If It Bleeds It Leads

A fast ride with Sean Allison

Sean Allison on stage in his monologue

It’s 1994, and Sean Allison is twenty-one. He’s flunked out of two colleges, and he’s living with his parents in Westchester. His dad worked in TV news—reporting from wars and later producing Dan Rather’s prime time show. Sean gets a job at the other end of the food chain, as a videographer for tabloid stories that are hawked to local TV stations. A dispatcher at home base, who is tapped into police radios, sends him to crime scenes and fires, animals down holes, and cuffed teenage perps, walking into cop cars and oblivion. It’s all about racing to the scene and then hurtling to the local stations, spread across the city, to beat the other stringers with the goriest footage.

On the job, amid cops, firefighters, and flying bullets—in Black neighborhoods he hasn’t seen before—Sean witnesses the light drain out of people as they die, and he sees he knows nothing of how the world works in terms of poverty and power. It’s so exciting, this chasm of ignorance coming into focus, he stays on the job for 18 months, driving the city’s bleeding arteries every night from 8pm to 8am, speeding crazy fast in a disguised cop car.

Few things are more captivating than learning on a job—the learning part of life—with pages ruffling as they turn, the pages you are writing on yourself. Sean has a job in the pain factory, yes, but by learning to do something well, he becomes a person to himself. It’s a contradiction that can’t be resolved and the perfect subject for art.

Last Sunday, at the Park Theater in Hudson, we watched Sean’s pulsing, 90-minute monologue, If It Bleeds It Leads. We met him the way you meet people in Hudson, where most of us live hyphenated lives. The contractor rebuilding our deck also writes screenplays. Sean works for a nursery and came to our house to check on shrubs we’d bought. He got out of his car and pointed to the Churchtown Dairy up the road, mentioning he’d recently played Oberon there in a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream. He’s tall and lean with a bass voice that doesn’t know where it comes from or where it’s going. Richard said, “You’re a perfect Oberon.” Sean could be beautiful if he thought about it.

Near the end of his monologue, he smiles and says, “I love TV.” In the house where he grew up, there were eight TVs. I was thinking, I love TV too. I love there is always a place to go that is not your life and that prompts you to think about your life. Sean’s solo is TV in the way it opens a world I didn’t know about. Somewhere, he’s gotten the idea his story needs to involve moral growth. He needs to disapprove of the people who wait on the edges of pain in order to pounce. And he needs to say how entering their ranks harmed him emotionally. I don’t doubt he feels shame and guilt when he looks back at some of his experiences, but the piece itself is thrillingly alive because it’s fueled by the love he feels for the people he met and by the pride he takes in having pulled himself out of childhood. For these things, there is nothing to be ashamed of. We can learn in the most unlikely places if we want to.

The piece is brilliantly detailed. How different kinds of bullets sound when fired near you. How the sky expands before dawn when only you are on the road. What rooftops are best for filming a riot or a fire. On one hand, there is always pain to document in ways that are heartless. On the other hand is the affection Sean feels for the underworld he’s entered, for its sadness and helplessness, and for inclusion in a society of male players. The cops in uniforms, the cops in plain clothes, the first responders, the other stringers with cameras who turn suffering into spectacle. This is the part of his life that turns Sean off, but not before he’s learned this I can do and this I can’t do. He meets a woman at a bar, and they fall in love. He moves in with her and out of the house of his parents. She goes on rides with him and helps him focus on what they are looking at.

Sean’s mother wants to buy him a bullet-proof vest. He feels safer disguised as a person with no good reason to be where he shows up. Being willing to work where bullets fly around him makes him feel something he doesn’t talk about with others. He may not know what it makes him feel. Every time you risk your life, you feel lucky to be alive. It’s the adrenalin rush of war reporters and first responders to sites of catastrophe. You could see it in the cocky walk, with head held high, in the people I met in Alaska, working to clean up the oil spill of the Exxon Valdez. Every time you risk your life, you return with a story.

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