Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (2 page)

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We came by U-Haul trucks, arriving packed like Life Savers on transat-

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lantic jumbo jets, riding flimsy wooden rafts across the powerful Gulf

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Stream, and sneaking across the Mexican border in the dark of night.

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We hail from Yankeeville, the Heartland, the Bible Belt, south of the

border and the equator, the Far East, the Wild West, and about every

country you can and can’t pronounce.

Many move to Florida hoping to start a new life and become what-

ever they thought they couldn’t be in the cloudier place they are from.

Such dreams are fed by media and tourism hucksters who for nearly a

century have portrayed the state as a magical paradise. Today Florida is

the world’s top tourism destination. More than 87 million people visit

each year to play, and another 19 million live here to do the same.

Most transplants were seduced by Florida tourism promotions be-

fore settling here, myself included. Television images of Florida’s white

sand beaches and Cypress Gardens water-skiers planted a kernel in

my mind that the state was one big playground. That anything was

possible.

Like many, I got my first taste of that paradise on a childhood vaca-

tion, the longest my family of five had ever ventured. Loaded in a Ford

tank, we wheeled down from north Alabama to Panama City Beach,

what many call the Redneck Riviera, a term I still embrace like a drunk

uncle.

I had never seen the ocean before, and I rode the waves on a blow-

up raft until my fingers pickled. Lathered in coconut-scented Hawaiian

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Tropic, I got the worst sunburn of my life. I built sandcastles with new

friends. My typically straight-laced dad’s spirits rose with every swig

of a Budweiser, which he occasionally put down to play with us kids in

the Gulf. My mom actually put on a bathing suit for maybe the second

time in her life.

I learned to swim that summer in the pool of a motel with multicol-

ored doors across the street from the Miracle Mile Amusement Park

with a roller coaster that I thought was a hundred stories high. You

could say that vacation eventually led me here. Years later, burned out

from chasing daily news deadlines, I joined the ranks of hundreds of

thousands who move here each year to start a new life.

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Though I’m not a biker, furry, nudist, sideshow performer, or any

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of the other lifestyles touched on in this book, I’m a voyeur of the un-

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usual, which is a category of fringe in itself. This brings me to the most

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elusive factor in “Why Florida?” Did Florida make me fringe, or was I

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drawn here because I already was a little gonzo? I say the latter, but

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many I spoke with couldn’t answer that question about themselves,

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much less speculate about their fellow fringers. To a fringe voyeur, this

conundrum only adds to Florida’s mystique. I have no plans to move.

Being a Florida native, my husband, James, can’t help but have a

little fringe in his veins, too, although he is more reserved than I. He is

a multimedia designer, a blend of artist and techno geek, and was my

sidekick, sometimes begrudgingly, on some explorations for this book.

While he had trepidations about what I might experience, I began

the project with some fear that I would find little that would surprise

me. I was wrong. Though rarely shocked, I discovered how much I

didn’t know about my sunny state and, more important, about human-

ity in general. However weird or different a person’s lifestyle may seem,

whatever furry costume they wear, exotic pet they bed with, spirit

they worship, or skin they expose, these activities do not wholly define

them. Things are not always as they appear. People who dare to pursue

an offbeat passion can be quite conventional in other aspects of their

lives. I greatly thank all those in this book who expanded this insight.

I applaud them for embracing the fringe. And I thank the universe for

Florida, a state where fantasies can come true.

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Menagerie of Fla-zoons

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On a sweltering summer afternoon at a Largo community baseball

park, a Little League mom fusses over infants inside two fancy strollers

complete with miniature parasols. A ten-year-old boy nervously steps

up to bat, his oversized helmet floating on his head. His stout dad be-

hind the fences barks for him to step closer to the plate, while his mom

in the stands yells for him to move back.

I’ve joined a friend to watch her son play ball. It seems to be a typi-

cally American Little League scene, but in Florida, you don’t have to dig

deep to reach Middle Earth.

“Did you see the capuchins?” My friend asks excitedly.

I dazedly scan the stands, half-expecting to see a family circus act.

I have no idea what she’s talking about.

“The monkeys! They’re right over there.” She points to the baby

strollers.

My friend is thrilled because she’s crazy about monkeys, not because

it’s in any way unusual for someone to bring their exotic pets to the

games. She’s brought the family lemur to more than one.

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Today Otis, her ring-tailed pet, is hanging out on a carpeted kitty-

cat tree inside a bedroom closet that she converted into his cage. She

took apart the accordion doors, stretched wire across the bare frame,

and painted the inside walls Madagascar-forest green.

My Lemur Mom friend bought Otis from a neighbor who breeds

prosimians in his small backyard. He claims to have sold some to ac-

tress Kirstie Alley, who has a house in Clearwater. Lemur Mom got a

discount because she and the kids sometimes help out her neighbor

with his various animals. Once they snake-sat his boa constrictor.

“Wanna see ’em?” she asks about the capuchins. Before I can answer,

she hightails it to the strollers. When she returns, she’s cradling some-

thing wrapped in a baby blanket, Capuchin Mom on her heels. I’m still

trying to digest that at least two out of about fifteen team moms not

only own exotic primates, but also bring them to their son’s baseball

games.

My friend pulls back the baby blanket, revealing a tiny creature. He

blinks his big eyes and puts his spindly little fingers to his mouth. He’s

wearing diapers far too small for even a premature human baby.

Capuchin Mom has three human sons, too. She’s quick to inform me

that she’s licensed to have the monkeys as well as a lemur she left at

home, but is reluctant to tell me where she bought them or how much

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she paid. “Normally they are about eight thousand dollars or more,

but I know the breeder and he gave me a deal,” she says. She graduated

to monkeys from the less-expensive lemurs because “they are more

humanlike.”

Capuchins are one of the hottest exotic pets at the moment. This

one is just a few months old but will never weigh more than two and

half pounds. The pads of his tiny fingers and toes are as soft as velvet.

His face is a mask of light fuzz punctuated by dark eyebrows and set

against a head of dark fur with a widow’s peak and sideburns. Spanish

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explorers who discovered the monkeys in South American rainforests

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thought their markings made them look like the hooded monks of the

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Order of Friars Minor Capuchin. This infant capuchin is more likely to

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wear a robe than climb a tree.

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“I have to get him back,” Capuchin Mom says. “I don’t want him to

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get sunburned.”

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When I later mention the odd Little League Monkey Mom encoun-

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ter to my Florida-born friends, one says matter-of-factly, “I used to

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date a girl who had a monkey,” as if owning a wild jungle animal is the

most natural thing in the world.

Another laughs, remembering his son’s exotic lizards, frogs, and

constrictors that he, dear old Dad, often had to search for when they

escaped into the neighborhood. “I finally just told a neighbor she could

have the boa if she wanted it,” he says. “I was tired of chasing it down.”

Topping them both, a cohort describes going to parties at the home

of a wealthy central Florida couple who served dinner overlooking a

backyard filled with big cats, that is lions, tigers, and such—beasts that

could eat you for dessert.

Monkeys, giant snakes, and big cats—why wouldn’t these exotic

animals seem as native as pelicans and alligators in Florida? Monkeys

have been running loose all over central and south Florida for decades,

swinging through trees at Silver River State Park, stealing oranges from

Orlando backyards, and hustling tourists for fruit at a Motel 6 parking

lot in Dania. A renegade rhesus macaque, a.k.a. the Mystery Monkey

of Tampa Bay, had more than eighty-three thousand Facebook fans in

2012 and was pictured on a local digital billboard with the cheer, “Stay

Free Mystery Monkey!”

When Miami gets a freeze, locals have to watch out for falling six-

foot Mexican green iguanas that have gone into hibernation. The Ev-

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erglades slithers with thousands of Burmese pythons that grow longer

than a car and weigh as much as a grown man. Carnivorous Nile moni-

tors, anacondas, piranha, monk parakeets, prairie dogs, and African

rats as big as housecats—the list of exotic species spotted roaming

Florida is as long as a lemur’s tail.

And those are just the ones that were freed or escaped over the years.

Thousands more live in captivity. They reside in theme parks, roadside

animal attractions, breeding farms, research facilities, backyard zoos,

refuges, gilded mansions, and mobile homes. Some twelve thousand

shipments of them come into the Port of Miami every year. Many are

passing through on their way to another state, but a good number stay

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and breed. The subtropical climate makes Florida a natural incubator.

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Exotic animals help fuel the state economy. Florida’s reptile trade

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alone is a $280 million industry, cornering 20 percent of the U.S. mar-

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ket, according to the U.S. Association of Reptile Keepers.

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Florida has so many exotic wild animals—exhibited and personal

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pets—that state and federal agencies don’t attempt to keep track of

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them all. “Closest I could estimate would be a lot,” says Jenny Tinnell, a

non-native animal biologist with the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conserva-

tion Commission (FFWCC). “Bottom line: We don’t know that answer.”

Officials also can’t say how many people own exotic animals since

not all require permits and some owners illegally keep them. The best

indicator is that four thousand facilities are licensed to house a variety

of the more dangerous and invasive animals. You don’t need a permit

for an Australian sugar glider, chinchilla, parrot, tarantula, hedgehog,

a variety of lizards, and dozens of others small enough to hold in one

hand; you can buy and sell them on Craig’s List.

In short, Florida is one big menagerie. I’m speaking not only of the

thousands of exotic animals but also of the Floridians who do almost

anything to make them a part of their family. They are a human subspe-

cies, a distinct mutation; I call them Fla-zoons, my play on the scientific

term “neozoon,” meaning introduced species. They range from a mall

clerk who saves up for a sugar glider, to a neo-menagerist who trades

in his life insurance policy for a white lion cub, to the hundreds of vol-

unteers who shovel poop and clean cages just to get close to beasts that

could bite off their face.

As survival of the fittest is a rule of nature, so it goes for the Fla-

zoons. Some find they just can’t deal with a snake once it grows past

ten feet or a teething lemur that starts chewing on the mini-blinds and

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sometimes friends. In efforts to keep overwhelmed pet owners from

releasing their exotic children into the Florida wilds, the state started

holding Animal Amnesty Days in 2006. Unlicensed owners can anony-

mously hand over their wild critters with no fear of penalty.

One of these events is being held on a Saturday morning in a grassy

lot owned by Busch Gardens® theme park in Tampa. The FFWCC is ac-

cepting orphaned exotic critters within earshot of the screams of riders

on loop-de-loop roller coasters. Nearby, giraffes, elephants, and lions

roam the park’s meticulously landscaped Serengeti Plains. FFWCC and

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park workers, meanwhile, mill around a tent of exotic castoffs that al-

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ready reeks of musk and animal poop.

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At the intake table, Lynn, a solid woman in an oversized zookeeper

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shirt, holds a knotted pillowcase that droops like it’s filled with twenty

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pounds of sand. She unties it and pulls out a thick 8-foot-long ball py-

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thon, a constrictor with a dazzling pattern of brown and black scales.