All Over but the Shoutin'

by Rick Bragg

  “Don’t be sure,” he said. I dismissed it from my mind.

  I was grateful to work at St. Pete. In many ways it was the best job I ever had. But I truly believed that there was a barrier between me and a place like the New York Times, a barrier that Kovach did not recognize—or refused to.

  Of all the things I took away from my short time with him, one rests in my mind the way an arm rests around your shoulders.

  An editor had asked me, sneering a little, who taught me to write. I told Kovach that.

  “The next time someone asks you that,” he said, “tell ’em it was God.”

  The year slid by, quick, like it was time, greased. As the winter finally gave up and the Charles thawed, I realized that much of a year had passed and I had not written a single story. I had not talked to a grieving mother or walked a hallway littered with crack vials or … I had just read and learned and talked and slept. What a gift.

  I knew now why I had disliked those Ivy League kids so, for so long. It was like I was a dog on a kinked chain, a foot short of the water bucket, watching every other mutt drink. The time at Harvard took the kink out of the chain.

  The last day, they gave me a certificate that had Harvard on it. I put it on my wall, where everyone could see it. Friends of mine who had gone to “real Harvard” said that displaying one’s Harvard pedigree was “not the thing to do,” as if people could tell you went to Harvard by your ambience alone.

  I left it on the wall for a good while. People might not be able to tell, just by looking at me, that I am a Harvard man.

  I had been ready to leave Miami when I left, but the more I thought about it, in those cold months in Cambridge, there was no other place in Florida I wanted to work when I returned to the St. Petersburg Times. I had known that the paper had closed its Miami bureau, which hurt my feelings but was nothing I couldn’t survive. I would work out of my house, I figured. But the paper had other plans. The top editors wanted me to return to St. Pete. I thought they were going to make me pay for my year-off drinking sherry and eating goose liver pâté by making me do some distasteful, boring work.

  I landed in the rose bushes again. The new executive editor, Paul Tash, the man who hired me, made me a sort of roving national reporter and told me to go to where the best stories were.

  I found some. I spent time on the Navajo Indian Reservation, eating grape snow cones and talking to medicine men and women about disruptions in the life force that flows from Mother Earth. I went to a “sing,” where people gathered to drum and sing under the biggest sky I had ever seen, not so some tourists could take pictures, but because a hanta virus was killing them. I walked in the desert and sat under a tree with an old woman who had lost her husband to cancer from the uranium he mined to make bombs. She invited me in for fried bread.

  I wrote about racism in Vidor, Texas, and floods in Des Moines, Iowa, and casinos in Biloxi, Mississippi. In the meantime, I lived on the beach on Florida’s west coast, in a second-floor apartment that had a view of the Gulf of Mexico from its kitchen sink. I had made a new friend, a lovely young woman who was going to college at the University of Florida, which I am sure I should have felt guilty about. It seemed like I had it made, again.

  As if things couldn’t get any better, I had job offers now, from the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. I thought I was charmed, again. I thought I couldn’t lose, again.

  I flew out to Los Angeles and met nice people who thought I would fit in, who complimented my work and took me to lunch in the “Picasso Room.” It would be a perfect marriage, they told me, a happy one.

  I flew to New York and saw the Empire State Building shrouded in fog. I sat in a room with Max Frankel and Joe Lelyveld, men of legend in this business, and I admit to being a little nervous there. I kept dropping my little security badge that said “NYT.” They would not try to change me, they said, except to maybe make me better. I could do the kind of stories I had always done, in the way I did them. Those stories had a place in their newspaper, they told me.

  I felt like a blue-chip quarterback. Maybe, I thought, it was true. I couldn’t lose.

  Then, the charm must have slipped through a hole in my pocket and rolled through a crack in the floor.

  I took the Los Angeles Times offer. It was the perfect job, a job I could not have designed any better myself, the perfect fit. The New York Times frightened me. Just reading it frightened me. There was great writing in it, but so many people had warned me that I would never survive there, that I was too different, that the newspaper would try to process me and my work. That would surely lead to disaster. In Los Angeles, I would get to write long, pretty stories. It was much more similar to St. Pete, and St. Pete had almost nurtured me.

  I know some reporters will roll their eyes at this, but I hated to leave St. Pete. The editors there had not given a damn where I was from or how I talked or where I went to school. I was ungrateful, at best, to leave so soon. But the editor, Tash, told me as I shook his hand: “We got our money’s worth out of you.” I will always appreciate that.

  I remember that my kinfolks were almost angry with me when I told them I was going to Los Angeles. Florida had been bad enough, but it did not seem so far, even when I was in Miami. My momma did not say don’t go, but for weeks, when I would call, her voice was small.

  She told me she had looked at Los Angeles on a map, and looked at where she was, and it scared her to death.

  I left for L.A. in the fall. I got my feet wet in the Pacific Ocean for the first time. The color of it almost startled me. In the deep water off the piers, it was almost purple.

  It was just a year after the L.A. riots, and the city was, as Miami had been, rich in the stories that I knew how to do. I rolled past them, cataloging them in my head. I took a stroll through Echo Park, ate a pig tripe burrito in the downtown, saw a man passed out with a needle dangling from his arm, chatted with a family of five living in a single room that had the fire escapes wired shut to keep out the “Chollos,” the little shitheels who terrorized their block.

  I arrived to sunlight still warm and strong in November, to traffic I could not even imagine, to Korean barbecue—it wasn’t much like home but it sure wasn’t bad—and an apartment building built on rollers, for when the earth moved.

  I arrived, I quickly found, to a job that did not exist. The job that waited for me wasn’t as good as the job that I thought I had accepted, and it pricked my pride so deeply that I let anger rule my reactions, and dictate the future.

  Too many people there knew the job I had been offered, so, at least, I didn’t have to doubt my own sanity when I challenged the top editors about the job I had traveled across the country to take. They told me to be patient, but patience is a quality I simply do not have, nor have I ever wanted it.

  There was no one to even really get mad at. This was just an unlucky circumstance of crossed wires. To be fair, the editors worked it out and made good on the job I thought I had come to do—the bottom line—but when you begin a job by fighting with your bosses there is little future in it for you. Common sense tells you that. As it was, when people ask how long I worked there, I tell them three weeks, two days, four hours and twenty-seven minutes. An editor demanded my parking card before I left. It was a little like having your chevrons ripped off and being drummed out of the service.

  It would have been a lot more noble if I had not landed so gently. I had called the New York Times, told them I had made a big mistake, and I would love to come to work for them if they would have me. I expected them to tell me to enjoy the sunshine, palm trees and unemployment. Instead, the hiring editor, Carolyn Lee, said I could start in January, start fresh.

  My luck, my old friend, had not left me after all.

  For maybe the first time in my life, I had tried to do the safe thing, and it had blown up in my face. Never, ever again.

  I stayed in L.A. for a month or so, mainly because I had no place else to live and my rent was paid. I worked on my pitiful Spanish,
read some books, even went to the beach. But it never felt right. The ocean was too cold, out there. It was the wrong ocean, entirely.

  Now and then I would sing a few words of an old Tennessee Ernie Ford song, and it made me feel better.

  I’ve been to Georgia on a fast train, honey

  I wasn’t born no yesterday

  I got a good country raisin’

  and an eighth grade education

  Ain’t no need in y’all a-treatin’ me this way

  30

  New York

  It is late afternoon in the newsroom of the New York Times and I have just turned in the story that will make or break me. It is only my second story, but I have written it with no concessions, no second-guessing of what will or will not get in this newspaper. The story sounds like me. It is gothic, dark, personal. I think it is good. But it doesn’t matter what I think, only what they think, the editors in that meeting, the mystical Page One Meeting, where stories are dissected by great minds. I watch the door like a doomed man watches a gallows being built. I cannot fail here. I cannot fail again. Finally it swings open and the editors file out, and I see Joe Lelyveld, the managing editor and soon to be the executive editor, walking toward me. He is not smiling.

  He stops at my desk and leans against it. I do not remember exactly what he said but it was something to the effect of, “I know we said we would try to get you some gentle editing, but …” and my heart froze.

  “… but we had to change the comma in your lead.” And now he is smiling, and I know I have been had. I do not mind at all. I only hope he does not notice that my laughter is laced with something not too far from hysteria.

  This, I think, is the cold and austere New York Times? This is the cold and unapproachable Joe Lelyveld? All I know is, at that exact moment, the debacle of Los Angeles that I had carried around like some clinking leg iron fell away, and I thought I might be OK. I would not, I thought, have to go back to Alabama in shame. I might still have to, someday, but not now. Not now.

  I don’t know if he planned it that way, if he even knew how I felt. Maybe he did. People say he is a smart man.

  It took me just a few weeks to learn that much of what was said about the Times was woefully out of date, or just plain wrong. Most of the editors I worked for had a simple mission: Go find the best and most important stories, and put them in the newspaper.

  It was the directive that Mike Oreskes, the metro editor, gave me before I even began work. For the next six months, through one of the coldest, nastiest winters on record, I roamed that giant, confusing place, but to say I searched for stories would be a lie. I did not have to search. New York hurled stories at you like Nolan Ryan throws fastballs. All you had to do was catch them, and try not to get your head knocked off.

  The newsroom, at the time, was a crowded, noisy, dusty dungeon of a place, where the reporters worked practically shoulder to shoulder. Some of them were nice to me and some of them treated me like I was going to get their newspaper dirty if I touched it with my pedestrian hands. I could feel the old chip on my shoulder pressing down, down, heavier than I could remember it being in a long while. But that was fine, too. Just because they let you in the school door doesn’t mean they’re going to invite you to the dance.

  Instead, I found my friends on the photo staff, a collection of delightful, smart, cranky, streetwise and often fearless artists and weirdos who knew this city frontward, backward and sideways, and consented to let me ride along. If not for them, I would have surely floundered, helpless. Instead they dragged me along to good story after good story. I felt like a freeloader, but we did find us some tales to tell.

  One sticks fast in my memory. With a long-haired, bearded man of Puerto Rican heritage named Angel Franco, who referred to me almost fondly as “big, dumb white boy,” I set out to report a story that carried me deep into the real New York, another story about living and dying and that fragile, shivering place in between.

  At least once a week in the New York papers, there had been stories of chilling murders in the city’s tiny groceries, what most people here called bodegas. In the past year, fifty people had died behind their counters, making it the most dangerous job in New York, more dangerous than fighting fires or fighting crime, even deadlier than driving a livery cab. Mind-boggling holdups ended in gunfights and cold-blooded executions. People killed for a hundred dollars, for twenty, for the joy of hearing their guns go “bang.” Most of the victims were Hispanic, but there were Chinese, Koreans, Haitians and Middle Easterners, too, trying to make a living one pack of M&M’s at a time in Washington Heights, the South Bronx, East Harlem, Bushwick Avenue.

  I wanted to hear those stories from the mouths of the people who lived behind those counters day after day. But this time I would see the fear, feel it, as they did. It made for a newspaper story, a New York story, that is as honest as I have ever done.

  Harlem, March 1994

  “One man has already died behind the counter of the grocery where Omar Rosario works,” I wrote, “murdered in a tiny business where customers pay in pennies and promises. Before he goes to work he slips on his bulletproof vest, slides a black 9-millimeter pistol into his waistband, and gives himself to God. It is early on a Wednesday night and the store’s lights gleam like new money among the dead street lights at the corner of 139th Street and Edgecombe Avenue. The door opens and a young man with a puny mustache walks in, one arm hidden deep inside his baggy, half-open coat. Rosario thinks he has a machine gun or sawed-off shotgun. Rosario takes out his pistol and eases it halfway into the pocket of his pants, his finger on the trigger. He faces the man and lets him see the gun in his hand. He wants to make it clear that if the young man pulls a gun, he will kill him. The young man drifts around the front of the store as the last two customers walk out, but everywhere he goes Rosario is beside him, as if in a dance. They stare into each other’s eyes for five minutes, silent, and the tension is sickening. Finally the young man turns and goes out. Rosario stares out the door, gun in hand. His face is pale.”

  I did not even know what was going on at first. The young man squeezed by me at one point in the cramped store and I felt, through his jacket, through mine, the hard shape that could only be a gun.

  Only when Franco eased up beside me and said, softly, “We have stepped in it,” did I really understand what was happening. There was no place to hide in a store like that, no place to run. They were between us and the door. We just had to stand and watch and hope that when it started, the shooting, it would be quick and clean. But I had little faith in that. When two country boys pull their pistols and start popping’, chances are that they will hit what they are shooting at. They practice, blowing beer cans off fence posts, or stalking deer through the pines. But city boys can’t shoot for shit. It is why they kill so many children and innocent bystanders. They keep their guns in their waistbands because they like the way it feels against their skin, but they are amateurs at killing.

  As they danced, I slipped the notebook into my back pocket. I figured it was unwise for a man about to hold up a store to see me recording it for the readers of the New York Times. Then I heard the soft click of Franco’s camera. He was literally shooting from the hip, the camera hanging from its strap, down around his waist. He was trying to be as quiet, as discreet, as possible, but to me every frame he snapped off seemed like a tap shoe on a tile floor. I was worried about getting shot. He was doing his job. Franco is not an amateur. He hits what he aims at.

  When it was over, Rosario walked out to stand in the cold rain with an employee, Pablo Mendoza. They scan the street, waiting for the man to come back. A half-hour later they are still there, watching. I am embarrassed. I feel like I’m in the way of something important. I guess survival is pretty important.

  I ask him why he faced down the man, why he didn’t just give him what he wanted. But Rosario, whose hands shake as he wipes his face, tells me he cannot trust the robbers anymore to take the money and go. “I do not resolve it, if I
do not act first, he will take my money, make me lie down on the floor, and shoot me in back of the head,” he says. There is no posturing here, only a young man who is tired of being scared every time the door opens.

  “Not one bullet will I use to protect a piece of candy,” Rosario says. “But I will kill ten before I let one pull a gun on me.” The previous owner of the store, Henry A. Medina, was killed on November 16, 1992, by two men in ski masks. Medina was opening the register to give them the cash when one man shot him in the heart. His killers were never found.

  “When I leave here, I am like a bird in the air, flying,” Rosario said. “I am free.”

  “Rosario thinks he can sense the spirit of the previous owner wafting around the place late at night,” I wrote. “He believes in God. He likes to think that maybe it is an angel. But there are no angels on Edgecombe after dark.” I had no right to say that.

  I did not even know what a bodega was when I came to New York City. It means, basically, “store,” but I learned it can also mean freedom, respect, dignity.

  For a week or so, Franco and I drove from tiny store to tiny store, interviewing people who had lost loved ones to bullets, talking to people who had narrowly escaped death. It would be wrong to say that we found that life is cheap there, behind the rows of breath mints. It is not cheap at all. People like to glamorize the high rollers on Wall Street, when they write of New York. They should come down here, to Leon Bodega at 289 Bushwick, to see what risk is all about.

  “Domingo Leon, the 40-year-old owner, has a bullet hole in the arm of his leather jacket,” I wrote. “The dry cleaner took the bloodstain out, mostly. Domingo Angeles wears the pants he wore when he was shot in the hip. He still has the bullet, lodged deep in his lower back. The difference between rich people and poor people is that poor people still wear the clothes they were wearing when they were shot. They save them from the emergency room floor. Along with a friend, Manuel Celado, who was shot twice in the chest, the men are survivors of a violent bodega robbery last year. But no one died. ‘Milagroso,’ Leon said. The men are all members of an extended family that draws much of its income from the bodega. It does not make anyone rich, but it is exactly what Leon was searching for when he left Moca, a village in the Dominican Republic, more than 20 years ago. He saved his money and opened in 1982. No one holds the keys to his livelihood, so no one can make him bow his head. People who have never been poor, who have never had to live on their knees, do not understand what it means to him.