Reporter Rich Mullins helps the Coast Guard scrub bird droppings off of a buoy. Photo by Crystal Lauderdale / Tampa Tribune
By Rich Mullins / The Tampa Tribune
Motoring in a small Coast Guard craft through the waves off St. Petersburg, Greg Bruzik scans the horizon and spots his nemesis.
“There he is, Enemy No. 1,” says Bruzik, a Coast Guard petty officer second class. The enemy is not a Colombian speedboat full of cocaine or a container ship full of terrorist bombs. This nemesis is black and white, bigger than a duck and a federally protected species.
The osprey circles us, menacingly, I think, as we motor up to a signal buoy a couple of miles offshore. Bruzik explains that it’s entirely possible this osprey is the main culprit fouling all over this buoy, Bruzik’s buoy, and those biologically natural droppings are a problem of major proportions.
Now before you flip the page to enjoy a story of less graphic detail, consider whether you like having gasoline in your car. If so, it’s worth giving a little respect to Bruzik and other Coast Guard crews in one of the least glamorous corners of the U.S. military armada.
Here’s why. Florida receives nearly all its gasoline by tanker barge from Texas, and those barges steer their way into Tampa Bay through a gantlet of narrow channels dug in the sea floor - channels marked by a constellation of signal posts, blinking lights and other markers. Bruzik and other Coast Guard personnel fix those buoys and signals and generally battle osprey guano and other less pleasant debris.
Without the deliveries, you have no regular unleaded. Enjoy your walk to work.
The First Stop
“On a really hot day, the guano kicks up into a dust, and it’s pretty nasty - a biohazard,” Bruzik explains as we jump from a crimson Coast Guard boat onto a signal platform covered with paper-white bird guano, three inches deep in some spots.
Several signal lights hang off the platform like electronic gargoyles on a gothic church, each powered by a battery and a jet-black solar panel. During daylight, the solar panel charges the battery so the light shines all night.
Tanker captains and barge pilots need to line up those lights to ensure they’re dead center in the path to their dock. Cover that solar panel with bird guano, and the solar panel has about as much electrical horsepower as a plank of plywood - zip.
Sure, tankers may have GPS to guide their way, but GPS is not foolproof, and without these signal lights, a tanker pilot may be left knowing that Tampa Bay is simply “that-away, maybe, probably.”
Scrub, Scrub
The platform on our list today is about a mile offshore and rises about 20 feet above the waterline. It’s held up by several tall poles sunk into the ocean floor. Climbing on top, our feet crunch into a combination of dry guano and fresher deposits slippery as grease.
Mere words fail to convey the aromatic trauma of inhaling a lungful of guano dust. Imagine, if you will, a cloud of pure ammonia, rotten fish fumes and dust from lizard dung left in the sun for a week. Duty to journalism prevents me from jumping into the cool water below to escape the gut-turning stench.
Adding to the aroma on some days, osprey leave half-eaten or regurgitated fish on the platforms to dine on later at their leisure. For protection, we wear navy blue coveralls, and we could wear latex rubber gloves and dust masks - which is lovely to have on in 95-degree heat.
Bruzik hands over our super-duper high-tech tools of the day: a white, plastic scrub brush and a bucket of sea water.
“Here you go; have at it,” he says with no small grin, pointing to the solar panel.
I scrub off a layer of guano an osprey recently left on the solar panel and wash the panel to a shiny gleam. Bruzik wrenches open the battery box and clips an electrical tester to the wires. Plenty of voltage now, he says.
“This is going to save a life, right?” I say.
He chuckles. “Yeah.”
Outnumbered
This line of work makes it easy to start hating ospreys. One cruises by, and I decide I rather dislike its character. It probably has similar thoughts.
I’m in its living room, essentially - me and my Coast Guard crew. Florida is its habitat, and these platforms provide wonderfully luxurious homes for roosting midocean. Anyone damaging ospreys or their nests risks serious attention from a federal prosecutor.
So, Coast Guard crews can’t simply blast away at the osprey with automatic weaponry, as much as that might improve their mood after a day spent elbow-deep in guano.
Instead, Coast Guard Sector St. Petersburg, which patrols much of the west Florida coastline, has a crew of 23 people whose full-time duty is to maintain 1,400 signals and buoys from Cedar Key to south of Fort Myers.
Oh, and then there are the drunk boaters.
It’s a big ocean. Yet, boaters frequently manage to steer into the buoys and signal posts. In that event, they’re supposed to stop, call the Coast Guard and confess the crime so the Guard can repair the signal before the next tanker of premium unleaded wanders into port.
“I’ve never seen so many discrepancies anywhere,” says Christopher J. Brown, the Coast Guard officer in charge of the Aids to Navigation group, which works with signals and buoys. “Discrepancy” is Brown’s diplomatic way of describing signals all busted up by boaters, covered with osprey goop or otherwise damaged by Florida’s natural or unnatural phenomena.
One might think some nice, sharp wire spikes bolted on the platforms would dissuade osprey from landing there. Nope, Brown says. Doing his best “osprey squatting” impression, Brown scoots his feet back and forth and squats down saying, “They just slip their feet between the wires and sit.”
Benefits Ahoy
Still, as a profession, Coast Guard work can’t be beat, Brown says. The pay is better than many American blue-collar workers would receive: about $20,000 per year for starting enlisted staff up to about $40,000 per year for higher-ranking staff. Plus, members receive a housing subsidy to defray rent or mortgage payments and gold-standard federal health care benefits that would astound any human resources chief in the private sector.
Also, depending on years of service, rank and decorations, retiring members can receive a large part of their salaries for the rest of their lives, plus medical benefits for life for themselves and their spouse.
Compared with other military jobs, Coast Guard crews have a very low risk of finding themselves shooting at insurgents in Baghdad. Yet, they have many perks of military work that appeal to adrenaline junkies and ocean fanatics. Want to chase drug runners in speedboats? Sure. Want to protect wildlife? Why not? Want to jump from helicopters into the Arctic? Sign up here.
Motoring back to the dock after cleaning buoys, I decided the job might not be for me, full time, but for anyone looking to spend time on the water and serve their country, there are lots and lots of buoys waiting out there.
Reporter Richard Mullins can be reached at (813) 259-7919 or rmullins@tampatrib.com.
Rich Mullins tries his hand at air-conditioner repair.
Video: On The Job With The Cold Warriors
By RICHARD MULLINS
The Tampa Tribune
This time of year, Lloyd Mischkel looks more like a superhero with each passing day.
Owner of Lloyd’s Heating and Cooling, he holds the keys to climate-controlled paradise, just as the August heat starts broiling the Tampa Bay area with swampish temperatures somewhere between 90 degrees and lethal.
“Summer is what separates the men from the boys,” says Lloyd, 57, a stocky and spry ex-Navy man with tightly cut salt-and-pepper hair and thick, scarred hands.
For air conditioner repair crews, these baking summer months are the Super Bowl, Kentucky Derby and Daytona 500 squeezed into 90 days of work. There are more desperate customers than anyone could ever help. “The office gets 200 to 300 calls a day lately - my wife screens them,” says Lloyd, who runs the business with his spouse, Kaylon. “But some still get to me.”
In no small way, people such as Lloyd make modern Florida life possible. For without AC, this state could still be a scarcely populated patch of swampy orange groves and cattle ranches tended by die-hards who can tolerate heat that cripples Northerners.
Today, Lloyd is busier than usual after two technicians left last week for another company, part of the cutthroat competition for AC talent.
“It’s hard keeping good trained guys when business is like this - people offer them so much money,” Lloyd says. “Now I gotta hire new guys.”
Luckily for Lloyd, today he has an enthusiastic amateur to help out: me.
Running Backward
Time: 9:30 a.m. Temperature: 85.
Our first stop is in Tampa Palms, past an automated gate and deep within a condo development lined with trim landscaping and imported sports cars in the driveways.
Lloyd had already called the customer for a remote diagnosis: Is the fan running? Do you hear the compressor humming? Is it cooling at all?
Slipping between some box hedges, Lloyd spots the fatal problem. The unit outside suffers from a kind of personality disorder. The main fan started running backward, sucking air down into the unit instead of blasting it out.
The heat and bugs are already building and swirling up from the damp mulch around us. In 10 minutes, I get five mosquito bites.
Lloyd zips off a few bolts, wrenches off the motor and chucks it aside like a NASCAR pit crew heaving used tires. His phone rings three times during this one job - desperate pleas from other victims without AC.
“Yes, I should be there in 15, 20 minutes,” he tells one caller, pinching his phone between his ear and shoulder so he can use both hands to screw a new fan back into place.
With the flip of a switch, the fan roars back to life, and somewhere inside the home, cool air starts flowing from the vents.
Repair cost: $225.
That job was simple, Lloyd says. At least no one ransacked the unit. Lately, the price of scrap copper is pushing $3.50 a pound, triggering a bizarre wave of vandals to chop up AC units for the copper coils.
Lloyd makes mock karate chops on the machine and says, “You just cut here, here and here, and you can tear out the whole coil.” That’s a quick $50 at the scrap yard.
It’s a popular crime lately. The Hillsborough County Sherriff says new developments are easy pickings because people don’t suspect workers wandering around with spare parts.
It’s an oddly cruel crime in the summer, and Lloyd says he has churches, stores and residents call him saying, “Hey, the AC stopped,” and he finds a ravaged pile of metal where the AC unit used to be.
Rapid-Fire Tour
We make a rapid-fire tour of customers for a couple hours. One has a mucky swamp in the back yard and an AC unit low on Freon. Standing in the soppy goop, we pump in some more gas, and the fan starts blowing wicked hot air, just like it should.
Time: 11 a.m. Temperature: 115 (above the AC unit). Ugh.
The next customer has a balky unit up in a roasting hot attic with a bad Freon leak. That happens over time because the coils vibrate so much. That means ripping out the whole coil in an attic space the size of a car trunk.
Over time, the heat starts to wilt my ability to think. Thoughts slow down into a fuzzy fog of uncoordinated murmurs. What should I ask Lloyd next? Um, um, dunno. Maybe I’ll just let him ramble.
Time: Noon. Temperature: I’ll just say unimaginably hot in that attic.
AC 101
Personally, I loathe the swampy heat of summer. So the basic idea of air conditioning seems mystical to me - and it hasn’t really changed in the 100 years since it was invented.
A typical house AC unit compresses gas into a big coil - that square thing outside your house. All that pressure heats up the gas, and a big fan blows air across it, cooling it off.
A pump then pushes the high-pressure gas into your house and through a smaller coil of copper, typically in the attic or garage. Releasing that pressure lets the gas expand, and its temperature plummets close to 30 degrees.
Another fan then blows air across the ice-cold coils, through the vents and into your house. The gas then goes back outside to restart the cycle
What helps AC guys such as Lloyd pay their mortgages is that a single breakdown anywhere in the system wrecks the whole process - a faulty fan, a creaky compressor, some frayed control wires, a clogged drain pipe, a leak in the coils.
In case you’re curious, a hero of mine lately is Willis Haviland Carrier, the official “father of air conditioning,” who first took early prototypes of refrigeration and patented an Apparatus for Treating Air way back in 1906 and installed one in a Brooklyn, N.Y., printing plant.
Yes, Carrier, like the company that makes air conditioners.
I would guess that very soon after, the world saw its first spousal dispute over the thermostat.
The Benefits
Lloyd didn’t plan on this kind of work. He was born on a chicken farm in New Jersey and spent 20 years in the Navy steering ships and as chief engineer. Once, while afloat in a ship with a broken air conditioner, he had to learn AC repair by trial and error.
“We were 1,000 miles out at sea and couldn’t just call a repair guy,” Lloyd says. “So we figured it out, and I kept tinkering with it until I got serious.”
Once out of the Navy, a veterans program helped Lloyd pay for air conditioning classes at a community college. In the 1990s, he started a repair company in Birmingham, Ala. In 1997, he moved the business to Tampa and makes 75 percent of his sales between March and October.
Despite the near-guaranteed revenue of selling air conditioning in Florida, the work isn’t for everyone.
First, it’s deadly hot, because … well … there’s no air conditioning, which is pretty much why Lloyd shows up.
Hornets especially like to nest in the metal electrical boxes. In winter, snakes like to curl up against the warm compressor motors. Cats, for some reason, like to urinate on units in attics. And rats like to chew into ductwork.
“I’ve learned to look before I reach in somewhere,” Lloyd says.
For repair crews, busy days of summer stretch to 15 hours a day, seven days a week.
Still, the pay is good for a skilled trade. A midlevel repair technician can earn $60,000 to $70,000 a year. Experienced installers who put in new systems can earn $80,000 or more. (Installers have a better job, in my opinion. There’s less detective work, and it’s simpler to start fresh than to repair a creaking unit.)
Meanwhile, Lloyd offers a repertoire of miscellaneous wisdom he has absorbed over the years.
“Take a look at the price of eggs and chicken in 1950 and now,” Lloyd says. “What do you think eggs cost in 1950?”
“Um, I don’t know, Lloyd.”
“Forty cents a pound; same thing they cost now,” Lloyd blurts out. “It’s the deal of the century.”
Brandon Organ Transplant
Time: 1:22 p.m. Temperature: 92.
Like many things in life, fixing the problem sometimes just isn’t worth the trouble. You have to start over and eject the wheezing, leaking, squeaking problem whole hog.
That’s why we drive to Brandon, where Lloyd’s crew is installing a brand-spankin’-new unit for Eveline Zajac. But there’s a glitch. The crew has accidentally brought the wrong brand unit, a Goodman, not an Amana, and Eveline paid a premium for an Amana and wants one. We heave the Goodman back into Lloyd’s truck, and he heads to the distributor.
“It’s just miserable hot in there, and I even like it hot,” she says. “Normally, I’m under blankets freezing and my husband is laying there naked, sweating. But this was too much even for me.”
I start to suspect that more and more marital problems start at the thermostat.
Up on a ladder in the garage, Daniel Figueroa chops away at old ductwork, preparing it for a clean transplanted unit. Daniel is a wiry guy who works at the slow, deliberate pace of someone accustomed to the heat. If it’s 92 outside, it’s easily 100 in the nook of a space Daniel has to work.
An hour later, Lloyd returns with the right equipment and asks, “Has Daniel started talking to the unit? Sometimes he talks to the unit. It’s always a ‘she.’ Sometimes he rubs its sides or curses at it in Spanish. ‘Come on baby. Work for me.’”
Total cost of the job: $5,000.
One Day Closer
Lloyd has stacks of customers to visit - and he could probably work 24 hours a day until October and still not keep up with demand.
If Lloyd has one piece of advice for frantic customers who can’t reach a repair crew, it’s this: Get a second opinion.
He has seen too many AC companies diabolically offer “summer pricing”: higher prices just because people are hot and desperate. He has seen customers who had AC contractors just pull a price from midair - billing for $7,000 when the job should cost $2,000.
“Instead of spending two nights in a hotel for $200 and taking the time to shop around, they [customers] spend thousands more than they should,” Lloyd says.
Every once in a while, I run into native Floridians who scoff at the summer heat and say, “Awwww, this is nothing. I grew up with no AC.” That may be true, but I defy them to honestly say they would give up air conditioning to go back to their idealized, sticky youth.
As my day with Lloyd ends, I realize what’s really keeping him in business.
Each house we pass probably has an AC system whirring away. And with each passing hour, that unit is steadily growing older - slowly growing closer to a total breakdown. So is every AC unit in the Bay area.
In an hour, I’m home, reclining with a cool beverage in my own air-conditioned bliss.
Time: 5 p.m. Temperature: 80. (That’s as cool as my spouse accepts in the house.)
Somewhere, Lloyd and his crew are just getting going on their evening repair calls.
Reporter Richard Mullins can be reached at (813) 259-7919 or rmullins@tampatrib.com.
By Rich Mullins
The Tampa Tribune
Opie Cheek loves baseball. It’s the baseball players who drive him nuts.
With their sharp metal cleats, players dig, gouge, tear and grind up Opie’s pride and joy: the immaculate grounds of the Clearwater Threshers baseball stadium, where he is chief groundskeeper. Chief architect, cultivator and surgeon of the living field.
“Look at this! I mean, come on!” he says, scowling at the victimized grass just beyond the infield. Cautious shortstops keep backing up and wearing ugly holes in the grass. “Come on. Be a man!” (He mumbles to no one in particular.) “Get up close and do your job - on the clay. Wussy shortstops.”
Opie paces and offers a running monologue of baseball, of turf, of clay and players who damage his precious field, his temple to baseball. Some people can ramble all day about their kids, or their boss, or their neighbors. Opie can expound for hours with authority on grooming baseball parks.
He has been tending baseball grounds for more than 20 years. This is a guy with tattoos of baseball stadiums down his arms. And his field won the award for best grounds in the Florida minor leagues for three years running.
Thresher executives so respect Opie’s skills that they put him in TV commercials and made an “Opie” bobble head doll. It sold thousands.
Now Opie has a new guy to ramble to: me. Opie is my boss for the day. It’s 11 hours until game time and there is clay to rake, grass to trim, and lines to paint. But before I get to try any of that, he assigns me to the bottom of the groundskeeper food chain: cleaning out dugouts. A janitor job, really.
My Dugout Blast
Cleaning comes easily to me. My first real job was janitor of a church and day care center at age 14. And I can say with authority that toddlers with leaky diapers leave less mess than baseball players in a dugout.
“Pretty nasty, eh?” says Zach Rickerd, my dugout partner, nodding at the debris.
The dugout looks like a frat house got in a fight with a landfill and both sides lost. There are thousands of chewed-up paper cups, millions of sunflower seed husks, clumps of used chewing tobacco. I mean really, there’s a trash can right there. Can’t they use it?
Clearly, this job calls for power tools. I strap on a backpack Husqvarna power blower, the kind landscapers use, and start blasting the dugout with a 100-mph wind. Cups fly. Seeds shoot in spirals. Tobacco splats everywhere.
Zach and I dump the debris into a virginal trash can (are we the first to use it?), and Zach hooks up a hose to water down the whole place. Eventually, it’s presentable again.
How Hot Is It?
The water helps cut heat, which might as well be 350 degrees on the field if you ask me. The sun reflects around the concrete walls and it feels like gamma radiation cooking my eyeballs. The air even tastes hot.
Meanwhile, Opie produces a fountain of quotable wisdom.
1) On baseball players: “These cleats they wear. We call them roto-tillers, how they dig into my field. I can’t watch.”
2) On cutting designs in the grass: “It’s nice to have nice grass, but, like I said, clay is the science part. Grass is a craft.”
3) On the struggles of groundskeeping: “And they wonder why I drink.”
After dugouts, Opie gives me a promotion and fires up a red three-wheeled John Deere tractor that drags a metal rake to smooth out the clay border around the field. My job: Just drive around and don’t run into the wall.
Tractor. Now we’re talking. Four laps of the field and I’ve smoothed everything out. “Not bad,” Opie says.
My next job: Paint lines from home plate to the outfield poles. Those lines mark if balls go fair or foul - so it’s kind of vital to paint them straight.
To do this, you string a tight cord from point to point and drive over it with a kind of skateboard that holds a spray paint can. “Hey, Opie,” I yell, “I’m gonna paint your name in the outfield. Is that OK?”
“Go ahead, see what happens,” Opie laughs. At least I think he’s laughing. I didn’t hear really because I’m trying to keep the line straight. Opie judges my painted line and says “Straight, but kind of wide. Like a NFL sideline. TOUCHDOWN!!”
Temple 24/7
Here’s the thing about their baseball field. Opie and his crew consider it their personal territory. And no detail is too small. Earlier, Zach hand-wiped clay stains off the giant rubber rain tarp. It’s a tarp, and he’s doing the “wax on, wax off” thing.
The crew’s relationship to the field is like a father to his daughter. Of course you want your daughter to be beautiful, even on prom night. But you don’t want anyone to actually touch her, much less date her.
They don’t do this for the money, either. Entry-level pay for groundskeepers is about $8.50 per hour. They do it because they looooove baseball. They sit in the stands and watch games on their field, and that’s the payoff for a job well-done.
They regularly work from 8 a.m., through a game, to 10:30 at night, seven days a week for months on end. There are home games three to five days a week in the season, plus a lots of other events in between:
•Senior citizen baseball leagues that play four games a day some weeks.
•A string of high school-age league teams.
•Promotional soccer games and kickball tournaments. And no, that’s not a joke. Kickball.
And there are the concerts. “They drive 65-ton semi trucks full of concert equipment on my field,” Opie says. “I just can’t watch. They put plywood and rubber tarps on my grass for days. Plywood. And they wonder why I drink.” (That’s one of Opie’s favorite sayings.)
Pesky Players
About 3 p.m., the first baseball players emerge for batting practice and it’s break time.
We relax in the equipment garage, chug Powerade and sit on partially broken chairs between tractors and bags of fertilizer. There’s a TV bolted to the wall, and somehow it’s always turned to “The Jerry Springer Show” or “Cheaters.”
I’m starting to think Zach is a clean freak. He has changed into the official Threshers polo shirt for the game, and he’s spraying glass cleaner on his black sneakers. Rand Stollmack is outside hand scrubbing bases with dishwashing soap and a brush.
Rand got into groundskeeping 15 years ago after years in construction and a decision to try something “totally different.” Zach got a summer job doing this because his mom is a friend of Opie’s.
“This was my dream job,” Zach says. “I didn’t even care if they paid me.”
And Opie - well - he’s just been doing this forever. Did I mention the baseball park tattoos? Only a tattoo of his wife’s name, Cheryl, outranks the others.
When the game starts, I see why Opie and the crew go nuts watching the players. Right there a player grinds his cleats into my outfield. And there, a player smears my fresh foul line. Is that necessary?
I swear, if I see a player drop a paper cup in my dugout I’m not responsible for what happens next.
The Big Inning
For us in the crew, the big event of the game is mid-fifth inning “drag,” when we pull big metal grids around the infield to smooth out the clay. It’s our only really public event, and it’s kind of nerve-wracking because 8,900 fans have nothing to do but eat hot dogs and stare at me dragging a doormat.
I’m the last in the procession and Zach says to just follow him. As the teams switch places, we leap out of the dugout, drop our mats on the field and start smoothing clay. (Actually, I drop my 30-pound metal mat on my heel, taking off a nice chunk of skin.)
We finish, and this pretty much ends our official duties for the night. And lookie there, that refrigerator under the stands has a few cold beers. Handy, that.
After the game, Opie says, “That’s all there is to it. We’ll do it all over again for the next game.”
Reporter Richard Mullins can be reached at (813) 259-7919 or rmullins@tampatrib.com.
Video: Behind The Scenes At Central Booking
At 2:45 a.m., prisoner 07017945 asks whether he’ll get on “American Idol” after I take his arrest photo. “This is my photo opportunity,” he jokes.
I tell him to stand up straight and look at the camera.
Click. … And that’s another mug shot taken during my night shift as photographer at the Orient Road Jail: The young man, 27, was arrested and charged with driving under the influence.
Police pulled him over, he says, on Howard Avenue after he left a restaurant in south Tampa. “It was stupid,” he says.
I give him a peak at my computer screen to preview his photo.
“That’s not bad,” he says and asks why a reporter would ever voluntarily work all night in a jail taking mug shots.
Get arrested for anything in Hillsborough County and this is where you end up: in a cramped, undecorated photo “studio” looking at a digital camera and a paper sign that says:
MIRA AQUI
LOOK HERE
In minutes, your photo appears on the Internet with your charge, home address, height and weight - just like any arsonist, kidnapper or wayward politician.
For many people, facing that camera lens is a humbling and shocking moment. Many people scowl. Some smile. You’re allowed to smile. But many cry.
Jail Tip No. 1: If you find yourself in the unfortunate position of staring at a mug shot camera, look at the camera lens, not the “LOOK HERE” sign about 18 inches below. Looking downward makes you appear dejected, guilty. The sign isn’t placed low on purpose. It’s just the only flat surface nearby.
The Orient Road Jail doesn’t look like jails in the movies - no barred cages with scary biker guys scowling as prisoners cry out, “Guard, gimmie my phone call.”
Rather, the booking room resembles a modern bus station in layout, decoration and odor. I’ll describe the aroma as an aggressive mixture of “locker room,” “sweat,” and “hand sanitizer” with persistent undertones of “feet.”
The layout is open. Men and women amble together. No bars or doors separate mingling prisoners from deputies - or me. This is a new law enforcement philosophy that treats prisoners more politely - a little. It tends to work. Wandering prisoners behave more like bored passengers at the airport than Hannibal Lecter.
To start my night, a deputy trains me on jailhouse photography, and at 10:35, my first mug shot of the night walks up. Prisoner 07017883, a tall, balding man arrested for “trespassing,” a term police seem to define rather broadly as people going somewhere they shouldn’t.
The photo equipment is decidedly modern. Unlike the movies, there is no flash, and I don’t get to yell, “Turn to the RIGHT!” Instead, I look at a large Dell flat-panel monitor that’s connected to a computer and Canon digital camera on a motorized mount. I adjust the camera remotely to center people’s image on my screen and hit the “Enter” button.
Simple.
In seconds, the image of prisoner 07017883 in orange jailhouse pajamas is transmitted online. Some prisoners awaiting their portrait session still wear their personal clothes, but most take a forced stroll to “the showers” to change into orange pajamas.
Jail Tip No. 2: At some point, all prisoners go to “the showers,” where a clerk behind a metal screen hands out orange pajamas, brown slippers and white underwear. Then prisoners walk into a 15-by-15-foot gray tile shower room to change clothes. (You don’t have to shower, but you can.) Guards separate men and women, but it’s not private by any means.
Parade Of Despair
As prisoners flow through my photo “studio,” the whole process strikes me as a slow parade of anger, fear and despair. People end up here after things go wrong. They’re a spectrum of society: male, female, white, black, Hispanic, old, young, professional, homeless, jobless, pregnant, bruised and bleeding.
Prisoner 07017889, a young brunette woman charged with burglary, smiles at me while fluffing her hair for the photo. I ask what happened. “It’s a long story,” she sighs, declining to elaborate.
Another alarmingly thin woman walks up for her photo holding her belly and groaning, “Oh, God, I can’t stand up! I can’t stand up!” She sways, but stands still for a second, and I snap her picture.
Next, a middle-aged man with a corporate logo sweatshirt fights back tears as I take his photo. He’s on the sex-offender registry and was charged with possession of child pornography.
It’s a relatively straightforward job, if occasionally violent. Deputies work 12-hour shifts and earn a starting salary of $36,931, plus medical benefits, tuition reimbursement and a pension. There’s plenty of multitasking. Photo deputies also fingerprint prisoners, walk them to the showers and tackle anyone who turns violent.
At 11:44, a woman kicks a deputy in the crotch.
Guards wrestle her to the floor in a grunting dog pile. She swears loudly as guards strap her to a wheeled restraining chair and roll her into a holding cell to calm down.
Jail Tip No. 3: Cooperate politely with guards. Once you’re handcuffed in the world outside, you’re going to jail. Cooperating won’t set you free, but it speeds the process and may get you bailed out sooner.
First Scowl
At about 2 a.m., a nurse checks on the woman in the restraining chair to make sure she’s alert. Oh, yes, she’s alert. Enough to scream and curse at me through the glass. “Please! Let me out of this thing! It hurts!”
Police say she punched her grandmother right in front of them. Her father was arrested tonight, too, and he looks at her through the glass, crying.
The next two hours pass without much action as packs of prisoners line up for photos. I check their names, then say, “Stand up straight. Look at the camera.” Click. “Next.”
Finally, at 4:30 a.m., a prisoner gives me the first high-quality scowl of the night - with gold teeth, too.
A few minutes later, a professional-looking woman breaks down crying as I try to take her picture. She had to give up her Treo PDA phone hours ago. She shakes with held-back sobs, and I give her a minute to calm down. She looks up at the camera, and I hit “Enter.”
She can’t find a phone book so I pull one down from a shelf and help her find the number for the hotel where her friends are.
Jail Tip No. 4: The booking room has no real guides or counselors, so first-timers seem bewildered about what to do next, how to find bail money or where to get food. So ask every question you need. Deputies are helpful if asked politely. Cooperative prisoners get baloney sandwiches and milk every four hours.
My shift ends at 6:30 a.m., and my last photo is prisoner 0701970, a woman with tear-streaked mascara running down her cheeks, arrested at 3:13 a.m. 1.9 miles from her home in Rocky Point and charged with DUI.
A deputy unlocks the central booking room door for me, and I realize the only thing distinguishing me from all the prisoners is the plastic “Visitor” badge clipped to my shirt.
As I walk out, the pale blue predawn light is just coming up, and I can drive away a free man. No one took my photo.
PRISON CLASSICS
“Letter From the Birmingham Jail,” by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a seminal work of the civil rights movement smuggled from jail on scraps of paper
“The House of the Dead,” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, recalling his years in a Siberian prison
“The Prince,” by Niccolo Machiavelli, written in prison to his patron
Letters of St. Paul, written by the Christian apostle in prison; they now form key parts of the Bible
“Behind Bars,” by Jeffrey Ian Ross and Stephen C. Richards, a how-to guide for surviving incarceration
BY THE NUMBERS
202 - Prisoners processed in an average 24-hour period
(813) 247-8300 - Phone number for information about prisoners in the Orient Road Jail
74,804 - Prisoners processed during 2006, a 3.9 percent increase from 2005
10 - Percentage of total arrests for driving under the influence
$36,931 - Starting salary for deputies at Orient Road (does not include $1,924 meal allowance in cash)
82 - Number of mug shots I took during my Saturday night shift
Source: Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office; Tribune research
Reporter Richard Mullins can be reached at (813) 259-7919 or rmullins@tampatrib.com.
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