He saw the ad on Craigslist for the black '03 H2 a little more than a month ago and raced to the small lot with the big trucks near Orlando to buy it before another guy got there first.
Steve in sales at Rob Bruce Auto asked him if he wanted to take it for a test drive. No thanks. No need.
Jeremy wrote a check for $15,344 and rumbled off in the 6,466-pound, four-door, V-8 military machine turned sport utility vehicle.
Along I-4, then I-75, then around the bottom of the bay, he looked down at the tops of the cars he was trying not to hit and wondered what others were thinking.
He drove past billboards for boat shows and auctions for houses, for Goodwill and the Seminole Hard Rock Casino, and finally arrived here just south of the Sunshine Skyway and pulled into a waiting bay at Slicks Garage.
'THE HAPPY-HOUR LAMENT OF YOUR BUDDY AT HAYNES AND BOONE'
Michael Brick: CEDAR PARK, Texas – Game night, and the goalie paused in his doorway – 6 feet 4 inches, 212 pounds and a faithless left knee backlit against the amber glow of a townhouse leased for seven months to last the hockey season.
Miles Amoore (thanks, Dawson): THE patrol set off in darkness. Through fields of poppy and wheat, 100 men from the Brigade Reconnaissance Force stumbled towards their target, a strip of compounds that had been used by the Taliban to fire on British troops.
“Right, lads, the Taliban are waking up. They’ve already pinged our position,” said Captain Andy Breach, the BRF’s intelligence officer, as he listened in to the insurgents’ radio under a moonless sky.
Hank Stuever: Of course Jay Leno opened his return to "The Tonight Show" Monday night with an "it was all a dream" gag, waking in a sepia-toned, Dorothy delirium from "The Wizard of Oz." Because it was sort of like a bad dream -- a national late-night hallucination -- in which overpaid funnymen retired, said farewell, switched time slots, spent millions on new studio sets, said hello, launched middling-to-awful new shows, then spoke badly of each other and their employer. All to bring Leno back to his old job.
Trent Moorman (thanks, Hank): he first thing you notice: eerie, sleek, air-lock cleanliness. Bodies: The Exhibition being an emporium of dissected dead people, I expected cots and canvas, a triage tent with bloodstains and tears. I couldn't believe how many couples were on dates. An exhibition of dead bodies, apparently, is a romantic hot spot. I brought beef jerky.
The bodies on display are small and svelte, skinless, and Asian. Muscles and bones. Cross sections of neatly carved-up torsos. Wet- looking lungs and hearts. Kidneys, intestines, and dangling balls. Lots of balls. Bodies is a ball fest. Also: penises. One body is flayed into two parts—its skeleton holding hands with its muscular system (ball area included) in a macabre eternal jig. Even more unsettling were the eyelashes. Tiny, delicate fringes, so alive, so familiar, guarding soulless, piercing glass eyes. The eyelashes made the bodies look like they were about to say something. Something like "Stop staring at my balls."
Kurt Streeter (thanks, Richard): The man, a thin and gray-haired federal judge, walked nervously up and down the streets of skid row, past drug dealers, pimps and thugs, past rows of men lying like glass-eyed zombies against concrete walls.
"Excuse me," he said, pulling out a photograph, "have you seen this man?" He was met by blank faces or angry stares. And, always, one word: "No."
He couldn't give up. Down more streets and through urine-soaked alleys. He was the only white person he could see.
To Judge Spencer Letts, then 72, this distinction did not matter. What mattered was that Michael Banyard, an ex-con who had lived much of his adult life in prison, could be in trouble again.
Two Fridays in a row I have arrived to work in emotional shambles. Thanks, StoryCorps.
But why does this work?
If you missed the stories (are they stories?) on the last two Fridays, give them a quick listen. Do me a favor though and don't read anything when you click on the following links so you can simulate my experience.
You get spare context and what amounts to a very short conversation. We know almost nothing about their lives. There is little character development. But I find myself inside the lives of the subjects immediately. Why?
... After the story appeared, I sent Sutherland an email asking him what he thought. He wasn’t happy with the drawing that accompanied the story, a couple of sharks circling a woman. And he wasn’t happy with the comments that readers posted on washingtonpost.com about the story.
Did someone else already post this? Even if they did, these stories -- by C.J. Chivers, Tom Junod, Richard Ben Cramer, Gay Talese, John Sack, Tom Wolfe, and Norman Mailer -- are worth another look. For its 75th anniversary, Esquire named them the seven best in its history.
Mark Seal (thanks, Mark): A man waits in the darkness, watching what is left of his life slip away. His name is Robert Joel Halderman. At 51, he is a producer for the CBS true-crime series 48 Hours Mystery, the latest post for a battle-scarred newsman who has spent much of his life in war zones. He’s had two divorces, which have saddled him with crushing alimony payments, and his second wife recently sent him “reeling,” as he e-mailed colleagues, when she moved to Colorado with their 11-year-old son, Jimmy.
It’s late August 2009, and Halderman is keeping watch outside his modest house, in Norwalk, Connecticut, as a $100,000 electric Tesla sports car comes to a stop at the end of the road. In the passenger seat is his smart, attractive live-in girlfriend, Stephanie Birkitt, 34, being driven home from work by her boss, David Letterman, who lives 20 miles away on a 108-acre estate in Westchester.
John Barry: ST. PETERSBURG — The way it was for 30 years, grizzled old fishermen, smelling of salt and last night's bait, stumbled into Skyway Jack's at dawn. A skinny Tennessee hillbilly brought their coffee and said — voice as Southern as peppered grits — "How y'all doin'?"
Those rough old cobs fell forever in love with Glenda Hill.
She died on Jan. 26 of ovarian cancer. She was 62. No one felt right that her ashes were whisked north without a goodbye. So Skyway Jack's will say farewell Saturday to the hillbilly waitress that everyone fell in love with.
The woman they loved was barely 110 pounds, a single mother of three. She held it together with her trayfuls of eggs and coffee.
Leonora LaPeter Anton: CLEARWATER — Robert Utley and his mother pedal their bikes up the sidewalk toward the library. The temperature is in the 40s, but Robert doesn't feel cold. He doesn't feel much of anything.
Inside, Robert sits in front of his battered computer and signs on to an airplane chat group. His mother waits nearby while he looks at photos of the largest plane ever built and the most expensive plane.
He imagines himself flying them one day. Up there, he could get away from down here.
Go, now, and sign up for the Mayborn conference in Grapevine, Texas, July 23-25. Sweet line-up, with keynotes by Gary Smith, Mark Bowden and Mary Karr.
Michael Mooney: In seconds, beauty morphs into brutality.
The quarterback takes the ball and drops back three steps, right elbow cocked, eyes darting across the field. Anonka Dixon spots her favorite receiver, Tina Caccavale, but she's double-covered. The quarterback searches for another receiver but instead sees a tall defensive end barreling down hard.
It's fourth down — 30 seconds until halftime, with the Miami Caliente down seven points — and the Chicago Bliss defense has applied relentless pressure to the quarterback. This will be Miami's last chance to score before halftime. As the seconds tick away, the sparse crowd speckled about the arena at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino is tense.
The quarterback tucks the ball to her ribs and squares her shoulders with the oncoming defender. A quick juke to the left sends the Chicago player flying by, a blur of orange jersey and blond hair. Dixon looks back down the field. A muscular 33-year-old born and raised in Miami, she always dreamed of playing full-contact football in front of a television audience.
Wow. Dan Barry: Open the door to a small hotel on the Bowery.
A small hotel, catering to Asian tourists, that used to be a flophouse that used to be a restaurant. That used to be a raucous music hall owned by a Tammany lackey called Alderman Fleck, whose come-hither dancers were known for their capacious thirsts. That used to be a Yiddish theater, and an Italian theater, and a theater where the melodramatic travails of blind girls and orphans played out. That used to be a beer hall where a man killed another man for walking in public beside his wife. That used to be a liquor store, and a clothing store, and a hosiery store, whose advertisements suggested that the best way to avoid dangerous colds was “to have undergarments that are really and truly protectors.”
Climb the faintly familiar stairs, sidestepping ghosts, and pay $138 for a room, plus a $20 cash deposit to dissuade guests from pocketing the television remote. Walk down a hushed hall that appears to be free of any other lodger, and enter Room 207. The desk’s broken drawer is tucked behind the bed. Two pairs of plastic slippers face the yellow wall. A curled tube of toothpaste rests on the sink.
Sara Corbett: This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.
And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.
Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.
Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman who was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s, thought it held infinite wisdom — “There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely,” she wrote — while another, a well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly after, deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic.
So for the better part of the past century, despite the fact that it is thought to be the pivotal work of one of the era’s great thinkers, the book has existed mostly just as a rumor, cosseted behind the skeins of its own legend — revered and puzzled over only from a great distance.
Which is why one rainy November night in 2007, I boarded a flight in Boston and rode the clouds until I woke up in Zurich, pulling up to the airport gate at about the same hour that the main branch of the Union Bank of Switzerland, located on the city’s swanky Bahnhofstrasse, across from Tommy Hilfiger and close to Cartier, was opening its doors for the day. A change was under way: the book, which had spent the past 23 years locked inside a safe deposit box in one of the bank’s underground vaults, was just then being wrapped in black cloth and loaded into a discreet-looking padded suitcase on wheels. It was then rolled past the guards, out into the sunlight and clear, cold air, where it was loaded into a waiting car and whisked away.
Rick Bragg: The first one I ate tasted like river mud.
It was not that earthy, pungent, essence du monde that well-traveled people like to go on about over their quenelles aux huîtres. It tasted like wet dirt, only slicker, fishier, like what a tadpole would taste like if you sucked it right out of the ditch, or a wet hoofprint.
Last year, at the Auburn Chautauqua, we were joined by Stephen Knudsen, a narrative artist and professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design. He told us his work as an adult is colored by a short story he read as a child: Jack London's To Build A Fire.
Wondering if anyone else can point to a single story that has influenced what you do?
I'm reading a screenwriting book by Blake Snyder called "Save The Cat," hoping to tease out some lessons for journalism. Found one I really like in the introduction: Save the cat.
I call it the "Save the Cat" scene. They don't put it into movies anymore. And it's basic. It's the scene where we meet the hero and the hero does something -- like saving a cat -- that defines who he is and makes us, the audience, like him.
In the thriller, Sea of Love, Al Pacino is a cop. Scene One finds him in the middle of a sting operation. Parole violators have been lured by the promise of meeting the N.Y. Yankees, but when they arrive it's Al and his cop buddies waiting to bust them. So Al's "cool." (He's got a cool idea for a sting anyway.) But on his way out he also does something nice. Al spots another lawbreaker, who's brought his son, coming late to the sting. Seeing Dad with his kid, Al flashes his badge at the man who nods in understanding and exits quick. Al lets this guy off the hook because he has his young son with him. And just so you know Al hasn't gone totally soft, he also gets to say a cool line to the crook: "Catch you later ..." Well, I don't know about you, but I like Al. I'll go anywhere he takes me now and you know what else? I'll be rooting to see him win. All based on a two second interaction between Al and a Dad with his baseball-fan kid.
I'm thinking this is incredibly important for anything longer than a thousand words. If I'm going to commit to a story, I need to feel emotion (love or hate, I'd argue) early for the main character.
I wrote a while back about a man who died violently. I was curious about why this story received such strong reaction. He didn't save a cat, but I think it worked because I gave people plenty of reasons up high to like him.
He lives in New York City, a splattered Bohemia where both street art and rules have gray areas. By day, he and his girlfriend run a "culture shop" where people buy art, vinyl records, vintage clothes or nothing if they're broke.
At night, sneaking outside and rattling a spray paint can isn't out of the question.
Here is Julian Grimes' reality:
At 22, he spends 75 hours a week inside Central Deli, a minimart on Central Avenue. He rings up cigarettes and beer and potato chips and ham sandwiches. He makes $7.50 an hour.
He can't move to New York. He is shackled to this city, because he literally painted himself into a corner.
Getting out — growing up, really — is complicated.
David W. Dunlap: Bill Cunningham is probably the most honest photojournalist in New York. But he can also be pretty deceptive.
Not that he tries to be. Rather, in his pursuit of a singular, joyful mission — documenting daily the interesting clothes that women and men can and (this is important) do wear — Mr. Cunningham makes it all look easy.
That’s deceiving because he may be, at 81, the hardest working reporter in New York. He’s also among the most private, despite the fact that he can easily be spied in public, wearing a blue worker’s smock and bicycling fearlessly through city streets. His personal life is so understated and ascetic as to seem anonymous. His aversion to the spotlight is itself the stuff of fashion legend.
David Mamet: THE AUDIENCE WILL NOT TUNE IN TO WATCH INFORMATION. YOU WOULDN’T, I WOULDN’T. NO ONE WOULD OR WILL. THE AUDIENCE WILL ONLY TUNE IN AND STAY TUNED TO WATCH DRAMA.
Ten years have passed since the country last tried to meet the essential, constitutional and all-but-impossible mandate to count everybody; the whole lot of us. Ten years since it last attempted something akin to counting the granules in an ever-filling, ever-leaking bucket of sand.
A decade, then, since the Bureau of the Census undercounted the number of residents here in San Antonio, a very small community in central Florida that is named after — of all the saints in heaven — the patron saint of those who seek missing things.
If the short count caused some celestial laughter, San Antonio’s city clerk and protector, Barbara Sessa, respectfully did not join in. She has bristled ever since with the knowledge that the city’s official population has stood for 10 years at 684, when it should have been 842.
“I know that’s a small number,” she says. “But to claim we had 684! When we knew we had 842!”
William Wan: At 2 o'clock on a Monday morning, the sound of angry pounding sent Army Spec. Zachari Klawonn bolting out of bed.
THUD. THUD. THUD.
Someone was mule-kicking the door of his barracks room, leaving marks that weeks later -- long after Army investigators had come and gone -- would still be visible.
By the time Klawonn reached the door, the pounding had stopped. All that was left was a note, twice folded and wedged into the doorframe.
"F--- YOU RAGHEAD BURN IN HELL" read the words scrawled in black marker.
Frank Deford: There are many roles a man plays in life. Son, Husband, Father, Breadwinner. If he is successful: Star, Boss, Grand Old Man. But nothing, I believe, is quite so thrilling as getting to be The Kid. That is, you, as a novice, are accepted by your elders into their privileged company. You are not quite their peer. You are on trial, tolerated more than embraced, but at least you are allowed to step into the penumbra of the inner circle, to sniff the aroma of wisdom and humor and institutional savoir faire that belongs to those old hands. It's a heady sensation.
It was at SPORTS ILLUSTRATED that I was, for the one time in my life, The Kid. I had come to the magazine fresh out of Princeton. Understand, in 1962 it was hard for someone like me not to move to the head of the line. Women and minorities were not given such opportunities at that time, so competition was limited to my own kind: the male WASP. On top of that, I was a Depression Baby—and, even better, conceived during a bad dip in the Depression. Except for my dear parents, nobody in America with any sense was having babies around the time I was born, so when I came out of college and dutifully did my six months in the National Guard, there were only a handful of us coming into the job market.
They had just finished lunch, were just crumpling paper napkins into trash bins, when the call came through the school speakers:
"Will the following girls please report to the conference room . . . "
The teenagers looked at each other. What was going on?
"Lindsey," said the voice coming through the speaker. A girl with green bangs hung her head.
"Spring," the voice continued. In the corner of the lunchroom, a 15-year-old huddled behind her black curtain of hair. Dark liner smudged her eyes. She looked as if she had been crying.
The voice called several other names. Finally it said: "Chayna." A girl with a short ponytail cringed. The look on her face said: What did I do now?
They trudged into the conference room, 10 girls wearing a kind of slacker uniform — jeans and flip-flops and baggy school T-shirts. They dropped into swivel chairs around a long table.
A whiteboard listed some of the things that could get you in trouble here at PACE Center for Girls: "Racist slurs. Smuggling drugs or weapons. Bad behavior."
On another wall, a framed print showed a dirt road winding beneath cherry trees. The picture carried a quote from Norman Vincent Peale. "People become really remarkable when they start thinking that they can do things."
Chris Goffard: In late April 2007, Mike Penner published an article unlike any of the thousands he had written for the Los Angeles Times. It was brief, just 823 words, and placed without fanfare on the second page of the Sports section that had been his home for 23 years.
Under the headline "Old Mike, new Christine," Penner explained that he would soon assume a female identity and byline, a decision that followed "a million tears and hundreds of hours of soul-wrenching therapy."
It was "heartache and unbearable discomfort" to remain a man, he explained. Being a woman promised "joy and fulfillment." The article ended on a hopeful note: "This could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
Kruse: TAMPA — On Saturday morning, not 24 hours after the state announced a record-high unemployment rate, business students from the University of South Florida stood in the lobby of the sleek Regions building downtown, ready to work on skills to land jobs that might not exist.
Alan Alford asked his wife to get in the elevator with him for one last practice run before USF's second annual elevator pitch competition.
The 34-year-old lives in Valrico, works full-time selling car insurance for Geico in Lakeland and is set to finish school this summer. Stocky, confident and dressed in a three-piece suit with a lavender shirt, he said he wants to work for Oracle and doesn't drink coffee because coffee stains your teeth.
"I'm putting pressure on myself," he said, "to win this."
And that's how you do that. Stuever: Somewhere between hard science and the Banana Splits, television has this insatiable need to apply human story lines to the lives of animals, and increasingly more animal channels on which to do it. I get the appeal, for I, too, felt a tiny pang in my cold, cold heart when Flower the Meerkat met her end on Animal Planet's successful "Meerkat Manor."
But something's wrong with "Rebel Monkeys," a pseudo-reality series about a gang of 60 or so rhesus macaques who live in (infest, some might say) Jaipur, India. Instead of being charmed by the show, which premieres Wednesday night on the new Nat Geo Wild network, I wound up rooting for the power lines that frequently jolt these obnoxious little primates as they skitter about the slums to steal and beg food. They're rats with thumbs!
Eli Saslow (thanks, Wright): The black binder arrived at the White House residence just before 8 p.m., and President Obama took it upstairs to begin his nightly reading. The briefing book was dated Jan. 8, 2010, but it looked like the same package delivered every night, with printouts of speeches, policy recommendations and scheduling notes. Near the back was a purple folder, which Obama often flips to first.
"MEMORANDUM TO THE PRESIDENT," read a sheet clipped to the folder. "Per your request, we have attached 10 pieces of unvetted correspondence addressed to you."