“See, first you get the story you see as a reporter. Then the photographer brings back the story he’s seen through his camera. You put them together and sometimes you end up with this third story, something neither of you saw. You may never see it but the people watching do.” He sighed.
“It’s really wild when that happens. Ask Ellen,” he said and reached for his drink. “She knows.”
The young editor Mark Cunningham also tapped on her door.
“Hey, hi, do you mind? I mean, you said anyone could come.”
He wasn’t sure he was allowed to be there. He had only been at the station for a few months and he seldom left the editing room. He was hoping he’d get a chance to shoot, maybe with Debbie. She was nice to him. She was nice to everybody.
Paige Allen came. She lived in the same massive complex of balconies and pools and bending palms. Kim Palmeri and Maria Lopez also became regulars of a sort.
The one person Debbie wanted to see never came. After the first few tries of asking Ellen to drop by, Debbie stopped. Ellen filled the newsroom with laughter and excitement and a good static, loud and demanding, but the camaraderie ended when the newscast did or after a few drinks at the nearby bar. With Ellen, there seemed to be a strict, almost frightening sense of privacy.
“I keep my own weekends,” Ellen told her.
By the second month, some of The Best made it a habit to go to Debbie’s for dinner on Sunday night. Even the television critic from the afternoon paper gave her a call followed by a knock on her door, often with a date standing behind him.
“I don’t watch much television,” he told one Sunday night group in Debbie’s living room. “I mean, not really.”
He knocked his pipe on the side of the ashtray.
“I was in radio, you know.”
*
Besides filling the apartment with herself and a few people from the station, Debbie managed to create a garden on the tiny patio with its thin strip of dirt bordering the concrete slab.
“Tomatoes,” she told Paige Allen one bright Saturday afternoon in
May. “I can grow tomatoes in this corner.”
“You can’t grow many.”
“Sure, I can. In the summer, I can.” Debbie stood on the patio holding a trowel and surveying her patch of land.
“I like tomatoes,” Paige said.
“And here I can put in some carrots or strawberries,” Debbie continued.
Paige smiled and dimpled. Those dimples would take her to a weekend anchoring job somewhere in the Midwest. Those same dimples would keep her out of the top ten markets.
Debbie already had the plants, more than she would ever need. Perhaps she should buy pots and fill them with the plants and give them away, little presents. She knelt down and began turning the hard soil with the green-handled trowel.
“I could give you a couple,” she said to Paige. “Some little plants.” She smiled.
Paige smiled back. “I don’t think so, but you could give me a couple of tomatoes when they get big.”
“Okay, but, you might like a plant,” she tried again.
“I’ve got a date tonight,” Paige responded, looking at her nails. They were perfect and painted a soft gold color.
SEGMENT TWO
“There’s a new plan to bring help to the homeless in our valley. It was introduced at a press conference this afternoon.”
Carter’s voice was clipped, to the point. This afternoon. Period. Pause.
Jean Ann watched him and, as her camera jockeyed for position, looked down at her script.
“Reporter Frank Kowalski was there,” Carter continued, “and has this story for us.” The tape was on.
She licked her lips. She would need the spit gloss for the next intro. She waited for the story to end and hers to begin.
7
“You know what I’d like to do?” Debbie looked up from the memo. “I’d like to do stories on Indians.”
“Indians,” she said again. “You know. I think they are really interesting people.”
“What’s that?” Ellen asked with a nod to the paper Debbie held.
“The memo about beats, what beats we want. It’s not beats though, areas of interest is what it says. What are you going to put down?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t do any good. You only end up going out and doing what George says.”
“Well, I’d like to do Indians.”
Ellen shrugged. The less they knew about what she wanted to do, the better off she was.
George Harding sat at his desk, one shoulder hooked to the phone, one hand reaching for a second phone. His job was simple, feed the news animal, feed it three times a day, twice a day on weekends. Find the stories and the people to cover them. Work twelve to fifteen hours a day, be on twenty-four hour call.
Have fire and police scanners set up in your bedroom so you can be making assignments at four o’clock in the morning for reporters who refused to answer their phones. Be the most hated man in the newsroom and the most pitied. Make thirty thousand a year and hear the word fuck in almost every sentence spoken to you. Be the first one there in the morning, the last one to leave at night and someone somewhere will have the feeling that what you do is interesting.
He had no idea why he did it. He hadn’t the time to think of one. He had never been a reporter or a photographer. That was one of the things the newsroom disliked most about him.
“He’s got no fucking idea what it takes to do this,” photographer and reporter would whine to each other on the way to a story.
“Shit, if he ever carried a camera, he’d know this is ridiculous.”
“Hell, he couldn’t write a story if his life depend on it.”
George Harding thought he could write a story. He had
