You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The combat vet.
I pull up to the four plex.
It is grey and worn. It is a stucco box with metallic railings and flimsy doors with peep holes.
It looks like a shoe box that was designed by Converse.
We pull into a parking space.
I get out.
To the right of me is a 5 foot stain on the black top.
It’s coagulated blood, rich and red and pulpy.
What the hell is that? I think to myself.
“I think we found it,” my photographer says getting his gear.
The sun is high in the sky. The golden glow is beating down on the blood lake, casting an eerie reflection.
I stare at the puddle. The fringes are dry. But the center of the puddle is thick like cold soup.
“Looks like a neck wound,” my salty partner says.
I think he’s right.
While he gets the gear ready I walk toward the apartment building.
With a few cobwebs and a crow on the roof, this would make the perfect haunted house.
I feel a chill in the autumn air as the wind wisps down through a tree.
I watch orange and brown leaves pop off their branch. They float down to the grass like spinning tea cups at Disney Land.
A man with long hair and a beard steps onto his porch.
He lights up a cigarette and stares at me.
His eyes are dark and give away nothing.
His face is hardened as he drags a puff of his unfiltered cigarette.
I watch him ingest the smoke, inhale it in, swirl it around his lungs and then blow it through his nostrils.
He looks like a flesh face chimney as the smoke dissipates in his black beard.
“Good morning,” I say.
“Is it?” he says with another drag on his cigarette.
He is skinny and unkempt. He is wearing dirty jeans and combat boots.
He is wearing a camouflage army jacket with an insignia I cannot make out.
“Is that where it happened last night?,” I ask my hand pointing to the blood pond.
“Where what happened?” he says, his voice low, defiant.
“The stabbing,” I say, sensing this is going to be less than friendly.
“Yeah. I saw something last night. Police were there,” he says. “I smoked a cigarette and went inside.”
“So you didn’t hear anything?”
“I don’t even know what happened here.”
“Someone was murdered in your parking lot,” I say, growing weary of this stone faced fool.
“People die every day,” he says stoically.
I want to bite his face, but I keep my cool. “Yeah. Yeah, they do. I’ve seen a lot of death. That’s a good-sized puddle of death over there.”
“I’ve seen a lot of death too.”
“Oh yeah? Where?”
“Afghanistan,” he says dryly.
I size him up. He looks like the poster child for PTSD. I wonder if he is hiding a Beretta under that army jacket. I imagine this guy taking another puff of his cigarette, putting a round in my mellon, snuffing out his cigarette on the porch and casually going inside to watch Dr. Phil while the termites eat what’s left of my decomposing carcass.
“Yeah. I guess you have seen some death.”
“What?” he says. “I don’t hear too well since the explosion.”
“What explosion?”
The one in Afghanistan, he says again.
I look at this guy. He might have been a life force worth knowing once. He might be a soul worth saving now. But I don’t have the time. I don’t have enough space in my heart for this hollow shell of whoever he might be. I’m a news mechanism. I’m here for answers, for truth.
I’m not a human soup kitchen of compassion. Not today. Not for this fool.
A woman was attacked here. She grabbed a kitchen knife and she plunged it into her boyfriend’s neck. He staggered down this flimsy stairs and collapsed in the parking lot, blood flowing from his veins like a fountain in the park.
This guy is a waste of my time. Let some advocacy group come here and save his soul. I don’t have time. I don’t care. That’s not who I am or what I do.
I nod my head to him. He throws his cigarette onto the porch and snuffs it out under his boot.
He turns and walks into his dark apartment.
I turn back to the blood pond.
“What that guy have to say?” my camera man says shooting a close up of the blood stain we will never be able to air on public tv.
“He’s a few eggs short of a carton” I say scanning the parking lot for answers.
And then, as is always the case, fortune smiles upon me.
A man with a shopping bag walks into my field of vision.
He is also wearing an Army jacket.
“You wanna be on TV?” I scream.
I don’t even have the energy to go through my schpeel again.
“Sure,” he says stopping.
“Do you know about that?” I say pointing again to the puddle.
“I tried to save his life and called 911,” he says putting his shopping bag down.
I eye-ball my camera man. We furtively smile.
The News Gods have once again put me in the right place at the right time and the truth is about to be revealed as it must be.
“What happened?” I say walking toward the young man with the army jacket and nose ring.
Life’s Crazy™