Multi-Hundred Dollar Records

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.

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. 

As I mentioned in a couple posts ago, I had a barber in Binghamton named Finesse.  Finesse was a New York City native who came to Binghamton to sell drugs, or so he said.  He also said he was running the barbershop while the owner was in jail.

 

One day while Finesse was in the middle of cutting my hair, two police officers came in with a cab driver.  The cabbie said Finesse put two big trash bags of laundry in the trunk of the cab when he picked him up.  The cabbie said his coat was in the trunk and after he dropped off Finesse he noticed money was missing from the coat.

 

Finesse wasn't having it and gave the cops a ton of attitude.  I don't know if he took the money or not, but I didn't want my barber to get the cuffs slapped on him for disrespecting a cop with half of my hair cut off.  This was only the second time I had been to Finesse.  The first time he offered me drugs.

 

The cabbie went outside with the cops for a bit and after a while one came back in and said Finesse was off the hook.  Relief.

NOTE:  I've been without power for the last few hours, but now I'm back in the modern age.

 

Binghamton is only about 15 percent black so I was worried that I wouldn't be able to find a black barbershop when I got there.  No offense to white barbers, but it's just not the same.

 

My second day there I found a narrow storefront barbershop.  I could literally touch both walls by stretching my arms out.  I got in the chair. The barber was a short muscular guy with tattoos.  I forgot what he said his name was but he said everyone called him Finesse.  I refused to call him that.

 

He was friendly and asked me where I was from and why I was in Binghamton.  I told him I was there for an internship at the Press & Sun-Bulletin.  I asked him why he would leave NYC for a sleepy place like Binghamton.

 

"To sell drugs," he said casually and without hesitation. "You smoke weed?"

 

I told him no.  I later found out Binghamton is the crossroads for drugs from NYC to Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo.  A week or two into my internship a meth lab blew up in my neighborhood.

 

Finesse explained that his friend owned the barbershop and asked him to run it while he was in jail.  It didn't surprise me when a few weeks before I left, the shop was gone without a trace.

 

Still, Finesse gave me the best haircuts I ever had. 

Writing obits in an area of 250,000 people is good because sources are easy to reach (so are police chiefs and mayors).  It's bad because you write obits ALL THE TIME.  I probably averaged two obits a week during my 12-week tenure at the Press & Sun-Bulletin.  My first wire pick-up ever was an obit about the man who popularized mini-golf.

 

I once wrote an obit about a local bartender who'd spent 30 years serving drinks to reporters (and others I assume).  The son and daughter of the owners of the bar where he worked dumped the guy when they got control.  The guy opened his own bar but it flopped.

 

The guy's mom was a frail old woman who spoke with a quivering voice.  She was upset at what the kids did to him and said she didn't want any mention of him working at that bar in the obit.  Why I was threatened by that, I'll never know.  I even wrote my writing coach, Mary Ann Hogan, asking her what to do.

 

When I explained what happened to my editor he said "How much is she paying us to write this?" 

My first job in a newsroom was at the Press & Sun-Bulletin in Binghamton, N.Y.  My first assignment was to do a follow up story about a woman who conned a bunch of people out of money by signing them up for her gym knowing the club was about to be shut down.

 

I went to a gym near the paper because I heard that some clubs were offering special deals to the people who had been fooled.  A guy who looked and acted like Hulk Hogan ran the place and decided it would be best to honor the bogus contracts at his gym free of charge.  I wrote that in the story, but an editor took it out, undoubtedly seeing it as a promo for the Hulkster.

 

The next day I got an earful from Hulk about how he wanted a retraction because we didn't mention he was the only gym in the Triple Cities (though his gym was in Vestal) that was "doing the right thing."  I was 21 and that was the first thing I'd written for a daily so I panicked.  After confirming the story was factually accurate, my editor laughed it off.

 

I feared Hulk would somehow come flying from the top rope and demolish me.