My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere

by Susan Orlean

  THE BYRON-MARASEK CASE reminded some people of the 1995 landmark lawsuit in Oregon against Vickie Kittles, who had a hundred and fifteen dogs living with her in a school bus. Wherever Kittles stopped with her wretched menagerie, she was given a tank of gas and directions to get out of town. She ended up in Oregon, where she was finally arrested. There she faced a district attorney named Joshua Marquis, who had made his name prosecuting the killer of Victor the Lobster, the twenty-five-pound mascot of Oregon’s Seaside Aquarium who had been abducted from his tank. When the thief was apprehended, he threw Victor to the ground, breaking his shell; no lobster veterinarian could be found and Victor died three days later. Marquis was able to persuade a jury that the man was guilty of theft and criminal mischief. He decided to prosecute Kittles on grounds of animal neglect. Kittles contended that she had the right to live with her dogs in any way she chose. Marquis argued that the dogs, which got no exercise and no veterinary care and were evidently miserable, did not choose to live in a school bus. Vickie Kittles was convicted, and her dogs were sent to foster homes around the country.

  The Kittles case was the first prominent suit against an “animal hoarder”—a person who engages in the pathological collecting of animals. Tiger Ladies are somewhat rare, but there are Cat Ladies and Bird Men all over the country, and often they end up in headlines like 201 CATS PULLED FROM HOME and PETS SAVED FROM HORROR HOME and CAT LOVER’S NEIGHBORS TIRED OF FELINE FIASCO. A study published by the Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium says that more than two-thirds of hoarders are females, and most often they hoard cats, although dogs, birds, farm animals, and, in one case, beavers, are hoarded as well. The median number of animals is thirty-nine, but many hoarders have more than a hundred. Hoarders, according to the consortium, “may have problems concentrating and staying on track with any management plan.”

  On the other hand, animal hoarders may have boundless energy and focus when it comes to fighting in court. Even after Byron-Marasek lost her final appeal, she devised another way to frustrate the state’s efforts to remove her tigers. The Department of Environmental Protection had found homes for the tigers at the Wild Animal Orphanage in San Antonio, Texas, and come up with a plan for moving the tigers there on the orphanage’s Humane Train. In early January, the superior-court judge Eugene Serpentelli held a hearing on the matter. The Tiger Lady came to court wearing a dark-green pantsuit and square-toed shoes and carrying a heavy black briefcase. She was edgy and preoccupied and waved off anyone who approached her except for a local radio host who had trumpeted her cause on his show and a slim young man who huddled with her during breaks. The young man was as circumspect as she was, politely declining to say whether he was a contributor to the Tigers Only Preservation Society or a fellow tiger owner or perhaps someone with his own beef with the DEP.

  Throughout the hearing, Byron-Marasek dipped into her briefcase and pulled out sheets of paper and handwritten notes and pages downloaded from the Internet, and passed them to her latest lawyer, who had been retained the day before. The material documented infractions for which the Wild Animal Orphanage had been cited by the USDA over the years—storing outdated bags of Monkey Chow in an unair-conditioned shed, for instance, and placing the carcass of a tiger in a meat freezer until its eventual necropsy and disposal. None of the infractions were serious and none remained unresolved, but they raised enough questions to delay the inevitable once again, and Judge Serpentelli adjourned to allow Byron-Marasek more time to present an alternate plan. “Throughout this period of time, I’ve made it clear that the court had no desire to inflict on Mrs. Marasek or the tigers any hardship,” the judge announced. “But the tigers must be removed. I have no discretion on the question of whether they should be removed, just how.”

  Before the state acts, however, there is a good chance that the Tiger Lady will have taken matters into her own hands. Last fall, in an interview with the Asbury Park Press, she said that she was in the process of “buying land elsewhere”—she seemed to think it unwise to name the state—and suggested that she and her dogs and her tigers might be leaving New Jersey for good. Typically, people who have disputes with the authorities about their animal collections move from one jurisdiction to another as they run into legal difficulties. If they do eventually lose their animals, they almost always resurface somewhere else with new ones: Recidivism among hoarders is close to a hundred percent. In the not-too-distant future, in some other still-rural corner of America, people may begin to wonder what smells so strange when the wind blows from a certain direction, and whether they actually could have heard a roar in the middle of the night, and whether there could be any truth to the rumors about a lady with a bunch of tigers in town.

  I HAD BEEN TO JACKSON countless times, circled the Maraseks’ property, and walked up and down the sidewalks in the Preserve, but I had never seen a single tiger. I had even driven up to the Maraseks’ front gate a couple of times and peered through it, and I could see some woolly white dogs scuffling behind a wire fence, and I could see tarps and building materials scattered around the house, but no tigers, no flash of orange fur, nothing. I wanted to see one of the animals, to assure myself that they really existed.

  One afternoon, I parked across from the Winglers’ and walked past their garage, where Kevin was still monkeying around with his Corvette, and then across their backyard and beyond where their lawn ended, where the woods thickened and the ground was springy from all the decades’ worth of pine needles that have rained down, and I followed the tangy, slightly sour smell that I guessed was tiger, although I don’t think I’d ever smelled tigers before. There was a chain-link fence up ahead. I stopped and waited. A minute passed and nothing happened. A minute more, and then a tiger walked past on the other side of the fence, its huge head lowered and its tail barely twitching, the black stripes of its coat crisscrossed with late-day light, its slow, heavy tread making no sound at all. It reached the end of the fence and paused, and turned back the other way, and then it was gone.

  Super-Duper

  I learned a lot by spending a week in Miami just before Super Bowl XXIX. For instance, I learned the superlative degree of the word nude just by reading the ads in the Miami Herald. Throughout Super Bowl week, dozens of nightclubs declared that they would be throwing the Super Bowl party of the year; as the competition heated up, one club went to a hurry-up offense, changing its ad from “Wide Screen TVs—Nude Girls” to “W-i-d-e Screen TVs—Nudest Girls in Miami.” At a press conference heralding the resurrection of the World Football League, I learned from former 49ers coach Bill Walsh how the new league would redefine football. “I can tell you this,” Walsh said with emotion. “You will see the ball thrown and caught.” Excellent. I learned that even cops call bad guys bad guys. This came up at the Stolen Ticket Press Conference, held after some smart aleck conned a Federal Express office into giving him packages containing two hundred and sixty-two Super Bowl tickets intended for the Miami Dolphins. “We don’t want to say much more than that,” the police spokesman declared. “It would be unfortunate if the bad guys found out what we know.”

  I learned that some American men still haven’t heard of Lycra. The hostesses at the Bud Bowl party, on the Tuesday before the game, were a half-dozen young women with large breasts and collapsing mountains of hair, wearing really tight tube dresses that were meant to look like Budweiser labels. The dresses provoked spirited but ignorant conjecture at the party regarding how a girl could get into one of them. Oh, Dan Marino was there, too. I thought this was kind of exciting—after all, Marino is the Miami Dolphins’ quarterback, we were in Miami, we were getting ready for the year’s climactic football game, and spotting NFL players seemed to be the pregame sport of the week—so I mentioned it to a football fan as I was leaving the party. He had a plate of stone-crab claws in one hand and a Polaroid of himself discussing the merits of a nickel-back defense with some of the Bud Girls in the other. “He was?” the fan said. “Marino? Oh. I didn’t notice.”

 
; I learned that the Super Bowl and the week of revelry leading up to it feels exactly like prom week—if you had happened to go to a high school with seventy-four thousand in the graduating class and your prom had been televised to seven hundred and fifty million people worldwide and your parents had been liberal about your curfew and you had accessorized your prom outfit by wearing on your head a piece of polyurethane foam shaped like a thunderbolt (if you were a Chargers fan) or a miner’s pickax (if you were for the 49ers). The only difference—which in the case of most Super Bowls turns out to be a minor one—is that most proms don’t feature a football game.

  If football is a metaphor for war, then Super Bowl week is a metaphor for football. Throughout the week, everything had a sort of battlefield urgency and martial precision. Posted at the Media Center: “Following is a press release regarding the Super Bowl Sod. It is from Bermuda Dunes (near Palm Springs), California, not Las Vegas. . . . It is very important for it to be known that the sod is from Palm Springs . . . and not Las Vegas, as has previously been reported.” Over the PA at an outdoor souvenir fair: “Attention, personnel! We need mini-helmets at the autograph booth! Mini-helmets! ASAP!” At the Commissioners’ Party, an enormous gala at the Miami Beach Convention Center, the league owners were penned in a corner apart from the crowd and were guarded by wiry tough guys with walkie-talkies. One tough guy had collared a small, tan man with luminous white hair who was heading into the pen. “Station to command base,” the guard said into his walkie-talkie. “I have a certain individual here asserting he is one of the owners of the Seattle Seahawks. Can you clear me?” He was, and they did.

  The Super Bowl is billed as the ultimate American sporting event and the ultimate athletic battle: No other television broadcast attracts a larger audience, and the money and effort that people spend to attend it is stupendous. But during my week in Miami, I didn’t feel that I was on the brink of a singular, decisive battle: I felt that I was bouncing from one little skirmish to another—the mini-helmet crisis, the heavy-duty credentials checkpoints at the parties, the elbowing through crowds to get near one of the players, the press briefings about which Charger had a case of the gout and whether the 49ers practiced in full pads or just in sweatclothes. Very few Super Bowls ever turn out to be exciting games. This is blamed, variously, on the misalignment in the two football conferences, which means the matchup always has one clearly superior team; on the fact that you can never guarantee that any single game in any sport will be suspenseful (as opposed to a playoff series, which builds momentum); or on the simple fact that nothing, no matter how thrilling, could ever live up to the hype that precedes every Super Bowl. Still, everyone runs around all week in a state of high excitation. There is a real contest at the Super Bowl, but it’s not on the field—it’s a battle for tickets and hotel rooms and invitations and autographs and access and souvenirs, and it requires both an offensive and a defensive strategy.

  The Merchandise Bowl was decided early in the first quarter of Super Bowl week, with victory going to the mini-footballs, which are about the size of a hand grenade and are totally adorable. Other contenders were Super Bowl hats, pins, earrings, coffee mugs, ashtrays, key chains, and diaper bags, and, of course, the Super Bowl sweatshirt, with appliquéd lettering, which cost $79.98. This seemed expensive, especially since Hosty the Super Bear, the mascot of the South Florida Super Bowl XXIX Host Committee, had taken an Official Super Bowl Superhost Pledge, assuring visitors that Miami merchants would be offering fair prices and quality service, despite the powerful temptation to gouge the seventy-four thousand fans in town for the game. I expressed surprise at the sweatshirt price to one vendor, and he explained, with special Super Bowl Superhost logic, that it cost that much because it had “authentic stitching.”

  Autographs were going for free, at least at the NFL Experience, which is a big football-themed carnival set up each year next to the Super Bowl stadium, with displays and games where you can test your football skills. Ken Stabler, the former quarterback of the Oakland Raiders, was there, signing stuff, one afternoon. The place was mobbed: A sign posted near the autograph table warned, in English and Spanish, DUE TO PLAYERS’ TIME CONSTRAINTS, NO AUTOGRAPHS GUARANTEED. I gave up on getting Stabler’s autograph and wandered around the on-site Foot Locker store; the sand sculpture busts of television commentators Dan Dierdorf, Frank Gifford, and Al Michaels; and booths for face painting, quarterback challenges, football cards, lost children, and a game called the Emmitt Zone, in which you dive for a pass over gigantic air mattresses shaped like Dallas Cowboys running back Emmitt Smith.

  The underground economy typical of mega-events was in play early in the week: Miami was dotted with guys scalping tickets to get into the game (fifteen hundred dollars by midweek); guys scalping tickets to get into the NFL Experience (twenty-five dollars for tickets that legitimately cost twelve dollars); guys with sandwich boards advertising for tickets (“True Fan Needs Tickets. Top Dollar Paid. Please Help”); guys offering to buy your press credentials, your tickets to any of the pregame parties, and even, the minute you stepped out of Joe Robbie Stadium after the game, your ticket stub (twenty dollars, any seat). Mega-events tend to inflame beyond reason—everyone wants to be part of them and to take a piece of them home for possible future resale. At a souvenir booth at the game, an agitated fellow wearing a Chargers shirt pushed his way to the front of the line and tried to buy the Stadium Staff hat that the cashier was wearing. The cashier stared at him in amazement. “Don’t you understand me?” the man barked at the cashier. “This is a major kind of day!” It is so major that many people come to the Super Bowl city without tickets, just to soak up the Super Bowl vibe. Some people don’t seem to care whether they actually get into the game, but others hang on to the hope that they will eventually stumble on tickets. Except for the brokers and the scalpers, only a few opportunities present themselves. One Miami radio station offered a pair of tickets to the individual who could come up with the most disgusting stunt. Sadly, only one person could win; in this case, it was a young man who ate another young man’s vomit. I was sorry the radio station didn’t release the location of the winner’s seats: I had wanted to be sure he wasn’t seated anywhere near me.

  Everything about the Super Bowl is extra-large—the parties, the prices, the buildup, the letdown. Even things you don’t expect to be huge are huge. For instance, the average size of the man on the street in Miami during Super Bowl week was at an all-time high, because so many football players from other teams were in town for the game and because so many fans had cultivated at least the form, if not the function, of an offensive lineman. There were times when it looked as if Miami were holding a big and tall men’s convention. At an outdoor café on South Beach on Saturday, I passed a table of seven giants wearing straw cowboy hats and gold chains as thick as cobras; they looked like football players and acted as cocky as football players and eventually drew a crowd of autograph seekers, whom they cheerfully obliged. They were not, in fact, football players. At that point it didn’t seem to matter: They were big, enormous, cool-looking guys, and it was the day before the big game.

  On Thursday, I had gone to the fashion show for the World Football League, which aspires to become the NFL’s European counterpart, because I expected the models to be real football players; after all, it would look pretty weird to have a waif drift down the runway in a helmet and pads. The event did not pack them in, and that meant that I was among the few who saw the uniforms for the Barcelona Dragons, the London Monarchs, and the Düsseldorf!Fire. When a model named Tim came out wearing the Amsterdam Admirals’ uniform (“Tim’s wearing an away jersey. . . . There’s the insert in the pants for an aggressive-type look”), I remarked to a reporter sitting near me that I thought Tim was pretty cute and perhaps a little slight for a football player. The reporter snorted and turned to me. “That’s no player,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s just some surfer.”

  The real players—the 49ers and the Chargers, that is—were scarce,
except on Friday, when 49ers Ricky Watters, William Floyd, Todd Kelly, and Toi Cook, along with Tim Irwin of the Dolphins, showed up at a press conference announcing a joint venture between Tommy Boy Music and Gridiron Records that will give football stars the opportunity to become recording stars. Then Watters, Floyd, and Kelly performed a rap song, and Irwin sang a few bars of a wistful country paean to his GMC truck. The female rappers Salt-N-Pepa had come to give the singers moral support. When someone in the audience asked them what an athlete needed to succeed as a rapper, Salt—or maybe it was Pepa—chuckled and said, “A nice butt.”

  At last, it was time for what had been described at one press briefing as “the on-the-field part of the product”—the ultra-big event that 49er Bart Oates had said early in the week he considered “better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.” On game day, the parking lots were filled with tailgate parties and with people still trying to buy tickets. Dozens of white tents had been set up beside the stadium: This was the Corporate Hospitality Village, where companies like Ford and Budweiser and Reebok were holding lavish private parties for their guests. The tents made the place look like a refugee camp, except that the VIP parking lot beside the Corporate Hospitality Village was packed with long white stretch limos—almost a hundred of them, idling in endless rows. Overhead, planes hauling banners buzzed back and forth: FLORIDA PEST CONTROL WORKS FOR YOU, followed by PRES. CLINTON: PUNISH CASTRO NOT OUR KIDS AT GITMO AND PANAMA, then LET US CUBANS SACK CASTRO, and then THE REAL WINNER IS JESUS.

  The real winners, of course, were the 49ers. It happened in a flash: Steve Young passed to Jerry Rice for a touchdown one minute and twenty-four seconds into the first quarter, and half the people around me threw up their hands and said, “Well, that’s the game.” It was, and three and a half unsuspenseful hours later, the final score was 49–26. In their locker room after the game, the San Francisco players looked sweaty and happy but not the least bit surprised. I talked for a while with Chris Dalman, an offensive lineman with pink cheeks and upper arms the size of turkeys. I had never seen upper arms like that in my life. He was telling me that it really hurts to play football and that after a game you feel lousy for a couple of days. I finally interrupted him and asked him if he had any idea of the circumference of his arms, and he said he didn’t. “I don’t even know exactly how tall I am,” he said. “The one size I need to know is my ring size, and that’s a Super Bowl size fourteen.”