Begin to Exit Here

by John Welter

  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.”

  17

  The 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, real
ly,” 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.”

  He was right, but in my deliberately absurd style, I said, “I wasn’t going to ask you any of that. I was going to ask if you ski.”

  “If I ski?” he said, starting to laugh.

  “Yes. You’re up there by the Rocky Mountains, so I knew our readers would want to know if gay police chiefs ski. Do you?”

  He did laugh, then. I was glad.

  “You’re not like most reporters,” he said.

  “Not really.”

  “Well, yes. I do ski,” he said.

  “Downhill?”

  “It’s too hard to ski uphill,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t know. I don’t ski,” I said. “But I used to live in Denver, when I was a boy.”

  “Really?” he said. “You lived in Denver but you never skied? That’s criminal.”

  “Criminal? You mean it’s illegal in Fort Lupton to not ski? I’m writing that down, chief. None of the other papers have this stuff.”

  Eventually Chief Donner and I digressed to the subject of his being a gay police chief, which didn’t seem upsetting to him at all.

  “Fundamentally, it’s best not to care a great deal if some people are going to want to call me a queer and say public officials shouldn’t have sex in the butt,” he said.

  As I was writing that sentence down in my notebook, I said, “Chief, that’s a great line, but you know we can’t print that.”

  “Why?” he said. “Do you mean that all of those people in the public who have images of a police chief having sex in the butt would be horrified to see their own imaginations in print?”

  “That’s it,” I said. “I think they object to their own knowledge.”

  18

  Things soon broke loose, and I was one of the fragments. On the same day my interview with Chief Donner was printed, the Journal ran a story saying there had been dissension and even a brief walkout among police officers in Fort Lupton when Donner became chief there in 1984 because some officers didn’t want to work for a queer. The Journal printed a huge headline saying, at the top of the front page, “Dissension revealed in gay police chief’s department.” It was a sensationalist story hinting at fractious troubles to come if Donner was hired by Small, and it essentially repeated an old story of problems long ago worked out between Donner and the officers in Fort Lupton. But because I didn’t have the same story, Lisa angrily told me what I’d done was shoddy, incomplete reporting that embarrassed the newspaper because we were beaten by the Journal.

  “Fuck the Journal,” I said in her office. “They took an old incident that was big news five years ago in Colorado only, one that involved maybe six police officers and which was resolved in a few weeks and hasn’t recurred. So what’s my embarrassment to the paper? That I didn’t exaggerate the fuck out of an old incident and pretend it was urgent news?”

  “The embarrassment is that you didn’t have it at all,” Lisa said with quiet anger.

  “I had damn near everything else in the interview.”

  “Everything else doesn’t matter. What you didn’t have matters.”

  “Jesus Christ, Lisa. That’s like telling me that most of what I did was good, but because I didn’t have some old news from Colorado that doesn’t matter anymore, I screwed up the whole story.”

  “It does matter,” she said, and threw a phone book at the wall. “It’s the main reason we’re even writing stories about this guy! He’s a gay public official, and if he comes to Small to head the police department, he might run into some of the same problems he had in Colorado.”

  I didn’t want to argue anymore. My head hurt and Lisa decided I was wrong no matter what.

  “That’s in my story,” I said quietly. “Three or four paragraphs of information and quotes from him saying he knows he could have those problems, but he doesn’t think it could be serious and he’ll be able to deal with it if it happens.”

  Lisa exhaled loudly and looked away from me. “But you didn’t get the story about his troubles in Colorado,” she said.

  “I missed it. You’re right. I only got how he’d deal with it here. Kill me.”

  Lisa scowled at me. “Put it in your next story,” she said.

  “Oh boy. One more story about the gay police chief and what he does with his butt.”

  “Don’t push me, Kurt. Don’t.”

  Also that day, Al Perrault had written a wildly ignorant editorial with all the grandeur of enlightened homophobia. It was the true embarrassment of the paper, one that made me ashamed to be a reporter there. Like looking at a dead animal on the side of the road just to see what it was, I looked at the first two paragraphs of the editorial again:

  It shouldn’t surprise anyone these days, with AIDS spreading like a cancer, that we have a homosexual police chief in Colorado. But do we need one in Small?

  It’s hard to say if discipline and morale will be damaged among the well-trained male police officers in Small if the Board of Aldermen elects to hire a homosexual to lead them. We’ve all heard stories about valiant homosexuals who fought in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. It seems appropriate, then, to keep our minds open now as a body of elected officials examines a prominent homosexual who has sex with men.

  Janice called me at work and said she’d just read the editorial.

  “Kurt, it’s too embarrassing to be in print,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “I’m writing a letter to the editor.”

  “Don’t use my name,” I said.

  “I won’t. The first thing I’ll say in the letter is it’s fantastically stupid to say AIDS is spreading like a cancer. AIDS is spreading like AIDS.”

  “I know. Perrault’s stupid.”

  “You sound depressed, Kurt. Are you okay?”

  “No. I’m a reporter.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I went to work.”

  She laughed a little bit and said, “Kurt, please don’t feel bad. It’s Friday. Do you want to go to the mountains?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do. You want to go to the mountains with me. We’ll stay in a lodge and go hiking and no one will bother us all weekend. Say yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “I love you, Kurt.”

  “I’m glad. I love you, too. I want you to hold me, now.”

  “I can’t hold you over the phone,” she said.

  “Goddamn phone.”

  “You’re silly,” she said. “I’m going to pack some stuff after work. I’ll be ready when you get home.”

  She’d never said that before. A pleasant, kind of scary shudder or tingling went through me. “Home?” I said.

  “Yes. Home,” she said. “I said that, didn’t I?”

  “Does this mean we have a home?” I said. “I want it to.”

  “Kurt. This is odd. I said home, like you’re
supposed to be there.”

  “I know. I realize that. I like it a lot. You’ll be ready when I get home.”

  “That’s right. When you get home,” she said.

  “I’ll try and leave work early.”

  “Good.”

  The day wasn’t through annoying and injuring me yet, though. Bobby Havelock, the mayor of Small, called to excoriate me.

  “I want you to know that I’m very angry and I think it’s both unprofessional and irresponsible of you to have written one more story that dwells on the sexuality of Chief Donner rather than his splendid record as a police chief, and I’d recommend that you resign,” the mayor said.

  Oh fuck. “I didn’t dwell on his sexuality. I wrote about it,” I said.

  “When Don Hoyle was hired to be the police chief up in Cokesboro, I didn’t see any strenuous efforts at investigative reporting or any sensational articles on his background or where he came from,” the mayor said irritably.

  “He’s not gay,” I said.

  “Is that it then?” he said with more anger. “These are supposed to be more enlightened times, and I find it singularly repugnant that you’d single out Chief Donner solely because he doesn’t choose to have vaginal intercourse.”

  “I don’t care what kind of intercourse he has. He gets to pick.”

  “Don’t be haughty with me, goddammit!”

  “I’m not haughty. If I wanted to be haughty, you’d really be pissed off. And don’t accuse me of singling out Donner for anything more than being a gay public official in an overwhelmingly heterosexual world. That’s news, and I don’t invent news, as much as I’d prefer to.”

  “Well, I’m damn sick of this so-called news, where a decent, intelligent, exceedingly competent man is held up as a public curiosity just because he’s homosexual.”

  “I’m sick of it, too. I didn’t want to write the goddamn stories. It’s not my fault that having gay police chiefs is a social novelty. So quit being pissed off at me. Be pissed off at humanity.”