger. Her work is incredible.

Beyond the light of the fires, we can see a round building with a thatched roof, right against the water. We have to get onto our hands and knees to crawl through a tiny opening to get inside.

Immediately, my head is spinning. There’s something in there. Dope… decaying something… maybe just air that’s generations old. A sandy floor around a fire pit, masks, drawings on the wall, carvings. I stay inside long enough to look around, then stagger back through the crawl space.

The dancing is full bore now, dozens of people jammed tight against each other, leaping, shaking their heads from side to side, tongues lolling.

Finally we go.

In the morning, along the street, there are raw fish and vegetables for sale, covered in a dense carpet of flies. It’s close to 100 degrees.

I meet a Catholic priest who shows me an orphanage full of tuberculosis and conjunctivitis. I say I’ve seen it in half the faces since I’ve been here.

Everyone has it, he says.

We walk. Behind a small house, two men are building a boat.

Engaged to the ugliest woman on the planet…

This post first published on Jan. 2, 2014…

She’d been a receptionist for the newspaper for decades. She had a feeling something was wrong. So she knocked on my door.

Take a look at this picture.

Imagine the ugliest woman you’ve ever seen. Multiply it by 10. This face was scary bad. A cold chill down your spine kind of face.

“Somebody just brought by a wedding announcement. This is the bride. The groom is a county deputy. He didn’t bring it. The girl didn’t bring it. Usually, it’s one or the other. And this is the crappiest photograph anybody ever submitted.”

Just to be on the safe side, we came up with a plan. Our suspicious receptionist would casually stop by the sheriff’s office, get a new signature from the groom.

That’s when the fun started.

The photograph of the woman… the record-breaking, mirror-breaking ugliest woman in the world…  actually was the property of the Department of Corrections. Said female was under sentence of death for a series of murders. Very nasty murders.

And so the wedding announcement was a prank. End of story? Not hardly.

This one took some investigating to put together.

The would-be victim of the gnarly wedding announcement was actually due for some payback, for a stunt he’d pulled.

It began with the new guy on the force. Night shift. Checking doors. This guy would drive around, stop at offices and closed-up stores, park the cruiser, walk to the door and rattle the knob. For eight hours.

First night, the one door he’d never again want to see. The old courthouse.

Set well back from the road. Surrounded by grandfather oaks. Side door. Long brick walkway, bordered on both sides by a hedge about 10 feet high. Streetlight, busted for the occasion.

It’s pitch black.

Picture a couple of guys hiding at the end of this walkway. And I don’t know how they managed this part, but they had succeeded in persuading a local tourist trap to lend them their gator. A very old, very stuffed, very big gator.

I’d seen this thing myself, in its commercial habitat. It was Old Florida, mebbe 16 feet long. You could cram basketballs inside his gaping jaws.

So here’s the newbie, walking down the narrow pathway between the towering hedges. Guy’s probably thinking about Stephen King right now.

He gets to the end of the walkway, hears a guttural moan. Steps closer.

Moan turns into a growl.

Big Boy comes flying at him out of the darkness.

Newbie cop did not draw his weapon. He did not call for backup. He did not demand to see some ID.

This sucker ran as fast and as far as he could, leaving behind his own cruiser, a dead gator and a couple of guys laughing so hard they coulda been heard across town.

Legend has it newbie then stopped by the house to change pants.

His revenge plot had style, but it fell short when he selected a lover just too ugly to be believed.

Otherwise, the lead perp of this conspiracy might have found himself “engaged” to a sweet young thing destined for the electric chair.

Going to jail for what!?…

This post first published on Dec. 6, 2013…

Miami to Haiti on Air France. We have just touched down on the runway.

All the sudden, the jet lurches violently sideways. Brakes screaming. People screaming. I look out the window. Here’s an old fart pedaling a bicycle, right down the center line of the runway.

He’s not looking at us. Guess he figures it’s his country. Bike’s as old as he is. He’s got two hens tied to the handlebars, two more tied over a little rack behind his seat.

We pull up to the gate. Actually it’s a doorway.

Tons of people inside. The big difference between this and, say, an American airport… I can’t really spot any booths, desks, gates, officials, places where you’re supposed to stand, signs.

There are a bunch of guys walking around carrying Uzis, though. This is 1980 and Baby Doc Duvalier is still in power. We won’t see airports this gunned up for another 20 years.

I’ve booked a car. Now I’m not real sure who to ask. I go up to a guy. Machine gun, sidearm, boots, puffy pants. All he’s missing is the bandolier.

Rental cars? I ask.

No answer.

I keep looking. Finally a guy with a little notepad comes up, asks if I’m the guy who wanted the car.

Do I stand out in this crowd?

Minute later, I am waiting outside, bag over my shoulder, as this guy drives up in a VW that might have something like 300,000 miles on it. No way to tell. None of the stuff on the dashboard works. It’s leaning to one side, lotta rust. Not sure who’s been sleeping in here.

Hands me the keys.

I hop in, head downtown. One thing you figure out real quick when you’re driving in Port au Prince. Other drivers do whatever they frickin please. And the whole thing about watching out that you don’t hit somebody…? Ain’t no big thing.

Same with the people. They wanna step in front of you. Might be the most interesting thing that happened to em all day.

At least the window works. It’s 100 degrees. No breeze.

Houses made out of scrap lumber, roofing material, chunks of billboard. Amid all the poverty, incredible artwork. The houses, the cars, everything is painted.

I get to the hotel. Holiday Inn. Go to the bar. Nice wood, somber lighting, smooth jazz. Americans are tucked in here. I start talking with a guy who turns out to be a longtimer in these parts.

How was the flight, he asks. I tell him about the cyclist on the runway with the birds, how that was nothing compared to the crazy drive into town.

You rented a car?

At this, he is stunned. He points out he would never rent a car in this country for any reason.

Never.

I don’t wanna go to jail, he says, for running over a chicken.

You can get in the cage with the lion if you want…

 

This post first published on Nov. 7, 2013…

Guy on the coast has his own little zoo. Some big cats. 40 acres, some bears, some monkeys, some birds.

Now he wants to sell the place. That’s gotta be tricky. I drive out with a photographer named Dennis Wall, who has kind of a wry sense of humor.

We talk to the guy awhile, walk around. Dennis gets a buncho pictures, glamour shots of the animals. We’re walking by one of the cages. It’s a mountain lion. Guy says the lion is super tame, a really nice lion.

“You can get in there with him if you want.”

We laugh.

“No kidding. People do. You sit down, he’ll come over and rest his head in your lap. You can scratch him.”

Who said my momma didn’t raise no fools?

I open the cage.

Dennis has his camera up. That’s after he tells me I’m a frickin idiot.

I climb inside. Sit in the back, lean against the wall. Lion saunters over. (Lions don’t walk, am I right? They pad. They slink. They move noiselessly.) Saunter is ok in this case.

He saunters over, puts his head in my lap. Proceeds to purr, which is very cool, because his purr is way more satisfying than the kind of purr you associate with, say, a house cat.

It’s more of a rumble. From a truck.

I scratch behind his ears. At this point, we are brothers. And I wanna hang out.

Dennis gets a couple cool pictures. Gives me one.

I send it to my mom, just to dispel any doubts.

The streets are paved with gold….

 This post first published on Oct. 21, 2013

Everybody knew the Cubans could play ball. Seemed like so many guys there, born with gloves in their hands.

There was a period, back in 1980, during the Mariel Boatlift, when the city of Miami started putting tons of Cuban refugees under the old Orange Bowl. When I say under, I mean on the ground, under the bleachers. Cots, blankets, big piles of empty wine bottles.

Over their heads, lush turf, glistening paint, a scoreboard like something they’d only seen on television, lots of places to buy food, when a game was on. But these folks couldn’t go up there, not even to look.

Eight long weeks in the heat. The government brought em stuff to eat and drink. People sneaked in some booze. Nobody was gonna grumble.

So they sat. They smoked.

One day a city guy shows up with a bat and ball, a couple of old gloves. Guys grab em and sprint out to the lawn outside the stadium. Old guys and kids and wives and girlfriends follow to sit and watch.

The guys toss their shirts. And what they know right now is that they have just a few minutes. Then the buses will arrive to take em miles from here, out to the middle of nowhere to a tent city where the controversy over whether these people are going to be allowed to stay in the United States is going to be just that much more muted. Further out of sight.

They’ll stay there, behind fences.

So they race onto the field, begin to throw it around. But this is not casual pitch and catch. We’re talking 50 yards apart, snapping off gorgeous throws, long and hard, that crack into the glove. They move like cats.

A guy picks up the bat, walks over to a bald spot. Pitcher cranks one at him, whistles it down the middle. Boom. Guy out in center sprints back… back… leaps, stretching for it. He pulls it in, spins, fires it home. And that ball is comin.

The people cheer.