You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The intern.
“Hey do you want to take her with you?”
The assignment editor’s eyes are big like a puppy dog.
“You don’t have to but…”
I look at the college girl on the assignment desk.
She is dressed in black. She is staring blankly into space.
I feel like saying no. I usually say no. There is no benefit to me. At worst, the intern tells the boss I have a dirty mouth and a terrible attitude. At best? The intern comes back in 2 years and steals my job for a happy meal and a hand shake.
Welcome to news.
Interns are a pain in the ass. They crowd my space and limit the topics on the table.
A news vehicle is a rolling cathedral of news where the front seat is a confessional for cathartic purification of the soul.
Nothing is off-limits in a news vehicle. The bosses hair cut, a producers lisp, another photographer’s strange addiction to milk and Asian prostitutes.
I don’t even know what that means.
I have baby sat a 1,000 interns in my day.
They are neophytes of news. They are wide-eyed journalistic simpletons waiting to Humpty Dumpty their way into the business. Some are assigned to the station and show up because they have to. Other interns are so amped up on news room adrenaline they need a dog collar just to keep them in one place.
But at the end of the day, most interns fall into 2 categories.
Those who have potential and realize it’s a noble profession that requires hard work and them taking their first job Joplin Missouri to make mistakes.
And then there is the rest of them.
The glamour babies. The wanna be super stars who think they’re the next Peter Jennings or Robin Roberts.
I’ve baby sat them all.
“What do you be when you grow up?” I always ask.
More times than not they say; “I wanna be an anchor.”
As soon as I hear that phrase, I know I don’t like them. I detach like a parachute on a dragster. I emotionally divest and start counting the hours till their mommy and daddy come home and pay me.
These interns sit in the back seat and tell me that they want to be work in L.A. or on GMA. That’s a lofty goal, I just don’t want to hear it. It makes me think you don’t want to work and your daddy has spoon fed you an easy life.
These interns have apple pie for brains and a misguided work ethic for a soul. They sit in the back seat, having just taken a multiple choice test in some worthless J class and regail me with stories of their future.
I wonder what dream planet they come from. It must be Intern Centauri, near the 5th moon of Jupiter, where college aged anchor kids have sun shine beaming out of their teeth and perfect diction and posture.
These interns want to be on TV instead of wanting to tell stories.
These interns want to be famous and get preferential seating at exclusive restaurants and sign autographs on the set of project runway.
I’ve dealt with these young dreamers before. I can’t remember many of them anchoring Fox This Morning or the CBS Nightly News.
These interns want the golden ring, but they typically don’t think of helping their communities or breaking the big story.
I have as much use for this group of interns as I do for tooth decay.
So I stare at the girl sitting on the assignment desk, wondering which of the two groups she falls into.
I wait for a look, a glance, a sign that she’s even interested in rolling with me.
“She’s from MTSU,” the assignment editor says trying to break the ice.
I wait for a pulse, for a blink, anything.
Am I interviewing to be her reporter? I wonder to myself.
I am almost say hello, but I stop myself.
The awkwardness, the quiet, the desolate look into oblivion is Life’s Crazy priceless.
The assignment editor begins to walk away.
The girl remains seated.
I feel like putting a mirror under her nostrils to see if there is life.
She is sitting there like cold syrup on a plate left on the counter of a diner getting raided by the INS.
She is like a lost dog, peering from behind a dumpster in a tough alley. She is scared, lost, perhaps needing a milk bone.
Maybe I can reach this deaf-mute journalist, I think to myself.
“Hello.” I say.
From somewhere in a galaxy far far away, her eyes go from fixed and dilated to alert.
She stares me in the face and stands.
She robotically extends her hand. She immediately reminds me of a Steppford Wife without the need to please.
“You wanna roll with me?”
“Sure,” she says sheepishly.
She follows behind me to the car.
I am like an Australian Shepard keeping her on the path.
We clear out a space in the back seat. No easy feat in a news car.
In my old camera man’s vehicle, that could entail pushing weed eaters and hibachi grills to the rear.
We roll out of the parking lot and do what news men do. We start talking about the story we will be working on.
Topic: A construction blast that goes awry, knocking out a side of a town home.
“You have any questions?” I ask the quiet lump of nothing in the back seat.
“No,” she says.
I smile staring at the highway before me, wondering what her parents did to her as a puppy to make her this dissatisfied with her life.
“Not one question?” I ask.
“I’ll just take notes, ” she says.
“You with the IRS?” I say facetiously.
Take notes? What the hell does that mean?
“I haven’t paid last year’s taxes yet,” I say trying to elicit a laugh, maybe even a flash of life.
Nothing. She is silent. I can’t see her. I can only imagine she is not there. Perhaps she has fallen out of the car.
I look to my Photog.
He smiles.
I give him a look. A look of “I don’t trust her.”
She reminds me of my ex-wife’s attorney and the deposition I endured that emasculated me.
I look at my watch, and sigh loudly.
Interns in the back seat mean you can’t talk freely.
You have to represent the station with a smile. It’s the corporate handbook of alacrity and service.
Broadcast Journalists are rarely boy scouts. Today we are riding with a note taker. Hmmmm?
So there is no talking about News room gossip or what so and so did to so and so.
My photog puts on a thrash metal cd.
It’s loud and makes me think of carving up a human we just captured in our van down by the river.
It sounds like we are driving to hell with Ozzy Osbourne’s rowdies.
I shout over the thrash metal concert blaring from the speakers and ask her my magic question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A reporter,” She says.
Hmmm?
Maybe there’s a chance for her after all, I think to myself.
“Then you are out with the right guy,” my photog says nicely.
I smile. Nice compliment.
My phone rings. I turn down the Pantera concert and put it on speaker so she can learn.
It’s the PIO from the state fire marshal’s office.
“Hey. I need to know what the company was doing out there? Were they cited? How many violations do they have with the state over what period of time? And send me investigative photos of the damage if the case is closed.”
I hang up.
“Rule 1. If you don’t ask for it. You don’t get it. Any questions?”
“Nope.”
“This is a teaching laboratory you know.”
“I know,” she says with the enthusiasm of a tuna laying on the deck of a fishing boat.
We pull up on the site. There are two large plywood boards covering two windows that are obviously destroyed.
“Wow. Whatever happened here happened big time.”
There is a construction crew nearby.
They look like rough, like they adorn an FBI wanted poster in the post office. On the evolutionary scale of minimum wage workers they are somewhere between carnies and plasma sellers.
“Did you guys blow that up?” I shout over the roar of their gigantic machine belching smoke and tearing up Earth.
The knuckleheads driving the bacco scream back.
“Nope. Not us. It was another company”
I don’t know if I believe them. Too early to tell.
I begin banging on doors. Knock. knock. knock.
Over my 30 years, I have developed an unusual system for getting reaction in apartment complexes.
I bang on multiple doors at the same time. I bang and ring and bang and ring and bang and ring and walk away without waiting a second.
I listen for the first door to open, sometimes multiple doors.
I am a news man. I need news. I want answers. I want what I want and I want it when I want it.
Bottom line. I don’t care about you in your house.
I don’t care if you are eating a TV dinner. Get up and answer your door.
I don’t care if you are taking a shower and shaving the hair off your back. Get up and answer your door.
I don’t care if you are making love with your boy friend. Get up and answer your damn door.
So I knock and walk away.
To me this is normal.
But to an intern, It must look like journalistic SWAT.
I look at the cold syrup intern. She is watching me, taking notes with her mysterious eyes.
I laugh. Tell our stupid ass professor about that, I think.
I try and teach. It comes off like this:
“If someone’s home they’ll come to the door, and I’ll talk to them. I don’t have time to waste.”
It sounds less like a lesson and more like an old journalist who is tired of no one talking.
She says nothing, taking it in, like a Steppford Journalist.
I think this intern is crazy strange, but I find it challenging and I am going to teach her something.
I bang on 5 more doors in 20 seconds.
“Come on people,” I shout out loud. “Isn’t anyone going to answer the door?”
My photographer motions to the 2nd story window above me. I look up. A man is staring down at us.
“Hello,” I scream. “We’re with the news. Come talk to me.”
The man is scowling. I either woke him up or he was in the process of killing his wife and dumping her dismembered body parts into the bat tub where he is melting them with lye and Mr. Clean.
Either way, he doesn’t answer the door. Dissolving dead body is a job in itself.
“Damn!” I scream spinning around in the middle of the apartment complex driveway.
“I thought America’s unemployment rate was higher than this? Where the hell is everyone?”
I look at the intern.
“So what have you learned so far?”
“You are aggressive.” she says from a
“Aggressive?”
I like that response.
“That’s right. Aggressive. You wanna be a reporter? Stories aren’t going to come to you. You have to make things happen.”
I see a tiny spark in her eye, as if a seed has germinated.
I remember she is a kid, in college, taught by professors who teach because they can’t do what I do.
At the end of the day, a 1o0 door knocks yields one neighbor who felt the blast.
in a 90 second story, all you need is one witness.
I end up talking to the blasting company president who tells me it was an accident.
Of course it was an accident. Nobody sets out to blow up a town home.
We bring the syrup faced intern back to the station.
“Any questions?” I ask.
“How long will it take you to put this together?”
“That’s a good question,” I respond. “We’re only half done. I have to log the video. I have to write the story. I have to edit it. I probably have 3 more hours to go.”
“Do you need me to log the video for you?”
Again, a sign of life.
“No thanks. For me, it’s kind of like a musical instrument. Editing and video and sound all come together in the edit bay. I’m not even sure what I’m going to do before I do it, and that, for me, is where the story unfolds before my very eyes.”
“Oh,” she says, her arteries once again filling with coagulating bacon grease.
I open the door and let her inside.
“Well thanks,” I say.
“OK,” she says disappearing into a hallway that leads to another section of the station.
“How was the intern?” another photog asks.
I shake my head.
“A Steppford reporter. The future of journalism is in trouble.”
He laughs out loud.
Life’s Crazy™