Flirtin' with Disaster

“Yeah, he sounds like a ‘prince’.” Jon sneered as he silenced all those crying doves with one jab of his bony finger. When he did, the Rebel’s radio switched over and the Southern thump of Molly Hatchet filled the old car’s darkened interior. This pleased my best friend greatly and he settled back in the passenger seat, a picture of Country Boy Cool in his cowboy boots, faded jean jacket and wispy blonde hair. Too bad he topped out at 95 pounds. Of course I wasn’t a hell of a lot huskier myself - at 16 years of age, I weighed in at maybe 110 pounds, provided I stuff the pockets of my baggy khaki pants with extra quarter rolls for the Galaga machine at Take Ten.

That was precisely my destination on that distant Fall evening. The last of the autumn afternoon’s long shadows had since grown together and draped the back roads of Wayne County in unseasonable darkness. Not that I noticed, mind you. With my hand slung over the wheel and sockless feet swathed in faded Vans, all I could think of was the romance to be had on the selling floor of Berkeley Mall - Goldsboro’s only shopping mall and premier punk-ass hang-out. After a slice of greasy pizza and a few distracted video games in the arcade, Jon and I would strut and preen along with the rest of the food court hoodlums of 1983. First though, I had to get there…

I was well on my way I ran afoul of physics, friendship and fuel efficiency. It started with an old lady in a wood-paneled station wagon; the back of her blue had lit up my by cocksure headlights. When she insisted on navigating the twisty rural road at a reasonable rate of speed, I gunned the engine of my aging chariot and blew the proverbial doors of Grandma’s Vista Cruiser. That I executed this particular move on a blind curve didn’t seem to bother either Jon or me. Apparently we were wearing our childhood cloaks of immortality along with copious amounts of Polo cologne. Whatever the reason, we just cackled like dumb school kids as I clipped the edges of the winding two lane road. When a low-slung Camaro tapped its brake lights up ahead, I stood on the 17 year old car’s accelerator and sang along with Molly Hatchet:

“Yeah, I’m travelin’ down the road and I’m flirtin’ with disaster…”

As if to prove it, I veered over into the oncoming lane and tried to pass the Camaro before the narrow road doglegged to the left. I’d just gotten past the screaming muscle car when the white-hot glare of headlights blanketed the Rebel’s windshield. In an instant that still feels like slow motion, I swerved back over into my lane, almost running the Camaro off the road in my haphazard attempt to get out of the way of the oncoming car. Through sheer luck and not experience I managed to squeeze past both cars without anybody trading paint. My driving prowess however was not refined enough to prevent my buddy riding shotgun from exploding in threats and curses and judging from the rapidly growing headlights in my rearview mirror, he wasn’t alone in his wrath.

When I realized I was being chased, I punched it. Looking back that was probably a mistake, as the last sip of gas I had on board at the time surely turned to my fumes underneath my lead foot. But having grown up on fresh ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ episodes, I knew only to floor it and I sure wasn’t about to falter on my very first high speed pursuit. That’s not to say I wasn’t frightened, as I trembled in my vinyl Members Only jacket as the Camaro’s headlights smothered the Rebel in its angry glare. ’ Don’t sweat it dude, we’ll lose in him town.” I offered bravely, lost in the youthful bravado borne of a dozen Starsky and Hutch reruns. In my rearview mirror, the Camaro closed in, almost bumping the Rebel’s rear as the road stretched out straight before us. I’d almost convinced myself I could ditch the angry driver once I reached the city limits when the last of the gas evaporated and my means of escape began rolling to a slow stop.

Inside the Rebel, reality set in. While my best buddy Jon fidgeted in his denim and cursed the day he met me, I sat frozen solid to my side view mirror, hypnotized by what I saw. The Camaro had pulled up within inches of my crippled steed; when the door opened the dueling gee-tar work of Lynyrd Skynyrd poured out, followed by the biggest hillbilly silhouette I’d ever seen. As the hulking mass rose to his full height and stomped toward my door, the tunnel vision started. Swinging my head from side to side, I took in swirling images like a punch-drunk prizefighter: the knuckle dragger closing in on my side of the car, the fuel needle buried left of the ’E’. my best friend cradling his own door handle and waiting for the best possible moment to bolt, leaving me to deal with Hood Swamp’s angriest felon all by my puny lonesome.

‘What the hell was that back there?” the hulk-billy roared at my rolled-up window. When I didn’t answer he landed a ham-sized fist on my driver side door, jolting the car and instantly purifying a good portion of my bowels. “We ran out of gas.” I offered weakly as the giant grappled with the door handle and cursed a Southern blue streak. Throughout all this, I did what any underage dumb-ass would have done - I scrambled to Jon’s side of the car and nearly gouged his eye out trying to open his door in the darkness, wanting only to run as fast as I could from the roadside, the Rebel and the redneck. That’s when the angel spoke.

“Styu-wert? Is that you?” Though I couldn’t see her for the towering inbred clawing at the door, I immediately recognized Rene’s voice. A friend of my older brother’s, she was all too familiar with my fondness with my own voice. Despite this, she chose to save me that fateful evening.

“Leave him alone, Charlie!” she spat at her colossal date. “That’s Richard Pittman’s little brother - He ain’t nobody!”

“He’s gonna be a dead nobody, he don’t learn to drive!” With that Charlie planted one more fist square and deep in my car door, then spun on his boot heels to shoo Rene back in the Camaro - where they were no doubt now late for the romantic tour of some tractor pull or another. As they pulled off, Charlie flipped me a big fat middle finger and mouthed an obscenity through his Rally Sport's own smoked glass. Showering my car with gravel, the Camaro sped off, leaving me with my entrails intact, my gas tank empty and my young friend nearly catatonic.

“So,” I said eyeing the farm house lights in the distance and thinking about the rusty gas can in my trunk, “you still feel like pizza?”

Ghost of Promos Past

I’ve always held that TV news promos do NOT age well. However, I’m almost willing to issue an exception - having just watched an old KTVY spot featuring its many hotshot news shooters. It’s 29 seconds of cinematic brilliance. There’s the discount bin mid-seventies musical soundtrack, that fleeting glimpse of the world’s ugliest live truck - there’s even a inexplicable Hall and Oates cameo! Yes, this clip has everything ... If for no other reason, this 21 year old promo is worthy of time-capsule inclusion for its stilted summation of just what it is those scruffy photogs actually do, delivered in the patently paternalistic style of the times:

“Their purpose is to focus on the pictorial images that make the news clear to you”

Huh? “focus on the pictorial images?” Like I often bellow from an edit bay when laying footage over a line I crafted a few minutes earlier, “Who writes this crap?” Oh well, at least the lowly lenslingers of Oklahoma City circa 1985 got some well-deserved props. We're likely to see more of these gems surface as archivists everywhere shove their longheld bounty through the rickety series of tubes that is our internets. Thank you, Al Gore! Still, if my own promo gurus came to me with cameras rolling and a script as lousy as that, there’s only one thing I’d tell them...

“Get my good side, would ya?”

Sticks in the Distance

From the Associated Press, a fine frame captured by Gerry Broome at Jordan Lake yesterday. I for one love everything about it: the suncast determination on volunteer Ron Clark's face as he readies his thrust, the frozen squawk of protest from the indignant eagle, and even the bend of the cameraman's knees. It's a pensive (and protective) position, wisely chosen by the anonymous(?) photog - should the jettisoned raptor suddenly veer off from his intended course of glory and proceed to dive-bomb the fleshier side of our good man's fancy-cam. Delusional? Perhaps - but take it from someone who's happily one-eyed every form of weasel, dog and pony show there is ... stay loose!

(As for the title of our hasty post, consider the three-legged beast grazing in the backdrop. If you're a news-shooter, it's all you see...)

Stashing the Atlas

Over at Under Exposed, veteran news hunter Richard Adkins waxes on the art of mobile map management - a dying discipline in the days of Mapquest and onboard GPS:

"There’s nothing like a paper map to give you a hands-on feel for the drive. Paper maps give you an overall look at the lay of the land, a bird’s eye view so you can see all your alternatives at once."

If RAD’s love for his onboard charts strikes you as odd, well then - you’ve never raced to a fresh plane crash on the far corner of an outlying county. I have - and I’m here to tell you, an ample atlas stash in the glove compartment is just as important as that fancy-cam sloshing around in back. More so, for if you can’t find your way to the smoldering wreckage in the first place, no degree of cinematic intent will appease the angry News Gods. It can mean the difference between quizzing the pilot as he stumbles away from the mangled craft and interviewing the driver of the flatbed truck who’s about to haul off the last remains of the twisted bird. I can hear the anchor dancing now, “The lack of video in the following piece is brought to you by ace photographer Roger Soreback, who, despite a flurry of cursed-filled u-turns, never managed to make it on scene...” Trust me, it’s not the kind of on-camera plug you wanna put at the top of your resume tape. Go with a montage, instead...

Despite the wisdom of printed directions, I’d be w-a-y less than honest if I implied my own cache of maps was in such pristine condition. Rather, my streamlined file is in reality a mangled heap of faded hieroglyphics, badly folded origami featuring dozens of circled side streets and the blotches of a few too many jostled condiments. (Head East out of town on Highway 64, then hang a left at the small inland sea of Ranch Dressing...) Still, I’m quite attached to my tracts of topography at scale. I still get a tactile thrill from blindly thumbing through its many greasy folds while I scan the horizon for smoke plumes and steer with my knee. Simply keying in the coordinates and having some disembodied voice lead me the rest of the way just seems wrong in my book (of which several key pages are missing). For now, I’ll forgo any satellite rendered assistance, any housewife-sanctioned cyber-map printout. Give the me the glossy fold-away, the tattered road atlas, the chamber of commerce freebie that counts among vital landmarks all three locations of participating Shoe Carnivals.

I’ll get there, somehow - and I’ll be the prouder photog for it. Besides, how may times can you glop Big Mac ooze on that gleaming GPS unit, before the boys at Radio Shack stop returning your calls? My guess is, no more than three.

Shiver and Sweat

Ten minutes into ‘The Pits’, I was drenched. Everyone was - the sweaty Mexican guys shoveling fire and their benevolent boss, Chip Stamey. Blinking back forehead water, the third generation barbecue baron watched me skulk about his smokehouse through a prism of perspiration. Why exactly the TV dude wanted to swelter outback with the pork shoulders wasn’t all that clear - but Warner Stamey’s grandson is far too skilled a businessman to turn down a curious cameraman. Besides, it ain’t the first time I’ve shown up at his restaurant with an odd request. Usually, it has something to do with an event at the Greensboro Coliseum next door, but today I was simply in seek of the heat. As always, Chip delivered.

I’d spent the morning pursuing more frigid temperatures. With the dog days upon us, I was looking for people who worked in shockingly cold environs - a visual yen to the summertime yang, if you will. I once shot a few minutes inside a local dairy’s hardening room - a sub zero freezer where ice cream is set to do ... whatever it is ice cream does in the deep dank dark. Memories of shivering uncontrollably that day while parka-clad workers got their ‘Willy Wonka on’ convinced me to revisit the scene on an insufferably hot day as this, but alas corporate PR flacks got in the way. After a punishing round of no-go phone-tag, I found myself sitting on empty, loitering in my cubicle as the noon hour approached. So I made a mad dash to Stamey’s and thought about the opposites.

All of which explains why, within a half hour of mopping my sweaty brow over those slow roasted pork shoulders, a shiver ran down my spine as I goose stepped across the shiny expanse of the Greensboro Icehouse. General Manager Chuck Burch barely batted an eye as I dragged my sticks onto the rink and took aim at the lumbering leviathan in the distance, a bored Zamboni driver hunched at his workaday wheel. Perhaps the staff had seen me stalking youthful skaters through the glass a few minutes earlier, leaning into my frosty viewfinder and ignoring the white-hot rage of a hopped-up hockey Dad screaming from the sidelines. ‘Hey, I’m just here for the elements’ I muttered as I scanned the walls for a visible thermometer to shoot. A few more frigid frames and I’d have the dichotomy of shots I needed for yet another minute-thirty masterpiece...

Beats workin’ for a living.

Crazy on a Ship of Fools

‘Fecund Stench’, a local blogging demagogue and amateur naval archivist, has kindly chosen a vessel from my past to feature as the weekly banner image on his own potent site. Thanks, Fec. Not only have you shone the spotlight on a thoroughly impressive ship, but you’ve dredged up memories I buried at sea a l-o-n-g time ago. While I’m less than ready to examine everything I did or even witnessed while in uniform, I do recognize that period of my young life for exactly what it is - saltwater fodder for one hell of a coming-of-age story. I’ve known it since the day I last came ashore, yet I’m still not one-tenth the writer I’ll need to be to fully capture my surreal stint in uniform, even if the impressions are still clearly visible on my frontal lobe.

After all, I was just a kid - a bookish underachiever with a few dozen wild oats still to be sewn. How I came to enlist in the first place is a lesson in improbability. Never one to embrace responsibility, I exhausted the patience of every lucid adult I encountered with my lack of life skills and my abundance of smart-ass remarks. Once those wise grown-ups let me fall on my face a time or three, it occurred to me I desperately needed a new direction. So, under the influence of a delusional roommate’s naïve advice and who knows what else, I wandered into the local recruiter’s office and defied them to take me away. When they finished doing back-flips, they shoved a sheaf of important looking papers under my scruffy chin and I started signing.

A few weeks later, I found myself standing at exhausted attention on an icy parking lot, as the frigid winds off Lake Michigan turned my nose hairs to brittle stalactites. Somewhere behind me, a small, leathery man whom I truly believed to demon screamed obscenities at my brand new bestest buddy. As the swarthy agent of hell force-marched us to the mess hall for a lightning round of freeze-dried dog food, I wracked my addled brain trying to remember why exactly I’d willingly volunteered to go to prison. A month earlier I’d been an underage lothario of sorts, a harmless hoodlum of the shaggy sort quite happy to ply my charms on any young college cutie who didn’t mind slumming for awhile. It wasn’t an perfect existence, but as I double-timed it back to formation with a greasy bacon substitute roiling in my gut - my memories of it seemed pretty idyllic.


But that was only boot camp - an idealistic prelude to the ocean bound adventure awaiting me. While it took several weeks of nautical instruction to convince me these cats actually wanted me to live on a boat - I eventually seized on the idea and successfully completed my training. Newly qualified to operate navigational radar ( and chip paint with the best of them), I checked aboard my first ship just after nine in the evening. With a scowl and a curse the Officer of the Deck signed my orders and led my sea-bag laden form down a pitch black passageway. Motioning me into a darkened compartment, the annoyed Officer instructed me to climb a rickety ladder to the smelly top bunk that would be my new home. I did and, fully clothed, curled up around my sea-bag and lost consciousness.

Seven fiftful hours later, I awoke to find myself the object of amused derision. As the surliest of salty-dawgs rubbed their bleary eyes and pulled on incredibly crusty socks, they heckled, hounded and harangued the new boot staring back at them from the top rack. It was then I realized I was in too deep.

Exile, Interrupted

Having spent the past week prone, boneless and comatose, the wife is now demanding I raise my pulse to that of an average cadaver.

“No problem,” I nod - as another twisted guitar solo flickers through my subconscious. "I’ll get right on that and the lawn - just as soon as I finish watching these three dozen Stevie Ray bootlegs on YouTube. Until then, I reserve the right to remain suitably useless, intensely inert, tenaciously incapable of any acts of urgency. Sure, I make it look easy, but a catatonic state of this level requires extraordinary dedication to the science of restraint. A street level shooter of my camera-acumen cannot dash about madly 52 ceaseless weeks a year, ya know? I owe it to my viewers to return to the broadcast refreshed and energized, able to pounce on the next available calamity with the speed of a cheetah and the bloodlust of a jacked-up badger. It’s a jungle out there, all right, heavy with humidity and teeming with predators… overzealous assignment editors, insipid public information officers and the occasional rabid rent-a-cop. No ma’am I cannot risk hurling myself into that perilous void without the proper amount of Zen-like preparation, endless hours spent locked in grueling inaction. It's all a part of a strict regiment of feng shui fitness, focused solely on my triumphant return to the news scene of someone else’s liking. For tomorrow I don the visage of mercenary journalist, a dusty lenslinger riding the horizon to make the electronic frontier safe from the onslaught of a thousand nefarious press releasers - Hmm? What’s that honey?”

“Yeah, I'd love to de-weed the flowerbeds...”