Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (7 page)

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exotic pet trade and the problems of keeping them as pets. (Finding a

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piece of raw meat in your bed can do that.) Like parents often do with

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children, Carole and Don argued over their animals. She wanted bigger

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cages; he argued they were fine. Don wanted to move the animals to

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their property in Costa Rica; he wanted to keep them in Tampa.

Then one day, Don vanished. Carole says he went to look at an ultra-

light plane at a nearby airstrip and never returned. A sheriff’s investi-

gation ensued. Searches were conducted. Carole was interviewed. One

of Don’s children accused her of feeding him to the cats. Don’s long-

time secretary insinuated the same, adding that Don was planning to

divorce Carole. Without a body, the investigation hit a dead end. What

happened to the cat man remains a mystery.

Carole says that after Don’s disappearance, she stopped breeding ex-

otics and started taking in unwanted ones: a crippled tiger confiscated

from a drug dealer’s basement, retired circus performers, former pets

that grew too big for owners to handle. Her missing husband’s $6 mil-

lion estate was stuck in probate for six years. She sold her jewelry and

her car to keep the sanctuary going. She allowed tours for ten-dollar

donations; volunteers built a small cottage amid the large cat pens and

rented it out on weekend nights to tourists who wanted to wake to a

lion’s roar.

After Don was officially declared dead, Carole got the lion’s share

of the estate, which was mostly real estate investments. She’s stopped

renting out the onsite cottage, enlarged cages, and spruced up the sanc-

tuary. She moved into a house away from the cat compound and even-

tually married a Harvard MBA who’s apparentlyas much a cat fanatic as

proof

she; he wore a tiger-print toga to their beach wedding. He helped Car-

ole restructure the nonprofit. They renamed it Big Cat Rescue because

it sounded more professional, she says.

Though visitors can no longer stay overnight, for a donation they

can take a guided tour of 55-acre big-cat habitat. You can even get mar-

ried there amid the pens of roaring cats on a faux beach. Just remem-

ber to keep the guests out of the lions’ soaker range.

Carole says 100 percent of the donations go toward feeding the cats,

which eat 1.2 million pounds of specialized food a year. The sanctu-

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ary has about one hundred volunteers and ten paid employees. Car-

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ole doesn’t earn a salary from the sanctuary even though she devotes

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most of her time to big-cat projects. Her latest charge has been assem-

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bling an online pride of like-minded big-cat lovers she labels AdvoCats.

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When one of them learns about an offensive event or operation, Car-

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ole sends out the alert and the AdvoCats leap into action. They over-

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whelm with calls, e-mails, letters, and posts to the offender’s Facebook

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page. If that fails, they contact anyone associated with the operators,

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such as all their Facebook friends. Perhaps not surprisingly, their social

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Carole Baskin, founder and chief executive officer of Big Cat Rescue, the Tampa

woman that big-cat owners across America love to hate. Photo by Jamie Ve-

ronica. By permission of Carole Baskin, CEO of Big Cat Rescue, Tampa.

proof

media prowess has been effective. AdvoCats successfully pressured a

bar owner not use a tiger cub for a promotional event. More than nine

hundred AdvoCats complained to PetSmart for allowing Dade City’s

Wild Things to bring a white tiger cub into a store near Tampa. Carole

says the corporation reminded managers that exotic animals are for-

bidden in its stores.

Carole is waiting on a list of state licensees to check if they have

bought the insurance she lobbied FFWCC to require. “I’ll bet when they

send it back to me there will be an awful lot of people that haven’t got-

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ten it,” she says. Yes, Carole still wears leopard print.

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A Real Live Monkey!

egnir A year has passed. The Little Leaguers are now a hand taller and only a

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hop from puberty. In an instant they go from hanging on the bullpen

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fence and singing silly cheers to keenly taking their positions on field

and not only paying attention to the pitch, but appearing ready for

whatever ball may come their way.

Monkey Mom and family are at their traditional spot between the

concession stand and the bleachers, a place where everyone passes, a

crossroads. A capuchin in a striped infant snapsuit clings to her neck.

There’s a new addition to the family; a tiny bundle hidden in a baby

blanket is nestled in her lap.

Little brothers and sisters occasionally stop to look at the capuchin

but don’t linger. They’ve seen him before. Team parents no longer give

the monkey a second glance. Even Lemur Mom doesn’t seem inter-

ested. She’s overwhelmed with her own pet dilemma. Otis, their lemur,

is teething and starting to chew up the furniture.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do with him,” she says. The kids have

lost interest and won’t be too upset if he gets a new home. But where

will she take him? “I can’t sell him because I don’t have a license to sell.

I just have the pet permit.”

As she ruminates I go check out Monkey Mom’s newest child.

The bundle in the blanket is an infant spider monkey; they can

grow up to 14 pounds and 2 feet tall, not including their prehensile

tail. They’re chatty with high-pitched attention-seeking screeches and

barks. Their calls sound like a gurgling chicken. This tiny guy hasn’t

proof

started talking yet.

Monkey Mom says she brings her furry ones to games to acclimate

them to different people. Even seemingly tamed wild animals require

frequent human interaction to prevent them from reverting back to

their natural fear of people. Lest he forget she’s his adopted mom, she

plans to bottle-feed him for the rest of his life. “You have to, to keep

that bond.”

One of her human sons runs up, and the monkey leaps from Mom’s

lap to his chest. The boy laughs as the furry creature runs around his

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shoulders. A couple of kids stop to watch. A passing pudgy ballplayer in

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an Auburn Tigers jersey stares back at the capuchin as his mother drags

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him along to the bleachers.

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The Tigers are new to the league, new to the faithful presence of

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monkeys at their games. The kid who discovered it dashes up into the

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stands, shouting out to his teammates: “Did you see the monkey?”

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“There’s a monkey down there! A real, live monkey!”

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He doesn’t have to say much more before half the team stampedes

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down the bleachers, their cleats clanking against the metal. One of

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their parents shouts for them to not get too close. An Auburn team dad

grumbles to another parent, “Yeah, some woman over there brought a

monkey to the game.”

The kids don’t brake until they are about 3 feet from Monkey Mom,

and then it’s as if they have hit an invisible wall; they bump into one

another, nearly falling down. Spread out in a semi-circle like TV report-

ers at a press conference, they gawk and whisper in each other’s ears,

but don’t dare inch closer.

Monkey Mom looks horrified. She holds tight to her capuchin, while

her mother, Monkey Grandma, keeps the baby spider monkey hidden

by a blanket. She avoids eye contact with the boys and talks to her

friend. Obviously she wants the little Auburn Tigers to move along. It’s

unclear whether she fears the monkey might hurt the kids or worries

that the squirming boys will stress out her pet.

The boys finally return to their seats at the insistence of one of their

parents. Monkey Mom relaxes and contentedly returns to watching her

son play ball while the capuchin dressed like a baby hops back and forth

across laps and shoulders. One big happy family.

proof

adirolF egnirF 43

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The King of Trampa

proof

From the outside, you wouldn’t guess that Joe Redner’s Mons Venus

strip club is as synonymous with Tampa as its world-famous cigars. It

looks more like a grungy topless joint you might see beside a truck stop

off a lonely interstate ramp. Built in the 1960s, the plain building is no

larger than a modest home with a flat roof, rock siding, and flashes of

purple trim. Squeezed between a full-service car wash and Joe’s Pizza,

which Redner also owns, the all-nude dance club is easily overlooked

on this congested section of Dale Mabry Highway. The roadside mar-

quee is modest by strip-club standards; a small, digital board claims,

“Home of the Most Beautiful Women in the World!!!” and a backlight

sign bears the word “NUDE” and the club’s name, “Mons Venus,” a eu-

phemism for vagina.

At 9:00 p.m. on the muggy eve of Memorial Day, the club is still dead

enough to find a front parking space beside a Porsche. A couple of men

in their thirties having a smoke underneath the front awning share

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Mons lore. “You want to know how famous Mons is?” asks Kristopher,

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who in glasses and a button-down seems an authority on the club.

“I got into a cab in Hong Kong a few years ago and the cab driver asked

me where I was from. When I told him Tampa, Florida, he said, ‘Oh,

Mons Venus!’”

Of course, Tampa cab drivers are even more familiar with the club.

They claim that Mons and Bern’s Steak House are the most common

destinations of fares they pick up at Tampa International Airport.

About 85 percent of Mons patrons are from out of town, largely con-

ventioneers, businesspeople, tourists, and sport fans. The home sta-

dium of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the New York Yankees spring

training field are within walking distance. Sometimes after games, the

crowd around the Mons stage is four or five deep. Joe Redner has es-

timated that in some years, more than a quarter of a million people

walked through Mons’s doors.

Florida certainly has bigger and fancier places to see skin. Based

on various strip-club databases and registries, the Sunshine State has

more topless and nude strip joints than any other state, which is un-

derstandable considering it attracts the most tourists. South Florida’s

venues are some of the loosest and largest all-nude clubs in America.

Customers are allowed to get not only a nude lap dance but also a shot

of alcohol along with it—a hedonistic mix prohibited in California,

proof

New York State, and most cities, including Las Vegas and Tampa.

Rapper Lil Wayne sings about making it rain at Miami’s swanky King

of Diamonds (K.O.D.) in “Hustle Hard,” and he held his star-studded

homecoming there in 2010 after he was released from prison. A one-

stop hip-hop he-man cavern, the K.O.D. is as big as a Wal-Mart Super-

store with a basketball court, barbershop, shoeshine service, restau-

rant, spa services, and tanning salon, which is a little perplexing since

the clientele is largely African American.

Then there’s more rural Pasco County, long home to the nation’s

largest concentration of nudist communities and resorts. Pasco gets

Tampa’s spillover of residents and all-nude strip clubs. And Pasco clubs

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can sell alcohol.

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Despite Mons’s lack of a bar, it ranks the best in the entire U.S. of

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A. among the one hundred thousand strip-club connoisseurs who sub-

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scribe to the Ultimate Strip Club List, a Las Vegas–based website that

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serves as a Tripadvisor® for lap dance junkies. Members laud it for the

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“major contact” with dancers and the “hot girls.” Mons ranked third

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among 2,800 strip clubs worldwide, losing out to two Tijuana clubs

that are also brothels.

Many locals know the club more for its opinionated owner, Joe Red-

ner, who’s forever in the headlines battling social mores and running