Rob Long:

A few years ago, I lived at the
beach in Santa Monica. It
was a two-storey, rectangular
beach house, and in the afternoons
I would sit on my balcony, smoke a
cigar, sip a bourbon, and watch the sun set
over the Pacific.
One day, though, I was disturbed by a
lot of alarming noise—ambulance-siren
noise, small-gathering-crowd noise,
squawking-police-radio noise—from
the next street over. And then, fluttering
above, there appeared several news helicopters.
I leaned over the balcony to get a
better look—far enough to crane my neck,
not far enough to spill my drink—and I
suddenly noticed, right below my balcony,
a news van pulling up in front of my
house, directly in front of my driveway
(conveniently marked by a “Do NOT Park
Here” sign), and several purposeful people
getting out and starting to unload video
equipment.
“You can’t park there,” I called down. A
well-dressed lady—the reporter, I figured—
looked up from her small mirror.
“We’re media,” she said, as if that settled
that, and went back to her powdering
and primping.
“Yeah, but you’re blocking my driveway.
You can’t park there.”
She looked up at me, squinted, took a
small, barely perceptible glance at my
drink—Ah, I could hear her thinking, the
local drunk—and repeated, just in case I
didn’t get it the first time: “It’s okay. We’re
media.”
And the gang started bustling around
again, slamming doors and hoisting equipment.
She tossed her mirror into her bag.
“I don’t care who you are. You can’t
park in front of my garage. I will have you
towed.”
“We’re a news organization, sir. We’re
press. We can park where we want.” (This
from the short, high-strung young man
with the clipboard and the major cell
phone.)
“Let me be clear,” I said, in my best
cranky-local-drunk voice, “I will have you
towed. You cannot block my garage. I
need to be able to pull my car out of my
driveway. There’s a chance”—and here I
dropped my voice just a bit, and held my
drink aloft—“there’s a chance I may need
to step out for some ice.”