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by Tim Bullard Brown ribbon, its shiny metal spinning, neon crimson bead the size of an insect eye blinking as the sour smell of three-day-old noodles lingers from a slimey sink, rats scuddling, roaches doing the 40 and hurdling motels. You're crazy to go into journalism. Go to a shrink. Kill yourself. Go to a pastor. Get help. You're going to need it. "You're dead. You hear me? You're a dead man," the answering machine crackled. An editor used to always tell me that it's the threats you never get or hear about are the ones you should be frightened of. My reoccurring nightmare is that I'm working again as a reporter with a column at the Florence Morning News, and I get fired again - over, and over, and over. I still wake up in the middle of the night, twitching, then shaking in convulsions, cursing in gibberish and swinging at the wall. I lose sleep, tossing and turning, reviewing the circumstances of my firing in my head, and then when sleep drops its dark cloak over my consciousness, bringing stealth to my disconcerting thoughts, nightmares form like coal-black summer tornado clouds, the same ones about me being back at the paper getting fired all over again. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about the expose I wrote there on a famous S.C. bordello, an investigative piece killed by the managing editor, who told me not to ask any more questions about it. When FBI Agent Joe Younginer of Florence, the closest cop to Jim West I've ever met, busted a Trucker's Motel hooker in Marlboro County, S.C. on July 9, 1989, she was wanted for running a teen-age prostitution ring at a brothel where girls as young as 14 worked. She had allegedly fled San Francisco shortly before a March '88 police raid after a probe that began in May '87. After "America's Most Wanted" ran a 10-minute blip, 135 calls were received. "We got several calls from Washington," Younginer told me. "I went up to Bennettsville on a Sunday night. I didn't identify myself as an FBI agent." His only lead was the suspect was a blonde, short and was branded with a tattoo of a teddy bear. She was found off-work in a trailer at 2 a.m.When Younginer and another agent entered, he said there was a lineup and search, but nothing was uncovered. "When we got there, she had a housecoat on. She didn't like me," recalled Younginer. In the manufactured mobile home she wasn't alone -- there was a shotgun-- loaded. Seven years later: my managing editor's face was white and pink in splotches, his jowls flapping like the mast of a catamaran in a raging nor'easter. I had called in a talk show on WBTW TV-13 and asked the Democratic gubernatorial candidates what they thought about prostitution. The editor had been dragging his feet about running the story. I was almost fired for mentioning it all in a column, "Reporter's Notebook," and finally I was told not to ask any more questions about it. So when I got the threat, I reported it to the police, and I sent the state police a Freedom of Information Act request to see if they'd ever heard of the place. I mailed a story to an alternative rag, POINT, in Columbia, S.C. When the article "Pros & Cons" was published in February 1995, I was fired the next day for giving company property away. There was no pay for the story. After my follow-up in POINT, I sent the two stories to GOP Gov. David Beasley, a former Democrat born in Darlington County, and the next September the state police busted the joint, arresting four suspects. In Dovesville, just over the county line from Marlboro County in Darlington County, the state police busted Shady Pines on U.S. 52, barely mentioned in my POINT story, a place the Darlington Fire Chief characterized to me as "the only truck stop without gas pumps. " Arrested were two woman and a Florence dude. The second bust at Trucker's Motel netted the ex-mayor of McColl and four others. I found out when my mother called read the Charlotte Observer and asked, "Is this the story you got fired over?" The arrest made the USAToday briefs section. Most journalists are eunuch lifers, chained to their desks and IV'd to the Blue Cross. The voters removed the district solicitor in an election and replaced the Marlboro County white sheriff with its first black sheriff, a former Highway Patrolman. "Free Bird" is the state song in South Carolina, and the shag is the state dance. I finally got another job, and it's great interviewing Lynyrd Skynyrd backstage at the new House of Blues in North Myrtle beach, shaking hands with Sen. Strom Thurmond, getting a photo with Bush's VP and working in Myrtle Beach, the number-two tourist destination in the U.S., second only to Orlando. When Howard Finster visited Myrtle Beach, he told me, "Everything is so beautiful here. Ya'll have a lot to be proud of. You don't have to be called to do art. If you want to be an artist, you can be one. What you're going to do in this life is going to be you. You don't wait around to see if you're gifted to do art. If you love art and want to do art, get started on it." Beasley last year was at a GOP event on Kings Highway in Myrtle Beach, where George Washington rode once to what he wrote in his journals was what he suspected was a tavern in Little River. As two daily reporters finished doubleteaming the governor, I told him aside, "Thanks for helping me on the Trucker's Motel story. I appreciate it a lot." "I'm surprised somebody hasn't taken a shot at me yet," Beasley replied, "I know what you mean," I said. "Word up, G." He called the video poker industry a "cancer" in South Carolina, and in his State of the State Address, when he said the word prostitution, the audience started applauding. "And I hear it, and you hear it," he said, "the great refrain is that you can't legislate morality. So what do you call the body of law that forbids drug use and prostitution and a variety of human behaviors that you, the elected representatives of the people, do not deem appropriate for our state?" When I hear someone complain about journalists, I seethe with homicidal anger. Don't criticize us to my face. Do it behind my back, if you value your life. |
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