A Cup of Water Under My Bed (20 page)

After that first story, editors send me to get quotes from people on the street about an increase in subway fares. Then to interview people on the street about the mayor’s new idea to ban loud noises. Then to take the subway to Brooklyn, because a fire there has killed a black child. Then to a Latino event to get the governor’s reaction. Eight hours become ten, eleven, twelve. The copy editors call at seven, eight, and nine at night.

In the morning, I board the subway, exhausted. I spot that day’s paper in someone’s hands. A small thrill comes into my heart. Someone is about to read one of my stories. But the woman scans the headlines, flips the pages, and then folds the paper and stores it in her bag.

That’s it. Twelve hours of work—by hundreds of reporters, stringers, editors, copy editors, designers, and deliverymen—were considered for a total of five seconds by a white woman on the Number 6 train. I meet humility for the first time, and I hate it.

One of the other young reporters decides that we need to meet with veterans at the paper for informal conversations about the business. This is her code for “I’m trying to move up,” and the rest of us agree that it’s a good idea. Someone from the powers-that-be says we can meet on the fourteenth floor, where the big private events happen.

I arrive early. I want to enjoy the quiet here, the cathedral windows, the sense that the city and even the newsroom, with its ringing phones and chatty television screens, are at a distance.

The veteran reporter steps into the room. He’s an older man with a kind voice and gentle smile. We exchange a hello, but then his eyebrows furrow. He’s staring at a door off to the side of the room. “Is the stairwell through there?” he asks.

“I think so.”

He’s lost now in his own world as he walks over and props the door open. I follow him. In the stairwell, he pauses at one of the windows, mentions the editor, the white man who killed himself, and grows silent.

The window pane here is dusty and
viejo
. It’s late in the afternoon, and the light bathes the parapets of the building and even, I suppose, the place where the man met his final moment. The older reporter stares out the window, then inspects the frame and sighs deeply, and I begin to understand that I believed the TV shows I watched as a child. I believed bad things didn’t happen to white people, not in places like this. But now here is the window, the man grieving, the light golden and punishing.

While I’m reporting for the
Times
, my father is spending his days in the basement where he’s made a room of his own, apart from my mother and tías. He has his beer, his radio, even a mattress so he can take naps. He has set up a shower for himself.

I am afraid of finding him dead in the basement one day. Already once, he drank too much, fell, and cut his head open, and we had to rush him to the emergency room. But there is no use trying to get him out of the basement. It is a blessing that he lets me take him now for a visit to the doctor.

The waiting room is large enough for about fifty people, but it doesn’t have a television, so everyone looks bored and restless. Papi is dressed in dark jeans, construction boots, and a flannel button-down shirt over a white Hanes T-shirt. He asks me about the
New York Times
, and I confide that I’m not liking it. He stares at the floor and says nothing.

Inside, he sits on the examination table, and I take the chair reserved for spouses or parents. I figure my father won’t say anything about what I shared, but then without my prompting, he comments, “
Tú piensas que a mí me gusta mi trabajo? A mí no me gusta mi trabajo. A tu mamá tampoco
.”

That is what I record in my journal that night: “Do you think I like my work? I don’t like my work. Your mother doesn’t like hers either.”

When the doctor arrives, I begin moving back and forth between Spanish and English admonishments: stop drinking, stop smoking, eat more vegetables, more fruits, more oranges.

“Oranges?” my father exclaims in Spanish. “No. That’s all I ate in Cuba, only oranges. No oranges.”

The doctor and I look at each other. After so many years of working in our community, he knows, like I do, that there is no use in arguing against memory.

Nor do I disagree with my father about whether or not people should have work they enjoy. But the next morning, I notice I have a hard time getting out of bed. Not an impossible time. Just a heaviness about me, as if the air itself were an open hand holding me down.

It’s a cool night in November and I am walking on the Upper East Side, past doormen and women in three-inch heels hailing cabs and men in their fifties walking dogs the size of their briefcases. I am, as usual, lost in my inner world. I am contemplating a conversation or rewriting an article or wondering about the origin of three-inch heels. I am acutely aware of the streets in Manhattan, of the way darkness never wins here, not even at night, but is always kept at bay by street lamps and the bobbing headlights of taxis and limos and buses. The city is a blitz of lights and sounds and smells, but I have learned to shut it out, to be in my own quiet place.

Tonight, however, is different.

I turn a corner, and the city yanks me from my inner world. Fifty feet up in the air is Kermit the Frog, his belly nearly touching the top of the street lamps, his fingers reaching to tap the windows of high rise buildings, his inflated balloon body covering a chunk of the Manhattan street.

It’s the night before Thanksgiving Day, and the balloons are being prepared for their annual walk in the Macy’s parade. It’s the sort of the thing that can only happen in New York, not the balloons but finding their giant faces and hands around the corner, the way they make even this city feel small, insignificant. It feels magical and bizarre too, how the world can contain all of this, the plastic green frog, the memories and the oranges, the dead white man.

Editors were invented for several reasons, one of which is to torture interns.

It’s a metro editor who decides that interns will spend time on the police beat helping to cover New York City’s homicides, rapes, and robberies. The work mostly involves chatting with white police officers in charge of information they won’t give you unless the two of you get along and they consider you something of a person they’d want to have a beer with. To say that I’m terrible at this would be putting it kindly.

The rest of the work, at least for me, involves watching a veteran reporter with reddish curls call the families of crime victims and say in a mournful tone, “I’m sorry for your loss. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”

The first few times, I stare at him, and when it’s no longer polite to do so, I pretend to read online while listening to him. He sounds genuine and compassionate during every phone call. He modulates the tone of his voice, and I note how his English is comforting, the way a hand-rolled cigar feels, as if the earth has been gathered up, made compact, held steady. His voice reaches out to the other person, yes, but it also allows for mutual silence and then directs back to the questions, the information that’s needed, the interview.

Then, the call is over, the moment has passed, and he’s on to other calls, detectives, cops, higher-ups, and he’s issuing orders, because another paper caught a piece of information we should have, and I’m off to the Bronx for a story about a young man named Buddha.

The hierarchy of pain has nuances.

The fact that Buddha murdered someone is news, because the victim was a child. If the child had been a few years older, if he had been not a child but instead a young black man, the editor would have said, “Victim and perp knew each other,” which is the preferred way to explain that black men killing each other in the Bronx is not news.

But Buddha murdered a child, and he did so three days after Christmas, on a day when the news was slow.

He’s in jail now, Buddha. It’s his mother we are after. Me and reporters and stringers for local newspapers. I interview the neighbors and note the holiday decorations (“Peace and Joy”). Later, the district attorney’s office will say that Buddha got his name because he was tall and fat, and that three days after Christmas, Buddha was bruised, not on his body but somewhere else. His heart or his ego. Another man, another tall, overweight black man had teased Buddha. Words were thrust back and forth between them, threatened to erupt into fists, into gunshots, but the women stepped in. The
novias
. And the air became if not calm, then, at least, still. Buddha and the man parted ways.

But Buddha followed him, not the man, but the man’s little cousin, thirteen-year-old Brandon. In an elevator, Buddha towered over the youngster, and while boasting of how he planned to hurt the other man, his mirror image, Buddha shoved Brandon against the wall of the elevator and shot him in the head.

The elevator reached the twelfth floor. It was after midnight. The door must have opened then, mechanically, indifferently, and spilt the boy’s blood.

Now the elevator door creaks open and Buddha’s mother steps into the narrow hallway. She’s pushing a shopping cart. It has two six packs of beer. She refuses, however, to talk to us as she opens the door to her apartment. She’s a heavy black woman with colorless eyes and deep lines set in her face, and my first thought is that no one is going to tell her story, the story of how she probably falls asleep at night in front of the television set with a can of beer still open, like my father, and how she raised a family here so many hundreds of feet above the Bronx, and how she bathed Buddha when he was an infant and fed him WIC baby formula and now all she wants to do is smack him.

There are also the other stories, the ones about how these neighborhoods were set up, how white men decided where black families would live, how it came to be that Buddha grew up in a place where you carry a gun to come and go from home and kill a boy who looks like a younger version of yourself.

I don’t have words for these other stories, only the feeling of them inside of me like pebbles piled at the corner of a child’s desk.

There were other black reporters in the newsroom at the
New York Times
besides Jayson Blair. When I think back to that time, though, to the spring of 2003, I can only see Jayson.

He is writing front-page stories for the paper about Iraq War veterans. I know he was once an intern like me, but what I haven’t figured out yet is if he’s quiet and withdrawn because he’s brilliant or if something is wrong with him. The fact that he wears long sweaters instead of shirts and ties unsettles me. It isn’t the sort of thing a white man would do here, let alone a young black man. I keep wanting to tuck his shirt in. I tease him once or twice about being short. He’s polite, but it’s clearly a sore point with him, and I leave him alone.

It turns out, though, that he has good reason to keep to himself. Jayson is drinking, lying, and plagiarizing his stories. Front-page stories.

“Did you hear?” another intern asks me.

I nod. “Crazy.” I figure the paper will run an apology and move on.

But there isn’t an apology. The story unravels. The anxieties of white people, the ones kept behind private doors, burst and the other newspapers report them: Jayson only got as far as he did because he’s black. A fellow intern comes up to me, irritated. “Why are people thinking it’s okay to say racist shit in front of me?”

She’s holding a cup of coffee. We both glance across the newsroom, across the cubicles and the tops of people’s heads. I have no way, none really, of knowing who in the room is a Mr. Flaco, and this is part of the agreement we make by working here, as people of color. We don’t know who harbors doubts about our capacity to think and work and write. We don’t know, not really, who we can trust.

Jayson, meanwhile, is rumored to be shut away in his apartment, and as a friend of mine puts it, the white people do then what they always do when they get nervous: they call a meeting.

The meeting is held on Forty-Fourth Street, in a theater. I get in line along with hundreds of reporters and administrative staff and editors. The executive editor and managing editor and publisher sit before us on a stage. They’re going to explain what happened. Sort of.

There isn’t an easy way to tell us that someone who was mentally unstable managed to get a job at the world’s most recognized newspaper and snuck lies past more than one or two or even three editors. I sit in the audience and inspect my identification card. I don’t like sports where a person is put in a ring to get beat up. Besides, no one is going to talk about race. Not in an honest way.

But I’m wrong.

The executive editor, Howell Raines, has the mic. He’s from the South, he reminds us, a place where a man has to choose where he stands on race. “Does that mean I personally favored Jayson? Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama with those convictions, gave him one chance too many. . . .”

I wince and I pray that he won’t go there, because if he does it will not be cute. It will not be understood by the hundreds of white people in the theater. But he does it. He goes there.

Did he, as a white man from Alabama, give a young black man too many chances? “When I look into my own heart for the truth of that,” he admits, “the answer is yes.”

It’s been eight years since that day in the theater, and I’m thinking again about a white man confessing to his own people that he cared about the black community, that he thought he could single-handedly change a hierarchy. I’m thinking about the whiteness of the news organization and how that whiteness reproduced itself with every hire, every promotion, but that is not a scandal.

He left, the editor. He was fired and the metro editor—a white man who once told me that community-based organizations, the ones helping poor people of color, were no longer relevant—was hailed as a savior because he had tried to stop Jayson from writing for the paper.

A week or so after the theater meeting, I meet the Jourdans.

They are Haitians. They came to New York City one by one over the course of thirty years: Patrick, Paul, Cosner. They knew that life would be easier the closer they lived to white Americans. They earned their money; they sent it back home. They brought another brother, a sister and a young cousin. Together, some of them with spouses, they shared the basement apartment and second floor of a two-story home in Brooklyn.