Begin to Exit Here (10 page)

You are not, I realized, having fun.

So it was decided, I allowed myself this judgment, that of everything I'd achieved I'd at least achieved being an alcoholic. This was the wrong career. And I left the psychiatrist and went home where it got darker and darker in my house, not surprising when Earth turns and it's night, where I began the sudden and severe discipline, almost a religion, of withdrawal. Panic me, O Lord, and horrify me, although plainly I can do it myself. Give me this night this night this night, I lay me down to sleep and was awake two days, taking that long before the panic that wouldn't leave me was finally replaced by exhaustion, and I slept.

Now I didn't drink, which itself was a faith, an intense, private ritual of
not doing.
I taught this to myself. The psychiatrist asked me if I believed in demons. I told her I wouldn't vote for one. She said, well, the demon you think
you killed in yourself is just you. It's not a demon at all. It's just you.

So you won't exorcise me from myself?

That's death, she said.

Death is a pretty harsh form of therapy. Let's not do that one.

So the demon I tried to kill in myself was only me. No wonder it hurt so much. Still injured and seduced, always seduced by this toxic, numbing peace that no one could give and no one could share, I lived each day in the ludicrous and almost comical triumph of not doing. Like now, I am not having Bass Ale. Now, I am not warm and serene in the aura that patiently annihilates me. And the demon whom I have not killed is not going to meekly vanish, but hides in me, remembering every old seduction and wondering if we're going there again. All I want to do, when every extraneous action and desire is lifted away like a cloak, is love someone who loves me. Looking in her eyes saying here I am. I wondered where you were.

Now, I am imagining Janice. The demon who is only me won't, therefore, go across the street and drink the house wine to resume my tranquil and evenly paced destruction.

I looked at Harmon, so happy and even elated, it seemed, to write with no understanding at all of a lethal force out of control. The only advantage of a tornado over drinking was it worked quicker. If someone found a man
crushed to death under a roof smashed there by a tornado, we in the business would strangely assume the death was more notable than the discovery of a man crushed to death from the inside out by his own toxic sanctuary, himself. Horror wouldn't have been so enthralling to Harmon if it were his sanctuary.

I began wondering if a tornado was an act of God. On my computer terminal I wrote: “Acts of God. Ax of God. Does it really seem spiritual to look at mass destruction and attribute it to God? I think we annoy him.”

Then I forgot what I was trying to write for the paper. I got some more coffee and lit another cigarette, sitting with my elbows on my desk and the palms of my hands covering my temples and my eyes, like blinders, and thought about the tornado. Soon, I tried to write a sentence on the computer: “For approximately seven minutes Thursday afternoon, a tornado advanced through the woods north of St. Beaujolais, knocking down hundreds of trees that no one should miss because we have thousands more.”

That wouldn't work. I was sorry it wouldn't.

W
hat I had realized about the honorable mission of newspapers in presenting the fullest and freest information for the benefit of all people was that the goal of the
News-Dispatch
was to help push the
Journal
into financial ruin and obliteration. The noble mission of the
Journal
was to tell us to go fuck ourselves. Accordingly, when the alert readers of both papers noticed how we took turns beating each other in publishing any story first, they praised us for our keen and healthy interest in the public welfare, while really we hoped only that the other paper would die so we could mourn them in an editorial and say privately: “You finally folded, you dumb bastards.”

If any reporter from the
Journal
got any story or fragment
of a story into print before we did, we were politely scolded and reviled, told that we weren't fully human and probably had deformed minds. Whenever we beat the
Journal
on a big story or a pointless, disposable fact, we reveled in smug and ugly arrogance, speculating that the
Journal
was already a failed paper that hadn't decayed yet. It was vicious and irrational. It was journalism.

On a Tuesday night when I was covering the Small Board of Aldermen's meeting because my editors favored the ludicrous belief that the readers were interested in local government, Jenny Harbecker of the
Journal
, who I had worked with before I was fired, whispered to me that she was going to Wendy's for a hamburger.

“Aren't you afraid you'll miss something important about this request for a variance on a variance to widen a sidewalk that had been narrowed?” I whispered.

“I'll let you print it first,” she whispered.

“That's mean.”

While Jenny was buying her hamburger, the aldermen voted to change the agenda so that discussion of hiring a new police chief was raised from the bottom of the agenda to the next item. It meant not only that I would get the story in time for the morning paper, but that Jenny wouldn't even get to take notes on it. This pissed me off at the aldermen, because now Jenny, who was kind of a friend of mine, would get berated and maligned by that son of a bitch Justin for missing a story that she couldn't have
known she'd miss. And I'd get a story I didn't deserve, by pure accident. Without skill or virtue, we'd beat the
Journal
, Jenny would be reviled and threatened, and I realized I still wanted to shatter Justin's skull, an evil thought that was still enjoyable. Jenny was going to be hurt and I couldn't stop it, unless I refused to take notes and deliberately missed the story, which I wouldn't do.

The only emotion I had then was anger, and as the aldermen discussed the apparent finalist to be the town's new police chief, Town Manager Gaede announced that the candidate, from Fort Lupton, Colorado, was the only openly gay police chief in Colorado. It was an important detail, one that was followed by silence throughout the room as the aldermen looked at each other and tried not to be silent.

“You mean homosexual,” Alderman Delores Newman said, which she shouldn't have because it only drew more attention to the uneasiness that everyone was trying to pretend they didn't feel.

“The preferred word is gay,” Gaede said.

And now, Jenny was just getting in worse and worse trouble for not being there, while I accidentally got a frontpage story and realized instantly that a lot of people in the area would probably start talking about that queer with a badge in Small. It was a big story, and I felt sick. Even as I took notes, I felt sorry for Jenny, but none of it could be stopped. I went out into the hall with my portable computer
and hurriedly wrote a story on deadline about the only openly gay police chief in Colorado apparently on his way to Small, and Jenny walked in. She'd probably been gone only fifteen minutes. She smiled at me and asked if the aldermen had stopped talking about the sidewalk yet.

“Worse than that, dear. I'll tell you later,” I said, and finished my story. I was sending it over the phone when Jenny walked back out of the meeting room and looked scared.

“They just finished talking about the police chief,” she said. “What happened?”

Then I did something reckless and shameful, something that would revulse most serious reporters. I explained everything to Jenny and told her to follow me to the bureau so I could give her a computer printout of my story and photocopies of all the notes I took.

She cried. She put her hand over her face and cried in the hall.

“They'll fire me,” she said. “I can't go to work
now. I
can't go
there.
This
ruins
me. It's inexcusable. I won't have a job.” She was still crying and slapped her forehead with the palm of her hand, then slapped herself again.

I gently grabbed her hand and squeezed it a little, as if that would help.

“You won't get fired,” I said. “You'll have my story and all of my notes, Jenny. I'll beat you
only
because they changed the agenda and I got the story in time, which
wasn't predictable and nobody knew it would happen. So you can't get in trouble for that. You can't. So if you just use my story and my notes, you haven't really missed
anything.
It'll work, Jenny. And then all you have to do is ask the aldermen a few questions after the meeting and make some calls in the morning and you'll still have your story. Okay? Don't be hurt. It's hurting me too. You're scaring me. Don't do that. You'll be fine.”

She stopped crying and looked at me with pink eyes. Her fear was gone, mostly, and she smiled at me with confusion.

“You're
not supposed to give me your notes,” she said. “You're the bastard enemy
paper
, Kurt.”

I was so glad she smiled. “Whenever I'm a bastard, I do it on my own. I never do it for the paper. So I'm not the bastard enemy paper. I'm Kurt, okay? Now, hurry up and follow me to the bureau, and don't you
dare
tell any of those fuckers at the
Journal
that I did this or Justin might find out about it and he
will
fire you. Then I'll have to kill the son of a bitch and dismember him and put his vile parts in the regional landfill, which would violate land-use laws and I'd be fined.”

T
he unspoken image around Small and St. Beaujolais the next day was that a little southern town, Small, might soon have a police chief who had intercourse in the butt. Although the headline on my story said “Small considers gay police chief,” it had been suggested in the bureau and on the streets that the headline should have been “Small takes it in the butt.” We used the
Associated Press Stylebook
, though, and I pointed out that “takes it in the butt” wasn't the AP style, even though I hated the AP style so much that I wouldn't even shop at the A&P.

Despite the reputation for liberalism and broad-mindedness that St. Beaujolais and Small had, ours was still a fundamentally heterosexual community in a heterosexual
world, and people privately winced, I thought, to think of a queer police chief. Almost no one would
say
queer, using instead the genteel expression “gay.” But I knew people couldn't help but think that public life was being infiltrated by a man who had intercourse in the butt with other men.

“All this hidden uneasiness is just weird and stupid,” I said, while some of us talked in the bureau.

“Really? Come on, Kurt,” Rebecca said. “I've never even
heard
of a gay police chief before, and nobody else has, either. So it's not weird to wonder about it.”

“Yeah, but look what we're doing,” I said. “A professional lawman was interviewed to come to Small and be a police chief, and instead of talking about whether he'd be a good police chief, we talk about who he fucks. He's not being hired to copulate.”

“He's a buttfucker,” Harmon said. “I wonder if that's on his resumé.”

“I'll ask him when I interview him,” I said. “You know, it's a certainty that when
other
professionals are interviewed here for jobs, they don't say, ‘And by the way. Who do you screw? Do you do it with people of the opposite sex, and do you do it in the butt, or what?' It just isn't done. Maybe to be fair, to be responsible reporters, we should call up every public official in town and say we're doing an intercourse poll to find out if how they copulate makes them suitable for public service.”

“That'd be fun. Let's start calling,” Harmon said.

.     .     .

When I tried calling Chief Donner in his office in Fort Lupton, I was glad at first when the dispatcher told me he was in a training meeting and couldn't talk for a while, because I felt stupid about having to interview a man about who he had sex with. While I killed time and waited for Donner to get back in his office so I could interview him, I picked up the phone one time and loudly acted as if I'd just reached Mayor Barbara Sartor in St. Beaujolais and said: “Mayor Sartor, this is Kurt Clausen, with the
News-Dispatch.
We've decided at our paper that since so much public attention is being given to the sexuality of the man who might be Small's new police chief, it's appropriate to find out for the welfare of the public about the sexual habits and proclivities of everyone in public service in St. Beaujolais and Small, so I need to ask you a few questions. Have you ever had intercourse in the butt, and if so, was it pleasant?”

Everyone in the bureau smiled as I hung up the phone.

“You didn't, really,” Rebecca said with uncertainty.

“I wouldn't hang up on the mayor like that,” I said. “She wasn't home, so I just left that on her answering machine.”

Finally, I knew it would happen, I reached Chief Donner on the phone. Before I could ask any tactful or blunt questions, Donner anticipated all of them.

“I know,” he said in a pleasant and sort of deep voice. “It's the obligation of the press to examine my law enforcement credentials, my ostensible success as a police chief here in Fort Lupton, and other pertinent questions about anal intercourse.”

It was so sudden and astonishing that I laughed.

“Well, I'm glad you have a sense of humor,” he said. “I know everything you're going to ask. I've been interviewed dozens of times by all the local papers here.”

“No, you don't know what I'm going to ask,” I said, realizing it was safe to be whimsical or ironic with the man, instead of distant and cautious.

“Sure I do. You're going to act like it's part of the finest tradition of American newspapers and democracy in general to ask me all about being a police chief in relation to how and why I have intercourse.”