As I re-read Andrew Klavan/Keith Peterson’s books starring newspaperman John Wells (see yesterday’s review), I couldn’t help (though heaven knows I tried) thinking back to my own short, undistinguished career as a small town radio news reporter.
When I consider that time, I find incomprehensible that I could have actually believed that I (that is, me, this guy writing what you’re reading now) might possibly, under any circumstances, be able to do the job of a news reporter. Going out and speaking to strangers. Asking them questions. Pressing them when they’re reluctant to answer. I actually had the idea that I could learn to do those things.
Well, I was young then. All my life I’d heard people saying, “I used to be pretty shy, but I learned how to just get up and talk to people, and I found out there was nothing to be afraid of.” I figured I’d be the same, with time.
But enough of that. Enough to note that I tried it, long, long since, in the early 1980s.
And for some reason, reading about reporter John Wells and his dangerous life as a reporter reminded me of old Carl (not his real name), the guy who taught me the ropes at the radio station.
I don’t know why I’m disguising his name. I’d say the chances that he’s still alive are about the same as the chance that a top-flight literary agent is reading this right now and getting ready to e-mail me, offering me representation.
Because like John Wells, Carl was a degenerative (Not degenerate. There’s a difference). He smoked constantly, drank heavily and was in terrible physical condition (John Wells in the books was much the same, though thinner). When Carl showed me the job routine, it proved to consist of reading the morning paper, driving downtown, talking to a guy at the police station, and then adjourning to a local bar for refreshments.
Carl was not a motivated guy.
And then I remembered something I’d forgotten about Carl. Carl had odd fingers.
His fingers weren’t straight. They were crooked. They kind of zigzagged as your gaze followed them from knuckles to fingertips. They looked very odd when he typed.
His fingers looked, in fact, as if somebody had put his hand in a desk drawer one day, and then slammed the drawer shut. Like in The Friends of Eddie Coyle.
And it occurred to me, I wonder if Carl got those fingers on the job.
Maybe once he’d been a hotshot, dynamic young reporter, out to break big stories and pull the curtain away from crime and corruption.
Maybe he made the wrong people mad. And maybe they taught him a lesson about going along and getting along, through introducing him to a desk drawer.
Maybe that’s what made him the sad case he was when I got to know him.
I have no way of knowing.
But it makes a story.