It was Dennis Macilwain. Yes, that Macilwain, "The Sign Guy." Macilwain has been putting up campaign signs on the mean streets of West Palm Beach since the Reagan years. It's a tough, grinding job, full of unexpected dangers. Macilwain has been pelted with eggs, threatened by alligators. He's had guns waved in his face. Macilwain knows where all the bodies are buried, and he never hits the streets without a PK Walther .380 in the glove compartment.
There was trouble, Macilwain told the 'Pipe, a hint of desperation in his voice. Jerry Beer's campaign signs were mysteriously disappearing. Beer, a candidate for Circuit Court judge in Palm Beach County, was in a hot race with incumbent Judge Art Wroble and a couple of other candidates, and somebody with a razor was on a rampage.
Macilwain's message was simple: Come on up and see for yourself.
The battered cylinder dropped the bourbon bottle back into the bottom drawer of his desk and headed out. It was up I-95, slicing through traffic, past retail boxes and glassy office buildings, pulling off finally at Atlantic Avenue. Macilwain was waiting there in a pickup, a short, round man in a golf cap.
He grimly opened the passenger door for the 'Pipe, then aimed the truck down the avenue.
Macilwain ran it down for Tailpipe, pulling the story, episode by episode, out of the ooze of Palm Beach County politics. The territory was under siege, he said. Campaign signs for Jerry Beer, a lawyer and traffic hearing officer who's been endorsed by the Palm Beach Post, were being sliced from their frames with razors, uprooted, and smashed. In the dog-eared notebook where Macilwain scrawls his sign tally, entry after entry indicated that Beer signs he'd posted in the past weeks were downed, mangled, or... just gone. Oddly, though, signs for other campaigns remained.
"I'll bet you the keys to my truck that this one is down too," the Sign Guy muttered as the lights of his massive pickup truck illuminated a grassy swale at Atlantic Avenue and 441. The sliver of land on the corner of the highway was littered with campaign signs, including some of Beer's competitors in this year's unusually cutthroat judicial race.
Macilwain gunned the truck over the curb and grunted knowingly. The big red, white, and blue, eight-by-four-footer advertising "BEER" in huge block letters that Macilwain put here weeks ago was nowhere to be seen.
Tailpipe groped for an answer, like a tongue probing a loose tooth. Let's face it, he said. Anyone might want an eight-by-four-foot sign proclaiming allegiance to beer. With college students moving into bare-walled dorm rooms at Florida Atlantic University this week, they'd be damned hard to resist. Macilwain ruminated on the idea. Maybe so, he said, though tales of vandalized signs were coming up empty on the FAU grapevine.
And the evidence was pointing elsewhere. Although some of the Beer signs had been carefully razored free from their frames, as if being prepared for a new life as wall art, others had simply been overturned or smashed.
"This is no college-kid job," Macilwain said as he leaned over a Beer sign at the corner of Glades Road and Boca Real, like a coroner examining a corpse. The top had been sliced off, neatly decapitated.
"This judge race has been ugly," Macilwain says. "Only the Bush/Gore campaign was worse."
The race pits Beer against Wroble, who has been widely criticized by local lawyers as well as trial lawyer David French and ex-cop Ken LeMoine. The contest has been an unusual round robin of credentials challenges — with Beer often striking the telling blows — in what's ordinarily the least interesting part of a county election.
Beer's campaign manager, Cheryl Carpenter Klimek, said the sign vandalism is starting to hurt the campaign. Big signs cost $20 to $40 apiece, not counting what Macilwain charges for labor. The damage Macilwain has seen just tonight has easily cost the Beer campaign hundreds of dollars. The campaign expected the $6,000 it had spent on signage to last it until Election Day, Klimek said, but now it'll almost certainly have to buy more.
"It seems odd that they're disappearing at one end of the county and not the other," Klimek said. "That's near the territory of one of our opponents."
Macilwain didn't want to name names. But at many of the corners where Beer signs have disappeared, signs for French are usually standing tall, he said. (Reached by phone, French said his campaign is missing some signs too. Vandalism? "In my humble opinion, that would be inappropriate for a judicial race," he said.)
Macilwain is bluer than B.B. King on a gloomy Monday. "You wonder why I still do it — I don't know," he says.
Tailpipe headed back down I-95, through a hard, slanting rain, wondering if he'd ever get to the bottom of Beer's missing signs.
Wanted: Slut With Digital Skills
A few busy investors in Fort Lauderdale aren't looking for just any slut. They're searching for a positive, self-starting slut who can be pleasant on the phone. A social butterfly with computer skills who enjoys travel.
Said the Fort Lauderdale craigslist.com posting, under the "Adult Gigs" section: "BASE SALARY $5,000.00 PER WEEK PLUS COMMISSIONS AND TRAVEL EXPS... CHOICE OF COMPANY CARS... FULL BENEFITS...
EARN OVER $250,000 PER YEAR..."
Among the successful candidate's tasks: to be "eye candy" at meetings and events, to provide "stress relief/sensual massage" and "concierge services," and to write daily reports.
Now, Tailpipe knows a high-priced call-girl solicitation when he sees one. To get that quarter-million gig and the BMW, Lexus, or Mercedes (the choice is yours), be prepared to hand out big-time sexual favors. The 'Pipe's own ringer candidate got as far as a request for a signed, ironclad nondisclosure agreement.
There used to be barriers to recruiting competent sluts for the workplace, like the ever-present threat of a sticky sexual-harassment suit. But with an anonymous craigslist.com e-mail account, you can now find out just how far a girl is willing to go for a gem of an office job. That, even among consenting adults, ain't necessarily progress.
Booty on the Beach
Amazing the things people leave at the beach. A couple of Sundays ago, while oiling up at Sunrise Beach, the 'Pipe spotted a curious, binocular-wielding fellow. This was metal-detecting legend Harry Fink, 77. He was scanning the water for pockets of undisturbed sand.
It's in those smoothed-out bars and moguls, where the sand drifts into empty spaces like snow in a field, that you find the golden goods, says Fink, who's been at it for more than 50 years.
Long before metal detectors were water-proof, Fink created his own floating, metal-detecting hat, he says. He used to wade off the Maryland shores, and the ample gold he discovered quickly turned his hobby into an obsession.
An obsession, a hobby, but not a profession. "I never sold a single thing," Fink says, his blue eyes flashing with pride.
He never needed to, of course. Fink owned his own bar and then his own drive-through car wash, Fink's Robo — the first of its kind, he says — in Maryland. But after being held up at gunpoint on four occasions, Fink says, he decided Florida looked friendlier. He brought his wife and daughter down, bought some condominiums, and began to explore the coastline, which has yielded "pounds" of gold over the past four decades. The hunt is particularly rewarding after beer-guzzling spring breakers blow in, Fink says.
Although he never sells jewelry, Fink does give it away. Five years ago, his daughter pawned some rings and was able to buy a house in Orlando, he says.
A tall tale? Maybe. But the old guy has loot to prove it. He pulls out a small velvet jewelry pouch and empties the contents, piece by piece, into his thick, tan palm. First, there's a gold and silver thumb ring festooned with what look like carved wooly mammoths. Next, a diamond slider — apparently all the rage for a while. Bigger diamonds follow, as does a ring with inset diamonds and emeralds.
Fink digs into his bag for one last piece.
"I didn't make this; I just found it," he says sheepishly.
Into his palm tumbled a chunky golden ring that featured a tiny naked couple in a full-out royal 69.
Amazing the things people leave at the beach.
—As told to Edmund Newton
