Charles D'Ambrosio - Loitering - New and Collected Essays

In a kind of illustrated food chain of journalism there are big white vans representing every major TV station in Seattle and then several shrimpy economy cars, also white, with the names of radio stations printed on the doors. I notice every journalist is wearing a particularly nice raincoat, with team colors. Then I notice other things, like the cameras, the monitors, they too are covered in specially made rain bonnets. And a couple of people are walking around with umbrellas the size of parachutes. All these dry people are from another tribe. This kind of hard-hitting, high-level journalism obviously requires neat hair, which partly explains all the first-rate rain gear, and that equipment can’t be cheap, not like three-by-five cards. One of the TV reporters is wearing navy-blue pants and a red coat, an outfit that resembles the unsexed uniform of a reservations clerk for a national hotel chain. Another TV guy is practicing a look of grave concern in his monitor, a look that, live at least, seems woefully constipated. It’s weird to watch what amounts oxymoronically to a rehearsal of urgent news, especially without sound, emptied of content, because this pantomime of immediacy is patently fake, a charade, a fine-tuning, not of emotions, but the reenacted look of emotions. It’s method acting or something. In a curious twist, I realize I always knew TV news seemed full of shit, but I never knew it was, in fact, full of shit. Previously I thought the TV news had a certain endemic phoniness because all the reporters were sorority girls who’d majored in communications, but it never occurred to me that the fakery was intentional. These people do this on purpose, and realizing that stunned me, because all my life I’d generously overlooked the canned quality of broadcast journalism, thinking it was, like other infirmities, something these people couldn’t help. I thought they were just naturally corny people and no more deserving of scorn than cripples, and in fact were entitled, because of their impairment, to an extra helping of tolerance and understanding on my part. And now this morning I’m learning that that peculiar phony quality really is phony.

It’s all big-time wrestling.

It occurs to me I’m not supple enough of an ironist to be alive and freely moving around in public anymore. With my skin practically leprous I might just hang a cowbell off my neck and clang around town the rest of my days.

I’m not going to mention the name of the big-league TV journalist I finally talked to because later in the morning, in between taping the twenty-five seconds of filler that feeds into the national show, he tried on a couple of occasions to pick up secretaries who’d come out on the sidewalk to gawk. Every time I turned around he was chatting up another secretary, then he’d rush in front of the camera and morph into the face of a slightly panicked and alarmed person nevertheless manfully maintaining heroic control while reporting nearby horrors. To look at his on-camera face you’d think Godzilla was eating lawyers off the Winslow ferry. It was clear to me that sometime in the past the putative luster of his job had landed him in bed with bystanders.

But before that, I thought he might be a reliable source of information.

“Hey,” I said, “what do you think of this?”

“It’s wet,” the guy said, and then, I kid you not, he lit up a cigarette and squinted at the sky — just like a hero of some sort.

In a study of poetics you’d call that kind of rhetorical understatement meiosis . In its most simple metalogical form it works by deadpanning the ostensive situation (the Bad Guy with the gun, the hostage, homicidal intent) by rerouting it through the bluntly obvious and uninteresting observation that it is raining. This kind of locution can be found in King Lear and some of Auden’s poetry, and it’s nearly a national mental disease in England, plus it’s pretty common in war, where the irony functions as an anodyne against other, more painful emotions.

Putting moves on secretaries, phony-faced reports, meiosis — you can’t finally penetrate the pose to anything real.

I walk off and get my story by eavesdropping on a wondrously cute black woman wearing a blue coat, the back of which quite clearly states, in reflective block letters, her purpose: SEATTLE POLICE MEDIA RELATIONS. She’s exactly what I’ve been looking for, maybe all my life. She’s the unambiguous source of everybody else’s story anyway. The most interesting thing I learn is there’s no hostage.

“Is there a reporter here?” some guy demands to know.

His voice wavers with anger but his question floats unanswered and hangs ignored in a rude silence until, unnerved, I point to the parking lot and say, “Yeah, there’s tons of them. They’re all over the place.”

Even as I watch the guy walk off I know in a low-frequency animal-to-animal way that he’s the one, the man I need to talk to. Some part of this story is lodged inside him. In terms of clothing alone he’s way worse off than I am, and what he’s wearing, jeans and a T-shirt, show he’s been rudely expelled from one cozy circumstance and dragged against his will into the rain. He’s now caught in between, trapped in some place I recognize as life itself. It’s obvious he hasn’t been sober in hours and maybe years. If it could be said that these big-deal journalists have control of the story, and therefore, in a fundamental sense, are liars, albeit professional and highly compensated, then this guy is the anti-journalist, because in his case the story is steering him, shoving him around and blowing him willy-nilly down the street. The truth is just fucking with him and he’s suffering narrative problems. He began the night with no intention of standing in this rain, and his exposure to it is pitiful. As he moves unheeded like the Ancient Mariner through the journalists I feel a certain brotherly sympathy for him, and I’m enamored of his utter lack of dignity. He’s moved beyond all poses. I know he’ll come back to me, that it’s just a matter of a little more rejection, and when he returns, when he settles on me, I’ll welcome him like a prodigal.

He doesn’t know it yet, but I’m the only one who will listen to him.

Meanwhile we’re at the edge of dawn, a first feathering of gray light that brings a bum stampede to the streets of Belltown. I live down here, and every morning at roughly five o’clock bums pour out of the missions and shelters and alleys in a kind of shabby and shadowy pre-commute, followed by the real thing an hour or two later. They pool up and briefly form a chorus. They fish around in squashed packs of GPC cigarettes, fire up. “Look at these news-media dicks,” they say. Lights have come on in the IBEW Local 46 building and a few guys with lunch buckets are standing outside the Labor Temple Restaurant and Lounge. More and more people are standing around, trying to figure out what’s going on. When the bums ask what’s happening the question sounds yearningly metaphysical or like a child stirring from a dream. Their need to know, at any rate, is tonally different than that of a big-league journalist. And still we’ve got beaucoup reporters doing their insane pantomime of sincerity in the parking lot. It’s like the Hitler tryouts in that Mel Brooks movie The Producers . None of the TV people have budged from their encampment in the parking lot, and I realize they’re operating under the strictest criterion of relevance — every camera is focused in the same direction — and that their sense of the narrative is, generally, in sync with the police, that is, their reason for being here will end in a roughly coincident moment.

The guy’s back. No one will listen to him, he’s just learned.

“These fucking cops,” he starts right up. “These goddamn pigs! They said there’s no room on the bus. Me and my friend been standing in the rain all night. I’m a vet and he’s an American Native. That ain’t right. And these fucking assholes — you don’t believe me? Here’s my card.”