Begin to Exit Here

by John Welter

  “Of course you weren’t deliberately attacking me, but it was almost worse than that because you’d obviously written something funny and potentially damaging without even guessing I could feel this way. You demeaned,” she said, creating little waves of red sauce in the pan, “my work, my responsibilities and me. And to you, it was an innocent amusement. AIDS research compared to breakfast at Shoney’s?” she said contemptuously, whacking the spoon on the edge of the pan to dislodge a gob of tomato sauce. “When did a fatal epidemic become funny, Kurt? And why was my job just a goddamn occasion for you to be clever?”

  There was nothing to defend. I was guilty. My impulse was to be punished as long as she felt I deserved it. She looked back angrily at me, as if my silence was a new offense.

  “Aren’t you going to talk?” she said.

  “No. I can’t defend myself because you’re right. I stupidly hurt you without realizing it could happen. Your criticisms are completely correct and fair. I was a self-willed, witless son of a bitch.”

  “Yes, you were,” she said, and began stirring the sauce even though it was already stirred and almost frothy. “And what should I do now? Forgive you because that would be nice? I don’t feel like being nice. I feel hurt and cheated, like you didn’t take me any more seriously than just a fortunate excuse for being funny. I exist too, goddamn you. All of my emotions and impulses are there just as strongly as yours, and I’m not some piece of material to be toyed with in a goddamn story. I don’t think I want a lover who has to be reminded that I’m real.”

  This scared me.

  “Are you leaving me?” I said quietly.

  She stopped stirring the tomato sauce and sighed. “I’m not leaving you. I’m fixing dinner. If I were leaving you, I wouldn’t feed you, you idiot. Do you think I’m such a nice woman that I’d give you an I’m-Leaving-You dinner? Good God. And quit standing behind me so quietly like a prisoner about to be killed. If I wanted to kill you, I would’ve shot you at the door. At least tell me you’re sorry.”

  I walked behind her and leaned my face against her head. “I’m sorry.”

  Reaching behind her, she put her arm around my neck as if to hug me, then increased the pressure enough to begin lightly choking me against her shoulder.

  “You really hurt me,” she said quietly as she choked me.

  “I didn’t mean to. I can’t be forgiven if you choke me to death.”

  “I’m not squeezing that hard yet,” she said, holding me to her affectionately enough to make unconsciousness seem imminent.

  42

  Christopher met me at the Same Place bar in Hampton to warn me that the qualities that made me valuable were also the ones that would make me fail. But first he decided to ridicule me for not drinking bourbon, like him, because I ordered a cup of coffee from the bartender.

  “I’m embarrassed to be seen with you. It’s un-American to drink coffee in a bar,” he said, playfully chiding me, without having any idea that I’d lived in a disabling panic for two days when I quit drinking.

  “I’m not an American. I was born in Texas,” I said.

  He sighed and scowled at me and my coffee, saying, “What are you, a born-again, charismatic, viper-fondling Christian?”

  “I don’t join clubs.”

  He nodded his head approvingly, then lit a Pall Mall from the butt of the Pall Mall he hadn’t finished smoking. Swallowing his double bourbon in two gulps, he ordered another one by holding up his index finger toward the bartender. Once he had his new drink and took a sizable sip, reminding me of the pleasure of alcohol rapidly poisoning your brain so that whatever hurt you seemed absent, when, really, it was just some of your consciousness going away, I said, “So is this a meeting or what?”

  “Sort of,” he said. “I just called you here to warn you about yourself. You’re doing a good enough job as a reporter it could fling you entirely out of this profession.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means a lot. I think when I hired you, I remember saying something like there’s something wrong with you. It might be valuable.”

  “Yes, and why are you warning me about myself?”

  “Well, it’s not something you don’t already know about, Kurt. Practically everything that makes you valuable as a reporter is precisely what most editors loathe, particularly Perrault. Most newspaper editors think of the readers as dull mammals with a single impulse to acquire facts, and a fact is any knowledge generally robbed of its complexity and undecorated with any emotion or irony or humanness. A true journalist, which you’re incapable of being, always tries to write a story as if simple factuality is all that matters. You’re not a true journalist. I don’t know what you are.”

  “A vertebrate.”

  Christopher sniffed his bourbon audibly, like a dog or a cat exploring for food, then took a big sip and stared off at three young women together at a table.

  “Perrault despises you,” he said.

  “Despises? He doesn’t know me well enough for that much emotion,” I said.

  “He doesn’t need to know you at all, and wishes you were gone,” Christopher said in his normal voice, without urgency or much emotion.

  “Why does it matter that he despises me?”

  “Yesterday when he was pissed off at virtually every story you’ve done in the last two months, like the Nicklai Indian episode, he called me into his office and asked why I hired you.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  He took another big sip of bourbon. “I told him you had substantial reporting experience, nothing excellent, but sound experience. And I told him you were a genuine writer, someone who knows why we even bother to put a single sentence on a page.”

  I nodded my head. “The reason we put a single sentence on a page is because most readers think two sentences is too much to read.”

  “And Perrault said he thinks you’re a self-willed, arrogant butthead,” Christopher said.

  We were both quiet, wondering about that description.

  “What do I do that he hates the most?” I said.

  “Work on his paper,” Christopher said.

  “And why should I care? Can he comfortably despise me for months and months, growing accustomed to my intolerable existence?”

  “No. He won’t change, and you won’t change. Or will you? To please Perrault, all you have to do is make every story as mundane as possible, showing no trace of yourself and a subservient adherence to that popular distortion of reality known as traditional journalism.”

  “Did he tell you that? Did he say what he wanted me to do?”

  “I don’t recall precisely what he said, but he described it as a strange experiment for me to have hired you. And he said he was getting fucking tired of reading what he described as your inexcusable offenses against objective newswriting.”

  “Tell him not to read it. Tell him to stop reading the paper. No one wants him to. How old is Perrault?”

  “I don’t know. He’s in his early sixties. But that won’t help you. He’s not going to die in his sleep.”

  “I don’t want him to die. I’d like it if he passed out for the rest of his life.”

  “You’re a humanitarian.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m a Sagittarian.”

  “Oh. Another s word.”

  “What am I supposed to do? I mean, does he have an ultimatum or something, or did he just say he’d keep hating what I do, or what?”

  “He didn’t say and I didn’t ask him. I think he believes that after I’ve told you all this, you’ll get nervous and timid and become an ordinary reporter.”

  “What will he do the next time he reads one of my stories and can’t stand it?”

  Christopher drank some bourbon and lit another Pall Mall with the butt of his last one. “I really don’t know. One thing he can do is ask me to fire you. But I won’t do it. I told Perrault that some of your sins against journalism were worth being committed. All that did was make him angrier, as if he were being
betrayed by me. He said he wanted to see some marked improvement in your work.”

  “Tell him it’s already there.”

  “I don’t think he’s capable of knowing that. Perrault doesn’t like talent. When he sees it, he regards it as a blight that needs to be removed.”

  “Is he going to remove me?”

  “He could. And that’s why I’m warning you. You’ve met a man who’s fundamentally opposed to everything you do well. If you persist in writing in your style, he might fire you. If you choose to become conscientiously mundane, he might give you a raise. What I think I’m telling you, Kurt, is you have to make this decision: sink or sink.”

  43

  And now I was beginning to realize there was a time when you saw failure rushing unalterably toward you and, rather than dodge it, which couldn’t happen, you had to direct that failure, select it and shape it, and at least have the honor to choose and refine the course of your own ruination. So I would. It would have been too easy to go on as usual and allow Perrault’s unremarkable loathing of me to result in my being fired again. That would have given Perrault the reason to get rid of me, when I wanted the reason to get rid of me. I think I decided that since my actions were going to ruin me anyway, I might as well ruin myself, instead of letting someone else do it. In other words, I decided to repress all my natural impulses, write exactly the way Perrault wanted me to write, and thus defeat myself before Perrault defeated me. It would be like standing in front of a firing squad and, right before they shot you, you pulled out your own gun, said, “I refuse to be shot by bastards like you,” then shot yourself.

  I resolved all of this secretly, to ruin myself rather than let Perrault ruin me, and I didn’t tell anyone, not even Janice, but simply began this private campaign the next morning at work. Whatever I would normally doctor up or refine in my personal style I’d ignore and treat as just raw fact, raw information. What I was presented with that morning—by Lisa, so no one could say I had any bias in either selecting or rejecting it as a story—was a new lawsuit in which a woman from Cokesboro was suing the Coca-Cola Company after she found a bug like a centipede in a bottle of Coke. I mean a bug like a centipede, and not precisely a centipede, because neither the woman nor her lawyer could irrefutably identify the dead bug as a centipede. When I interviewed the woman, Donna Reidel, over the phone, I said, “How many legs does it have?”

  “Well, I’m certainly not going to count them,” she said with irritation and distaste.

  “I think a centipede’s supposed to have a hundred legs.”

  “I don’t have to count them. All that matters is I found a dead bug in my Coke.”

  “What if it’s a millipede?”

  “What’s that?” she wondered.

  “I think it’s supposed to have a thousand legs. Did you and your lawyer count your bug’s legs, or are you just estimating?”

  “I have no idea,” she said.

  “Well, I think a judge and also the public is going to be at least a little bit curious about whether it was a hundred legs or a thousand legs in your Coke,” I said. “And, as a reporter, I’m obligated to be precise.”

  I wasn’t going to put down in my story how the woman hung up on me. But it was exactly the innate oddness and silliness of the story that prompted Lisa to give it to me, although I refused to treat it oddly or with any respect for the dear art of silliness like I usually would. And with some sadness I wouldn’t explain and didn’t really understand, either, I told Lisa this was the end of my reign of silliness and personal style at the paper, and that regardless of how appropriate humor or irony might be to the dead-bug-in-the-Coke story, I no longer was going to supply it. My instinct, my most natural impulse, was to begin doing the story this way, sort of:

  Donna Reidel doesn’t know if the dead bug she says she found in a bottle of Coke was a centipede or a millipede.

  “I don’t care whose pede it was. It was in my Coke and I’m suing,” she said Monday.

  Or another lead I thought of after I talked briefly with a lawyer for the Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta was this:

  The ingredients in Coke aren’t supposed to include centipedes.

  In a way it was endless, the ways you could play with the facts and still be factual. But I wasn’t doing that anymore. The lead I wrote and which was printed in the paper was this one:

  A Cokesboro woman filed a suit in Vermilion County against the Coca-Cola Company after allegedly finding a dead insect in a bottle of Coke.

  When I wrote that lead on my computer, Lisa and I stared at it quietly, like spectators at a sorrowful accident who are nonetheless fascinated by the damage.

  “Why are you writing that?” Lisa asked quietly. “It’s sterile and dead.”

  “That’s my new style,” I said. “I’m giving the editors what they want. Corpses.”

  Everyone knew, when the morning paper came out, that something was wrong, that an unexplained decision had been made and something was ended. They looked at me, Harmon and Rebecca and the others in the bureau, the way people sort of secretively stared at someone who just got a new disease that probably was going to kill them. And it was going to kill me, but at my own pace and for my own reasons. All that was good about it, if self-destruction can be regarded as good, was that I controlled my own vanishment. I wondered if vanishment was a word. I liked the way it sounded. It sounded better and more noble than controlling my own destruction or doom. I at least had my vanishment to look forward to.

  As I advanced nobly toward my vanishment, without even knowing exactly when I’d reach it or how I’d know when I got there, the next story I deliberately screwed up and wrote with as much lethal dullness and fatal factualism as possible came in the morning when we got a press release announcing a PLO dance in St. Beaujolais. The press release was mailed to us by a group called the American Arab League, ostensibly some national group with members at the university, and the release was essentially a flier explaining almost nothing and saying this:

  PLO Dance

  Live Music. Rock, Blues

  & traditional Arabic

  music.

  Benefit concert for Palestinian families displaced in Israel and the occupied territories.

  Dance sponsored by the American Arab League. $3 cover. Profits to be disbursed by the Palestine Liberation Organization.

  I didn’t know the PLO could dance. Ever since I’d known of them, they’d been more associated with bullets and explosions than with dancing; although it was true, as someone pointed out to me one day, that Yasser Arafat looked a hell of a lot like Ringo Starr. But Arafat didn’t play an instrument, unless you regarded a grenade launcher as musical. Maybe you could regard it as a percussion instrument. And at least these were the natural thoughts I was having as I studied the strange task of writing a serious news story about a PLO dance at the university. It was too bizarre, the entire notion of a PLO dance. It was like announcing a fascist covered-dish supper. Or a Nazi bake sale. Or a Stalinist bingo game. Even if you intelligently and correctly realized that the Palestinian people had been violated and did deserve some kind of a national homeland, and even if you intelligently and correctly realized that at least some of the goals of the PLO were good, it was still, when you associated the PLO with dancing, just pretty damn strange. Maybe next time there’d be a PLO Easter-egg hunt. Before I called the organizers to interview them about the dance, I thought of asking them if you should bring your own sandbags and automatic weapons for the dance.

  When I thought of all those Palestinian boys and teenagers throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers and police, when I imagined all those Palestinians getting years of earnest experience in skillfully throwing rocks, I wondered if they might start becoming major league pitchers. Could there be a PLO expansion team? You could call them the Occupied West Bank Dodgers. Or you could call them the Gaza White Sock, because they could only afford one sock.

  Thinking of PLO baseball reminded me of Christopher Columbus. This was because in 1492, Co
lumbus discovered the Dominican Republic, where dozens of major league baseball players are born. In fact, when Columbus was named Admiral of the Ocean Sea and set off to find a new route to reach Asia, he was the world’s first baseball scout, sort of, since what he discovered was Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico, where about one-third of all the Earth’s serious ball players were to be conceived and bred one day. I got out my baseball cards at home for some research on my PLO dance/baseball story and realized this:

  Niña rhymes with Peña.

  That is, Columbus’s ship, the Niña, rhymes with Tony Peña, a catcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, and it rhymes with Alejandro Peña, a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers. And guess what? Tony Peña was born in Montecristi, Dominican Republic. And Alejandro Peña was born in Cambiaso, Dominican Republic. What I did then, just as a cursory yet sensible check for my PLO baseball story, was use my baseball cards as a research library to compile a sample list of major-league ball players from the Caribbean. I found out that José Canseco of the Oakland Athletics was born in Havana. And so was Rafael Palmeiro, the first baseman for the Texas Rangers. And Ivan Calderon, of the Chicago White Sox, was born in Fajaro, Puerto Rico. All this made me think that when Columbus walked onshore in the Dominican Republic, he said, “I’m sent by the king and queen of Spain. We’re looking for shortstops and centerfielders.”

  I read in a literary reference book of mine that in 1498, Columbus sailed along the coast of Venezuela. Maybe that’s where he found Luis Salazar, a third baseman for the Detroit Tigers. Salazar was born in Barcelona, Venezuela. Based on this research alone, it became astonishingly clear that—

  No, it didn’t, really. But I was acting like it became astonishingly clear that Christopher Columbus was the father of major-league baseball. However, as my mind regressed to the subject of the PLO dance and the strange possibility of PLO baseball, I wondered if there were any Palestinians in major-league baseball. I looked through my cards and didn’t find any Arabs or Palestinians, but I found Denny Martinez, a pitcher for the Montreal Expos who was born in Grenada, Nicaragua. The baseball card didn’t say if he was a Contra or a Sandinista. I think he was just a pitcher.