Begin to Exit Here (18 page)

“I don't know about taunts, but I personally enjoyed it,” Donner said.

“Well, I hate to sound selfish, but I didn't do it for you,” I said. “I did it for me. I just thought it was unfair for people to pretend that scripture justified their anger and hatred when they were plainly ignoring another part of the scripture showing a drunken man having sex with his daughters, as if that were fine.”

“Most newspapers wouldn't
print
such a contrast, even if it
is
plainly in the Bible,” Donner said. “Is your paper different?”

Janice shook her head, saying, “No. But Kurt sure as hell is. You never can tell who he'll outrage next.”

T
he next curious thing that happened was that an angry and kind of horrified woman called the bureau to announce that she and several other parents were filing complaints of child abuse against an employee of a kindergarten who tried disciplining the children by saying she'd suck their brains from their ears if they weren't quiet. I wondered if this was similar to eating crawdads in New Orleans. I'd seen people suck the brains out of crawdads before, but I didn't know if there was a Cajun recipe for kindergarteners.

“My four-year-old son came home from the Five Ducks Kindergarten and told me that Miss Beasley at the school had threatened to suck the childrens' brains from
their ears if they didn't stop making noise and behave themselves,” the woman said in an agitated and somewhat angry voice over the phone. I couldn't imagine any proper way to react to what I'd just been told.

“Did the woman suck anyone's ears?” I said, deciding not to ask the woman if her son still had his brain.

“As far as I know she didn't, but we still regard it as assault for a grown adult telling harmless children that she'll suck their brains through their ears. And we've called the district attorney's office to seek criminal charges.”

I called Susan Crewes, the district attorney, trying to pose my questions to her tersely and with vast disinterest.

“Is it illegal to tell children you'll suck their brains out?” I said.

“Off the record, Kurt, I don't think you could. Their ears are too small,” she said.

“Well, if you
attempted
to suck their brains out, even though you knew it wasn't possible, is it illegal?”

“Are you really doing a serious news story on this?” she asked.

“Sure we are. You're taught in journalism school that it's always news if people threaten to suck your internal organs.”

“They actually teach that?”

“I wouldn't know. I studied English.”

“I don't know why you're trying to make a big deal out of this, Kurt.”

“I know. Brain-sucking is so ordinary. I hate the press, don't you?”

“You despise your own profession?”

“I could despise yours, too, if it makes me seem more broad-minded.”

Looking for more balance or thoroughness in the story, I called the head of the university medical school for professional views.

“Even if you could generate enough suction through the human mouth to make a brain move, which I can't imagine is possible,” he said, “it's reasonable to argue that the ear is too small an orifice to allow for the passage of a relatively bulky organ like a brain.”

“That's what I thought,” I said.

“Was it necessary to call a physician to confirm an obvious opinion?” the head wanted to know.

“In journalism it is. Reporters are ordered to make believe that their own intelligence and common sense don't matter unless it's gained in an interview with someone else. In other words, editors wouldn't dare allow me to simply say in this story that it's probably impossible to suck a child's brain through his ear, even though no one would argue with that, because reporters aren't supposed to put
their
opinions in a story. So you need an authority to state the obvious.”

“I'm not an authority,” he said. “As far as I know, no one's an authority on brain-sucking.”

“Wow. It's a whole new field. Should I call the Department of Brain-Sucking at Johns Hopkins?”

“I wasn't aware they had one.”

“I wonder if it's in the Yellow Pages.”

Eventually I had to end this systematic interviewing and take my story notes down the street to Stanley's where I sat by myself on the deathly humid terrace while drinking Central American coffee from a nation we hadn't invaded yet as I experimented on my legal pad with straightforward, perplexing ways to write this newest news for the morning paper. People who thought life in St. Beaujolais and Small was relatively civil and refined might open the paper to read this sentence:

Threats to suck kindergarteners' brains through their ears are being examined tentatively by the district attorney.

It seemed too fantastical to be true, while the main quality it had was that of being true. Sometimes if you just wrote the truth without exaggeration, no one would believe it. Then I began to wonder if you could say “suck” in a family paper, such as “suck on this, this sucks, go suck a dead dog.” This wasn't particularly helpful for my story, but I knew a lot of people disliked the word “suck” and might find it offensive in the news. Was there a genteel way to discuss brain-sucking? Probably Miss Manners knew.

On my legal pad I wrote:

Although a University physician says brain-sucking isn't a credible skill, the Vermilion-Wellington County district attorney is investigating a reported threat to suck kindergarteners' brains through their ears.

In a way, it didn't seem possible or even advisable to correctly write this story as if I were alerting the public to the horrors of something that almost certainly wasn't a real threat. My general usefulness to the public was under suspicion again, but that was a truth about journalism anyway. Sometimes the news wasn't worth knowing, but like a child picking up a handful of exotic, unidentified crud from the bottom of a ditch, we carried it home, just in case.

As I glanced up from my private, journalistic ditch, there was Janice, and some old man with her, staring at me from the end of the terrace and walking down the little aisle toward me.

“Hey,” I said, because that was how people were supposed to greet each other in this part of the South. In Kansas City, people said “Hi,” but I'd learned in North Carolina that you talked like you came from the “Andy Griffith Show.” So if I'd been sitting there on the terrace at Stanley's and Pope John Paul II approached me with a bunch of cardinals and bishops, I wouldn't say, “Good evening, your holiness.” I'd say, “Hey, your holiness.”

“Hey,” Janice said back to me as she and the old man arrived at my table. “Kurt, this is my father, Joseph.”

I stood up abruptly to shake his hand.

“We came here for an early dinner,” Janice said as she put her arm around my waist. “Daddy flew in from Philadelphia today, and I'm so glad we ran into you here. Are you working on a story here? Well, Daddy, you get to see a newspaper story being written for the morning paper.”

“Well, please have a seat,” I said.

“We can't interrupt your work,” Mr. Galassi said.

“Yes, you can. It's not hard,” I said. “Please, go on and have a seat. I'll finish the story later.”

“Let me see your lead,” Janice said, taking my legal pad and holding it up in front of her.

“Those are just notes. I'm still working on it,” I said.

“What's it about?” Mr. Galassi said. Before I could explain or object, Janice started reading aloud from my notes.

“Threats to suck kindergarteners' brains through their ears are being examined tentatively by the district attorney,” Janice read, sniggering and putting the notes down to stare at me with amusement and maybe some embarrassment that she had no idea what this meant but she'd just read it in front of her father, who probably couldn't imagine I was a serious, responsible reporter if I sat at a table at Stanley's writing bizarre descriptions of brain-sucking.

“What's
that
all about?” Mr. Galassi said wonderingly.

“Yeah, Kurt. Is there some Satanic cult at a
kin
dergarten?” Janice asked.

“I think that would go on the religion page. That's not
my beat,” I said, taking my notes from Janice so I wouldn't have to explain them right then.

Mr. Galassi smiled at me and said, “So
you're
the young man Janice has been telling me about.”

“I hope so. I hope she hasn't been telling you about some other man,” I said.

“I was, but he insisted on hearing about you, so I told him,” Janice said.

“Actually, you're almost the only person she talked about,” Mr. Galassi said.

“I told her I'd give her a dollar if she did that,” I said, pulling out my wallet and getting a dollar out. Janice smiled and took the dollar.

“He doesn't pay very well, does he?” Mr. Galassi said.

“No, but he's a nice man,” Janice said. “He doesn't earn much now because he's a journalist, but he can give me more money for saying nice things about him when he sells a southern novel he's writing called
Uncle Tom's Cabin Cruiser.”

I'd forgotten about that. Across the table, Janice grinned at me.

“Uncle Tom's
Cabin Cruiser?”
Mr. Galassi said.

I nodded my head. “Yeah. One night while Janice and I were barbecuing some chicken and talking about what we hoped to do in life, I was rambling about important southern novels written by Northerners and decided inexcusably to write a novel called
Uncle Tom's Cabin Cruiser.
It
would be about a slave working for the Securities and Exchange Commission. That's how he can afford the boat.”

“The Securities and Exchange Commission? You didn't give him that job when we first talked about it,” Janice said.

“A lot of time has passed. I promoted him.”

I
t was Janice's idea to take her father, who was a sixty-two-year-old retired police detective, down to The Tomb with its clientele dressed variously for the tastes of a rock club, a redneck bar, or a jail.

“This is like descending into hell,” Mr. Galassi said as he stared at the low-hanging, fake rock ceiling and the fake rock walls protruding jaggedly everywhere in a steady haze of cigarette smoke, like the imagined dimness of hell.

“Hell doesn't have Christmas lights,” Janice said, pointing at the string of tiny Christmas lights suspended from the ceiling.

“By God,” Mr. Galassi said, as if discovering another unexpected weirdness. “This is
July
.”

“They have July in hell,” Janice said.

“Do they? I wonder what winter is like in hell. Do they have molten snow?” I said.

“This place reminds me of jail,” Mr. Galassi said.

“We wanted you to feel at home, Daddy,” Janice said.

“Then I should be questioning a robbery or murder suspect,” he said.

“We'll introduce you to some of them later,” I said. “First let me get you and Janice a beer.” I got them each a bottle of Rolling Rock, and Mr. Galassi stared curiously, maybe even suspiciously, at my bottle of Soho Cream Soda.

“Isn't that a childrens' drink?” he said, sounding like a detective. “You're not much of a drinker.”

From the corner of my eye I saw Janice blink or flinch, and almost imperceptibly, I felt her fingers in the middle of my back, as if to protect me. I wondered how you conversationally said you're an alcoholic and you don't want to painfully deteriorate, watch your mind vanish, and die.

“Actually I'm an excellent drinker,” I said, reaching behind me to put my finger in Janice's hand. She grasped my finger. “I could probably drink more than anybody in this room and not even feel sleepy. But once you get that good, excellence becomes lethal. So when I realized I'd mastered everything that matters about drinking, I quit.”

Mr. Galassi looked a little embarrassed, as if realizing I'd been accidentally cornered and, out of politeness to myself, I wasn't going to say I was an alcoholic.

“Oh,
oh
,” he said, kind of apologetically. “So you're on the
wagon?”

“I wonder why people always think of a wagon,” I said, “as if, if you don't drink, you're expected to get on this particular wagon. And it's always
the
wagon, implying that of the hundreds of thousands of people in the world who quit drinking, all of them somehow are crushed and smashed and gathered simultaneously on just one wagon.”

“So you're
not
on the wagon,” Mr. Galassi said.

“I hate that expression. It makes me envision alcoholics on a hayride,” I said, smiling slightly. “Like people spending the summer at Camp Detox. Everyone get on the wagon, now. We're gonna drive this son of a bitch at full speed and see how many of you fall off. Uh-oh. A bump. Ahhhhhhh! Well, there went
some
of ‘em. At Camp Detox, we're looking for the few, the proud: Alcoholics on a Hayride. And do you know what I just realized? The acronym for Alcoholics on a Hayride would be this: Ahhhhh!”

T
he following day at work, in one of my ordinary seizures of severe and chronic whimsy, I devised a new rule of English: “i before e except on Friday.”

This came after Marta was trying to spell “seize” in a story she was doing about cops seizing some marijuana. On her computer she had written “The officers siezed approximately 50 bags of marijuana.”

“This doesn't look right. How do you spell seize?” she said.

“I don't,” I said.

“But if you use the rule ‘i before e except after c,' then I've spelled it right,” she said. “But it still doesn't look right.”