23
E VEN BEFORE THE DINNER DEBACLE, THE OLD FART WAS MAKING ME crazy.
Dinner Debacle. Men’s Room Incident. Byline Blowup. I was starting to think of my life in the newsroom as a series of B-movie titles.
On the Monday after the great Men’s Room Incident, O’Connor walked by my desk and said in an overly loud voice, “Great story about the dogs, Kelly.”
Kelly. Not Ms. Kelly or Miss Kelly. This probably isn’t something a lot of people would even notice, but it seems to me the naming business is part of deciding who is on the team and who isn’t. Last name only, you’re on.
I was still angry with him, though, and decided I was going to ignore him, but he ignored me first. He kept walking.
Later, he waited until Mark Baker was standing near my desk, walked up to him, and said, “What I said the other day was crap. I’d appreciate it if you would forget every word of it.”
“No problem,” Mark said, and looked at me.
I pointedly turned my attention back to the black IBM Selectric on my desk. I was writing a story on Las Piernas High School’s astounding success in a drill team competition. Not a story that would win a Pulitzer, but I wasn’t ashamed of it, either. I had found a quotable kid who made all the difference.
Lydia told me that O’Connor had been asking her a lot of questions about me. That bothered me. It bothered me even more that she had answered most of them. I asked myself why I cared and couldn’t come up with a good answer.
Then came the Byline Blowup.
A week after the Men’s Room Incident, I was working on a story about art supplies. I hit upon this one by accident-I was waiting for my father to finish his latest round of chemo, when Aunt Mary became irritated with my anxiousness and told me to take a walk. So I strolled down toward the emergency room. Sure enough, there was someone there with bigger problems than mine: the mother of a teenager who had started hallucinating in art class, then passed out. So far, he hadn’t regained consciousness.
“He doesn’t use drugs,” she said. “I don’t know what caused this.”
At first I chalked this up to the “not my Johnny” syndrome-no love is so blind as parental love.
But some of his friends came by to wait with her, and after talking to them for a while, I became convinced that her son might be the clean-and-sober type after all. I got a few details from his classmates about what had been going on just before he started freaking out.
I took down the mother’s name, address, and phone number. When the doctor came out to talk to her, she let me listen in. I asked him if chemicals in use in the art class could cause that reaction.
“Conceivably,” he answered. “We won’t know the answer to that until his blood work comes back from the lab.”
When I got back to the paper that afternoon, I contacted a woman in the purchasing department of the school district. I had been trying to build trust with her; she had been a minor source whom I had hoped to go to for more in the future. I hadn’t really planned on hitting her with anything big so soon, and at first I feared that asking for a list of art supplies purchased for one of the local high schools might be more than she was willing to risk. The records were ones I could demand to see, but I preferred not to do that-taking that approach only builds future resistance.
When I told her about the episode in the emergency room, though, she asked me to meet her at a coffee shop in forty minutes. When she arrived, she was carrying a big stack of photocopied invoices.
“I have a son that age,” she said, and left without anything more than my thanks.
I don’t know how O’Connor learned I was working on that one, but he did. I found a note on my desk in his odd, nearly indecipherable scrawl: the name and phone number for the Center for Occupational Safety in New York, an organization that could give me information about the hazards associated with art supplies.
I marched over to his desk and said, “Do you think I’m so helpless, I can’t do my own research?”
“No,” he answered.
I was trying to come up with something truly disagreeable to say to him about not being able to buy me off with little favors, when, as if reading my mind, he added, “I know you have no intention of accepting an apology from me, but we do have to work together here. Just use that information if you can, toss it if you can’t. I’m sure you’ll do what’s best for the story.”
So I used it. I felt proud of the result of my work: a story that revealed that a local high school was using dangerous chemicals in art classes with poor supervision and inadequate ventilation, and had come close to causing one student’s death.
H.G. praised me. John Walters praised me. Wrigley II praised me. This last had me all puffed up with pride until Wrigley also handed off the story to O’Connor for a rewrite and basically took it away from me.
To my further irritation, O’Connor complained about that before I could, then he went on to make it a much stronger story, discovering that a teacher at another school in the district was out on permanent disability, probably as a result of exposure to the same chemicals. I hadn’t dug deep enough, or in enough directions.
I felt angry with myself over that, and had just decided that he deserved all the glory anyway, when I learned about his next campaign on my behalf. Before the shouting between O’Connor and Wrigley was over, everyone in the newsroom knew exactly who had made sure I’d get my first byline in the Express.
When Lydia asked me-in front of O’Connor-how it felt to have that byline, I told her that I would find it less embarrassing and painful to fall flat on my ass while crossing a busy street.
My only comfort was seeing the frown that remark brought to O’Connor’s face.
Lydia frowned, too, as she watched him walk away. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
“He’s way too involved in my career, thank you. I want to earn my bylines on my own. And I don’t want to share them with that jerk.”
“He’s not. You ask me, you’re the one who’s being a jerk. He said something out of line, and he knows it, and besides, that was before he knew about your dad.”
I felt as if I had swallowed a block of ice. “What?”
She had the look on her face that a person gets when he or she suddenly figures out that a really good idea was actually a really bad idea. Shouldn’t fill blimps with hydrogen. Shouldn’t dive headfirst into unknown waters. Shouldn’t tell everyone at work about the health problems of your best friend’s father. She broke eye contact.
“You told him about my dad?” I asked, horrified.
“Not much…” she said faintly.
Translation: too much.
I tried to explain that although I knew her intentions were good, I’d rather that details about my personal life- and my father’s health-did not become the property of newsroom gossips. When she insisted that O’Connor wasn’t the type to spread gossip, I reminded her about the Men’s Room Incident.
“Are you ever going to let that go?” she said.
The real problem was that I would have preferred O’Connor’s respect rather than his pity.
That was a Monday. The next day, I came into the newsroom and went to my desk without hearing one double entendre, without a single “honey,” without so much as a sour look. In fact, the whole room became quiet, then everyone managed to be really busy all of a sudden. Shades of the features department. I felt uneasy, and that unease only increased when I happened to surprise a look of sympathy on Wildman Billy Winters’s face.
O’Connor had told them.
Over the next few hours I received several offers of help, compliments on the art supply story, and friendly reporting advice from veteran newsmen who had wanted nothing to do with me for weeks. I managed to get through the day without letting my temper get the better of me, mostly because I was afraid that if I started to express my true feelings about their sudden solicitousness, my brief career in journalism would be over.
