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| purpose of prostitution or to become an inmate in a house of prostitution;
(4) Receive or give or agree to receive or give any money or thing of value for procuring or attempting to procure any female to become a prostitute or an inmate in a house of prostitution; (5) Accept or receive knowingly any money or other thing of value without consideration from a prostitute; or (6) Aid, abet or participate knowingly in the doing of any of the acts herein prohibited. SECTION 16-15-110. Prostitution; violations. Any person violating any provision of Sections 16-15-90 and 16-15-100 must, upon conviction, be punished as follows: (1) for the first offense, a fine not exceeding two hundred dollars or confinement in prison for a period of not more than thirty days; (2) for the second offense, a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars or imprisonment for not exceeding six months, or both; (3) for the third or any subsequent offense, a fine not exceeding three thousand dollars or imprisonment for not less than one year, or both. Snickering should cease and desist. “All of us go a little mad sometimes,” Norman Bates says. POINT, was a small alternative rag in Columbia, S.C., and this copy had a Charleston artist's rendering of the governor, David Beasley, with two horns on the cover and dressed like a priest, looking like the Devil. At the Florence Library this publication caught my eye on the shelf between Newsweek and Rolling Stone, misplaced like a Confederate widow in a mosh pit. This was where my story would be read. There were stories about gays, politicians, articles that regular newspapers would never print, never in a million years. The editor was Brett Bursey, a radical jailed for draft evasion and bitter against the government. He got in trouble at the airport for protesting Bush. He once told me he was the basis for Jason Elliott in “Beach Music” by Conroy. Nobody likes POINT in public in Columbia, but copies go briskly in the legislative buildings, and some say the governor’s men snatch them up whenever they hit the stands. Not a bad strategy. After skimming the entire two years worth from the reference room, I wrote down the address and phone number and hit the road. The next time I visited the library I had been fired at the Florence Morning News, and on that day I ran into Nicole Gustin. It was very embarrassing for me, knowing there would be a report made immediately afterward to the newsroom. She was one of the reporters. “Oh, hi, Tim. What are you up to these days?” When you're out of work, people always fail to look you in the eye, but Nicole was after a weather report and there was no way out. “Fine. Fine. Sorry I didn't get to say goodbye.” Getting up enough nerve to write for POINT was hard, losing the newspaper style. The first annoyance during writing is always self-perpetuating - you gotta get up and clean up. Washing the dishes usually is a followup after making the bed and do-si-doeing around the house until you're sweating and ready to sit back down and begin writing after a buzz. Scrubbing the bathroom is a blessed choice in a way; you never flee “blocked” enough to tackle that stuff. Phone calls, minor disturbances. I always get more writing done when there are at least five Southern Bell bills in the dung hopper and silence on the other end of the receiver when you pick it up to make the call you can't make. When all else fails, go sit on the commode to escape the keyboard. The only way to re-group is to hit the refrigerator. Picking one's nose becomes an art form. The body is certain to be pimpleless by the time words return. It's the fever - temperature time when circuits overload from a session of crank-out writing and all of a sudden you're yanked away like a puppeteer with a sneeze. Turning on and off the faucet requires energy, BTUs flying like popcorn. Like warming up my Comet in Boone during -25 (-135 F wind chill). Plots grow like weeds in your mind, choking off active character developments. You find yourself sifting through a few new ideas while shutting off all senses, in a drug store, on the phone or while on a tangent of some kind. The whole process amazingly enough, fends off heightened manic depression, unless you imagine no audience at all. A novel is a whore. The readers are johns. Your mind is the pimp. The currency is paper. The market is the street. It's like falling asleep with contacts in or like Superman having a nightmare and toasting his eyelids by accidentally activating his superpower. It's serendipity of vitriolic, virulent cross-stitching, when your legs quiver in uncomfortable agony from road lag on a long trip, your scrotum performing aerobics in your sack. Whether or not you roll the shampoo bottle top on your wrist to open it, or screw it off with your teeth, there is some regularity to the doldrums of your miserably normal life. There were no victims at My Lai. Have you ever stayed up to watch Johnny Carson and felt embarrassed for the guests for whom Doc Severinson and his band had no signature or decent introductory music for, cleaning their spit valves and playing a nondescript musical that smells of Hollywood indulgence? That's the feeling I get when I write. It's the reoccurring nightmare of being naked in class. Even though the total combined audience I have ever written for may total into the hundreds of thousands or higher, writing for dailies, weeklies and other publications, when I sit down and write for myself, that is when I feel the most vulnerable and shy. I'm showing off when I write for a newspaper. When I write for myself, I'm more at ease, like standing in front of a full mirror, staring at my imperfections, the huge gut and goiter deposit of chinflesh. Writing in first gear, most of the time is a smash, just sheer consciousness and the spew of the self-hypnosis. The problem is remembering what you told yourself the secret wake-up word was going to be. Sometimes I wonder if I've ever really awakened after getting up from writing. It takes a while for it to wear off. It's difficult to share this type of confusion with someone. While the best ride of the amusement park has provoked you to use that sixth sense, all fantasy and left-side brain strain closes your eyes while you feel like they're still open. Realizing a story line, a thematic story course, as in a geographic map, you wake up five hours later in a sweat, red warts on your writing fingers and a buildup of gas. I like to write in the dead of night - it's sneakier, writing while everyone is out like a light, and I'm in complete control, wheeling sans inhibitions and the skeletons. Nobody can touch me. No one. Night moves, you move with it like fog off the pavement. You feel like you're getting away with something. I think of Voltaire, a N.Y. restaurant, the origin of the word “Dixie,” how the myth of an apocalypse is such bull crap, how Gustave Flaubert found enough time in the day to write, caveat emptor, bluegrass hootnannies, a homily from the 60s, a blithely inhumane editor and the fellow on the Gallows Pole in the Led Zeppelin song. The crux of the Southern mosaic rests on the forgone conclusion that wheresoever an offspring veers astray from the beaten path of disregarding, conservative, WASPy progressive high finance, the authoritarian judgment will be to walk the plank - it's always the same. Even though you are allergic to a formal public education and break out in hives at the mention of a test, especially a mathematical test, you've got to study. You've got to go back to school, boy, you hear? Maybe the Air Force or the service would straighten you out and give you some direction. Son, you're in a heap of trouble. If pouring salt into a wound isn't you cup of ginseng, go out the patriotic way, cuz, join the U.S. Armed Services. But don't sign up for that there welfare, Jack, I don't care how bad off it gets. Too many assholes are walkin' off with Uncle Sam's money and buying Cadillacs. What red-blooded American boy hasn't wanted to take a peek at those unreachable, top-secret academic records of educational achievement and see just what they've been saying about you for the last 12 years? They're off-limits, Jack, at least that's what they tell us. Maybe they tell you after you've busted your first cherry or get wounded in military combat maybe or something. Southerners deserve real journalism. *************** My expose finally appeared in POINT. About halfway through was the cuss-out the day everything hit the fan. A reader wrote a letter to the editor, complaining about the profanity. “Durnit! What is this Talk Back crap?” There was a lump in my throat, the one I always get when I'm on the verge of getting fired. I'd been here before. Deja vu. On the chopping block. Swallowing would telegraph my weakness.” My managing editor's face was white and pink in splotches, his jowls flapping like the mast of a catamaran in a raging nor'easter. All I could do is hold my poker face and amazement. There's a shortness of breath, accompanied by constriction of facial muscles, kind of like the feeling I just got phoning in the school board election results here in Marion County, South Carolina on deadline to the news desk. You know how it feels when somebody is holding your head below water like a bully? I was drowning in the office of my managing editor here at the Florence Morning News. He had a right to swear, I suppose. You feel better when your face gets red and your eyes bug out like a cartoon character with steamwhistle nostrils. To diffuse his temporary psychosis, I quietly asked him why he was cursing at me just to assure him that a continuation would mean me thrashing him. Nobody cusses me. “Durnit, because I want to, that's why!” Good enough reason, Skeebo. You skank Roger Ebert lookalike. “Let me tell you something. (Long pause) You're off the whorehouse story. I'm assigning someone else to it. (He never did of course.) You'll get some credit. But from here on you are to make no more telephone calls and ask no more questions concerning it. You got it?” I got it all right. I wasn't getting fired after all. “You know, I'm on the verge of throwing you out of this building.” Go ahead, big guy. He was just busting my chops. It was a bluff. He had been leading me on the whole time. He had ceased using the Lord's name in vain, thank God. Trying to look confident and nonplused under these circumstances was virtually impossible. It's like cheating at poker with a blind man. I'd bet my Dollhouse V.I.P. card and my Playboy subscription I was getting the Palmetto Runaround. There was something about this story. Something nihilistic, dark and absolutely rotten. It was one of those stories that feels like you were tugging on a string coming out of a mouse hold and something - or someone - was tugging on the other side. I could feel it. There had been not one modicum of encouragement from anyone, including the company lawyer, toward my continued involvement in this research. “I'll take it to the company lawyer and see what he says,” the managing editor said. For three weeks he promised to let the lawyer peruse my stories and dissect them for errors or problems with litigation. It was crying time in the slaughterhouse. He never did, so I took a copy down to the attorney's office and had to listen to him chuckle. “This is libelous in so many ways. I admire your zeal but....” “I didn't know I had zeal. Why doesn't anyone want me on this story?” “It's a good story, but you've got to see the court records.” So I rode to Columbia to the Federal Building and looked it up in the Clerk of Court office. My friend and I stopped at the lunch hour at “Twin Peaks, the name of a strip joint on Blossom Street in the heart of Gamecock country and the University of South Carolina. Upon my return and after racking up 200 miles mileage I would later charge the company, even though we rode in my friend's car and I was too broke to chip in for gasoline, the boss surprised me again. “Where are the court documents? Didn't you copy them?” He knew good and well there were several hundred pages at two bits a pop. I wasn't told to copy them. I wanted to protest to management about my story being killed without reigniting my temporarily postponed firing. Of course, they claim the story is theirs, even though it was never published. It was my story from Day 1. In the boss's office I stood my ground like Custer. “I resent being accused of not looking out for this newspaper's best interests,” I told him. My head was throbbing like a cam at the Lake View Dirt Track Speedway. Hungover as all get-out, I had vomited that morning for the third time in a week, and it wasn't even 11 o'clock yet. “You know, you can't force us to publish this story. Word is around town you're trying to force us to print this.” “You can't force someone to print something,” I responded. How could I force someone to print something which had already been promised front page coverage? All this grief over a small Pee Dee brothel that's already famous up and down the Eastern Seaboard with truckers, motorists, preachers and pilgrims alike. There were more important issues on the horizon here in South Carolina, I suppose - the Confederate flag flying over the Statehouse in Columbia, poker machine gambling, a lottery and handgun sales under the Brady Bill. They didn't call the village of “Society Hill” its name for nothing, however. It's the best little whorehouse in Marlboro County, S.C., the home of Blenheim Ginger Ale, the spicy up-and-coming soft drink that has recently been advertised in Forbes and in The New Yorker. This story wouldn't hurt business at Buddy's Truck Stop and Motel. It might even help business in the county which was number 10 in AIDS cases in 1998, according to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control, up from 14th the year before. “That's a good story,” my boss would say in 1994. This was a 31,000-circulation rag that was about to bid farewell, a fond adieu at that, to an article my employer had been complimenting me on. Any 38-year-old journalist who gets Associated Press bylines like me knows there's something fishy when your story is killed, and management drags its clay feet on its gestation, finally accusing you of tipping off the competition on this investigative expose on the world's oldest profession. All I had done was to call in the WBTW Channel 13's 5 p.m. call-in line to ask these zoot-suited white dudes running for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination about what they think. “Caller, please, we haven't got much time.” “This is Tim Bullard with the Florence Morning News, and I'm doing an investigative article on prostitution in Marlboro County, and I'd like to know what you would do if elected to combat this crime in the state of South Carolina?” Good question? Here sat the top law enforcement officer in the state, Travis Medlock, Charleston's “Hugo-Buster” Mayor Dick Riley, some other guy and the suave, debonair Lt. Gov. Nick Theodore, the sleek Greek, a shoe-in to take the place of out-going Republican Carroll Campbell. There were two stories which I had completed, both very long for our paper in any shape or form since the editorial powers that be think run-overs are putrid and unnecessary in this season of 1994 and that the decision-making machinery behind that logic was strictly sacrosanct. A photographer had even been sent to take a color photograph of the joint. “Man, I saw this lady come out and point with this other guy, so I hauled buggy and got back in the car and hit the road,” he said. He was married and about 26, much too young to die on the job. His photograph had already been scanned into the computer. It had all begun when I began to write a confessional piece on Buddy's Truck Stop, a stucco 1940s-50s dive between Bennettsville and Society Hill. Rummaging around the former metro editor's desk one day, I had stumbled upon a letter from a man. After this man learned that someone was doing a story or even remotely interested in the story he had to tell, the letters started coming. It was an avalanche of fan mail. He was my “biggest fan.” Getting fan mail stamped “The S.C. Department of Corrections has neither censored nor inspected this item therefore the Department does not assume responsibility for its contents” isn't something you brag to your friends about. When an inmate in the state penal system is writing you more than your family, well, it's like being on the receiving end of a funky chain letter. The only bird that can't fly, and here he was becoming a fast and furious best friend. “Jan. 10, 1994, Ronald F. Jackson, attorney pro se, SCDC No. 173141;F1-B244, Route 2, Box 100, McCormick, S.C. 29899. “Dear Mr. Bullard, Enclosed is a copy of the state trial transcript of Nov. 15, 1990 conducted in Marlboro County. If you can read just the first 33 pages and tell me this is not a prime example of a Sham Howdy Doody Trial without laughing, I will shut my mouth forever!” Somebody had tried to shut his mouth recently because after I started communicating with this consummate prime time jive jailhouse lawyer, they started shuffling him from one prison to another. They had sent him to McCormick to Bennettsville's state prison, Evans Correctional Institution. I nearly sent a whole cell block into a riot after visiting there once with the Mullins Rotary Club. “Do you provide the prisoners with rubbers?” I asked the assistant warden and now current warden. “No.” “Tim Bullard,” a local banker said to me aside. “Don't you know any other word for a condom like prophylactic or something?” From that point on the Rotarians referred to me as “The Condom Kid.” I wrote about the question in my article and the warden was chewed out by the prison population about me quoting him as saying one cell block was filled with the non-violent offenders and homosexuals. Apparently some of the straight inmates didn't think it was too cool for somebody to be calling them queer. I was proud to be from Mullins anyway in this facility, and when I doubted my ability, I remembered Willie Richardson's rank, smelly trailer and his pet Arnold, who is now at Ripley's Believe It Or Not Museum in Myrtle Beach. Gifted with multiple sex organs and six legs, the Lord had touched this porcine critter, and he was the only pig I ever met who had a lawyer. I still recall his wet, cool snout snorting up my trouser leg cuff. I miss him. Died of cancer. Willie's still alive. That durned pig could, on command by his owner, who purchased him for only about $10 from a farmer who was superstitious, piss in an ashtray just as pretty as one could please and fail to spill a drop. Sugar Ray Leonard's parents showed me their Faberge egg in Mullins, and his dad, Cicero, gave me a gigantic cucumber. There have been garden club meetings, chamber grand openings with the “grip-and-grin” shots, an obligatory photo of the mayor and the newest business which would close in six months. Cartoon eyes bugging out atop steam whistle nostrils, I gasped as two cars sped sideways, coming right at me at Lake View Speedway 14 miles away one Friday night. The drivers had fistfights in the pits. Earplugs cost two quarters. The parking lot vendor had been snickering before he laughed out loud. “Thanks now, come again,” he said. “HA, HA, HA, HA!” He and his buddy were having a huge laugh at my expense. The 50-cent earplugs had telegraphed my naiveté. You don't need them after about 30 minutes of ear-tickling thunder. The tickets are cheaper than a shower at Shady Pines in Darlington County. Every Friday night homegrown mechanics, proletariat dreamers and a multi-millionaire driver from Sumter meet to lock horns on this course in spine-rattling Southern rapture. Whoever's going to be imbibing sits in a special grandstand section, while the family crowd enjoys the action without distraction. There's a temperature-controlled VIP booth with a couch and chairs high atop the track. A WVC channel rep eyed the action, contemplating sponsorship. Behind me sat a smiling young boy, nestled in the cool March night air, between the warmth of the jackets of his father and grandpappy. Couples hold hands as diehards slurp sodas and wolf down nachos and cheese, hot dogs and pizza. Driver tempers occasionally flare in the pits with knock-down, drag-out fisticuffs. There's no guard rail, so when a qualifying driver lost it in a curve, he plowed into the field as puffs of dirt shot up over the other end of the track. There's Bobby Harrelson from Mullins driving Bill Jordan's car. On Saturday nights Harrelson racing in Myrtle Beach in the Lambert car. On the back of a pickup truck in the infield, a red-haired young boy jumped up and down, going ballistic with electric pride as he and his mom hollered to cheer on Gene Horne's charging car. Painted on the car: “Yeller, Ain't It?” That made me smile the same involuntary grin I display when I get behind a car with one of those crown air fresheners in the window. ************* Pity the lost souls of barren lost innocence as they feed upon the red flesh of conquered psyches. Mourn them not. For they will rise again the roar over the pestilence of human depravity and feeble will, pity them not. They will become forgotten, and lost in the dust of time, but until the last gray matter of brain cells die and erase a lifetime of frailty and injustice, the spirit of hope will prevail in its absence. From behind the dark shield of night's cloak, beyond the kitchen window where a shadow merges, forget the still born fear. Feel calm. Do not overload, for this is the ride of your life. Hold on to the panels. You'll need to fasten your Seattle and chatter your wisdom teeth like a skeleton in an earthquake. Tears fall like laughter in the halls of Bull Street in Columbia where the state mental facility is. Fear not the unrecognizable. Trust not the forlorn, nary the seemingly straight. Use that brace of conscious which was set forth in your noggin, and stretch it to the rubber bands of infinity, until the rubber starts crackling, breaking, tearing, and finally unraveling to the point of rapture. You're teetering. You're controlled. But the thirst for individual personification and self- adjustment is overwhelming. ************** THE STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA SUPREME COURT Sandra Prosser Holtzscheiter, Respondent, v. Thomson Newspapers, Inc., d/b/a The Florence Morning News, Appellant. Appeal From Florence County Ralph King Anderson, Jr., Judge Download 2.99 Mb. Share with your friends:
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