Begin to Exit Here (7 page)

Just like at every other paper I'd worked for, I was given an unclean desk and an unclean chair. On the desk was an old brown phone that looked as if people had thrown it away before but someone else, maybe vandals, kept bringing it back. And I had a brand new computer terminal without a keyboard.

“It's broken,” Lisa said. “Christopher said the keyboard should be back today or tomorrow. He's probably wrong. You can use someone else's terminal.”

I was briefly introduced to four of the five other reporters who worked at the bureau, all of whom appeared to be in their mid-twenties and seemed so absorbed in their particular stories that day that the rest of reality was an irrelevant distraction. It was reporter's disease, a vile and communicable mental affliction in which a reporter irrationally believes that nearly any given story he's working on for the morning paper is more urgent and interesting than whatever he's
not
writing about, as if all educated and sensible adults in the community based their lives on reading the morning paper. That was dog shit.

Already my sardonic impulses were loose. “Stay. Sit,” I whispered to myself, like a dog known for suddenly gnawing on things. And I remembered Janice staring at me seriously that morning on the sofa, smiling with affection and hope, like I was a thirty-six-year-old boy going into the dangerous world again, and she couldn't always protect me. I loved her.

“Do you want to become one with me?” I asked then.

She laughed and touched my face. “I'll become one with you later. You go to work. And try, Kurt, try very hard, to be the kind of reporter they
want
, until everything fails and you bust loose like I know you will. Okay?”

“Okay.”

My first official work of the morning was to fix a cup of coffee, light a cigarette, sit comfortably in my unclean chair and say, “It's a good thing I don't have a keyboard, or else I'd have to work.”

Lisa sent me down to the police station to read through the daily crime reports, where I saw Captain Trollope and had to explain to him the recent changes in my fate.

“I heard you got booted from the
Journal,”
Captain Trollope said. “I was sorry to hear that.”

“Being fired is one of those fringe benefits they don't tell you about,” I said. “But it didn't last very long. I was hired yesterday by the
News-Dispatch
, and here I am. I guess I'm hard to exterminate.”

“Evidently. Did they give you the police beat?”

“I don't know yet. This is just something to keep me busy right now, I think, while they decide which beat I get or if I'll be the free safety.”

“Free safety? I haven't heard of
that
reporting position.”

“I made it up. It's when you don't particularly belong anywhere, so they put you everywhere. I guess a free safety is like a floater.”

This also puzzled Captain Trollope, who smiled and said, “Floater? That's what we call a drowning victim.”

“Really?” I said. “I never heard that name before.
Floater.
You cops are grotesque, you know.”

“We know.”

“But when I say floater, I mean someone who just floats around freely, doing random assignments that no one else can or wants to do.”

“Sounds better than a drowning victim.”

“I think so. Being dead would interfere with my work.”

“Somewhat. Well, congratulations on your new job. If you need anything this morning, I'll be in my office where I don't want you to bother me.”

“Well, I'll just bother whoever walks by.”

Then I sat at the desk with the big stack of overnight crime reports, scanning each one to look for suitable crimes and peculiarities to write about for the police blotter. There were several DWIs, a tedious feature in newspapers that I despised, as if people genuinely wanted to read the freshest list of strangers who got drunk and drove somewhere. It seemed possible, though, that I could take a group of DWIs and rank them according to how high they scored on the Breathalyzer test. As a journalistic project, I wrote down the names of five people arrested for driving while intoxicated, and included the blood-alcohol levels they got on the Breathalyzer test. In my notepad, it looked like this:

Today's Scoring for DWIs

At the end of the week, the paper could give an award of mild dishonor to that week's most drunken DWI, although maybe that would be too harsh. I'd ask Christopher and see what he thought. If he said we shouldn't ridicule people by ranking their drunkenness, I'd say we already do it by writing about their arrests in the first place. You might as well convert it into a sport.

Most of the crime reports were slight things of practically no interest but which witlessly conscientious reporters wrote down anyway because they're company dullards, such as the report of a woman whose purse, containing car keys and nine dollars, was stolen. I dismissed that crap and searched for things that were at least acutely weird, like this one, written in the officers' own personal scrawls: “Complainant reported apparent sound of cats fighting in her yard, which disturbed her sleep. After I arrived to investigate, complainant complained that my knocking on her door disturbed her sleep. Cats gone.”

And this crime report certainly warranted publication for the well-being of the community: “Received call from
Ms. Lohman about a strange man on front porch of her house. Subsequent investigation revealed it was her husband.” In my notes, I wrote: “No arrest. Marriage itself not a punishable offense.”

Farther down in the stack was a report that most journalists would dismiss as being an empty and vain incident not worthy of serious attention, but to me it was an enthralling bit of weirdness suitable for the front page of the paper, and I copied it all down: “Complainant, Mrs. Delio, advised officers that her estranged husband apparently entered the home in her absence and removed the light bulbs from every light in the house. Complainant advised she couldn't see. Officers confirmed all light bulbs were missing. No suspect.”

An instinct or a personal aberration told me that only a meteor hitting St. Beaujolais would be a more engaging story that day, and if a meteor did hit St. Beaujolais, writing about it would be hampered by our instantaneous deaths. Gleefully I went back to the bureau with my prized crime report, interviewed Mrs. Delio over the phone, and began writing a peculiar drama:

A St. Beaujolais woman's estranged husband reportedly entered the woman's home sometime Wednesday, unscrewed all 19 light bulbs from every lamp and fixture in the house, then escaped with the light bulbs, leaving no clues but the dark.

“Nothing else was gone, just the light bulbs,” said the victim, Marianne Delio. “I called the police and told them all my light bulbs were missing. They said buy some more.”

It wasn't big or important news at all, but it was funny and human, the kind of story people wanted to read because it wouldn't hurt, scare, numb, annoy, or bewilder them, like the majority of newspaper stories did. The story made it onto the front page of the morning paper, a nice start for my return to a profession that generally regarded me with abiding distrust.

I
nsofar as Harmon Sparr wanted someone to be bludgeoned to death with a violin so he could write about it, he was a common American reporter. Harmon, who was twenty-six and had been a reporter for five years, was habitually upset that not enough corruption, evil, and horror happened in Vermilion County to produce the really good stories that newspapers are all about.

“Goddammit,” Harmon said in his low, peevish voice as he sat at his computer working on a story about protecting the Wolfe Lake watershed from pollution. “Goddamn watershed. I hate these stories. This isn't journalism. Why can't a military train loaded with five-hundred-pound incendiary bombs crash into a church bus carrying a choir?
That's
journalism.”

Harmon's desk was behind mine. “You could go to Romania and get shot to death. I won't stop you,” I said.

“Kiss my ass,” Harmon said.

“I have a girlfriend. She'd be mad,” I said.

“Will you guys please stop talking on deadline? I'm trying to
work,”
Rebecca said across the aisle with self-righteous annoyance.

“Why can't we have a revolution in Vermilion County?” Harmon said. “I wish the redneck farmers would attack St. Beaujolais with shotguns and backhoes, a war of genocide against the godless liberals. I'd be a stringer for the
New York Times.”

“You'd be a disfigured corpse,” I said. “Farmers hate reporters, too. They'd bury you in a shallow grave and plant soybeans on you.”

“Dammit!” Rebecca said, staring angrily at me and Harmon, so we shut up.

One of the phone lines began buzzing throughout the bureau and no one would answer it. It could have been a mayor, a police chief, a provost at the university, a lawyer, a petty bureaucrat, a basketball coach, Jimmy Hoffa. We didn't care. No one liked to answer the phone on deadline, and our secret policy was to ignore it. If you answered, it might be a subscriber wanting to know why they didn't get a paper today. I always wanted to say “Read yesterday's paper again. The world couldn't have changed that much.”

I unfolded a copy of the memo we just got from
Hampton. It was from Al Perrault, the executive editor, announcing a style change:

It will now be the practice of every reporter and editor at the
News-Dispatch
to name the day of an event or action in all news stories at the very beginning of the sentence in which the event or action is described. Example:

“The police Tuesday arrested nine drug dealers.”

Many of you are accustomed to a sentence structure in which you would say “The police arrested nine drug dealers Tuesday,” which you will no longer be accustomed to at this paper. Instead of writing a sentence such as “Authorities say they received numerous reports of dairy cattle found dead with their reproductive organs missing or mutilated Friday,” you will write “Authorities Friday received numerous reports,” and so on. The new style, long ago adopted by the wire services, lends immediacy to our reporting.

Immediately I wrote a note on my computer to Perrault:

Dear Al Perrault: I today got your memo on the style change. I tomorrow will begin using it in all stories,
although possibly I today should start. Never tomorrow put off until today what you can do.

To make sure he didn't get my note, I deleted it, then looked over at Rebecca and said, “Did today you see our new style change, Rebecca? I today don't intend to follow it.”

“Shut up,” she advised me.

During dinner that night with Janice and Rebecca and Harmon at Collier's, we all practiced the new style, with me saying to Janice, “What today did you at work do?”

She was confused at first, but figured it out. “I today studied some blood pathology charts,” she said. “Please all night don't talk like that. I'll get a headache.”

“So you don't like journalese?” Harmon said. “All the really important reporters write like that.”

“All the dicks write like that,” I said.

“Well, you don't have to pay attention to Perrault's memos,” Rebecca said. “He writes four or five memos a week. By Friday, he can't remember what he wrote Monday.”

“I tonight am glad,” I said.

“Don't. I'm getting a headache,” Janice said.

“Me, too. Maybe journalism is a virus,” I said, putting my hand on Janice's forehead. “Do you ever study the pathology of newspapers?”

“If I ever do, I'll start with you,” she said, then looked at Harmon and Rebecca and said, “So how's the newspaper doing with its newest reporter here?”

“It's too early to assess the damage,” Harmon said.

Looking at Janice, I said, “They've already asked for my resignation, but I told them I can't find it.”

She spit wine, just like when I first met her, laughing with wine in her mouth and spraying it across the table.

“That reminds me of the mosquito trucks that used to spray DDT in Texas where I grew up,” I said. Janice seemed terribly embarrassed, and I held her hand under the table as she and I used napkins to clean up the wine.

“I
wish
you wouldn't say funny things when I have something in my mouth, Kurt. And I'm also not sure I like being compared with a mosquito truck.”

“I'm sorry. I'll quit comparing you with health-department vehicles.”

“But anyway,” Rebecca said, giving us a chance to forget about Janice spitting wine, “even before Kurt was fired from the
Journal
, he was regarded as one of the few local reporters who wrote with any sense of style and emotion.”

“Which was why he was fired,” Janice said. “Do you think he'll survive at the
News-Dispatch?”

“We hope so,” Rebecca said.