The List, Part II.

About a year ago I started compiling this list of songs that capture some facet of the state of journalism. I had help from some good friends — and even from a couple random people who left comments on the post.

I figured it’s time for another stab at this. If you have ideas, leave ‘em in the comments. If not, c’est la vie. Hope it’s worth a chuckle or a cry. Hell, maybe both. At the least, it was fun to put together on a furlough day. Seemed appropriate.

As with the first go-round, keep in mind that there’s far more dark humor here than outright despair. For now, anyway.

“Suffer,” Smashing Pumpkins

“We’re In This Together,” Nine Inch Nails

“Runaway Train,” Soul Asylum

“Paranoid Android,” Radiohead

“Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me,” U2

“Hey Jealousy,” Gin Blossoms

“Cryin’,” Aerosmith

“Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand,” Primitive Radio Gods

“Reckless Life,” Guns ‘N’ Roses

“Can’t Stop The Music,” The Village People

“Going South,” Dead Moon

“Smokin’ From Shootin’,” My Morning Jacket

“All Blues,” Miles Davis

“I Don’t Know What I Am,” The Wipers

“She’ll Dance To Anything,” John Paul Keith & the 145s

“Stop Stalling,” Jack Oblivion & the Tennessee Tearjerkers

“Never Tear Us Apart,” INXS

“Keep Your Eyes Ahead,” The Helio Sequence

“Made My Bed Gonna Lie In It,” The Easybeats

“How Naked Are We Going To Get,” The Blow

“Sufficiently Breathless,” Captain Beyond

“Useless Information,” The Move

O death.

I write a lot about death. Even a lot of times when I don’t write explicitly about death, I’m still writing about a time when someone died.

Which means I get a little used to it.

So the phone call I got not too long ago was unsettling. An old friend of mine, a guy I was quite close to in high school, died of congestive heart failure. He was 31. Wife, two kids. He went into the hospital for a routine surgery, what I heard was a simple thing, and his heart couldn’t take it. The doctors could not resuscitate him.

Christopher Lee Andrews.

The day after I found out, my cell phone was like a high school reunion. People I had not talked to — some of whom I had not thought about — in years.

Even with Chris himself, we traded the occasional e-mail, talked on the phone maybe every couple years. It was never awkward or forced when we did. It felt good to reconnect.

I remember talking to him after he first collapsed five years ago. Same as always — upbeat, positive, learning about his disease, not shy at all talking about it. Fearless.

A couple things about Chris. In high school, he had this hulk of a 1972 Chevy Malibu. My first car was a 1973 Plymouth Satellite, sister car to a Roadrunner. Also massive. On a lot of days we parked next to each other. He tried to talk the physics class into coming out to measure whether that much Detroit steel side by side altered gravity.

He also showed me the Internet. Weird thing to remember, I know. But it was the week after we graduated, and for some reason we were over at his house. I think there was a party. Anyway, he fired up his computer and signed on to AOL.

It was fine, I guess. I didn’t get it.

One of my favorite memories of Chris is our senior prank. A group of us stayed up all night going to Kinko’s and running around town stapling fliers to telephone poles announcing a used-car sale the next day at the high school. In the teachers’ parking lot. I had a master key to the school for reasons that now escape me and we got into the store room where they stored the letters for the big marquee out in front of the campus. We put something up about our everything-must-go sale there, too. The price on every car: $96, for our class year.

Chris was our carnival barker. Our huckster. He put on this ridiculous shiny green blazer I had — funnier still because I’m so very much bigger than he — and stood by the driveway into the parking lot, waving in customers and assuring them this was all legitimate. One of the school secretaries told me later that she got more than 100 calls and security had to kick maybe 50 people out of the teachers’ lot.

Good times.

So, yeah. This is when death is hard. When it is in some way personal, which, sure, isn’t a huge surprise. But especially when it is personal, unexpected and inexplicable.

B.T.

Maybe there’s some kind of theme developing here.

This is a guy I’ve wanted to write about for a while. Nothing quite as dramatic as what happened with this story, but still. A SWAT sniper who lost his shooting hand during a demonstration for Boy Scouts when a flash-bang went off early, then taught himself to do everything left-handed and came back not just to the force, but to SWAT as a sniper.

It’s an incredible story. In a business where people retire on full medical disability because they wrenched their knee getting out of their patrol car wrong, or have a chronic back condition nobody believes because their duty belt was too heavy, B.T. Carmical shows up at work every day and kicks some ass.

Of course, he didn’t want to do the story. Even seven years after the explosion, he’s still a bit self-conscious about his prosthesis. And like a lot of cops, he’s uncomfortable being singled out. Even his wife told me, “I’m surprised he’s talking to you.” Someone we both know went to him and convinced him I was the right reporter to tell this story.

I asked Carmical why he agreed. It’s not like reporters — newspaper, TV, everybody — haven’t tried to do this before. He said it was because he thought his story might help somebody else — even one person — through a hard time. Not necessarily an amputation, but the loss of a job or some other personal, traumatic thing.

I just hope I did him justice.

Deal.

Other than maybe “bad guy,” one little four-letter word seems to pop up most often in law enforcement.

“Deal.”

It’s like the scene in “Donnie Brasco” where Johnny Depp runs through all the different permutations of “fuggedaboutit.” “Deal” can mean nearly anything.

“Hey, would you hand me that deal?” Maybe it’s a camera, a pair of rubber gloves, handcuffs, a clipboard.

“It’s like that deal last year at 18th and Pike.” An arrest, perhaps, maybe a homicide or a crazy domestic call.

“Let’s go do that deal.” That could be serving a warrant, checking for a suspect at his mama’s house, meeting at a favorite place for lunch.

“What’s your deal?” Pretty much self-explanatory, but meaning can vary with tone.

With each, context will most likely provide the answer. If not, just smile and nod and say, “Good deal.”

2,000.

At some point yesterday, I got the 2,000th pageview on this little site. As of this morning I was at 2,022.

That’s kind of trippy. I mean, I write for a newspaper that still very much thinks of itself as a newspaper. I never get much of an idea how many people read anything I write.

So for those of you enjoying this experiment of mine, I’m much obliged. To the rest of y’all, thanks at the least for stopping by.

Stubborn, persistent, whatever.

It’s a little triumph. I’ll give you that.

Not long after I started this job, the largest police department in the state began shipping certain prisoners — nonviolent repeat offenders, mostly — across the county line where there was room in the jail. The jail here couldn’t take them — too full. So the department agreed to pay the neighboring county $30 a day per prisoner.

I’d been here just a few months. I wrote a profile of the first dude sent out.

It never ran. Even now I’m not entirely sure why. I could guess, but the Internet’s probably not the place to do that out loud.

Still. I kept my story drafts, my notes, my file full of records. Didn’t know what I’d ever do with them, precisely, but I got a feeling I’d have another opportunity to write about my dude.

Here we are two years later. My dude was back out of prison — but back in jail and, interestingly, back in that neighboring county’s jail under the same program he inaugurated. I remembered him, certainly. And so did my editor, who was an advocate for my original story.

We thought this might be the right time. It was. The story ran on the front page, the only staff story there that day.

I admit it. I did a little dance. Surreal as hell to see a lede on the front page I originally wrote two years ago.

As my man Vin Scully might say, a small thing, but thine own.

++ DOUBLE UPDATE: So, wow. The executive editor got back from vacation and told me he has his secretary FedEx him the papers from when he was gone so he can read them on the way back. He brought me into his office just to tell me how much the story stood out and how much he enjoyed it. Cool thing.

++UPDATE: So, yes, I’m a journalism dork, as we have established. I asked for and got the press plates for Page One the day this story ran.

My wee trophy:

.

Incredible. Almost.

If you have any interest at all in the ways justice can elude people, read this.

Please.

1887.

Sometimes it’s better not to wait.

A regular source of mine mentioned a letter his office got from a national organization for cops killed in the line of duty. The group was trying to research two names to see whether they belonged on a national memorial. The two men died in 1887.

My dude gave me a copy of the letter and a few short newspaper items from around the country that mention the men’s deaths. His office hadn’t found anything, but maybe my newspaper’s archives might have something.

I suppose I could have looked around a little and passed along what I found, then waited for some movement on their cases to write a story. But I had a different idea: Why not research the deaths myself, see what I could find or prove, then write a story about how we did the research. Sort of a meta story.

Every time I read one of those stories about long-dead cops getting recognized, there’s rarely anything in there about how, exactly, people found what they found. I thought our readers might be kind of interested.

So I started simply. The men worked in Grant County. I called the sheriff, who never heard of them, and a local history museum. I also found a couple clips in our archives. Based on the little bit I found in those places, I checked Census records, personal property tax records, probate and criminal court records, election records — anything I could find that might tell me a little more about who these men were and how they died.

What I was looking for was at least 122 years old. Not all of what I wanted still existed. But I found enough.

These two men aren’t listed on the state’s memorial either. But now, with this story and the research behind it, they might be. A cool little thing, that.

Hard news.

That last post got me thinking. A few people have suggested that in addition to many of the stories I tossed up on this site, I make sure to add at least a few articles with straight ledes just to show that I can do those, too.

(Cough*clickthelinks*cough.)

See what I did there? Story vs. Article. The editor of the long-gone Arkansas Gazette — he was in the job 70 years and died in 1972 at age 100 — used to admonish reporters who wanted to write stories, saying that term left too much room for fiction, while an article provided only fact.

I don’t know about that. That seems an archaic way to describe it.

Some stories want to be told certain ways. Others are flexible. The style of the lede could well determine whether anyone bothers to continue with the paragraphs that follow. A writer should have some sense of which way to go.

The lede to me, however, doesn’t determine whether a story is hard news or not. You can write hard news with a soft touch. There are stories that seem to require it.

Yet a straight lede is a crucial tool for a writer. Not every story must — or even wants — to be a story.

It’s interesting to me because my paper is the most old-school shop I’ve ever worked in. Most of what we write has straight ledes. The ability to write something else has to be earned over time. It took me about a year here to get even a little bit of latitude, if not the benefit of the doubt.

Still. Sometimes journalism is best as a blunt instrument.

‘Keep telling stories.’

As I try to sort out where I am in this business, while still trying to get better at what I do, I sent out a few e-mails last week — some to people who might not even remember me — asking them to take a look at some of my work.

One of them is an editor at one of the largest and best newspapers in the country. He has a reputation as being a truly incredible editor. Anything he could offer be would be a gift.

Strangely, he wrote me back. (The best in this business are generally quite kind in my experience.) He read a few things of mine on this site, had a few nice things to say. Made a few suggestions I have taken to heart.

Then he gave me this: “Keep telling stories. That’s the thing I admire about the work I saw.”

Now, let’s stop and acknowledge that “admire” is a word into which I should read nothing. OK? OK.

But the simple idea there is one I sometimes get too far away from. I always want to make a story better, tell it the way it wants to be told. Sometimes I try too hard to do that.

At the same time, almost any story is better when the story of it doesn’t get lost. The beginning-middle-end of it, the humanity of it. Those stories become like annotated, illustrated reality. There’s power in that — to bring people together, to change things, to take people places they would never otherwise go.

I’m grateful for the reminder.

50 years.

One of the things I like about being a beat reporter is finding out little things — small facts — that become whole stories with a little context.

There’s a sergeant in North Little Rock who is about to hit his 50th anniversary with the department. Far as anyone can tell, that’s some kind of record in Arkansas.

No one sent out a press release about it. No one mentioned it to me as a story. I just heard he was retiring.

I made some calls and asked a couple helpful people in the department to talk to him as see if he’d sit for an interview or two. He’s the kind of guy who at a crime scene would back out of a photographer’s shot. A bit gruff, not too friendly to reporters.

I made a few more calls to see if I could really show anybody reading this story just how rare a thing his longevity — especially with one department — is. One executive director of a national police organization couldn’t think of anyone. Another gave me the name of someone who might be able to think of a name. Both of them were in awe at this guy.

And that’s the thing. He’s just a guy. Never intended to stay this long, just sort of did. To call him, say, the institution within the institution is a bit grandiose and builds him up more than he needs or deserves. And to do that is not to do anyone justice.

Saying something.

Sometimes the best quotes come right after a person says they won’t talk to you.

We broke the story that police charged a former Little Rock Zoo cashier with stealing money from three schools’ field-trip cash. She posted bond and was out of jail by the time I heard about her arrest. I tracked down a cell number for her and called her.

The first call was brief. Told her who I was and asked her to explain what happened. Her answer: “No.” Then she hung up.

So I called her right back to explain that I was writing a story about this and talking to me was an opportunity to avoid it being a one-sided piece. She was indignant.

“Did I ask you to write a story about that?” she said. “I don’t think so. I ain’t got nothing to say to you, so you can quit calling me on my phone or else I’ll say that’s harassment.”

That’s what I put in the story.

When the paper came out the next day, my wife read the story and walked around for part of the morning laughing and repeating, “Did I ask you to write a story about that? I don’t think so.” At work, one of the copy editors, who usually has a very dry sense of humor and is not given to dramatic recital, walked by my desk and did the same thing in a goofy voice. Twice.

If that weren’t enough, the executive editor stopped by. Thankfully for both of us he didn’t try to say the line in a funny way. (He’s not that kind of guy.) But he told me how much he appreciated having that quote in the story — verisimilitude, a respite from newspaperese, all that jazz.

“Don’t ever lose that eye,” he told me.

I don’t know. I guess I can’t help finding it amusing that the part of the story everyone remembered was the “no comment” part.

Even more amusing to me was that it wasn’t even my favorite quote in the story. When I called the teacher who by asking for a receipt started this whole thing rolling, I asked her if she had ever helped the police make an arrest before.

“No comment,” she said.

I said, OK, what about helping police arrest someone who wasn’t a student? Now I was really curious. I wasn’t expecting her to say, “No comment.”

“No comment,” she said again. “But my ex-husband is in law-enforcement.”

Details.

Man. Yesterday was one of those strange days.

I was covering the same story everyone else in town was covering — a break-in in a granite-lined mausoleum inside a Catholic cemetery. But as happens sometimes, I started to get more absorbed in the details than in the larger story once it became clear the cops didn’t have much and the diocese didn’t have much to say.

I had the names of the people whose remains were disturbed. So did everyone else. They were in the police report. So I started going through our obit archives trying to find out who they were. One had owned an amusement park. Another was a manufacturing executive. A third had been a reporter and editor for years at the defunct Arkansas Gazette.

And then I saw something interesting. In the obit for the former president of a masonry and construction firm, where it listed his children, was someone with the same name as one of Little Rock’s assistant police chiefs. I don’t know that chief well enough to know his parents names, but damn if the picture of the deceased doesn’t look at least a little bit like him.

I left him a message. He called back. Didn’t want to talk for an interview, but wanted to give me the courtesy of confirming the information: Those were his parents whose vaults were broken into.

This became my favorite detail of the day. It was also one I knew no one else had.

Of course, this meant I had to sit on it for a good long while. See, most of the time, my paper pretends there’s no Internet. Unless something massive or incredibly dramatic happens — a vicious tornado, say, or Bill Clinton self-immolating in front of the Paula Jones hotel — we just hang back and write for the paper the next day. Suggestions that we do otherwise, even for competitive reasons, are generally met with mild grumpiness at a minimum.

So unless I wanted to walk around the newsroom and maybe a couple of nearby streets downtown telling people my little detail over and over again like a 6-year-old at a grown-folks dinner party — which I considered — I just had to hope no one else figured it out in the 16 hours before the paper hit doorsteps.

Success! Well, this time, anyway. When I woke up this morning, there my little detail was in all its newsprinty glory. Nobody else had it. Then I could savor my coffee instead of cussing a little in between sips.

If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

I was in the middle of something else. Phone calls, reading reports — my mind was in a different place.

Usually when the phone rings at my desk and I don’t recognize the name or number, the conversation goes one of three ways.

1. It’s a crazy person. I need to be polite, but I need to run away as fast as I can. Sometimes this doesn’t happen quickly. (Yes, I’m talking about you, lady who called about the “box of murder” she found in her house.)

2. It’s someone who didn’t get their paper. Here’s the number for circulation, have a nice day.

3. It’s someone who wants to talk about a topic or a part of the state I don’t cover. Let me transfer you to the state editor/appropriate reporter/obit clerk/whatever.

This was not one of those calls. On the other end of the phone was a police officer I’d never met. His department had a big shootout — a five-hour standoff — with a suspect last year. He was in the middle of it.

I’d heard a rumor that a few officers either quit or had some personal issues afterward but couldn’t nail it down. People left, sure, but no one would confirm the reason. I’d tried to get in touch with this guy months earlier but never had any luck. I’d all but forgotten about it.

This officer had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder by four doctors. He wasn’t working and wasn’t getting paid. His workers’ comp claim was denied. Then his chief threatened to discipline him when he wouldn’t see a fifth doctor the department chose.

He was willing to talk to me exclusively — something I asked for if we continued. Was I interested?

First thing, I had him fax me copies of some of his documents — letters from the four doctors, the denial letter from workers’ comp, a couple other things. It was just enough to know I had something but not enough to get him too excited or burden him.

Then I talked to my editor, who gave me the green light to pursue a story.

But I still didn’t know whether the story would be one officer’s experiences or more than that, a piece that tracked a number of officers in the year since the shootout.

I went to his department and read through the statements all the officers wrote after the shootout. At the least, I had to confirm that this officer was where he was at the time he said he was there. Really I wanted to get more names, find more people to talk to who were there and to know more of the story of what happened that day. Maybe my officer was a sidebar. Maybe he was a main story and other officers were a sidebar. Maybe neither. I didn’t know yet.

I tried to contact a number of others. Most weren’t interested in talking about it. By then, I’d met with my officer and his attorney and gotten more documents, including the chief’s letter discussing discipline.

I also did everything I could to make sure this officer was who he said he was. I called old bosses at previous jobs going back years. I read through his nine-year-old divorce file. I checked his personnel file for commendation letters and discipline.

The pieces fit. He seemed to be who he said he was. I could verify almost every last detail he gave me.

All of that shaped the story.

I spoke to the chief who wouldn’t meet me in person and all but hung up on me as soon as he found out some of the questions I wanted answered. I talked to the workers’ comp folks who told me they couldn’t understand exactly why the officer’s claim was denied — they needed to gather more information.

The day the story ran, the department postponed an administrative hearing to talk discipline for the officer. I got word that workers’ comp was re-examining his claim.

The officer was ecstatic. People I know at other agencies — line officers and sergeants, mostly — went out of their way to shake my hand and say thanks when I saw them. That never happens.

And I was reminded of why I do this for a living.

Getting back into this.

So I realize I’ve let this thing languish a bit. Time to get back to it. I’ll have some new posts up later this evening, I think. Some stuff I’ve been tossing around in my head that I’d like to share.

Until then.