All Over but the Shoutin' (33 page)

They, especially, taught me that you can’t go through life not liking people because they didn’t have to work as hard or come as far as you did. And who knows, maybe if I had bothered to get to know them better, maybe they had. Maybe they just didn’t wear it like some bullshit badge of honor, as I did. Olive was from Texas, anyway.

The students, the ones who actually paid tuition and had to study—didn’t quite know what to make of me. I was twice their size—Harvard students tend to run small—and some of them would walk all the way off the concrete paths in Harvard Yard to avoid walking close to me. I am not a scary-looking man, and I know I was better dressed than the homeless. A friend of mine told me that it is just the way most of them had been raised, that it wasn’t me, it was them. “Don’t make any sudden moves. If you throw up your hand and say, ‘Hey, how you doin’?’ you’ll scare ’em to death or at least into therapy, and they might hurt themselves getting away.”

In the classrooms, though, when I felt I had something to add or something to ask, it was different. It is a fact that some Harvard students will not ask questions in class because they are afraid they might appear as if they don’t already know everything, but time and time again I found myself answering questions from them after class, about the South, about race in the South, about politics and food and relationships between the sexes and … after a while I realized what they meant in the Nieman program about giving something back to the university. I was, by my very presence, a walking lab, a field trip. I had seen the meanness and killing that they read about in their texts on the Third World. I had seen George Wallace, big as life.

Most of the professors were glad to have us in their classes, because we were there because we wanted to be, not as one more credit. One professor seemed less than happy to have me. The professor spoke about the legacy of pain and prejudice, in that Yankee accent, and I could tell that the professor was speaking from insights gleaned on long-ago field trips, from old safaris through the rural South, and had formed petrified opinions that no amount of new information could change. There is plenty of new meanness and new racism in the South, but it is more complicated now. Some of the bad men have public cable access shows. Others are more prone to wear swastikas than burn crosses. The new racists blur their messages of hate with anti-government sentiment more than religion. Harvard was a little out of date, on racism.

But there were so many others who opened doors in my mind. I remember watching one old professor speak long and eloquently on U.S. diplomacy and the legacy of mistrust this country had sown in the rest of the Western Hemisphere, and as he would talk he would reach up to clutch the lapels of his robe, a robe that was not there. When he had begun, professors had worn such things, and he still reached for it as his mind whirled from fact to fact. I would just sit and listen.

It is a cliché to say I learned something about other people and other cultures, but it is true; I had begun that process with my first interview as a reporter, of course, but Harvard was a Sam Walton Wholesale Warehouse of information and experiences. I will always loathe movies with subtitles, I will perhaps never own a pair of Birkenstocks, but I opened my head a little, in that place.

When I could, I talked about writing and living with Bill Kovach, one of those smart, decent men you would like to be like, if you had it in you. Through his intelligence and hard work and decency, he had proved himself. I did not have his arsenal, I couldn’t be like him, and I am even reluctant to claim him as a friend because I do not want to suppose anything. But few people have been as good a friend to me as him.

A silver-haired, dark-eyed man whose parents had emigrated from Albania to Tennessee, he never thought it particularly funny when I asked him if they still had a football program at the University of Tennessee. When I would try to avoid a question, or use my Southernness as a shield, or try to bullshit him, he would call me a “mush mouth.”

He told me I had a gift, which I guess anyone wants to hear even if it ain’t noways true, but he also told me, more or less gently, that I could use some work. He told me I crowded too many pretty lines into my stories, that I needed space between them. I tried to fix it. He told me he thought I was a decent man, and I almost cried, because somehow he had seen something in me that made him believe it.

As curator of the program, you have to listen to a lot of whining from journalists who have it made and are too dense to realize it. Maybe one of the reasons he could put up with me was I woke up every day grinning.

One day he asked what I was going to do with my life. I told him I loved my job and might stay, but that the idea of a bigger paper, of proving myself at some writer’s paper like the
Los Angeles Times
or one of the better magazines, tugged at me.

“How about the
New York Times?”
he asked me.

I shook my head.

“They wouldn’t look at somebody like me,” I said, and he looked at me like I had told him I couldn’t do one more push-up.

“Don’t be sure,” he said. I dismissed it from my mind.

I was grateful to work at St. Pete. In many ways it was the best job I ever had. But I truly believed that there was a barrier between me and a place like the
New York Times
, a barrier that Kovach did not recognize—or refused to.

Of all the things I took away from my short time with him, one rests in my mind the way an arm rests around your shoulders.

An editor had asked me, sneering a little, who taught me to write. I told Kovach that.

“The next time someone asks you that,” he said, “tell ’em it was God.”

T
he year slid by, quick, like it was time, greased. As the winter finally gave up and the Charles thawed, I realized that much of a year had passed and I had not written a single story. I had not talked to a grieving mother or walked a hallway littered with crack vials or … I had just read and learned and talked and slept. What a gift.

I knew now why I had disliked those Ivy League kids so, for so long. It was like I was a dog on a kinked chain, a foot short of the water bucket, watching every other mutt drink. The time at Harvard took the kink out of the chain.

The last day, they gave me a certificate that had Harvard on it. I put it on my wall, where everyone could see it. Friends of mine who had gone to “real Harvard” said that displaying one’s Harvard pedigree was “not the thing to do,” as if people could tell you went to Harvard by your ambience alone.

I left it on the wall for a good while. People might not be able to tell, just by looking at me, that I am a Harvard man.

I
had been ready to leave Miami when I left, but the more I thought about it, in those cold months in Cambridge, there was no other place in Florida I wanted to work when I returned to the
St. Petersburg Times.
I had known that the paper had closed its Miami bureau, which hurt my feelings but was nothing I couldn’t survive. I would work out of my house, I figured. But the paper had other plans. The top editors wanted me to return to St. Pete. I thought they were going to make me pay for my year-off drinking sherry and eating goose liver pâté by making me do some distasteful, boring work.

I landed in the rose bushes again. The new executive editor, Paul Tash, the man who hired me, made me a sort of roving national reporter and told me to go to where the best stories were.

I found some. I spent time on the Navajo Indian Reservation, eating grape snow cones and talking to medicine men and women about disruptions in the life force that flows from Mother Earth. I went to a “sing,” where people gathered to drum and sing under the biggest sky I had ever seen, not so some tourists could take pictures, but because a hanta virus was killing them. I walked in the desert and sat under a tree with an old woman who had lost her husband to cancer from the uranium he mined to make bombs. She invited me in for fried bread.

I wrote about racism in Vidor, Texas, and floods in Des Moines, Iowa, and casinos in Biloxi, Mississippi. In the meantime, I lived on the beach on Florida’s west coast, in a second-floor apartment that had a view of the Gulf of Mexico from its kitchen sink. I had made a new friend, a lovely young woman who was going to college at the University of Florida, which I am sure I should have felt guilty about. It seemed like I had it made, again.

As if things couldn’t get any better, I had job offers now, from the
New York Times
and the
Los Angeles Times.
I thought I was charmed, again. I thought I couldn’t lose, again.

I flew out to Los Angeles and met nice people who thought I would fit in, who complimented my work and took me to lunch in the “Picasso Room.” It would be a perfect marriage, they told me, a happy one.

I flew to New York and saw the Empire State Building shrouded in fog. I sat in a room with Max Frankel and Joe Lelyveld, men of legend in this business, and I admit to being a little nervous there. I kept dropping my little security badge that said “NYT.” They would not try to change me, they said, except to maybe make me better. I could do the kind of stories I had always done, in the way I did them. Those stories had a place in their newspaper, they told me.

I felt like a blue-chip quarterback. Maybe, I thought, it was true. I couldn’t lose.

Then, the charm must have slipped through a hole in my pocket and rolled through a crack in the floor.

I
took the
Los Angeles Times
offer. It was the perfect job, a job I could not have designed any better myself, the perfect fit. The
New York Times
frightened me. Just reading it frightened me. There was great writing in it, but so many people had warned me that I would never survive there, that I was too different, that the newspaper would try to process me and my work. That would surely lead to disaster. In Los Angeles, I would get to write long, pretty stories. It was much more similar to St. Pete, and St. Pete had almost nurtured me.

I know some reporters will roll their eyes at this, but I hated to leave St. Pete. The editors there had not given a damn where I was from or how I talked or where I went to school. I was ungrateful, at best, to leave so soon. But the editor, Tash, told me as I shook his hand: “We got our money’s worth out of you.” I will always appreciate that.

I remember that my kinfolks were almost angry with me when I told them I was going to Los Angeles. Florida had been bad enough, but it did not seem so far, even when I was in Miami. My momma did not say don’t go, but for weeks, when I would call, her voice was small.

She told me she had looked at Los Angeles on a map, and looked at where she was, and it scared her to death.

I
left for L.A. in the fall. I got my feet wet in the Pacific Ocean for the first time. The color of it almost startled me. In the deep water off the piers, it was almost purple.

It was just a year after the L.A. riots, and the city was, as Miami had been, rich in the stories that I knew how to do. I rolled past them, cataloging them in my head. I took a stroll through Echo Park, ate a pig tripe burrito in the downtown, saw a man passed out with a needle dangling from his arm, chatted with a family of five living in a single room that had the fire escapes wired shut to keep out the “Chollos,” the little shitheels who terrorized their block.

I arrived to sunlight still warm and strong in November, to traffic I could not even imagine, to Korean barbecue—it wasn’t much like home but it sure wasn’t bad—and an apartment building built on rollers, for when the earth moved.

I arrived, I quickly found, to a job that did not exist. The job that waited for me wasn’t as good as the job that I thought I had accepted, and it pricked my pride so deeply that I let anger rule my reactions, and dictate the future.

Too many people there knew the job I had been offered, so, at least, I didn’t have to doubt my own sanity when I challenged the top editors about the job I had traveled across the country to take. They told me to be patient, but patience is a quality I simply do not have, nor have I ever wanted it.

There was no one to even really get mad at. This was just an unlucky circumstance of crossed wires. To be fair, the editors worked it out and made good on the job I thought I had come to do—the bottom line—but when you begin a job by fighting with your bosses there is little future in it for you. Common sense tells you that. As it was, when people ask how long I worked there, I tell them three weeks, two days, four hours and twenty-seven minutes. An editor demanded my parking card before I left. It was a little like having your chevrons ripped off and being drummed out of the service.

It would have been a lot more noble if I had not landed so gently. I had called the
New York Times
, told them I had made a big mistake, and I would love to come to work for them if they would have me. I expected them to tell me to enjoy the sunshine, palm trees and unemployment. Instead, the hiring editor, Carolyn Lee, said I could start in January, start fresh.

My luck, my old friend, had not left me after all.

For maybe the first time in my life, I had tried to do the safe thing, and it had blown up in my face. Never, ever again.

I stayed in L.A. for a month or so, mainly because I had no place else to live and my rent was paid. I worked on my pitiful Spanish, read some books, even went to the beach. But it never felt right. The ocean was too cold, out there. It was the wrong ocean, entirely.

Now and then I would sing a few words of an old Tennessee Ernie Ford song, and it made me feel better.

I’ve been to Georgia on a fast train, honey

I wasn’t born no yesterday