(^36) The last word
Laughing at Florida Man
SJSO, Newscom
about men like Hatfield that a “Florida
Man Challenge” went viral this March,
in which millions of people Googled their
birth dates and “Florida Man,” finding a
near-endless list of real news headlines for
all 365 days of the year:
“Florida Man Steals $300 Worth of Sex
Toys While Dressed as Ninja.” “Florida
Man Tries to Pick Up Prostitute While
Driving Special Needs School Bus.”
“Florida Man Drinks Goat Blood in Ritual
Sacrifice, Runs for Senate.”
At its most comical, the Florida Man phe-
nomenon encapsulates the wildness of both
America and the internet. At its most sala-
cious, it’s a social media update on the true-
crime TV of America’s Dumbest Criminals.
At its most insensitive, Florida Man profits
by punching down at the homeless, drug-
addicted, or mentally ill.
I’ve laughed at headlines like “Florida Man
Arrested for Calling 911 After His Cat Was
Denied Entry Into Strip Club.” I’ve gawped
at stories like “Florida Man Removes Facial
Tattoos With Welding Grinder.” But over the
years I’ve also started to get a queasy feeling
of complicity when I click on headlines that
play up the quirks of horrific crimes for web
traffic. This past April, I set out to meet a
few Florida Men behind the clickbait and
answer some questions, such as “Is Florida
Man a hero, a villain, or a victim?”
T
HE BIGGEST QUESTION I get is
“What were you thinking?”
Hatfield continues, from his seat
inside the St. Johns County Jail. “Every
time, my answer is I wasn’t.” Hatfield
is telling his entire Florida Man story
for the first time, and in much more
detail than the thousands of versions
told without his input. The details mat-
ter: Take the two Croc-like shoes found
floating in a crocodile enclosure, which
prompted jokes and led the zookeeper
to suspect a prank.
Hatfield is, on this April afternoon,
wearing the same style on his scarred
left foot, the one the crocodile attacked.
Five months and six surgeries later, doc-
tors have barely managed to save it.
The pair of shoes found floating in the
park had also been issued to him in jail,
after his first drug conviction at age 23.
On Instagram, Hatfield has claimed to be
a descendant of “Devil” Anse Hatfield, the
wildcat outlaw who sparked the Hatfield-
McCoy feud: Rebelliousness, he bragged,
is in his blood. When Hatfield was 10, he
says, he captured a rattlesnake and hid it in
an aquarium in his bedroom closet, until it
killed his pet boa constrictor and terrified
his mother, a nurse. After that, his amused
stepdad stuffed the rattler—“so we’d
always remember,” Hatfield says. From
then on, Hatfield bounced between his
divorced parents’ homes.
On Nov. 2, 2018, Hatfield was convicted of
grand theft auto and possession of a sched-
ule II substance. He tells a convoluted story
about how the car was his own and the
methamphetamine was his ex-girlfriend’s;
the judge sentenced him to two years of
parole. When Hatfield showed up for his
first parole appointment, he panicked,
certain that if he went inside, he’d be sent
to state prison, since he’d already violated
parole by leaving the county. Wearing his
jail Crocs, Hatfield sneaked out to the park-
ing lot and called some friends, figuring, “If
I’m going to prison, I’m going to do it big
for the weekend—and then turn myself in.”
A few days later, well into his bender at the
Best Western Bayfront hotel, Hatfield boasted
to friends about how he grew up wrangling
We never tire of gawking at the exploits of America’s most shameless and boneheaded hooligans, said journalist
Logan Hill in The Washington Post Magazine. But real tragedy lies beneath many of their stories.
Hatfield, after his alligator encounter
S
PORTING A BUZZ cut, prison
blues, and a chin-strap beard,
the slim 24-year-old Floridian
Brandon Hatfield leans sideways
in a rolling office chair inside the
St. Johns County Jail. With a warm
Southern drawl and a crooked smirk,
he says, “I remember half of what
happened...and half of what didn’t.”
Hatfield finds it hard to separate
the fact from the fiction of what
took place on the night of Nov. 5,
2018, for a few reasons. That
night, at a Best Western not far
from the Fountain of Youth theme park in
St. Augustine, Fla., America’s oldest city,
he was drinking Jack Daniel’s. He’s sure
the whiskey led to smoking weed, but he’s
not as clear on how that led to fentanyl,
ecstasy, and whatever else ended up in his
toxicology report.
He remembers the rest of the night in
“blackout splatches,” which have since
mixed with the stories he’s heard about
himself: how he jumped into a crocodile
pool at a local zoological park after hours,
got bit by an American crocodile, and
barely escaped with his life—but not his
Crocs shoes, which were found floating in
the water the next day. Next thing he knew,
he was waking up “at the hospital shackled
to a bed with my foot gnawed off.”
Another reason Hatfield finds it hard to
separate the “half of what happened” from
the “half of what didn’t”: When he woke
up, he wasn’t himself anymore. Much as
an arachnid bite changed Peter Parker into
Spider-Man, that crocodile chomp trans-
formed Brandon Hatfield into Florida Man.
His tale was being retweeted around the
world: “Florida Man Wearing Crocs Gets
Bitten After Jumping Into Crocodile Exhibit
at Alligator Farm.”
Since Florida Man was first defined on
Twitter in 2013 as the “world’s worst
superhero,” many men (and it’s almost
always men) have assumed the mantle. He
is a man of a thousand tattooed faces, a
slapstick outlaw, an internet-traffic gold
mine, a cruel punch line, a beloved prank-
ster, a human tragedy, and like some other
love-hate American mascots, the subject of
burgeoning controversy.
Most memes—from planking to Tide
Pods—fizzle fast. Florida Man has only
grown stronger. There are so many stories
michael s
(Michael S)
#1