Authors: Ardella Garland
So to forget about my breakup with Max, I focused on the double murder in Fellows Park. Who shot the two Rock Disciples? Members of the rival gang the Bandits, of course. Each day I hustled. I had my news groove on and I was determined to have the best reports on this top story.
I scooped everyone when I found out that the Chicago PD had issued arrest warrants for three members of the Bandits street gang. They were the main suspects, believed to be the shooters. I was on this story like cheese on grits. When two of the Bandits were arrested and charged with murder, I was there and got exclusive pictures. I covered the story all day, fronting it live from the cop shop for the six o’clock and the ten o’clock news. Think that was the end of it? Think again.
M
y day seemed to be winding down innocently enough—“Georgia, may I see you for a minute?”
—but it didn’t play out that way.
I stepped into my boss’s office. Garbage was everywhere. Crushed tin cans. Stacks of old newspapers. A broken stress toy on the floor.
Stress test flunked, okay
.
I thought of Junk Man, the urban prospector who used to cruise my old neighborhood with a grocery cart. Junk Man loved to sift through garbage. This office would be his treasure island.
“Clear a space somewhere,” said my boss, Halo Bingington. “Please have a seat.”
Bing’s personality is half George Foreman and half Mike Tyson. That’s cool for two rock ’em, sock ’em boxers but not cool for one newsroom boss. So I knew that Bing’s nice-nice stuff could turn ugly quick and in a hurry.
When your boss calls you into his office, you get that
feeling
. Like after the match ignites the fuse in a
Mission Impossible
rerun, I saw scenes flashing before my eyes. They were scenes from my last exclusive.
It was late night and hotter outside than a hole-in-the-wall barbeque joint. The police cars were lined up in front of a frame house. I was on the journalistic down low. Me and my one-man crew crouched in the bushes, waiting for the arrests.
Two Bandits were inside the house. Sammy Sosa could throw a baseball from the front porch and it would probably land near the pitcher’s mound in nearby Fellows Park. That’s where the bodies had been found, riddled with bullets.
The two suspects were grabbed out of bed, but, true to thug life, they seemed unfazed by the police. Officers yanked them outside by the necks, pajama bottoms sagging, hands cuffed behind their backs with silver bracelets that jingled. It was the only sound in the night. Except cries. One of the suspects’ mothers leaned over the porch railing sobbing as she grabbed for her son, a man who had been out of reach for quite some time.
I’d written the story with feelings and facts. I’d fronted it live from the scene. But now something was wrong. The competition couldn’t possibly have scooped me on some new development, could they? Did the suspects make bond and I didn’t know it? Did the cops find the murder weapon and I missed it?
I watched my boss, Bing, as he made a quick call. He sat wide-legged, khaki pants high above his bare ankles. Scuffy, comfortable shoes fit loosely on his feet as he bounced his right leg up and down. Small freckled hands drummed on the desk, then Bing stopped and used his left hand to free several strands of dirty blond hair matted against the back of his neck by sweat. Bing finished his call and focused directly on me.
In direct contrast to Bing’s warm and rich voice, suddenly his eyes turned cold with displeasure. Bing had started out as a commercial announcer, moved to radio news, then to TV. But he paid the cost to be the boss. Three decades in this business had lost Bing some of his hair, his waistline, his first and second wives, but not his drive to be number one.
“Georgia, your on-camera look stunk. You didn’t fix your makeup and your hair was out of place! Channel 14’s reporter looked flawless.”
I thought of the Generation X babe with Breck hair and poor writing skills. “But, Bing, the competition didn’t have the exclusive video of the arrests. They didn’t have the kid’s mother either. I was hustling like a popcorn vendor at the circus! I was worried about facts, not face.”
“Georgia, this is TV news. The viewers care about how you look. You kicked tail on the story but you didn’t polish it off. Ratings are about how our reporters look
just as much
as they are about our news coverage.”
Bing continued to bawl me out. I listened halfheartedly, then shrugged before heading back out into the newsroom.
“Georgia, Georgia on my mind!” Nancy Haverstein yelled out at me. She’s the producer for the ten o’clock news.
“Yeah, Nancy.” I smiled. She was actually one of the reasonable ones at my tripped-out television station, WJIV Channel 8 in Chicago. I’ve been a TV general assignment reporter in four other markets, all in Ohio, before finally getting a break. Then I was able to get-down-boogie-oogie-oogie back home to Chi-town.
My coworkers seem to think that “Georgia, Georgia” is an original joke. The best joke occurred when my twin sister and I were born.
At first my mother named me Georgia and my sister Georgina.
But my grandmother, who in her heyday did musical comedy on the chitlin circuit, went to find the hospital nurse. Grandma told her to change Georgina’s name to Peaches. Mama threw a fit. Grandma said then, and still says now, that Mama is always raising saying over nothing.
Mama changed my sister’s name back to Georgina but as far as my family was concerned it was far too late. You know how black folks hate to let go of a nickname. Poor Georgina’s nickname was stuck to her like paint on a brush. I have to admit, though, I loved going to Savannah and hearing my grandmother call us in from playing: “Georgia, Peaches! Where are my sweet Georgia, Peaches?!”
I walked over to Nancy. She’s good people—kind, even-tempered, considerate, and gently honest. Nancy’s fronting on fifty but not looking nearly that age. She has a naturally slender build and bright, taut skin; raven black hair falls three inches below the big hoop earrings she loves to wear. Nancy’s eyes are the singed brown color of cigar smoke. She blinks them constantly, too. It’s a nervous habit she shoplifted after working in various television newsrooms across the country.
Nancy pointed to the show rundown, which lists the stories included in the newscast. “Take a look, Georgia. I don’t have a strong lead. What about a hot-weather story—can you write something cute?”
“Ughh!” I groaned. Don’t go there! I would have to stand outside somewhere on Michigan Avenue or along the lakefront and talk about how hot it was—and my hair was surely going to go berserk! Heat and humidity on a black woman’s hair? Goodness.
“Georgia, what do you think about doing a weather crawl?”
“A weather crawl? Girl,
do a hair advisory!
Nancy, if you send me outside to do a heat story in this weather, my hair is going to look like I’m a backup singer with Sly and the Family Stone. And you know Bing wears two hats—newsroom boss and chief of the cosmetic police. Dude wants glamour. Bing doesn’t care if it’s humid or windy or wet. He wants face and hair from his female reporters. But Bing doesn’t say a word to the guys! They can look any kind of way. Give me a pass, huh, Nancy?”
Before she could answer, an intern yelled, “Got a breaker! Caller says there’s been a drive-by shooting. Five people shot.”
“New lead!” Nancy announced to the newsroom. “Hit it, Georgia!”
I hustled to get started on the breaking story. But I got delayed at the front door, waiting for one of our crew trucks to pick me up. I flipped a glance up to the sky, then sighed. The raindrops were steamed by the sun until they became a mist that clung to everyone who stepped out into The Sauna, a Chicago synonym for midday in August.
I put on my thinking brim as I waited for my crew. A drive-by at Fiftieth and Hedge. It was in Englewood, my old neighborhood. A curious feeling came over me—a double-dip emotion of warmth and apprehension. It’s hard covering stories in Englewood. The neighborhood has changed so much from the way it was when I was a little kid.
I had already covered the double murder in Fellows Park last week, a park where my twin and I used to play double Dutch and where we sang our first “concert” under the monkey bars, come one come all, for a nickel apiece.
Once again I tried to give myself the proper distance for peace of mind to do my job. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of a Channel 8 truck turning the corner. When I saw who the cameraman was, my heart went
yeah!
and
help me, Lord!
at the same time. It was Zeke Rouster.
Zeke shoots great pictures but he drives like Al Unser on crack. Zeke has long bony legs, a jelly stomach, pale green eyes, and stone white hair. He holds the record among cameramen for the most moving violations. It’s not a Channel 8 record, it’s the record for the entire city. And Zeke has no shame in his game about it either.
A country boy raised outside of Birmingham, Zeke says his hot-rod days began at twelve years old when he jumped into a beat-up flatbed truck one day and set out driving. His goal was to travel as far as he could, as fast as he could, without knocking down anything that breathed. Zeke is an underachiever; he hasn’t killed anything yet and his goal hasn’t changed in thirty years.
“Rock and roll!” Zeke said, burning rubber when he hit the brakes and opened the door with one fly-guy motion. As the truck sped toward the crime scene, so did my thoughts and my expectations. Doesn’t everyone have some recurring experience that makes them uneasy? Butterflies before making a speech? An anxious anticipation of something? I was nervous as a turkey in November as I fumbled with the metal fringes of my pad.
It’s not as if I’m a cub reporter. I’ve been to violent crime scenes a gazillion times. Sometimes the body is still there. Sometimes there is blood. Sometimes the victim is still alive, grappling with his spirit like a child trying to steer a runaway bike. I’m called upon to make sense out of it for more than 300,000 viewers.
Isn’t that a big dog of a responsibility, being the eyes, ears, and conscience of others? How can I ever take it lightly? How can I ever cruise through work? Each day is mentally tough, but I love it. How great is it to be able to tell a story that people want to know about? But the violent news always works my nerves in the beginning. Mentally I got prepared to do my best and deal with the violence by silently saying the Twenty-third Psalm. That got me focused for whatever lay ahead of me on this story. It turned out to be something to pray about and nothing to play with.
O
ver here! Bring the stretcher!”
“Get back! Get back!”
“Damn! I haven’t seen this many shell casings since Nam!”
The scene was ugly and chaotic. I know a veteran reporter in Cleveland who says he’s been in TV news so long that he doesn’t get emotional when he looks at a crime scene. Must be nice. I’d like to borrow his eyeballs right about now.
A block party had just ended when the shooting started. Four metal folding tables were turned over on their sides. A white tablecloth, splattered with blood, was swaddled around a folding chair. I stepped around two cracked plastic plates, a swirl of mushy food staining the ground beneath their edges.
We were the first crew at the scene and that’s always good. But, honey-chile, I knew the competition was smoking a path to get there. My mind spun into high gear. The caller said five people were hit. Were there more? We were a few blocks away from the park where the two gangbangers were killed last week. Was this drive-by retaliation like I thought? How many witnesses were there? Could I get them to talk?
The questions banging around in my mind were interrupted when I saw two people, a man and a young girl, being loaded into an ambulance. Both wore breathing devices that resembled a catcher’s mask; the apparatus was hitched behind their ears to protect them from the wild pitch that Death was throwing.
I glanced behind me. Zeke was on the case, panning and zooming with the camera. The strong arm of the law had a choke hold on the scene. There were eight to ten beat cops and three plainclothes detectives plus a couple of evidence techs wearing skintight beige gloves searching the grass for bullet casings.
I looked up to my left and saw groups of people sitting on their front porches watching, first the police, then me. A few of the younger, more eager ones were hanging over their chain-link fences. They didn’t seem frightened or angry or unhappy but just really tired. Maybe numb is a better word. A creepy feeling came over me as I realized how difficult it had to be to deal with violence like this on such a regular basis. It had become part of the neighborhood scene like the trees and the corner newsstand.
But the way they did nothing tripped me out. The violence didn’t seem to scare the hell out of these residents enough to make them grab anything they could get their hands on to fight back against the gangbangers. That may seem naive, but to me complacency is naive. Doesn’t history prove that action and change go hand in hand? And that’s not book knowledge talking, that’s street sense, too. You want something to go down, you have to make it happen yourself.
There were a few more pockets of people on the corners, too. In one group, a bunch of little kids were standing around watching the commotion.
In the other group, adults talked amongst themselves. I spotted a tall man in a sweat-stained work shirt, about six-two, wide across the shoulders, standing tensely. I guesstimated his age to be around about forty. His upper-body strength clearly established that he did some heavy lifting for a living. A spit of gray adorned his temples and he was hugging a teenage girl who was crying. I couldn’t see her face but I saw his. His eyes looked as if they were throbbing, the anger in them was just that intense. With an arm around the girl’s shoulders, he comforted her. I could see the oil stains beneath his nails. His jaw clenched as he gritted his teeth twice.