Begin to Exit Here

by John Welter

  These were my thoughts and impulses and sensibilities and natural ramblings, none of which I used when it was time for the serious reporting about the PLO dance. All I wrote in the lead was:

  A dance to raise money for displaced Palestinian families in Israel will be held at the university this weekend.

  Harmon looked at that lead on my computer and made a realistic puking sound.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he said.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “That lead sucks, just like yesterday. You’re not normal anymore. What’s wrong with you?”

  “I’ve decided to become normal. That’s what’s wrong with me.”

  Then came the incident of the unidentified flying omelet. Several people from the public at large and also a state trooper reported seeing something like a spaceship or a meteor or, at least, some damn thing flying in the air one night. The difficulty with such things is that because no one sees them very clearly or for very long and they don’t know what happens with them when they vanish from sight, then this is what people can tell you with real certainty: hardly anything. When this trooper, Trooper Saundra Gamel, described to me over the phone how she’d seen a bluish, reddish, somewhat orange object shooting rapidly across the night sky, I asked her what she thought it was.

  “An unidentified flying omelet,” she said.

  “What?” I said, because I couldn’t quite be sure she said “omelet.”

  “I get so tired of people saying UFO this and UFO that when they think they mean spaceship and really they don’t know at all what they’ve seen, so it’s kind of a personal joke of mine to say that UFO stands for unidentified flying omelet,” she said.

  “You mean it wasn’t a meteor, it was an omelet?”

  “Might as well have been, if you don’t know what it was,” she said pleasantly.

  “Maybe I should call up the Air Force and ask if they detected any breakfast food on their radar tonight,” I said, writing that down in my notes.

  “You might try it. I’m not so sure omelets show up on radar, though.”

  “I wonder if hash browns show up on radar.”

  “There’s a lot we don’t know.”

  As much as I wanted to do a factual, correct, and playful news story including the idea of unidentified flying omelets, I remained loyal to my new and lifeless prose style, and the lead I wrote was just factual: “Colored lights spotted racing through the night sky near St. Beaujolais Thursday have authorities and the public wondering.”

  44

  Every day for two weeks I wrote this way, ignoring all of my natural impulses and sort of castrating or suffocating myself spiritually. I didn’t know what it was supposed to lead to. My death, maybe? I didn’t know what happened when you mutilated yourself emotionally for so long. But it was successful. After two weeks of this horrible self-mutilation, I was now regarded as such a promising reporter that Perrault praised me in a memo and gave me a one-hundred-dollar-a-month raise. I reacted to this honor by quitting.

  It was, I decided later on in a somewhat peaceful and sullen mood, something I wanted to be able to put on my resumé; that I quit my last job because they gave me a raise. This seemed funny, but actually being ruined hurt too much to really be very funny, and now I had no future or safety, which probably I never had anyway. I told Lisa goodbye and everyone else in the bureau goodbye, wondering how stupidly dramatic it was to quit abruptly like that, although I found the drama fully enjoyable in a kind of touching, masochistic way. Instead of letting Perrault ruin me, I ruined myself. Wasn’t that better?

  One didn’t know. So one just walked across and down the street that evening to Stanley’s for a newer and equally inexplicable drama. At the bar, where I no longer drank, I ordered a bottle of champagne.

  “You don’t drink, though,” Nicole the bartender told me. “Remember?” she said with a cautious smile.

  “You don’t have to drink to order champagne,” I said. “I’m celebrating my job.”

  “What about your job?” Nicole asked as two people I didn’t know at the bar stared at me and Nicole and my bottle of champagne.

  “My editor just gave me a raise, so I quit,” I said, then poured a glass of champagne and pushed the glass along the bar toward this woman I didn’t know, saying to her: “Here. I want you to celebrate the job I just quit. I don’t drink, so you’ll have to do it for me, please.”

  She said okay, and so did her boyfriend or whoever the man was who was with her, and without any genuine understanding of what was happening to me or how I felt, I celebrated the loss of my job. Chief Donner came in later for dinner and walked up to me, smiling at me and the bottle of champagne in front of me.

  “Are you getting married? Did you have a child?” he asked.

  “I can’t have children. I don’t have a uterus,” I said. “But here. Let me get you a glass of champagne.” And I poured him some.

  “And what are we celebrating?” Donner said cheerfully and uncertainly.

  “My editor,” I said, staring at Donner ironically or something, “the one who can’t stand my existence, just gave me a one-hundred-dollar-a-month raise for agreeing to never write like myself again. So I quit.”

  “You quit?”

  I nodded my head yes. “Either he was going to defeat me, or I was. I wanted to do it myself.”

  Donner looked at me with a sort of amused but serious expression, as if there was some pain I refused to mention. “He wouldn’t compromise?”

  “Well, I think this is a compromise. I’m gone,” I said, sipping the coffee and whipped cream Nicole gave me as a substitute for champagne. Donner patted my back lightly and sat in the chair next to mine.

  “I think you’re in danger of becoming a professional outsider,” he said.

  “Is that a job? I need one,” I said.

  “No. You don’t get paid for being a professional outsider. It’s more of a situation.”

  “Like yours?”

  “What? You mean the gay police chief?” he said, smiling.

  “That definitely makes you a serious outsider.”

  “True. And that’s exactly what you’re getting into, I suspect.”

  “No. I’ll never be a gay police chief. It’s just not one of my ambitions.”

  “Well, the market around here can’t hold too many, anyway, and I don’t want you competing with me. But I mean I think you’ve made some decisions over a long period of time, even if you’re not aware of them, that helped deliberately push you into the role of the professional outsider, because you sure as hell aren’t an in-sider. You don’t even have a job,” Donner said lightly and sipped some champagne. “Do you mind if I talk this seriously about your private life that I know almost nothing about?”

  “No. It’s fine. I don’t have anything left but a private life.”

  “Well, why are you doing this? I’ve never known anyone, except maybe me, who suddenly quit their job and endangered themselves financially for purely personal and moral reasons.”

  “Danger’s one of the few things I’m good at.”

  “I believe you.”

  “When did you quit a job for purely personal, reckless reasons like me?” I asked.

  “In this little city in Idaho called Soda Springs, when I was a captain on the police force. The police chief there learned that I was gay, and, unwilling to have any queer officers in the department, he ordered me to lead a raid on a supposedly gay bar in town, even though there wasn’t anything illegal about gays going to a bar. And I resigned.”

  “That was stupid. Then you didn’t have a job,” I said.

  “Like you? Yeah, one of the side effects of quitting is you don’t have work. At least you have your honor.”

  “Which is worth more: honor, or money?” I said.

  “Honor. ‘He who steals my purse steals trash,’ you know.”

  “Good. When I run out of money and someone comes to repossess my car, I’ll kick the son of a bitch in the head and say
, ‘I don’t need money. I have honor. Now get the fuck away from my car.’ And then I’ll be arrested for assault, and when they put me in jail and tell me I can post bond, I’ll offer them my honor, instead of cash. And for free, they’ll let me stay in jail.”

  “Well then, why did you quit your job, if you think money’s so important?”

  “Because I’m a fucking idiot. Does that sound plausible?”

  “No. It’s because you really have honor, and it was your choice to keep it. There are people in the world who still admire that.”

  “I wonder if I know them,” I said.

  Donner patted my back again. “You’ll be okay.”

  “Doctors say that every day to people who die,” I said.

  “Well, you have to say something,” Donner insisted.

  This was true. Even if I wasn’t going to be okay and I was going to hurt very badly for a long time, you had to say something. Which was all I was doing at the paper when I had to be punished for it. All I did was look at part of the world and describe what I saw. And when I varied too much from the orthodox descriptions of all things, when I became too distinctly myself and no longer resembled a safe, tolerable drone; no, not a drone. A news aphid, spitting up a harmless, bland batch of news goo every day; when I quit being the happy little news aphid and described how I saw the world and not how I was told to see it, this individualism was regarded as pathological, and I was expelled. They spit me out. Actually, the neat trick this time around was that I spit myself out. It would’ve been funny if it wasn’t so depressing; to have destroyed myself so no one else could do it. It was getting harder and harder to call self-destruction a victory. But you had to call it something.

  Before more and more of the depression leaked into me and emptied me of all hope, the one impulse I had left was to call Janice.

  45

  As my best friend, my lover, and my archaeologist, Janice decided to bury me alive in sand at Topsail Beach. We were going down there for the weekend anyway. After hearing me recount the long and unhappy talk I’d had at the Same Place with Christopher, Janice said I was another cultural outsider about to be entombed by the prevailing cultural power, meaning journalism in general and Perrault in particular, so Janice envisioned for me a ritual burial in sand. I asked her if sand had some ancient significance. She said no, it just meant she wouldn’t have to use a shovel. And so late on Saturday morning, about eleven o’clock, we formed our burial procession and left the motel in sandals and swimming suits, carrying with us such vital burial implements as some towels, Coppertone suntan lotion, some M&Ms, a little Sony radio and tape player, a copy of Crime and Punishment, a notepad and pen for my final remarks in this transitory life, a paperback Bible, and a small cooler with devotional things in it, like some Michelob Dry and Royal Crown Cola.

  Janice picked a spot in the dirty white sand, sand that was the color of dirty rice, right at the border of where the endless waves flattened out and grew quiet and tiny as they slid transparent over the sand and backed into the ocean again. There, she sat facing the ocean in the dark, moist sand, digging up big handsful of sand that she began shaping into a kind of mound.

  “This is your sand pillow,” she said as she formed it. “You need something to rest your head on.”

  “What for? The dead don’t rest,” I said.

  She looked over at me and said, “Don’t be morbid while I’m making your tomb.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Once the sand pillow was finished, Janice started scooping out a little shallow area for my torso and hips and legs, making me realize we really were doing this. It was a grotesque, ritual joke symbolizing my vanishment and death. It unnerved me a little that Janice, who was both the priestess and the laborer for my burial, might still be hurt enough from my story that she’d find it strangely enjoyable to put me under sand and see no reason to stop.

  She halted her tomb construction to open a bottle of Michelob Dry and take a big drink.

  “Is it a primordial burial custom to drink beer when you’re making a tomb?” I said.

  She nodded her head and said, “Yes. The Egyptians often drank beer while they were making the great pyramids. That’s why the construction took so long.”

  She wiped her hands on her thighs to get the sand off her hands, then searched through her bag for a religious tape to play during the ritual. We’d wanted to get Handel’s Messiah but couldn’t find it, so we settled on a tape she’d made with some Beatles songs. Putting the tape into the player, Janice stared at me solemnly and said, “Let the dirge begin.”

  She pushed the button and on came “Twist and Shout.”

  “That’s a good dirge,” I said, opening a can of Royal Crown Cola and lighting a cigarette as Janice resumed scooping out wet sand to assume the form of my declining form.

  “Do you want to dance?” I said.

  She smiled slightly and said, “You can’t dance at a burial. It’s disrespectful.”

  During the scooping, a couple of small crabs poked their heads from my tomb and ran away.

  “I hope there aren’t any more crabs down there,” Janice said. “It wouldn’t be a very dignified burial with crabs pinching you.”

  The digging was soon done to her satisfaction, and she said, “Okay. Lie down with your head on the sand pillow.”

  “I have to put on my burial shroud,” I said.

  “We don’t have a shroud. Just put on your Cleveland Indians cap.”

  I did, saying, “This way, when archaeologists dig me up two hundred years from now, they’ll know what tribe I’m from.”

  This was formally the burial. I lay myself down with my head propped up softly on the sand pillow, relaxing in the cool, damp sand as Janice knelt beside me holding two handsful of sand above my stomach and we looked at each other. We hadn’t worked out a precise ritual.

  “Man born of woman,” Janice said, stopping there to look down at me for help. “I don’t remember the complete sentence,” she said.

  “Man born of woman comes out of the uterus,” I said.

  “It doesn’t sound biblical. I’ll just try a different ceremony,” she said, closing her eyes briefly, opening them, then saying, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

  “Janice. We don’t have any ashes or dust.”

  “Well, I’ll have to go back to the motel and get some.”

  “Just use the sand.”

  “I don’t know any rituals with sand. I need to say some spiritual things. I can’t just dump wet sand on you.”

  “Yes you can. This is a new ritual. Just dump wet sand on me and say ‘There.’”

  “There?” she said. “It’s not very elegant or solemn.”

  “Being buried alive in sand isn’t elegant.”

  “You’re right,” she said, moving her fingers apart to let sand spill onto my stomach. “There,” she said, smiling.

  Now that the burial had begun in earnest and I felt a little dizzy, wondering if Janice might eventually abandon the simple ritual and bury me forever, she moved a little faster, rhythmically scooping up sand and gently plopping it along my stomach and chest. It only took a few minutes for her to cover most of my torso, and now she hesitated.

  “I’m ready to start down there,” she said, holding some sand over that crucial organ between my legs. She patted me there and smiled.

  “Do we have a special song for this part?” I said.

  “You mean organ music? We didn’t bring any,” she said, covering the middle of me with sand and moving on quickly to my legs and feet. Gradually a smooth mound of sand rose above me nearly a foot at its highest point over my stomach. The sand was heavy and wet, making me feel trapped in the earth and, which was only true, helpless. Janice put her towel down near my head and sat next to me so her shadow blocked the sun from my face and we could look at each other. On the tape player, the Beatles were singing “Back In the USSR,” and Janice took my paperback Bible from her bag.

  “What do you want me to read?�
�� she said.

  “Read the whole Bible,” I said. “It should only take four or five days.”

  She sipped some Michelob Dry and wiped some sweat from her nose.

  “Just open it at random and read the first thing you see,” I said.

  She flipped open the Bible, squinted at the page and began reading aloud:

  “And David said to Uriah, Go down to thy house, and wash thy feet. And Uriah departed out of the king’s house, and there followed him a mess of meat from the king.”

  She stopped and looked at me. “A mess of meat?” she said. “That doesn’t sound biblical. It sounds like Jethro, from the ‘Beverly Hillbillies.’”

  “Do it again,” I said. “Flip some pages and read something else. It’s all very spiritual.”

  She did it, and read this:

  “When a man hath taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war, neither shall he be charged with any business: but he shall be free at home one year, and shall cheer up his wife which he hath taken.”

  “That’s nice,” I said.

  “Yes,” Janice said, sipping some beer and flipping through the pages again. “But I’m not doing it at random anymore. I’m going to read that part in Ecclesiastes you picked out last night.”

  I watched her look through the pages until she finally stopped.

  “Here it is,” she said, staring down at me in her shadow as she read the passage:

  “Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored to do: and behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.”

  “Yes,” I said. “All was vanity and vexation of spirit, and I hurt you, without excuse or understanding. And I alienated Perrault, that Philistine fuckhead whose ignorance and narrowness is the law. And though I walk through the valley of death, the ravine of despair, the ditch of grief, the culvert of psychological disorders, I will fear no evil, because I’m too stupid. You can bury me now.”