What Goes Up

by Allen Weiner

  For Max, after receiving praise from peers and management, work settled into its customary routine. Civic meetings, fairs, celebrations, and the occasional car crash or robbery became standard issue tasks for the young reporter. The most memorable assignment was one when a bank about fifteen miles east of Nesquehoning was robbed. It was the fourth holdup for the bank in as many months due to its prime location at two major interstate roads. Getaways were a piece of cake.

  Taking a different approach to the story, Max led with the robbery facts but ended with a tongue-in-cheek remark that it might be time for Bank of America to rethink such a vulnerable location. That is, unless it likes giving away free greenback souvenirs.

  The weekend plans Sue suggested never materialized when Max decided to go home to Philadelphia for a family visit. He promised to make it up to her but wasn’t quite sure what that meant at the time. Sue was getting to understand Max’s fragile personal existence, and while she wasn’t sure what she expected out of their relationship, taking things slow was her only recourse.

  Max’s weekend with his parents started with him driving to Philadelphia after work, late Thursday. From personal experience, he knew his mother would be waiting up no matter what time he arrived. The good news was that she would have some of his favorite food waiting in the fridge when he pulled in to the driveway. Sure enough, as he turned the corner onto their street, Max spotted his mother peering out the front window. “Nothing has changed,” Max muttered to himself.

  Max made small talk with his mother as he devoured the egg salad sandwich waiting in the fridge. He was careful with his topics, wanting to avoid anything that would lead to serious questioning. After far too many talks in which his mother “spoke like a Dutch Uncle,” Max was in no mood for anything but a restful night. He finished his meal, kissed his mother on the cheek, and went off to bed.

  Most of Friday, Max hung around the house, tacking a few solid naps onto a decent night’s sleep in his old bed. With his mother off playing mahjong, Max went into great detail about his work on the arson case with his father, leaving out the hidden FM transmitter and the fact that his boss was forced into early retirement.

  After dinner, Max drove over to Barrett’s condo to talk strategy regarding their successful eavesdropping caper. Barrett did not read the Chronicle, being out of its circulation area, but a few of his friend’s stories ran on the AP Wire and were included in one of Philadelphia’s daily papers. Secretly, Barrett felt as if the entire scheme was his idea, but could not take credit lest he admit to being part of a criminal conspiracy. The former attorney and part-time tennis hustler had an ego that needed constant nourishment.

  “So, should we take it down?” Max asked his friend/co-conspirator.

  “Ya know, I have a feeling about this. I think there’s one more story that will go up with the elevator and come down with a front-page item.” Barrett paused and took a swing from his bottle of Frank’s Black Cherry Wishniak soda. “Let’s give it one more week.”

  “I never knew you had such psychic powers to predict breaking news?”

  “Take it out, smartass, if that’s what you want. I just feel there could be one more story that could get you out of that hick town bureau and behind a desk in Allentown. You’re riding high, man . . . leave the money on the table and roll the dice.

  “By the way,” Barrett added with his trademark smirk, “You forgot to thank me for helping you land the story of your career. I take cash, Visa, and MasterCard. No American Express.”

  Max got back to his parents’ home long before his mother could worry about him staying out too late. She did have a plate of her famous meatballs waiting for him, which made Max miss her cooking, but not the usual side of guilt and sadness. It was a rare occasion when he was able to go to bed before 11 p.m. Even if the solid night of rest ahead was on his lumpy old mattress, Max looked forward to making a major deposit in his sleep bank.

  Alongside his meaty nighttime treat was a note from his mother that Max’s friend from college, Dan Hersh, called asking his former roommate to call back if it was before eleven. It was ten fifteen, so Max took the kitchen phone, a long cord, and went into the living room. The streetlight outside shone brightly through the front window, enabling Max to sit in the dark and make his call.

  “Max, I heard you were coming home this weekend,” Hersh blurted out. Nothing about Max’s junior year roommate was subtle. “A bunch of us are going to the Sixers game tomorrow night, and we thought you might want to come.”

  “Let me check my busy schedule,” Max joked. “Sure, what time?”

  “The game is at eight, but we thought we’d all meet at the Rusty Scupper around six. Does that work?”

  “Yeah, why not? Who else is coming?”

  “Aside from you and me, there’s Steve, Norm, and Marc Stein.”

  “Okay. See you then.”

  Max relished the chance to be with some people who had nothing to do with the newspaper business. Because of their all-encompassing careers—two were in medical school, and one just joined a prestigious law firm—the talk would be fairly superficial and friendly. Of the four, he was the only one who knew anything about sports, so it gave him a chance to show off his pro basketball knowledge in general, the Sixers in particular.

  The Rusty Scupper was a bar and restaurant near Philadelphia’s waterfront. It wasn’t exactly the hippest place in town, which made it ideal for five men who, between them, had been on six or seven dates in their lifetimes. After some hellos and watcha-been-up-to’s, the quintet of young professionals ordered some drinks and appetizers.

  Norm Weiss was seated to Max’s left, and with the din of the Saturday night crowd beginning to take over, the two launched into a timely conversation. Norm Weiss graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and was recruited by top firms in New York and Philadelphia. Wanting to stick close to home, Weiss chose Fogel-Rothchild-Hess, a practice that specialized in injury law. F-R-H was not a team of ambulance chasers; instead, they went after egregious malpractice cases and the emerging field of protecting people who had information about dangerous business practices related to their employers.

  Norm mentioned that he was impressed with his friend’s reporting on the arson case and was sure to save the clippings and pass them around to others in his office. Max was impressed, given that Norm not only finished in the top ten in their high school class but also made law review at Penn. Additionally, he won the Professor C. Edwin Baker Award for advancing social justice. Norm was not a talkative sort, usually observing his surroundings more than jumping in mouth-first—a trait Norm and Max shared.

  “I think you’d be interested in the firm’s new direction, which is to attract and protect citizens who want to report illegal practices with the government or Fortune 500 companies.”

  “I think I heard something about that during Watergate, right? Didn’t it have to do with the release of the Pentagon Papers?”

  “Good knowledge.” Norm grinned. “It’s covered under a statute that is over a hundred years old, and primarily it relates to people who turn in government wrongdoing, but we’re also looking for cases in which big companies can be held liable for not releasing information such as product recalls.”

  “How do you find these people?”

  “At this point, we hope they find us. We’ve gotten some publicity from one case in which a defense contractor was selling faulty helicopters to the Army. Someone in engineering came forth because, in advanced testing, the mast of the copter’s rotor system had a 20 percent failure rate.”

  “That would have made a great story.”

  “Part of the settlement,” Max’s friend added, “was to keep the details sealed. Still, within government and legal circles, it created a buzz.”

  The discussion turned on some lightbulbs for Max. Such cases would make for great investigative reporting. He made a mental note to follow up with Norm to find out more about these cases.

  The three others in M
ax’s group got up. It was thirty minutes to tipoff, and they were taking a cab down to the Spectrum, leaving their cars parked at the restaurant. Hersh’s mother worked as a concierge at one of the city’s bigger hotels, and she was able to score five seats behind the Sixers bench. It had been a year since Max went to a Sixers game; the team’s sickening loss to the Blazers in the 1977 NBA Finals was enough to send even the most loyal fans reeling.

  The Sixers came out flat but limped along to be only two points behind Seattle at halftime. Jack Sikma, the center for the Sonics, was having a career night while Philadelphia’s heralded bench contributed only 24 points to the visitors’ 41. At the buzzer, the final score was 100–97, with Philadelphia on the short end.

  The concessionaires made little profit from the five friends who had one beer and one Coke between them. Max bought a soda for the souvenir cup, which showed Dr. J in full flight. He wasn’t sure who bought the beer, but Max was certain whoever it was complained about it being five dollars.

  After taking cabs back to the Rusty Scupper and some brief goodbyes and see-ya-soons, each man took off. Max had a thirty-five-minute drive up I-95 and calculated that he’d reach the front door of his parents’ house around eleven. While he had no way to explain it, when Max went out with his friends, his mother never waited up. But then again, on those occasions, he rarely got back after eleven thirty.

  Sunday lunch was a nice sendoff for Max. His mother prepared a corned beef with some homemade potato salad, packaging up her son’s leftovers to take back to Nesquehoning. The kitchen conversation was light with little grilling about his job and whether he was seeing someone. Talking about Sue would have been awkward. Max suspected his father told his wife of twenty-seven years to cool it. Around 2 p.m., Max took off, timing his departure to the Eagles game kickoff at Minnesota. Charlie Swift’s play-by-play would make the tedious ride go more quickly in this all-important game for the Birds as they competed for a Wild Card playoff berth.

  Max got back to his one-room apartment just as Ahmad Rashad caught a 20-yard TD pass from Fran Tarkenton to beat the Eagles 28–27. The loss dropped Philadelphia to an 8–6 record with only an outside chance at making the NFL Playoffs. At least the close game and the exciting action made the ride go quickly despite a slowdown on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Max usually took the turnpike, despite the toll, which was a contrast to his mother, who would drive miles out of the way to avoid paying tolls. At least gas was twenty cents a gallon.

  Somewhat refreshed, he got to the office an hour before his scheduled six o’clock start time. One reporter each night would be asked to begin his or her day an hour late and stay an hour after the official business close at eleven thirty. That night was Max’s turn to work the graveyard shift.

  Waiting on Max’s Selectric was a letter that looked to be an invitation. The letter asked Max if he would be gracious enough to attend the monthly meeting of the Carbon County Chamber of Commerce. The event was scheduled for the following Thursday at the Country Inn and Suites by Radisson, which sat halfway between Jim Thorpe and Lehighton. He was not being asked based on his recent celebrated reporting; the goal was for county leaders to get to better know the man whose job it was to write about all things Carbon County.

  Max knew little about the chamber or the venue but didn’t see any harm in getting out in public. He had heard that the hotel, which was all of two years old, had an excellent meeting room on its top floor, which was in great demand for weddings and other celebrations. It might be a good time for him to drag out his one suit and display his sartorial majesty. He also wondered if it might be worth asking Sue to come with him—not necessarily as a date, but to make up for him canceling their recent plans and boost his confidence going into this event.

  On this slow Sunday evening, the monotony was broken by a call from the Blavosky Funeral Home. A local World War II vet had passed, so a special ceremony was to honor Steve Nalesnik, a winner of the Purple Heart for his heroism at the Battle of Anzio in 1944. Max took the call, wrote up the details for the funeral and wake, and batted out a brief story about Nalesnik’s life.

  Done with that task, Max combed through clips in search of information about whistleblowers. With all past articles on individual pages of newsprint folded in small envelopes in a large file cabinet, the job was like finding a needle twisted around another needle in a haystack. Just by happenstance, he did find out some interesting things about one of his current interim editors, Ervin Swan. Swan, it seemed, had a lawsuit against St. Luke’s Hospital in Allentown for damages after he got an infection from his first hip surgery. The case was settled out of court, but Swan made it very public that he didn’t get what he deserved from the case.

  That explains a lot, Max thought to himself. It could be one of the reasons he’s an anti-Semite. According to the four-year-old story, the lawyer representing the hospital was Joel Wiener. In addition to being a top legal mind, he was also president of the synagogue where Max taught while in college.

  The week went by quickly. Max RSVPed to the invite from the Carbon County Chamber of Commerce. He began digging into information about some of its biggest members and came away with a list of who’s who in business and politics in the area. Standouts included Juniper Letterpress, a printer and publisher that specialized in corporate newsletters; BLM Inc., a manufacturer of machine parts; Genesco, Inc., an owner of the local Falk’s Supermarkets; and Andersen Trucking, a short- and long-haul logistics company. Many accountants, lawyers, and real estate firms were also members, as was the Chronicle, despite having its headquarters in Allentown.

  Sue was given her first major assignment related to school overcrowding. Her job was to conduct a series of interviews with teachers, students, and administrators to get varied takes on the problem. When other reporters in the bureau asked her about the opportunity, Sue said that her mom was a junior high school teacher in Macungie, so it was a topic near and dear to her heart. Despite all the work on her plate, Sue was excited and surprised at Max’s invitation to attend the chamber of commerce event.

  It was always wise to operate on the theory that it’s better to overdress than show up at a gathering looking like a ragamuffin, Max believed. His one suit, purchased with his parents’ assistance at B&G Silverman, a discount clothier in Philadelphia, looked fresh since Max had worn it twice—once to a friend’s wedding and again to a college classmate’s party celebrating his graduation from med school. To go with the suit, Max had the choice of two dress shirts—both white—and one tie that may or may not have gone out of style. He was certain that no matter how he looked, Sue was bound to look better.

  General anxiety set in after lunch when Max realized that he would be at a meeting where he knew only a few people, but the idea of bringing a date along would make the situation more complicated. He wasn’t sure how to introduce Sue. As a friend? A fellow reporter, or maybe just someone he met in the parking lot? As far as to how Sue felt about the evening, that was too much for a socially inexperienced man to process.

  Max and Sue left the bureau together in what could be described as their Sunday best. The other reporters were far too busy with their work to notice or care, which was simply fine for the couple. Sue laughed on the ride over as Max nervously fiddled with the car radio jumping from station to station when a song he didn’t like came on. Now being somewhat of an expert in elevators—or least where to hide things in them—Max was impressed with the hotel lift’s modern design. He stood looking at the back of the unit, wondering what Sue was thinking about his visual scan of the motorized bucket.

  As they arrived at the top-floor meeting room, the Chronicle reporters were greeted with a beautifully decorated space with an open bar and twenty round tables with bright tablecloths and vases filled with roses and carnations. Max and Sue split up, shaking hands with local leaders wearing name tags for easy identification. John Andersen, head of the area’s largest trucking firm, was the guest speaker for the meeting, which was close to starting. Max and S
ue met at their assigned table and introduced themselves to the six other guests at table five. Sue had grabbed a white wine from the bar and brought one over for Max, realizing he might be nervous in such a social situation.

  Andersen delivered a fifteen-minute commercial about how his trucking firm has been the county’s backbone for two generations. He rambled on about how his company has been responsible for hauling the large components used to build most of the area’s bridges and roadways. Andersen loved the sound of his voice.

  Bored with this self-aggrandizing soliloquy, Max looked around the room, hoping to find someone or something to distract him from Andersen’s endless prattle. At the main door to the meeting room stood a short, grubby man in his late thirties wearing overalls, furiously shaking his head. His hands clenched at this side; the uninvited guest appeared angry and distraught. If smoke could come out of his ears, he’d fill the room with carbon monoxide.

  Max elbowed Sue and nodded his head in the direction of the man in the door. Sue returned the poke with a look of bewilderment as if to say, “What’s going on?” His curiosity getting the better of him, Max got out of his seat, trying not to attract attention, and walked toward the rather peeved bystander.

  “Is everything all right?” Max whispered to the visitor.

  “No, it’s far from all right,” Dan replied. Below the left shoulder, the man had a patch that said Andersen Trucking along with his name, Dan Bigelow.

  “Something bothering you?”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m a reporter with the Chronicle. I’d love to hear what you’re so mad about.”

  “Okay, but not here. Let’s go down to the bar, and we can talk there. I have a story you won’t believe.”

  Max motioned for Sue to leave. She softly and politely said her goodbyes and joined Max and his new acquaintance by the elevator. Max introduced her to Dan just as the elevator arrived. The three got in, and Dan hit B, which was the lower level that housed the bar.