* * *
—
“Slow down,” another copy boy said as I rushed by with a pile of stories from AP and UPI. “They don’t need everything so fast.”
“I’ve got nothing better to do,” I replied.
My work at the Times verged on the robotic. A row of machines in what was called “the wire room” printed stories on scrolls of paper. Men there ripped off each article before passing it through a hole in the wall to a senior copy kid on the other side. That person glanced at the story to see if it involved foreign, national, local, or other news and shoved the paper into the correct opening among more than a dozen slots. Then another copy kid would pull out the paper and take it to the proper desk.
Usually, the copy kids let articles pile up until they decided there were enough to justify carrying them to their final destinations. But I never stopped moving, walking in endless circles as I grabbed wire stories from the plastic slots and carried them to the correct news desks. I knew, once again, my overeager behavior annoyed some colleagues, but I didn’t care.
Let them think I’m a jerk and a kiss up. With my approach, everyone in the newsroom saw me working all the time. It was a way to attract the attention I wanted. Copy kids in the writing program were all young entrepreneurs—striking up relationships with editors, pitching story ideas, offering to take any assignment, and handling the reporting and writing in the off hours. Our jobs were grunt work; we had to blaze our own paths to promotion by persuading someone at the paper to print our articles.
I quickly discovered that some editors in the high-stress newsroom considered copy kids and clerks to be objects for letting off steam, the moral equivalent of dogs to kick. I took a share of insults, quiet tirades, and nastiness from frustrated editors.
Members of the clerical staff often compared war stories, competing to see who experienced the worst ill-treatment. I joined in the grousing but rarely took it too seriously. No matter how nasty an editor might be, none could match the abuse I had endured over the past six years.
The lead of the first major Times article written by copy boy
KURT EICHENWALD, 1986
LINDEN—Fuzzy peach navel is the recommended drink at the Old Tavern Inn here, one of the latest and most unlikely ripple effects of the American auto industry’s march toward high technology.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Nan Robertson saved lives.
The thought struck me every few days. The article she had written for The New York Times Magazine about her experience with toxic shock raised national awareness of the condition. Joan Kelly, my friend from CBS, continued encouraging me to do the same for epilepsy. Now I was in the building; I could simply drop by the magazine office on the eighth floor and pitch the idea.
Still I resisted the impulse. This was hardly the time to reveal my health problems. I had worked at the Times for five months and been promoted from copy boy to national desk clerk. I knew I was terrible at the job—with my memory deficiencies, I often bungled the rapid demands of answering phone calls, taking messages, filling out forms, moving copy, and running for coffee. Fortunately, people thought I was just inattentive. Meanwhile, I wrote freelance articles for the paper and helped with “legwork”—covering events around New York for staff reporters. I’d had one seizure at the office, but I knew the newsroom was large enough that it had probably escaped senior editors’ attention. If I announced my epilepsy in the magazine, I could derail my career. There were plenty of young people in the writing program; once the top brass knew about my health, I was sure they would pass me over for someone without the baggage of chronic seizures.
Still. Out of millions of people with epilepsy, I could think of only one—Tony Coelho, a California congressman—who had publicly revealed his condition. A few years earlier, when I wanted to learn more about seizures, I found only one book, Living with Epilepsy. To avoid embarrassment, I had removed the jacket and covered the spine with tape so no one could see the title.
People like me lived in the shadows, afraid of losing jobs or friends or educational opportunities due to public ignorance. To reach them through the magazine, to educate the misinformed, a writer with epilepsy would have to disclose having the condition and know how to contact an editor. I fit every requirement except one: I wasn’t willing to reveal my health problems.
One morning after my shower, I stared in the mirror. Help others or protect myself? I thought of the person I had been at Northwestern, trying to find purpose in life. Helping others. That thought had not occurred to him. Helping others or being a newspaper reporter. I knew what choice he would have made. If I could spare someone my pain, even though I might have to give up on a newspaper career, how could I stay silent?
The next day, I rode the elevator to the eighth floor. I identified myself and said I wanted to discuss a possible article. I was escorted to a magazine editor, who invited me to pull up a chair.
* * *
—
My fear of neurologists was unshakable, so I continued to travel to Dallas every six months to see Naarden, the only doctor I trusted. Now he was offering advice that alarmed me: My seizure control might improve if I changed anticonvulsants. The best choice all along had been Tegretol—the overdose that had almost killed me shouldn’t bar us from trying it again, he said. I had never been at a good therapeutic dosage. At proper levels, it might work, and he promised to monitor my blood carefully.
“I have one question,” I said. “If we make this switch, and the blood problem starts again, if we switch back, can you guarantee me I’ll have the same control I do now?”
“You know nothing can ever be guaranteed with epilepsy.”
A metaphor popped into my head. “Dr. Naarden, think of it like this: I wandered around on a foggy, frozen lake for years. I kept falling through the ice, getting so wet and cold I thought I would die. Then I found a thick piece of ice. It’s still cold, but I can stand here and be sure I won’t fall back into the water.”
I could see he already understood where I was going. “Now I’m hearing a voice calling through the fog,” I continued, “telling me if I just head toward him, I’ll make it to land. But maybe I’ll start falling through the ice again. And if I do, I might not be able to find my way back to the thick piece of ice where things aren’t perfect, but at least I’m safe.”
Naarden shook his head. “You’re too smart for your own good,” he said.
He increased my Dilantin dosage. Tegretol was off the table.
* * *
—
I wrote the epilepsy article for the magazine in a little-trafficked area called the recording room, one floor above where most reporters and editors worked. The process was torturous. I read and listened to some of my diaries, reviewing for the first time my own anguish from the worst moments. When I reached the tapes I made after my dismissal from Swarthmore, I couldn’t play them. I did not want to immerse myself in that trauma again. I interviewed people who had been with me—my parents, Carl, Franz, and others—and used their information to fill in blanks. I had no records for the day I learned of my epilepsy, and on a tape where my mother recited her recollections, she cried when she reached that moment. It hurt too much to listen.
The final product seemed right. I was honest, at least as much as I could be at the time. There were hints about my memory problems, but that was one topic I would not openly address. If disclosing my epilepsy didn’t destroy my future as a journalist, revealing my impaired ability to recall events might.
I reread the article and was intrigued to realize the most important paragraph was a quote from Carl:
If everybody in the world knew how to deal with epilepsy, if everybody in the world were not mystified by a seizure, if everybody in the world were willing to help out when they see a stranger have a seizure, then the lives of people with epilepsy would be infinitely easier. They would be ab
le to go everywhere and do just about everything and not worry.
That was the reason I wrote the piece, the message I wanted the world to hear. I thought it fitting that it came from a person who had aided a friend with epilepsy rather than from someone with the condition.
I filed the article to the magazine, and a man I’d never met before edited it. When the piece was returned, I was horrified. It was maudlin, filled with a defeatism and drama that I had never expressed, attributing emotions to others that I had never heard. This would accomplish nothing—I would be revealing my epilepsy and portraying it as something to be pitied rather than a challenge to be overcome.
I was a clerk; this was an editor. How could I argue? I printed both copies and asked an older reporter I knew to read them. She complimented the original.
“What do you think of the edited version?” I asked.
“It reads like something out of Redbook.”
A few seconds passed in silence. “I don’t know what to do,” I said.
She didn’t miss a beat. “This is your story. Don’t let them do this to you.”
Her words gave me the courage to push back. The editor fought when I demanded the removal of made-up emotions attributed to others and me. Each time, I said loudly enough so others could hear, “But it’s not true!” That led him to back down.
* * *
—
The Sunday magazine arrived in the newsroom each Wednesday, and I wanted to be out of New York when my article hit. That morning, I boarded the train to Washington. I’d decided to work in the bureau, far from where my story could be read.
As I typed at a desk, I saw Craig Whitney, the bureau chief, walking toward me with the magazine’s next issue in his hand. I realized in horror—advance copies landed in the bureau the same day they reached the New York office. I wanted to run.
He reached my computer with a hand thrust forward to shake mine. “Congratulations,” he said. “This is an incredible piece.”
I nodded and uttered a soft “Thank you.” He returned to his office, and I left the office. After a block, I leaned against a building, then slid down to sit on the sidewalk. I covered my eyes with one hand and cried.
* * *
—
I still dreaded the reaction in New York, particularly among senior editors. They rarely spoke to clerks, and I feared their true thoughts would be revealed only behind closed doors.
Those anxieties were put to rest in a very public way. The day I returned, I was at the national desk when someone tapped my shoulder. I looked around and almost fell off my seat. Abe Rosenthal, the Times’s legendary and mercurial executive editor, stood beside me. I jumped up as I would have had the president suddenly appeared. I assumed he wanted me to handle some menial task. Instead, he shook my hand.
“That was an important and amazing article you wrote,” he said. “It’s an honor to have published it.”
I mumbled my thanks.
“No,” Rosenthal replied. “Thank you.”
He returned to his office, and a number of people offered me congratulations; a compliment from Rosenthal was a rare thing. I excused myself and went to the men’s room. I feared I was going to start hyperventilating.
* * *
—
Scores of letters arrived at the Times from people who had epilepsy or knew someone who did. Given that I had no desk, the correspondence stacked up in a wire basket in the mailroom. I read each one, but often felt emotionally unable to respond. So many of them expressed pain I could not salve, often from those with the condition who wrote to ask for my help in fighting discrimination they faced.
Only one letter contained a photograph. It spilled out onto the tabletop where I was opening the envelopes. The eyes of an old man sparkling behind thick glasses stared back at me from a Polaroid. I recognized him instantly and unfolded the note.
Dear Kurt: I have seen your byline several times and have wondered if you were the Kurt that I knew. When my daughter Lois sent me a copy of your epilepsy story, I knew that you were the young man with whom I shared a room at Northwestern Hospital in 1981—the young man I referred to as my ersatz grandson.
Memories flooded back of Irwin Henoch, my hospital roommate in Chicago who, with his wife, Florence, helped me to connect to my feelings again, to contemplate life and happiness, to set myself on the path that led to the very newsroom where I was standing. He told me that, when he was well on his way to recovery in 1982, Florence had died from a lung cancer discovered during a routine checkup. He was broken up by her death, he wrote, but was saved by the support of his children and through volunteer work. He remembered my mother, and always thought of her when he used the yellow pen she gave him, a pen that only recently had been replaced. The affection for this man I had known for only a few days came rushing back, and then I choked up as I reached the final words of his letter.
I am happy that you are making a name for yourself. I always knew that you were something special.
Best regards,
IRWIN H. HENOCH
Ersatz Grandfather
* * *
—
In the weeks after my magazine article appeared, life at the Times continued as it had. There were no stares or recriminations, no suggestions that my responsibilities be limited, no efforts to remove me from the writing program. I still received assignments for articles and legwork. And the next time I experienced a seizure in the newsroom, everyone knew what to do. I continued fumbling about in my job as a national desk clerk, still unwilling to reveal that my epilepsy caused severe memory loss. That led to an editor turning on me with a ferocity I had never experienced before.
My primary assignment was to move digital copies of newly filed articles from an electronic “in” basket to a directory used by the first team of editors, known as the backfield. Then, I filled out a piece of paper called a “buck slip” with the one-word name of the article and passed it to an editor who was infamous among clerks for her abusiveness.
One day, the article schedule included two stories with comparable names: “Immune” by Philip Boffey and “Virus” by Larry Altman. I don’t know if the reporter mislabeled his piece or I mixed them up, but I filled out the slip as “Immune” by Altman.
The abrasive editor jumped on the error. “It’s ‘Immune’ by Boffey and ‘Virus’ by Altman!” she snapped. “You can’t be so sloppy in your job! Start paying attention!”
Another clerk had taught me never to apologize to this woman because it only made things worse, so I silently filled out a corrected buck slip and passed it to her.
She didn’t stop the verbal assault. “It’s one word and one writer! How hard is it to keep that straight?”
On and on she went, growing ever louder. She paused, and I saw a familiar expression of malign satisfaction. I knew she thought she had found the perfect insult.
“I didn’t know epilepsy caused illiteracy!” she shouted.
Everything stopped—typing, talking, phone conversations. Editors and clerks stared at me. Nothing, not a sound or a motion, disturbed the moment as everyone braced for my reaction. In the silence, the angry editor realized she had gone over the line and turned away from me to stare blankly at her computer.
I knew from experience that I needed to say something, anything. Work would remain at a standstill until I did. At that moment, “Virus” by Altman appeared in the electronic “in” basket. I glanced across the news desk at Bill Dicke, the night editor.
“Bill,” I said, “ ‘Virus’ by Altman just landed.”
It was the equivalent of my saying, “Bill, the phone is ringing.” But it was a signal to everyone that I was not going to respond to the comment just shouted at me.
“Oh, okay, thank you,” Dicke stammered. “Can you move it to the backfield?”
Work resumed. Soon after, I was transferred
from the toxic presence of the misanthropic editor to a better job in the third-floor newsroom. She moved to the fourth floor.
* * *
—
Everyone in the writing program had a deadline, a point when editors would decide if they would be promoted to reporter trainee. Mine arrived in early 1988. By then, I had written scores of articles. I had become the metro desk’s go-to guy, accepting any legwork, even in the middle of the night. I had been awarded a one-month tryout as a reporter, and it could not have gone better—I asked to be assigned to the business desk to prove I could handle topics foreign to me. While I was there, the stock market crashed, and I threw myself into the coverage, sometimes filing several stories a day.
Editors and reporters told me my chances looked good, but then a hiccup. I heard from a friend that the editor in charge of the final decision had nixed me. I sat down at a desk and fished out a piece of paper I had prepared for any last-minute problems. I telephoned everyone at the Times who knew me or who owed me favors—Hedrick Smith, two editors in Washington, the assignment editor on the metro desk, and about a dozen others. I asked each of them to call on my behalf to the boss of the editor about to hand down the bad news. One ally, Rick Berke, reached me after his conversation.
“As soon as I started speaking, he said, ‘Yes, I know. You’re calling to recommend Kurt Eichenwald,’ ” Berke told me.
The next day, Warren Hoge, an assistant managing editor, summoned me to his office. He was on the phone when I arrived and waved for me to come in. My heart raced as he spoke in a foreign language I thought was Portuguese. He hung up, looked at me, and thrust out his right hand. My mind went blank as I stared at the silver bracelet on his wrist.
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