Tampa Bay Noir

by Colette Bancroft

  Given that he wasn’t broadcasting anywhere, I knew that whatever pennies he was collecting on Facebook weren’t covering operating expenses. I searched the open records of Pinellas and Collier counties and discovered that he was being evicted from his Naples mansion. The eviction notice was dated two days after the election—the day he’d stopped broadcasting. His rent had been $8,000 per month. He owed his landlord $64,000, the equivalent of eight months.

  A notorious televangelist’s fall from grace. His pitiful attempt at scamming people. Whether anyone was falling for the lie at this point was unclear. If no one were falling for it—if he wasn’t bringing in any money from the Battles—there would be no reason for him to continue publishing them, unless it was for existential reasons.

  “Our spiritual free fall would be less if God allowed Trump to become president over Clinton,” he said in his last broadcast. I was eating my dinner from the gas station, watching the recording on my laptop. My dinner included beef jerky and a single-serving Häagen-Dazs strawberry ice cream. I made a tiny Ritz cracker–and–yellow cheese sandwich, and ate it with a mealy apple slice. Despite my greasy appearance, I was feeling gleeful. I had found someone worse off than I was, and more evil, and I was going to publicly shame him. “And that’s what happened,” Buck said. “The wrath and judgment is still coming, but I do believe it gives us a little bit of a reprieve.”

  His eyes cast wildly about the small room. Behind him, cheap-looking gold curtains hung pleated from a tall window. He talked in circles and sniffled, rocking back and forth. I simply needed to uncover the reasons for his downfall. He wore a plaid shirt open at the collar. He strained to fit the election results into the tiny framework of his limited belief system, grasping for any justification he could find.

  He based his “final conclusion” on Trump’s clean slate of a voting record and his recent reversals on the topics of gay marriage and abortion. He acknowledged that many believers considered Trump to be morally bankrupt, but explained that because Trump was in the entertainment industry, like God, we shouldn’t seek to understand why he does what he does.

  In the end, neither candidate could alter the “spiritual course” of this nation, he concluded—and though in the end, “Trump might be just as bad” as Hillary, “at least he might not be.”

  I called the number hovering at the bottom of the screen. Someone answered, then immediately hung up. I called back and stepped outside to smoke a cigarette on a folding chair chained to a dead planter. The rain had finally stopped and the air was now thick with foggy exhaust. The sky was a flaming sunset. Next door, a skinny girl leaned against a doorframe. The call went straight to voice mail. I left a message: “Hi . . . Buck? My name is Andrea Noble, I write for the Tampa Bay Times . . .”

  My phone vibrated against my ear. I glanced at the screen. What is it that u need? it said. The sender had signed the text, BH.

  I hung up the phone. Thanks for responding, I typed. I’m wondering when Live Crusade will be back on the air.

  Hopefully back on tv in Sept . . . thnx, he responded.

  Did you stop broadcasting because you’re working on a new project? Clive said you had outgrown Victory Motors.

  Who is this?

  The skinny girl greeted a ragged biker in a leather vest. The vest had a Confederate flag on it. He asked her something and she shook her head and looked away.

  Andrea Noble. I’m a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, I said. I’m wondering if you can tell me what motivated your move down to Naples.

  Email me so I have ur info, he said. Will get back to u later in the week.

  The biker walked across the parking lot to the milky check-in window. The office didn’t have a door on it, just the window, and someone saw you there or they didn’t, and if they didn’t, then you waited. There was no bell. The bell would ring all night if there were one. The illuminated Gateway Motel sign flickered like a moth against a lightbulb.

  I asked Buck if he would be open to talking on the phone. It may be faster, save you some time.

  Email me so I can work it into my daily schedule, he said. He added, Thnx.

  I knew this would be the last I heard from him. I’d e-mail him and he’d never respond—he was ghosting me; it had happened to me dozens of times. He was hiding something.

  So I said, God bless.

  * * *

  Buck had given his life to Christ while he was in prison, serving thirty months for insider trading. He’d been raised Methodist, and had planned to be a minister. Then in college, he had answered an ad seeking PC salesmen, and soon after got into selling fax machines, then got into investment banking. He spent eleven years running from God.

  “Lying on my prison cot, I thought about my wife, Mi-Seon,” he told Bay News 9. I was making my way through the videos posted on his YouTube channel. It had been twenty-four hours since I’d stepped outside the Gateway and every flat surface in my room was now populated with beer bottles stuffed with cigarette butts. Bags had appeared beneath my eyes, but it didn’t matter since no one was looking at me, and I also wasn’t looking at myself.

  “We’d been married seven years and I hadn’t been a good husband,” Buck said. “She had every reason to leave me, and yet, that morning, she had vowed to stand by me. If my wife of flesh and blood could love another person to that degree, how much more must God love me?”

  I had e-mailed my editor that morning with an update. My hypothesis is that Buck’s recent troubles stem from an illness brought on by his daily consumption of wrath, I said. I think I can have this story to you by the end of November. There are questions I still need to answer.

  Send when you can, he responded.

  I knew he didn’t care. I was not a priority—the paper was buried under postelection news. No doubt he’d forgotten about this quirky editorial. I couldn’t even imagine which section he would put it in. Metro?

  I was a shitty journalist, and this couldn’t be argued. The drinking didn’t help. I hoped there was a story in Buck, but I hadn’t yet found it, and I couldn’t be trusted with anything breaking.

  After leaving prison, he’d earned his ministerial degree and had hit the road as an itinerant preacher, then accepted an invitation to produce Christian television in Florida. Neither was satisfying. Everyone he ministered to was already saved, and as an evangelist, he needed to reach souls in jeopardy.

  In 1999, he launched LiveCrusade.com, the first place where people could go seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day for prayer. He answered prayer requests live on the air, broadcasting from midnight until two a.m. Within a year, seven hundred volunteer pastors around the country were responding to forty thousand LiveCrusade.com prayer-request e-mails daily. Within three years, Buck had secured a time slot on secular television. Though Live Crusade with Buck Hill reached national and international audiences for limited periods, his greatest impact was in regional networks throughout Florida.

  He appeared on air in a suit and tie. His hair was cut and styled, bleached blond. He was charismatic, seated before a serious-looking bookcase, preaching on everything from divorce to gluttony.

  Even back then, his sermons skewed political. He took particular aim at “baby killing” and “the radical homosexual agenda.” After five years, networks pulled Hill’s show under pressure from the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Among other things, he had called Islam a “1,400-year-old lie from the pits of Hell,” and called the Prophet Mohammed a “murdering pedophile.” The Koran was a “book of fables and a book of lies.”

  Americans United for the Separation of Church and State petitioned to have Live Crusade’s tax-exempt status revoked. “I have every right to educate people on spiritual matters and deal with the pressing spiritual issues of our day, even those that transcend into the political arena,” Hill told the New York Times, which broke the story. “Unlike many Christian leaders, I have never and never will endorse any candidate for public office. I have never told people who to vote for or who not to
vote for.”

  The IRS launched an investigation into the Live Crusade ministry that lasted for nine years. This past March, Buck and his lawyer finally reached a settlement. I spent a day at the courthouse, wading through the filings. He owed $10 million in unpaid taxes. He owed $100,000 to American Express.

  * * *

  “He was very theatrical,” said Shelly Zeno, his former publicist. I had found her on Facebook, living in Sarasota. To my amazement, she posted her phone number on her profile. It sounded like she answered the phone in her car. She invited me to come down to the lot where she was now selling Aston Martins. We borrowed a Vanquish Volante and followed the bay. She rolled the top down. Chrome clouds gathered over the water. She was a fast talker, peroxide blond, with oversized lips and enormous knockers. She had represented some of the biggest names in Christian media, including Buck’s archnemesis, “prosperity pimp” Joel Osteen. I hoped she would give me some dirt on Buck’s spending habits.

  “I worked pro bono for him,” she told me. “He never had the money to pay me. He wrote his own copy, and I just sent it to editors. I didn’t always agree with what he had to say, but he was good at attracting attention. I liked his spirit. There was a time when he felt everything he was saying and doing was coming from a very deep conviction.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Absolutely.”

  We pulled up to a streetlight and she smiled at the car next to us. Two men leered back. I could tell my plastic Walgreens sunglasses next to her Ferragamo’s didn’t make sense to them, much like her story about Buck’s finances didn’t make sense. Did she think I hadn’t done my research? That I didn’t know about his Naples mansion or his trouble with the IRS?

  “If he didn’t have the money to pay you, what happened to his donations?” I said.

  “What donations?” she laughed.

  “You’re saying he never got any?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  I’d read somewhere that he refused to sell trinkets on the air. “The Bible says the Gospel should be free,” he’d said. But then, he also ran a “Souls of Gold” mail-in jewelry campaign offering only receipts and prayers in return for your family heirlooms. And the Ezekiel Project: a paid membership that offered prayers in return for the membership fee. Members of the Ezekiel Project were expected to sign up other members who were “committed to the Truth,” like a holy pyramid scheme. Where did that money go?

  “I looked him up about a year ago,” Shelly said. “It made me sad. I could tell he wasn’t doing well, that something had happened to him.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “I couldn’t tell you. His website was rolling out old information. His appearance concerned me. It looked like he was in a dark, tattered room with the drapes pulled. It was just so not Buck.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “I considered it, but I was afraid he would ask me for help.” She wasn’t doing Christian PR anymore—she refused. “You can’t pay me to walk into a church now. By the time I left PR, I didn’t feel like I was doing anything except making rich Christians richer.”

  * * *

  I was driving on the Tamiami Trail when Buck called me back. I had been persistent in trying to get him on the phone since leaving St. Petersburg, wanting to make a plan to meet him in person. In my voice mails, I had expressed my concern for the future of Live Crusade given his recent troubles with the IRS. I was careful not to give him further reason to avoid me. I pulled out my recorder and steered with my elbows, praying that my car wouldn’t veer off the road, since I didn’t have the money to get it serviced, and hadn’t in over a year.

  “We’ve been jammed with so much, trying to get our TV show back on the air,” Buck apologized. “I’ve just been so slammed with so many things.”

  I said it was no problem. The sun streaked past my passenger window. “What do you have to do to get your show back on the air?” I said. I figured entertaining his fantasy was the best way to ingratiate myself.

  “Oh, just . . . when you’re working with twenty-five syndicators, it’s a daily grind to get everything set up,” he said.

  “That’s a lot of syndicators. Can you name some of them?”

  “We’re going into eighty-some-odd markets,” he said. “But I’ll, uh, fill you in on everything. Just let me get through December and I’ll talk to you, okay?”

  “You know, I talked to Jim West from the Walk TV,” I lied. “He said he would be happy to have you back on the network, but that you owe them money, and would have to negotiate a new contract.”

  “We’re dealing with another syndicator,” said Buck. “One of the major networks.”

  “I thought there were twenty-five syndicators? Is there only one? Which one are you working with?”

  “I’ll talk to you about it in January, hon. Everything will be up and running by then.”

  “You know, I talked to your landlord, Carol, too. I know that you’re in the middle of eviction proceedings, so I’m wondering what’s going on with that.”

  “I’ll talk to you in January.”

  “You owe her about the same amount that you’re asking for in the Battles—$64,000. You’re asking for $65,000 in the Battles. Is that related?”

  He hung up.

  * * *

  I knew from Google Maps that his mansion sat at the end of a cul-de-sac in a double-gated golf course community. I parked across the street from the entrance and leaned on the hood of my car. There was no way I could drive up to it; I would have to sneak in. Given that Buck was dodging me again, showing up at his door now could seem like escalation, a threat. I decided to get a room and regroup. I expected him to e-mail me that night, anyway, since I had baited him. The truth was, his landlord had refused to speak with me. I wasn’t surprised; I knew from social media that she was a Trump supporter. When I’d asked her whether she believed in Hill’s work, whether she and Buck had a “personal friendship,” she’d said it was none of my business.

  No official motion had been made on his eviction in several days. This led me to believe that she didn’t really want him out; she just wanted her money. Maybe she believed his lies about syndication. Maybe she agreed with his views on Muslims, Oprah, abortion, and salvation.

  Some part of me was beginning to sympathize with Buck. I could almost ignore his hateful messaging and see him for who he was: an insolvent, weak, lonely has-been. I related to his moral certitude, but tendency to violate his own moral code. I related to his failure, but determination to keep trying against all odds. I almost, in spite of myself, felt like reaching out to him and saying, Here, let me help you be less of a fuck-up. Then again, he might not have wanted my help. Maybe he believed himself a martyr.

  * * *

  I checked into the Sunrise Motel, advertising fifty cable channels, a mini fridge, and low rates. A wreath of dead leaves hung above the bulletproof glass of the check-in window, beside an American flag. Next door was a liquor store that I planned to hit up as soon as I changed out of my dirty clothes. My car was one of two in the lot. The other was missing a back window. I needed a nap.

  The walls of the room were concrete blocks, painted white and unadorned. The bedspread was the color of red tide. I was checking the mattress for bedbugs when Buck’s first e-mail came in. I scrolled until I reached it—he had not waited for me to respond before sending others, each spiraling deeper. Who are you? he demanded. First..I am NOT being evicted. Second..why would you be calling my landlord? Wht is your real goal? Issue?..If we are to move forward??

  His messages were riddled with snark and jabs at my intelligence, and sarcastic turns of phrase: FYI, LOL, Obviously you are very ingenious.

  Outside, the sun was setting fast over a blighted intersection crawling with souls of little faith. I decided to hold off reading any more of Buck’s e-mails until he was done being mad at me, but my phone kept vibrating in my pocket, and each time I felt it, my pulse quickened. I hated when people were mad at me
, even people I hated. I asked the liquor store clerk where the Scotch was, and opened my phone in the back corner. Interesting, Buck said. Spoke to Mi-Seon?..Spoke to Shelly?..Mike? Key $ man David?

  I took note of these names.

  He insisted that the Live Crusade’s monthly operating budget for the last nine years had been $65,000, that the bulk was balled bandwidth—though it was obvious to me, and anyone taking even a cursory look, that he was using no bandwidth.

  I paid for my Dewar’s and carried it out in a paper bag. Back in the room, I brought it to the bathtub, where the squawk of Trump’s voice penetrated the wall from the next unit. A murderous fantasy overtook me and I thought about my ex-boyfriend, how proud of himself he must be now, seeing that horny toad’s face every day. I hadn’t even told him about my abortion. I’d paid for it with my own credit card and had lied about leaving town for two days to report on a story. “I’m a feminist,” he had told me. “I just think that a man should have some say, if he’s the father.”

  I smiled imagining telling him now, imagining stabbing Trump in the face and, as he died, holding up a picture of the thirteen-year-old he’d raped, tossing money at him for an abortion as I was leaving.

  Buck was still e-mailing me.

  …btw..throw Hinn…Jakes..and the rest of the prosperity pimps on Christian TV with Osteen, he said. I would never worry about money again if I took their path to preaching/fleecing the choir…

  Poor baby.

  I actually live and believe all I teach..and one day..like each one..will stand before God..

  Then, to my surprise, he said, Chat with you in Jan…

  * * *

  I went back to Buck’s Facebook. The sun had set and the Sunrise was filling up, all of the windows coming alive. Next door, someone was getting fucked or murdered. I turned up the TV. Buck and I had a friend in common: the mother of a person I’d dated briefly in high school. The family identified as Messianic Jews, or “Jews for Jesus”: ethnically Jewish, but evangelically Christian. This manifested in curious ways. One day, my boyfriend built a didgeridoo out of some old PVC pipe. He was playing it in the kitchen and his mom came to listen.