Police knew where Pigger and Irene came from. Sometimes, though, you never know.
Close to midnight there was a knock at their apartment door. Gilbert Maseda, forty-three, opened it, and his wife watched.
There stood a two-foot-tall black monkey.
Startled, Maseda slammed the door. The couple scrambled to the window and peered out at the creature. That made the monkey angry, so angry that he began screaming, then jumped up and smashed the window.
Screams from the monkey and the Masedas aroused neighbors, who rushed out to chase the intruder away. He refused to go. Then he saw Estella Pena, forty-three, leave a friend’s home to walk to her car. The monkey leaped onto Pena, who ran away screaming.
Three times she dashed for her car. Three times the monkey intercepted her as she shrieked and cried and neighbors ran and shouted.
“He had great big eyes,” she told me. “There were lots of people there, but he kept chasing me. I never saw him before,” she swore.
Finally she dove into her car and slammed the door, safe at last, or so she thought. A window was rolled down three inches. The monkey leaped onto the car, trying to wriggle inside as she screamed and neighbors ran and shouted.
Somebody called Animal Control and the police as Estella Pena shook the monkey from her car and sped into the night. The monkey eluded the Animal Control officer and the impromptu posse of crazed neighbors.
After an hour-long chase, Miami policeman J. K. Fitzgerald and passerby Louis Moldinado, thirty, cornered the monkey under the hood of a car a block and a half away from where it had originally appeared.
The monkey, suffering from cuts and bruises, was taken to Animal Control and booked into solitary at two A.M.
The owner was never found.
And nobody knows why the monkey knocked at the Masedas’ door.
Sidebar: Duck
A bird in the hand makes a bit of a mess.
—ANONYMOUS BIRDCATCHER
He came into my life in January, along with all the other snowbirds. He was short and beady-eyed, with a waddle, and I loved him on sight.
He meandered across my front yard trailing a length of purple cloth in the dust. Thinking he was hungry, I fed him Tender Vittles and went back inside. Preoccupied, I vaguely wondered why he was there but paid no more attention until a friend arrived.
“Did you know there is a duck in your front yard?” my friend Patsy asked. Also a city girl, she was excited.
On closer inspection we could see that somebody had bound his wings with that purple cloth, apparently to keep him from flying. Even if I could hold him, I was afraid to try to remove the intricately tied binding for fear of hurting him. He was skittish anyway, but he loved those Tender Vittles.
Next morning he was still there, still hungry. There was only one thing to do: I got out the cat carrier and dropped a trail of Tender Vittles leading to a dish inside. He greedily ate his way into captivity. I slammed the door, and we were off to the vet.
A woman in the waiting room with her dog said she had seen a duck tied just like that, with the same purple binding, near her bayfront home. She was certain it was not the same bird.
Something bizarre, as usual, was happening in Miami Beach.
Why was somebody tying up ducks? People have been arrested for sexually assaulting ducks; Santeria cultists sacrifice them along with other creatures, and some people fatten them up for Sunday dinner. I didn’t want to think about it. The veterinarian had never treated a duck before. No problem—all I wanted, I said, was to set him free.
Oh, said the doctor. He picked up his scissors, severed the purple binding with a single snip and billed me ten dollars.
I will never forget the expression of relief and delight on the bird’s face as he stretched out his wings and flapped them ecstatically. An impressive and beautiful sight—who knows how long they had been uncomfortably bound. He willingly stepped back into the carrier, which I took home and placed out on my little dock. I opened the door and said goodbye. He stepped out and stood for a moment, getting his bearings. I didn’t wait to watch him fly away. I left home for several hours, returned and went to fetch the empty carrier.
The duck came running, webbed feet making slapping sounds on my patio, begging for some Tender Vittles.
He took up residence in the backyard. The dog was no threat, but I worried at first about the cats. No problem—the first time he was stalked he merely extended his neck and expanded his wings to full width, and the cats backed off. This bird was bigger than they were. Soon he and Sharkey the cat were eating Tender Vittles together out of the same dish.
It did occur to me that ducks should be wet. Writing at home, on leave from the Herald, I took breaks several times a day to go out and spray him with the garden hose. He loved it, running back and forth through the spray like a city kid at an open fire hydrant, and I observed for the first time why people say, “Like water off a duck’s back.”
Doubting that Tender Vittles was a balanced diet for a bird, I switched the menu to day-old bread, bagels and lettuce. My bird book said that ducks eat corn but was not more specific. This duck did not like fresh corn off the cob, canned corn or frozen niblets, but he did relish corn muffins. He probably would have liked dried corn, but none was to be found at Miami Beach supermarkets.
The bird book called ducks fresh-water fowl. The waterway behind the house branches in off the bay and is brackish, and I worried that he probably should have more access to fresh water. I had the perfect answer: a giant kitty-litter box, deeper and twice the normal size—a perfect swimming pool for a duck. Splashing furiously, he kicked his feet, flapped his wings, ducked his head and threw water into the air. I had to refill it several times a day.
Extensive remodeling was under way next door. Some of the workmen were refugees, and I was alarmed to see them gazing hungrily at my duck, busy in his bath. He had become quite corpulent on his diet of day-old bread, bagels, lettuce, corn muffins and Tender Vittles. I started to work with one eye out the window, on guard for any false moves. When the duck perched atop my chain-link fence to look at the water and caught his webbed foot on a wire, I had the fence removed. The view is better without it anyway.
He slept on a piling at the corner of the dock, head tucked under his wing. Each night before retiring I would deliver his midnight snack—a handful of Tender Vittles—stroke his glossy feathers, and we would look at the stars.
He never quacked, but he cooed while gently nibbling at my clothes and fingers. And he was intelligent. When I emerged one chilly morning wearing a long flannel nightgown instead of the usual shorts and T-shirt, he did a double-take and waddled around nibbling at the hem, looking up at me in mock surprise.
He had a roguish personality. Soon he no longer wanted me to hand-feed him his bread, he wanted to play with it. He liked me to wad it up and toss it in the air so he could catch it. Better yet, after he got his little swimming pool he wanted me to toss the bread into the water from afar. He would back up, get a running start, leap into the pool and dive for it. Then he would clamber out, back away and wait for me to toss another morsel. He was hilarious.
How can anybody ever shoot a duck—or eat one? Veal was already off my menu because of the big-eyed baby calves. So was tuna, because of the murdered dolphins. Now ducks were too.
His play was so much fun that I even considered buying him a child’s wading pool, but things changed the week before Palm Sunday. He grew restless, pacing up and down, staring out over the water. He flew off one day and was gone for more than an hour. I was concerned, but he returned, landing out on the water and streaming straight to the dock leaving a widening V on the mirror-bright surface behind him. Next day he flew away again and was absent longer. But still he came back. I talked to him as usual out on the dock, where he cooed and settled down on the piling for the night.
The following day he soared again into the sky, following the waterway north. When he did no
t return by nightfall, I almost regretted not having his wings clipped as the vet had suggested, but that wouldn’t have been right.
I looked at the stars alone that night, but in the morning, there he was, running eagerly to greet me as usual. Later, the pacing began once more. He stood in the shade under the ficus tree, staring skyward for a long time. I went out and stroked his handsome head and fat little belly.
I watched later, from my Florida room, as he took to the sky.
This time he did not come back.
He left me with a fridge full of day-old bread and lettuce. The story of my life.
PART THREE: The Heroes
10
Fire!
Yell “Help!” or scream “Rape!” and expect to be ignored. Yell “Fire!” and a crowd comes running. Fire kindles something deep and universal in the human soul. Fires are news.
Hair and clothes smelling of smoke, sinuses clogged, head pounding, I have covered hundreds of fires and had to run to escape or to rescue my car when the flames spread or explosions began. Paint factories and lumberyards catch fire a lot—so do failing businesses and old hotels. So do homes and high-rises.
It is healthy and advisable for reporters to view with suspicion warnings from most government officials, but it pays to listen to firefighters. At one burning paint factory, I argued with a fire department chaplain who insisted I retreat from the scene. He warned that explosions might occur inside the building and we could all be showered by dangerous debris. As I poohpoohed the hazard and refused to budge, an explosion rocked the building. Debris rocketed into the air and I ran for my life.
After that, I started wearing a hard hat at fires.
Until fire hoses were trained on me, I did not appreciate their effectiveness.
On my first newspaper job, at the Miami Beach Daily Sun, where I shot my own photographs, I always wore dresses and high heels to work. That was before I knew better.
Fire erupted at a major oil facility on the MacArthur Causeway. Fuel-fed flames towered over the bay, making it a photogenic blaze. I rushed about, shooting the inferno and the firefighters at work. A tall construction crane stood abandoned nearby. Better pictures could be shot from that vantage point, I thought, and in my miniskirt and heels, I clambered awkwardly up into the cab.
The view was ideal. The fire, unfortunately, seemed to be spreading fast—in my direction. “Better wet down that crane!” the fire chief shouted. Before I could protest, they did. All I could do was try to shield the camera as, from all directions, pounding streams of water pummeled me about inside the cab. A TV camera crew caught the whole thing, much to their delight.
Fire attracts all sorts of people. Stu Kaufman was a little boy when he was chased away from a fire and told to go stand behind a rope with the media. “This is not your business,” the man in charge sternly told him. Stu never forgot. He swore that someday it would be his business. He would run to fires, and they would tell him everything.
They did.
When he was a successful young businessman and reporter, he gave it all up to become public information officer for the Metro Fire Department. They gave him a beeper and the chance to do exactly what he had wanted to since childhood. He went to all the fires, disasters, plane crashes and major catastrophes and was told everything. He loved it. He went to bed at night afraid his beeper would not go off during the wee hours.
Relations between the press and Dade County’s close-mouthed and sometimes sullen firefighters were traditionally poor. Stu taught them that they had nothing to hide. People love firemen. Stu thrived on excitement. He loved heroes and wanted to tell the world about them. When planes crashed, when a busload of migrant workers sank roof down in a deep canal, when an exploding cocaine lab shattered a quiet neighborhood, when rescue workers used the “jaws of life” to cut a dozen injured motorists out of a multi-car pile-up, Stu was always there.
Unlike many people designated to deal with the press, he had heart, compassion and sense enough to recognize a good story. He also knew that when the department was wrong it was far more effective damage control to tell the truth right up front, rather than to lie and have the scandal snowball into a far bigger story as the outraged press tracked down the truth. Stu loved firefighting and reporting, passions that made him the best at his job.
He was still a radio newsman when I first encountered him. A wealthy couple was kidnapped by a man named Thomas Otis Knight. He forced them to drive to their bank and withdraw money. The victim asked bank officials for help and they summoned the FBI. The victim took the money the kidnapper demanded and returned to his wife, held at gunpoint in the car. The kidnapper and his victims drove off with the FBI right behind them.
Everybody assumed that once the gunman got the money, the couple would go free. The agents decided a rescue attempt would risk the safety of the victims. They decided simply to trail the car until the couple was released, then swoop down on the kidnapper. Agents followed the car until they realized it was taking too long. It all went bad in a remote area, on a desolate road. Knight shot both victims in the head, executing them before the agents could make a move. The killer fled into the underbrush.
It was my day off, and I had friends in for lunch. They went hungry.
Every reporter in the world seemed to be at the crime scene. Frustrated cops, dogs and FBI agents combed the brush in an intense manhunt. Reporters, photographers, and TV news crews gathered to interview the local agent in charge of the FBI.
Suddenly a cop shouted, “I’ve got ‘im!” He had flushed out the killer, who had literally burrowed into the ground. Everybody ran, leaving the FBI chief standing alone, his mouth still open. Leading the stampede of running reporters was Stu, pounding after the cops and the guns and the dogs, tape-recorder mike clenched in his fist, breathlessly reporting as he ran. “They got ‘im! They got ‘im!” he shouted. He was not on the air live of course, but when it was broadcast later, his tape had the spellbinding urgency of news happening in your face. I loved it. Who is this guy? I thought.
I next saw him at a cargo-plane crash. Surly firefighters usually banned us from such scenes, but at this one, Stu seemed in charge. “Right this way,” he said and led me up to the wreck. Who IS this guy? Still a radio reporter, he had become friendly enough to convince fire officials that what they needed was a better attitude toward the press. Next thing I knew, he was working for them, and he certainly made a reporter’s life easier. Always accessible, he would put us in touch with rescuers at the scene, with the fire captains in charge, with the hero who revived a baby with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When he saw people in need of help, he made us aware of the story.
His energy and commitment were clear away from the fire scenes as well. He arranged funerals for fallen firefighters, friends and heroes. One fireman was driving his wife to a movie when he stopped to help a woman whose car had knocked down a power pole. He was electrocuted. A fire department paramedic drowned trying to save a girl trapped in a submerged car. A lieutenant died in a burning warehouse, another in the crash of his rescue truck while speeding to a false alarm. Stu cried every time.
When firemen told him how they hated to drive away after a house fire, leaving a burned-out family huddled on their front lawn at three A.M. with no place to go, he established a program called After the Burnout. Stu or a department chaplain would arrange to have the damaged property boarded up and coordinate with the Red Cross for shelter. Thanks to Stu, no burned-out family is left alone in the night.
After a teenage-arson epidemic, Stu set up Dade County’s largest summer employment program for underprivileged youngsters. The kids wore shirts with official patches and went door to door, teaching their neighbors about smoke detectors, the importance of family escape plans and the dangers of children home alone. Stu knew that the best people to deal with neighborhood problems are neighborhood people. As important as the pay was the youngsters’ sense of pride and self-worth. Many of them work for maj
or corporations today.
Stu forgot no one. Every Sunday morning he and his children would visit headquarters to share a sack of bagels with the “unsung heroes”: the fire department dispatchers.
Stu’s official code designation was Staff 10. He was driving his radio-equipped county car to an airport incident one day when he heard an injury call: “A small child fell through a television set.” The address that followed was his own.
He spun around on the highway median and raced toward home and family. Pedal to the floor, he heard a paramedic who had arrived at the scene. ‘Tell Staff 10 to slow down. It’s just a small cut.”
Stu even issued beepers to reporters, so Dispatch could alert us to major blazes. News agencies gave him their private frequencies so he could guide their photographers and reporters around traffic and police roadblocks to reach fires and disasters the fastest. Metro-Dade was the first fire department to set up its own photo van and shoot its own video. News photographers and TV cameramen taught firefighters how to shoot the best pictures until they arrived. A fireman shot still photos and video, then shared his pictures with the media. The van was equipped with a video recorder so footage could be copied and distributed.
Stu gave firefighters’ discarded bunker gear to news photographers. He knows the best pictures are shot heading into the flames, over the shoulder of a firefighter using a hose. The resulting camaraderie sometimes saw photographers put down their cameras to help drag hoses. Stu set up a daylong news-media fire college for reporters—so we could experience what it was like to be firefighters and understand the job better when we wrote about it. We wore firefighters’ gear, climbed tall ladders and ran in and out of burning buildings wearing oxygen tanks.
Nobody ever said you had to be rational to do this job.
Stu Kaufman was the best thing that ever happened to fire-fighting in Dade County. Too bad good things never last. After ten years, Stu had swallowed enough smoke, seen enough excitement and lost enough sleep. He felt that he owed more of his time and earning power to his wife and children and left to make big bucks in the corporate world.
Never Let Them See You Cry Page 16
