You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The door knock.
You probably don’t think about knocking on a door when you go to work.
You probably don’t equate the door knock with life and death.
I think about it every minute of every day.
The door knock is the portal to the story, which is the portal to success.
But the door knock can also be the final salvo in an angry person’s last fit of rage.
BLAM BLAM BLAM
That’s the last sound you hear as the bright blinding flashes of light fill your eyes and pieces of wood blow out of the door in explosive little balls of anger.
As I’ve often said, my day is different than yours.
My day starts with a police report and a bad guy accused of something.
Maybe he’s a child rapist. Maybe he’s a sexual batterer. Maybe he’s a multiple drunk driver or a violent felon.
The only way to really know what he has to say for himself is to go and ask him.
You can try calling this miscreant, but 9 times out of 10 that’s like giving up.
“Did you try and get the offender’s side of the story?” the judge will ask you during the slander trial.
“Yes your honor. I tried to call him and nobody answered.”
“You tried to call him? Bailiff, remove this sorry ass journalist from my court room. The court finds for the douche bag offender, slander in the worst degree.”
You want to get the story?, you bang on the door.
You go right for the piece of crap’s throat, you shove a microphone up his ass and you say sing like a canarie you murdering raping piece of filth.
It sounds haphazard, but there’s a technique to it.
If you are in a marked car, the entire neighborhood knows that you are driving down the street. Little kids with smart phones can text the offender and let him know that the news is about to buzz the bell.
You might as well drive a live truck onto his yard and talk to him through a loud speaker.
The element surprise is the key to the door knock.
The best news teams have their cameras white balanced, their batteries full, their microphones on.
If you want to kick ass, then be ready to kick ass.
Jump out of the car and approach.
It’s not like Seal team 6 bailing out the back of an open transport plane, but it’s damn close.
You exit the car and you move with purpose, with stealth, up the stairs to the porch.
You get to the door and you take a deep breath.
You have to know which way the door opens so you can get the right angle to zoom in to the perp’s surprised face to capture that moment in time when the child rapist opens the door.
Chances are you will only get one second of this son of a bitch before he shuts the door on you.
If you are going to make that moment count, you need to see the face, zoom into the bewildered face and slow mo it for an entire viewing market to see.
“Get the face. Get the face,” a lame ass producer, now out of the business once preached.
She never got the face. Because to get the face you gotta knock on the door.
Most people don’t have the guts to go and knock on the door.
It takes guts. You are holding the bastard’s mug shot in your hand. You are holding the charges against him in his hand. You know what his bail is. You look at the house and you can almost decide right there whether he was able to make 10 percent of the bail amount.
All of this goes through your thoughts as you poise your fist, ready to bang, making sure you and your camera man are on the same page.
Because once you knock upon the door, the door is knocked upon. You can’t unknock the knock.
The knock sets off an unstoppable series of events that can be good or can be very very bad.
Knocking on the door is an art form.
It take balls. It takes guts. It takes choreographed courage.
You don’t know what is going to happen. It’s like putting a bullet into a six shooter, spinning the barrel and placing it against your head.
CLICK.
The guy behind the door is all ready mad. If he just got arrested and bonded out of jail, chances are he is pissed, angry at the world. He hates everyone. He is surely going to hate you.
The last thing he wants to see is your big ass camera and some smart ass like me asking if he did it and what would he say to the victims?
The door is either going to open or it’s not.
The problem is what if it does open and the man behind the door is crazy.
What if he wants to take out the crappy part of his life on you?
What if he has a shot gun? What if he has a pit bull? What if he is just a mean mo fo and he wants to pound some reporter flesh.
“Roll on me going down,” I always tell my camera man. “We’ll need it for court later.”
I don’t want to be that sorry ass reporter getting his ass whipped on camera, having it shown on CNN over and over again.
Like those CNN morning show anchors have the balls to knock on a door. They sit in a cushy studio and have lap dogs bring them lattes.
They don’t know what it’s like to count to three and ask your camera man if he’s rolling.
What you are really asking your cameraman and yourself is “are you ready to die?”
I like to stand to the side of the door, toward the door frame. I knock from the side.
That way if there is a shot gun blast from inside, the shot gun pellets, hopefully bird shot and not 20 guage, won’t hit center mass, my center mass. Maybe it will just hit an arm or a shoulder. They can sew that up.
You just never know.
Bad guys are called bad guys for a reason. They’re bad. They do bad things. Shooting a reporter and his camera man? That’s just one more bad thing.
When you’re on a rocket sled to hell, after a while, who really cares how many life sentences you get. What’s two more stupid journalists in the big bad scoreboard of life?
That’s why the door knock is the key to the news kingdom.
It’s volatile, unpredictable, chaotic.
When you knock on your bosses door tomorrow to ask a question; pause a moment and think about what if.
What if your boss might shoot you from within? What if your boss unleashed a savage pit bull to tear your skin off your bones.
Might change the way you knock wouldn’t it?
The door knock.
Dangerous, exciting, the exclusive lies beyond the peep whole.
It just takes a certain mentality to go get it.
Anyone who says it’s easy doesn’t knock on doors for a living.
It’s only easy if the mad man behind the door never made bond.
You’re alive. But then the portal never opened and at the end of the news day, you got nothing.
KNOCK. KNOCK.
Life’s Crazy™