Sunshine State

by Sarah Gerard

  A patient of Ralph’s father brought in a snake with a wooden egg in its belly, and Ralph knew it would die unless they operated on it, which they did, then kept it while it recuperated. All of their lives, Micki says, every time she can remember, Ralph has been saving animals.

  “Anything wildlife,” she clarifies, “he’s always wanted to help.” End segment.

  Where is Micki now? Chris ignored my question.

  “Now it’s Kellie,” he said. “She’s managing the money.”

  The sanctuary currently relies heavily on outside help. Licensed rehabbers pick birds up from the hospital a few times a week so they can receive care the sanctuary can’t provide,63 as it no longer has a veterinarian or any licensed rehabbers on staff, aside from Ralph. Each rehabber specializes in a particular species. The Audubon Society of Clearwater helps. There’s a duck lady, Mary. Then there’s Eddie Gayton, who exercises the sanctuary’s hawks and takes their screech owls. It seemed obvious now, but it hadn’t occurred to me until then that the woman running the hospital, Shelley Vickery, wasn’t a veterinarian. She’s a former kindergarten teacher.64

  A rotating cast of volunteers bolsters the work of the small team of paid employees now carrying out the sanctuary’s daily operations. Some have been there for years. Others work there for a few months while they find some life direction. I spent most of my time in the indoor hospital scrubbing cages full of fish-scented shit and squirting vitamin-and-mealworm mash into the mouths of baby birds with a plastic syringe. I was told on my first day that feeding baby birds was easy—I just had to aim at the side of the throat, away from the windpipe. This wasn’t always the case: sanctuary volunteers used to go through special training to feed baby birds,65 in part due to how easily they imprint on humans. They grow accustomed to seeing human faces every day, and hearing their voices, and being cared for. They will never learn to take care of themselves.

  I was feeding a pair of baby blue jays when Greg came into the hospital chuckling. Shelley had just called after releasing a baby Muscovy duck back into the wild and had sworn off releasing birds ever again. “She put him down on the bank, watched him swim out,” Greg said. “Otter come right up from underneath and ate him!” He laughed with Kim, a veteran volunteer, at the thought of poor Shelley.

  “Is that mourning dove here?” he asked, calming down. “I hid it last night so Ralph wouldn’t get to it.”

  The dove was still there, Kim said. Greg was glad.

  “Why would you have to hide it?” I asked.

  “So Ralph doesn’t take it home with him,” said Greg.

  “He’s an OCD. Hoarder,”66 Kim explained. “We don’t talk about it.”

  I continued about my business as they finished their conversation, struck by Kim’s casual tone. Hoarding animals was nothing to laugh about. I weighed the open secret of Ralph’s alleged hoarding against my knowledge of the sanctuary’s finances. Beyond their inability to maintain a full-time, permanent staff, in 2011 Ralph signed over the deeds for the sanctuary property and his house to Seaside Land Investments LLC,67 a Texas-based corporation owned by his sons—heirs to the Anheuser-Busch fortune and the fortune of their stepfather,68 Adalbert “Adie” von Gontard III.

  I knew that all three of Ralph’s sons were in town. I’d also heard that Ralph’s best friend, Jimbo Guastella, had recently moved into the second floor of his house. Before leaving for the day, I asked Kim if she’d ever seen inside it.

  “I caught a glimpse of it once,” she said. “It’s wall-to-wall pigeons.”69

  Pigeons are an invasive species in Florida. If you find an injured pigeon, you can take it to a licensed rehabber, who can rehabilitate it but can’t legally release it back into the wild.70 Some rehabbers will choose to euthanize. Others rehabilitate and rehome them. With nice facilities some rehabbers can accommodate as many as fifteen or twenty pigeons at once.

  So Ralph was taking the sanctuary’s pigeons. All of them, apparently.

  “But the mourning dove?” I asked. “They’re a Florida native species.”

  Kim shrugged. “Well, yeah. He comes in and looks around.”71

  The costs associated with daily rescuing, feeding, and housing of four hundred birds are considerable. There’s the daily cost of six hundred pounds of fish72 and their refrigeration in two walk-in units. Then there’s medicine and staff. Facilities and repairs. Rescue vehicles, both land and water. In times of emergency, such as oil spills, red tides, and hurricanes, the costs skyrocket. Not to mention the labor demands. Greg Vaughan was working at the sanctuary when the Deepwater Horizon oil spill happened.73 The sanctuary alone received 120 gannets, large shorebirds not used to walking on land. The birds had lost their feathers after countless Dawn washings stripped them of their delicate oils, so the sanctuary kept the birds for a year while the feathers grew back. Walking on land can give gannets blisters, so each had to wear special shoes: mesh flip-flops taped to their feet. Then they were placed in water for four hours a day in a specially built enclosure that kept them from climbing out. It doubled the workload, Greg said, and nearly doubled the cost of food.

  The sanctuary has never applied for government grants, claiming there’s too much paperwork involved.74 It has opted instead to rely on private donations from local philanthropists and bird lovers. Some come in single-bill kindnesses dropped into the sanctuary’s pelican-shaped donation boxes; some are quite large, whether monetary or in the form of cars and yachts.75 But there have always been low periods. At first, the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) and the now-defunct Evening Independent were supportive through periods of scarcity, urging local citizens to pitch in where they could. When Dick Bothwell of the Evening Independent reported on the 1974 Smithsonian article, for instance, he added accusingly, “If everybody who loves birds in the Tampa Bay area would put their money where their bills are, the sanctuary’s troubles would be over, for a time at least.”76

  And yet there were years of unimaginable prosperity. Every few months, someone died and left millions of dollars to the sanctuary.77 Others were all too ready to donate when asked. Ralph’s mother, Helen, managed the business78 and kept up positive relations with the public, faithfully sending thank-you cards and developing the sanctuary’s Adopt-a-Bird program, managing memberships and keeping precise books until she fell ill and Micki took over.79 Ralph met his best friend, Jimbo, when Jimbo’s band held a benefit concert for the sanctuary down on St. Pete Beach80 and raised $28,000 in T-shirt sales alone. Jimbo told me he’d needed to earn some good karma and had been looking for a cause. He and Ralph were fast inseparable.

  “I had hair down to here,” he reminisced, pointing to his shoulder. “Eighteen different colors from being bleached out,81 working parasail during the day, and I sang, and there were girls.

  “That was part of the bad publicity,” he added.

  I’d met Jimbo in the sanctuary’s gift shop. He’s an aging surfer type—leathery but colorful. He was chatting up Diane, a petite middle-aged administrative assistant with blow-dried hair and a permanent low-grade smile. The next evening I observed him singing “Carolina on My Mind” into a beach bar microphone in Gulfport and chatting up a woman in the audience, asking her the name of her young son. I was there because Jimbo had invited me and because I figured Ralph would be there, too, and maybe his sons; I was right

  Jimbo had told me that Ralph really liked to spend money. According to him it was part of the sanctuary’s downfall. Ralph didn’t know how much money the place had because he’d never been interested in the sanctuary’s operations;82 he just happened to be the face of it. With his mother running the office, he never thought to learn how it ran.83 When publicity went south, so did donations.84 In 1996, Ralph came under criticism for overstating the effect of a cold winter on shore in a fund-raising letter—he said, wrongfully, that birds faced famine.85 The next year, his expenditures came into question over his waterfront home, which he’d purchased for $300,000,86 and the sanctuary yacht, which he�
�d purchased for $355,000. The yacht had five luxury staterooms, satellite TV, and a hot tub. It was supposed to be a source of revenue for the sanctuary, bringing in charter fees and serving as a venue for donor parties. When it came out in the press that Ralph was taking it down to the Bahamas for months at a time, he claimed he was using it to research the effects of plastic pollution on the ocean floor.87

  But Jimbo had mentioned the boat to me. He’d told me that Ralph took him down to the Cayman Islands on it, a month at a time, and paid him a hundred dollars a day to play guitar on the beach. Micki went sometimes. They just wanted to party. “I watched the gasoline go in the boat,” he said. “I came home with three thousand dollars in my pocket.”88

  Before Jimbo’s show, I found Greg and Kellie in the next-door restaurant ordering burgers. They’re the kind of people you don’t talk about separately; one seems out of place without the other. Maybe it’s their thick midwestern accents. Maybe it’s Greg’s quiet, no-frills attire counterbalanced by Kellie’s sundrenched hair and two rings on every finger. They were down in Florida on vacation nine years ago when Greg spotted an ad for a groundskeeper in the paper.89 He applied and got the job, sold their business back home, and moved down within the month. Mrs. Heath, Ralph’s mother, was still running the office, with Micki assisting. When Mrs. Heath fell ill, Kellie, a certified nurse, moved in with her,90 and Micki took over the office. Kellie was there when Mrs. Heath died. This is how the sanctuary has always been run: not as a business, but as a family operation.

  That night at the bar, Greg told me that Ralph owes him and Kellie each $7,00091 in unpaid wages—it was an open secret, he said, water under the bridge at this point. Greg had been promoted from avian supervisor to general manager since everybody left. Though Shelley had called Ralph “sort of a consultant”92 when I’d asked her to explain his current role at the sanctuary, Greg told me Ralph was still the director, despite not doing much of anything. In what sense was he the director? I asked. In the minds of the people? It wasn’t clear. What was clear was that his association with the sanctuary had crippled Kellie’s ability to maintain donor relations.93 Too much bad press had hurt them—and it wasn’t stopping. Just a few months earlier, Ralph had been in the news again, this time for attempting to sell the same 1963 Corvette Stingray to two different buyers,94 both of whom were now suing him. He’d collected each of their monies and then refused to turn over the car. These kinds of antics were not unlike Ralph, according to Greg.

  “Ralph’s an idiot,”95 he said. “You can put that in your book.”

  He gave me another example: Recently a man had died and left his estate to the sanctuary.96 Among its holdings were twelve cars, antique and unrestored, but possibly worth some money. Some of the cars were intended for the SPCA of Pinellas County. But when the time came to settle the estate, Ralph said he wanted all of the cars for himself—“for his ‘museum,’” Greg said, “which is his warehouse.” Ralph fought the SPCA for a year over the cars. Finally, the SPCA backed down and the sanctuary decided to put the cars up for silent auction. Beforehand, Ralph called one of his friends, and asked him to make a bid.

  “Ralph’s friend made a bid of $80,000 for the twelve cars,” Greg said. “And he got beat—a guy bid $90,000.”

  Ralph threw a fit. He refused to give up the twelve cars. He was taking the man to court.

  So now, the lawyer had to be paid, said Greg. “The building that they’re in has to have rent on it, the ground has to have rent on it, the car has to have insurance on ’em, the building has to have insurance on ’em.”

  “The thing is, he’s not doing it for the sanctuary,”97 Kellie said. “Even the attorney said that. Ralph not one time mentioned the sanctuary. It’s all, ‘I, I, I, I.’”

  I looked forward to hearing Ralph’s version of events. It had begun to rain lightly by the time we made our way to Jimbo’s set in the bar next door, but we stood outside on the concrete step of the open-air entryway and smoked cigarettes, looking at the sunset over the pier, talking casually with glasses of beer at our feet. Adrianne and Diane had come—we waved. Jimbo opened with some classics and got everyone singing along. He wore red Converse high-tops and board shorts, and a red surf-shop tee. He was recovering from a cold and his voice was still raspy, but he sang like it wasn’t. When Ralph’s son Andrew arrived with his wife and their new baby, Jimbo took a break to talk to them and pinch the baby’s cheeks. I stood nearby, listening. Though as yet there was no sign of Ralph, everyone seemed sure he would come at the last minute. He was probably at his warehouse on Starkey Road, they thought. That’s where he spent most of his time.

  I’d read about the warehouse: there was a foreclosure suit against it back in 2013.98 The Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary had originally bought the property for $550,000 back in 1997, to be used for storage. Then, in 2009, a local catamaran manufacturer and real estate mogul, Ronald Cooper, issued Ralph a loan for the same amount, with the warehouse as collateral. Ralph and the sanctuary promised to pay $5,500 in monthly interest until November 2011, when they’d make a balloon payment. Cooper received payments on the property until late 2011—then they’d stopped and the rest of the loan had never been repaid. Cooper was patient, but when he found out about the federal tax liens against the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary properties in 2012, he sued to protect his interests. Then, in December 2013, the warehouse was put up for auction99 to satisfy an almost $800,000 judgment, which comprised the amount of the original loan as well as unpaid interest, damages, and lawyer fees. At the last minute, the auction was canceled.100 Ralph’s sons registered an LLC named after the Starkey Road address;101 they listed themselves as officers of the company and paid for the warehouse.102

  When I’d asked Chris what was stored in the warehouse, he’d told me simply, “You don’t want to know.”103 He was wrong. Besides, certain things I already knew: The warehouse measures 35,000 square feet, according to News Channel 8,104 and has two floors, according to Jimbo.105 It’s owned by the sanctuary but not open to the public. I was determined to find out why.

  Ralph arrived at the Gulfport beach bar after Jimbo’s set ended, just as everyone was making their way to the bar next door to hear another musician. He wore a dirty white T-shirt with a hole in the sleeve, khaki shorts, and flip-flops, and sat alone on a bar stool facing the stage. Up close, he looked almost childlike—he has an innocent smile and clear, unassuming eyes. The thick head of hair from the Dewar’s ad has gone almost bald. He has a big, round belly, and his face is bloated and sunspotted.

  I introduced myself as a new volunteer and told him I was writing about the sanctuary. As we talked, I remembered something Greg and Kellie had told me earlier: Ralph refuses to believe what people say about him is true.106 The things people write in the paper are all lies, he insists; he will prove them all wrong—“The media, as you well know, likes sensationalism,”107 he would explain to me later. Jimbo had echoed Greg and Kellie’s sentiment: “He has to win.”108

  Ralph’s need to win doesn’t manifest as anger. He’s actually rather blithe, almost charming—call it stubborn naïveté perhaps. Willful self-deceit. He has a heart of pure gold, and it seems to be true—he’s for the birds.

  I asked Ralph if he kept any birds at home. He replied that he had one hundred pigeons.109 Then he told me about the warehouse on Starkey Road, his real joy, where he keeps the other six hundred birds.

  Chickens and parrots, pelicans and doves.

  Pigeons. Turtles. Furniture.

  A few cars.

  He’s working on a grant to fix the company yacht.

  Then he told me something his father had told him when he was a child, a basic principle he’d carried throughout his life: If an animal doesn’t have to die, it shouldn’t die.

  At the end of our conversation, Ralph told me I could call him after the weekend. On the way home, I drove by the warehouse. The gate was closed, but I pulled into the driveway and stood on the pavement, imagining the inside. Were the birds loose and f
lying around or in cages? Who cleaned this place every day, or every week? Behind the building, live oaks and shrubs crept up to the walls and tangled together. How much money had been poured into building and maintaining the warehouse while the sanctuary couldn’t pay its bills?

  Here, I thought, standing in the darkness, was the answer to my question: Here is why so many people turned on Ralph.

  That was Thursday. On Monday, I awoke to a thunderstorm. Morning storms in Florida are a special kind of sign, a reminder that you’re trespassing on Mother Nature’s turf—that everything you know could be washed away in an instant. The thunder that morning had made its way into my dreams, drawing me out of sleep. I lay in bed watching lightning flashes across my ceiling, knowing something was wrong. I got up and called Ralph.

  “I can’t talk now,” he said. He sounded frantic. “We got a lot of baby birds in the hospital last night.”110

  It was baby bird season, this was true, and it was also true that baby birds could be blown from their nests by the storm. The hospital tended to get a few more birds than usual on stormy mornings, but certainly not a catastrophic number, as Ralph’s tone suggested. The birds were not the issue. He was avoiding me. I asked when I should call him back.

  “I’ll call you,” he said, and hung up on me.

  I sipped my coffee.

  Greg had given me his phone number the night at the beach bar, telling me we’d talk more when we could be alone. He and Kellie had wanted to divulge things—to expose some goings-on at the sanctuary under cover of anonymity.

  I called Greg. No answer. I texted. No reply.

  By the time I arrived at the sanctuary that afternoon, the storm had cleared and the heat had risen from the dirt walkways into a thick steam. I found Shelley leaving the indoor hospital and asked about the baby birds. I’d heard they’d gotten a lot that morning.