Chapter 28 #2
When I’d make a mistake that ended up in print, he’d circle it in red and pin it to the bulletin board in the newsroom.
My most infamous typo was Daffy Fuck instead of Daffy Duck and the copy desk missed it.
I imagine the ratings went through the roof that morning.
One day Gerry took me downstairs to the cafeteria for coffee and told me I was the worst clerk the paper had ever hired.
I didn’t doubt it, and the mistakes continued, my writing the wrong blurbs for shows.
It was easy to have this happen if you had no idea that Robin Williams was in Mork & Mindy and not WKRP in Cincinnati.
I found updating the magazine unbearably tedious.
It didn’t require an ounce of intelligence or creativity.
I started casting my friends into the late-night low-budget horror flicks featuring actors with unfamiliar foreign names.
My pal Aida Doss starred in a few. So did the owners of Peregrine House, Cindy and Eddie Booker.
Also, my classmate Ellen Schlaefer and several Davidson professors.
I never admitted my mischief to anyone at the newspaper. Nobody there noticed.
I wanted to write stories, and every day I’d cruise each desk asking about anything they needed someone to cover.
The book reviewer Dannye Romine could use my help, and one morning she handed me an early copy of Elvis, We Love You Tender, a memoir based on hours of interviews with Dee Presley, the king of rock and roll’s stepmother.
I read the book over the weekend and thought it would make a much better review if I tracked down Dee Presley and interviewed her.
What a coup that would be. Don’t ask me how I got her phone number.
I don’t remember. But I seemed to have a knack for finding out how to contact people. She and I talked for about an hour.
“The truth is, Vernon was more married to Elvis than to me,” she said about her former husband, Elvis’s father.
I asked if the book exploited her famous stepson.
“We all gave our lives to Elvis… Now maybe we’re just trying to take a little something back,” she told me.
When I turned in my story, Dannye Romine was aghast.
“When you write a book review, you’re not supposed to talk to the author!” she protested.
“But the book is more of an as-told-to and not really written by Dee…,” I argued.
“That’s not how we review books!”
The paper ran my story anyway, and it went out over the wire. Even my father in Miami saw it and sent a letter congratulating my good work. I began writing obituaries, and one of the first was another mess. I cited the wrong person being dead, and the next day he called me to say he wasn’t.
WE WERE WRONG, the paper printed yet another retraction, my mistake pinned on the bulletin board for all to see. It’s a wonder I didn’t get fired. Perhaps the secret to my eventual success was my willingness to cover anything that no one else wanted to write.
Ingersoll Rand had a new air compressor that would be used in the Olympics to make artificial snow, and I toured the factory.
The Boy Scouts’ convention featured wrestling star Ric Flair, and I enjoyed my chat with him.
The stamp collectors were in town, then the backgammon world championship, where the number-one-ranked player gave me a lesson, insisting I try a game.
I was so freaking lucky with the dice that I beat him.
I’ll never forget the look on his face, and I was wise enough to leave that out of the story.
It seemed yet another example of magical things that happened in my life, like the intramural basketball finals my sophomore year of high school.
Three seconds before the final buzzer, I had the ball and hurled it from half-court.
It went in and my team won by a single point.
My biggest challenge early on at the newspaper happened when one of the journalists had a spat with her editor and refused to cover that night’s Ebony Fashion Show.
I was asked to fill in at the last minute.
It was a big assignment for a novice, and the first thing I did was drive off in the newspaper’s staff car forgetting that my notebook was on top of it.
I watched in dismay as it fluttered away in my wake.
Then I failed to jot down which designer outfit was what.
The photographer couldn’t identify the clothing he’d taken pictures of and chewed me out.
I wasn’t interested in the designers or their outfits, spending my energy on interviewing the members of the audience, some of their outlandish attire far more newsworthy than what I saw on the runway.
Each morning I would arrive for work at 4 a.m. and finish my TV blurbs by noon. The rest of the day I would write stories. I reworked my term paper about Black Mountain College, and it ran as a big feature. By the end of my first summer at the Observer I was logging considerable overtime.
“This sort of writing does little to feed me,” I journaled that October. “I’m not sure what I’m meant for, but I don’t think it is this.”
I was still living in the small cottage on Lake Norman, and usually not home until nighttime, by then bleary with exhaustion.
“Fatigue is strange, it unleashes sleepy beasts in my mind,” I noted. “As I drive home in the dark, I expect furry King Kongs and strange apparitions to swoop down upon me and fling my car, like a toy, into space.”
Toward the end of 1979, I was promoted to the metro desk. One of my first assignments was to interview the legendary actors Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. They were appearing with religious celebrities Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker on their PTL show. The acronym stood for Pass the Loot, the media joked.
Dale got up to sing, making her way to the bales of hay onstage, when her pumps went out from under her. She slid halfway across the floor on her velvet-covered backside.
“If she breaks a leg, you gotta shoot her,” Roy announced.
Before I left, I was given a leatherbound PTL counselor’s edition Bible, and asked Roy and Dale to sign it. Unlike Billy Graham, they didn’t mind. I wanted the autographed Bible for Charlie, knowing he’d be amused.
Charlie, God bless you with many happy trails. Dale Evans, Roy Rogers & Trigger.
On Sunday, December 3, Charlie took me out to dinner, and while we were in the car I finally asked about his intentions. We’d been dating since the summer, and not a word about marriage. I needed to know if that was on the horizon, and he surprised me by proposing.
“Question,” he said. “If we got married, would you let me keep my cats?”
“Of course,” I replied.
“Question. Will you marry me?”
We were seeing each other only on the weekends.
He’d appear at my lake house for dinner, and leave no later than 3 a.m. I never understood why he wouldn’t stay over, and it bothered me considerably.
I’d get up and tidy the mess we’d made, feeling forlorn when I’d look out the window at his tire tracks in the grass.
As a general assignment reporter, I was covering everything.
Fires. Service stations cited for overcharging at the pumps.
A policeman losing his cap to a bullet. An estranged couple dead in a murder-suicide.
Parades. A baby born in a taxicab. Free tests for auto pollution. A plane crash. The weather.
Then I was assigned the police beat, and writing about crime was life-changing. For the first time, I was afraid to go home after a shift covering murders, rapes, robberies, death, and more death.
“I don’t even want to leave the newsroom because my imagination escorts me to my car…”
I bought a B.B. gun pistol, as if that would solve my problems should someone break into my lake house in the middle of the night.
“I go mad with a deep fear as images of what I’ve read & written nag at the back of my mind.”
I was perpetually jumpy and afraid to be alone in the dark. The instant I’d get home at around 1 a.m., I’d close the curtains. I worried that someone might be watching.
“Every sound startles me. Every pair of headlights that swings around a curve & follows me makes me want to flee. It’s because of this God-forsaken reporting…”
One of the journalists I worked with had covered the police beat before I was assigned it.
He told me what it did to him, all but driving him crazy.
Some nights he’d go home, get drunk, and throw up after covering a fatal car crash where he watched someone die.
He was burned out and warned about the same thing happening to me.
“I know there is evil in this world, in this town, but Jesus I don’t want to wallow in it,” I wrote in my journal on March 13, 1980. “I continue to think there must be something wrong with me because I can’t cope with the nastiness. But maybe there would be something wrong with me if I could.”
By now I’d met Charlie’s family, and he’d visited with my mother in Montreat.
She wasn’t keen on him, and when Mrs. Cornwell invited her for dinner, Mom said no.
She told me Charlie wasn’t right. She didn’t trust him, and no doubt wouldn’t any man I might have decided to marry.
When I’d try to change her mind, often she hung up on me.
“She hasn’t even met my future in-laws yet,” I noted on March 23, “and I bet she won’t until the wedding—if she comes.”
I wasn’t seeing much of Charlie because of our schedules.
He worked during the day, and my shift was four to midnight Sunday through Thursday.
The police beat had completely dismantled any sense of safety and peace I might have had.
I was afraid of death. I was afraid of losing people I loved, most of all him.
“I fight my fear that the world will end before we begin. I won’t let it.
I’ll spin the stars and sun around and start our time all over again,” I wrote on April 13, 1980.
“After all—who knows how many times we’ve done that…
In this world and the next and from then on—I do and will forever love you. ”
Charlie and I were married on June 14, 1980, our schedule terrible for newlyweds.
After we returned from our honeymoon in Charleston, South Carolina, our only quality time was Friday and Saturday nights.
The rest of the week we were the proverbial ships passing.
In that era of no internet or cell phones, sometimes we went days not communicating.
When I’d roll in at 1 a.m., he was asleep.
When I’d get up in the morning, he’d already left for his office on campus.
Adding to the unhealthy mix, we’d moved into his bachelor apartment on Jackson Court, and he wasn’t accustomed to having anyone in his private space.
He’d insist I take off my shoes when walking in, and it was obvious he felt invaded.
Tension began building between us. This would get worse as I dealt with the stress of the police beat.
I was off to a bad start because the cops hated my newspaper.
When I’d walk into the duty sergeant’s office to ask what was going on, the officers would swivel their chairs around, turning their backs to me.
“What’s it going to take for you to give me a chance?” I asked one afternoon.
“Maybe if you sit in my lap,” the duty sergeant sneered.
“Well, I won’t do that. And you’re welcome to hate me if I’ve earned it. But I haven’t.”
The next day I brought in a barrel of Bojangles fried chicken. I began riding around with Captain Roy Phillips, and he became a mentor. My relationship with the police changed dramatically. As much as I hated violence, I seemed to have a knack for writing about it.
I realized I was good at getting people to talk openly.
If I was told there was no way so-and-so was going to give me an interview, I made it my mission to get it and usually did.
I didn’t care what anybody assumed, or how much I was discouraged about the impossibility of an idea.
I was driven to find out the truth for myself, and that’s a good attitude to have.
I noticed what my colleagues took for granted, and next thing I was writing another front-page story.
A good example was what went on around the Observer’s building in the heart of downtown on West Trade Street.
When I’d pull in and out of the parking garage in the beige Skylark staff car, I noticed sex workers loitering near the wall out front.
Reporters drove past them all the time without a glance or a thought.
I started strolling outside late at night and striking up conversations with the ladies and their pimps.
I ended up doing a front-page series on prostitution in downtown Charlotte, and it would win an investigative reporting award by the end of 1980.
Then I got subpoenaed to testify against Angel, who’d told me what she charged and for what.
After I quoted her in the newspaper, she was arrested.
I was eager to help bring about justice, thrilled that the police and district attorney needed my help for real.
Angel represented herself, her examination of me on the witness stand Gary Larson Far Side.
“Now you wrote that I told you how much I supposably get paid.” As she paced like Perry Mason.
“That’s right,” I said from the witness stand.
“Now I’m wondering why would I tell you something like that?”
“I wondered the same thing. I was surprised.”
“Meaning maybe I didn’t tell you nothing like that.”
“But you did.” I reminded her of the amount per trick.
I gave the court the salacious details, and she was convicted of soliciting for prostitution.
It must not have been much of a sentence.
As I left the courthouse, she and her pimp were on the same elevator with me.
We smiled at each other as if old friends.
I wrote a story about that too and included a photograph.
My editors were most unhappy. It wasn’t my job to solve crimes and lock people up.
I was supposed to remain neutral. Well, that just wasn’t possible in my case.
I was more interested in helping the police than reporting on them, and as a result I became their favorite.
When something big went down, they’d give me the tip.