NOTE: This is the beginning of a novel that I began writing a few years ago and didn't finish. In fact, I hardly got started. It stops suddenly after eight pages. Anybody care to pick up where I left off? "Interactive fiction!" Why the hell not?
"The wild god of this world is sometimes merciful
to those that ask for mercy; seldom to the arrogant."
--Robinson Jeffers
Nobody
hitchhikes any more, not unless they have a death wish. We’re told that hitchhiking used to be as
American as hopping freight cars, something else no one does any more.
It’s a new world, and it’s been a long time
coming: way back in 1978, Bob Dylan told an interviewer that he wouldn’t
consider hitchhiking even then, although he had famously hitchhiked from
Minnesota to New York when he was about 20 years old. “Too many drugs out there now,” I think he
said.
Already, as early as 1978.
I sometimes get
nostalgic for this America that I never saw or knew, (call it second-hand
nostalgia) the America in which Jack Kerouac could thumb and freight-hop his
way from one coast to the other without having to worry about any threat more
sinister than a railroad bull looking to toss him off the Midnight Ghost from
Los Angeles to San Francisco, (yes, I know that this has been exaggerated—he
did most of his actual traveling either
in friends’ cars or on Greyhound buses, but what the hell, it makes a good
story), the America of Route 66 and its less-storied sister two-lanes, which ran
right through the middle of otherwise-sleepy towns where you could get a
hamburger, french fries and a milkshake for 85¢.
The advent of the
interstate highway system ended all of that.
The Eisenhower years are traditionally depicted as a time of stagnation,
but in that sense they were revolutionary:
they killed off Kerouac’s “great American night” and replaced it with a
homogenized network of coast-to-coast asphalt on which you can go for a
thousand miles in any direction and hardly have a sense of where you are
outside of the state name heading the red-white-and-blue sign by the road that
reads “70,” “8,” “95” or whatever.
Hitchhikers? You’ll still see them haunting the occasional
on-ramp about once every conjunction of Jupiter and Mars, but nobody in his or
her right mind would give them more than a glance while accelerating into the
right lane past the “Speed Limit 55” sign which everyone also ignores. Too many
drugs out there. Not to mention guns, knives and wannabe space aliens waiting
to hijack your car for a side-trip to the Planet Mongo.
These
problems didn’t exist, or barely existed, when my father, James Donahy,
hitchhiked from Los Angeles to El Centro in 1940.
The Great
Depression was lingering. America’s
entry into World War II wouldn’t come along to finally end the massive
unemployment for another year and a half.
My father knew how to drive a truck and someone had offered him work
driving lettuce out of the Imperial Valley.
He quit a job as a security guard at a Long Beach oil refinery to take
the truck-driving job in El Centro because it promised to pay better. But he didn’t have much money in his pocket
and he wasn’t sure whether the new job was going to work out or not, so to save
a couple of dollars he hitchhiked out to the desert rather than taking a
bus.
But as it
happened, the truck driving job worked out well, so well that he stayed in
Imperial County for three years. He got
married there, (he’d already been married and divorced once) to a woman whose
family was from Long Beach, the place he had left to come to the desert. Having Long Beach in common was in fact what
started their first conversation at the Centinela Café. It was a Saturday night, and I like to
imagine that Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman were blowing out of the
jukebox. (Another boring romantic,
that’s me.)
My father and his
second wife, whose name I think was Betty (my mother was his third wife) moved
into a house in Holtville, about 15 miles east of El Centro.
Betty died in
childbirth, as my father’s story went, and the child lived only a few
hours. Her family back in Long Beach
wanted to have her body returned to the coast for burial there. The baby, who didn’t live long enough to be
named, was buried right there in Holtville.
My father moved on.
Almost four
decades later, I went to El Centro to take my first real job. Call it a
coincidence if you like. I didn’t hitchhike there, I drove—in a 1973
Plymouth Scamp, to be exact.
But modes of
transportation aside, the Imperial Valley is a place where my family has gone
to burn a lot of karma.
Later
I found out that Herm Syktich wasn’t exactly home-grown either. He was a transplant too, in his case from
Pomona. The official story from the
Syktich family was that he’d come to the Imperial Valley for his health. He had asthma and they thought the dry air of
the low desert would be good for him.
That, and real estate was cheap there—very cheap, for the obvious reason that nobody
in his right mind who wasn’t born in Imperial County would want to live there,
not with those 115-degree summers—so the house in Holtville where the Syktiches
lived had been a bargain. (Syktich is a Ukrainian name,if anyone cares.)
But I suspected
that there was more to it than that.
Pomona is in Los Angeles County, and Los Angeles is a big place. Herm’s incessant letters-to-the-editor
couldn’t have been attracting much attention there. But in Imperial
County, a sparsely-populated farm area
with lots of churches, Herm and his alternately neo-Marxist and neo-atheist
broadsides would get listened to, if not necessarily welcomed. Pissing people off, after all, beats the heck
out of being ignored.
How I came to
close my father’s circle is simple enough.
When I got out of college the country was in a recession, (again) so
jobs weren’t that easy to get generally, and to make matters worse, I had
majored in journalism, chiefly as a sop to my father, who was worried that I
wasn’t “learning a trade.” I’d wanted to
major in history; in fact I did pursue a history major, but after witnessing
not only my father but both of my parents wringing their hands over the
generally-accepted “uselessness” of a liberal arts degree, I added journalism
as a second major. Yes, it came under
the College of Professional Studies, so I suppose in a sense it passed for
“learning a trade,” but journalism is a field in which it’s notoriously hard to
find work, (and once you do find it, the next thing you discover is that the
pay is a joke) so I didn’t just walk out of Cal State Northridge’s front door
on graduation day and find a job waiting for me. No, to my parents’ continued consternation
(and continued hand-wringing) I lived on at home for a time after graduation,
working at odd jobs and trolling for that first break in the news business.
It was a while in coming. In fact after a few months I began to think
that maybe, despite my father’s misgivings about liberal arts as a career, I
ought to go back to Northridge, get my M.A. in history. After that perhaps I could at least teach somewhere.
But then, when I’d
been stocking shelves and mopping floors in a 7-11 store in Los Angeles for
about six months, on the graveyard shift no less, a man walked into the store
at 4:00 one morning for a pack of cigarettes.
He stopped long enough to have a cup of coffee and I, grateful for a
chance to put the mop down, chatted with him for a few minutes as he sipped and
smoked.
His name was Tom
Bergland. He had just driven most of the
night to get back from Santa Cruz, where he’d gone to attend a funeral. He was a reporter for L.A. Press Service, an
independent news organization that served subscriber newspapers in the
county. Naturally I mentioned that I’d
just graduated from Northridge with a journalism major, and we talked about
that for a while.
He came back about
a week later and asked me if I were ready to go to work.
I thought he was joking. But he wasn’t. He said LAPS had just lost two reporters and
he needed to replace them quickly. He’d
decided to offer me a shot at a real job.
He said he believed in giving young people a chance, and he gave me a
test which, if I passed it, would convince him that I could be placed on a news
beat.
The test: he
pointed to an office building across the street and told me that if I could
find out who owned that building, that would prove that I knew how to dig for
information, which he said is the most important thing any reporter does. He’d put me to work if I could find out who
owned that building. He gave me his
phone number and told me to call him when I did.
Not sure whether I
was getting the break of my life or whether I was having my leg pulled by a
loony, I drove out to the L.A. County Administration Center, found the hall of
records and learned that the building in question was owned by a large
insurance firm based in Indiana. I
called Bergland and gave him this information and he told me to meet him at the
press room at city hall the next morning.
He was going to put me to work, he said, covering the Los Angeles City
Council.
Of course there
was, and I should have thought to ask, but when you’re 22 you don’t think to
ask about such things, or at least I didn’t.
The catch was, of
course, the money. L.A. Press Service
was a shoestring operation that didn’t even have its own office space. Its reporters worked out of the press rooms
of the public buildings where they worked: the city and county buildings and
the county courthouse. LAPS used desks
and telephones that were furnished by local government for the media’s use, and
often had to jockey for space and facilities with the more-mainstream people
from the L.A. Times and other papers, not to mention the TV news crews,
when something flashy enough to attract local television’s interest came
up.
As a newcomer I would be paid 60
cents per column inch for everything I published in the subscriber
newspapers. I soon found out that, with
long hours and hard work, I could expect to make $300 or $400 a month, and that
would be a good month.
Still, I quit the
7-11 store where I was working and accepted a berth with Bergland’s little
organization.
My parents were in
despair of course, utterly convinced by this latest folly of mine that I would never
move out of their back bedroom and get a “real” job. I tried to explain to them that, even though
L.A. Press Service wouldn’t be paying me much, this was an opportunity to get
some hands-on experience which could lead to a regular, salaried job later
on.
It was a tough
sell, to my father especially, who had lived through the Depression in his
youth and even now, decades later, still subscribed to the belief that it was
unreasonable of anyone to feel that they should be allowed to “pick and choose”
their employment. In 1934 you were
grateful to have a job, any kind of job, and that was that. He saw no reason to think that things should
be any different now. That I would give up a guaranteed $3.25 an hour to go
chasing after something that promised only so much for what I could sell seemed
crazy to him. So I took a second job,
working weekends as a swing-shift security guard in a tuna cannery in San
Pedro. This served two purposes: it
added a little extra change to what I was bringing home from my work at the
L.A. Press Service, and it convinced my father of my seriousness: if I was willing
to work seven days a week so I could be a reporter five days a week, well, that
impressed him.
The city press
room saw a lot of people come and go during the course of an average week, but
there were some regular “fixtures” there besides myself. A couple of times a week either Tom Bergland
or Katie Cusic from LAPS would come by to check up on how things were
going—they both handled client relations as well as reporting, and their time
was as much filled with selling the service and getting the bills out as it was
with actually covering news—but for the most part I spent my time with Leslie
Sirota, who covered city government for the Los Angeles Times, and Juan
Fontes, who covered it for the San Gabriel Valley News.
Within fifteen seconds of
meeting her, I decided that Leslie Ann Sirota was beyond any doubt the most
beautiful woman upon whom I had ever laid eyes.
About three years my senior, she had already spent considerable time “in
the trenches,” a fact made obvious in turn by the fact that she was, at age 25,
already a reporter for the biggest newspaper on the west coast. In fact, I learned as I talked with her, that
from age 13 on she had never wanted to be anything except a reporter. She’d gone to U.C.L.A. and had done an
internship at the Washington Post during
the summer of her senior year. After
graduating, she’d taken a job on a tiny twice-weekly in Huntington Beach called
the Huntington Beachcomber. A dumb move?
Not at all—on a newspaper that small, one tends to become an editor very
quickly, in fact, sometimes one becomes an editor upon walking through the
door. Leslie became the Beachcomber’s
editor in less than two years.
Subsequently, when the Los Angeles Times was looking for someone to
cover local government in Orange County, Leslie caught their attention and, at
24, she was hired. A year later they had
her covering L.A. city government. She
was a blue-eyed brunette, and I’ve always been a sucker for blue-eyed
brunettes. She was Polish-Jewish by
descent; her parents had been in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during
World War II. They had both died by the
time she was 18. She didn’t put a lot of
effort into dressing well—she was too wrapped up in her work, I always
supposed—but she had a good figure and an engaging smile and what with that
thick brown hair and those blue eyes, I spent the best part of the year I
worked for LAPS hopelessly in love with her.
She was usually too busy to even talk to me, though, and I spent whole
days sitting at my desk in that press room contemplating the back of her neck
and grinding my teeth.
But although I
would moon and moan at length over Leslie Sirota in the months to come, it was
Juan Fontes who ultimately proved the wild card which would result in the
closing of my father’s circle by bringing me to El Centro.
Juan was in his thirties
and had been in the business for ten years.
He was originally from San Diego.
In my early days of covering the council, he gave me pointers on
everything from when was the best time to catch the city clerk in her office to
cleaning my typewriter (yes, we still used typewriters in those days—mine was a
Smith-Imperial Classic 12 portable, and no, L.A. Press Service didn’t provide
me with it, I brought it from home.)
Soon Juan and were hanging out together.
We would sometimes go jogging during his lunch hour (there was a locker
room in the basement where we could change and shower) and once in a while
after work we would slip off to a nearby tavern for a beer or two, although my
tight budget didn’t allow for too-frequent bar drinking. It was during one of these beer-drinking
sessions after a day at city hall that Juan raised the question of where I was
planning to go from LAPS.
“After all, sooner or later
you want a job where you ain’t being paid so-many peanuts per column inch,
right?”
“Well, yeah, of
course,” I replied. “But I don’t think
the Times is going to look at me just yet, or the Valley News
either.”
“I had my first
newspaper job down in the Imperial Valley, in El Centro,” he said. “You ever think about going down there?”
“Are you out of your
mind?” I asked him. “The DESERT?
There’s nothing down there but lettuce.
And doesn’t it get up to something like 20,000 degrees in the summer
there?”
“Right on both counts, and
precisely my point. See, because it’s
such an undesirable place, nobody wants to stay there for very long. So the daily paper down there has a turnover
problem. People come and go. If you get your resume on file there, you
might have a chance at getting a job. I
know it’s not much of a place, but it would be a step up from this. At least you’d be working on a daily
paper. And you’d have a by-line—LAPS
don’t give nobody a by-line, your stories just say ‘L.A. Press Service’ at the
top. Nobody’s outside city hall’s
getting to know who you are, and people getting to know who you are is half the
game.”
He had a point.
Still. “The Imperial Valley?” I cringed.
“Well, just think
about it. If you at least want to send a
resume down there, I can tell you who to send it to. The managing editor’s name is Henry
Birnbaum. He’s been there for about 10
or 11 years. He was sort of ‘exiled’
from the paper’s parent organization, the Springfield, Illinois Tribune. That’s where he’s from, Springfield. But about ten years ago the Tribune
decided they had too many assistant managing editors running around, and Henry
got transferred all the way out here.
The Trib actually owns a chain of papers down there in the desert. They have papers in Indio, Blythe, and
Needles besides the one in El Centro.
Henry’s a case. He used to give
me a bad time about my long hair. He
called it my ‘Buster Brown’ haircut. I
couldn’t convince him that that was the style then. Henry still lives in the 1950s. But he’s really into the
business. His father was an editor, and
Henry has ‘printer’s ink in his blood,’ as the old saying goes.”
“I don’t know.”
“Just think about
it. I’ll even give Henry a call if you
like.”
From here, my protagonist was to have gone down to the Imperial Valley and gotten involved in the investigation of a ten-year-old murder case involving the killing of two FBI agents by a local young crazy whose trigger-point turns out to have been Herm Syktich's political ravings in the letters-to-the-editor section of the local newspaper. But this was as far as I got. I fear this book will never be written, and I spent 25 years thinking about writing it, because the story would have been based on true events.
Anybody out there care to make a suggestion as to what should have happened next?
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