The life of a repo man is always intense

Another story dug from the crates, this one is from 1990, and was published in the West Hernando News and Independent Press. Basically a single source story, backed up with some simple research, it was a pretty quick study. Still, I had a fun conversation with Mr. Taylor at a diner in Central Florida, where he poured out too many stories for me to recount. When he left, I challenged myself to see what his car looked like, but he disappeared into the parking lot. He was that good.

Joe Taylor's wrecker truck idled at an intersection in a small town in Marion County.

He spotted the car on the right of way down the street, and he knew from experience he needed backup. He radioed another agent, who arrived shortly thereafter.

The other agent pulled in to block the front of the car they were about to repossess, and Taylor pulled the wrecker in behind. He was hooking the car when the delinquent owner appeared at the front door of his mobile home, about 30 feet away.

"Hey, leave my car alone," he yelled. He cursed. He pulled out a long-barreled .38 and fired six rounds, sending Taylor and the other agent for cover behind the vehicles. Four bullets hit the wrecker, two whizzed by.

"I'm gonna get this damn car," Taylor thought as he lay on the ground. "I'm gonna get this car." He couldn't fire back -- state law prohibits him from carrying a gun.

Inside Job: Private industry in beginning to realize there is plenty of cheap labor in the U.S.--prison labor

This article was originally published Dec. 13, 1995 in Moon Magazine, a Gainesville, Fla. newsmonthly.

Three prisoners in white scrubs and masks spray rows of dangling green loofahs with a pesticide. Twenty rows away, three inmates in prison blues inspect the struggling sprouts, making sure crows haven't pecked away their labor.

The future of prisons may be growing on these ten acres of mucky soil 35 miles north of the Florida Everglades.

The Hendy Correctional Institute near Immokalee is a sprawling 3,850 acre compound whose razor wire-enclosed landscape includes orange groves and cattle range, a catfish pond and tanks, a station for the work camp and the main prison building. The state started a program here in August that employs a few low-risk inmates to grow loofahs, the mammoth cousin of the cucumber that can be eaten if picked young enough or used a scrubber when dried and bleached.

"This is not the menial task usually associated with prisons," Clarence White, Hendry's assistant supervisor of operations, said. It is hard work, though. Inmates work six hours a day, five days a week, inspecting budding plants, making sure the vegetables have room to grow along a wire, trying to keep water from rotting the plants off the vine and spraying pesticides. Of 1,300 inmates at Hendry, only a dozen or so work on the farm.

The Other Side of the Lake

A short story.

The mist hung dead over the lake, a settled shroud our canoe parted and wove through. The cloud, about a knee deep as far as I could see, absorbed all noise except the far-off interstate whine and the occasional swish of a fresh water bass churning the water. My paddle dipped the surface, I splashed too much, and my father shushed me. The air was crisp and slightly damp. The far side of Silver Lake was ringed with a dense wall of long-leaf pine and oak; behind us the campground with our warm truck camper parked a hundred feet or so up the bank. There my mother and younger brother slept on thin vinyl mattresses.