alligators from one pond to another on his
papa’s land, to “balance the ecosystem.”
Nobody believed him. “I said, ‘I’ll catch
an alligator right now!’ My friend said, ‘I
know a perfect place....’” The friends drove
2 miles to the St. Augustine Alligator Farm
Zoological Park, the world’s only home to
all 24 crocodilian species, with a main pen
holding 210 alligators.
News channels and sites told Hatfield’s
story through video clips stitched together
from four hours of night-vision security-
cam footage, in which he is the zoo’s
acrobatic attraction: Florida Man, in his
native, ersatz habitat. He climbs onto a
corrugated metal rooftop about 12 feet
above a shallow pool occupied by large
American crocodiles. He leaps in and
thrashes as he’s bit. But what most news
videos missed is that Hatfield escaped,
unscathed, after his first jump. Then he
jumped back in, turning himself into
literal clickbait. “The whole thing was,
I dropped my phone inside the pit,” he
says. “A brand-new iPhone. That’s when-
ever he death-rolled me. It de-sleeved the
bottom of my foot, until it looked like
a chicken breast; I’d wiggle my toes and
you could see my tendons move.”
On crutches at his first court appearance,
he heard the bailiffs and others “crack-
ing jokes and calling him Crocodile
Dundee,” says his defense attorney, Jill
Barger. She took his case pro bono because
she pitied him, and also—“I’m not gonna
lie,” she admits—because Florida Men get
valuable media attention.
His new convictions of criminal mischief
and trespassing compounded his early
charges. Judge Howard Maltz, who saw
Hatfield on TMZ the night before meeting
him in court, sentenced him to 364 days in
county jail, plus two years of community
control. At Hatfield’s sentencing, Maltz told
him, “You should not be alive. God has a
plan for you. We may not know what it is,
but God has a plan for you.”
“I hear it all the time,” Hatfield says with
a shrug. “Daniel in the lions’ den.” In the
Bible, Daniel was thrown into a den of
carnivorous beasts but found “blameless”
by his god and saved for a higher purpose.
Hatfield likes this idea. He says he’ll warn
Floridians not to follow in his bloody
footsteps and become a Florida Man like
him, because he wishes he’d done the same
for his stepbrother, who died of a heroin
overdose while Brandon was in jail. He’s
lost three relatives in the past year to drug-
related deaths, he says. “My little brother,
Bo, passed away on heroin at 17. He was
probably looking up to me. I went to jail
and left him out there by himself.”The last word^37
Newscom
There’s nothing funny about this part of
Hatfield’s viral story. It’s the “half of what
happened” in most Florida Man stories that
doesn’t fit in a tweet—the bummer half that
has to do with how people end up doing
reckless things, and what follows viral
infamy. “We laugh at these stupid things,”
Maltz tells me in his chambers. “But there
are tragedies behind many of them.”
I came to the jail to see how Hatfield ended
up in that crocodile pit, but also to ask
how the media attention had affected him.
I assumed that he would be mortified to go
viral on the worst day of his life. But that’s
not how he saw it. “At first I was embar-hadn’t hurt anyone, who wasn’t being
exploited, and who was happy to have peo-
ple laugh along with him. They found Lane
Pittman, a multiple-time Florida Man who
rallies the crowd at Jacksonville Jaguars
NFL games, waving flags and firing T-shirt
cannons as part of the Jax Pack hype team.
At the Jumbo Shrimp’s Florida Man
Night, Pittman will play the national
anthem on electric guitar, because the first
time he went viral, he was “Florida Man
Arrested After Playing National Anthem
on July 4.” In the video seen everywhere
from BuzzFeed .com to Fox News, Pittman,
wearing jorts and an American flag tank
top, shreds like Hendrix on a
Neptune Beach sidewalk until hun-
dreds of people gather around and he
is arrested for obstructing traffic.
“I was like, This is American as crap!
Freedom, baby!” Pittman reminisces.
“I had everybody dabbing me up,
high-fiving me. I had one old lady
kiss me on the face. Then two cops
came over.”
The second time he went viral,
he uploaded a nine-second video of
himself—no shirt, no shoes, just board
shorts— headbanging and holding an
Amer i can flag against the torrential
wind and rain of 2016’s Hurricane
Matthew, to the blare of Slayer’s “Rain-
ing Blood.” The video was viewed nearly
4 mil lion times.
When I meet Pittman at a hard-rock music
festival in downtown Jacksonville, the lean
26-year-old surfer dude with long red hair
is again wearing jorts and an American flag
tank top—what he calls “my Hurricane
Lane persona.” Amid the roar of speed
metal, Pittman hypes up fans at a pop-up
advertising space, where autograph seekers
wait on members of Korn and Evanescence.
Pittman’s hurricane videos have become a
hurricane-season YouTube ritual—a rain
dance in defiance of the weather. In some
ways, the original video is, like frozen
Florida orange juice, the most concentrated
and syrupy example of what it means to
be a Florida Man: a wild man who stands
firm against propriety, the forces that
threaten to destroy this strange paradise,
and common sense itself.
“People throw shade at Florida. Like, a
lot,” says Pittman. A brief cloud passes
over his upbeat mood, then the Florida
Man smiles. “But you can’t put shade on
us. We’re the Sunshine State!”Excerpted from a story that originally
appeared in The Washington Post Mag a-
zine. Used with permission.Alligators figure in many ‘Florida Man’ episodes.rassed,” he says. “But I’m prone to do stuff
like this anyway, so it was just a matter of
time before something blew up.”
Hatfield talks about his newfound internet
notoriety like he’s Brer Rabbit, thrown into
the digital briar patch where he was born
and bred. “I was always on the internet: I
go live on Facebook. I live on Instagram.”
Drugs have been Hatfield’s escape from the
real world, but social media is where he
feels most honest: “It’s the real me.”I
S IT OK to laugh at Florida Man? In the
comedy business, the answer to such a
question is always an unsatisfying “It
depends.” The once-absurdist Florida Man
meme has undoubtedly curdled into callous
jokes at the expense of the vulnerable. But
plenty of people laugh with Florida Man,
knowing how easy it is to become one.
Ultimately, many of these stories aren’t as
extraordinary as the headlines; they just
have that one odd detail—or one memora-
ble mug shot—that, if spun correctly, might
turn one person’s DUI into another’s LOL.
When Double-A baseball team the
Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp planned its
Florida Man Night, it looked for a family-
friendly mascot who represented the best
of Florida Man without dragging along
the worst of his baggage: a Floridian who