Pink Man and the Bank Robber

I was drinking beers with the boys late one Friday afternoon when I first saw that flitting flash of Pink.

The year was 1998 and we were letting off steam after another long work week, perched around an outdoor table at our favorite haunt on Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade.

I’d only had a few pints, so it couldn’t have been the booze, but suddenly, there it was, this crazy, take-a-hit-and-inhale, Southern Californian apparition.

A slightly-built man covered from head to toe in a form fitting, screaming-pink leotard, zig-zagging along the near-empty promenade on a unicycle.

“What is that?” I said to nobody in particular.

Nobody knew.

As the apparition passed, I called out.

“Yo!”

He smiled, punched his fist into the air.

“Pink Man!” he shouted back.

And then he was gone, just like that, and we went back to our beers.

What followed, for me, was the start of a wacky, hard-won lesson in journalism -- about checking the backgrounds of sources and, perhaps as important, observing a person’s right to privacy, that best face they fashion for the world at large.

Because in the days and weeks that followed, I began to see this pink man everywhere, even without any two-beer base to my reality. First, it was along the Venice Beach Boardwalk, and then just about everywhere around Santa Monica.

Like I did, people called out, and he’d respond with his raised fist.

“Pink Man!” he’d say and then be on his way.

Pretty soon, the little dude had me thinking pink. After all, I was a newspaper reporter whose beat was LA’s west side.

So the next time I saw him flash by, I stopped him.

Amazingly, he paused. I had his attention. His presence was somehow ephemeral, like beholding a beautiful yet fragile butterfly. 

I knew I didn’t have long before he flew away.

“So, what’s with the outfit,” I began, the stylized interviewer that I am.

He briefly told his story. His name was Michael, he said, and for years he’d been riding his unicycle around the San Francisco Bay Area, decked out in pink.

He'd invented a superhero he believed America needed in the complicated 1990s -- someone for people to believe in, both children and adults.

Pink Man.

I suggested a feature story. He paused, smiled, and reluctantly agreed.

We agreed to meet the following week back on the Third Street promenade.

My pinkish feature profile ran on the Metro page of Monday’s newspaper, with several color photographs of a smiling Pink Man doing his man-in-pink thing.

That day, I was already on to my next story, when my phone rang.

The caller was no-nonsense, lacking any kind of pleasantry.

“Are you the guy who wrote the story about that pink man character?”

I said I was.

“Well, did you know he’s a child molester?”

A … what?

He launched into a hair-raising tale of how this same man I’d celebrated in the pages of my newspaper had inappropriately fondled a small girl years ago when he lived up in southern Oregon.

“Don’t you people check your facts?” the man said.

I stuttered. No, I did not know any of this. 

Was there proof?

Check the newspaper in Eugene, he said.

Then he hung up.

I did what most reporters would do in such a situation.

I called my editor.

He wasn’t happy, and demanded that I check it out.

I called Pink Man, who was still basking in the glow of that morning’s story.

“Can you come into my office, like now?” I said. “We need to talk.”

His voice dropped, like a thief caught with the goods.

He’d be right over.

We sat there that afternoon and he talked about that terrible night long before he’d invented his Pink Man persona. He was contrite, this man who dressed in pink.

He told me how he’d touched the friend of his young daughter during a sleepover at his home. Filled with remorse, he’d immediately come clean, and called the girl’s parents.

It wasn’t pretty in pink; it was a nightmare.

While no charges were filed, he said, his life unraveled.

His wife divorced him. He left town a disgraced man.

He said he'd had his reasons for not telling me earlier about this unsavory part of his past: Did he have to go around telling every person he met, reporters included, that he had once done something so shameful?

I called the Eugene newspaper and later the courthouse. The story checked out. No charges had been filed, but the man in pink had been publicly disgraced.

Yet that wasn’t enough for some angry townspeople. Whenever they learned their dishonored former neighbor was trying to assume any new public identity that might involve children, they felt compelled to set the matter straight. 

I called my editor. 

With no public record of the event, he saw no need for any correction or clarification.

But this darkening pink cloud would not dissipate.

A few weeks later, the phone rang in my Santa Monica office.

A nice young woman from the Orange County Fair said officials had read my story. They wanted to hire Pink Man as a colorful ambassador to flash around that year’s event, hand out cotton candy and appear at events.

She asked a few questions but, mostly importantly, how to reach him.

I hesitated, but gave her the number.

Then I called my editor.

Again.

We talked about people’s enduring right to privacy. Was it our duty to join the torch-wielding Oregon hoards on this hunt for their Frankenstein?

With no public record of his actions, we decided, it was not.

The Orange County Fair was its usual success, drawing big crowds.

One day, my phone rang again.

It was a reporter for the Orange County Weekly. Apparently, he’d been contacted by the same Oregon tipster. Fair officials had been publicly embarrassed, and the magazine was going to run a story.

Then came the question: Did I know the story behind this guy?

Yes, I did, I said, but only after my story ran. 

When fair officials had called, I did not feel compelled, I said, to contribute to this man’s Scarlet Letter.

What the reporter did was up to him.

The Weekly ran its story. 

Days later, outed once again, Pink Man resigned.

Months later, I wrote a story about a father-and-son duo who played for the community college basketball team in far Northern California

The father, a fellow named Frank, had played two decades ago for the College of the Redwoods team as teenager but had left school before graduating. 

Years later, the father of six, who was still in great physical shape, decided to exercise his remaining year of eligibility to join his son Isaac on the squad in a highly-unusual example of family bonding.

When he had shaken his on-court defender, the son would often yell to his point-guard father, “Dad! Dad, I’m open!”

I loved the idea.

I visited the school for a few interviews for a story that later ran under the headline, “Dad Scores Points by Playing With Son.”

A few days later, back in Santa Monica, my phone rang again.

“You the guy who wrote the story about the father-son basketball players?”

I said I was, but did so a bit reluctantly.

“Did the Dad tell you he once robbed a bank?” the man said.

“Um, no, he didn’t.”

My heart sank as I listened to the rest of the man’s report.

Then -- you guessed it -- I called my editor.

I can’t print here what he said to me.

But within minutes I was on the phone with Frank.

I asked him about the bank robbery claim.

Frank was unapologetic.

“That was years ago,” he said. “I went to prison, paid my debt to society. Do I have to tell the story to every damned reporter? Remember, you called me.”

He had a point there.

I made some calls to confirm the facts, then called my editor.

Again, we didn’t run any correction or clarification. 

What would it have said?

“Man featured in feel-good story about playing college basketball alongside his son had once robbed a bank as a misguided youth”?

I’ll admit, however, that I was gun-shy for a long time afterwards.

“I don’t care if I interview the Pope himself," xI assured my editor. “The first two questions I’m asking are ‘Have you ever molested a child?’ and ‘Have you ever robbed a bank?’”

Luckily, for both of us, I've never met the pontiff.