Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

Story about greed and temptation?

“Are we supposed to suggest to our readers that money will set them free? Are we supposed to appeal to their basest fantasies about what it is that money can do for them? You know what I see when I go outside and look at the young men there? Half of them want to be basketball stars. The other half want to be rap stars. Basketball and rap. And you think, I know you’re thinking, well, that is just one segment of the population. I assure you that it is not. I was at a dinner the other evening. A very elegant dinner at the well-appointed home of a man who is rightly considered a pillar of the community. Elegant dinner in Highland Park, night falling on quiet streets lined with homes that spoke eloquently of achievement, of permanence, of perseverance. Well, this man’s son and two of his friends came in. They were boys from the affluent suburbs. Boys who’d never done without anything, who understood what money could buy because they’d always had those things, and they’d watched their parents go to work each day — lawyers, doctors, businessmen, college professors, executives, board members, volunteers reaching out if not to the world at large then at least within their own community. Citizens who live by the credo that my own grandmother lived by and put to me: work hard, follow directives, and be credible. And do you know what these young men, the product of affluence, the flower of their generation, spoke of as they deigned to sit down with us for dessert? They spoke of getting rich. They spoke of getting rich in a manner that would enable them never to work again. They spoke of billions. The language today is of billions, as if mere millions, hundreds of millions, could never be enough to sate their desire for money. The surefire idea: that was the extent of their plan; to devise the surefire idea that would bring a veritable cavalry of white knights sweeping in with cash sufficient to idle them for the rest of their days. And I could tell that the parents of this young man, to whom it has never occurred to stop working and building and ceaselessly trying to make a difference in their community, were embarrassed by their son and his friends. I could tell that, in that moment, they felt as if they must have done something gravely wrong, must have failed somehow to impress upon him that the money was merely one part of the reward one reaps for a lifetime of hard and fulfilling work. There was a palpable sense in that dining room that for all that they had done by way of example, for all of their attempts to influence their son’s thinking, something, something terrible, had influenced his thinking more than they ever could. What might that something have been? Could it possibly have been the continuous depiction of wealth as an end in itself in our mass culture? Let me ask you: is it responsible to add even one stick of kindling to a raging inferno?”

He had started really messing with her now. He’d rocked behind his desk, his hands gesturing first to one side, then the other, shoulders working beneath the fit of his shirt. This was the voice and cadence, the attitude, that he’d intended his dead column to impart. When he had finished he let his hands drop into his lap, exhaled deeply, gazed at her.

He’d asked, “Do you read the police blotter?”

“Uh.”

“Every day, in Metro, the police blotter. You read it?”

“Not really.”

“Dry as dust. Just the facts, ma’am. Just the facts. Someone aims a gun at a liquor store owner, pulls the trigger for the hell of it. Someone beats an old lady on her way home from visiting her sister. Someone paints a swastika on the door of a synagogue. The facts take up sixty words or less. Often much less. Metro editor decides. Mike Turowicz decides that’s what we need to know. Mike Turowicz decides because the story doesn’t seem to be about anything. Now who the hell is Mike Turowicz? Mike Turowicz walks to the El every night drinking a can of beer out of a paper bag. Mike Turowicz has never read anything but the newspaper. He’d be the first one to tell you that. Mike Turowicz’s idea of whether a story is about something or not generally centers on the complexion of the characters in that story. But I’ll tell you something. I will tell you something. There is one thing and one thing only that Mike Turowicz and I have in common, other than our employer. Mike Turowicz and I both want the stories we print to be about something. Now maybe you want to take a minute, think, and tell me again.”

Another ironic little coded conversation in quotation marks. What were the hints she’d been given here? This was, she knew, the way Nables had of working with his people. It was possibly one of the reasons why he seemed to spend his days steeped in disappointment, although the basic problem probably was systemic: Nables wanted to be the conductor of soaring symphonies and he’d been given a marching kazoo band. He wanted to send people out to find injustice and they brought him county fairs, puppies, and guns. Old men who carved Civil War figurines out of soap. It was the perfect exile for someone like him. Only a very few were born to love the status quo, at least insofar as they were certain that it contained a privileged place for them. Everyone else, accommodating it in all of its arbitrary contradictions, effaced to a certain extent what they’d been branded with at birth. But Nables couldn’t erase the rubbed ebony skin, the full lips, the broad nose with the flaring nostrils, and he was even less capable of erasing the stroke of indignation connecting his every decision to a central motivation. So he messed with his staff. It was a way of actively not waiting for the chimerical story that would force the world to apologize for being itself. He knew Saltino wasn’t a shit story; he knew that his budget was devised to accommodate some travel since the small regional bureaus had been shut down; he knew that overseeing a real story — any real story — had to beat the maddening job of compiling a gazette of AP stuff each day, setting some beery old reporter to the task of making the wire copy conform to the paper’s style sheet. And of course he’d heard all the same rumors everyone else had about plans for folding the Midwest section as a standalone and consolidating it into the main news section. Kat had looked around the little sheet-metal box that held them. No sign of the Pulitzer, either. Maybe you had to surrender it to the publisher, or maybe it was just too shaming to have Ben Franklin’s face smirking down on you in your tuna can cubicle. He’d given her two weeks.

SHE CALLED BECKYfrom home that evening while Justin was out. The phone rang and rang, and just as she was about to hang up, a kid answered, too young to be bored by the chore of answering the phone, old enough to be vigilantly territorial.

“Who is it, again?”

“An old friend of your mom’s. Becky’s your mom?”

“Yeah, she’s my mom. I mean what’s your name again?”

“Kat, again. Is Becky there?”

“I’m not sure. You want to talk to her?”

“Yes. Please.”

“Are you from Citicorp Credit?”

“No, I’m a friend.”

“Well, I don’t know you.”

“No,” said Kat. “No, you don’t. I knew your mother before you were born. There in Nebising. Can you check if she’s there for me please?”

Finally the kid put the phone down and went to look for his mother. Put the phone down: was Becky still making do with a phone that had a cord? Maybe even a rotary dial. But don’t be a jerk. She has e-mail, after all. Maybe the kid just liked making everybody take a couple of extra steps.