With the help of the Jackson County Special Response Team, a few bad guys, some guns, smoke bombs and flash grenades, a fake credit union was held up three times in three hours.

Read the story here and watch a video of a robbery turned hostage situation.

I’m going to ditch the whole idea of this being a personal blog in the traditional weblog sense. That content, the few short stories or pieces I post, can live at tinynotebook.tumblr.com. underlined text, my highly popular book blog, will now live at underlinedtext.tumblr.com. I just created the url.

So what becomes of aaronaupperlee.com? This site will be strictly a portfolio site. I’ll update it more frequently with stories written for the Citizen Patriot and other publications. I might write about the industry or stories I wrote. The theme, look and feel of this site will change. I just don’t know when.

So, stayed tuned for more. Thanks.

I’m new, still new. I’ve been at the paper a year and a month. And I’m not part of the clique. At least I don’t feel like it. When I was really new, during my first months, my first 10 months, probably, I went to the bars with the rest of the reporters, whole groups of us. The patrons of the bars new us collectively as the CitPat, the paper’s nickname, a name I was trying hard to avoid becoming the paper’s permanent moniker. Not that I like the Citizen Patriot, a product of a century-old merger, if my newspaper history serves me correctly, which it doesn’t, but the CitPat, I felt, was worse, new in that way that things were new in the 1990s and 10 years later everyone realized they were just bad ideas.

Like laser discs.

I go out with the CitPat much less now. It’s because I don’t like most the bars in this city.

This page designer, who stopped to check his mail that one night, he’s a newsroom legend. When someone says “Mark” everyone knows who they are talking about. I assume it’s the same way with “Aaron,” I just haven’t felt it yet.

When most people stop to check their mail, they don’t talk to me. I’ve learned not to look up from what I am doing. I did at the beginning. I looked up, thinking they were coming over to talk to me, and made eye contact. An awkward hello often followed. I learned, quickly, not to make eye contact. It has made for equally awkward silences the few times someone has come over to ask me a question. Usually just Brian, an editor who I work with rarely, and who I think will stand quietly near my desk forever as long as I look busy forever. I have played games, sort of like chicken or staring contests, where I see who breaks first. I knew Brian is there but kept working to see how long he would stay. We’re about even, if anyone is keeping score.

So Mark stopped by that night to check his mail. I was working late that night, and hard, because when I work late it is only because I am working hard. While he checked his mail, I took my glasses off, sighed and went back to work.

Mark wears glasses too.

“You know we’re not supposed to do that,” he said.

“Huh, what?” I was startled.

“Take our glasses off and stare at the screen.”

“Oh. It’s something I do,” I said.

“But has it ever helped? Has it ever made you feel better?”

“No. I guess not.”

“Yeah. We’re not supposed to do it.”

He walked away. I put my glasses back on.

At my first job, for a small newspaper in the middle of the desert of California, taking my glasses off was a cue to the rest of the newsroom. It meant I was stressed and to not bother me unless you were going to make my life easier, which was almost always never the case, or it was really important, which always seemed to be the case, no matter the issue. The technique, I will confess, failed to keep the badgers away.

I take my glasses off much less now, and if I do, I put them back on promptly, realizing that it is something we’re not supposed to do.

No one is a tourist.

In Munising, there’s a restaurant on the docks on the bay where a man broadcasts a radio show, he could do it all day, from a booth behind the hostess stand. She’ll seat you because you waited because the sign said to, out of courtesy, even though the place is yours.

“The fish fry, on Fridays, is quite the event, get here early,” she tells a couple seated after you. The man might have said “Oh boy” and rubbed his hands together inches from a busting grin. He pledges to come back on Friday.

“Won’t we honey,” he says to his wife, who orders a cinnamon roll.

“Big as the plate,” the waitress says. “Would you like warmed up.” She does.

You’ve ordered eggs and toast and potatoes and have lots of coffee because you slept last night in your car under a street lamp in a rest stop about 30 miles outside of Munising. And sleep is generous because you realized why the other cars, mostly trucks, its mostly trucks 30 miles outside of Munising, why the other sleepy trucks parked far from the street lamps.

You parked near one for safety, you thought, entertaining wild notions of a homicidal mad man raging through the rest area with a taste for human blood, especially 27-year-old blood, disemboweling only those parked far from the street lamps sleeping peacefully in the dark. The street lamp saves you.

And you do not sleep peacefully. If a mad man, if any man, woman or child, for that matter, escaped from of those up north prisons, maybe not a child then, or just a man looking for a quarter, a ride, a pair of socks, a sip of water, a swath of flesh, were to ramble though the half-circle drive off the local highway 30 miles outside of Munising, you’d know right away. You could speed away because of the street lamp, because the street lamp kept you awake with its light and buzzing.

You raided your pack for a few t-shirts to wedge in windows rolled down and then up to catch the hem and hang like curtains, your dirty laundry. How far your car seat reclined surprised you and morning came quick. You washed up over the sink in the Lysol-smelling bathroom.

Munising was 30 miles away and the morning djs on the morning show on the morning radio station joked about the weather as the sun peaked east in the early September sky.

I’m not Catholic and never was good at giving things up, if even only for 40 days during Lent. Plus, all my friends who tried, and in college, it was friends who tried to give up drinking for 40 days, spent the usually three or four days of abstinence complaining and whining. It was, in part, to show off “Look at me, I’m not drinking for 40 days and you know how hard that is” and, in part, suffering, which is the point isn’t it.

Well, instead of giving up something for Lent, I added something. This, like I said, did not catch on, and I think the first thing I added that first Lent had lots to do with it. For that first Lent, I added to my life that when ever anyone mentioned spring break, I had to yell “Spring Break 200(whatever). Woohooo! Show us your titties.” After my friends learned this, spring break (Spring Break 200(whatever). Woohoo! Show us your titties.) became a frequent topic of conversation. Until it became annoying. And sadly, my resolution to add something to Lent lasted only about as long as those who gave up something for Lent.

But the suffering, the suffering under my yells of Spring Break!, it was universal. So, I won.

Now I’m bringing back the Lent addition tradition. For the next 40 days, I am going to write. And what I write, I’ll publish here.

Round 1 … Bob Dylan fail

For a moment I think of all that I’ve failed to become and that is Bob Dylan because Bob Dylan never sat in a carpeted studio apartment with matching furniture and a tiny bed. Bob Dylan had a big bed and that was his only furniture because that was the only furniture Bob Dylan needed because Bob Dylan fucked a lot. Nothing matched.

And Bob Dylan wouldn’t have a guitar with rusty strings, one broken, cased up in the corner like I do. Bob Dylan’s guitar would be out, lying across his coffee table or couch or bed, because that’s the only furniture he really needs, and he would tell his girl to mind the guitar while they fucked. He’d have extra strings too.

He had no use for carpet, or sweatpants, which he might not have even known about because why would Bob Dylan need to know about sweatpants. His bed had rumpled blankets, probably white, and red sheets. None of the bottles in Bob Dylan’s apartment had labels, because, well, fuck labels, and fuck sweatpants, because maybe he knew about sweatpants because it’s fucking Bob Dylan and who knows.

So, with sweatpants on, in a tiny bed, carpet floor with a guitar forever in its case and bottles with labels and no fucking, I’ve failed at being Bob Dylan. I had my bottles with labels lined neatly in my kitchen where clean dishes dried in the dish machine, and the recycling was divided into glass, plastic, aluminum, paper. Maybe I’ll start a garden in the spring.

I love recycling. Going to the long slugs of recycling dumpsters at the fire station near my apartment is like taking a walk in the woods, coming back fresh and refreshed with a new, superior even, glow. I know a secret — recycling — a secret to simple bliss.

******

“What’s the word for Bob Dylan?” she asks, the next night, looking up from the carpet in front of the coffee table where she fumbles with her phone.

“Musician?” the girl sitting next to me on the couch says. Always the basics, the most trusted answer, the simple and the correct, she is rarely wrong.

“Does fucking awesome count?” I say. I don’t know why. I wouldn’t consider Bob Dylan fucking awesome. Top 10, for sure, but not in the fucking awesome stratosphere. I probably say it because the night before, I wrote this stuff in my journal about how I failed at being Bob Dylan and all the ways Bob Dylan was not me or I was not him. How he would not be in my apartment with my things, ever. So maybe, to vindicate myself, the fucking awesome response was more that it is fucking awesome that we’re talking about Bob Dylan because I just wrote about him and now the reality in which I write is merging with the reality in which I live and then … BOOM … I’m a writer.

“No,” she on the carpet says. She’s drunk, has already thrown up in the bathroom. She comes back and continues to drink more. “It’s like wasting beer,” I say, as the other boys, her friends from college, on spring break, feed her more PBR. She is the intern. It’s a Monday night and her friends are down from a college and it’s spring break and I’m there.

I feel old. I am old. Twenty seven. I’m the oldest one there and the soberest and the best at quarters.

“No,” she says. “What’s that word for someone who you don’t know if they are a man or a woman?”

“Androgynous?” I say, hoping she doesn’t ask me how to spell it and hoping that’s not what she was asking in the first place.

“Yeah.”

“Androgynous is the word for Bob Dylan?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

“No. You think Bob Dylan’s androgynous? He’s a guy.”

“Nope. He’s androgynous. Cate Blanchett played him in that movie.”

“And she was awesome,” chirps one of her college friends.

“She did. What was that movie called?” I ask.

“I’m Not Here,” one of them says. “It was awesome.”

“I didn’t like it,” I say. I really didn’t. I’m not just trying to be difficult. “But Blanchett was good. Sort of a reverse Shakespeare.”

I don’t know where this conversation went. The girl on the carpet never expounded on the androgyny of Bob Dylan. Maybe to her, and her friends, and people her age, Cate Blanchett’s performance makes Bob Dylan androgynous. Maybe that’s too bad.

But I don’t, then, feel too bad about failing at being Bob Dylan.

Gail Hammett walked to the Wesley Street jail once a week to visit her son. (Katie Rausch | Citizen Patriot)

Following Gail, and on some Thursdays, walking right beside, was a trying experience. She’s no one we’re to feel sorry for — a husband in prison for dealing meth, a son in prison for waving a gun at someone. She’s an alcoholic who hasn’t quite gotten her life straightened out with a mentally handicapped son that needs constant care.

She beat cancer, was homeless and has sacrificed a lot for her sons. But she’s made plenty of mistakes, plenty of bad decisions, and cannot be absolved from responsibility for her her son’s life of crime. He’s basically a grade-A screw up.

Gail showed me, and I hoped to show readers, two things. Her story is one of the struggles mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters go through when a loved one is locked up. It’s a story we don’t often tell.

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx certainly haunted me while writing this.

Once someone goes to jail or prison, they disappear, for most of us, resurfacing rarely for court or parole hearings. But for others, and for more than we probably care to recognize, those behind bars are still family, they are loved ones and burdens at the same time. Gail let me peek into that.

Her story is also one of a mother’s love for her sons. In the piece, I wrote this:

It is impossible to measure a mother’s love and devotion to her children, but consider this.

The walk from Gail’s Joy Avenue home to the Wesley Street jail is about 2 miles — 2 miles there and 2 miles back. Rarely accepting rides or taking the bus, she has made the trek about 20 times to see her son.

Gail Hammett, 55, walked 80 miles to talk to her son. Fifteen minutes, Gail said, is not enough.

“It’s just enough to make you cry. It hurts.”

Mothers, most likely, will always love their sons. But what does that mean? How does that hold up in extremes? Who could love a young man with eight felonies and headed back to prison for a fourth time? Gail answered those questions and showed the depths that love can reach.

No, I don’t think we have to feel sorry for Gail, but we need to know about Gail. We need to read and understand that this, this story, is a consequence of crime.

I met Gail in December a few weeks before Christmas. I had gone to the Wesley Street jail myself  to see a man about a horse. I wrote a story over the summer about a man who saved a horse from starvation. The horse is fine. The man is in jail. I went to check on both.

While waiting at the jail, I heard women around me talking about Gail. She was late that day. They worried about her. I kept my mouth shut, told no one I was journalist and listened. Gail finally showed.

She sat across from in the waiting area. She asked me who I was there to see. “A friend,” I said. I asked her. She told me about her son. I asked about her walking. She told me about that too, as if walking 2 miles in the winter to visit a son in jail was no big deal.

It hit me later that maybe there is a story with Gail. I tracked her down, found her apartment. Katie and I showed up a week later, knocked on her door and introduced ourselves. She recognized me from jail. I told her I was a journalist. She seemed flattered we wanted to do a story on her.

Keeping up with Gail was tough. She canceled on Katie and me a lot. I knew my best shot at finding her was around noon on Thursdays when she would leave her apartment to start walking. But even then, she would leave early, decide to take the bus or somehow, disappear.

I waited an hour for Gail the morning of her son’s sentencing. She never showed. About a half hour after the hearing, she called and left a message. She was hysterical. She begged us not to run the article. She asked us to leave her alone, to let her be.

A few hours later, I went looking for her. She wasn’t at her apartment. I called her. She answered, started crying, and asked what her son’s sentence was. I told her, and she hung up. I waited five minutes and called her back. She answered, still crying, and told me she was wandering around downtown near the homeless shelter. We arranged to meet there.

Gail was talking to her son on a cell phone when we met. She handed the phone to me. Her son thanked me and told me not to write anything bad about his mom. I said I thought what she was doing for him and his brother was amazing and handed the phone back to Gail.

The time on her son’s phone card ran out. For about about the last 30 seconds, Gail said “I love you” as many times as she could, probably for 10 seconds after the call disconnected. We talked for a bit. She told me to print whatever I wanted. She just needed someone to scream at that morning.

I was glad Gail let me tell her story. It needs to be told.

Enjoy.

Walking with Gail: A mother walks to visit her son in jail

Two miles. Fifteen minutes. Two miles.

For six months, this has been Gail Hammett’s weekly routine. Almost every Thursday, she walks nearly 2 miles from her Joy Avenue house to the Jackson County Jail on W. Wesley Street.

She waits, is led up a staircase by a Jackson County Sheriff’s deputy and files into a narrow room. She holds a telephone to her ear and talks to her son — dressed in the orange jumpsuit and sitting behind Plexiglas — for 15 minutes.

She walks down the stairs, outside the jail and another 2 miles home.

“He’s my son,” she said. “I think that any mother would.”

She pauses.

“Maybe I’m not just any mother. I’m his mother.”

Gail Hammett, 55, walked to jail almost every week to visit her 27-year-old son, James Hammett. On Thursday, he was sentenced to 19 to 40 years in prison. He pleaded guilty to first-degree home invasion, felonious assault and two felony weapons violations, his fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth felony convictions. It will be his fourth trip to prison.

But Gail has not turned her back on her son. (read more)

A disgruntled Steelers fan was taking some of his frustration out on neighborhood mailboxes and letting his neighbors know how he felt about the game.

I covered the incident, sitting in my chair and reporting what the scanner chirped (not recommended ever), on Facebook.

Yes, the tomorrow of journalism has dawned.

I bought two cans of whole tomatoes, an economy size bottle of shampoo and a twin pack of deodorant.

“Stocking up for the blizzard?” the lady at the register asked me.

“At least I’ll be clean,” I said.

That was Monday night. The snow hadn’t started falling, but it was coming. Two feet, they said, high winds, ready to sock Michigan Tuesday night. The National Weather Service wasn’t fooling around. They started issuing warnings and advisories on Sunday.

I already had plans for chili.

The night before the blizzard, I chopped an onion, a green pepper and a few spicy peppers. I minced a few cloves of garlic. I opened the cans of tomatoes, drained them, and chopped them too. It all went into a crock-pot — one given to me by my parents, of course. On the stove simmered a pot of beans, kidney and pinto. They had been soaking for days.

I added a can of diced tomatoes, a can of Mexican tomato sauce and a can of Mexico jalapeño sauce. I’m not sure what the jalapeño sauce is, but it comes in a green can, is sort of a greenish red and balances the spice and smoky taste of the peppers nicely.

In the back of the freezer, I found a container of ground beef already browned. I dumped it into the crock-pot, still frozen, still in a square from the container. After all, a blizzard was coming.

The beans, soft but not mushy, went from the stove to the crock-pot. They covered the vegetables, the sauces, and the square of meat. The beans reached to the brim of the crock-pot. I shook in a healthy amount of chili powder, some salt and pepper, and it was done. Into the refrigerator it went.

The morning of the blizzard, the snow hadn’t started falling yet. There was no wind, either. The sky was blue. There was sun. Before work, I skied along the creek running through the park behind my apartment. My skis glided across the snow, settled and packed.

I took the chili out of the crock-pot, plug it in and set it to low. A whole day of cooking ought to do it, I figured. I left for work.

The day of the blizzard, the snow hadn’t started falling yet, but the weathermen said it would that evening. Schools were already closing for the next day.  Co-workers left early, to beat the storm home. I stayed, to monitor the storm, because that, that night, was my job.

The snow started falling around 5 p.m. It got worse around 6. By 8 p.m., it the blizzard was here.

I work with Nick. He called me once the blizzard started. His job, that night, was to drive around and photograph the storm. He had to find people suffering in its grasp. He couldn’t find anyone. The streets, as I had observed from my second-story window at an intersection downtown, were empty.

I told him about the chili. He told me about his whiskey. We decided after work to wait out the storm together, kept warm by whiskey and chili.

The phones went dead at work, but that, they told me later, had nothing to do with the blizzard. Still, it was sort of scary. No one was on the roads outside, which quickly became white. By 9 p.m., all the schools were closed for the next day. By 10 p.m., snowplows were rumbling down the city streets, a fruitless war.

I left work at 11 p.m. and drove to my apartment alone. The streets were empty. The snow was high and blowing. I couldn’t see much ahead of me, just snow whirling toward my windshield and disappearing when it hit. My car slipped and slid, but I wasn’t worried. I drove slow and figured anything I hit would be cushioned with a layer of snow.

I didn’t hit anything.

When I opened my apartment door, I could already smell the chili. It’s an unmistakable smell, but indescribable. It’s that “I’ve been cooking all day” smell. I changed, bundled up, grabbed the pot of chili and walked to Nick’s apartment. It’s not far. I wouldn’t normally drive there and couldn’t that night.

The chili was warm. The whiskey was warm. Nick and I sat on his couch, watching television. Outside, the storm blizzard did whatever the blizzard wanted.

When I lived in the California desert, I missed this. I missed the yearly battle against the elements Michiganders call winter. It makes us tougher. It brings us together. The winter weather keeps us inside and there, we find each other. We bundled up and gather around for a few months each year. Each spring, we emerge victorious, to birds and budding trees and the sun. Each spring, we emerge with the common bond that we had survived the winter.

Around 1 a.m., I got up from the couch and peered outside through two slats of the blinds. The outdoor lights of other apartments lit up flakes of snow as they swirled.

“No peeking,” Nick said.

Jackson Police Officer James Bonneau was shot and killed just after midnight on March 9, 2009. About mid-afternoon that day, a woman called the newspaper and wanted to talk to a reporter about Officer Bonneau. Danielle Salisbury took the call.

The single mom lived in a not-so-nice part of the city and called the police frequently. Noises scared her, worried her. She kept an eye out for suspicious people and activity and called when she didn’t feel safe. Bonneau worked the night shift in her area and often came to her house.

She said he was always nice to her, re-assuring. He listened to her concerns, would check around the house and promise to drive-by during the night to watch. He would, she said. She saw his car.

He made her feel safe, she said. And now he was gone. She wanted to tell someone that.

I don’t know the exact conversation Danielle and the woman had. I don’t know her name. I don’t remember if she ended up in a story. I can’t know exactly why she called, but I can guess.

Many people after Bonneau was killed felt something. Few people knew him as a police officer and even fewer knew him as Jim. But many people felt something. I did. And many people did not know what or why.

I suspect she was hurting. She felt this inexplicable loss, a loss that perhaps her family, her neighbors, they wouldn’t understand. She didn’t know Bonneau, but his death hurt. She wanted to tell someone she hurt. She wanted to tell someone why, her story, how she knew him, how much she liked, appreciated and will miss him. She wanted to tell someone that she was not OK with his death.

I think a lot of us wanted to tell someone that.

She wanted someone to listen, someone to understand. She wanted to talk to someone. She picked up her phone and called the newspaper.

They walked into the beer cooler at the food store in Petoskey. Marcus slowly spun around, looking at the pallets of beer arranged in cardboard boxes. It was unimpressive.

“Well,” Marcus said, still turning, “That’s always a lengthy process.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Aaron protested.

They — the five of them, Aaron, Katie, Marcus, Gina and Dylan — had already spent too much time inside the food store looking for a lunch and dinner to make inside a hotel room with only a coffee pot to heat water, a microwave and mini refrigerator.

Sandwiches for lunch, roast beef, pretzels, salad with Caesar dressing, they decided. Gina and Dylan already had mustard, no need to buy that. Dinner, quesadillas, made in the hotel microwave, another decision was made. With chicken, a rotisserie chicken, someone suggested.  Aaron added a bag of rice cookable in the bag in the microwave. Gina and Dylan grabbed a zucchini, a squash and a red pepper, also a jar of salsa. Tortillas and cheese later, and dinner was in the cart.

Do we have enough plates? No, Gina and Dylan said. They actually did. We should have raided the continental breakfast for plates and plastic silverware, Aaron said. They got plates.

“And booze?” Aaron asked. Wine for dinner, a white, beer for later, they decided.

Back inside the beer cooler, “It doesn’t have to be,” Aaron said.

“But I don’t like hops,” Marcus said, standing near a corner where six-packs cost $10.

“OK, I want something cheap.”

“Do you like Killians of LaBatt?” Marcus was moving closer to where Aaron stood, reasonable beer.

“I love LaBatt,” Aaron bent toward the cases of LaBatt. “Cans or bottles? Should we get this 15-pack?”

He reached for the big cardboard box before he even asked and did not listen to the response. Decision made.

They walked out of the cooler and stood looking at the wine.