High Noon: Taking it to the Streets with Baltimore's 12 O'Clock Boyz

This article originally appeared in the Baltimore City Paper, May 21, 2003. Photographs by Jefferson Jackson Steele.

It's a cool spring evening, and Druid Hill Parkis jumping. Cars and motorcycles are parked all along a narrow road near Latrobe Pavilion. Everyone's hanging out by their rides, listening to car stereos and chatting up their neighbors. The road itself is jammed: freshly washed cars, SUVs, and motorcycles, all going back and forth, up the road to the basketball courts and down to the statue of George Washington. It's the kind of slo-mo cruise you'd find at any decent beach, except here the nearest body of water is the reservoir at the bottom of the hill.

The distinct high whine of a two-cycle engine calls from the other side of the reservoir, along Druid Park Lake Drive. It's a dirt bike. First one, then another, then a dozen or more young guys on motorcycles hit the park, weaving along the cruise route and zooming across the grass. The weekly Sunday gathering is hardly quiet, with the sound of the hornetlike motors cutting through the crowd, yet the roadside gauntlet erupts with laughter and shouting. The 12 O'Clock Boyz have arrived.

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. 

Bombs Over Baghdad

Illustration by Tom Chalkley

This article was originally published Dec. 23, 2009 in Baltimore City Paper

On March 19, 2003, the most powerful military force on the planet began raining bombs on buildings across Baghdad, attempting to decapitate the most evil head on the planet from its oppressed corpus. A shattered leadership would soften the resistance for when the tanks rolled in. Six-plus years later, we know the premise was bogus: there were no bio-weapon tractor trailers, no chemical-bomb caches, and though a few right-wing wonks insisted otherwise, no connection to al-Qaida. Six-plus years and hundreds of thousands of deaths.

My wife and I decided to get married in February 2002, well before the Iraq invasion, but well into the Global War on Terror. U.S. and allied forces had invaded Afghanistan and deposed the Taliban. The president gave his "axis of terror" speech, so we knew it was just a matter of time. No way could we have predicted that 10 days before our ceremony bombs would drop on Baghdad.

Maryrest Cemetery, Mahwah, NJ

Suz, Owen and I left Kelly and Dustin's converted cabin in Glen Spey, NY Saturday morning, hoping to get to Brooklyn by about 2 p.m. to catch the Mermaid Parade on Coney Island. Suz spent the last 2 days painting a mural in the nursery set aside for Kelly and Dustin's fast-approaching baby, which you can see on her mural website Wallybee.com (well, pretty soon anyway, as soon as yours truly updates the site).

Once we rounded up all our junk and said goodbye, we drove along the Delaware River, through Port Jervis and into New Jersey, pretty much following the same route as my trip to High Point a couple days earlier. Before we were to drive into the city, I wanted to do some more family soul-searching. After my ghostly experience at the High Point State Park, what better way to sort through the past than visiting the graves of my father's family? So we set off for a little Catholic cemetery near Ramsey, our old hometown. (My father is buried in the sandy earth of Spring Hill, Florida, the area where our branch of the family settled in the 70s.)

High Point Monument, New Jersey

Highway 23 in Sussex County, northeast New Jersey, is a steady, weaving climb from the Delaware River to the highest point in the state at 1,800-odd feet. This is the kind of road our diesel Mercedes is built for--the massive compression and torque just pushed the car up the incline. I kept pulling down the rear view mirror to smile at and talk to my 18-month old son Owen, who was strapped into his car seat, happily yammering to himself. The roads were slick, and fog drifted between the trees, revealing lush meadows and marshy clearings where birds took flight into the mist. We were heading for High Point State Park, a place I hadn't visited since 1975, when I was nine years old. That's when this picture was taken. I'm at far left, with my brother Mike and my mother. My father, with the camera, had worked at the state park when he had joined the Civilian Conservation Corps in the early 1940s, but not on the construction of the monument, as family lore recalls. He was on a crew that improved the park or built some of the massive granite walls that weave through the park, because he would have been only five years old when the monument was finished in 1930. The park, incidentally, was designed by the Olmstead Brothers, sons of Central Park-designer Frederick Law Olmstead, and who left a string of beautiful public parks in their own wake, notably Druid Hill Park in Baltimore.