You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Freaky Friday.
It was a busy news week for me.
The mean man who scratched the car.
The girl who didn’t die.
The Cancer Bike Rider held up at gun point.
The Mayoral candidate who parked his bright red Cadillac in front of an expired parking meter with his temporary handicap placard.
The Hot Dog Law that almost every Nashvillian is in danger of breaking.
BUT Friday was electric, chaotic, like dumping rocks in a blender and then hitting the Whip button.
That’s how Fridays can be.
Sometimes the calendar turns on its ear and all the crazy runs to the bottom of the funnel and it just blows out of the tail pipe like so much gunked up news exhaust.
Normally the morning news editorial meeting is a round robin of what you got?
It’s sporadic hold ups and car crashes and the bosses wish list of news that makes his friends happy.
But Friday was on black market Mexican steroids.
This Friday was hallucinating, sweating, looking for a Crazy fix.
This Friday was a machine gun assault of news that came and came and came some more.
It starts around 5am, with an ATM heist where the bandits pull up to the convenience store. Using their SUV, the bandana wearing idiots secure a logging chain to the front of the façade and then yank the machine through the wall, through the glass, through the building.
BLAM!
Concrete and smoke and alarms sound.
The bandits throw the safe in the back of their truck and take off.
8 am. I get a call from an officer that a dead body is found in an alley.
“Is it a shooting?” I ask.
“Don’t know. It’s wrapped inside of a carpet. Someone smelled it and called the cops.”
“wrapped in a carpet? Hard to die naturally and wrap yourself in a carpet?”
“yup.”
8:30 am. The scanner blares in the news room. The ATM has been discovered 4 miles from the crime scene. It is in the woods, near a jogging path. It has been cut open and the money is missing.
“Get a crew going that way,” the assignment editor hollers.
9 am. We’re sitting around the editorial table and all 3 networks put up a breaking news graphic from the Supreme Court.
“Uh Oh. This is it,” the Executive producer says aloud.
We all stare at the monitors.
Gay Marriage is upheld. Suddenly it’s legal in all 50 states to get married no matter whether you both sit or stand to pee.
“We’re gonna have to put two crews on that,” the assistant news director says.
Rainbow colored flags are flying with smiles and joy while part of America wonders what’s wrong with this country.
Tennessee is a red state. It’s a bright red state. Finding reaction here will not be difficult.
Gay Marriage assigned news crews quickly scramble out the door. Some head straight for the Davidson county clerk’s office to document two women who will be the 1st to get married before Nashville’s entire viewing audience.
Other crews head to the leader of the black churches who have a much less enthusiastic viewpoint on the ruling.
Before the magnitude of the landmark decision can be weighed, the News Day presses forward, like a steam roller that is churning out news stories at a going out of business pace.
“What about the confederate flag issue?” someone chirps.
“OMG,” a producer gasps. “I almost forgot about that.”
In the wake of anti Confederate symbolism following the South Carolina church massacre, A state senator has introduced a proposal to prohibit the sale of state vanity license plates with the controversial symbolism.
This comes on top of a week of non stop news coverage of Nathan Bedford Forrest, A Confederate General, a war hero, and the Grand Wizard of the KKK.
His name is on the side of University buildings. Bedford County is named for him. His likeness is in many places in the Volunteer state including the State House.
Tennessee has a lot of symbolically significant figures, Governor Bill Haslam tells reporters earlier in the week. The state’s top law maker tells reporters he would think that more appropriate historical figures could be chosen to sit in the State Capitol beside Nathan Bedford Forest.
There is a private statue on the side of I-65 commemorating the war general.
Suddenly there is talk of removing the statue so nobody driving up the interstate can see it.
It’s America I think to myself. You don’t have to like it, but you do have the right to express your views.
“The state should plant big trees to obscure the view of the statue,” someone suggests.
I don’t want my tax payer money used to plant trees to mask something another man has chosen to express. Give the money to kids who don’t have pencils.
One by one, reporters and photographers leave the newsroom. They are not so much assigned by news staff as they are assigned by the scanner and the news of the day.
I get a call that the body in the carpet is a woman. She is black. She has suffered some sort of blunt force trauma. Her identity is unknown and who killed her equally as vague.
I am the last reporter at the table.
The surveillance photos of the ATM heist are suppose to be stellar.
“Get the pictures,” the assistant news director tells me.
And that’s it. The board is full and the table empty.
We head to the scene o the crime.
Along the way I stop at a 2nd avenue bar that is just opening up.
I talk to a waitress putting tables on the sidewalk for lunch.
I hand her my business card. “Give this to your boss,” I tell her.
Her boss was involved in a garage shooting 2 weeks ago where his friend was gunned down by a car burglar.
The man is clinging to life and the shooter still on the run.
“I’ll give it to him she says, ” with alacrity.
I never heard from him.
On my way to the ATM heist, my phone rings.
It’s a trusted source.
“Remember the guy you busted in 2009 for stealing water from hydrants?”
I think for a moment.
“You mean the guy who was filling up his tanker trucks with city water every morning and then using the water to wash cars at local car lots. Yeah, I chased him right into his business, what about him?”
“He’s been at it again. Every morning like clock work.”
I smile. Looks like he’s going to get a taste of me.
Click.
We arrive at the ATM crime scene. The building is in shambles. There’s a pile of glass in the driveway. There’s a massive black plastic tarp hanging in front of the building. When the wind blows, it rises like superman’s cape, revealing a small box of a store that is barely large enough for a drink cooler and a counter to sell cigarettes.
“Can I see the video?” I ask the Middle Eastern owner.
“Police have it,” he replies with a swish of his broom.
I look to my photographer.
“we’re screwed.”
I end up doing a look live. That’s where I walk and talk as if it is a live shot. It’s not Earth shattering, but it is energized and will carry the story for the time allotted.
My story airs at 5pm and 6pm.
The police have been quiet all day as to whether they will release the surveillance video that we have been told is stellar.
I cut the story leaving place for the footage.
4pm. 4:15pm. 4:30pm.
Finally at 4:45pm, I tell my photographer to send the story to the server for the 5pm show. We can’t wait on the police who can be super dicks when it comes to releasing information in a timely fashion for multiple newscasts.
At 5:15 pm, the press release comes out. There is no surveillance footage. It’s 2 lousy pictures.
“What’s wrong with these guys?” I grumble as I take the 2 photos and insert them into the 6pm piece.
I finish editing and send the story to the Server.
I turn off my computer and look up at the news monitors.
What a day.
Gay marriage. Carpet murders. Nathan Bedford Forest.
Freaky Friday.
Life’s Crazy™