The downtown streets were quiet, with no traffic. A gaggle of slim, half-dressed men sprinted by as they did every morning, snickering at my ratty attire as they passed. They wore matching neon shorts and no shirts. Big Boy growled. I imagined him taking bites out of their color-coordinated butts.
A bald, large black man named Tiny greeted us as we passed the Bodacious Brew. “When you gonna put my pretty face on the cover of your newspaper?” he said, smiling and tossing Big Boy a piece of his cinnamon bun.
Tiny was an Iraq War veteran with no visible means of support. I wasn’t sure where he slept at night, but he bussed tables at the coffee shop in exchange for breakfast and lunch. He refused to go on their payroll.
He wore a Pensacola Marathon T-Shirt that someone had given to him, and his shorts and shoes were better than mine. He was on a break sitting at a table on the sidewalk outside the Bodacious Brew watching Fox & Friends on the flat-screen TV above the door.
“Well, Mayor, not this week,” I said, “but maybe next month. When can we set up the photo shoot?”
“It’s about time you write about me, the mayor of Palafox,” he said, as he petted the dog. “I have a lot to say.”
“I’m sure you do, but I’m not sure we’re the right medium for your story,” I said, pointing to the television. “Have you heard from your friends at Fox News?”
Tiny shook his head. “No, but I’ll write them again today.”
I gave the man a dollar as I did most mornings to contribute to the postage. Big Boy and I crossed Main Street and continued toward the bay.
The humidity soaked the Sandshaker Lounge T-shirt. No breeze came off the water. Both the dog and I panted. Thirty-five minutes. That’s how long I had to endure this torture to work off Tuesday night’s beer.
Wednesday morning usually was my favorite day of the week. We had gotten the week’s issue of the Pensacola Insider, the newspaper I owned, to the printer, and we shifted to planning mode. We caught our breath and talked about what worked or didn’t work with last week’s issue. Our next press deadline was six days away.
This Wednesday was different. I had to testify against my friend, Bowman Hines, a man I thought I knew, but who had played me and Pensacola as a bunch of fools. The town’s golden boy would stand trial for embezzlement because of my reporting.
However, Pensacola didn’t want to see Bo Hines disgraced. I had become the town’s pariah. The trial would be my opportunity to save my reputation, validate my reporting, and avert the demise of my newspaper.
The dog and I jogged, walked, and stumbled past the Trillium property, thirty acres of vacant land on Pensacola Bay that sat across from Pensacola City Hall. The property was once the site of a gasoline terminal where barges offloaded fuel from Louisiana and Texas refineries. The fuel was stored in huge tanks and shipped by trucks to gas stations along the Florida panhandle.
In the early 1980s, Phillips 66 closed the facility after the Florida Department of Environmental Protection discovered the soil was contaminated. The oil company determined the terminal wasn’t profitable enough for them to pay for a massive cleanup and left Pensacola.
A few years later, the city bought the property for $3.5 million.
Our paper supported the public-private partnership that had won the city’s approval to build a maritime park. This would include a baseball stadium, maritime museum, and commercial development with a huge public space on the waterfront.
Just as the project was to about to begin, Jace Wittman, a former city councilman and Bo Hines’ brother-in-law, notified the City of Pensacola that he planned to lead a petition drive to halt the construction. Wittman had opposed the project when he served on the council and had already forced one referendum on the park. He lost both the vote on the park and his reelection bid. His new angle was to claim the construction plan was not what the voters had approved.
Why did Wittman oppose the maritime park? He said it was because the city government had not allowed for enough time for citizens to voice their opinions on how the land should be developed, but the real reason, I learned, was that it was because Stan Daniels supported it. In high school, Daniels had beaten him out for the quarterback position at Pensacola Catholic High School. It was rumored that Wittman never forgave him for this.
“Grudges—” my late mentor Roger Fairley had told me over dirty martinis at Global Grill, “Pensacola runs on them.”
I could still see my old friend stirring the drink and plucking the green olive off the toothpick. He said, “When you can’t figure out the grudge, go back to high school. It will be some slight over a girl, sport, or class honor—or maybe even something much deeper.”
Apparently Wittman would fight Daniels’ park project for the rest of his life because of a grudge over not making quarterback on the high school football team.
Progress be damned. Forget the plan to revitalize downtown Pensacola after the ravaging by Hurricane Ivan. The hell with the jobs the development would generate. Wittman had to humiliate and defeat Daniels, and he could care less about the negative impact on the City of Pensacola.
“Grudges are the lifeblood of Pensacola,” Roger told me. “Remember, we are the site of the first European settlement in North America. Before St. Augustine, Jamestown, and Plymouth, Don Tristan de Luna landed on Pensacola Beach. Within days of celebrating the first Mass in America, a hurricane wiped out the settlement. The settlers wanted to lynch Luna and almost did.”
Roger and I had often enjoyed a few cocktails on Tuesday night before he headed off for choir practice. I had no idea what his singing voice was like but knew he had a
