You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The minute by minute assault that is news.
Tick Tock. The day can change in the swing of the second-hand.
News is a professional juxtaposition where one minute you are sipping tea with your pinky extended and the next moment a momma wails in the darkness.
I am having one of those days today.
It starts as a slow motion polka. It’s hot. It’s slow. I’m moving in news molasses.
I’m in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Franklin. The big iron gate swings open and a shiny SUV’s drives by.
The driver is on a cell phone, possibly talking to his stock broker about hiding money in a Swiss Bank Account.
He drives by like I am a pot hole to avoid.
Another vehicle enters the subdivision and slows.
I hold up my hand for the young woman who stops and rolls down her window.
“Did you get the email blast from the HOA?” I scream.
Her face is blank.
“About the Bobcat?” I shout.
Her eyes grow wide.
“Bobcat? Here? no, I didn’t.”
“It was spotted a few days ago. It was walking across a man’s driveway and he snapped a photo, so they put out a warning to be careful.”
She seems interested.
I will follow her to her home with the neatly manicured lawn and 3 car garage and multiple sports cars inside.
She excuses herself for a few minutes, finally exiting her mansion with a large poodle named Mister. She is wearing a colorful wrap, the kind you might see at a resort. I expect a man-servant and a margarita to accompany her.
We talk about the predator lurking in the woods behind her subdivision.
She says she is not concerned about a Bobcat and jokes that Mister can handle his own.
I look at the big poodle. He is manicured in the ugly Poodle way. He reminds me of a Frenchman who would sword fight with a soggy bread stick.
I’m not convinced I’d take the poodle over the bobcat in a fight.
According to Wild Life Web sites, Bobcats are a common wild cat in North America. They primarily eat rodents and rabbits, but have been known to take down a deer.
I thank her and leave the golden sunset of affluence and cool whispering fountains.
I go back to the news room and meander through the evening, finishing the story, trudging through drudgery and slow motion who cares.
Suddenly the white hazy news blah is obliterated.
SHOTS FIRED.
The scanner chirps.
It’s 8:40 pm; the bewitching hour.
The assignment editor is fidgety and sends a photographer out the door.
I’m writing my Bobcat story for the web, but I can hear my night changing with every new police broadcast.
Words like Two Victims and Child shot are game changers.
The next thing I know I’m behind the wheel of a live truck driving to the projects half a mile from the station.
“Your technically insured to drive the live van” the assignment editor says not really sure what she is saying.
I don’t respond. I don’t feel the buzz of my 25-year-old self, but I am grizzled and know that this is the kind of story you just roll on.
A child shot is serious business.
I pull down a dark street of row houses and people meandering in the darkness.
I roll down the window and inhale the sounds of choppers over head and sirens in the dark.
Blue lights swirl on the windshield making the drive surreal, difficult to tell where the street begins and ends.
The live van is wide and I’m certain I’m going to smash into the side of a parked car, if not a Metro Police Vehicle.
I park the van and move to the center of the turmoil.
The center of turmoil has a feeling. It’s like a toilet flushing full of anger and police lights and despair.
I walk to the crime tape and join other photographers and reporters crowding the plastic yellow crime tape that creates the boundary, our new breaking news office.
No one is talking yet, one reporter tells me.
Neighbors aren’t saying much either, a 2nd chimes in.
I look around the scene.
It’s dark and dirty and poor like a third world country.
I think back to the gated community from 2 hours earlier. When I was there, the sun was setting, bathing 5,000 square foot homes in gold. The biggest problem these residents have beside hiding illicit finances from the IRS? – a 15 pound bobcat that got lost in the expansive forest behind their palatial sub division.
Now I’m in a 3rd world nation that UNICEF won’t visit.
“take your camera off the sticks,” I say to my young photographer.
He looks at me oddly.
“Why?”
“I wanna shake this motha up.”
He smiles and grabs the camera. The light is blaring, piercing, probing as it reaches into the mass of huddled humanity.
I walk to a street corner. It is 3 deep in young men with no shirts. The youths are carrying on, acting stupid.
I treat crime tape like church. Nothing good comes from crime tape. In this case a baby has been shot.
I am solemn, respectful.
These young men are fools, disrespectful. They need to be engaged on some sort of social level.
Since their daddy’s aren’t here, I will introduce etiquette into their existence.
I walk into their midst and shine the light upon them.
I extend the microphone and ask no one in particular “you see anything? Anyone know the family of the child who was shot?”
Young men bend over at the waist, concealing their faces. Some throw t-shirts over their heads, backing away into the darkness.
“Get that motha F***ing light out my face,” others shout.
The crowd that was gyrating without a care in the world is now running, scattering, like the cock roaches they are, returning to the darkness.
I follow the group much to the consternation of the young men. They scatter, never allowing the light to touch them.
I encounter a woman standing in the darkness. She is watching.
She covers her face and turns her head.
“you know anything about the shooting, mam?” I say all ready knowing the answer.
I’ve done this a thousand times. I know nobody is going to talk to the news man.
I’m the establishment. I represent all that’s wrong with the world.
I find an older gentleman standing on the sidewalk.
As the cockroaches flee from the light, he remains.
I put the microphone before him.
“See anything?”
“Not really,” he mumbles. His words are choppy, almost unintelligible.
I am unclear if he is inebriated or just slow.
I thank him and move back to the crime tape where it all began 2 minutes earlier.
“I thought you scooped us on that one,” a fellow reporter says smiling
I feel the pulsing blue lights penetrate my psyche as I stare at the crime scene. I close my eyes and suddenly I see the golden sunset on the big iron gate. It is slowly opening, inviting me inside.
Somewhere in another world a Bobcat watches a poodle and bides his time.
It reminds me that everyone has a role. Hunter. Hunted. Bobcat. Cockroach.
Get that light out of my face Motha F****er.
Life’s Crazy™