Chapter 19 #3
When Marty stops laughing, he says, “If you know a better place than Hearth’s print issue for the discerning divorcee to find punishing crossword puzzles, I’m all ears.
” Sam says nothing, and the anticipation overmasters his nerves; his eyes flick back to the magazine, and Marty smirks.
“Also, print subscribers get the issue a few days before the stories come out online, and landlines are better in an emergency. The internet isn’t everything.
” Glancing at Joanie, he adds, “Just to cycle back to that divorce comment for a second—it’s not like a recent divorce or anything.
I’m all healed and therapized and ready to get back out on the—”
“Marty!” Sam’s voice is maybe slightly strangled. “Could this maybe wait!”
“Right,” Marty says, and sighs. “Right.” He passes over the magazine, and then, talking too quickly as Sam stares down at the cover, says, “I want you to know that I tried to get him to tell you about a hundred times. We’ve gotten to know each other pretty well since he’s been living in my building—he teaches my kids’ dance classes, too—and I know he didn’t mean to hurt anyone.
He just made a mistake, and then…” Marty sighs, looking uncomfortable.
“I don’t want to speak out of turn, and it’s not any of my business, but I think that jackass back in Los Angeles really messed him up.
He was so afraid of how you’d take it, and even though I tried to point out that the reactions he was afraid of didn’t sound like you—”
“Marty,” Sam says quietly. “Please stop talking.”
On the cover of the magazine, in the small font sidebar that teases the articles within, are printed the words, kiss of death’s kiss of death, by jake thompson (aka norman endicott).
“Oh, shit,” Deb breathes, which is when Sam realizes she’s hovering over one of his shoulders. He steps away from her, wanting some space, as he rips the magazine open and starts rifling through, dismissing feature stories and glossy photos and advertisements and—
there.
When I was in high school, I was in love with this guy who lied all the time.
I could never understand why he did that. He was so great already, exactly the way he was. Why lie? Lying, as I understood it, was something a person did in order to cover up shortcomings, and as far as I was concerned, he didn’t have any.
I didn’t know, then, the mechanics of falsehood.
I’d never sat in on a doomed celebrity wardrobe fitting and watched a roomful of people smoothly insist that no, really, the outfit looked great.
I’d never attended the opening of a highly anticipated new restaurant and pretended, with a commitment that was probably more theatrical than necessary, to be a regular patron instead of a reviewer.
I’d never had the chance to get used to lying, and then so used to lying that I could do it easily, without even noticing.
What did it matter, after all? Who could it hurt?
But that’s the thing about making a liar of yourself: Eventually, it always matters.
What starts as a tiny, inconsequential lie can begin to bear weight, and then more weight, and then so much weight you’d do anything to keep it from breaking, or to get to spend just one day more pretending it is true.
And when, finally, it does break, you have no choice but to realize how much damage you’ve done—which was, in my case, a considerable amount.
At least one of the apologies I owe I don’t deserve the opportunity to deliver, and I won’t add insult to injury by airing his business in public. But to the rest of you I owe, at very least, the truth.
I have held many jobs over the past ten years, but, among other things, I’ve been a restaurant critic.
It is strange, lonely work, or at least it has been the way that I’ve done it.
I have written only for Hearth, and only under the pseudonym Norman Endicott, which was created to protect my anonymity.
For years, I believed that decision—writing under a pseudonym—to be one of personal and journalistic integrity: I thought being unknown would help me feel safe to punch up, and take shots at the sort of pricey, overblown places Kiss of Death used to review.
Unfortunately, I have recently come to doubt my own integrity in the extreme, and suspect the only way to even hope to recover it is to return to a place of honesty, however uncomfortable or personally damaging that honesty might be.
Five months ago, I accepted a payoff to write a Kiss of Death column attacking Silverman’s Deli, a beloved local restaurant in Cleveland, Ohio.
I did not, for the record, know that’s what I was doing, but it is, in all the ways that matter, what I did.
The person who approached me with the idea for this particular column was someone close to me, who I trusted, and while what I’ve done is terrible, what I didn’t do is even worse:
This person told me a series of lies about the conditions at Silverman’s—lies which I had an obligation to investigate before repeating them, and did not.
They brought me a variety of unappetizing dishes that they claimed were from Silverman’s—a claim which I had an obligation to verify before reporting on the food, and did not.
They offered me a meaningful sum to do what they insisted was a public good and rip Silverman’s apart—to help “defray the opportunity cost of work to help the community,” is how they phrased it.
However, regardless of how the offer was phrased, I had an obligation to refuse it.
I did not.{EDITOR’S NOTE: We are saddened and horrified by the unscrupulous behavior of this contributor.
This will be Mr. Thompson’s last piece with Hearth. }
In my defense, I very badly needed the money.
I was freshly out of a toxic relationship with a wealthy man in Los Angeles; by the time he cut me loose, he’d isolated me from my friends and family and controlled my finances for the bulk of my adult life.
It also took me longer than it should have to realize I was being used by the source of my “information” regarding Silverman’s.
When I finally got around to doing the digging I should have done in the first place, I discovered that the person pushing the negative story had a significant financial incentive for wanting Silverman’s to fail.
But that’s about all I can say in my defense. Did I think about the livelihoods of the restauranters, the staff? No. Did I think about journalistic integrity or ethics? No. Did I think about the community surrounding each place, the effort that goes in, every day, to keeping things going? No.
I didn’t think about any of that until I had the opportunity to spend some time hanging out at Silverman’s Deli, a place I had not actually visited when my previous review was published.
I would like to say here, as emphatically as possible, that I could not have been more wrong.
The food at Silverman’s is some of the best in this city, and the staff and proprietor surely the best anywhere.
Anyone would be lucky to get to enjoy a meal there, and I consider myself entirely unlucky—a classic, tragic fool—to have closed their doors so firmly behind myself.
Silverman’s never deserved the Kiss of Death, but this column does.
Thanks for reading, and I’m so sorry. If, someday, someone out there takes up the mantle of lampooning the restaurants that do need humbling, a word of advice from your old pal Norman: Your due diligence matters, and you need to do every last inch of it before you move forward.
If, and only if, it turns out they deserve it, then I hope you give ’em hell.