Psycho is Jarod Ceres, 26, a Middleton garbage collector by day. He leaned against a ring at Chaotic’s North Andover training center, wearing a striped shirt and corduroy bucket hat over his dirty-blond hair. The blond was no more real than the pink: he dyed it for a wedding. Just behind his head, wrestlers slammed off the ropes, practicing double clotheslines.
Helio Castroneves is late. Not by much, but enough to be noticeable for a man who makes his living getting from one place to another as quickly as he can.
The source of his lateness Wednesday, four days before the running of the Indianapolis 500, is a crowd. His crowd.
Her phone rings at 10 p.m. The voice on the other end is quiet, uncertain.
I just got picked up by the police. … Do you hate me?
Donnette Siems takes a deep breath and looks down at Victoria’s baby cradled in her lap.
Maddie. Seven pounds of hope.
Big eyes and silky curls. A near copy of her mother. Innocent. Vulnerable.
Helpless.
No, Victoria, I don’t hate you, Donnette says. What happened?
Ashlee in an e-mail: Some Mike Levine teachings have trickled their way into my dailies. A co-worker and I just completed a profile of a man who died in a mysterious house fire.
Meghan Murphy: Adam Bosch definitely used some workshop tips on a daily crime story in today’s Record. Note that he asked the neighbors exactly what they were doing (vacuuming and tinkering with the leaf blower) when Elisabeta ran into their garage screaming, with a hole in her shoulder “the size of a half dollar.”
Here:
Buddy Johnson feels most comfortable in restaurants. He visits four a day sometimes. The chatter and the clatter of cutlery offer the illusion that he’s less alone.
The restaurant he goes to most these days is BuddyFreddys, where the waitresses greet him by name and he eats for free. Sitting at his table, he can see the sign outside with his name on it, and inside, in a frame, his tiny blue and gold Cub Scout uniform hangs on the wall.
“To this day,” he said one afternoon this spring, “people still say, ‘You’re the Buddy of BuddyFreddys?’ And I’m very proud of that.”
This restaurant remains the site of his best success. It is also now his most reliable refuge.
Update from Janine: My editor was not happy when I suggested brown bags for writers. Then we had one, where I got to talk about things I learned at the workshop. Everyone participated, asked great questions, had a great time … and he approved of everything everyone said. Now he wants to have them once a week.
Pete Hamill: “Some of this, in my opinion, has been our fault. Over the last quarter of a century, in too many newspapers, we’ve trivialized the newspapers as if trying to capture the TV audience; to capture the youth audience; to capture the ‘dumb guy’ audience. Dumbing the paper down is not smart even as business, but there was a relentless move down, and I think that is showing in what’s happened to so many papers. If you put out printed television, people will just watch television.”
“I have a stubborn stamina and the joke about me at work is that I’m relentless. Not a prick, not a micromanager, not personally critical, just staying there are all night to play with the words one more time. I know I can be exhausting. If you come to my funeral, tell ‘em I’m sorry.”
