#ReadingRobDay

Words to live by: A sampling of writing by Rob Hiaasen

“Not Quite Home,” Baltimore Sun, Sept. 19, 1999

Fred is dead, although with an iguana it's sometimes hard to tell. But Fred the
iguana is truly dead, and his passing requires a proper burial.

In a few moments, everyone will gather behind the green dumpster at St.
Vincent's Center. Its pastor, Father Ray Chase, will preside. He will find the
right words. The 12 boys of Martin Luther King House, one of six cottages at
the center, will join him at the grave site. They will carry flowers and stones
painted with messages: Fred, I love you!

St. Vincent's, a state-licensed group home for abused and neglected children,
had a no-pets policy. Abused children sometimes, in turn, abuse pets. But two
years ago, King House somehow adopted an iguana. So along with making
beds and washing dishes, feeding Fred became part of the posted daily chores.
Then two days ago, Fred was dead.

"It was not an accident," whispers Ellen Torres, director of development at St.
Vincent's. Fred had been squeezed too hard by a boy named Sheldon, who
soon after was sent to a psychiatric hospital. Another round of drama for a
house of drama, King House.

Shhh. Here come the boys, walking two-by-two in the rain with their flowers
and stones. Half are crying, half are trying not to. Fred's death is one more
emotional hurdle for kids who have known greater pain and loss.
The boys circle the shallow grave. One boy, Chad, weeps beyond all others, as
if something in him has died. Torres hugs him from behind, and Chad leans
into her. Once, he'd told her, he'd watched someone in his family kill their
family dog.

"God will take good care of Freddy," Father Ray assures the boys, then invites
them to say a few words.

Will: "I hope God takes good care of you." David: "I hope you play good animal
games in heaven. And tell God I said hi." Very nice, says Father Ray.

The boys take turns feeding dirt atop the pink shoe box. Shoulders shake from
crying. "Let us pray," Father Ray says. Silence -- four, five, six beats ... heads
up. The service is over. The boys walk back up the hill to St. Vincent's, to their
house away from home.

“Rocking in Our Chairs,” Baltimore Sun, May 13, 2001

Remember when we were younger and every concert was unbelievably great?
There was no critical assessment. There were no bad shows. The Little River
Band could have been the Beatles up there on stage. We stood throughout the
entire show. No one cared about parking. We came early -- hours, sometimes
days before the show. Even the opening act was sacred and not to be missed.
And there wasn't a grown-up to be seen.

Remember naively believing that encores were spontaneous gifts and not built
into the musician's set? Now we know the house lights come up to signal the
end of a concert. Then, we believed the Doobie Brothers would come out one
more time despite the adroit men in black T-shirts having removed every piece
of stage equipment eight minutes after the last song. We held out. We had
hope. We came to play.

Now we come late to concerts, hoping to skip the opening act. … Now we
bring our children to concerts to see the Dixie Chicks or Bare-Naked Ladies.
We come to concerts to eat and sit. Sitting is good; too much standing is too
much work. We paid $60 for the seat -- not the space in front of the seat.

Just look around any baby-boom concert crowd. At this Sting concert, no
lighters were lit, the delicious scent of cannabis wafted not -- although
someone was wearing Paco Rabanne -- and no one was topless, unless you
counted receding hairlines.

The guy next to us at the MCI Center came strictly for the pizza. Not yet a
graduate of the Subway diet, the man in the golf shirt kept getting up to get
little pizzas. He talked to his female companion almost the whole show. We
never saw him look at the stage -- that flat, noisy, flashy thing where the
musicians stand. He looked like he had missed the exit to Camden Yards.

Another sign the apocalypse was upon us came when Sting sang his up-tempo
songs. (In music reviewer talk, this means songs with a "rock beat.") You could
see the terror and indecision in the faces of the men. Do they stand while Sting
sings "Everything Little Thing She Does is Magic" and clap or move their body
in a way suggesting a dance movement? Or do they sit and pray for a ballad?
Their female companions, meanwhile, are already up and dancing as if it was
some concert. What is wrong with these female people?

When did clapping to the beat of a song become such a complicated concert
exercise? In our younger days, we'd play air guitar along with Pete Townsend
or strum our chests before Tom Petty. Guys look around the crowd now and
notice their clapping is out of rhythm. When you can't clap along to a song,
you know it's time to sit down. Luckily, you've paid for a seat.
There were other sad signs. Concertgoers attempted to rush the stage with all
the steely determination of people filing into a funeral. They retreated without
making a scene, and we all were privately relieved.

“A Mother’s Second Chance,” Baltimore Sun, August 14, 2005

On April 24, 2004, Laura Rogers aimed a 20-gauge shotgun one foot from the
left eye of her sleeping husband. She had never fired a weapon, so she followed
the instructions. The gun proved easier to load than she thought.

At 6 a.m., streetlights shone through their bedroom window on Walter Rogers.

Laura hesitated, then didn't.

The shotgun worked.

Laura and Walter: They met at a Clint Black concert at Merriweather Post
Pavilion in 1992. Love at first sight, he told people. A charmer, she thought.
They married and had a son. Laura's son and daughter from a previous
marriage also lived with them. They moved around the South before finally
settling in an apartment in an Anne Arundel County industrial park. Three
years into the marriage, things had gone bad, then went beyond worse.

Laura's story is one of crime and punishment, fear and forgiveness. A wife kills
her sadistic husband for sexually preying on her daughter. The daughter, who
wears a ring that says "Mom," needs to see her stepfather's autopsy
photographs. "Kind of gross. But then, I knew it. He really is dead," she says. A
videotape, finally discovered, exposes the truth about Walter Rogers.
"He should have been awake when she put the gun to his head and pulled the
trigger," says Laura's attorney, Clarke Ahlers of Columbia. "It was a homicide
without a victim."

Six months after her release from jail in November, 36-year-old Laura Rogers
sits in the garage of her boyfriend's rented house in Westminster. Bronzy from
a tanning-bed stint, she has a smoke and plans a karaoke party for her
daughter's 18th birthday this summer. She might even take her family to
Ocean City. Birthday parties and vacations -- Laura can do things like that
now.

"For the first time in 12 years, I feel free," she says. "It's scary, exciting,
different, but I feel free."

“Faith and Forgiveness,” Baltimore Sun, Jan. 21, 2003

PARSONSBURG - Every pew is full for the afternoon service at the Mount
Calvary Holiness Church - every pew but one. There wasn't enough time (or
stain) to cover "Next time you'll burn," which had been etched into the pew, so
it was removed. There is no need to remind everyone of the ugliness that
scrawled, ripped and sliced its way into this rural, black church.

"The devil did it to harm us," says Velma Wilson, 68, who first came to Mount
Calvary 50 years ago - the year it opened. She has since moved on to another
church in another town, but she's here today for the special service, the first
held in the church since the vandalism.

The desecration occurred sometime between Dec. 26 and Dec. 28, the day
Assistant Pastor Matthew Leonard returned to look in on the church.
Electricians had just put in the new chandeliers and paddle fan. The wiring
had needed serious work; they couldn't plug in the fan and organ at the same
time. But now the wiring was up-to-date, and the carpet was new, too. The
insurance man was due out, because Leonard was considering insuring the
church for the first time.

Today, a frigid Sunday in mid-January, the Baptist church is packed with its
black members and visiting white ministers and guests. When was the last
time this roadside church had 40 worshippers! "I think," says Velma Johnson,
"that it's going to bring the black and white churches together." Maybe.
Certainly for today.

Father, forgive them for they know not what they do, Leonard repeats
throughout his sermon. Built like George Foreman, the 42- year-old Leonard
recites the passage from St. Luke maybe 20 times and each time, people echo
Amen. "It's time to move on," Leonard says. It's time to forgive.

"I don't know what Satan meant by this - but it didn't work," Leonard says in a
voice that could rattle any church's windows. Father, forgive them for they
know not what they do. Amen. Still, it's all right to ask God a question,
Leonard exhorts. He tells his church that it's all right to ask:

Why?

“The Voice of Love,” Baltimore Sun, Dec. 24, 1997

Hey you. You are missing your baby. You want her back, you want her front
and sides, you want her bad. You want another chance. You are a fool for love.

You are on the air.

"Hey you," says the late-night voice of Love. "I'm in the mood for love tonight.
How you feeling?"
Bad, Fran. Real bad.

"I'm with you ... until midnight, playing your love songs and dedications," says
Fran Lane, host of WLIF-FM's The Nite Lite. Weekdays 7 to midnight, 101.9
on your digital dial. You can't place the face but you know the voice.

The voice listens, seduces, indulges. The voice would buy you a drink, if it
could. The voice does not snicker when you request Barry Manilow's "Could it
be Magic?" or Chicago's "Colour My World" or anything by Lionel Ritchie.
"What song is burning in your heart?" the voice asks.

You're not alone for the holidays. Fran knows the name of your wife or
boyfriend and how long you've been together. The voice knows your habits --
the way you call every Tuesday, the way you love the voice's voice. Fran calls
you by your nickname -- Slim, The Roving Ambassador, The Key Man, The
Captain, Mrs. Captain or The Fat Man. Real names would only break the
mood's back.

Now come inside the radio station and sit 5 feet from the voice at work.
Broadcasting is all so technical and electronic, isn't it? How does passion
possibly escape from these compact office walls?

Don't answer. Just close your eyes and listen.

"I love the magic of radio," Fran Lane says.

The voice makes a plea. Sure, she'd love to be interviewed for this story, but
remember the man behind the curtain in Oz? And how it turned out he was
just a short, dumpy guy with no powers?

"Don't," Fran says, "take the magic away."

“Small Miracle,” Baltimore Sun, March 12, 2000

Hazleton, Pa. -- He walks on frozen water.

Also, in the bitter cold, people claim his hands radiate heat. People say he can
see in the pitch dark, that he can lower older people's blood pressure. Folks
say his Scripture-based street ministry has brought people back to church in
Hazleton, where Catholic churches seemingly outnumber homes.

Since he arrived last October, 39-year-old Carl Joseph has placed his soft
hands on the hood of a sick car and on the belly of a woman with child.
Churchgoing women get goose-bumps when he sings "Ave Maria." Younger
women cruise the streets of this northeastern Pennsylvania coal town, just
hoping to see him walking barefoot in his white tunic and blond, Nazarene-
style hair.

"I firmly believe he's a modern-day St. Francis of Assisi," says Monsignor
Anthony Wassel at St. Joseph's Church near Hazleton. "He's not looking for
anything, and he's not asking for anything," says Father Austin Flanagan, a
hospital chaplain in Hazleton.

But public opinion cuts both ways. Some people suspect this guy dyes his hair.
See those dark roots? And he looks as if he has stepped out of the cast of some
off-Broadway production of "Jesus Christ, Superstar." If he were in jeans and
a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt instead of a white robe, he'd be called "homeless
unemployed man" and not "Hazleton's mysterious nomad," as ABC's "20/20"
called him.

"My biggest question is how Joseph could become so popular preaching the
same things priests convey every Sunday at the pulpit. Why does the message
mean more to people coming from him?" Hazleton newspaper columnist Mark
Guydish asked his readers. "I don't get it."
Why so popular, indeed. Since his arrival in October, Joseph has piqued the
spiritual curiosity of Hazleton and, through the lens of the national media,
points beyond. By his own proud count, this "Jesus look-alike" and "13th
apostle," as newspapers have described him, has spent nine years roaming 47
states and 13 countries. But of all the towns he's drifted through, Hazleton has
welcomed Joseph most warmly, with open hands, homes and chapels.

While people on New York's Broadway wouldn't blink, people on Hazleton's

Broad Street get out of their cars to shake his toasty hands. They nudge their
school-aged children into his robed arms. People like cancer patient Anthony
Vetter treasure their visits with the preacher, who makes house calls.

"When he embraced me, I never felt so much heat," Vetter says. "I feel a little
more positive now about cancer treatment."

All the man is doing is preaching goodness, Vetter says. "Why be skeptical?"

Why, indeed. In his four months here, Joseph has managed to prove
something to Hazleton. He's not Christ, never claimed to be. He's not taking
anybody's money. He's harmless. And whether it's his robe or his message,
he's inspired people to talk and think about their faith.

“Murder One,” Baltimore Sun, Dec. 23, 1998

New Year's Eve, 1997.

Why don't you stay home tonight? Cassandra Fair asked her husband. Since
their marriage in 1994, Cassandra and Aaron Tracey Fair had brought in the
new year together.
But Tracey, as everybody called him, wanted to go out with friends. Maybe go
play video games at somebody's house. Tracey was a security guard for Johns
Hopkins Hospital, was in the U.S. Army Reserves, was a husband and a father
of two children -- but he still could be a kid. Still played tackle football with the
guys, volunteered as a mentor at the Lafayette Square Community Center, still
played video games.

Still, it's New Year's Eve, Cassandra grumbled. And she was, after all, seven
months pregnant with their third child. (They didn't know its gender, but it
was Tracey's turn to name her or him.) But around 9:30 p.m., Tracey left the
house.

"I love you," Cassandra said, meaning it but miffed.

"I love you," Tracey said, knowing this might not cut it. "If I'm not with you
now," her husband told her, "I'm with you always in spirit."

Yeah, yeah, Cassandra thought, smiling, sending him off. Just call me, she
said.

The phone rang sometime in the second hour of the New Year. But it was
Davon Fair, Tracey's younger brother, who woke Cassandra up. Tracey is
dead, he told her.

Stop playing around, Cassandra chided Davon. Quit trying to pretend you're
crying.

It was no joke. Her husband, 23-year-old Aaron Tracey Fair, had been shot to
death outside a West Baltimore nightclub. "Mr. Fair (victim #1) was
pronounced dead by medic at 0045," reads the police report. Meaning that 45
minutes into the new year, Fair had become the first murder victim of 1998 in
Baltimore, the first of 300 murders and counting.
"Maybe they shot him in the leg," Cassandra had asked Davon that night
nearly a year ago. "Are you sure? Are you sure?"

"They put the sheet over him, Cassandra," Davon told her.

Two hours into 1998, the newly widowed mother of Tracey's children fell to
her knees.

“Leon’s Story,” Baltimore Sun, Nov. 23, 1997

The accidental author rests in the warmth of a crusty red Ford parked off Park
Heights Avenue. The day is nameless and timeless. There is nowhere to go,
nothing really to do. Then, old men in older folding chairs tell Leon he's got a
visitor.

Susan Roth, a white, middle-aged artist from Guilford, is looking for Leon
Walter Tillage, a black, 61-year-old custodian from Park Heights. They know
each other. In fact, Roth knows Tillage's life story.

Using his "fancy" cane, Tillage takes baby steps toward Roth's white Toyota.
"I'm going for a spin," Tillage tells a man named Ike. "You people are nice, but
these people are nice, too."

One tricky part is over -- Leon Tillage has been found.

Roth and Tillage can now catch up on their project: "Leon's Story," a 101-page
memoir based on Tillage's oral history of growing up in the segregated South. I
remember that as a young boy I used to look in the mirror and I would curse
my color, my blackness, the book says for openers.
For 30 years, Tillage has been a custodian at the Park School in Baltimore
County. For the last several years, this son of a North Carolina sharecropper
has spoken annually to Park's seventh-graders about Jim Crow and civil
rights.

"They just knew what their moms and dads told them, or what the TV tells
them," Tillage says. "The kids really didn't have it together."

Students left reminders on school bulletin boards: "Please, Leon, tell us that
story again." Students told their moms and dads: You wouldn't believe Leon's
childhood. Men in white hoods scaring him to death, having to attend separate
schools, ride the back of the school bus. All because he was black, mom.

"It's amazing," Tillage says. "They didn't know about this stuff."

Alana Leah Roth was one of those seventh-graders who told her mom about
Tillage. Susan Roth, author of 22 children's books, had to meet this man. "I
was so fascinated by him," Roth says. If only others could hear his life story,
she thought. What an education.

What an opportunity. Tillage handed Roth a tape of what became known as

"Leon's address." Roth had the tape transcribed, then began searching for a
publisher. Six years later, Tillage's words were set to paper. "Leon's Story,"
with collage art by Roth, quietly debuted at this fall's Baltimore Book Festival.
Four thousand copies printed by a big-time New York publisher, $14 a pop.

Word of the little memoir has spread beyond Baltimore. Smithsonian

magazine and Publishers Weekly have selected "Leon's Story" as a notable
children's book for 1997. Reviews in the literary press have been gushing.

From Publishers Weekly: "In this riveting autobiography, Baltimore janitor

Leon Walter Tillage reflects on his life with all the vitality of a storyteller
gathering his audience around him."
And from Booklist: "There is no rhetoric, no commentary, just the facts. ... The
boy saw his father chased by drunk white kids in a car and run over twice, and
nothing done about the murder."

As he takes a spin in Roth's car, Tillage is congratulated on his acclaimed

memoir. Thank you, he says.

"It's a true book."

True, that is, to one man's memory. And the true nature of memory, as
Tennessee Williams said, is "dim and poetic." Not always a stickler for
accuracy, memory remains faithful to its maker.

"Leon's Story" is a civics lesson. Truly, it is an education. Tillage's memoir is

also a lesson in what happens when one man's truth is faced with facts. When
one man's celebrated memory is questioned. There is, in fact, another side to
"Leon's Story."

“Lord of the Vigils,” Baltimore Sun, June 22, 1997

Him again.

Here comes Willie Ray, Baltimore street minister and founding father of the
"Stop the Violence" vigil. Here comes Ray, a prophet without a phone, car,
church or desk job. People duck him or deal with him. What's his program
today -- another bull-horning, hand-holding, chanting, marching rally?

We need to take back our neighborhoods! Stop the killing! I'm going to preach
this until I'm dead.
For more than 25 years, William Edward Ray has been on a death watch, on
call for a rally, eulogy or candlelight vigil. It's the vigils that have made him
part of the fabric of Baltimore. He held the first in 1985 for murdered Calvert
Hall basketball player Craig Cromwell and has organized countless others in
the 12 years since.

Death, taxes, Cal Ripken Jr. and Willie Ray -- the (revised) constants in life.

Ray, lord of the vigils, is 48 now. Bit of a gut on him, but Ray still has fire in
the belly. And he's still working alone and on foot. Watch his eyes crawl over a
banged-up street as he barrels into alleys and past stoops where brothers and
sisters hail him.

Hey, brother, we're doing a story on the neighborhood, he announces while on

his rough rounds. It's WE now. We are on board now with Willie Ray in a West
Baltimore neighborhood "that ain't Petticoat Junction," as he says. But where
are you leading us, Rev. Ray?

And more importantly, then what?

For Jesus himself testified, that a prophet hath no honour in his own country.

“A Voice Silenced,” Baltimore Sun, May 9, 2006

Thames Street in Fells Point is quieter these days. Michael Sibert, also known
as "Screaming Mike," passed away at the age of 53, or maybe he was 57. His
age, like his background, remains sketchy. Either way, the man looked 70.

The street person died on the street April 4. Two weeks later at St. Stanislaus
Cemetery in East Baltimore, Sibert was quietly buried among old headstones
of babies who lived only two days, five days, six months. At least Mike Sibert
lived 53 or 57 years.

"He might have been crazy, but he was our crazy," says Wes Robison, a Fells
Point resident. "I loved him, and I miss him."

Sibert was a loud regular and regular nuisance sometimes. Tourists would
walk the other way when shaggy-haired Sibert was on one of his rants; his
obscenities would often echo from the underbelly of Recreation Pier. He was
not an easy presence even in Fells Point, with its history of harboring and even
embracing down-on-their-luck souls.

He was, for better or worse, a member of this waterfront community. Here,

despite the neighborhood's more recent reputation for upscale bars and pricey
condos, Sibert had a group of residents and shopkeepers who would care for
him, calm him down, move him along. And now, bury him.

"Despite his constant, insane rambling, you knew there was someone inside
and you could get to that person," says Robison, who paid for Sibert's April 18
funeral at a neighborhood funeral home, Lilly & Zeiler. Sibert's body was taken
to St. Stanislaus in a hearse -- perhaps the best ride the man ever had. "I knew
no one was else was going to bury him," Robison says, "and he deserved a
decent burial."

Sibert did receive a decent burial, attended by two friends under a cemetery
tent. In Row 9, Grave 2-A, the dirt is dried and cracked above Sibert's coffin.
Topsoil, seeding and a flat marker are on their way. A bouquet of red
carnations rests on the mound among the children's headstones at St.
Stanislaus. Robison chose this sentiment for the marker: He gave those who
helped him a reason to feel better about themselves.
“The Woman Who Wouldn’t Forget,” Baltimore Sun, April 25, 1998

Lola, with the Whoopi Goldberg grin, with the NBA-sized hoop earrings, Lola,
who seems bashful but is brashly determined, Lola, heartsick over forgetting
the names of Baltimore's gunned-down kids, Lola, who sits straight up in bed
one night and hears the voice of God, Lola Willis, mother of four, who the very
next day of her life, activates her God-given idea:

A children's memorial museum.

It will showcase murals painted by kids -- joyful, sprawling murals. It will be a

celebration of life among the repetitive losses of Baltimore kids caught in the
gunfire, caught dead in barbershop seats, dropped dead on street corners.
Something more memorable and permanent than the same brief story in the
newspaper, the same 30-second story on TV.

The memorial will feature a bulletin board where school and family pictures of
slain city children can be pinned. Maybe a toy or two could be enshrined.
Maybe we -- we, the community -- could build a peace center here, Willis says.
And a resource center that offers bereavement counseling, meditation, teen
mentors, a legal defense fund. Maybe even a museum shop with T-shirts silk-
screened with the faces of slain children.

We must have a place where these children are memorialized, Willis thinks.
It's too easy to forget their names, their faces, what they wore to school, what
games they played, what friends they had, what they were doing in the
moment before they were gunned down.

"Lot of people look at me like I'm crazy," Willis says. "But we all have
children."

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