My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (15 page)

“This thing was dreadful last time you did it,” Herb said, and he began riffling through papers on his desk.

Vitale said, “The show is a huge hit, Herb. The girls on the show are models, or whatever, and they’re incredibly popular. They’re cute girls.” He paused and looked at Herb for a reaction.

Herb had turned slightly away from him and was scanning some paperwork on his desk. He once told me that he was now quite inured to being pitched, even by someone of Vitale’s gusto. “At this point, I know exactly what I want for the store,” Herb had explained to me. “Someone else isn’t likely to present me with something I haven’t already decided I want. I’ve been in this business long enough that I know my style.”

Vitale tried again, adding, “Herb, the girls are appearing at some of the stores in combination with the promotion.”

“I used to do this sort of thing more often,” Herb said, mostly to himself. “We used to give away samples of new products and so forth. Maybe we should start it again, although I’m inclined to think that good service matters to people more than this sort of hoopla.”

Vitale said, “Herb, this has been a major success in other places. The girls were just in a store on Roosevelt, and it was a mob scene.”

Without looking up, Herb said, “That’s why you’ll never see them here.”

AT THE END OF THE DAY
,
you close down a supermarket by first putting the more tender vegetables in the cooler and the money in the safe. At Sunshine Market, at the end of every day, the afternoon cashiers—mostly high school girls from Jackson Heights who are saving for college or for a solid start in life—go around the store and collect the abandoned things and put them back where they are supposed to be. Then they go up and down each aisle and tidy up all the merchandise. Bruce Reed told me that in grocery language this is known as “leveling the shelves” or “touching the shelves.” If you take the time to do this, then every morning, when the store opens, it looks fresh and full and ready for business, brimming with everything anyone might need, instead of looking like a place where hundreds of people had been racing through all day, pulling things off the shelves and carrying them away faster than they could be replaced.

One Sunday I spent at the store had been a big shopping day, so the shelves were particularly empty and somewhat disordered. There was a Reynolds Wrap and a four-pack of Charmin in the magazine rack, some Scooter Pies in the Ding Dongs, a Cadbury chocolate bar on top of the Schaefer beer display, a five-pound bag of Heckers All Purpose Flour on the Maxwell House shelf, a can of Carnation Leche Evaporada with the Sanka, and a can of Krasdale Fancy Small Whole Beets in with the Calimyrna figs. A basket with Downy fabric softener, two cucumbers, a head of lettuce, and a roll of ScotTowels was abandoned on the Pepsi display: Maybe someone had left his wallet in his other pair of pants. A box of Duncan Hines Devil’s Food Cake Mix, a half pint of whipping cream, and a package of Joseph Woo’s slivered almonds had been abandoned in the canned tomatoes: maybe the sudden onset of a diet or the decision to hold off baking for a cooler day. It took the girls a good half hour just to round up the stray groceries. I watched them put those things back where they belonged and then start touching each shelf in each aisle. By the time I headed out the door that night, they had just begun touching Aisle 3.

The Lady and the Tigers

On January 27, 1999, a tiger went walking through the township of Jackson, New Jersey. According to the Tiger Information Center, a tiger’s natural requirements are “some form of dense vegetative cover, sufficient large ungulate prey, and access to water.” By those measures, Jackson is really not a bad place to be a tiger. The town is halfway between Manhattan and Philadelphia, in a corner of Ocean County—an easy commute to Trenton and Newark, but still a green respite from the silvery sweep of electric towers and petroleum tanks to the north, and the bricked-in cities and mills farther south. Only forty-three thousand people live in Jackson, but it is a huge town, a bit more than a hundred square miles, all of it as flat as a tabletop and splattered with ponds and little lakes. A lot of Jackson is built up with subdivisions and Wawa food markets, or soon will be, but the rest is still primordial New Jersey pinelands of broom sedge and pitch pine and sheep laurel and peewee white oaks, as dense a vegetative cover as you could find anywhere. The local ungulates may not be up to what a tiger would find in more typical habitats like Siberia or Madhya Pradesh—there are just the usual ornery and overfed pet ponies, panhandling herds of white-tailed deer, and a milk cow or two—unless you include Jackson’s Six Flags Wild Safari, which is stocked with zebras and giraffes and antelopes and gazelles and the beloved but inedible animal characters from Looney Tunes.

Nevertheless, the Jackson tiger wasn’t long for this world. A local woman preparing lunch saw him out her kitchen window, announced the sighting to her husband, and then called the police. The tiger slipped into the woods. At around five that afternoon, a workman at the Dawson Corporation complained about a tiger in the company parking lot. By seven, the tiger had circled the nearby houses. When he later returned to the Dawson property, he was being followed by the Jackson police, wildlife officials, and an airplane with an infrared scope. He picked his way through a few more backyards and the scrubby fields near Interstate 195, and then, unfazed by tranquilizer darts fired at him by a veterinarian, headed in the general direction of a middle school; one witness described seeing an “orange blur.” At around nine that night, the tiger was shot dead by a wildlife official, after the authorities had given up on capturing him alive. A pathologist determined that he was a young Bengal tiger, nine feet long and more than four hundred pounds. Nothing on the tiger indicated where it had come from, however, and there were no callers to the Jackson police reporting a tiger that had left home. Everyone in town knew that there were tigers in Jackson—that is, everyone knew about the fifteen tigers at Six Flags Wild Safari. But not everyone knew that there were other tigers in Jackson, as many as two dozen of them, belonging to a woman named Joan Byron-Marasek. In fact, Jackson has one of the highest concentrations of tigers per square mile of anywhere in the world.

BYRON-MARASEK
is famously and purposely mysterious. She rarely leaves the compound where she lives with her tigers; her husband, Jan Marasek; and scores of dogs, except to go to court. On videotapes made of her by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, she looks petite and unnaturally blond, with a snub nose and a small mouth and a startled expression. She is either an oldish-looking young person or a youngish-looking old person; evidently, she has no Social Security number, which makes her actual age difficult to establish. She has testified that she was born in 1955 and was enrolled in New York University in 1968; when it was once pointed out that this would have made her a thirteen-year-old college freshman, she allowed as how she wasn’t very good with dates. She worked for a while as an actress and was rumored to have appeared on Broadway in Tom Stoppard’s play
Jumpers,
swinging naked from a chandelier. A brochure for her tiger preserve shows her wearing silver boots and holding a long whip and feeding one of her tigers, Jaipur, from a baby bottle. On an application for a wildlife permit, Byron-Marasek stated that she had been an assistant tiger trainer and a trapeze artist with Ringling Brothers and L. N. Fleckles; had trained with Doc Henderson, the illustrious circus veterinarian; and had read, among other books,
The Manchurian Tiger, The World of the Tiger, Wild Beasts and Their Ways, My Wild Life, They Never Talk Back,
and
Thank You, I Prefer Lions.

The Maraseks moved to Jackson in 1976, with Bombay, Chinta, Iman, Jaipur, and Maya, the five tigers they had gotten from an animal trainer named David McMillan. They bought land in a featureless and barely populated part of town near Holmeson’s Corner, where Monmouth Road and Millstone Road intersect. It was a good place to raise tigers. There was not much nearby except for a church and a few houses. One neighbor was a Russian Orthodox priest who ran a Christmas-tree farm next to his house; another lived in a gloomy bungalow with a rotting cabin cruiser on cement blocks in the front yard.

For a long time, there were no restrictions in New Jersey on owning wildlife. But beginning in 1971, after regular reports of monkey bites and tiger maulings, exotic-animal owners had to register with the state. Dangerous exotic animals were permitted only if it could be shown that they were needed for education or performance or research. Byron-Marasek held both the necessary New Jersey permit and an exhibitor’s license from the United States Department of Agriculture, which supervises animal welfare nationally.

After arriving in Jackson, Byron-Marasek got six more tigers—Bengal, Hassan, Madras, Marco, Royal, and Kizmet—from McMillan and from Ringling Brothers. The next batch—Kirin, Kopan, Bali, Brunei, Brahma, and Burma—were born in the backyard after Byron-Marasek allowed her male and female tigers to commingle. More cubs were born, and more tigers were obtained, and the tiger population of Holmeson’s Corner steadily increased. Byron-Marasek called her operation the Tigers Only Preservation Society. Its stated mission was, among other things, to conserve all tiger species, to return captive tigers to the wild, and “to resolve the human/tiger conflict and create a resolution.”

“I eat, sleep, and breathe tigers,” Byron-Marasek told a local reporter. “I never take vacations. This is my love, my passion.” A friend of hers told another reporter, “She walks among her tigers just like Tarzan. She told me, ‘I have scratches all along the sides of my rib cage and both my arms have been cut open, but they’re just playing.’ Now that’s love.”

YOU KNOW HOW IT IS
—you start with one tiger, then you get another and another, then a few are born and a few die, and you start to lose track of details like exactly how many tigers you actually have. As soon as reports of the loose tiger came in, the police asked everyone in Jackson who had tigers to make sure that all of them were accounted for. Six Flags Wild Safari had a permit for fifteen and could account for all fifteen. At the Maraseks’, the counting was done by a group of police and state wildlife officers, who spent more than nine hours peering around tumbledown fences, crates, and sheds in the backyard. Byron-Marasek’s permit was for twenty-three tigers, but the wildlife officers could find only seventeen.

Over the years, some of her tigers had died. A few had succumbed to old age. Muji had an allergic reaction to an injection. Diamond had to be euthanized after Marco tore off one of his legs. Marco also killed Hassan in a fight in 1997, on Christmas Eve. Two other tigers died after eating road-killed deer that Byron-Marasek now thinks might have been contaminated with antifreeze. But that still left a handful of tigers unaccounted for.

The officers filmed the visit:

“Joan, I have to entertain the notion that there are five cats loose in town, not just one,” an officer says on the videotape.

Byron-Marasek’s lawyer, Valter Must, explains to the group that there was some sloppy math when she filed for the most recent permit.

The officers shift impatiently and make a few notes.

“For instance, I don’t always count my kids, but I know when they’re all home,” Must says.

“You don’t have twenty-three of them,” one of the officers says.

“Exactly,” Must says.

“You’d probably know if there were six missing,” the officer adds.

“I would agree,” Must says.

On the tape, Byron-Marasek insists that no matter how suspicious the discrepancy between her permit and the tiger count appears, the loose tiger was not hers. No, she does not know whom it might have belonged to, either. And, gentlemen, don’t stick your fingers into anything, please: I’m not going to tell you again.

The officers ask to see Byron-Marasek’s paperwork. She tells them that she is embarrassed to take them into her house because it is a mess. The tiger quarters look cheerless and bare, with dirt floors and chain-link fences and blue plastic tarps flapping in the January wind, as forlorn as a bankrupt construction site. During the inspection, a ruckus starts up in one of the tiger pens. Byron-Marasek, who represents herself as one of the world’s foremost tiger authorities, runs to see what it is and reappears, wild-eyed and frantic, yelling, “Help me! Help! They’re going to . . . they’re going to kill each other!” The officers head toward the tiger fight, but then Byron-Marasek waves to stop them and screams, “No, just Larry! Just Larry!”—meaning Larry Herrighty, the head of the permit division, about whom she will later say, in an interview, “The tigers hate him.”

THE DAY OF THE TIGER
count was the first time that the state had inspected the Maraseks’ property in years. New Jersey pays some attention to animal welfare—for instance, it closed the Scotch Plains Zoo in 1997 because of substandard conditions—but it doesn’t have the resources to monitor all its permit holders. There had been a few complaints about the tigers: In 1983, someone reported that the Maraseks played recordings of jungle drums over a public-address system between four and six a.m., inciting their tigers to roar. The New Jersey State Office of Noise Control responded by measuring the noise level outside the compound one night, and Byron-Marasek was warned that there would be monitoring in the future, although it doesn’t appear that anyone ever came back. Other complaints, about strange odors, were never investigated. Her permit was renewed annually, even as the number of animals increased.