The Best Worst TV in Texas
(Page 2 of 4)
The tools of the trade are few: a 16 mm hand-held movie camera, a battery pack, a set of two arc lights that attach to the camera, and, probably most important of all, a fast car outfitted with police radios. These radios are mounted over the drive shaft hump between the dashboard and the front seat. They monitor all three San Antonio police channels, Don's Ambulance, the city fire department, the Department of Public Safety, the Highway Patrol, Bexar County Sheriff, Bexar County Fire, and Channel X, the frequency used by special squad of undercover investigators. The skills involved are shooting film, staying calm, and driving very, very fast.
It was for gathering street news that Ronnie James' father had unwittingly trained his son. Mr. James was a photographer who had equipped his car with police and ambulance radios and set out to make a living on the streets. When he heard accident calls on the radios he ramrodded down the freeways or up small alleys to reach the scene. There he photographed the wrecked cars, the victims (if he got there before the ambulance had taken them away), and any property in the area that had been damaged. Then he sold the photographs to insurance companies. When he was 16, Ronnie started riding with his father. He loved street life as much as his father did.
Several years ago, when Mr. James died, Ronnie took over the business. By that time he could go to sleep with a police radio near his bed and wake up if anything came across that interested him. Ronnie kept the business going for awhile but then became convinced that it was only a matter of time before someone passed a no-fault auto insurance law which would eliminate the need for his photographs. Going to work for a television news show was a natural step.
"I love this job," Ronnie once said to a visiting journalist who had come to ride with him. "Most people don't understand what this job really is. It's not so much your ability to take film as your ability to get to the scene with your equipment in good working order. There're lots of people who can take film who can't get there fast enough. I've lived in this city all my life and I can get you pretty much any place you want to go. Pretty fast, too." In his late 20's, Ronnie is a short, stocky, young-looking man with dark hair, dark mustache, dark eyes, and a tight, abrupt energy. He works now for KENS, Channel 5.
As he and the rider talked, Ronnie would suddenly stop speaking in the middle of a sentence, lean close to the radio for a moment, then, if the report hadn't been important after all, lean back and continue. To the rider the static, buzz, hiss, and gravel voices from the radios were no more intelligible than museum recordings of obscure jungle dialects. Earlier Ronnie had complained that the station's regular "mobile unit" was in the shop. The car he was driving now, a Ford Galaxie, had fewer radios. "We're probably going to miss a lot of what's happening," he'd said.
It was Saturday night and raining just enough to keep the streets black and shiny. It wasn't even really a rain, more like a constantly regenerated dampness as if the air were sweating. Drivers found themselves switching their windshield wipers on, then off again. Suits wilted, mascara ran, straight hair curled, curly hair straightened. High-school football games were plagued with fumbles.
Ronnie was driving toward the Dunkin' Donuts on San Pedro just north of Cypress where he expected to find street news reporters from other television stations. He wanted to get the benefit of their extra radios. "It's important to get to the scene fast as you can," he said to the rider. "Then, once you're there, you try to look for something that'll make your story better than everybody else's. Like the other day there was a motorcycle wreck and the police and everyone were up by the cycle, but about 20 feet away the guy's helmet was lying in the road. There was some blood by it so I got down low and shot the helmet up close but in the background you could see the police and the wreck. From there I moved in close for details of the scene. It was a real good way to do the story. At the scene you've got to decide what you're going to shoot right away. You don't have time to hunt around for the very best shot." As they rode, the radios the Ford did have crackled and buzzed and sputtered. The air was heavy from the rain and the car was musty with the lingering smell of stale tobacco.
Sure enough the cars from Channel 4 and Channel 12 were parked in front of the Dunkin' Donuts. Next door in a vacant lot an ambulance and a wrecker and their separate crews were also waiting. The Dunkin' Donuts has become a natural gathering place for people who have to spend hours in or very close to their cars. It has plenty of parking as well as coffee, a public telephone, bathrooms, central location, and, yes, doughnuts.
The reporters driving for Channels 4 and 12 were both part time replacements. One, from Channel 12, was a slight red-haired man somewhere in his 40's who wore chino pants and bobby sox and stared through his horn rims at the world with thin-haired, wide-eyed, constant surprise. He was not the fastest driver in the world and when he first started the job he had missed some good shots by taking light meter readings before shooting anything, earning him the nickname of Larry Lightmeter. He'd been getting better lately but still ...
The kid from 4 was more of a threat. He was young—a thin, rangy student who went to Trinity during the week—and knew how to drive fast. But he was just learning how to take film and he still hadn't learned San Antonio's baffling layout. He had been studying a street guide when Ronnie pulled into the slot next to him. Every now and then while they waited for something interesting to come over the radios, the kid would pick the guide off the dash-board and read, slowly turning a page or two before throwing it back on the dash and propping his high-heeled, platform-soled boot beside it.
Both the kid and Larry Lightmeter, who had parked just far enough off to suggest he wanted to be left alone, had backed into their spaces, ready to rip straight ahead onto San Pedro when the time came. Ronnie, in the slot next to the kid, had conspicuously parked front-in even though that would slow him down getting out of the lot. Little games like that tend to brighten up the job.
The wait was boring. Larry Lightmeter stood by his car eyeing the ambulance drivers for any sudden moves. The kid from 4 meticulously clipped his nails. Ronnie shrugged at the rider. "Saturday night, too," he said. "Sometimes three or four tanks of gas is nothing on a Saturday. I don't understand this." He went inside to buy a cup of coffee. The rain started again. Larry Lightmeter got inside his car. Traffic on San Pedro whirred past. The Dunkin' Donuts fluorescent lights glowed into the darkness. The rider listened to the buzz, the wheeze, and the abrupt, scratchy voices from the radios.
"Anything happening?" A man about 40, his skin stretched tightly across the bones in his face, had pulled his hopped up two-door, its immense engine idling ominously, into the slot on the rider's side. The man's own police radio crackled over the rumble of the engine.
"Nothing so far," the rider said. "Are you a...newsman?"
"No, hell no. I run the Texaco station down the street. I just closed up and come on down here. I like to run with 'em, too." He ran a gnarled, grease-black hand through his hair and settled back to concentrate on the radio. "It's just too damn early to go to bed."
Ronnie, back in the Ford, had smoked two Pall Malls and drunk about half his coffee when it happened. All at once the ambulance peeled onto San Pedro with the wrecker right behind. Larry Lightmeter popped into his car, and the kid from Trinity tossed his nail clippers into the seat beside him.
"What is it?" Ronnie shouted. His radios hadn't been adequate.
"Major accident!" the kid shouted back. His car was already rolling. "7700 South W. W. White!"
Ronnie clipped together his seatbelt and backed out of the lot. On San Pedro he slowed for one red light, then went on through. At the next one, passing cars forced him to wait before pulling on through and down a couple of blocks and into an entrance for I.H. 35. "Sometimes you get tickets," he said, "and sometimes you don't."
"They ought to give you guys sirens and a light," the rider said.
"I'm glad they don't." Ronnie swerved onto the freeway. "It's too easy to start thinking people see you coming when they don't."
The ambulance, its red light barely visible around a long curve, was far in the lead but Ronnie passed the lumbering wrecker right away. Larry Lightmeter had disappeared. The kid from Channel 4 was about 30 yards ahead.
Ronnie flipped on his windshield wipers. He drove leaning back in the seat, arms extended, hands at the top of the wheel, his right foot pressed hard against the floor. The rider watched the speedometer needle—80, 95, 100—then he stopped looking. A white semi sprayed torrents of water against the windshield. They roared past it keeping pace with the kid from 4. The kid swerved right to pass a Cadillac. Ronnie passed it on the left. The rider saw a square, jowled face framed in the Cadillac's side window shouting unheard threats in their wake. Waves of heat from the engine washed across the rider's legs. As the painted dashes on the road blurred into long white streaks, his fingers dug into the seat for hand holds. Ronnie sipped the last bit of his coffee.
An interchange with a huge green sign reading "W. W. White" loomed up on the right. The kid from 4, still about 30 yards ahead, took the exit. "That's a mistake," Ronnie said. "He's going to have to circle way around then come back in. We should beat him by at least half a minute."
Half a minute! From the Dunkin' Donuts to W. W. White is about ten miles, a trip from the center of the city to its eastern edge which, going by freeway at normal speeds, should take at least 15 minutes. This trip would last only seven or eight, and even that might be too long. On this scale, half a minute is an eon.
Past most of the traffic, no ambulance or other newsmen to gauge his progress, Ronnie pushed the Ford even harder. The rider thought he saw the needle at 120. Turning away as from a horrible vision, he told himself no, they were surely going much slower than that; it must be the angle he was looking from. They might actually be breezing along as slowly as 95. He looked toward the needle again. It had—disappeared! It was buried in the dashboard! And then they slowed suddenly and Ronnie raced along a curving exit ramp. The rider wrote one faint word in his notes: Gone.
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