Monday, January 24, 2011
Fresh Writing: The Newsroom
This is a story I ran last week, part I and then, as usually is the case, I got busy on an idea that led to a revision and the completion of the story. I had this rif in my head, "On the day I got fired..." and it played over and over so I decided why fight it. Re-write the story off that line. Who knows if it worked.
On the day I got fired, I left my boyfriend—Steve, at my place with my dog named Carmel—the two of them together in my apartment to enjoy a lazy Saturday while I went to work because that’s what I did. I worked on the weekends and I worked the late night shift and I worked the holidays too. All of them. I loved to work. I lived for work. If anyone asked, I’d say I was my work.
“Have a great day,” Steve said, his feet up on my sofa. I knew, as I pulled the door closed that he would spend the greater hunk of the day right there, reading the paper and eating the food in my refrigerator. Maybe later he’d take a shower in my bathroom and forget to hang up the towel and when I said something about the wadded wet towel on the white tile floor later, his response would be, “man, are you uptight.”
On the day I got fired, I wore a form fitting Calvin Klein suit—black and white checks in the pattern of the fabric. A forest green linen shirt gave a splash of color to the ensemble and my shoes were sensible black pumps. All snazzy and sharp, I also stopped at the 7-11 to get Ava a cup of her favorite coffee and two donuts with sprinkles on top. I made sure to get the creamers on the side too but these details wouldn’t matter to Ava, being nice wouldn’t matter either. Ava, her afro poking up this way and that, a tilt of crazy hair that wobbled around her head like it was supercharged with some kind of electricity, would be elbow deep in the morning paper, police scanners blaring behind her and three TV’s on too. She’d be pissed, like she was always pissed and ready to tell me to get to work because that’s what an assignment editor did. She barked at reporters and reporters got to work.
And that’s how it went down, that day, my last day in T.V. news working as an investigative reporter at the age of twenty-three. KXLY-TV. Spokane, Washington, a tired little town on the eastern edge of the state which was fast drive to and through the panhandle of Idaho and two hours from the Montana state line.
“You’re late,” Ava pointed out when I walked into the newsroom.
I set her coffee and donuts on her desk.
“Your welcome,” I said.
Ava nodded at the coffee gift and went back to her newspaper—silent.
As if I didn’t sting from her bitter tone, I dropped my purse on the back of my chair, put my own coffee by the typewriter, an IMB Electric Selectric with an automatic back up correction key and checked my mail slot—the one marked LAUCK.
Tilted on its manila side was a letter that read “Society of Professional Journalists.”
“Look at that!” I said.
I slid my thumb under the flap, a little shaky for how I knew it was good news or bad. You win. You lose. The Society of Professional Journalists gave out annual awards but before I could fish the results, Ava shook a pile of pink message slips in my direction.
“Hello?” she said, “remember your story? From last night? Wake up, it’s time to get to work!”
I wanted to ignore her but something bigger won out. Guilt? Very likely guilt and the accusation in Ava’s tone of voice that said, “ you’re blowing it, Lauck. You are not acting like a real reporter. You’re not doing your job.”
Of course she didn’t say those words. She didn’t need to. They were spoken in every exasperated eye roll, every smart assed comment and every shake of the head. Ava didn’t think I should work at KXLY, didn’t deserve to be promoted there from the tiny little outback where I worked before in Montana and she didn’t think I had the “chops” to survive in the business. Which was funny, in retrospect. Spokane was not New York or even L.A. Spokane was small potatoes, a snag along the river bank to much bigger destinations—a whirlpool where I was temporarily turning in circles and going around and around and around to no-where-fast.
On the day I got fired, I forgot the notification from the Society of Professional Journalists and flipped, instead, through the message slips, which were “call in tips” from viewers. People who were claiming, according to the messages, to have seen a kid who we reported about last night as a possible abduction.
I already knew about the tips, Ava had called me at home last night to tell me but we both agreed, at least at midnight, that the tips were common at the beginning of a missing person’s story and that it would be best not to chase every crazy lead. We agreed to wait until daylight, check in at the site of the search, interview the cop in charge and then talk about what story I would file—as an update—about the missing kid.
What I hoped, deep in my gut, was that the kid would be found—safe and sound—over the long night and that we would be able to report that all was well in his world. I wanted a good outcome for a scary story. No one wanted to have a seventeen-year-old kid, who had gone missing, to end up being a victim of foul play. That was, to me, a bad story. It was sad and cruel and even painful—especially for the mother and the family and for everyone. How did anyone gain from the death of a kid?
Except in the real world, in small-town-Spokane, hearts were small and reporters who worked in that town salivated for a good murder story. Who cared about the age of the victim? The goal was to beat the competition—break an exclusive—and get the best video. The goal was viewers. Cash in on fear. Make people cry in front of their televisions. Get them hooked on your channel long enough to see the commercials we ran selling furniture and light bulbs and dishwashing detergent.
The story about this kid went like this. A teenage boy from a local high school, an honors student from a good family, disappeared from Riverside State Park at about noon. His car, a black Chevy Nova was found in the parking lot. His wallet, empty, was found a few feet away. The keys to the car were gone. There was no sign of the kid or a struggle. Police had no leads. The mother, interviewed by every reporter in town, asked anyone and everyone to please, please, please look out for her child. The photo of the boy, released by the mother, showed a good-looking youth with dark hair and eyes, slim, narrow face, slight build. His feet, according the mother were size twelve (he was apparently in a growth spurt) and he was wearing jeans, a black t-shirt and a navy blue windbreaker. He might be wearing a red baseball cap. The mother wasn’t one hundred percent sure. She didn’t see him the morning he left for school, she had gone to work before he was awake. Instead, fellow students, who had seen the kid earlier on the day he disappeared, described his outfit.
“These messages say he’s been spotted along the interstate.”
“Brilliant, Lauck.”
“Near the Sprague exit too,” I added. “Okay, so what do we do with that? Should we go to the highway, get some video, interview a few of these people?”
“That’s a start,” Ava said. “Look, this is your job. Figure it out. Get a story though. You’ve got…” Ava eyed the clock set to Pacific Time, “…eight hours. Go!”
With my courtesy coffee in her hand, Ava flicked at me like I was a bug that needed to go away and I took up my purse, left my coffee behind and walked out of the newsroom in search of my cameraman—Allen.
~
Allen and me had clocked a lot of hours together in the front seat of the news rig. Press conferences, fires, traffic accidents. Allen was the guy I worked with most weekends and no matter where we went, he always drove. While he was driving, Allen kept his eyes on the road and made sure to stay safe—driving with both hands on the wheel. From the passenger seat, I had a close up view of his right ear canal. For most people an ear isn’t memorable but Allen had more crap in his ear. Was it wax? Lint? Dandruff? How many hours did I sit, on the road with Allen and perplex myself over the puzzle of his ear contents. I would try so hard not to look only to find my eyes drawn in. How I wanted to tell him, no beg him, to go to the store and purchase swabs.
But I didn’t.
I just averted my eyes and made small talk and forced myself to stop staring at Allen’s ear crud.
Allen wasn’t a bad guy. He was a little heavy around the middle and soft in the shoulders and he did wear striped rugby shirts that seemed to draw the eye to his swollen belly, but over all, a nice guy. Bland. Vanilla. Allen wasn’t exciting or daring or even dangerous. He was just like his name. Allen. Like the wrench—Allen was a bit of a tool. Reliable and then, when we were done working our shift together, forgettable.
My favorite cameraman was Lyle, blue eyes like ice and curly black hair (with a hint of gray) that I wanted to touch just to see how soft it was. Lyle was exciting and sexy and hot beyond description but he was another silence I kept to myself. Besides, Lyle didn’t work weekends. He was too fantastic for holidays too. Lyle was one of the people Ava adored (with good reason), he had an amazing eye behind the camera and good artistic instincts. Although Lyle was known as the “complainer,” he was so good-looking, that part of his personality was set aside.
On the day I got fired, I worked with Allen all day long. We drove to the scene where the kid disappeared, interviewed the cops and the guy who had the search and rescue dogs. I wrote down a statistic in my book, the cost of the search, which was passed directly to tax payers. It was costing like five thousand dollars a day to search for the missing kid. Why this was important, I didn’t know but Ava would be happy. She loved obscure and irrelevant factoids.
By noon, Allen and I were in the parking lot of Zip’s getting a burger and fries. Allen ate two Belly Busters—the ones with ham on top—and had a milkshake to wash it all down.
Ava and I talked on the phone and that’s when we agreed I would follow the call in tips and drive up the interstate. I told her, “why not, we’ve got all day. Allen and I will just drive around a little bit and see what we can find.”
From her end of the conversation, Ava said that she had been monitoring the other stations and they were all doing the standard follow up story. Nothing new was coming in. She gave Allen and me the okay to sniff around.
As I look back now, at that decision, I have it in my memory that I was the one who had the idea to check out the random leads, that I had an intuition in my gut that kid wasn’t missing or even dead but instead was up to something. Perhaps a prank or maybe was even a runaway.
I want to believe I was the one who thought this scenario up but if Ava or even Allen were telling this story it would be different. Ava would be the one who knew and forced me to go check it out, she’d likely say that I didn’t want to, being a lackluster weekend reporter from Montana who had no journalistic instincts and didn’t even deserve the job. Allen would likely say it had been his idea, wanting to go out and search for the kid on our own. But that’s not how I remember it. I just remember thinking, “that kid isn’t missing. He walked away. He’s running.”
And here’s why. The boy in question was the son of a local activist. I cannot remember, if my life depended on it, what she was for or against. I want to say she was pro-life and that she was high profile meaning she carried signs of dismembered fetuses in her car and picketed on corners and in front of Planned Parenthood clinics and yelled at anyone within twenty feet: “SAVE THE BABIES. GIVE THEM TO ME!!! ABORTION IS MURDER!!!!”
Yes, the mother of that boy was prime time loud and with a mother like that, who wouldn’t run away?
So off we went, Allen and me, bellies full of burgers and fries, his ears full of gunk and my mind full of comments I wouldn’t dare say out loud.
On the day I got fired, Allen and I ended up in a little farm town called Sprague with it’s wide open spaces and fields laid bare in swatches of green and brown for rotation farming. The crop out in Sprague was wheat and the fields lifted in gentle hills that unrolled to the east as far as a person could imagine. It was the beginning of Palouse country, which, if you saw it from a birds view, looked like virgin sand dunes blown by the wind.
Why we ended up in a little corner store in Sprague, I don’t know. Was Allen thirsty for a Coke? Did I want to call Ava on a landline? I just know we were in that little store and I ended up talking to the man behind the counter. Another man was in the store too, getting three inch nails.
“You guys hear about a kid who’s missing in Spokane?” I asked. “Name of Tim?”
“Yep,” said the guy who sat behind the counter. He had a chaw of tobacco in his lip and yellow stained spit along both sides of his mouth. The man, somewhere in his sixties, gray stubble on a double chin and white hair poking from under a striped baseball cap, was balanced on the edge of a metal stool and wore zip up coveralls in a shade that once had been beige but had, due to time and neglect, become grayish black. He pulled an empty can from under the counter and let go of a long stream of yellow spit.
“Well,” I said, “we’ve got some tips that a kid was spotted out here, last night. Hear anything about that?”
The man wiped the back of his arm over his mouth and shook his head like nope, he ain’t heard nothing about that.
I chewed my lip, double thinking my reason for being in the store when the other man came up the aisle with the box of nails. He thumbed at the window in the general direction of the northeast.
“Old Seth’s got a new kid out at his place, washing trucks today,” he said.
“Hmm,” said the man behind the counter, taking up the nails and looking for a price tag. “You don’t say.”
My heart skipped a full beat and due to a lack of breathing, I felt light headed.
I looked through the dirty window of that store, in search of Allen who was out getting gas but I only saw a swatch of his yellow and blue striped rugby shirt on the other side of the truck.
“Seth?” I said. “Can you tell me where his place is? I sure would like to check that out and see if it’s the same kid.”
There was no response for the longest minute of my life as the men took me in from the top of my short, stylish haircut to the bottom on my practical black pumps. Just what did they made of this woman in a hounds tooth suit anyway? Where they thinking, “city girl?”
The fan in the store, high on the ceiling, was the only sound in that place and made a thawp, thwap, thwap that went right up the back of my neck.
The man buying the nails wasn’t that tall but he was thick and solid. A farmer. His hat was tipped back on his head, John Deere written across the brim and his face was clean shaved. He had dark blue eyes, like still water.
In a few minutes, that farmer gave me the directions to Seth’s place, five hundred acres of prime farmland just east of town. A right turn there and a left turn here and next thing, Allen and I pulled up to a huge metal building where several semi truck’s were shining—as if just washed—in the afternoon sun.
I just knew, in my gut, the boy was there. I could feel it like energy pulse. It was hot and wavy and my heart pounded in my chest so hard it hurt.
I didn’t call Ava though. Not yet. I wanted to be sure.
I told Allen to hold back on shooting any video. “Let’s be polite,” I said. “I don’t want to scare these people with cameras. Let’s take it slow.”
We both agreed, before I left the truck, that he would not tell Ava where we were either, because if he did, especially on the two-way, the other stations would here and the story wouldn’t be ours anymore.
A knock on the door of the farmhouse and a woman answered right away. She wore a cotton dress, baby blue and over that was a white apron. She looked like she was fifth generation farm girl with her hair up on top of her head, a whole gaggle of little ones clustered around her legs and flour on her face. She had been baking a pie.
“Are you here about Jack?” she asked.
“Jack?” I said.
“He’s been helping out today, doing chores for some extra money.”
“Oh,” I said, “well, actually, yes. Is he here?”
The woman looked at me and I looked at her and she had soft mother eyes that knew about boys who ran away from home and were looking for another way. I wasn’t a mother yet, that would be a long ways off, but I had been a wanderer for all of my life and knew a few things too. My parents died when I was small, my brother had shot himself just a couple years back and I had been passed around, as a child, from family to family and when it suited some, from man to man.
That’s why I worked all the time, why I tried so hard to be liked and why I would never succeed playing this heartless news game or even become a great reporter who cared most about leading the news with a story of disaster and pain.
Pain had been my life story. I was looking for a different tale to tell.
The woman looked up as if he might be over her head and then she bit her lip and nodded. She leaned forward and whispered. “He’s hiding upstairs.”
“Can I talk to him,” I asked, “just talk. That’s all.”
The farmwife nodded and made her kids move off to the side in order to open the screen door. As we went up the stairs, I told the woman I was a reporter from Spokane but that I wouldn’t put any of this on the news. I told her all I wanted to do was make sure the kid was okay and was the same kid everyone was searching for and if he was, I’d call his mother and get him home safe.
The woman nodded while I talked and seemed to take it all in stride. At a door at the end of the hall, she knocked a couple times and then turned the knob to let me in. Her kids were down the steps, all their little faces looking up and I went into the room by myself.
As if the photo of Tim grew to be full sized, there he stood—the missing youth—the good looking boy with dark hair and eyes who was slim with a narrow face and a slight build. His feet were big and of course, could have passed for a size twelve and he was wearing jeans, a black t-shirt and a navy blue windbreaker. There was no baseball cap.
Tim hung his head, as if busted, the way you see teenagers do sometimes. His hide out was a room with two bunk beds and a dresser shoved to the side.
I did not know Tim, we were not friends and I did not know his family and yet something in me snapped and I stopped imagining that we were separate in any way. Being a stranger didn’t matter. He was a human being and he was alive! I reached out to this kid, pulled him into my arms and hugged him like a mother would do. I hugged that boy so tight and no, he didn’t hug me back but he did laugh like he had been taken by surprise and I laughed for how out of character it was for me to show that much emotion. I set Tim back from me and looked him level. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” I said. “Everyone is so worried about you.”
Tim was like a rag in my hands, so frail and worn out from running to wherever he was going. He also looked spooked by his adventure and the decision he had made. After the initial exaltation of finding him, we sat together on the bottom bunk of one of those beds and I told him who I was and where I worked and then I asked what was going on. Why had he left?
Like I suspected, Tim ran away. His mother had been on his case, things were crappy with his dad, school was a bummer and the pressure to go to college was just too much. He wanted to be free. He wanted a different life. He wanted something but didn’t know what.
He talked and cried and then talked a little more.
I yanked a napkin from Zip’s out of my pocket and handed it over to him.
Tim swiped at his face and blew his nose. He was so young.
“What do you want to do?” I asked. “Do you want to keep running? Do you want to go home? Tell me. Just tell me what you want.”
At that moment, I was as good as fired. I had entered the worst terrain a reporter could enter. Without even realizing what I had done, I had left the land known as “impartial” and walked down the path of heart. There was no turning back. Yet I had no map.
Tim asked me to go ahead and call his mom. He was sorry he had upset everyone. He just wanted to go home.
Tim asked if I would leave too. No video. No interview. Just let him and mom work things out on their own.
“Could you do that?” he asked.
On the day I got fired, I said yes, I could do that.
Back at the station, Ava had called in the news director to tell him how I had blown it on every possible channel. I had missed the big story that every other station had run, except for us. I didn’t even get an interview and we were smeared by the completion—creamed on a story we owned until I walked away.
Steve Johnson, the big boss, was waiting for me when we got back. He did a finger motion that said, “get into my office, right now.”
On the day I got fired, I cleaned out my desk, dumped everything into a cardboard box and carried it out to my car. I loaded my stuff into the passenger seat of my Honda Civic and came around to the driver’s side. Ava didn’t say goodbye. Neither did Allen. I was old news, history.
Somehow Johnson had gotten someone from payroll in to cut me a final check so that would be it. No more contact.
As I sat in the parking lot, hands on the wheel, I felt as low as I had ever felt. I was a failure. Total and complete but the thing was, no one I knew would care. All my people were dead.
About to cry over my pathetic state, I remembered that envelope that came from The Society of Professional Journalists. Leaned over the cardboard box, I shuffled through the papers and reporter note pads until I found it, flap open, the mystery letter tucked inside.
I fished out a white page, just one and read how I had won five awards. One of the stories had been about an abduction, last year, of a woman who had never been found. I had hated that story for it’s futile and sad end and yet, look, I had won a prize.
Hot tears burned down my face and splashed on my dark green linen top. Who cared? I didn’t. I just sat there, a kid myself and I cried only there was no benevolent person to hand me a napkin or help me get home. I was on my own that day. I had to figure out what came next.
On the day I got fired, I started up my car and drove home to find my dog and my man where I had left them. On the sofa. There was, indeed, a wet towel on the bathroom floor. But this time, I didn’t say anything.
2 Comments:
So what did come next?
I appreciated your authenticity in this piece. It is not easy to acknowledge a time when we feel so vulnerable, yet so important to one's storytelling. :)
Thank you.
Ha! As we both know...here I am, teaching writing and publishing a few books. So I guess what ends badly ends well, yes??
Post a Comment
<< Home