Begin to Exit Here (24 page)

“Did he tell you that? Did he say what he wanted me to do?”

“I don't recall precisely what he said, but he described it as a strange experiment for me to have hired you. And he said he was getting fucking tired of reading what he described as your inexcusable offenses against objective newswriting.”

“Tell him not to read it. Tell him to stop reading the paper. No one wants him to. How old is Perrault?”

“I don't know. He's in his early sixties. But that won't help you. He's not going to die in his sleep.”

“I don't want him to die. I'd like it if he passed out for the rest of his life.”

“You're a humanitarian.”

“No, I'm not. I'm a Sagittarian.”

“Oh. Another
s
word.”

“What am I supposed to do? I mean, does he have an ultimatum or something, or did he just say he'd keep hating what I do, or what?”

“He didn't say and I didn't ask him. I think he believes that after I've told you all this, you'll get nervous and timid and become an ordinary reporter.”

“What will he do the next time he reads one of my stories and can't stand it?”

Christopher drank some bourbon and lit another Pall Mall with the butt of his last one. “I really don't know. One thing he can do is ask me to fire you. But I won't do it. I told Perrault that some of your sins against journalism were worth being committed. All that did was make him angrier, as if he were being betrayed by me. He said he wanted to see some marked improvement in your work.”

“Tell him it's already there.”

“I don't think he's capable of knowing that. Perrault doesn't
like
talent. When he sees it, he regards it as a blight that needs to be removed.”

“Is he going to remove me?”

“He could. And that's why I'm warning you. You've met a man who's fundamentally opposed to everything you do well. If you persist in writing in your style, he might fire you. If you choose to become conscientiously mundane, he might give you a raise. What I think I'm telling you, Kurt, is you have to make this decision: sink or sink.”

A
nd now I was beginning to realize there was a time when you saw failure rushing unalterably toward you and, rather than dodge it, which couldn't happen, you had to direct that failure, select it and shape it, and at least have the honor to choose and refine the course of your own ruination. So I would. It would have been too easy to go on as usual and allow Perrault's unremarkable loathing of me to result in my being fired again. That would have given Perrault the reason to get rid of me, when
I
wanted the reason to get rid of me. I think I decided that since my actions were going to ruin me anyway, I might as well ruin myself, instead of letting someone else do it. In other words, I decided to repress all my natural impulses, write
exactly the way Perrault wanted me to write, and thus defeat myself before Perrault defeated me. It would be like standing in front of a firing squad and, right before they shot you, you pulled out your own gun, said, “I refuse to be shot by bastards like you,” then shot yourself.

I resolved all of this secretly, to ruin myself rather than let Perrault ruin me, and I didn't tell anyone, not even Janice, but simply began this private campaign the next morning at work. Whatever I would normally doctor up or refine in my personal style I'd ignore and treat as just raw fact, raw information. What I was presented with that morning—by Lisa, so no one could say I had any bias in either selecting or rejecting it as a story—was a new lawsuit in which a woman from Cokesboro was suing the Coca-Cola Company after she found a bug like a centipede in a bottle of Coke. I mean a bug
like
a centipede, and not precisely a centipede, because neither the woman nor her lawyer could irrefutably identify the dead bug as a centipede. When I interviewed the woman, Donna Reidel, over the phone, I said, “How many legs does it have?”

“Well, I'm certainly not going to count them,” she said with irritation and distaste.

“I think a centipede's supposed to have a hundred legs.”

“I don't have to count them. All that matters is I found a dead bug in my Coke.”

“What if it's a millipede?”

“What's that?” she wondered.

“I think it's supposed to have a
thousand
legs. Did you and your lawyer count your bug's legs, or are you just estimating?”

“I have no idea,” she said.

“Well, I think a judge and also the public is going to be at least a little bit curious about whether it was a hundred legs or a thousand legs in your Coke,” I said. “And, as a reporter, I'm obligated to be precise.”

I wasn't going to put down in my story how the woman hung up on me. But it was exactly the innate oddness and silliness of the story that prompted Lisa to give it to me, although I refused to treat it oddly or with any respect for the dear art of silliness like I usually would. And with some sadness I wouldn't explain and didn't really understand, either, I told Lisa this was the end of my reign of silliness and personal style at the paper, and that regardless of how appropriate humor or irony might be to the dead-bug-in-the-Coke story, I no longer was going to supply it. My instinct, my most natural impulse, was to begin doing the story this way, sort of:

Donna Reidel doesn't know if the dead bug she says she found in a bottle of Coke was a centipede or a millipede.

“I don't care whose pede it was. It was in my Coke and I'm suing,” she said Monday.

Or another lead I thought of after I talked briefly with a lawyer for the Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta was this:

The ingredients in Coke aren't supposed to include centipedes.

In a way it was endless, the ways you could play with the facts and still be factual. But I wasn't doing that anymore. The lead I wrote and which was printed in the paper was this one:

A Cokesboro woman filed a suit in Vermilion County against the Coca-Cola Company after allegedly finding a dead insect in a bottle of Coke.

When I wrote that lead on my computer, Lisa and I stared at it quietly, like spectators at a sorrowful accident who are nonetheless fascinated by the damage.

“Why are you writing that?” Lisa asked quietly. “It's sterile and dead.”

“That's my new style,” I said. “I'm giving the editors what they want. Corpses.”

Everyone knew, when the morning paper came out, that something was wrong, that an unexplained decision had been made and something was ended. They looked at me, Harmon and Rebecca and the others in the bureau, the way people sort of secretively stared at someone who just got a new disease that probably was going to kill them. And it
was
going to kill me, but at my own pace and for my
own reasons. All that was good about it, if self-destruction can be regarded as good, was that I controlled my own vanishment. I wondered if vanishment was a word. I liked the way it sounded. It sounded better and more noble than controlling my own destruction or doom. I at least had my vanishment to look forward to.

As I advanced nobly toward my vanishment, without even knowing exactly when I'd reach it or how I'd know when I got there, the next story I deliberately screwed up and wrote with as much lethal dullness and fatal factualism as possible came in the morning when we got a press release announcing a PLO dance in St. Beaujolais. The press release was mailed to us by a group called the American Arab League, ostensibly some national group with members at the university, and the release was essentially a flier explaining almost nothing and saying this:

PLO Dance
Live Music. Rock, Blues
& traditional Arabic
music.

Benefit concert for Palestinian families displaced in Israel and the occupied territories.

Dance sponsored by the American Arab League. $3 cover. Profits to be disbursed by the Palestine Liberation Organization.

I didn't know the PLO could dance. Ever since I'd known of them, they'd been more associated with bullets and explosions than with dancing; although it
was
true, as someone pointed out to me one day, that Yasser Arafat looked a hell of a lot like Ringo Starr. But Arafat didn't play an instrument, unless you regarded a grenade launcher as musical. Maybe you could regard it as a percussion instrument. And at least these were the natural thoughts I was having as I studied the strange task of writing a serious news story about a PLO dance at the university. It was too bizarre, the entire notion of a PLO dance. It was like announcing a fascist covered-dish supper. Or a Nazi bake sale. Or a Stalinist bingo game. Even if you intelligently and correctly realized that the Palestinian people had been violated and did deserve some kind of a national homeland, and even if you intelligently and correctly realized that at least some of the goals of the PLO were good, it was still, when you associated the PLO with dancing, just pretty damn strange. Maybe next time there'd be a PLO Easter-egg hunt. Before I called the organizers to interview them about the dance, I thought of asking them if you should bring your own sandbags and automatic weapons for the dance.

When I thought of all those Palestinian boys and teenagers throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers and police, when I imagined all those Palestinians getting years of earnest experience in skillfully throwing rocks, I wondered if they
might start becoming major league pitchers. Could there be a PLO expansion team? You could call them the Occupied West Bank Dodgers. Or you could call them the Gaza White Sock, because they could only afford one sock.

Thinking of PLO baseball reminded me of Christopher Columbus. This was because in 1492, Columbus discovered the Dominican Republic, where dozens of major league baseball players are born. In fact, when Columbus was named Admiral of the Ocean Sea and set off to find a new route to reach Asia, he was the world's first baseball scout, sort of, since what he discovered was Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico, where about one-third of all the Earth's serious ball players were to be conceived and bred one day. I got out my baseball cards at home for some research on my PLO dance/baseball story and realized this:

Niña rhymes with Peña.

That is, Columbus's ship, the Niña, rhymes with Tony Peña, a catcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, and it rhymes with Alejandro Peña, a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers. And guess what? Tony Peña was born in Montecristi, Dominican Republic. And Alejandro Peña was born in Cambiaso, Dominican Republic. What I did then, just as a cursory yet sensible check for my PLO baseball story, was use my baseball cards as a research library to compile a sample list of major-league ball players from the Caribbean.
I found out that José Canseco of the Oakland Athletics was born in Havana. And so was Rafael Palmeiro, the first baseman for the Texas Rangers. And Ivan Calderon, of the Chicago White Sox, was born in Fajaro, Puerto Rico. All this made me think that when Columbus walked onshore in the Dominican Republic, he said, “I'm sent by the king and queen of Spain. We're looking for shortstops and centerfielders.”

I read in a literary reference book of mine that in 1498, Columbus sailed along the coast of Venezuela. Maybe that's where he found Luis Salazar, a third baseman for the Detroit Tigers. Salazar was born in Barcelona, Venezuela. Based on this research alone, it became astonishingly clear that—

No, it didn't, really. But I was acting like it became astonishingly clear that Christopher Columbus was the father of major-league baseball. However, as my mind regressed to the subject of the PLO dance and the strange possibility of PLO baseball, I wondered if there were any Palestinians in major-league baseball. I looked through my cards and didn't find any Arabs or Palestinians, but I found Denny Martinez, a pitcher for the Montreal Expos who was born in Grenada, Nicaragua. The baseball card didn't say if he was a Contra or a Sandinista. I think he was just a pitcher.

These were my thoughts and impulses and sensibilities and natural ramblings, none of which I used when it was
time for the serious reporting about the PLO dance. All I wrote in the lead was:

A dance to raise money for displaced Palestinian families in Israel will be held at the university this weekend.

Harmon looked at that lead on my computer and made a realistic puking sound.

“What's wrong with you?” he said.

“I'm fine,” I said.

“That lead sucks, just like yesterday. You're not normal anymore. What's wrong with you?”

“I've decided to become normal. That's what's wrong with me.”

Then came the incident of the unidentified flying omelet. Several people from the public at large and also a state trooper reported seeing something like a spaceship or a meteor or, at least, some damn thing flying in the air one night. The difficulty with such things is that because no one sees them very clearly or for very long and they don't know what happens with them when they vanish from sight, then this is what people can tell you with real certainty: hardly anything. When this trooper, Trooper Saundra Gamel, described to me over the phone how she'd seen a bluish, reddish, somewhat orange object shooting rapidly across the night sky, I asked her what she thought it was.

“An unidentified flying omelet,” she said.

“What?” I said, because I couldn't quite be sure she said “omelet.”

“I get so tired of people saying UFO this and UFO that when they think they mean spaceship and really they don't know at all what they've seen, so it's kind of a personal joke of mine to say that UFO stands for unidentified flying omelet,” she said.

“You mean it wasn't a meteor, it was an
om
elet?”

“Might as well have been, if you don't know what it was,” she said pleasantly.

“Maybe I should call up the Air Force and ask if they detected any breakfast food on their radar tonight,” I said, writing that down in my notes.