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It is good to read a little in the Files.
- Kipling
Writer’s block has struck again, I’m afraid. I’m going through a time when it’s easier to find things not to write about than it is to find things that I want to write about. I don’t want to write about Iraq, or Britney Spears or Paris Hilton or Anna Nicolle Smith or the 2008 election or global warming or Scooter Libby or illegal aliens or, oh hell, a whole lot of things that are clogging up the newspapers and the airwaves in these declining days of winter. It’s not that I don’t have opinions on some of them at least, it’s just that I feel the world isn’t ready for them yet. So I’m keeping them leashed in their cage until the time comes to let them out to run wild in the streets. What I mean is that some of the ideas I do have might possibly be a little outré for the blogging business and might not be helpful to me in the matter of building up my readership a little. So I’ll save them for another time.
That brings me back to my last resort for a subject to kick around in print on an otherwise pleasant weekend. It’s necessary to have a source for updating unless one wants to become one of the Legion of Lost Bloggers, the 90% of all bloggers who fail to update their sites regularly and disappear from view. In my case, as I’ve pointed out sometimes, my source is my collection of reports from the days when I used to chase around New York responding to police incidents weighty enough to require an immediate investigation and report to Headquarters.
I kept stacks of copies of these reports, first just from instinct, then with the realization that one never knew when one of them would become the subject of an investigation itself. A dispute over the facts could arise, after all, and it would be useful to have your own copy of your original report on hand rather than someone else’s copy. You never knew about such things, did you? Anything might happen and the wise thing was to protect yourself at all times.
But even if nothing ever happened, your name was on the bottom of these reports and that had to mean you were entitled to your own sample of the merchandise. There were no “Classified” or “Top Secret” stamps in use in the Police Department, so you didn’t have to worry about that angle. Take ´em and keep ´em, and who knows, they may come in handy some day. You’ve got a right to some souvenirs, haven’t you?
You bet, and you earned it too. When things hit the fan at 11:00 at night just when your thoughts were beginning to run on home and bedtime, your heart fell when you thought of the hours of work that suddenly lay ahead -- interviews, fact-finding, reconnaissance, pulling it all together and getting a sequence of events into a coherent narrative that headquarters would accept without sending you back a list of unanswered questions like what’s the name of the witness you mentioned in your opening and then alluded to no more? The only sure way to prevent things like this was to shut out all ideas of home and family from your mind and resolve to stay with the job on hand to the bitter end when all the “T’s” had been crossed and all the “I’s” dotted. It was overtime, for which you didn’t get paid, being an executive, but which did entitle you to time-and a-half in compensatory time off. Actually getting it was like pulling teeth, but not getting it was not be considered, and it wasn’t.
Now I come to the point of actually finding some gem in my file and retelling it here for the entertainment of the public. Tonight that didn’t go smoothly. That was unexpected, the first report I pulled out seemed like a sure winner. It detailed the escape of Sean Ryan, the perpetrator of two homicides in Manhattan, after which he escaped from Rikers Island prison by swimming the turbulent Hell Gate strait where Long Island Sound meets the East River and the waters surge in several directions at once.
Here was a spectacular hoodlum, twice a killer, my god, and an escape artist to boot, who had sworn not to be taken alive and now was discovered by detectives in his hideout in Queens. It had all the ingredients for headlines, not to mention these memoirs, but, well, it didn’t work out. The detectives got a tip that he was at his uncle’s house. Their boss formed a task force out of the district attorney’s squad, which he commanded. They staked out the house and almost immediately spotted Ryan going in with some beer. They got ready to storm the house, but Ryan crossed them up by coming right out again and walking away. When he saw he was being followed he picked up his pace, cut through some backyards where he jumped over the fences and disappeared into the twilight. That was it, no siege of the house, no gunfight, no arrest, no headlines, no nothing. No blog entry either. The occupants of the house were arrested for harboring a fugitive, but that didn’t make up for the escape of Killer Ryan.
Here’s another one; off-duty detective driving east toward Long Island at 4:40 in the morning, gets hit in rear by mystery car, leaving him unconscious so that he had no memory of being questioned by the captain who originally investigated the accident. All well and good, but why was he out on the road at 4:40 when he also claims he left his house at 2:00 AM to return the car he was driving to its owner? She didn’t live that far away. So where’d he go in between? Why does that matter if he didn’t spend the time drinking, of which he showed no signs when he got hit? Why did I have to spend so much time on this nothing case? Just because the Police Department has a nanny complex and worries itself sick over what its members might be up to when they’re on their own time living their own lives? Who would want to read this if I put it in the blog?
So it isn’t all peaches and cream when it comes to finding material for my weekly story hour. It requires vast powers of discrimination, an innate sense of good taste, a sharp eye for nuances of narration that will enthrall an audience and leave it helpless in your grasp, only longing for more of your inspired output. Since I haven’t any of these things, what you see is what you get. | |