As I pondered this unfortunate truth, I realized the rain had stopped. Steam rose off the hot pavement as the business day subsided. Workers piled out of the Escambia County Office Complex opposite the Insider offices. Secretaries and their supervisors wandered across the street to Blazzues and Intermission to commiserate over a few beers about how they only got four weeks of vacation and the stupidity of the county commissioners before they headed home.
A herd of runners thundered down Palafox Street. Downtown bars had running clubs that offered pasta and cheap beer. The afternoon runners, older than the morning crowd and about twenty pounds heavier, jogged or walked past me in their too-short shorts. Me? I’d rather pay the extra dollar for my PBR and skip the lasagna on a plastic plate.
When I walked into the meeting room at New World Landing, a boutique hotel on south Palafox, I expected to see a bunch of old farts wearing tinfoil hats, drinking warm punch, and eating soft sugar cookies. I wasn’t too far off. However, they had left their hats at home, probably because the tinfoil interfered with the sound system.
I had taken it on the chin earlier at Sue’s funeral, but not tonight. I got a sick pleasure from walking into rooms like this one. The crowd reacted to me the second I entered and signed the guestbook. A perceptible shudder could be felt, as if someone had found a fingernail in their punch, but was too polite to say anything.
I sat in the front row with my black notebook and recorder. Wittman and his brain trust huddled in the corner next to the punch bowl and cookies. I looked around and didn’t see a pile of stones in any of the corners, which only meant they hadn’t planned ahead.
Wittman’s Save Our Pensacola attracted two groups of people—military retirees who hated anything they believed might increase their taxes, and old Pensacola families that resented anyone changing their town. The military retirees always talked about their tours of duty and how Pensacola didn’t measure up to other cities. From their vantage point, community leaders were idiots and never did anything right.
The old Pensacola crowd began every conversation with a statement about how many generations their family had lived in the area. They tolerated the military retirees because they were worker bees that did the tasks they would never do like knock on doors, gather petition signatures, and put campaign signs in yards.
The Save Our Pensacola leaders wouldn’t ask me to leave. After all, they had complained about the city’s lack of open meetings. The daily newspaper and the television reporters stood in the back of the room. Two very slight men in cheap suits with their photographers and cameramen shook their heads and grinned at me. Apparently they expected fireworks.
A couple of retired military types sat on both sides of me, not saying a word, but they looked hard to see what I was writing in my notebook. Pensacola attracted such retirees from Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois. They complained about everything while getting their health care for free at the Navy hospital and buying cheap goods and groceries at the Corry Station PX Mall.
They filled their days attending city council meetings, writing letters to the editor that quoted Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, and trolling internet forums and blogs looking for chances to prove their brilliance.
I wrote in my notebook for my chaperones to see, “The crowd is warm and happy to see me. Their medications must be kicking in. There is a smell of Bengay, talcum powder, and Old Spice in the air. I hope the Depends hold out.”
The two men sitting next to me snorted. Having failed to intimidate me, they stood and moved to sit next to the refreshments to guard against reporters eating the cookies. They muttered “asshole” under their breaths as they left me.
A lady in red polyester pants with a head of orange-tinted hair opened the meeting with a prayer to “Our Lord and Savior.” I didn’t think she meant Wittman, but I bet he did. The room didn’t have a flag, so they said the Pledge of Allegiance to Wittman’s lapel pin.
The woman sat down at the head table with a gangly fellow who turned out to be her husband, and Wittman. Her chair creaked as she plopped down. My escorts stood and stared at me from their vantage point near the sugar cookies. I barely suppressed a laugh and kept my head down while I wrote.
“Ichabod” thanked his Technicolor wife before launching into a diatribe about all the sins of Kettler and the flaws of the maritime park. The retired UWF professor, who said he was a sixth-generation Pensacola native, droned on and on. A few of the faithful in the crowd appeared to be nodding off. The reporters were getting restless, and I noticed them checking their cell phones. Wittman nodded with a fixed phony smile and stroked his gray goatee. He kept looking at the door and checking his Rolex. After nearly thirty minutes, he stood and took over the meeting.
Wittman was a big man, a former athlete whose waistline had expanded as he had gotten older. His black hair with a few strands of gray was still full, and he wore a white polo under a Ralph Lauren blue blazer and loafers without socks. He didn’t have his brother-in-law’s natural charm and perfect manners, but he commanded attention when he spoke.
“Thank you, Professor Ellis,” he said. Looking at the other reporters, he continued, “I see the legitimate, nonbiased press is here for this very important meeting.”
Professor Ellis and his wife stared daggers at me.
“We, the people of Pensacola, don’t want this park.” Wittman’s words set off a round of applause and a chorus of “amen” from the crowd. “The downtown crowd is trying to force this on us. We shouldn’t be paying for a baseball park for
