Multi-Hundred Dollar Records

I used to open the YWCA gym at 6:30 every morning. It sucked but the extra money was good and I could get a jump on the news of the day.

 

A guy came in asking for a $10 bill in exchange for two $5 bills. I thought it was weird and that he might be trying to rob me. It wasn't my money in the register and it was barely 7 am so whatever.

 

I gave him a ten and as I was putting the fives in the register he did something weird with his hands and slapped one on the counter. 

 

"You gave me a one," he said.

 

I thought it was weird but didn't care because it wasn't my money. I took the one and gave him (another) $10.

 

He gave me $11 in total and I gave him $20. I checked the register and we were down $9. It seemed like a strange way to make $9, but he was getting the same amount of money in 60 seconds that I made in 60 minutes.

 

I wrote an e-mail to my boss and went about my business.

I was a summer camp director at the YWCA the summer after I graduated college. I was nervous about being responsible for 20+ kids but nearly the whole schedule had been set for me.

 

On the first day we took the kids to the National Mall to play some games. I decided on kick ball -- which was way harder to execute than I expected because the kids didn't know each other and weren't comfortable to play freely and some of the younger kids didn't know how to play.

 

NOTE: In my experience, if you try to show off athletically in front of kids, you'll do one of two things: hit the kid(s) in the head or hit yourself in the groin.

 

We had an even number of kids so I decided to pitch only and not play. On the very first roll this kid kicked the ball pretty hard straight at me. I poised myself to catch it but remembered at the last minute that I wasn't playing and jumped out of the way.

 

The ball absolutely clobbered this little guy named John who never saw it coming because my big body was in the way until the last second. He took it like a champ but I was initially scared, then embarassed.

 

We all had a good laugh about it.

I worked at the YWCA for seven years, mostly as a desk clerk/sales person. The club is across the street from the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, which attracts a lot of homeless people.

 

When I started at the gym, the library didn't open until 10 or 11 a.m. on Saturday mornings and people would frequently ask if they could wait in the lobby of the gym when it was really cold outside. One day my general manager let this guy named Peter wait there on a cold morning.

 

Peter was pretty quiet while my co-worker, Jim, and I folded towels. Jim and I started talking about video games and Peter chimed in.

 

"Have you guys ever played Super Mario Brothers?" he asked.

 

Jim and I said yes and commented on how it's a classic game and pretty much anyone who plays videos games has played it.

 

Peter, a white man, responded with, "When me and my black girlfriend play it, she always gets mad because I always beat her."

 

Jim, also black, and I didn't know how to respond.

 

Peter stayed there for another 30 minutes. During that time he told us about how his girlfriend beats him with a hairbrush when he's bad, how he and his girlfriend wanted to get a Bluebird trailer to live in and have a bunch of kids and "give them Spanish and black names like Juan and Shaquita," and how he told his mom that he wished he had been raised by a black family because he probably would have gotten spankings when he did bad things and he would have gotten in less trouble.

Have you ever had something strange or unusual in your house so long that you forget it's there?  This is that.

 

This is the wallpaper in my bathroom.  Why I have this whimsical wallpaper in my bathroom, I don't know.  We moved into this house when I was about 18 months old.  My brother is about 13 1/2 years older than I am so he got the third floor and a bathroom to himself.  Which is why I can't figure out why this wallpaper would be in that bathroom.

 

When my brother went to college (I was 5) I used the bathroom even less because I was afraid of the third floor.

 

The only thing I can think of is my parents put it in there for me as a kid, though I remember getting most of my baths in the downstairs bathroom, which had considerably less entertaining wallpaper.  It's not like I was in the bear bathroom enough for it to be considered mine.

 

The wallpaper remains and has been there so long I don't usually notice until someone points it out.  Someone pointed it out recently. 

I used to get calls from this guy named David that said he had tips. He would ramble about random current events, usually the Chandra Levy case, which at the time was still open.

 

I fell for his insanity the first time he called me, taking notes until I realized he was a little off. The moment of clarity was when he told me he knew who orchestrated the anthrax attacks in D.C. David said it was Eric Ketz of the Stone Temple Pilots because the anthrax came in potato sacks and Ketz had thrown a sack of potatoes at him while he was on the side of the road one day.

 

I used to transfer David to interns or people I wanted to annoy. One intern realized he was crazy, only after taking 10 minutes worth of notes, and started telling everyone on the desk about it. The intern was strangely rattled by the call and kept using profanity in his story.

 

Another intern unwittingly boned (hahaha, yeah I get it) my editor because he didn't know how to handle David. When I transferred David to the intern I told my editor and chuckled. A few minutes later my editor picks up the phone then turns to me and says, "That smartass [the intern], he transferred him to me." 

No updates or videos because I actually got to leave the house two days in a row for something constructive.  No not interviews.  :-(  I may venture out into the world again today.

 

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The Press & Sun-Bulletin sent me to a funeral in Candor, NY, which is about 30 miles northwest of Binghamton.  It was the first funeral I'd ever been to so it was particularly awkward that it was for people I didn't know.  A couple from the town and one of their two children were killed in a car accident.

 

One of the editors arranged for me to go and made sure it was OK with the family, and the funeral director introduced me to the people I needed to talk to.  It was a small funeral and the family had a reception at a small banquet hall.  I wrote the story with no problems.

 

The next day some lady called me complaining about why we did a story on a funeral and how she didn't even want to open the paper because she thought we might have pictures of open caskets in it.  I explained to her that the family gave us approval to cover the funeral and blah blah blah.  It made no difference to her.

 

It further reinforced that when you're in a small area like that, you can get a phone call about pretty much any story.

 

I got used to living in Binghamton and actually really liked it with the exception of the cold, but there still wasn't much to do there.

 

A reporter there, named Rahkia, offered to take me with her to meet a friend a mall in Syracuse my first weekend in Bing.  The three of us had a good time and it was good to be in a place that reminded me of home.

 

It had started snowing a few hours before we left so the roads were slippery.  As Rahkia was merging onto a highway, we started sliding and actually ended up hitting the car in front of us, but the tap was light and the person we hit didn't even notice.

 

Interstate-81 was pitch black and the snow was really coming down.  I started to get nervous because I realized if something happened it would probably be a long time before anyone got to us.  On the way up we passed a bad accident shortly after it happened and it looked like a logistical nightmare.

 

I asked if Rahkia had driven in that type of weather before and she said no.  I got more nervous.

 

"Are we off the road?" I asked.

 

Rahkia started to say she didn't know but were heard the car roll over the rumble strips on the shoullder.  The car swerved a little bit and stopped in some snow covered grass.  We got back on the road behind a snow plow and followed it most of the way home.

 

Rahkia and I have been close friends ever since.

This is the scene outside my house right now.  What you can't see is the other car on the sidewalk that's smoking.

 

I met a guy, who I'll call Mike, at a community meeting in Binghamton. Years earlier, Mike got in trouble with the law, but the right people intervened and he dodged a prison sentence. After that he started rescuing at-risk friends and accquaintances from NYC by bringing them to Bingtown and getting them in school and in jobs.

 

Guys like Mike are pretty common in the District so I didn't see why residents were so impressed by him. I later realized that I could possibly do a profile on Mike and submit it to a contest my journalism program was having.

 

I met him at his mother's house to talk. At one point he suggested I should hang out with his family because his sister and her friends were about my age.

 

Mike wanted to start a non-profit that would help at-risk youth. He worried his past would keep hurt the organization and didn't want it in the story. I told him his court records were public and it was best to get it in the open up front. Mike's friend advised him not to risk it unless he could read the story before it was published.

 

We agreed to disagree.

 

Mike and his friend asked if I could give them a ride to the McDonald's a few blocks away and I agreed. Mike's friend started making catcalls to a girl walking down the street. Mike honked my horn.

 

I didn't talk to Mike anymore. 

I'm sure many of you remember the whiteboard.  I brought it back to illustrate the importance of good organization.