Sunshine State

by Sarah Gerard

  “Not really,” she said, looking confused. I thanked her and continued on toward the office.

  Outside, Greg was smoking a cigarette as if nothing was going on—as if he hadn’t ignored my call that morning. I bummed a cigarette, acting casual. Took a drag. Pointed across the street at Ralph’s house.

  “So, that’s his?” I asked, as if I didn’t already know.

  “Yup,” he responded.

  “Uh-huh.”

  We smoked.

  “Did I miss a call from you this morning?”111 he asked.

  “You did.”

  “My phone died.”

  “No problem.”

  We smoked.

  “I won’t know anything until Wednesday,” he said finally.

  I left this mysterious comment hanging in the air between us. We finished our cigarettes and dropped them on the ground, where, looking back, any number of birds could have eaten them. I followed him inside the office like I was allowed to be there and found Jimbo sitting on a couch by the door, holding a glass filled with, I later ascertained, an awful lot of vodka.

  Outside, moments later, Jimbo told me everything.

  Ralph’s sons were dissolving his association with the sanctuary. “They want to keep it alive, and they know it won’t stay alive with him involved.”112

  I appreciated this anthropomorphizing of the sanctuary, as if it were a living thing in need of immediate care. Knowing what I did about the sanctuary’s troubles over the last few years, most of which could be traced back to Ralph, I wasn’t surprised to hear of this development. But I had a feeling there was more to it than money troubles.

  “He’s so committed to winning,” Jimbo continued. “He says it’s for the birds, but the birds are suffering.”

  It wasn’t clear whether he was referring to the birds at the sanctuary or the birds in Ralph’s house and the warehouse, or even to the birds in general that needed the sanctuary. When Jimbo mentioned that he’d moved in with Ralph to help him clean up his life, I asked him about the birds in Ralph’s house. It sat a few hundred feet away from us, and I pictured them inside there now: some caged and some not; some falling in love, as Ralph had described113 at the beach bar; some sick and waiting to die until he returned home,114 as he told me on the phone a few days later. From outside, the building looked so small I couldn’t imagine how he’d fit a hundred birds inside it. Jimbo answered gravely: “Some don’t need to be there. Some are alive only because they’re there. And some shouldn’t be alive.”

  Periodically during our conversation, Jimbo would ask me to turn off my recorder so that he could speak candidly, and I would oblige, turning it back on when he signaled it was okay. Deeper into our conversation he decided, for convenience, to leave it on. “I’m just going to trust you,” he told me, though I wasn’t sure by what standard I should be trusted. I said I knew he wouldn’t be telling me any of this if he didn’t care.

  “I would take—let me be clear about this—I would take a nonfatal bullet for him,” he said. “I would really have to think about a fatal one. Because he’s old and he’s really on the wrong path.” He thought about this for a second. “I would jump in front of one only if it wouldn’t kill me,” he clarified. “I would, because his heart is pure.”

  I said I believed him.

  This was an emotional conversation for Jimbo. He asked me many times while we talked if I was comfortable with him crying, and I assured him I was—that I cry all the time. I’m an artist, like him. He appreciated me opening up to him.

  “I’m touched that I’m actually able to be this comfortable,” he said. “I’m kind of freaking out. Sometimes I imagine I’m a macho man.”

  “I knew better from the start,” I said.

  “He’s got birds up there that are so . . . warped,” he said, shaking his head. “But they’re breathing. And I’m glad about some of them. Some of them should probably be euthanized. But to pull up your flooring so that the birds can shit on the floor without destroying something is a little over the limit, as far as I’m concerned.”

  I mentioned to Jimbo what Ralph had told me at the bar: that he couldn’t let an animal die if he knew it could live.

  “I watched him cry for seventy-two hours straight over Snowball dying,” Jimbo said. “That was a pigeon. And he didn’t shed a tear for his mother.”

  We looked at each other.

  Finally, I ventured: “Do you think his mother’s death was just too much for him?”

  “No. I think he just doesn’t value human life as much as bird life,” he said. He sat for a minute, looking at Ralph’s house. “He really—He really is committed to birds.”

  Greg walked by, startling Jimbo. “Write that Ralph’s an asshole and an idiot!” Greg yelled over his shoulder.

  Jimbo was upset. “We’ve been expressing that differently!” he said. “Wow,” he apologized.

  “There’s some animosity flying around,” I said in my most understanding tone. Jimbo agreed. The night before, he’d gone out to dinner with Ralph’s sons, to talk about what should be done with the sanctuary. Beatrice had joined via phone. The boys had put their foot down.

  “She was on the phone saying, ‘We can let Papi have a title. We can call him associate, vice president, director,’ which would have made him happy. And Andrew went, ‘Fuck no! If he has anything to do with this place, it’s going to fail!’ And I’m here in the middle, you know? Because I really care about him—Kellie, are you mad at me?” he said as Kellie walked by.

  “No!” she said.

  “See?” He turned back to me. “I care too much what people think. It’s because my parents never cared about me.”

  That’s why he was so protective of Ralph’s sons, he explained. Growing up, the boys split their time between Florida and the von Gontard estate, Oxbow Farm,115 in Virginia. Their stepfather, Adie Senior, adopted them, and they took his name, erasing any public association they had with Ralph. Even back then, Ralph spent most of his time at the warehouse, so the boys had an au pair or went with him to the warehouse when they were in town. But they were lonely and hated the warehouse, Jimbo said. He was around to help them have a normal life.

  “I raised those boys,” he told me. “They came to me with, ‘Please save us from going to the warehouse!’ And Andy: ‘Take us out! Take us to the beach! Take us to something, do something!’ I became their guide.”

  At Oxbow, Adie Senior made the boys work. They’d get up at five in the morning and work all day, doing manual labor—and they earned money doing it. It taught them work ethic, taught them how to make a dollar, or a few million, the right way. Now in their thirties, the boys have amassed impressive résumés: Andrew is a commercial airline pilot based in St. Louis, has a law degree, and is making his way toward being a judge.116 In Dallas, Alex and Peter, along with their stepbrother, Adalbert “Adie” von Gontard IV, recently launched an upscale bar called the Eberhard,117 as well as a dating app called Courtem,118 which has drawn the interest of several major investors, including venture capitalist Mark Cuban.

  “And the twins—this is where the huge fear is going on here right now,”119 said Jimbo. “The twins are in the real estate business of buying failing properties and tearing them apart and making money.”

  He sniffled. “That’s what’s making this difficult.”

  I spent the next week trying to pin down Greg and Kellie. First, Greg would say they could talk before noon. Then, after noon. Then, that evening. Day after day. Was he stringing me along, wasting my time until I had to leave town?

  I persisted.

  I needed to know what would happen to Ralph and to the sanctuary. Against my better judgment, over three weeks I’d come to care deeply for the place and its people, not to mention the birds.

  Finally, Greg called me back, and I picked up a six-pack of alcoholic root beer to bring to the Vaughans’ home. They lived down a residential street in an area Floridians fondly describe as “back in the cut,” or far from the main road
. Greg called to me from the garage as I shut my car door. He sat at a tall, particleboard table smoking a cigarette and attempting to set up his new iPhone. Nearby, a green-cheek conure named Jack nibbled on an apple slice amidst a scattering of birdseed. I asked Greg where I could put the beer and he pointed to a refrigerator, which I found stocked with Budweiser cases. Their friend’s liquor store was closing and they’d gotten them for cheap, he explained. Kellie exited the kitchen to join us and I glanced inside—several framed pictures of the Last Supper hung above the sink.

  Everyone who talks to me about Ralph is careful to say they admire what he’s built. He’s done things at the sanctuary over forty-plus years that no one had done before him—fought for the animals when no one else would. He’s for the birds one hundred and ten percent, they all say. He’s a hero.

  “He’s just made a lot of stupid mistakes,”120 Greg said.

  Kellie nodded. “He just doesn’t use his head.”

  As Greg continued, Kellie stood nearby punctuating his sentences with “Yeps” and “Yeahs,” amending or expanding where necessary. They told me that Ralph hadn’t been paid by the sanctuary for three years and had been living on social security and the sanctuary’s donation boxes—hence the accusations in the press about stealing. His sons were now setting him up to live in the warehouse. It was appointed with beds for people evacuating from the beachfront in case of a hurricane, and Ralph already spent most of his time there. Ralph’s sons would pay his bills every month, thus relieving the sanctuary of the responsibility of supporting him and his habits and enabling it to get back on its feet.

  I asked what would happen to the birds in Ralph’s house.

  “He’ll have to take care of them,” Greg said simply.

  “They’re going to stay there?”

  “They’ll go to the warehouse.”

  “They’ll all go to the warehouse,” Kellie said.

  “Are they okay?”

  “They’re fine,” Greg said.

  “They’re fine,” said Kellie. “Fish and Wildlife check them all the time.”

  “I mean, yeah, some of them could use more cleaning,” said Greg. “But it’s not a health issue, anyway.”

  I was skeptical.

  “His house is,” Greg said, “but the warehouse isn’t. The warehouse is his go-to place. His pride and joy.”

  It occurred to me that the merging of Ralph’s house and the warehouse in his psychological world might have dire consequences. I imagined him left to his own devices with his seven hundred birds in a part of town that was zoned as industrial, isolated from other humans and miles from any supermarket, in precisely the location where his fantasies ran free. The scene had a postapocalyptic wash.

  “Isn’t there a yacht?” I asked.

  Greg laughed. “I’d like to show you that yacht.”

  “That yacht ain’t worth a freakin’ nickel,” said Kellie.

  The Whisker was sixty feet long and hadn’t been in the water in twenty-one years. It had a wooden hull and was, according to Jimbo, sitting under three feet of bird shit, infested with bees.121

  “But, uh, I don’t know if anybody ever told you about Micki,” Greg said.

  “Ralph’s cousin?”

  “Well, she’s the one who ruined the place.” This was awfully forthcoming for Greg. “It was a power thing for her. She wanted all the power. That’s when shit started going downhill.”

  I’d been curious about Micki, so I was glad she was coming up. As it turned out, shit had been at the bottom of the hill for quite awhile before she entered the scene in 2007. The sanctuary’s score on Charity Navigator,122 a website that rates nonprofits, peaked at one star for years until Micki’s predecessor, Michelle Glean Simoneau, took over publicity. The bad press that started the sanctuary’s demise had begun long before that, and the sneakiness, too—Ralph’s house, for instance, had been purchased by the sanctuary back in 1997, from a funeral director.123 The plan was to generate revenue for the sanctuary by renting out the house.124 Then Ralph moved into it.

  I tried to imagine, too, what kind of privileges would be afforded to Micki once she had ultimate power over a lowly bird sanctuary—aside, of course, from the two-minute cameo in Flying Free 2. But there was history to Micki and Greg, I’d learn. They’d come on at around the same time, before Mrs. Heath fell ill. Micki had retired from Verizon after thirty-four years125 and come to work at the sanctuary at Mrs. Heath’s request. In 2007, Mrs. Heath was ninety-four years old and had been doing the sanctuary’s books by hand for almost forty years.126 Ralph had always been too busy taking care of the birds to learn how to run the business, and he didn’t particularly care to learn, either. So his mother had stepped in. And in 2007, she asked Micki to help her with administrative duties.127

  Micki’s husband, Slick, was against the transition128—he had worked at the sanctuary for twelve years previously and had left on bad terms. To this day he hates Ralph. But Micki thought she might be able to help relieve Ralph of some of his bad publicity by leading him in the right direction.

  At the time, Michelle Glean Simoneau was the sanctuary’s marketing and public relations director.129 She was responsible for bringing in most of its money: calling donors for regular donations, and bigger donations in cases of emergency, and keeping on general good terms with the public.130 She excelled at her job and, over four years, built the sanctuary back up to near its former glory.131 Michelle’s daughter even came to work with her, in keeping with the family business spirit of the sanctuary. According to the Vaughans, Ralph promised Michelle she’d be executive director when he retired,132 and she believed him. It was what she’d been working toward.

  But “Micki wanted all the power,” Greg said. “She wanted to have full control, boss over everything. And Ralph let her have it because it’s his first cousin.”133

  In 2011, after four years working alongside Micki, Michelle quit and Micki took over her public relations responsibilities. Ralph gave Micki the new title of operations manager.134 Shortly thereafter, Michelle told News Channel 8 that she left “because of conflicts over financial accountability.”

  “I would say we need to use this money for what it was intended for135 or we’re going to get in trouble,” she said, referring to a $300,000 donation she’d arranged, which she said came with stipulations for its use. “Finally, I had to leave.”

  Her daughter left, too; she was weeks behind in pay.136

  Kellie shook her head mournfully. “Micki hired eight or nine more employees, including her son.”137

  “Who was the most useless piece of shit in the world,” Greg added.

  “Yep,” Kellie agreed.

  The following year, the Tampa Bay Times reported the sanctuary was under investigation by the Department of Labor for possible violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which covers minimum wage, overtime, child labor, and record keeping, and that the sanctuary had allowed employees’ health insurance to lapse without telling them.138 Micki insisted the issue had been resolved and denied any wrongdoing. Then the payroll tax scandal happened. Then the workers’ comp scandal. Then Ralph was caught stealing from the donation boxes. Meanwhile, more and more employees were finding themselves without paychecks. Kellie began working full-time at a nursing home to make ends meet139 as her full-time pay at the sanctuary dried up, until Ralph’s sons hired her to care for Mrs. Heath.

  “Mrs. Heath, to me, was like my grandma,”140 Kellie said. “I lived with her for two years. Her and I were so close.”

  “That’s what kept us there,” said Greg.

  “Micki always told us, since I was working and making money taking care of Mrs. Heath, that we didn’t need no check,” Kellie said.

  Micki promised they’d be paid the next week, and the next—for seven months, they said, she paid one of them or the other. They never saw that back pay, nor the rest of the money they gave to help the sanctuary through what they saw were hard times. By the time Micki left, they said, they’d given $60
,000 of their savings and were living on credit cards. They were lucky to have a good landlord.

  “He never said a word about it,” said Greg.

  “Never said a word,” Kellie said.

  The Vaughans’ deeper motivations for depleting their personal savings to help the sanctuary when they weren’t getting paid regularly were still hazy to me. I suspected it was connected somehow to their feelings about Micki, but they never said so outright.

  Then, in March 2013, Greg showed up to work at six a.m. as usual. He went about his business, checking on the birds, preparing their first meals. Everyone else would come in at seven, he thought. But seven rolled around and nobody showed. Then 7:15, then 7:30.

  “At seven thirty, I thought something was wrong,” he said. “I went in, there was keys everywhere, Post-it notes everywhere. Everybody quit.”

  “We’re the only two that stayed,” Kellie said, forgetting Chris.

  Two months later, Micki quit, and Kellie went to the office preparing to take over.

  “My first couple months, you can ask him, I was very overwhelmed,” she said. “It was just like, ‘We’ll never get out of this mess. We’re freaking screwed. We’ll never get out of it.’ Greg was like, ‘Calm down, Kellie, you’ll figure it out.’”

  They were $24,000 in the hole at the bank, said Kellie. There were hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid bills stacked high on her new desk. They owed $8,000 to Office Depot alone.

  “Now, how do you get away with it with somebody like that?” Greg laughed.

  According to Kellie, the sanctuary’s accountant discovered Micki had been turning in receipts every week for tanks of gas and cartons of cigarettes, claiming them as travel expenses. But more important was what happened when Kellie first went to the bank. There, she said, she discovered a bank account holding over $200,000, which, it seemed, nobody else had known existed. Kellie asked the bank teller what it was for and he promised to look into it over the weekend. When she came back on Monday, he’d resigned, and the bank account couldn’t be verified.