What feels like an urban myth has attached itself to Ronda Storms.
She's been poor.
She's been abused.
Oh, baby, she's even lived in the Salvation Army and out of her car.
She's worked for two bucks an hour.
Bloody but unstoppable, she has crawled across glass, put herself through law school, and now, lucky us, graces the Hillsborough County Commission with her presence.
I may be wrong that all this is an urban myth, one of those stories that sound like they have just enough truth in them to be real. I hope I'm wrong because Storms herself has unloaded these morsels during outbursts - does she speak any other way? - at commission meetings.
If Storms' troubles have been real, I don't want to make light of them. But she goes on and on like she's a guest on Maury Povich. This is where my gut hunch comes in. I'm thinking that at the very least she might exaggerate.
I cannot prove that, not until I get to talk to Storms - if she will talk to me. I have tried before and my calls have fallen into that black hole of left-a-message-dom. I put a call in Tuesday and heard the whoosh of it being sucked away.
Storms' latest declaration of her hard life came last Wednesday as the County Commission prepared to kill one token of humanitarianism, a proposal to raise the wage of the lowest paid county workers, and employees who work for county contractors, to $9.97 an hour, or, for a 40-hour week, a $400 gross.
Storms flew into one of her best, perverse routines. This was the day she talked about the Salvation Army, the crummy jobs, the glass.
She attacked the sexual habits of people who had come to make their case before the commission, dredging up cheap shots about welfare queens and missing men.
"If you can't afford four children," she said, "birth control has been around since the 1960s. There is a little thing called the pill."
I still don't know what $400 has to do with making babies. One or two people would be hard-pressed to make rent, utilities, a car payment, car and health insurance on that pay.
On the other hand, a commissioner's salary of $84,000 provides enough room to put your feet up and snicker at the working poor.
That's the bizarre part of Storms' shtick. If her life has been as hardscrabble as she says, you'd think it would make her compassionate to the struggle of others.
But compassion isn't in her vocabulary. If she survived to make $84,000 a year, other people can.
(It's regrettable that such sinecures are hard to nail down outside politics.)
If others can't make it, it's their fault. Poverty isn't an economic condition. It's a moral failing.
Some ears are still burning over Storms' big mouth. On Tuesday, I visited with the pastor of an east Tampa church, the Rev. W.F. Leonard. He belongs to HOPE, the group that sought the living wage. Leonard couldn't get over how little sympathy Storms had shown for the poor and homeless.
If she really had been living among them, he said, she'd know that homelessness affects every stripe of the ordinary and unlucky.
And, I'd say, she might know that constantly declaiming about her life could backfire with people who think their lives have been just as hard or harder.
There's a contradiction in Storms' telling and retelling her story. She says she believes in every individual working hard, getting no more breaks than anyone else, and finally achieving equality.
But her yapping suggests she believes she's suffered more than others.
It telegraphs a sense that her suffering has made her not equal, but special.
And it seems to be justification, at least in her mind, for lording it over people who come before her, asking for help.
