Begin to Exit Here Read online

  “I’m an artist, Mr. Holstner,” I said. “I didn’t spend four years in college studying Twain and Dickens and Joyce and Faulkner and Welty and all those other people without first names just so I could sell third-rate pornography. Why can’t we take one of our video cameras and do a Tolstoy video called War and Lesbians?”

  Without expression, he said, “Our customers don’t like academic stuff. Put your headphones back on.”

  I had a headache that morning, as I did every morning when I walked into the little cubicle surrounded by complimentary dildos and vibrators with the catalog numbers on them, as if all of life and history had been reduced to battery-operated love. The four Tylenols I took hadn’t numbed me fast enough, so I began massaging my temples with one of the flesh-tone, bendable, three-speed vibrators. I didn’t know if it worked for women, but it distracted me from my headache. Then there was a call. I turned the vibrator down to low speed so the customer wouldn’t hear it.

  “East of Eden Enterprises, catalog office. May I help you?” I said.

  “Kurt?” a woman said.

  Not many women called, especially ones who knew my name, and a sudden rush of apprehension washed through me.

  “Kurt?” she said again, and I began to recognize the voice.

  “Janice?”

  “Well, of course. I’m probably the only one on the planet who knows you work there, unless you told your sister,” she said, laughing.

  “Well, Janice, you’ve never called me at work before. I don’t understand. Do you need a portable, pulsating vagina?”

  “Stop it, Kurt. The one I have is better.”

  “I know.”

  “Guess what, Kurt?”

  “I can’t guess what. Tell me.”

  “Some guy named Andrew Christopher called for you at my apartment. He said he’s the city editor for the News-Dispatch and he wants to interview you this afternoon. I told him three o’clock was fine and I’d tell you. You’ll be there. I promised. Kurt? What’s that weird noise?”

  “I have a headache. I’m massaging my head with a vibrator. It doesn’t work very well, either.”

  “You need a new job. Go.”

  “I’m going.”

  The important thing I noticed about Andrew Christopher during my interview in his office in Hampton was that he had a Texas accent and wore cowboy boots, which he rested inelegantly on top of his desk while trying to intimidate me and make me admit that I was a stupid, subservient bastard for coming into his office and needing a job.

  “Why should I hire another subservient college boy like you, another spineless clone who thinks he can memorize all the phrases from the New York Times and call himself a reporter?” he said, striking a wooden match on the bottom of one of his boots, then lighting a Pall Mall and trying to blow the smoke across the desk into my face.

  “Are you from Texas?” I said.

  “What the hell would you know about Texas?” he said with moderate irritation.

  “At least as much as you. I was born there.”

  “Well kiss either one of my buttocks and what the hell does Texas have to do with anything?” he said loudly, as if choosing to lose control with me.

  “You’re wearing cowboy boots,” I said. “Most of the people I’ve ever seen wearing cowboy boots are either Texans or pimps. I’m assuming you’re not a pimp.”

  He squinted at me then, as if sighting me for future damage and violence that might occur instantly, which didn’t matter to me because he’d pissed me off enough that already I was imagining how, if he came over the desk at me, I’d shatter the side of his face with my fist.

  “I don’t think if I was a pimp I’d conduct my business in the newsroom of a daily paper, do you?” he said accusingly.

  “You dress too badly to be a pimp. You must be an editor,” I said.

  This savage remark caught him off guard, and while he tried to remain haughty and dangerous-looking with me, he reluctantly grinned at me and changed his attitude slightly. Instead of attacking me for my mere presence, he attacked me for sport.

  “Boy, I was raising cattle in Texas before you were more than an errant spurt from your daddy’s dick on a windshield at a drive-in, and you don’t look like a reporter to me, let alone a Texan,” he said, blowing more smoke at me.

  Tired of the drama, and unwilling to endure his contempt any longer, even if I wouldn’t get hired, I sat up peevishly in my chair and said, “From one Texan to another, Mr. Christopher, fuck you. I came here for an interview, not a personal assault. I understand that you want a reporter in St. Beaujolais. I can do that. I’ve worked for four newspapers in three states for nine years and I know what the hell I’m doing. I’ve been a copy boy, an obituary writer, a news clerk, and a night police reporter running around looking at bodies in the street just so we could write three goddamn column inches saying one more human was dead. And don’t dare accuse me of wanting to imitate the New York Times or the Associated Press, because I despise those bastards, which my last editor should be able to tell you if you care to call him.”

  “I already did,” he said, and leaned back in his chair to stare at me suspiciously.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he fired you because you can’t write good newspaper prose.”

  “He’s mistaken. He fired me because I write better than that.”

  “He also said you were arrogant.”

  “He isn’t completely mistaken.”

  And we were both quiet then, privately agitated and silent. My headache came back and I wished I had a vibrator or something. Christopher picked up a filthy coffee mug and sipped from it, then stared off at the wall with annoyed thoughtfulness. Probably I should have just left, but I was going to wait to be asked.

  Then, without looking at me, Christopher said, “There’s something wrong with you. Something uncivilized. Not docile. Not invaded yet by the horrifying sameness of the world. Whatever’s wrong with you is probably valuable. I want to hire you and pay you badly. Is four hundred dollars a week bad enough?”

  I said, “Well, I don’t get to pick how badly you pay me. You do.”

  “I want you at work tomorrow. Are you going to ask why I hired you?”

  “It’s not something I’m willing to question.”

  Less than two weeks after being fired for who I was, I was hired for who I was. The world had no interest in making sense. That was one reason we had newspapers, to take the ordinary chaos and complexity of daily life, rob it of nearly all emotion and wonder, then arbitrarily force sense onto the world. Again I was going to be an important ally and enemy of newspapers, which I gleefully expressed that evening during a champagne toast to me and my new job, and I wanted to drink. It was embarrassing and oddly sad in this new victory of mine that I couldn’t even drink a toast to myself, and I could only watch the waitress uncork the big green bottle that was for me and which I couldn’t touch, like it was an old ruin that wasn’t done with me yet.

  “I want some,” I said quietly to Janice, so no one else could hear.

  “I know. You can’t,” she said, squeezing my hand under the table, as if her fingers would help me not want my champagne, and only she and I knew this.

  “I can smell it,” I said, closing my eyes and still seeing every glass being filled with champagne, smelling the light fragrance everywhere that was supposed to be happy but which for me was just a dangerous taunt.

  “Don’t smell it,” Janice whispered, squeezing my hand harder.

  I was going to cry, but not there, not when everyone was happy and couldn’t tolerate my sudden breakdown, and so you’re dishonest, aren’t you, and you don’t cry, and you never let anyone know that a panic is invading you again, that a mere fragrance settling across the table wants to destroy you, and maybe you’ll let it, squeezing her fingers until you feel bone, and the tiny thump-thump-thump of her pulse in your hand, saying here I am, here I am, and you can’t tell anybody, not even her.

  Raising my glass. When�
��s it going to go away? Is it? Raising my glass, the only one there with ginger ale in it, as if this makes me safe, deciding not to cry and now invent something you’re supposed to say of yourself in a toast, saying, “Here’s to that endangered man, me, whose perilous goal it is to, I forget. What’s my goal?”

  “Not get fired,” Janice said.

  “Yes. Whose perilous goal it is to disregard the fundamental teachings of American journalism, write however the hell I want, and not get fired.”

  And everyone clinked their champagne glasses over the center of the table in my perilous honor.

  Janice didn’t really like the toast, raising up her glass in a new one, holding my chin in her hand so I’d have to look at her eyes as she said, “And here’s to realism, which Kurt will have to learn.”

  “Realism?” I said.

  “Unless you want to make a career of being fired, here’s to realism, where you actually learn to work with editors and not just treat them as your invited enemies,” she said.

  It was like being shot in the head by the one you love, and such an astonishingly unexpected and accurate shot.

  “My God. You just shot me in the head. And you did it so well, too,” I said, staring at Janice and raising my glass until it touched hers, where we held them together for a while and stared at each other, like there was more of her I didn’t know and I needed to find it. Find her.

  “Here’s to realism,” I said, not looking away from her eyes.

  11

  The St. Beaujolais bureau of the News-Dispatch, my new professional home, was a mildly upsetting brick structure on West Jefferson Street that looked as if it originally was a windowless storage building and was squashed between a drugstore and a vegetarian restaurant.

  “What did they used to store here?” I asked my new bureau chief, Lisa McNatt, on my first day at work.

  “Men with their pants off. It used to be a massage parlor,” she said.

  “Ah. From a massage parlor to a news bureau. The building is deteriorating,” I said.

  “That’s why we can afford it,” Lisa said. She seemed bright and funny, and already I liked her.

  Just like at every other paper I’d worked for, I was given an unclean desk and an unclean chair. On the desk was an old brown phone that looked as if people had thrown it away before but someone else, maybe vandals, kept bringing it back. And I had a brand new computer terminal without a keyboard.

  “It’s broken,” Lisa said. “Christopher said the keyboard should be back today or tomorrow. He’s probably wrong. You can use someone else’s terminal.”

  I was briefly introduced to four of the five other reporters who worked at the bureau, all of whom appeared to be in their mid-twenties and seemed so absorbed in their particular stories that day that the rest of reality was an irrelevant distraction. It was reporter’s disease, a vile and communicable mental affliction in which a reporter irrationally believes that nearly any given story he’s working on for the morning paper is more urgent and interesting than whatever he’s not writing about, as if all educated and sensible adults in the community based their lives on reading the morning paper. That was dog shit.

  Already my sardonic impulses were loose. “Stay. Sit,” I whispered to myself, like a dog known for suddenly gnawing on things. And I remembered Janice staring at me seriously that morning on the sofa, smiling with affection and hope, like I was a thirty-six-year-old boy going into the dangerous world again, and she couldn’t always protect me. I loved her.

  “Do you want to become one with me?” I asked then.

  She laughed and touched my face. “I’ll become one with you later. You go to work. And try, Kurt, try very hard, to be the kind of reporter they want, until everything fails and you bust loose like I know you will. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  My first official work of the morning was to fix a cup of coffee, light a cigarette, sit comfortably in my unclean chair and say, “It’s a good thing I don’t have a keyboard, or else I’d have to work.”

  Lisa sent me down to the police station to read through the daily crime reports, where I saw Captain Trollope and had to explain to him the recent changes in my fate.

  “I heard you got booted from the Journal,” Captain Trollope said. “I was sorry to hear that.”

  “Being fired is one of those fringe benefits they don’t tell you about,” I said. “But it didn’t last very long. I was hired yesterday by the News-Dispatch, and here I am. I guess I’m hard to exterminate.”

  “Evidently. Did they give you the police beat?”

  “I don’t know yet. This is just something to keep me busy right now, I think, while they decide which beat I get or if I’ll be the free safety.”

  “Free safety? I haven’t heard of that reporting position.”

  “I made it up. It’s when you don’t particularly belong anywhere, so they put you everywhere. I guess a free safety is like a floater.”

  This also puzzled Captain Trollope, who smiled and said, “Floater? That’s what we call a drowning victim.”

  “Really?” I said. “I never heard that name before. Floater. You cops are grotesque, you know.”

  “We know.”

  “But when I say floater, I mean someone who just floats around freely, doing random assignments that no one else can or wants to do.”

  “Sounds better than a drowning victim.”

  “I think so. Being dead would interfere with my work.”

  “Somewhat. Well, congratulations on your new job. If you need anything this morning, I’ll be in my office where I don’t want you to bother me.”

  “Well, I’ll just bother whoever walks by.”

  Then I sat at the desk with the big stack of overnight crime reports, scanning each one to look for suitable crimes and peculiarities to write about for the police blotter. There were several DWIs, a tedious feature in newspapers that I despised, as if people genuinely wanted to read the freshest list of strangers who got drunk and drove somewhere. It seemed possible, though, that I could take a group of DWIs and rank them according to how high they scored on the Breathalyzer test. As a journalistic project, I wrote down the names of five people arrested for driving while intoxicated, and included the blood-alcohol levels they got on the Breathalyzer test. In my notepad, it looked like this:

  Today’s Scoring for DWIs

  At the end of the week, the paper could give an award of mild dishonor to that week’s most drunken DWI, although maybe that would be too harsh. I’d ask Christopher and see what he thought. If he said we shouldn’t ridicule people by ranking their drunkenness, I’d say we already do it by writing about their arrests in the first place. You might as well convert it into a sport.

  Most of the crime reports were slight things of practically no interest but which witlessly conscientious reporters wrote down anyway because they’re company dullards, such as the report of a woman whose purse, containing car keys and nine dollars, was stolen. I dismissed that crap and searched for things that were at least acutely weird, like this one, written in the officers’ own personal scrawls: “Complainant reported apparent sound of cats fighting in her yard, which disturbed her sleep. After I arrived to investigate, complainant complained that my knocking on her door disturbed her sleep. Cats gone.”

  And this crime report certainly warranted publication for the well-being of the community: “Received call from Ms. Lohman about a strange man on front porch of her house. Subsequent investigation revealed it was her husband.” In my notes, I wrote: “No arrest. Marriage itself not a punishable offense.”

  Farther down in the stack was a report that most journalists would dismiss as being an empty and vain incident not worthy of serious attention, but to me it was an enthralling bit of weirdness suitable for the front page of the paper, and I copied it all down: “Complainant, Mrs. Delio, advised officers that her estranged husband apparently entered the home in her absence and removed the light bulbs from every light in the house. Complainant advised s
he couldn’t see. Officers confirmed all light bulbs were missing. No suspect.”

  An instinct or a personal aberration told me that only a meteor hitting St. Beaujolais would be a more engaging story that day, and if a meteor did hit St. Beaujolais, writing about it would be hampered by our instantaneous deaths. Gleefully I went back to the bureau with my prized crime report, interviewed Mrs. Delio over the phone, and began writing a peculiar drama:

  A St. Beaujolais woman’s estranged husband reportedly entered the woman’s home sometime Wednesday, unscrewed all 19 light bulbs from every lamp and fixture in the house, then escaped with the light bulbs, leaving no clues but the dark.

  “Nothing else was gone, just the light bulbs,” said the victim, Marianne Delio. “I called the police and told them all my light bulbs were missing. They said buy some more.”

  It wasn’t big or important news at all, but it was funny and human, the kind of story people wanted to read because it wouldn’t hurt, scare, numb, annoy, or bewilder them, like the majority of newspaper stories did. The story made it onto the front page of the morning paper, a nice start for my return to a profession that generally regarded me with abiding distrust.

  12

  Insofar as Harmon Sparr wanted someone to be bludgeoned to death with a violin so he could write about it, he was a common American reporter. Harmon, who was twenty-six and had been a reporter for five years, was habitually upset that not enough corruption, evil, and horror happened in Vermilion County to produce the really good stories that newspapers are all about.

  “Goddammit,” Harmon said in his low, peevish voice as he sat at his computer working on a story about protecting the Wolfe Lake watershed from pollution. “Goddamn watershed. I hate these stories. This isn’t journalism. Why can’t a military train loaded with five-hundred-pound incendiary bombs crash into a church bus carrying a choir? That’s journalism.”

  Harmon’s desk was behind mine. “You could go to Romania and get shot to death. I won’t stop you,” I said.

  “Kiss my ass,” Harmon said.