The bathroom facilities were less convenient. A shower and commode on the second floor had been rescued from the pile of rubble that nearly covered them, and Fogarty kept all his toiletries in that tiny room. He would arise with the alarm at six thirty—even though there was no real reason to get up that early—stumble to the elevator in his boxer shorts with his clothes over his arm and ride down to what he began calling the bathroom level.
With most of what remained of his final Jersey Progress paycheck, Fogarty bought a small refrigerator, a radio, and a lamp. As the summer wore on and the third floor nights grew more stifling, he would learn to take a beer or two and climb the ladder to the roof in search of a breeze. Still, even with the buffeting from a heavy-duty fan and an occasional cool draught from the trap door above, the third floor was almost insufferable. And on nights when he didn’t fall asleep as soon as he collapsed into bed, Fogarty could sometimes hear mice cavorting in the far reaches of the storeroom. He hoped Whitt was wrong about the rats.
“What you need,” Zoe told him, “is a cat.”
“I’ll bet it’s cozy up there,” Brenda said, suggestively.
The freight elevator scared him a little. Big enough to convey an entire football team, its ancient cable whined and its timbers groaned with every ascent, but he could leave it parked up on his floor and enjoy a sense of total isolation. The second night after he moved in, Deputy Robert Turbyfill noticed a strange light upstairs in the Echo building as he cruised down Main Street and at three in the morning had come banging on the front door.
“Working kinda late, ain’t you?” Turbyfill asked.
“No, I was asleep upstairs,” Fogarty told him.
Turbyfill looked to be in his early 30s, with short dirty-blonde hair and a thin mustache still trying to establish itself. Taking a step across the threshold, he peered into the interior of the Echo building.
“It’s against city code to have a residence in a commercial building, you know,” he said to Fogarty, “and this place looks like a fire waiting to happen.”
“I just moved here,” Fogarty replied, “and I haven’t been able to find a place.”
Turbyfill paused, and Fogarty could almost see the inner gears of his cop’s brain grinding. Issuing a summons meant a lot of paperwork when he’d already had a long night. And was it smart to alienate the editor of the town newspaper?
“I’ll check back in a couple of months,” Turbyfill said.
Somehow, Fogarty knew he never would.
Fogarty had missed staying with Tucker and Sarah for a day or two. Then he got his refrigerator, and soon he found himself sliding back into his hermit’s lifestyle.
His lodgings weren’t the main source of his discontent, anyway. It was his newspaper. Nothing in his work or life experience had prepared Fogarty for the abysmal quality of the Southside Echo.
The Daily Orange, a newspaper put out by college kids in what was essentially their spare time, had been far superior. Even his high school paper had been far superior.
Not that Eddie had worked for his high school paper. At the time, growing up in the comfortable Philadelphia suburb of Bucks County, he was seeking a path to popularity, and he knew better than to embark on one strewn with social misfits.
But which path? Although his father sold computer systems and did well at it, he wasn’t socially connected, and the Fogarty’s weren’t old money. They were, in fact, only one generation removed from a lower-middle-class section of Brooklyn’s Howard Beach.
This was obvious to longtime Bucks Countians. Jack Fogarty may have evacuated his family to a $350,000 suburban house, but he still sounded like Brooklyn. And even if he hadn’t felt alienated from his neighbors, he spent too much time on the road for him or his family to be social.
This meant that Eddie couldn’t get in with the rich kids at school, the ones who got summer jobs as lifeguards at country clubs and invited their rich friends to keg parties when their parents were out of town.
Athletics were also out. Eddie never grew much beyond five-seven before his senior year, and he weighed less than one hundred fifty pounds. He was too light for football, too short for basketball, and too slow for soccer. He tried baseball, only to discover that he was afraid of the ball. When he was younger, his father stopped going to his Little League games, telling him, “Eddie, if you’re not going to try, I’m not going to watch.”
Eddie wasn’t unusually good-looking in high school, and he wasn’t ugly. He wasn’t noticeably awkward. He wasn’t brilliant, and he wasn’t stupid. He could talk to girls, but he was afraid to date.
What saved him was that he was also Mike Sellers’ friend. Mike, Eddie’s next-door neighbor since elementary school, grew to six-five and All-Conference as a basketball forward and football tight end. And he looked after Eddie, partly because he was secure enough in his school status to hang out with whomever he pleased.
“There’s this girl I want you to ask out,” he kept telling Eddie, who always declined.
When Sellers’ jock friends and their accompanying jock groupies asked him what he saw in this Eddie Fogarty kid, Mike would always loyally reply, “Hey, Eddie’s a good guy. He’s really funny when you get to know him.”
Until his senior year, hardly anyone but Mike ever bothered. But then, just before his high school years slid away from him forever, Eddie took his first drink. It was a revelation.
You didn’t have to be smart to drink, or strong, or good-looking. You didn’t even have to be good at it. In Eddie’s high school in the late ‘70s, you were just as much a topic of half-admiring hallway conversation if you passed out after four beers than if you betrayed no visible effects from a dozen.
Yet it wasn’t the drinking itself that finally bestowed an identity on then seventeen-year-old Eddie, but the realization on the part of everyone around him that, “Geez, Mike was right—this guy is funny. He’s a crazy bastard.”
Given a six-pack or a bottle of cheap fruity wine, Eddie was, indeed, a crazy bastard. Drunk, he would do almost anything. One night, he thrust himself halfway out of Mike’s Mustang speeding down the Schuylkill Expressway, screaming obscenities at the cars they passed. Another night, on a bet, he climbed a sixty-foot water tower in the rain. With a buzz on, Eddie could also unleash a wicked and barbed sense of humor.
Eventually, Mike Sellers’ jock friends actually began seeking out Eddie’s company, and since the girls in that crowd looked to the jocks for validation, Eddie became datable by extension.
Eddie could hardly believe that his long-lamented celibacy was over. It never got serious with any of the girls, but at least he was no longer staying home on Friday and Saturday nights.
Even his grades got better. Now that he had established an alternative identity, he was allowed to find his true academic level without fear of scorn. His last semester, Eddie got A’s in everything but Advanced Algebra—a shaky but crucial C. He also slew the Scholastic Aptitude Test monster one snowy Saturday morning while his head throbbed from Friday night.
Eddie spent the latter part of his graduation night under a tree. He had been at a party at the home of Susan Sprague, the student government president and cheerleader, when he announced he was going out to get some air.
It had been an excessive evening, even for him. Caught up in the celebration and unmolested by Susan’s tolerant parents, he had guzzled beers, seven-and-sevens and screwdrivers. Somewhere around one an equally inebriated Mike Sellers pulled Eddie over in front of some senior football players and said, “You guys gotta see this. This…is amazing.”
Eddie put on a proud, drunken smile. He knew what was coming. Mike found a large water glass and tossed in double shots of rum, vodka and bourbon from the array of random bottles littering the Spragues’ downstairs bar. Then, for good measure, he filled it the rest of the way with keg beer.
“Ten bucks says my man Eddie drinks this right down,” Mike announced solemnly.
“Gedouttadere,” mumbled Kit Shepherd, the quarterbac
k, brandishing a pint of Old Forester for emphasis. “That’s disgusting.”
“Christ, he could die from that,” someone else said. “We could get in trouble.”
In the midst of the debate, Eddie snatched up the glass and drained it, the unholy concoction sliding down like the mercury on a plunging thermometer. It didn’t kill him, and Mike gave him five of the ten dollars he’d won.
Twenty minutes later, still clutching the crumpled dollar bills in his fist, Eddie wandered vaguely out the front door into a small grove of trees across the street from Susan Sprague’s house. At the time, it looked like a primeval forest. The next morning, when he awoke, he realized he was lying in full view of passing traffic; face up in the dew-soaked grass. And he had puked all over himself.
He looked so bad when he dragged himself home that Rita Fogarty couldn’t even bring herself to yell at him. Not much, anyway. Jack was gone again, having left for the airport right after the diplomas were handed out. Two days later, Eddie’s acceptance arrived from Syracuse University—a pleasant surprise, given the fact that his academic record was marginal overall—and all was forgotten and forgiven.
Jack Fogarty liked the idea that his only child was going to a high-profile university. The fact that Syracuse’s tuition was on a par with the Ivys only gave him a new reason to work harder.
“Go up there and kick ass, Eddie,” he said. “You get a degree from there, you can do anything you want.”
Jack had been kicking ass most of his life. Unlike Eddie, he had been an outstanding athlete in high school and played baseball at St. John’s. He even pitched for two years in the Yankees’ farm system before waking up one morning in Binghamton with a sharp pain in his right elbow. Within two days, he was filling out alternative job applications.
He did well at IBM, riding the new wave of business and home computers at a time when everyone was making it up as they went along. The new technology was reinventing the old hierarchy, and there was no limit to how far a kid from Brooklyn could rise.
Then Jerry Vaughan approached him about helping to start a spinoff company, and Rita—his wife of sixteen years—felt cold fear in her stomach.
“I think that would be a big, big mistake,” she told her husband across the kitchen table one night. “Think of the future you’ve got where you are. What if this doesn’t work? What will we do?”
Jack looked her in the eye over his bourbon and coke and nodded. Later that night, Jerry called again. The next day, Jack gave his notice, and his marriage also ended, for all practical purposes. To Rita and Eddie, Jack Fogarty became a phantom, a framed photograph on the television set. He had always been driven while at IBM, but at least he was home most nights—even if he stayed for hours behind the closed door of the study, the pecking of his keyboard barely audible above the classical music Rita always played.
Before the divorce, Jack would return home, late, after a week or two weeks out of town, and Eddie would hear his parents arguing downstairs as he lay in bed.
“Why do you even bother having a wife, having a family?” Rita would demand in a voice strangled by her efforts to turn a scream into a whisper.
Eddie never heard Jack’s reply.
Rita was a librarian. She had been an English major at St. John’s, where she began writing a novel, survived a crush on her literature teacher, and then met Jack Fogarty. The novel never got finished.
Where Rita was uncertain, Jack was concrete. Where Rita was frightened, Jack was upbeat. Where Rita was a fresh breeze, Jack was relentlessly predictable.
The surprises in the relationship was always hers. She sent the flowers, bought the cakes, staged the surprise parties. Jack’s short baseball career was nothing more than a romantic extension of the honeymoon—and it seemed that when his elbow went bad, part of his soul was lost, too. Rita couldn’t sit in the stands and cheer for him at IBM, and maybe that was the problem. In time, only child Eddie became the single justification for a marriage in name only.
But if their son thought about family problems at all on his way up to Syracuse to begin his freshman year, the whirlpool of college life quickly swept them away.
He’d planned to major in business, which seemed the quickest route to affluence. Maybe later, he’d specialize in computers, like his father. Or maybe the straight management training track. Hell, maybe even law school. As a freshman, looking out over the faded Snowbelt city of Syracuse from atop his magnificent hill of learning, all things seemed possible.
On the other hand, Eddie was eighteen, and there were late-adolescent hormones to be dealt with. And so, not surprisingly, it was a girl who lured him off the path to pinstriped security.
Her name was Amy, and she was from Long Island, and she wanted to join the Daily Orange newspaper staff. Eddie, who met her one night at a place called Hungry Charley’s, wanted to see her naked. The best way to accomplish his goal, it seemed to him, was to accompany her on the path to hers.
CHAPTER TEN
THE ORANGE LIFE
A few weeks into every school year, the Daily Orange held an open house at its offices in an old four-bedroom house just off campus. The first floor was reserved for the advertising department, the second floor for the newsroom, and the basement for the photo lab. The third floor was condemned.
As Fogarty and Amy walked in the front door and started up the swaybacked stairs, two boom boxes were cranked to full volume in separate rooms above them, each playing different music. The competing melodies collided at the top of the stairs and rushed down at them in a single unintelligible gush. They heard hysterical laughter. The stairs creaked as they ascended them.
“Beer’s in the back room,” announced a stocky sophomore in a Daily Orange t-shirt “and munchies. Have at it.”
At some point in the evening, Fogarty found himself crouched on a black vinyl couch in a small room, listening to two DO staffers earnestly explaining what a reporter did. After frequent visits to the keg and a long hit from somebody’s fuming hash pipe, he had reached the stage where nearly everything seemed profound.
“Hey, I could do that,” he found himself saying.
“Ever write for a newspaper before?” one of the DO guys asked him.
“Nope,” he replied, nodding his head with the firm emphasis of the intoxicated, “but I can write. It’s just like a term paper, only shorter. Right?”
One of the DO staffers laughed and cuffed him on the shoulder.
“I don’t think so, sport,” he said.
It was around that time that Fogarty realized he had lost Amy—probably forever—to a tall, bearded senior on the DO staff.
“Son of a bitch,” he mumbled to himself as he stumbled back down the creaking stairs an hour or so later.
But the challenge remained with him. Even though he had no particular desire to major in journalism at Syracuse, he knew he could write. All the teachers back in Bucks County told him he could write, and wondered why he didn’t do it more. And the morning after the DO open house, he swore on his aching head that he could make the staff.
It turned out that his teachers were right. Fogarty went back to the Daily Orange office and was given a tryout that involved interviewing an SU political science professor about his recent trip to Northern Ireland. The editors liked the story.
That is, they liked the top half of it, having carved away the bottom half with their delete- keys and exactor knives.
“You’re on the staff,” DO Managing Editor Joe DeSpain told him, “but geez, you’ve got to write shorter.”
Fogarty shrugged.
“I can do that,” he said.
Fogarty had found another path. He still enjoyed drinking—it was a way of life at SU, with its myriad bars marching down Crouse Avenue and Marshall Street—but alcoholic excess was no longer a novelty here. So he threw himself into the newspaper.
Before long, Joe DeSpain became his new Mike Sellers, and it didn’t take long for DeSpain to realize that this dark-haired little kid from Philly would do
anything he asked of him.
Just as Fogarty had climbed up water towers and out of Mustangs while drunk back in high school, so he earned a college reputation for what he would do under the influence of this new intoxicant. Before the first semester ended, it was generally acknowledged that DeSpain’s protégé was willing—even eager—to be assigned to the stories everyone else was afraid to do.
That reputation was cemented in February of his first year.
Over beers one night, a fellow staff member passed along a rumor about Jim Kolar, a star on Syracuse’s storied lacrosse team. Kolar had found his girlfriend, Lucy Cegelski, with another guy in her sorority house bedroom, and the beefy midfielder roughed them up. No assault case ever went to court, however. The other guy was afraid to file charges, since Kolar’s reputation for violence had been well earned both on and off the field. Lucy debated what to do for several days, nursing her facial bruises at home and wondering whether her right ankle might be broken.
On the morning of the third day, a local alumnus called her with a proposition—he would pay her medical expenses and add another thousand dollars on top of that, and he would even make sure Jim Kolar never came near her again. In return, she would develop an alternative explanation for her bruises.
Lucy had driven her car without oil and the motor seized up. It would be nice, she thought, to have her car running again. Lucy asked the caller for fifteen hundred for her silence.
“Sound like a great story, Richie,” Fogarty said.
“Probably,” Britt replied, “but who’s going to write it? You know how much of a homer the sports editor is, and lacrosse is like religion around here. And there’s no way I’m risking getting Jim Kolar’s fist in my face.”
“Shit, I’ll do it,” Fogarty said. “You think Lucy would talk to me?”
“Would you talk to a reporter if you’d just taken a $1,500 bribe?” Richie asked.
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