Begin to Exit Here (11 page)

He was right, but in my deliberately absurd style, I said, “I wasn't going to ask you any of that. I was going to ask if you ski.”

“If I ski?” he said, starting to laugh.

“Yes. You're up there by the Rocky Mountains, so I knew our readers would want to know if gay police chiefs ski. Do you?”

He did laugh, then. I was glad.

“You're not like most reporters,” he said.

“Not really.”

“Well, yes. I do ski,” he said.

“Downhill?”

“It's too hard to ski uphill,” he said.

“I wouldn't know. I don't ski,” I said. “But I used to live in Denver, when I was a boy.”

“Really?” he said. “You lived in Denver but you never skied? That's criminal.”

“Criminal? You mean it's illegal in Fort Lupton to not ski? I'm writing that down, chief. None of the other papers have this stuff.”

Eventually Chief Donner and I digressed to the subject of his being a gay police chief, which didn't seem upsetting to him at all.

“Fundamentally, it's best not to care a great deal if some people are going to want to call me a queer and say public officials shouldn't have sex in the butt,” he said.

As I was writing that sentence down in my notebook, I said, “Chief, that's a great line, but you know we can't print that.”

“Why?” he said. “Do you mean that all of those people in the public who have images of a police chief having sex in the butt would be horrified to see their own imaginations in print?”

“That's it,” I said. “I think they object to their own knowledge.”

T
hings soon broke loose, and I was one of the fragments. On the same day my interview with Chief Donner was printed, the
Journal
ran a story saying there had been dissension and even a brief walkout among police officers in Fort Lupton when Donner became chief there in 1984 because some officers didn't want to work for a queer. The
Journal
printed a huge headline saying, at the top of the front page, “Dissension revealed in gay police chief's department.” It was a sensationalist story hinting at fractious troubles to come if Donner was hired by Small, and it essentially repeated an old story of problems long ago worked out between Donner and the officers in Fort Lupton. But because I didn't have the same story, Lisa angrily
told me what I'd done was shoddy, incomplete reporting that embarrassed the newspaper because we were beaten by the
Journal.

“Fuck the
Journal,”
I said in her office. “They took an old incident that was big news five
years
ago in Colorado only, one that involved maybe six police officers and which was resolved in a few weeks and hasn't recurred. So what's my embarrassment to the paper? That I didn't exaggerate the fuck out of an old incident and pretend it was urgent news?”

“The embarrassment is that you didn't have it at all,” Lisa said with quiet anger.

“I had damn near everything
else
in the interview.”

“Everything else doesn't matter. What you
didn't
have matters.”

“Jesus Christ, Lisa. That's like telling me that
most
of what I did was good, but because I didn't have some old news from Colorado that doesn't matter anymore, I screwed up the whole story.”

“It
does
matter,” she said, and threw a phone book at the wall. “It's the main reason we're even writing
stories
about this guy! He's a gay public official, and if he comes to Small to head the police department, he might run into some of the same problems he had in Colorado.”

I didn't want to argue anymore. My head hurt and Lisa decided I was wrong no matter what.

“That's in my story,” I said quietly. “Three or four
paragraphs of information and quotes from him saying he knows he could have those problems, but he doesn't think it could be serious and he'll be able to deal with it if it happens.”

Lisa exhaled loudly and looked away from me. “But you didn't get the story about his troubles in Colorado,” she said.

“I missed it. You're right. I only got how he'd deal with it here. Kill me.”

Lisa scowled at me. “Put it in your next story,” she said.

“Oh boy. One more story about the gay police chief and what he does with his butt.”

“Don't push me, Kurt. Don't.”

Also that day, Al Perrault had written a wildly ignorant editorial with all the grandeur of enlightened homophobia. It was the true embarrassment of the paper, one that made me ashamed to be a reporter there. Like looking at a dead animal on the side of the road just to see what it was, I looked at the first two paragraphs of the editorial again:

It shouldn't surprise anyone these days, with AIDS spreading like a cancer, that we have a homosexual police chief in Colorado. But do we need one in Small?

It's hard to say if discipline and morale will be damaged among the well-trained male police officers
in Small if the Board of Aldermen elects to hire a homosexual to lead them. We've all heard stories about valiant homosexuals who fought in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. It seems appropriate, then, to keep our minds open now as a body of elected officials examines a prominent homosexual who has sex with men.

Janice called me at work and said she'd just read the editorial.

“Kurt, it's too embarrassing to be in print,” she said.

“I know.”

“I'm writing a letter to the editor.”

“Don't use my name,” I said.

“I won't. The first thing I'll say in the letter is it's fantastically stupid to say AIDS is spreading like a cancer. AIDS is spreading like AIDS.”

“I know. Perrault's stupid.”

“You sound depressed, Kurt. Are you okay?”

“No. I'm a reporter.”

“What's wrong?”

“I went to work.”

She laughed a little bit and said, “Kurt, please don't feel bad. It's Friday. Do you want to go to the mountains?”

“I don't know.”

“Yes, you do. You want to go to the mountains with
me. We'll stay in a lodge and go hiking and no one will bother us all weekend. Say yes.”

“Yes.”

“I love you, Kurt.”

“I'm glad. I love you, too. I want you to hold me, now.”

“I can't hold you over the phone,” she said.

“Goddamn phone.”

“You're silly,” she said. “I'm going to pack some stuff after work. I'll be ready when you get home.”

She'd never said that before. A pleasant, kind of scary shudder or tingling went through me. “Home?” I said.

“Yes. Home,” she said. “I said that, didn't I?”

“Does this mean we have a home?” I said. “I want it to.”

“Kurt. This is odd. I said home, like you're supposed to be there.”

“I know. I realize that. I like it a lot. You'll be ready when I get home.”

“That's right. When you get home,” she said.

“I'll try and leave work early.”

“Good.”

The day wasn't through annoying and injuring me yet, though. Bobby Havelock, the mayor of Small, called to excoriate me.

“I want you to know that I'm very angry and I think it's both unprofessional and irresponsible of you to have written one more story that dwells on the sexuality of Chief
Donner rather than his splendid record as a police chief, and I'd recommend that you resign,” the mayor said.

Oh fuck. “I didn't dwell on his sexuality. I wrote about it,” I said.

“When Don Hoyle was hired to be the police chief up in Cokesboro, I didn't see any strenuous efforts at investigative reporting or any sensational articles on
his
background or where
he
came from,” the mayor said irritably.

“He's not gay,” I said.

“Is
that
it then?” he said with more anger. “These are supposed to be more enlightened times, and I find it singularly repugnant that you'd single out Chief Donner solely because he doesn't choose to have vaginal intercourse.”

“I don't care what kind of intercourse he has. He gets to pick.”

“Don't be haughty with
me
, goddammit!”

“I'm not haughty. If I wanted to be haughty, you'd
really
be pissed off. And don't accuse me of singling out Donner for anything more than being a gay public official in an overwhelmingly heterosexual world. That's news, and I don't invent news, as much as I'd prefer to.”

“Well, I'm damn sick of this so-called news, where a decent, intelligent, exceedingly competent man is held up as a public curiosity just because he's homosexual.”

“I'm sick of it, too. I didn't want to write the goddamn stories. It's not
my
fault that having gay police chiefs is a
social novelty. So quit being pissed off at me. Be pissed off at humanity.”

“I'm calling your publisher,” the mayor said in a sullen tone. “I think your entire bureau should resign.”

“I'll tell them, unless you want to call everyone individually.”

I heard him bang the phone down. Very slowly and quietly, I hung up the phone, sighed, and stared at the ceiling. Everyone in the bureau who had heard my part of the conversation—four reporters and Lisa—walked toward me, the way water comes back after a splash.

“Who was that?” Lisa said.

“Some mayor,” I said.

“Havelock,” Harmon said solemnly. “What'd he say?”

I wondered how to summarize everything I was already trying to forget. “Ohhhh,” I said, “something about newspapers, enlightened times, anal intercourse. We were just chatting.”

At home that night Janice said an odd irony about me writing about Donner was that while the public was being asked to wonder, through my story, if a homosexual could be a competent, acceptable kind of human, the public had no idea that the story about the homosexual was written by an alcoholic.

“It's like the public itself always takes on the general pose of goodness or wholesomeness,” she said, “and when
an issue like homosexuality comes along, represented here by a gay police chief, the public is asked to pretend to stand back objectively and examine the whole subject of homosexuality through the presumably objective, untainted, wholesome institution of the daily paper, as if you, the reporter, represent all of the unquestionable goodness of the public or something. But if the public knew you were an alcoholic, you'd be in the same damnable position as the gay police chief, or worse. Its almost gotten fashionable among some people to accept gays and lesbians, or at least say you do. But if you started telling people you were an alcoholic, people would secretly think of you with pity or revulsion, as if you weren't Kurt anymore but you were just a drunk.”

Even though what Janice was saying was correct and she only said it because she cared about me, it hurt me to listen to her. I was afraid to look at her, as if even some part of
her
couldn't help but find me detestable.

“Kurt. I'm not
saying
you're a drunk.”

I couldn't look at her, reminded—and she didn't want to hurt me—that all my life now I wouldn't really be thought of as a man you could talk with but just this humanlike figure with symptoms of life.

“Don't.” She walked from the kitchen and kind of kneeled next to me on the couch, putting my head against her chest and holding me.

“You're okay,” she said, squeezing me to her.

“Usually when people tell you you're okay, it means something's wrong with you,” I said.

She rocked me a little and held me and said, “Kurt. Shut up.”

I did.

A
s we drove west into the stinging brilliant light of the afternoon sun, Janice wore black sunglasses and a pink, straw sunbonnet, which made me decide she looked like a nursery-rhyme girl planning to attend a robbery.

“Does that mean I look exotic?” she said.

“It means you're pretty,” I said, watching her drive. It was pleasant and soothing just to look at her, to see her leg and her arm work together when she shifted, to see her do anything, and to take me with her.

“I like it when you're in control,” I said, resting my hand on her shoulder.

“All I'm
doing
is driving,” she said.

“I like it when you're driving, and I get to be with you.”

She reached over and stroked my cheek with her fingers and we kept going into the sun. Fast. She started to tell me which mountains we could go to, but I asked her not to. I asked her not to tell me which mountain or mountains or
part
of the mountains we were going to, so it would simply be up to her and we'd just drive up in there and be at a place and that was it. The mountains.

“Okay,” she said. “Kind of like we're going into a life that hasn't started yet.”

“Yes. But it will,” I said.

“I know,” she said, and she put her fingers between mine and rested our hands on her leg. Soon, she started singing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” like a girl on a long trip.

“You're such a girl,” I said. “I love it.”

She smiled and kept singing the various verses, and when she asked me to sing with her, the first verse I sang was “and on his farm he had some pigs / and committed sod-O-mee.”

“Kurt,” she said. “That's not nice.”

“I know,” I said. “In some states, Old MacDonald could be arrested for that.”

“You've been a reporter too long,” she said. “You're cynical and jaded.”

I smiled and put my head on her shoulder, saying, “Then fix me, woman.”

“Oh, you big baby,” she said. “We'll be in the mountains soon. We'll find a nice place to stay and we can hold each other.”