by John Welter
“I have a shooter, too,” I said, putting my hand between my legs.
Janice grinned at me with her lips tightly held together. She put the palm of her hand over her mouth so she wouldn’t laugh.
“You’d have to wear the holster in the front,” I said.
Her head was trembling a little bit, and it looked like she was biting her hand.
“But I’d hate to walk into a saloon where they made you leave your shooter at the door.”
She laughed, toppling backward in the dirt. Her voice was so pretty when she laughed, and I realized I was elated to be able to cause that in her. Sometimes I could be elated just by looking at her. She was a lot.
When she sat back up, she leaned her head against mine and hugged me, sniggering a little more and putting her hand between my legs.
“I like your shooter better than mine,” she said. “I’m glad you brought it.”
23
At my desk in the bureau Monday morning, I was sore and tired and filled with a kind of silent exuberance. Vivid pictures of Janice appeared and disappeared in my memory, automatically, like my heart was showing me what mattered, and I sat there quietly at my desk, watching. No one else was in the bureau, and the phone buzzed.
“Fuck you,” I said, waiting for the phone to quit buzzing. The noise seemed to drive away the automatic pictures of Janice, and I was angry at journalism for doing that. My normal impulse was to never answer the phone anyway. Lisa established a rule to answer every call within six rings. No one honored the rule. We established a separate rule to answer within six minutes. The phone wouldn’t quit buzzing, so I answered it.
“News-Dispatch. Kurt Clausen speaking.”
“Yeah? Well, where’s my morning paper?” said an old woman, with deep spite.
I hated it when strangers assumed I was worthy of being abused by them.
“I can’t find it, either,” I said. “It’s not here.”
“Well, that carrier of yours is worthless. How am I expected to read my paper if I can’t find it?”
“I’m not sure, ma’am. I think the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is working on that project. One day, you’ll be able to read something that’s not there. These are exciting times.”
“If my paper isn’t in my driveway in ten minutes, I’ll be calling you back.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I resumed sitting quietly at my desk, wondering why I was loose in the world, when I’d see Janice again, and how long I could endure being a hard news reporter before the maddening sterility of it poisoned me and drove me into a state of depressed panic, like Victorian housewives suffering hysteria. That was why Justin fired me. I had no will to write orthodox news anymore, or to cover any of the annoying human events that rose above the usual tedium of daily life, distinguishing themselves as news not because they were worth knowing about but because an editor said so. Papers lied when they said their mission had anything to do with describing human events that mattered the most. Their missions were to master uniformity and sameness. If they inadvertently reported something that more than thirty percent of the readers really cared about, which was unlikely, it was nearly a certainty every time that each competing story began with the same facts, the same emphasis, the same wording and the same phrases. The key wasn’t that the readers were being given a story that meant very much to anyone, but that the reporters and editors were getting more successful at reducing all existence to a uniform, deadened sameness, like cells duplicating themselves.
At my desk I typed this note:
Reporter’s Workshop, June 23, Washington.
Dare to be the Same.
Panelists from Columbia University, the University of Kansas, The New York Times and The Washington Post will work in small groups to help new and experienced reporters master the skill of sounding like everybody else.
Harold K. Wasserman, 18-year veteran at The Times, delivers keynote speech: “Sameness Makes the Difference.”
Call 202-639-1002 to make a phone ring.
I pinned the note on our bulletin board, where I noticed a new memo from Perrault:
When reporting on prominent homosexuals, always refer to them as homosexuals, not gays. “Gay” is the preferred euphemism that we don’t prefer. When reporting on prominent heterosexuals, it doesn’t matter, so you needn’t allude to what kind of sex they like.
Whenever I imagined Perrault, I imagined a man in hiding from his brain. I assumed he rose to the position of executive editor through a profound accident we weren’t encouraged to know. Like a senile czar, he retained his title and some access to authority, part of which, I hoped, was secretly taken away from him each time he tried to use it.
Back at my desk, I wondered what I’d write that day, and why. If Lisa was in a bad mood, or if her sense of abstract professionalism overpowered her sense of humanness, she’d probably order each of us to write two stories; not because there were that many stories worth writing on any given day, and certainly not because you could turn out two superior stories in one day. You usually couldn’t. But because the Journal had the asshole rule of forcing its reporters to turn out two and sometimes three stories a day—regardless of how incomplete and sloppily written such stories almost necessarily were—Lisa sometimes forced the same rule on us, the way a military officer would impose hardships on his troops, as if the goal no longer was to excel at a single story but to show the readers how many items we could cram into the paper without justifying why we did any of it.
It was about eight-thirty, at least half an hour before anyone else would be in, and in my luxurious privacy, I began drawing a chart on my pale purple legal pad:
The chart needed refining. I didn’t have time to do it because I needed to start planning my next story that not very many readers would be interested in. Regardless of what story I selected, if I began working on it assiduously and did any of the interviewing or writing before the ten o’clock staff meeting, and Lisa didn’t like my idea, the story would be held or killed. So if I began working now, there was at least a fifty-fifty chance of accidentally wasting my time by working. If I deliberately wasted my time and did nothing, I’d still get paid the same amount of money as if I accidentally wasted my time.
Faced with that, I went to McDonald’s to buy a biscuit.
Having part of a dead pig in my mouth reminded me of a story I could work on: The vegans!
24
On my McDonald’s napkin, I wrote “Dead pig in mouth. Vegans.” This was to result in one of my eternal skirmishes with editors. Newspaper editors mainly believed that the only subjects worth unquestionable attention were government, politics, education, crime, and disaster, as if the remainder of life were peripheral. This was, I knew instinctively, dog shit. The vegans were fascinating, and despised dead pigs in your mouth. I didn’t care that Lisa or any other editor would sneer at this idea and regard me again as a precocious but regrettably whimsical reporter. This was life, not news. Editors often acted as if news were the most refined form of reality, when actually it was just a goddamn side effect.
Why, then, are you a newspaper reporter?
I’m not. That’s just my title. They have to call me something.
In the ten o’clock staff meeting, after everyone else announced their appropriate stories for the day, covering government meetings, criminal proceedings, school-board ramblings, a house fire and university affairs, it was my turn to propose my coverage for the day.
“Dead pig in mouth. Vegans,” I read from my napkin.
Lisa blinked at me. “Does that mean something?” she wondered.
“It means the vegans are attacking. They’ve killed pigs,” Harmon said.
“Vegans don’t kill pigs. They only kill plants,” I said.
“And, how is this a story?” Lisa said. “Aren’t the aldermen discussing a road-widening project with the DOT?”
“Yes, but roads aren’t as interesting as dead pig in your mouth and vegans,” I said.
> “We need to find out which roads will be widened, how much it will cost, how many trees might be cut down in the right of way and all that stuff, plus ask someone if the project might threaten a rise in property taxes,” Lisa said, which was like saying to me “Shut up, Kurt.”
“We already know some of that stuff and the project won’t start for at least six months,” I said, which was like saying to Lisa “I know more than the news, and no, I won’t shut up.”
Then I explained vegans to her. “Vegans are people who don’t eat meat or any animal products, for moral and environmental reasons. Some of the local vegans, who object to dead pig in your mouth, are having a meatless Fourth of July picnic to draw attention to dead pig in your mouth and why it shouldn’t be dead or in your mouth. They’ll have fake hot dogs and fake hamburgers made out of soybeans. It’s grotesque. I’m sure the readers will want to be outraged by this.”
“Kurt,” she said with exaggerated patience. “The road-widening story is clearly a more substantial piece of news.”
This was the mental disorder called journalism. But I couldn’t say that to Lisa. I had to try to honor her authority, even though I didn’t honor it, and use tact and guile to avoid writing about some goddamn roads.
“Road,” I said. “Dead pig. Dead pig on the road. I sense a union of ideas.”
She smiled at me with annoyance. “Can you do both stories?” she said.
“If I’m coerced.”
“You are.”
“You’re an evil woman. Do your sins ever upset you?”
“Not at work,” she said.
An old realization visited me again as I went to my desk. We frequently didn’t select stories because they had some obvious or immediate effect on the public. We selected them because we felt like it. This was important, and I composed it on my typewriter:
Another maxim of journalism:
News is anything we say it is.
That went up on the bulletin board. Then I went to my desk to try calling various vegans named in a press release about the meatless Fourth of July picnic, which the vegans were calling Independence-from-Flesh-Day. On the third call, I reached a woman named Kathi. Her last name wasn’t listed in the press release. When I told her who I was and that the press release didn’t list her last name, life became strange again.
“A last name is a yoke to the past, a form of cultural and spiritual bondage robbing you of genuine identity,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, since I thought it was the safest remark.
“My last name is gone,” she said.
“That’s an interesting last name,” I said.
“No. I’m afraid you misunderstand me.”
“Not really. You gave up your last name, and now you only have a first name.”
“That’s correct.”
For a while, I invaded her privacy and her life, asking her any questions I cared to think up for any reason, without justifying any of them, because that’s what reporters did.
“Why do vegans think it’s wrong to put dead animals in your mouth?” I said.
“Because animals are sentient,” she said.
“Not dead ones.”
“No, but animals shouldn’t be killed for food. They have an awareness of being alive. We believe it’s immoral, actually, to kill animals for food.”
“Then if a catfish eats a crawdad, the catfish is immoral?” I said, taking notes.
“No. Catfish don’t have morals,” she said.
“I know. They’re probably promiscuous. But that’s not really the point. The point is, if it’s immoral to eat animals because they’re sentient, then couldn’t you say that half the animal kingdom is immoral because they eat each other?”
“No, you can’t say that,” Kathi said without her last name. “Animals don’t have morals, so it’s not wrong for them to eat other animals.”
“Oh. Oh,” I said. “So if a Bengal tiger killed and ate me, that’s okay, but it would be immoral for me to eat a Bengal tiger, because he’s sentient.”
“I think you’re twisting my logic,” she said.
“No. I think it was kind of curved when I received it. Let’s quit using the word ‘moral’ and just use the words ‘good’ and ‘bad.’”
“All right,” she said kind of warily.
“Okay,” I said, because that’s how all classic intellectual arguments begin. “It’s bad to eat animals because they’re sentient.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Well then, when all the animals in the world eat other animals by necessity, it’s bad.”
“You’re trying to trick me into saying that nature is wrong, aren’t you?” she said.
“Well, I wouldn’t say a trick is necessary. If vegans say it’s bad to eat animals, then they are saying nature is wrong.”
“Mr. Clausen, I did not say that,” she said peevishly.
“No, but your reasoning says it.”
“I refuse to be interviewed,” she said, hanging up the phone.
Still, I had a legitimate story to write, one that would piss off all the vegans and vegetarians in Vermilion County. Sometimes reporting was fun. To add balance and depth to the story, I called an ethics professor at the university to chat about vegans.
“Is it immoral to eat hot dogs?” I said.
“Hot dogs aren’t sentient,” she said. “Is that the answer you’re looking for?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Then I can quote you as saying ‘Hot dogs aren’t aware of themselves?’”
“They don’t even know they exist,” she said.
“That’s a wonderful quote. Thank you.”
In the morning, as I ate breakfast with Janice, we both looked with delighted astonishment at my front-page story in the paper. She read the first few sentences aloud:
“The hot dogs people will eat by the thousands this Fourth of July once were aware of themselves.
“‘Yes, you could say that putting part of a slain pig in your mouth, in the form of a hot dog, is the same as eating a creature that once was sentient,’ said Kathi, one of the local vegans planning an Independence-from-Flesh Day picnic in Vermilion County.
“Kathi (who legally abandoned her last name) is among a growing number of vegans and animal rights activists who believe it’s wrong or immoral to kill animals for food.
“‘Animals are my friends, and I don’t eat my friends,’ Kathi said, attributing the quote to George Bernard Shaw.”
“That sounds sexual,” Janice said.
“I know. I don’t eat my friends. I don’t even lick them,” I said.
“You lick me” Janice said.
I was embarrassed, then leaned over and licked her nose.
“That’s not usually how you do it,” she said, grinning.
“I was raised not to have sex during breakfast,” I said, staring back at her.
Her eyes narrowed a little bit as she grinned. Putting her spoon down, she stood up in her peach nightshirt, pushed the table away and stood over me in the chair, straddling my legs and pulling up her nightshirt high enough to lower it back over my head, like a tent. By standing on her tiptoes, she arranged it so her warm stomach was right in front of my face.
“This is the best tent I was ever in,” I said.
“I’m the mysterious circus lady. See what I have for you?” she said. She sighed when I kissed her stomach, and didn’t say anything when she rolled her white panties down and stretched up higher on her toes. She was always a new gift.
25
One day, for no defensible reason, which was often how life progressed, the Ku Klux Klan decided to have a parade in St. Beaujolais to promote white pride and piss off all the liberals. I called Mayor Havelock in Small.
“There you are being overshadowed by St. Beaujolais again,” I said. “I bet you were pretty disappointed when, one more time, St. Beaujolais gets the parade.”
“It’s an honor to be snubbed by the Klan,” he said.
“Sure. You don�
�t even have any hotels or convention centers for them,” I said.
“I don’t have time to be bothered by you all day.”
“It doesn’t take that long.”
Harmon was nearly elated that sullen Klansmen with guns in their pickups were coming to town. “If everything works right,” he said, tapping his forefinger thoughtfully on his lip, “angry blacks and lunatic college students will call the Klansmen motherfuckers and failed descendants of the apes. Rocks and Molotov cocktails will be thrown. Innocent people will die needlessly in a bloody horror that’ll be shown on the ‘ABC Evening News.’ I hope it doesn’t rain.”
St. Beaujolais Mayor Barbara Sartor issued a formal statement saying although the Klan was not welcome in St. Beaujolais, their presence couldn’t be forbidden without violating their civil rights.
“On the day of the parade,” her statement said, “I urge all residents of St. Beaujolais to stay away from downtown, granting the Klansmen a parade and no spectators. To be greeted by a ghost town would be the welcome they deserve.”
Harmon and I were assigned to cover the parade. Harmon said if I got killed, he’d write about me. I said if he got killed, I’d steal his car. Janice reacted to the parade with mild anxiety and depression, telling me to always stay as far away from the crowd and the Klansmen as possible, and to please not die on her. “You come home to me, dammit,” she said, staring real hard into my eyes; not that I was in any known or likely danger, but that when she even imagined me dying, it scared her. I told her I’d always come home to her.
On the afternoon of the parade I wore basketball shoes, in case I had to run, and jeans, a black, short-sleeve shirt, sunglasses, and my Cleveland Indians cap. Captain Trollope, who was accustomed to seeing me in a dress shirt and necktie, squinted at me with amused uncertainty.
“You look like a drug dealer,” he said.
“It’s just a weekend job,” I said.
He and I stared off down West Jefferson Street at about forty or fifty of his uniformed officers standing along both sides of the street for several blocks. They all wore helmets. Trollope said another thirty-five or forty officers from Small and the county were available, on standby, plus some highway patrolmen. Barricades had been put up at both ends of the parade route to keep cars off the street. Pedestrians were allowed to walk on the sidewalks, but only a dozen or more people were out.