All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found (7 page)

I throw mud at people who deserve mud flung at them, I said.

He smiled and looked around the room. He raised his arm and gestured toward me. I thought he might be about to hit me, and my arms tensed, ready to deflect his punch. Instead he said, as if he were the arbiter of such things, as if he knew he held my fate in his hands but decided to let me slide:
This guy’s all right
.

The woman behind the bulletproof glass called out my order. I stepped up and paid through the little cash-exchange hole. He sidled up as I put the change in my wallet.

Will you give me a dollar, man?

Give you a dollar?

Yeah, man, just a dollar.

Again I felt myself performing, everyone waiting to see what I’d say. I thought I’d do well to avoid establishing a reputation as the white boy in the neighborhood who went around giving away his money.

No, man, I worked hard for this dollar.

Come on, man.

I need this dollar. I need to buy lunch tomorrow. I need to pay my rent.

Okay, okay, he said, palms up in a gesture of surrender.

I’ll see you around, though, I said.

That’s right you will, he said. Every day.

I never saw him again.

Less than a year into my tenure at the
Journal
, I learned of a job opening on the Leisure & Arts page. It was listed on the company’s internal Web site, a copyediting job, repairing split infinitives and run-on sentences. I fastened with unreasoning hope on the notion that the job—and the raise that came with it—could be mine.

My hope vanished the moment I learned that, in order to get the job, I would first have to sit for an interview with Bob Bartley, the editorial page editor of the paper, who oversaw hiring for the Leisure & Arts page, which he otherwise supervised with benign neglect. Bob Bartley was among the most influential American journalists of the second half of the twentieth century, although his name was not widely known outside of New York and Washington. He was fairly soft-spoken, and his posture was not what you’d call ideal. He rarely smiled, but when he did he looked like a cat who’d just swallowed your canary.

Bob Bartley’s two abiding obsessions were taxes and weapons. He thought taxes should be cut always and everywhere, except for poor people, on whom they should be raised as a disincentive to being poor, and as for weapons he thought America should build as many as possible. The more weapons we had, in his view, the less likely we were to need them. But he believed that occasionally we needed them to bomb other nations that were trying to develop them too, because those nations couldn’t be trusted not to use them. In order to further thwart the nations that, unlike ours, couldn’t be trusted not to use their weapons, he thought we should spend however many trillions it took to build a missile-defense shield, that sci-fi umbrella that would protect America from the rain of other nations’ missiles. Bob Bartley believed that with tax cuts, lots of weapons, and a missile-defense shield, Americans would remain safe, happy, and prosperous.

Bob Bartley had been writing editorials about these ideas for almost thirty years.

Someone once made a joke about editorial writers. Why is writing an editorial like pissing yourself in a blue serge suit? Because it gives you a warm feeling, and nobody notices what you’ve done.

Bob Bartley was no trouser-wetter, though. From what I could discern he never had warm feelings, and people in power tended to notice what he wrote.

The arena in which he’d had his greatest influence was tax policy. He was American journalism’s leading proponent of trickle-down economics: by cutting taxes on rich people and raising them for poor people, he argued, more money would end up not only in the hands of rich people but—because the rich people would spend it on housekeepers and yachts—in the hands of people who kept houses and built fancy boats. Because everyone would be making more money, the government would generate more revenue in taxes, even though the top tax rates were lower. Since bloating government coffers with more taxpayer money was actually a
bad
thing, an evil outcome of sound policy, the government would be obliged to funnel the extra tax revenues to bomb-building projects—in effect throwing the money away, since it created wealth, in the form of weapons, that could only be used once, if at all, and then only to destroy, never to create more wealth, which thus ran counter to the essence of capitalism, wealth creating wealth—while at the same time cutting programs for poor people and generally running the machinery of government with an incompetence bordering on malice, which would make poor people angry at the government and entice them to vote for Republicans, just like most rich people did, ensuring Republican rule forever.

Despite the baroque strangeness of some of his ideas, Bob Bartley had once won a Pulitzer Prize.

When I first joined the paper, Bob Bartley was in the late, hysterical stages of his obsession with Bill Clinton. Bob Bartley’s editorial page had printed enough editorials about Whitewater to fill three thousand pages in six anthologies. Bob Bartley was proud of these books, even though no one bought them. He thought Whitewater was comparable to Watergate; he was hoping to bring down a president, in the manner of Woodward and Bernstein, and perhaps win another Pulitzer Prize. But despite his three thousand pages of editorials, the Whitewater investigation devolved into an absurd argument about whether fellatio is actually sex, and the president did not resign and was not forced from office, although Bob Bartley was adamant that he should have been, because Bob Bartley did not approve of extramarital fellatio, at least not for Democrats. When a reporter had asked him whether he and his editorial page would’ve attacked Newt Gingrich or another prominent Republican faced with similar charges of sexual misconduct, Bob Bartley admitted that “we would have defended them. That’s the way it is.”

I was nervous when I went to Bob Bartley’s office. My internship at the
Nation
featured prominently on my résumé. While the work I had done there was utterly harmless to the spread of corporate capitalism, the
Nation
was known to say kind things about socialists. Bob Bartley detested socialists.

Bob Bartley held my résumé in his hands. I feared he would ask me about socialism, taxes, trickle-down economics. I would then face a choice: I could either tell him what I thought about these things, whereupon he would refuse to hire me to work on the Leisure & Arts page, or I could betray my principles, such as they were, and lie. I’d been here before, and I knew which path I’d choose.

He did not ask me about these things. We talked about Minnesota and Iowa, where, it turned out, we had both lived as boys. He’d been born in southwest Minnesota but grew up mostly in Ames, Iowa, while I’d been born in Ames, Iowa, and grew up mostly in southwest Minnesota. This struck me as appropriate, our moving in opposite directions at the beginning of our lives—me upward and to the left on the map, him downward and to the right.

Bob Bartley asked me only one serious question, with two leading follow-ups: What is your ambition in life? Do you, for instance, want to be a reporter? Or do you want to be editorial page editor of the
Wall Street Journal
?

I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be a reporter, especially not at the
Wall Street Journal
, where many reporters covered a single industry (airlines, pharmaceuticals) or even a single company (General Motors, Microsoft), had minimal opportunities to afflict the comfortable and even fewer to comfort the afflicted, and never detached themselves from their cell phones. Even though a part of me did want to be editorial page editor of the
Wall Street Journal
, which was the same thing as saying I wanted to be the most important person at the world’s most important publication, I knew I’d never get that chance, because I didn’t believe any of the things Bob Bartley believed. I figured I’d have to say something completely harmless, though not without a hint of some trivial ambition.

I said, No, I want to write historical fiction.

My answer pleased him, as I’d figured it would. It wasn’t long before I was told the job was mine.

When I moved to the Leisure & Arts page, I assumed I’d have no personal contact with the editorial writers, but my cubicle was situated smack in the midst of theirs. A couple of them came forward to welcome me, but most of them did not. The ones who welcomed me overlooked the fact that my politics were repugnant. Those who did not welcome me could not overlook that fact. Admittedly, by hanging posters of Emma Goldman and Ralph Nader in my cubicle, I made it a hard fact to overlook.

Though I had little in the way of social interaction with the editorial writers, I began to read their pieces very closely, sometimes even dipping into the archives to sample their obsessions over the decades. They wrote with the zeal of converts, as if they’d all been communists in their youth, and each of them rode a favorite right-wing hobbyhorse into the ground, month after month, year after year: not only cutting taxes and stockpiling weapons but the treachery and moral lassitude of the Palestinians, the deleterious effects of the 1960s on American moral values, the heroic necessity of Pinochet’s bloody dictatorship in crushing democratic socialism in Chile. The collective voice of the newspaper—the unsigned editorial—was always the furthest to the right of the range of beliefs held by the editorial board members, no accident on Bob Bartley’s part. He held the most extreme position on almost every issue and, because he couldn’t write three editorials a day himself, took great care in his choice of lieutenants. His fondness for partisan hacks led him to hire people who could just as well have been Republican speechwriters, as indeed some of them had been (Peggy Noonan) or soon would be (Bill McGurn).

For the most part, Bob Bartley held meetings only with people who shared his opinions, in a little conference room near my cubicle—meetings with men like Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor who wrote the most famous volume of pornography during the 1990s, and William Bennett, the moralist who gambled away, at the tables in Vegas, the earnings from his books and speeches, which proselytized on behalf of virtue and self-discipline. I came to think of this conference room as the echo chamber for the vast right-wing conspiracy, though not because of its acoustics.

I tried once to engage in a reasonable discussion about politics with one of the editorial writers. She was a voluble young woman who’d grown up in Oregon and gone to college at Princeton. She worked in the cubicle next to mine, so I overheard her on the phone every day, talking the crazy with like-minded crazies—suggesting, for instance, that the U.S. Navy, after being pressured to stop raining practice bombs on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, should instead bombard the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, making it the opposite of a wildlife refuge. She cackled when she said this, though not because she was kidding.

She wrote a lot about the environment—she was reliably against it—and one time I told her I disagreed with something she’d written about federal forest policy. The essence of my argument was simple: I didn’t think trees should be cut down carelessly. She told me that trees existed to be cut down. She said she preferred clear-cuts—forests transformed into nonforests. She said clear-cuts grew back as peaceful meadows, which were aesthetically superior to forests. I disagreed not just on the aesthetics but also in regards to the effect on wildlife and watersheds. She said I had an unhealthy, sentimental attitude about trees; she accused me of wanting to hug them. I told her I didn’t want to hug them, I just didn’t think they should all die and take with them songbirds and squirrels and all the other life that make an ancient forest more than a stand of timber poised to become lumber. She said most trees would be better off dead, after which they could be given a more useful second life as furniture, houses, or fax paper.

We didn’t talk much after that, although we always exchanged cordial hellos when passing in the hallways.

It took me a while to notice that the only people who would speak to me on the streets of Bed-Stuy were over forty or strung out on crack. No twenty-five-year-old guy was going to strike up a casual conversation with a white dude in plain view of anyone else; even less likely a young woman. The women were magisterial in their ability to pretend I wasn’t there when we passed in the streets. I loved the irony of my status as an invisible man. The homeboys would cast a glance my way—surprised, bemused, sometimes aggressive, as if sizing me up, trying to guess my angle—but not the women. To them I was less than an ectoplasm, though I know they sensed my presence and must have been curious. I couldn’t blame them for their posture of indifference. In fact I was secretly grateful. They didn’t need any trouble, and neither did I.

For a while I lived without a home telephone, so I made my calls at a pay phone, around the corner on Marcus Garvey. One afternoon I left a message for a friend I planned to meet that night for dinner. I hung up and turned to find myself in sole possession of the gaze of a woman maybe fifty years old, wearing a green and gold head scarf. She walked with an erectness of posture that made me think she might be some kind of neighborhood ambassador, there to take the measure of me.

Happy New Year, she said. You new to the neighborhood?

I live on Monroe Street, I said. Just moved in.

Well, welcome. You know, there’s another couple in the neighborhood. I saw them in the Laundromat a few weeks ago. Young folks like you.

I hadn’t seen a white face yet. The closest I had come were rumors, secondhand reports of sightings, which sort of disappointed me. I wanted the other thirteen to have fled. I wanted to be the one and only.

I’m sorry, she said. That was a foolish thing to say. You know what I mean, I hope.

You mean about the other couple?

She nodded, looking rueful.

Of course, I said. It’s pretty obvious.

Well, kinda put my foot in my mouth.

There’s no point denying I’m white. It’s a hard thing not to notice.