Pulse Was a Happy Place
Orlando’sPulse nightclub in late 2016, after the shooting. Credit: David Ryan
Ten years ago today, I woke up in a hotel on the east coast of Costa Rica. The in-room air conditioner chugged away, defeated, and it was too early. We’d gone to bed just after dark because we had just started our journey and we were whipped.
I was on vacation from my digital marketing company, but five years earlier, I was employed at the Orlando Sentinel as a breaking news editor. So, awake in the dark with no light for a book and no games on my phone, I checked the news to see what we had missed while traveling.
And saw the news about Pulse.
I remember the incredulity of it all. I remember thinking about the reporters on scene trying to pry unknowable facts from first responders, trying to round out witnesses. Just . . . the enormity of it all.
A Ridiculous Shooting
The Orlando Sentinel had a reporter near the nightclub, reporting in real time on the website about the most horrific event in the city’s history — the state’s history. Nobody knew specific details. Nobody had exact numbers. In time, those would all come out: 49 dead, 58 physically wounded, a community shattered from a one-man massacre.
Glancing at periodic updates that day was like reading an evolving horror story. The death toll kept climbing, the saga grew more vomitous.
What made it more upsetting, in addition to the sheer ridiculousness of a gunman wanting to punish gays, was that Pulse was accepted. There were never any protests about the club’s existence or its patrons.
You want to know what’s amazing about night? That there were only 49 people killed.
The FBI estimates that there were 300 people at the club when Omar Mir Seddique Mateen started shooting around 2:30 a.m.
In the days that followed, I saw live reports on CNN and saw sights of home. I recognized not only every official they interviewed on camera abut also every building in the background.
I don’t know what images Pulse conjures for you, but it was not a club downtown, crowded by other buildings and fronted by a bustling sidewalk. It sat half-a-mile south of downtown at the start of a small, modest residential neighborhood called SODO (south of downtown).
Also, the club was never an issue with the locals. Yes, traffic near the club was a pain in the ass along Orange Avenue, a main north-south throughway, on Friday and Saturday nights. But you had to be up late (past 10 p.m.) for that to be an issue for you.
I mostly saw Pulse, quiet and desolate, from across the street at my favorite bagel shop. Painted blue-gray, the cinder-block building was nondescript, with small parking areas along the side and back. Local cops and security personnel recognized for what it was: a place for customers to get drunk, flirt, dance, and have other fun. (You fill in the gaps.)
Again, there were never any protesters.
Many Changes and Dumb Debates in 10 Years
Ten years later, the bagel store still exists, with a large hand-painted mural on its south side to celebrate those who endured that horrible night in June 2016 and the ones who never made it out.
I’ve written about Pulse before, and in the 10 years since the shooting, much of the news about Pulse has gone in predictable places. Officials had to decide what to do about the club, the land, the owner, a memorial, etc.
At some point after the shooting, someone (or some people) made the crosswalks near the club a rainbow made out of chalk. When it rained, they kept chalking. One year after the shooting, Orlando and the state of Florida approved the idea to paint the crosswalks near the club rainbow colors.
Commanded by tone-deaf Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state’s Department of Transportation covered the rainbows in black and white paint.
Sigh.
Locals, of course, simply reverted to their original idea. They’re rainbow chalking the crosswalks again.
Pulse, the building, was leveled earlier this year, clearing land for a permanent memorial. That, too, became a political football and a game of finger-pointing.
It’s sad to admit that we spend way too much time and energy arguing about things that matter little and worrying about things we can’t control and not nearly enough time working to solve problems we can control.
Ten years ago, we woke up to the biggest mass shooting in American history.
Incredibly, that sentence would be rewritten in less than two years. In October 2017, a gunman firing from a 32nd-story hotel room in Las Vegas killed 58 people and wounded more than 400 others at the Route 91 Harvest music festival.
Remembering Pulse’s Fun and Happiness
Over the past decade, survivors from that terrible night and other former Pulse customers have talked about what a fun place the club was. How managers would arrange various themed events to appeal to people from various segments of the LGBTQ+ community.
When I think of Pulse now, I don’t consider to be a national statistic, one of a list of (way too many) places where a mass shooting happened in America.
I’m reminded of a story that a friend of mine told me. He was an EMT at the fire station located half a block from Pulse. One perk of being a firefighter or police officer in any community is that you can pick up off-duty shifts at concerts, sports events, festivals, etc
One event that hits Orlando every year is the Electric Daisy Carnival, a multi-day EDM concert. My friend liked to serve as part of the medical personnel for the event several years, and it was always his favorite event to work. Why
“Because everyone is so happy,” he told me. “People are drunk and high and confused and dehydrated. But nobody had guns or knives, and nobody was ever fighting. Everybody wanted to give me a light wand. That’s all they had. They were just very happy.”
That’s how I like to think about Pulse when it was alive.
