The Scarecrow (3 page)

“Yeah, sure. And, um, sorry, you know?”

“Thank you, Angela, but it’s okay. I think it’ll end up being the best thing for me anyway. But if you’re still feeling sorry for me you could come over to the Short Stop tonight and buy me a drink.”

She smiled and got embarrassed because she and I both knew that wasn’t going to happen. Inside the newsroom and out, the new generation didn’t mix with the old. Especially not with me. I was history and she had no time or inclination to associate with the ranks of the fallen. Going to the Short Stop tonight would be like visiting a leper colony.

“Well, maybe some other time,” I said quickly. “I’ll see you Monday morning, okay?”

“Monday morning. And I’ll buy the coffee.”

She smiled and I realized that she was indeed the one who should take Kramer’s advice and try TV.

She turned to go.

“Oh, and Angela?”

“What?”

“Don’t call him Mr. Kramer. This is a newsroom, not a law firm. And most of those guys in charge? They don’t deserve to be called mister. Remember that and you’ll do okay here.”

She smiled again and left me alone. I pulled my chair in close to my computer and opened a new document. I had to crank out a murder story before I could get out of the newsroom and go drown my sorrows in red wine.

O
nly three other reporters showed up for my wake. Larry Bernard and two guys from the sports desk who might have gone to the Short Stop regardless of my being there. If Angela Cook had shown up it would have been embarrassing.

The Short Stop was on Sunset in Echo Park. That made it close to Dodger Stadium, so presumably it drew its name from the baseball position. It was also close to the Los Angeles Police Academy and that made it a cop bar in its early years. It was the kind of place you’d read about in Joseph Wambaugh novels, where cops came to be with their own kind and the groupies who didn’t judge them. But those days were long past. Echo Park was changing. It was getting Hollywood hip and the cops were crowded out of the Short Stop by the young professionals moving into the neighborhood. The prices went up and the cops found other watering holes. Police paraphernalia still hung on the walls but any cop who stopped in nowadays was simply misinformed.

Still, I liked the place because it was close to downtown and on the way to my house in Hollywood.

It was early, so we had our pick of the stools at the bar. We took the four directly in front of the TV; me, then Larry, and then Shelton and Romano, the two sports guys. I didn’t know them that well, so it was just as well that Larry was between us. They spent most of the time talking about a rumor that all of the sports beats at the paper were going to be shuffled. They were hoping to get a piece of the Dodgers or the Lakers, the premier beats at the paper, with USC football and UCLA basketball close behind. They were good writers like most sports reporters have to be. The art of sports writing always amazed me. Nine out of ten times the reader already knows the outcome of your story before reading it. They know who won, they probably even watched the game. But they read about it anyway and you have to find a way to write with an insight and angle that makes it seem fresh.

I liked covering the cop shop because usually I was telling the reader a story they didn’t know. I was writing about the bad things that can happen. Life in extremis. The underworld that people sitting at their breakfast table with their toast and coffee have never experienced but want to know about. It gave me a certain juice, made me feel like a prince of the city when I drove home at night.

And I knew as I sat there nursing a glass of cheap red wine that I would miss that most about the job.

“You know what I heard,” Larry said to me, his head turned from the sports guys so he could be confidential.

“No, what?”

“That during one of the buyouts in Baltimore this one guy took the check and on his last day he filed a story that turned out to be completely bogus. He just made the whole thing up.”

“And they printed it?”

“Yeah, they didn’t know until they started getting calls the next day.”

“What was the story about?”

“I don’t know but it was like a big ‘fuck you’ to management.”

I sipped some wine and thought about that.

“Not really,” I said.

“What do you mean? Of course it was.”

“I mean the management probably sat around and nodded and said we got rid of the right guy. If you want to say ‘fuck you,’ then you do something that makes them think they messed up by letting you go. That tells them they should’ve picked somebody else.”

“Yeah, is that what you’re going to do?”

“No, man, I’m just going to go quietly into that good night. I’m going to get a novel published and that will be my fuck-you. In fact, that’s the working title.
Fuck You, Kramer.
”

“Right!”

Bernard laughed and we changed the subject. But while I was talking about other things I was thinking about the big fuck-you. I was thinking about the novel I was going to restart and finally finish. I wanted to go home and start writing. I thought maybe it would help me get through the next two weeks if I had it to go home to each night.

My cell phone rang and I saw it was my ex-wife calling. I knew I had to get this one over with. I shoved off the bar stool and headed outside to the parking lot, where it would be quieter.

It was three hours ahead in Washington but the number on the caller ID was her desk phone.

“Keisha, what are you still doing at work?”

I checked my watch. It was almost seven here, almost ten there.

“I’m chasing the
Post
on a story, waiting for callbacks.”

The beauty and bane of working for a West Coast paper was that the last deadline didn’t come up until at least three hours after the
Washington Post
and
New York Times
—the major national competition—had gone to bed. This meant that the
L.A. Times
always had a shot at matching their scoops or pushing the lead on stories. Come morning, the
L.A. Times
could end up out front on a major story with the latest and best information. It also made the online edition must-reading in the halls of government three thousand miles from L.A.

And as one of the newest reporters in the Washington bureau, Keisha Russell was on the late shift. She was often tagged with chasing stories and pushing for the freshest details and developments.

“That sucks,” I said.

“Not as bad as what I heard happened to you today.”

I nodded.

“Yeah, I got downsized, Keish.”

“I’m so sorry, Jack.”

“Yeah, I know. Everybody is. Thanks.”

It should’ve been clear I was in the gun sights when they didn’t send me to D.C. with her two years earlier, but that was another story. A silence opened up between us and I tried to step on it.

“I’m going to pull out my novel and finish it,” I said. “I’ve got some savings and there’s got to be some equity in the house. I think I can go at least a year. I figure it’s now or never.”

“Yeah,” Keisha said with feigned enthusiasm. “You can do it.”

I knew she had found the manuscript one day when we were still together and had read it, never admitting it because if she did she would have to tell me what she thought. She wouldn’t have been able to lie about it.

“Are you going to stay in L.A.?” she asked.

That was a good question. The novel was set in Colorado, where I had grown up, but I loved the energy of L.A. and didn’t want to leave it.

“I haven’t thought about it yet. I don’t want to sell my place. The market’s still so shitty. I’d rather just get an equity loan if I have to and stay put. Anyway, it’s too much to think about right now. Right now I’m just celebrating the end.”

“Are you at the Red Wind?”

“No, the Short Stop.”

“Who’s there?”

Now I was humiliated.

“Um, you know, the usual crew. Larry and some Metro types, a bunch of guys from Sports.”

It was a split second before she said anything and in that hesitation she gave away that she knew I was exaggerating, if not outright lying.

“You going to be okay, Jack?”

“Yeah, sure. I just… I just have to figure out what—”

“Jack, I’m sorry, I have one of my callbacks coming in.”

Her voice was urgent. If she missed the call, there might not be another.

“Go!” I said quickly. “I’ll talk to you later.”

I clicked off the phone, thankful that some politician in Washington had saved me from the further embarrassment of discussing my life with my ex-wife, whose career was ascending day by day as mine sank like the sun over the smoggy landscape of Hollywood. As I shoved the phone back into my pocket I wondered if she had just made that up about getting the callback, attempting to end the embarrassment herself.

I went back into the bar and decided to get serious, ordering an Irish Car Bomb. I gulped it quickly and the Jameson’s burned like hot grease going down. I grew morose watching the Dodgers start a game against the hated Giants and get shelled in the first inning.

Romano and Shelton were the first to bail and then by the third inning even Larry Bernard had drunk enough and been reminded enough of the dim future of the newspaper business. He slid off his stool and put his hand on my shoulder.

“There but for the grace of God go I,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“It could’ve been me. It could’ve been anybody in that newsroom. But they tagged you because you make the big bucks. You coming in here seven years ago, Mr. Bestseller and
Larry King
and all of that. They overpaid to get you then and that made you a target now. I’m surprised you lasted this long, to tell you the truth.”

“Whatever. That doesn’t make it any better.”

“I know but I had to say it. I’m going to go now. You going home?”

“I’m going to have one more.”

“Nah, man, you’ve had enough.”

“One more. I’ll be fine. If not, I’ll take a cab.”

“Don’t get a DUI, man. That’d be all you need.”

“Yeah, what are they going to do to me? Fire me?”

He nodded like I had made an impressive point, then slapped me on the back a little too hard and sauntered out of the bar. I sat alone and watched the game. For my next drink I skipped the Guinness and Bailey’s and went straight to Jameson’s over ice. I then drank either two or three more instead of just the one. And I thought about how this was not the end to my career that I had envisioned. I thought by now I’d be writing ten-thousand-word takes for
Esquire
and
Vanity Fair
. That they’d be coming to me instead of me going to them. That I’d have my pick of what to write about.

I ordered one more and the bartender made a deal with me. He’d only splash whiskey on my ice if I gave him my car keys. That sounded like a good deal to me and I took it.

With the whiskey burning my scalp from underneath I thought about Larry Bernard’s story about Baltimore and the ultimate fuck-you. I think I nodded to myself a couple times and held my glass up in toast to the lame-duck reporter who had done it.

And then another idea burned through and seared an imprint on my brain. A variation on the Baltimore fuck-you. One with some integrity and as indelible as the etching of a name on a glass trophy. Elbow on the bar top, I held the glass up again. But this time it was for myself.

“Death is my beat,” I whispered to myself. “I make my living from it. I forge my professional reputation on it.”

Words spoken before but not as my own eulogy. I nodded to myself and knew just how I was going to go out. I had written at least a thousand murder stories in my time. I was going to write one more. A story that would stand as the tombstone on my career. A story that would make them remember me after I was gone.

T
he weekend was a blur of alcohol, anger and humiliation as I grappled with a new future that was no future. After briefly sobering up on Saturday morning I opened the file that held my novel in progress and began reading. I soon saw what my ex-wife had seen long ago. What I should have seen long ago. It wasn’t there and I was kidding myself if I thought it was.

The conclusion was that I would have to start from scratch if I was going to go this way, and the thought of that was debilitating. When I took a cab back to the Short Stop to get my car, I ended up staying and closing the place out early Sunday morning, watching the Dodgers lose again and drunkenly telling complete strangers about how fucked up the
Times
and the whole newspaper business was.

It took me all the way into Monday morning to get cleaned up. I rolled in forty-five minutes late to work after finally getting my car at the Short Stop and I could still smell the alcohol coming out of my pores.

Angela Cook was already sitting at my desk in a chair she had borrowed from one of the empty cubicles. There had been a lot of them since they’d started the buyouts and the layoffs.

“Sorry I’m late, Angela,” I said. “It was kind of a lost weekend. Starting with the party on Friday. You should have come.”

She smiled demurely, like she knew there had been no party, just a one-man wake.

“I got you some coffee but it’s probably cold by now,” she said.

“Thanks.”

I picked up the cup she had gestured to and it had indeed cooled. But the good thing about the
Times
cafeteria was free refills—at least they hadn’t changed that yet.

“Tell you what,” I said. “Let me go check in with the desk and if nothing’s happening we can go get refills and talk about how you’re going to take over.”

I left her there and walked out of podland and over toward the Metro desk. On the way I stopped at the switchboard. It sat like a lifeguard stand in the middle of the newsroom, built high so that the operators could look out across the vast newsroom and see who was in and able to receive calls. I stepped to the side of the station so one of the operators could look down and see me.

It was Lorene, who had been on duty the Friday before. She raised a finger to tell me to hold. She handled two quick transfers and then pulled one side of her headset off her left ear.