Begin to Exit Here (6 page)

But I was born naive, a disorder more disabling than leukemia, which my father pointed out to me in 1972 when, instead of going to college to study engineering or computers or business, I told him I was going to study English. He looked across the table at me in the dining room of the Kansas City Club, where we were having a family dinner to celebrate my graduation from high school, and said, “English? You already know English. We taught that to you when you were a boy.”

“I'm going to study literature,” I said.

“Literature?” he said with scathing distaste, like a bug was on his tongue. “Good Lord, boy. We didn't win World War II and invent nuclear missiles to make the world safe just so people could read goddamn books.”

“He's going to be a writer, Daddy,” Kristen said, smiling at me.

“We don't need any more writers,” my father said. “We've already got Herman Melville and Mark Twain.”

“They're dead,” I said.

“Dead writers are fine. They write the best stories,” my father said.

My mother said, “I don't think Kurt wants to be a dead writer, dear, do you, Kurt?”

“Not right away,” I said.

Kristen smiled.

“Well, you're an endlessly naive son of a bitch if you want to waste your life studying literature,” my father said.

“I think how Kurt wastes his life is up to him,” Kristen said. “Someday he'll be more famous than Dostoyevski.”

My father scowled at Kristen and said, “Who's that? Some Soviet defense minister?”

“No. He's a famous dead writer,” I said.

“See what literature leads to? Death,” my father said.

It didn't lead to death in my case. It only led to anxiety and despair, like being fired from the newspaper, having absolutely no savings, and being forced, out of ugly practicality, to take a job as the toll-free telephone operator who helped the glorious tenets of American capitalism by selling anal-intercourse videos that I didn't think Patrick Henry died for. While I was talking morosely about this with Janice one night, I said, “As an instrument of capitalism, the penis is overrated.”

“It has other uses,” she said, patting my leg. “You never really believed your penis was going to get you a job.”

I sighed and said, “No. In fact, in all of the cover letters and resumés I've sent off in renewed futility this week, I don't even refer once to my dick. I'm too depressed.”

Janice hugged me and rocked me and gently laughed in my ear.

“You're a treasure,” she said.

“Spend me,” I whispered.

“Oh, I will,” she said, pushing her cheek against mine and rocking me some more, and I wanted my heart to merge into hers, but there were ribs in the way.

I held her and said, “Janice? Do you want to become one with me?”

“Yes,” she said.

“There's bones in the way.”

“That's so you can get a grip,” she said.

M
y crucial break allowing me to resume my damaging career in journalism and acquire important experience I didn't want came to me over the toll-free number at East of Eden. It was an ordinarily slow morning, the time of day when most Americans hadn't had enough time yet to become prurient and depraved and phone in orders for such movies as
Debbie Eats Every Man in Dallas.
To show my boss, Mr. Holstner, that I had a superior grasp of erotic cinema, I suggested that morning while we were both drinking coffee that we could have some attractive and morally neutral woman at the University of St. Beaujolais star in a film we'd produce called
Debbie Puts Fort Worth in Her Mouth.

Mr. Holstner smiled grimly. “We don't do production. Just sales,” he said.

“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.

T
he 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.