Begin to Exit Here

by John Welter

  “I’m not an authority,” he said. “As far as I know, no one’s an authority on brain-sucking.”

  “Wow. It’s a whole new field. Should I call the Department of Brain-Sucking at Johns Hopkins?”

  “I wasn’t aware they had one.”

  “I wonder if it’s in the Yellow Pages.”

  Eventually I had to end this systematic interviewing and take my story notes down the street to Stanley’s where I sat by myself on the deathly humid terrace while drinking Central American coffee from a nation we hadn’t invaded yet as I experimented on my legal pad with straightforward, perplexing ways to write this newest news for the morning paper. People who thought life in St. Beaujolais and Small was relatively civil and refined might open the paper to read this sentence:

  Threats to suck kindergarteners’ brains through their ears are being examined tentatively by the district attorney.

  It seemed too fantastical to be true, while the main quality it had was that of being true. Sometimes if you just wrote the truth without exaggeration, no one would believe it. Then I began to wonder if you could say “suck” in a family paper, such as “suck on this, this sucks, go suck a dead dog.” This wasn’t particularly helpful for my story, but I knew a lot of people disliked the word “suck” and might find it offensive in the news. Was there a genteel way to discuss brain-sucking? Probably Miss Manners knew.

  On my legal pad I wrote:

  Although a University physician says brain-sucking isn’t a credible skill, the Vermilion-Wellington County district attorney is investigating a reported threat to suck kindergarteners’ brains through their ears.

  In a way, it didn’t seem possible or even advisable to correctly write this story as if I were alerting the public to the horrors of something that almost certainly wasn’t a real threat. My general usefulness to the public was under suspicion again, but that was a truth about journalism anyway. Sometimes the news wasn’t worth knowing, but like a child picking up a handful of exotic, unidentified crud from the bottom of a ditch, we carried it home, just in case.

  As I glanced up from my private, journalistic ditch, there was Janice, and some old man with her, staring at me from the end of the terrace and walking down the little aisle toward me.

  “Hey,” I said, because that was how people were supposed to greet each other in this part of the South. In Kansas City, people said “Hi,” but I’d learned in North Carolina that you talked like you came from the “Andy Griffith Show.” So if I’d been sitting there on the terrace at Stanley’s and Pope John Paul II approached me with a bunch of cardinals and bishops, I wouldn’t say, “Good evening, your holiness.” I’d say, “Hey, your holiness.”

  “Hey,” Janice said back to me as she and the old man arrived at my table. “Kurt, this is my father, Joseph.”

  I stood up abruptly to shake his hand.

  “We came here for an early dinner,” Janice said as she put her arm around my waist. “Daddy flew in from Philadelphia today, and I’m so glad we ran into you here. Are you working on a story here? Well, Daddy, you get to see a newspaper story being written for the morning paper.”

  “Well, please have a seat,” I said.

  “We can’t interrupt your work,” Mr. Galassi said.

  “Yes, you can. It’s not hard,” I said. “Please, go on and have a seat. I’ll finish the story later.”

  “Let me see your lead,” Janice said, taking my legal pad and holding it up in front of her.

  “Those are just notes. I’m still working on it,” I said.

  “What’s it about?” Mr. Galassi said. Before I could explain or object, Janice started reading aloud from my notes.

  “Threats to suck kindergarteners’ brains through their ears are being examined tentatively by the district attorney,” Janice read, sniggering and putting the notes down to stare at me with amusement and maybe some embarrassment that she had no idea what this meant but she’d just read it in front of her father, who probably couldn’t imagine I was a serious, responsible reporter if I sat at a table at Stanley’s writing bizarre descriptions of brain-sucking.

  “What’s that all about?” Mr. Galassi said wonderingly.

  “Yeah, Kurt. Is there some Satanic cult at a kindergarten?” Janice asked.

  “I think that would go on the religion page. That’s not my beat,” I said, taking my notes from Janice so I wouldn’t have to explain them right then.

  Mr. Galassi smiled at me and said, “So you’re the young man Janice has been telling me about.”

  “I hope so. I hope she hasn’t been telling you about some other man,” I said.

  “I was, but he insisted on hearing about you, so I told him,” Janice said.

  “Actually, you’re almost the only person she talked about,” Mr. Galassi said.

  “I told her I’d give her a dollar if she did that,” I said, pulling out my wallet and getting a dollar out. Janice smiled and took the dollar.

  “He doesn’t pay very well, does he?” Mr. Galassi said.

  “No, but he’s a nice man,” Janice said. “He doesn’t earn much now because he’s a journalist, but he can give me more money for saying nice things about him when he sells a southern novel he’s writing called Uncle Tom’s Cabin Cruiser.”

  I’d forgotten about that. Across the table, Janice grinned at me.

  “Uncle Tom’s Cabin Cruiser?” Mr. Galassi said.

  I nodded my head. “Yeah. One night while Janice and I were barbecuing some chicken and talking about what we hoped to do in life, I was rambling about important southern novels written by Northerners and decided inexcusably to write a novel called Uncle Tom’s Cabin Cruiser. It would be about a slave working for the Securities and Exchange Commission. That’s how he can afford the boat.”

  “The Securities and Exchange Commission? You didn’t give him that job when we first talked about it,” Janice said.

  “A lot of time has passed. I promoted him.”

  30

  It was Janice’s idea to take her father, who was a sixty-two-year-old retired police detective, down to The Tomb with its clientele dressed variously for the tastes of a rock club, a redneck bar, or a jail.

  “This is like descending into hell,” Mr. Galassi said as he stared at the low-hanging, fake rock ceiling and the fake rock walls protruding jaggedly everywhere in a steady haze of cigarette smoke, like the imagined dimness of hell.

  “Hell doesn’t have Christmas lights,” Janice said, pointing at the string of tiny Christmas lights suspended from the ceiling.

  “By God,” Mr. Galassi said, as if discovering another unexpected weirdness. “This is July.”

  “They have July in hell,” Janice said.

  “Do they? I wonder what winter is like in hell. Do they have molten snow?” I said.

  “This place reminds me of jail,” Mr. Galassi said.

  “We wanted you to feel at home, Daddy,” Janice said.

  “Then I should be questioning a robbery or murder suspect,” he said.

  “We’ll introduce you to some of them later,” I said. “First let me get you and Janice a beer.” I got them each a bottle of Rolling Rock, and Mr. Galassi stared curiously, maybe even suspiciously, at my bottle of Soho Cream Soda.

  “Isn’t that a childrens’ drink?” he said, sounding like a detective. “You’re not much of a drinker.”

  From the corner of my eye I saw Janice blink or flinch, and almost imperceptibly, I felt her fingers in the middle of my back, as if to protect me. I wondered how you conversationally said you’re an alcoholic and you don’t want to painfully deteriorate, watch your mind vanish, and die.

  “Actually I’m an excellent drinker,” I said, reaching behind me to put my finger in Janice’s hand. She grasped my finger. “I could probably drink more than anybody in this room and not even feel sleepy. But once you get that good, excellence becomes lethal. So when I realized I’d mastered everything that matters about drinking, I quit.”

  Mr. Galassi looked a l
ittle embarrassed, as if realizing I’d been accidentally cornered and, out of politeness to myself, I wasn’t going to say I was an alcoholic.

  “Oh, oh,” he said, kind of apologetically. “So you’re on the wagon?”

  “I wonder why people always think of a wagon,” I said, “as if, if you don’t drink, you’re expected to get on this particular wagon. And it’s always the wagon, implying that of the hundreds of thousands of people in the world who quit drinking, all of them somehow are crushed and smashed and gathered simultaneously on just one wagon.”

  “So you’re not on the wagon,” Mr. Galassi said.

  “I hate that expression. It makes me envision alcoholics on a hayride,” I said, smiling slightly. “Like people spending the summer at Camp Detox. Everyone get on the wagon, now. We’re gonna drive this son of a bitch at full speed and see how many of you fall off. Uh-oh. A bump. Ahhhhhhh! Well, there went some of ‘em. At Camp Detox, we’re looking for the few, the proud: Alcoholics on a Hayride. And do you know what I just realized? The acronym for Alcoholics on a Hayride would be this: Ahhhhh!”

  31

  The following day at work, in one of my ordinary seizures of severe and chronic whimsy, I devised a new rule of English: “i before e except on Friday.”

  This came after Marta was trying to spell “seize” in a story she was doing about cops seizing some marijuana. On her computer she had written “The officers siezed approximately 50 bags of marijuana.”

  “This doesn’t look right. How do you spell seize?” she said.

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “But if you use the rule ‘i before e except after c,’ then I’ve spelled it right,” she said. “But it still doesn’t look right.”

  I got out my dictionary and saw that it was spelled with the e before the i.

  “The old rule doesn’t apply,” I said. “Because today’s Friday, the new rule is ‘i before e except on Friday.’”

  “Thank you, Kurt. You’re unbearably helpful,” Marta said.

  Distractedly, because that’s all I was good at then, I wondered about doing a follow-up on the kindergarten story, saying no charges could be filed because the district attorney saw no genuine criminal threat in telling children you were going to suck their brains through their ears. It was rude, but not criminal. First, I distractedly studied Perrault’s new memo:

  Reporters invariably deal with sensitive, upsetting subjects in the community, such as rape; incest; child abuse; pederasty; sex with farm animals; prominent homosexuals; Satanism; lesbians who want sperm; property taxes; and cock fighting. Always we need to exercise our utmost care and prudence in selecting a story that’s newsworthy and in writing that story in a way that’s both factual, balanced, correct, responsible, tasteful, and follows the basic tenets of sound newswriting.

  Sometimes a reporter, aided by an inattentive editor, deviates from sound journalism, as in the recent story on the unfortunate children in St. Beaujolais who were led to believe that their kindergarten teacher would suck their brains out. Doubtless, the story was somewhat newsworthy, since an apparent threat against innocent children was made. But in my experienced view, the lead of the story placed too much emphasis on brain-sucking and failed to name a specific, tenable criminal offense in a more abstract manner, such as assault. The reporter also might have been taking liberties in his writing style by inserting fatuous information from a neurologist announcing the slight likelihood of anyone sucking out a child’s brain.

  The story could have been far more precise and readable had the reporter simply stated the basic facts and avoided extraneous musings and implied humor about something so serious as a child’s brain. Perhaps we need to re-examine our mission to provide the public with concise, unadorned facts that aren’t wantonly interpreted by unmindful reporters.

  Normally you could ignore Perrault’s memos. I’d been told to regard him as a pompous figurehead, a former reporter and editor who, if he ever had much extraordinary skill in journalism, found no occasion to display it anymore. His advice was never wanted and was followed—if at all—begrudgingly. While he sat in his distant office in Hampton, drawing an unknown salary to match his concealed worth, other editors actually ran the paper, and Perrault fired memos at everyone like a retired general fucking around with the artillery and striking his own troops. His newest memo was far longer than normal, and instead of blathering tediously about his latest annoyance and then shutting up, he seemed to have found a more volatile source for his suspicion and hostility. Me.

  Everyone else in the bureau told me to ignore the memo anyway, like I always did.

  “Maybe you should go to Hampton and suck his brain through his ears,” Harmon said.

  “I wonder why he suddenly doesn’t like me,” I said. “I’ve been trying to write in my style and violate every tradition he believes in for about two months. Is he just now noticing?”

  “Could be,” Rebecca speculated. “Or maybe somebody complained about your story, and Perrault, who otherwise doesn’t notice anything, was forced to realize you exist.”

  “Could we tell him to stop reading the paper?” I wondered. “I know what. I’ll send him a memo saying what his staff writes is none of his business.”

  32

  My story in the morning paper, which I assumed at least several thousand people read for their general well-being, said, “Criminal charges won’t be filed against a woman who said she would suck the brains out of kindergarteners’ ears because brain-sucking can’t be regarded as a credible threat, District Attorney Susan Crewes said Friday.”

  I liked it. It was true, concise, and exceedingly strange. Lisa worried about my prose style, though. She said I could have written a more harmless lead such as “District Attorney Susan Crewes says no basis exists for filing criminal charges against a St. Beaujolais kindergarten teacher who threatened a bizarre punishment for noisy children.”

  “Child abuse is a sensitive issue, Kurt,” she said as we talked in her office.

  “You mean brain-sucking is a sensitive issue,” I said. “Although how do we know? It’s never happened before, so no one has any opinions on it. I know what you really mean. You don’t like my lead because it faithfully repeats the grotesque threat of sucking children’s brains out, as if we’re supposed to report the truth without saying the truth because it’s upsetting. If my writing style is upsetting it’s because the world is upsetting.”

  She didn’t particularly want to say I was right.

  “I could have rewritten your lead if I’d wanted to,” she said.

  “Yes, and thank you for not doing it.”

  “Why can’t you be a normal reporter and write serious, straightforward, abstract crap that doesn’t show any trace of irony or comprehension of how strange your job is?”

  “I’m not that way.”

  “Why can’t you just be an ordinary, muck-raking reporter who wants to tell the truth in a highly imitative style that’s indistinguishable from the style of ten thousand other reporters?”

  “Being ordinary is a disease.”

  “Would it kill you to write like everyone else and be a dutiful AP clone?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll never do it.”

  “Well, here’s something to think about,” she said. “Perrault.”

  “What about Perrault?”

  “I’ll tell you about Perrault. Everyone thinks he’s just this harmless old man remote from everything and pleasantly unable to have an effect on the paper anymore, but I don’t know. He still has the luxury of power, and you’ve pissed him off.”

  “I know. I worry about that. Do you think he’ll do anything other than remain pissed off and write snotty memos?”

  “Well, it’s not something I’m going to ask him, Kurt. But what I worry about for you is that Perrault, like most editors, is pretty much an orthodox traditionalist. That is, he thinks all stories should be written however it was he got used to writing them himself back whenever it was that he was most successfu
l and started getting promoted. I don’t know what most journalism schools are teaching now, or what they taught when Perrault was a student, but a basic axiom that I don’t think will ever be changed is that, in fact, I think the axiom was in one of your notes on the bulletin board: Dare to be the same. I’m pretty damn sure that Perrault honors that axiom, and when someone like you comes along, defying the great sameness of the world and sneering at every tradition, he’s going to want to kick your ass, you know.”

  “I know.”

  We sat quietly for a few seconds, as if allowing me to be noiselessly in trouble and begin wondering how I might change myself to become ordinary. It would never happen.

  33

  A meeting was held in the bureau to discuss the newspaper’s policy on shit.

  “You’ve seen this,” Lisa said to everyone, holding a copy of Perrault’s newest memo.

  “Oh shit,” Harmon said. When he was interviewing a university student about attitudes toward the role of the military in achieving a president’s political goals, Harmon asked why the student felt it was fine for George Bush to send twenty-some-thousand soldiers to Panama and overthrow a government. The student’s answer, which got printed in the paper, was: “Sometimes the greatest good for the greatest number is achieved by kicking the shit out of someone.” We did get a few disagreeable phone calls from incensed readers who wouldn’t say “shit” over the phone, and we were too polite to say “shit” either, so we just had to guess that shit was the subject they so despised in the paper. Perrault despised it, too. His memo said: “There plainly has been some uncertainty among our staff on the News-Dispatch’s policy about vulgarities and obscenities. This is our policy: Don’t use them.

  “The definition of a family paper is one that contains reading matter suitable for a prude, and that’s who you should assume you’re writing for: a prude.”

  “We’re just writing for one person?” I said. “We need more subscribers than that.”