Gregg and I woke up one day and still had some acid left.
At $3 a hit, and because I had not yet built up any resistance to LSD, leftovers were common.
“Can we just do it again, please?” I asked Gregg. I just wanted to be high.
“Okay,” he said. We had the high drama moment of putting the tabs on our tongues and then … waited.
I started to shake. My heart started to race. I saw little trails behind my closed eyelids, but nothing else happened.
I wasn’t happy with the heart-racing thing. “This doesn’t feel right at all,” I said. I wasn’t high. I was just … jittery. “Why am I shaking?”
“That’s just the Strychnine,” Gregg said.
“Strychnine?!?”
“Yeah, they use it to make acid,” Gregg said.
“Well I want it to stop!” I nearly screamed.
“It will,” he said.
As if.
It didn’t stop for at least two hours. Meanwhile I did not have any kind of fun. I just sat around panicked. I was afraid to smoke because I was on poison, and my heart wouldn’t stop racing, and I was pretty sure I would kill myself if I even lit a cigarette.
Eventually when my heart stopped its incessant pounding, I walked to the bar, where I got drunk and forgot I was not-high on Strychnine.
Another day, though, I decided that streaking was a lost art. “Let’s all streak to the mailbox!” I yelled, tearing off all my clothes and racing to the mailbox, feeling the wind in my hair, my breath strong in my chest, my feet grazing the pavement as I ran.
I ran two blocks – and back. It was awesome. “Who’s next?” I asked upon my return.
Everyone just stared at me. Running on LSD was awesome, and running naked was awesome. I have no idea why nobody else wanted to try it.
Another night, Gregg and I went out with Barry and Kim, the neighbors who lived in the apartment next door. Barry and Kim were getting married the next day and they wanted to do something really fun, so we all went out together and got wasted in a parking lot by a lake.
The party ended when Kim found me having sex with Barry in the front seat of the car, which I had never done before and certainly hadn’t wanted to do the night before their wedding.
But I did.
Barry and Kim still lived next door to me after they got married, but Gregg and I didn’t party with them anymore. Another two acquaintances disappeared from my life.
Little things were happening that separated me from the other people in the world. I had no idea that my daily “normal” was “beyond wasted” for most people. I didn’t know that some people spent time sober. I didn’t know that everyone wasn’t doing exactly what I was doing … except that these little things kept happening.
I lost my keys. I left Kitty outside in the snow. I tried to make chicken marsala but drank all the wine. I puked on the walls in my kitchen. I puked in my bathtub and slipped on it when trying to shower. I burned my couch, my mattress, my carpet, my pillow. I slept through a job interview. I went to a job interview without shoes. I went to the bar without shoes.
As long as I kept drinking, these little things kept happening.
I fell head over heels in love with Kurt the moment I laid eyes on him. He stepped out of that car at the gas station and I thought, Oh my GOD, where have you been all my life?
Then I thought, Do you have any cocaine? We’d been waiting for hours for him to appear, so we were thrilled when he pulled out a little baggie and sold it to us.
Then he disappeared into the wind.
Gregg told me that Kurt was the mayor’s son and a junkie. This made me love Kurt even more.
When the Grateful Dead was in town in June, Gregg and I went downtown to the Civic Arena – with Kurt. We didn’t have any tickets to the show; we went into town to party with the Deadheads.
The Civic Arena parking lot was mayhem. It was swarming with tie-dyed wannabe-hippies, some who had just pulled up in their VW minibus and poured out onto the asphalt. A hundred boomboxes all blasted bootleg Dead concerts. Drugs were visible everywhere, as though Grateful Dead tailgate parties were immune to the law.
Everyone was dancing.
Kurt and I walked together, admiring the crowd. Gregg followed us like a lost puppy as we explored.
Kurt didn’t talk much. When he did, his voice was soft but intense. “Do you hear the sirens?” Kurt asked.
I stopped walking and listened. Sure enough, far in the distance, I heard sirens. “Yes,” I said, astounded by Kurt’s brilliance at locating the distant wails in the midst of such chaos.
“Stay far away from those,” he said, still walking.
I caught up quickly. “Why?”
“Cops,” Kurt said.
“Oh, right.” I made a mental note to always listen to Kurt.
A guy with a brown floppy hat and a full beard jumped in front of us; he pulled out a huge roll of LSD and waved it in Kurt’s face. The guy was a bit frantic.
Kurt stopped walking and stared at the guy until he settled down. Finally Kurt said, “No thanks.”
We had only walked a few more yards before a young, blond girl in a similar floppy hat held up a strip of acid tabs as we walked by. Kurt reached out and snagged 2 tabs off the bottom almost without stopping. He smiled at the girl and put a tab on his tongue.
“Thanks,” Kurt said. He ripped the second tab in half and put one half on my tongue. He handed the other half to Gregg.
Within minutes, we were dancing in the parking lot, too.
After nightfall, Kurt bought a huge joint and we shared it outside under the stars. Life was glorious.
Until it wasn’t.
Suddenly a dragon swooped down from the night sky, nearly tearing off my head.
“WHAT WAS THAT?” I shouted.
Kurt mumbled something to Gregg. The music was suddenly too loud, the sky too black.
I ducked from another screaming, flying hallucination. “WHAT’S GOING ON!”
“That joint must have been laced with PCP,” Kurt said.
“WHAT?!” My terror was palpable.
I’d seen the videos in health class. People died on PCP, always.
Kurt put one hand on my head. “Just relax. It’s like acid.”
“Really?” My heart slowed a little; I breathed. “It’s like acid? I love acid.”
But it felt like very glitchy, unpleasant acid.
For me, the party was over. We sat on a curb and waited for the PCP insanity to fade.
Eventually, we all went home. I did not do PCP again.
With therapy included, my weeks now looked something like this:
MONDAY: Get up, kill hangover with a liter of Diet Coke, shower, and put on khakis. Go to a temp job. Drink with Gregg after work until the bars close, have sex and/or pass out.
TUESDAY: Drink a liter of Diet Coke, maybe shower, put on yesterday’s clothes. Go to temp job. Leave at 1:45 for therapy (pre-authorized by the temp job); drive back to work by 3:15. Drink after work with Gregg….
WEDNESDAY-FRIDAY: Same schedule, different day. Drink even more on Friday because, well, it’s Friday.
SATURDAY: Wake up at 10 a.m. and turn on Pee Wee’s Playhouse. Wait patiently for the Penny cartoon. After Gregg rolls a joint and we smoke it, gaze like an insane person at the nuances and brilliance that has been created just for my enjoyment. When My Little Pony comes on afterward, watch it as though it details the deepest secrets of the universe. (It probably does.) After watching TV, take a two-hour nap. Get up and get/do acid, if possible. Do cocaine, if possible. Stay high until well past sunrise on Sunday. (Backup plan if no drugs: drink copious amounts of alcohol until puking/passing out is inevitable.)
SUNDAY: Sleep until well past noon. Send Gregg to 7-11 for Sunday paper with weekly classifieds. Send out cover letters for anything related to television (exceedingly rare). Then go to the bar and drink until it closes.
*********************
Obviously, Saturday was my clear favorite day. I had my own version of a cartoon party, then – on a good day – did acid or cocaine or drank until I dropped.
Some days, there was no acid to be found. Given that it is completely illegal and was incredibly dangerous, it could be hard to find.
But if there was no acid, I would whine like a toddler in the grocery store who’s not allowed to buy a candy bar at checkout.
I wanted drugs like a baby wants candy. And I did whatever I could to get them.
Sometimes Gregg would disappear for a couple of hours, coming back with nothing.
Sometimes we would go together to get drugs by hanging out at the gas station.
Based on Gregg’s latest information, we would walk together to the other side of Swissvale – a mile, maybe two. Then we would stand next to the phone booth at the gas station and wait for whichever drug dealer happened to be “on his way.”
Sometimes we were waiting for LSD, sometimes cocaine, sometimes pot.
We would stand there and watch the cars go by. We’d wait and wait and wait and wait and wait. Sometimes we waited for two, three, even four hours. We’d smoke cigarettes and lean on the phone booth and stare at the cars.
I was like a heroin addict in desperate need of a fix. I’d wait forever, just wishing for the drugs to appear. The only difference between me and any other homeless street junkie is that I still had a place to live.
Sometimes we’d be there for an hour and I’d give up. I’d go to the bar – and Gregg would always tag along. It never occurred to me that Gregg didn’t have an actual deal in place.
Gregg would use the phone on occasion to call the drug dealer. I never talked to the dealers myself, so maybe there was no one on the other end of the phone.
Then, one day, a long black sedan pulled up and a rail-thin, dark-eyed man stepped out to sell us some cocaine.
Therapy let me attack my underlying issues instead of gnawing at the symptoms of addiction. It was like drinking water for a dehydration headache instead of merely taking aspirin.
But I didn’t know this. For me, it was just a new thing to do. So I walked into Dr. C’s home sometime in mid-summer, 1988.
“Come in, come in!” said Dr. C, as though he were welcoming a long lost friend. I was not a long lost friend; I didn’t know this guy. And I sure didn’t want to go into his house.
Dr. C was a short, weasly, bearded fellow with dark hair and dark eyes and an impish smile. I hated him instantly.
I hated everyone instantly.
But I believed this was how all therapists looked, this was how they all acted, and this was the only therapist I would ever know.
“I’m finishing up a phone call,” he said. “I’ll be with you in one minute.” Dr. C disappeared.
So I stood in his living room and looked around. It was cluttered and dark and not my style at all. I assumed we’d be going to an office, but no.
He breezed back into the room: “Sit down! Sit down!” he said.
I glanced at the wooden chairs covered with blankets and pillows. Yuk. I sat on the couch and sunk too far down. I hated this man and I hated his house.
He smiled at me anyway. “So, what are you here for?”
I considered this. I was only here because my parents wouldn’t give me any more money, but I didn’t want to tell him that.
“I’m here because my parents wanted me to talk to you,” I said.
“Okay,” said Dr. C. “About what?”
“I have no idea,” I said. And I didn’t.
So Dr. C asked me some questions about my life: my job, my living situation, my “partner” (he couldn’t mean Gregg) and my family history. I didn’t mind answering his questions. In fact, I had more things to say when my hour was over and I had to leave.
“Do you want to do this again next week?” he asked, as though we’d just had a standing lunch date.
“Um, I guess,” I said. “I have more things to tell you.”
“Okay!” he beamed. “I’ll see you at the same time next Tuesday!”
I walked out into the sunshine and thought, Huh. Therapy’s not that bad.
And the next week, I went back to see Dr. C in his dark living room, again and again and again. I told him everything I could tell him about my life, about my history, about my wonderful childhood and all the horrible things that had happened to me since then. I never once lied to him, and I was always a little sad to stop talking at the end of my hour.
One day I showed up and told him about a weird dream I had, and we analyzed it together. “Dreams just represent different parts of you. So if you have a dream about Joe,” he said, “you give me the top three adjectives you would use to describe Joe and those are the parts of yourself that you’re dreaming about.”
“Does that really work?” I asked.
“Well, let’s find out,” he said. And from that point on, in addition to regular chit-chat, we analyzed every single dream that interested me.
It became more fun for me to be at therapy than anywhere else in the world.
I didn’t even realize that I always went to therapy stone-cold sober.
It was the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday. I’d just realized I had no money to do laundry or eat, and I was hoping this would garner some sympathy from the one person who loved me in the world.
“Mom?”
“Kirsten?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
I could feel my mom tense, even through the wire. I’d tried to stay away from my family since Europe, so I wasn’t sure how much she knew about my life since I’d been fired.
“How are you?” she asked, already knowing.
“I’m okay,” I said. “I’ve been doing temp jobs and stuff.”
“That’s good!” My mom has encouraged every tiny step I’ve ever taken for my whole life.
“Yeah but I don’t have any money to do laundry.” I laughed a little, hoping to get the point across without asking for money.
“Are you drinking?”
I calculated my response. I was doing acid as often as I could get my hands on it, and I was smoking pot in the mornings to alleviate my horrific hangovers. So I felt like I was drinking less often. (This was not true.)
“A little bit,” I said. I didn’t mention the drugs.
“We can’t give you any money,” my mom said.
“Well even five dollars would …” I started.
“We can’t give you any money,” she said again. Her voice shook.
My guilt was overwhelming. I was sorry I called but I didn’t hang up. I didn’t want to give up just yet.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said. If I bought a 12-pack, I’d be broke. I felt lost and hopeless.
“The only thing we can do is to send you to therapy,” she said. “We would pay for therapy for you.”
“Therapy? What do you mean?”
“We would pay for you …” Mom stopped, breathed, started again. “We can pay for you to see a psychologist.”
“A psychologist? Why would I want to do that?”
“That’s all we can do for you,” she said.
I sat silently on the other end of the line. I didn’t want therapy. I wanted five dollars. I wanted beer. I wanted anything that could take me out of feeling like I did right now and numb the pain that no longer had any discernible origin.
“Therapy.” I sighed.
“Would you be willing to go to a therapist?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What would I have to do?”
“You’d just sit down and talk to somebody,” my mom said. Then quickly: “And we would pay.”
Sit down and talk to somebody, I thought. How hard could that be?
I was still thinking when my mom repeated: “Would you be willing to go to a therapist?”
“I guess,” I said. “What do I have to do?”
“We’ll make an appointment,” she said. “You just go.” Then she gave me the name and address of a man who was, I was sure, the only therapist in the entire Pittsburgh area.
My mother must have been holding onto his information for a long time, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know then that he specialized in addiction, or that my parents had talked to him beforehand. She called a few days later with my appointment time.
Meanwhile I still didn’t have any money for beer, and it was getting late in the day. I needed to get that 12-pack.
“Okay thanks,” I said, somewhat disappointed in the result of the call. They’d never not offered money.
It was the first time my parents had denied my incessant cries for “help” … and the first time they actually helped me.
One day, when Gregg wasn’t around, I left a bar with a guy I didn’t know. I wanted to go to Tubby’s, a few blocks away. We left in broad daylight, needing those flaming shots before lunch.
We got into the stranger’s car to get to Tubby’s faster, even though it was less than a mile away. This made sense to me at the time. Always let some other person drive. That was my motto.
We were both wasted.
We were in the car for maybe a minute when the guy turned in the wrong direction.
“Where are you going?” I asked politely. It was early enough that I didn’t think I was slurring my words. “Tubby’s is that way.” I pointed backwards and turned around in my seat, as if looking for the bar. Without a seatbelt on, it was easy to sit completely backwards and use the dashboard as a backrest.
“It’s cool,” he said, laughing. “I know a better place.”
“Tubby’s is a great place,” I said, facing front again. I started to panic a little; I didn’t want to go too far from home.
“It’s good to try new things,” he said, hitting the gas a little harder. “You’ll like it.”
You’ll like it?
Suddenly I felt gripped with an overwhelming terror that was not sufficiently squashed by my alcoholic intake.
I had a barrage of flashbacks reminding me very energetically why I shouldn’t be in a car with a stranger: sweaty bodies, fists in my face, “take this!” … shadows towering over me, “shut up!” … and now some voice suggesting “you’ll like it” when I already very much did not.
I sat up straighter and demanded very calmly: “Let me out.”
The stranger laughed again. “It’s okay!” he said, maybe genuinely.
But he didn’t stop the car.
I could barely breathe. I don’t know this guy, I thought. I don’t even know his name and they’re going to find my body in a ravine.
“It’s NOT okay!” I managed. “Let me out!”
He glanced at me, smiling, and laughed again. I stayed frozen, listening to the engine.
Then, just as the car went around a slow curve to the left, I lurched forward, grabbed the door handle, opened the passenger-side door, and threw myself out of the moving vehicle onto the pavement.
I’d expected to fly from the car onto the sidewalk; instead I thudded onto the street. I flopped around a little, then my body landed with a fallump against the curb.
I could hear the guy screaming “… fucking nuts!” before he squealed away, his car door still slapping the side of the car as it rounded another corner and disappeared.
He did not stop to check on my well-being.
For some reason, his car did not run me over me – nor did the car behind it.
I pulled myself onto the sidewalk, stood up, brushed some gravel out of my skin and, bleeding only a little, headed for Tubby’s.
Halfway there, I realized that the guy might try to find me at Tubby’s, and kidnap me again. So I walked to a completely different bar and hid in plain sight, drinking with other complete strangers.
I didn’t leave until the bar closed at 2 a.m.
I never saw that guy again, and it was the only time I ever jumped out of a moving car. For some stupid things, once is enough.
When I wasn’t at the bar with no name, I would drink at a bar called Tubby’s. Gregg’s friend, Tubby, was the bartender, and Tubby was always bartending. The only time he wasn’t was when he was in the hospital for an emergency appendectomy and, rather than being empathetic, I was pissed off about his absence. I don’t know if I ever knew Tubby’s real name.
Tubby’s had a bright red phone on the wall that served as a jukebox. I would pick up the phone and say, “Play Break on Through by The Doors!” And the person on the phone would say, “Okay, it’s on the turntable!” And then I would wait – or forget about it – until it played. It was like an early version of Spotify.
Tubby served flaming shots, which I dearly loved. He’d pour alcohol into a shot glass and light it on fire. I sat mesmerized, watching it burn, until Tubby doused the flame and demanded that I quickly down it.
This was my idea of great fun. I couldn’t afford flaming shots very often, but I would purposefully go across town to Tubby’s just to watch that tiny fire, as though they couldn’t be served anywhere else.
One drunken night I ran to the bathroom, barely in time to puke my guts out in the stall. This was not a new thing for me; I’d been vomiting in order to drink more for years.
But on this night, I puked for ten minutes then went back to the bar and said to Tubby, “Okay! I’m ready for my flaming shot!”
“You just drank it,” Tubby told me.
“No I didn’t!” I said. “I just went to the bathroom!”
“You drank it before you went to the bathroom,” Tubby said. “Look! Here’s your empty shot glass!”
There was, indeed, an empty shot glass, but I had no recollection of drinking that flaming shot. I had to pony up and buy another one, so that I could drink it while not in a blackout.
One night I was sitting at Tubby’s, wasted as usual, and a guy walked in to pick up a 12-pack. He waited next to me at the bar then, quite suddenly, exclaimed: “Kirsten!”
“It’s me!” I replied. The man looked vaguely familiar and oddly happy. I looked closer, completely befuddled.
“Robert!” he said, pointing to his chest. “From Seven Springs!”
I nearly fell off the barstool.
This was the man with whom I’d spent a beautiful night after nearly being gang-raped by his friends. Robert – my love – who’d dropped me off after Larry had left without me at Seven Springs ski resort.
I’d never expected to see Robert again, and I didn’t know what to do with him now that I had. I had adored this man and he was standing here, alone, next to me.
But Gregg was at Tubby’s that night, on the other side of me.
I glanced at Gregg, then back at Robert, who was wise enough to recognize that he was – again – a third wheel.
And again, this made me very, very sad. But what could I do? I was stuck with the person with whom I was stuck. Again.
I gave Robert a quick hug and felt my body flash back to rolling in the sheets, laughing all night. Suddenly I missed him like he was a dear friend, a long-lost love, even though he wasn’t.
I let Robert go and never saw him again.
I was so far beyond repair, I couldn’t even feel sad about it. Just empty and lost and utterly alone.
Through all of my job searches, life failures, and desperate attempts to manipulate the world according to my flimsy attempts to “do better,” I recognized that my life was starting to fall apart around me.
My friends from various jobs disappeared with every position. My high school friends had dipped their toes in the water of friendship and gotten scorched. I tossed Gregg around like a baseball, not really wanting to be alone but not wanting a liar in my life. And Gregg’s friends – including Barry and Kim, who lived next door – were part of what I considered to be the Loser Clearance Bin.
So once again, I was completely and utterly alone – just like I’d been in Larry’s world. Except this time, I’d created the life I thought I wanted. With no responsibilities, I had a very flexible schedule and I used all of my free time – which was all of my time – to drink and do drugs.
I spent a lot of time at the dark bar at the end of the street – the one that served me my first drink after months without any alcohol. The one with the broken screen door and the tiny glass block window glowing through the solid brick wall. The one with a handful of bar stools and a jukebox in the corner. The one with no name, no theme, no identity, no way to distinguish it from any other bar in the entire world.
I drank with people who, like me, drank solely to escape reality.
At this bar, no one talked about current events, about politics, about the weather, about their families. No one talked about anything. We sat and smoked cigarettes and stared at the ashtrays and guzzled our beers and didn’t say much to one another, except to declare loudly, as needed, This is a great song! or Who played this fucking song? or Gimme another one, will ya?
Nothing outside the bar mattered.
I drank at this bar because I felt safe there. Once in a great while someone would strike up a conversation but I knew I would be leaving there alone, just like everyone else.
A dozen times a night, I’d stumble into the bathroom and toss myself onto the toilet, resting my head against the sink with the rusty drain, cooling my forehead. I’d spend a moment there, trying not to think.
But then I’d stand and have no choice.
I looked into the mirror.
I saw a face I vaguely recognized, hair askew. My unsmiling face stared back at me.
I leaned in closer to the mirror and zoomed in on my eyes: hard, cold, unblinking and lifeless, a void of blackness that bored into my core. There was no sparkle, no color. My eyes were dead.
I stared harder, begging there to be something inside – anything – but those cloudy circles were painfully, excruciatingly empty. I stared until I was sure: Yep, I thought, nobody’s in there at all.
I did this every time I stepped into the restroom alone, testing myself, looking for some sign that I was still alive, that my soul had not been permanently eradicated.
And every time, I found nothing in those eyes, in that mirror, on that wall, in that restroom.
Eventually I would tire of staring; I’d blink once or twice.
Then I’d turn the loose knob and open the door, enveloped immediately by smoke. I’d walk back into the dingy room, sit back down at the bar and order another beer.
After my journalism career ended, I went back to the temp agency to get more work. It was perfect for me. I only had to work a couple of days at a time. Long-term jobs meant “three weeks” instead of “three years.” I didn’t care for commitment. And whenever I didn’t like a job, I would just ask to be reassigned.
One day, I got assigned to work in a factory. I have always been intrigued by the inner workings of factories; it was one of the reasons I’d been happy to work at the window-selling place in Florida. But there I was removed from the action; I’d been a lowly secretary. I was going to work in a doll factory – and would be right there on the factory floor with the other factory workers!
I was going to make dolls! This felt meaningful.
Unfortunately when I arrived at the doll factory, I was somehow assigned to create tile boards, meaning I would be sticking little pieces of tile onto a piece of hard wood. Four pieces of tile per board. White in the upper left corner, cream in the upper right corner, reddish brown bottom left, dark brown bottom right.
I was bored to tears after making six boards. But the worst part was my co-worker, who seemed to think that board making was challenging and productive. Our conversation fell flat after two minutes.
We were all allowed to have a smoke break after two hours of work; I thought it had been six hours and we’d only been working for 12 minutes.
I asked the temp agency if I could make dolls the next day, but it they couldn’t guarantee that.
I begged: no more factory work, please. One day in a factory was enough.
Instead, I surveyed people at the mall. I worked for home security, a credit union, and the buyer’s division for J.C. Penney I worked in a trailer for a construction company, in an apartment complex, in a senior center and – one of my favorites – at PAT transit, where I spent my day in the break room talking to bus drivers.
Sometimes I took smoke breaks every half hour. Sometimes I worked very, very hard doing data entry and making sure my charts were 100% perfect. Sometimes I played video games all day. I was a good worker, when I had work to do. And I showed up on time.
One of my favorite data entry jobs was evening shift, 4-12. We chit-chatted through our evenings, so I made a few friends. One night we all went to lunch together, at my request, at a bar in downtown Pittsburgh.
We ate burgers and drank a few beers and then, when it was time to go back to work, I convinced everyone to stay with me at the bar.
“We’ll just go back tomorrow!” I said. “They’ll never even notice!”
Only one person went back to work that night. The rest of us stayed and got plastered.
I had sex with one of my coworkers and woke up in Northside, nowhere near where I lived. I had no idea how to get home. I left the guy still asleep, took a bus into downtown, then took the bus from downtown back to my apartment.
I never went back to that job, nor did the guy. I loved that job, but one liquid lunch was too many.
I had another job within a week.
I kept drinking, kept paying the rent, and thought nothing of my behavior.
I liked working night shift, so I quickly got a job selling hot dogs at The Original Hot Dog Shop – otherwise known as “The O” in Oakland, Pennsylvania, home to Pitt and The Electric Banana. I’d often eaten there after a long night of drinking and couldn’t imagine a more fun place to work.
I was mistaken. I slipped and slid on floor grease for three long nights, and then I simply disappeared. Night shift wasn’t as fun at The O as it had been at The Pennysaver.
So I bought a Sunday paper and typed dozens of cover letters and envelopes. My degree in communications (with no internship) was useless, but I typed 90+ accurate words per minute which, before computers, was a highly marketable skill.
I was hired by a local temp agency. I could choose which jobs I did, each lasting only a few days.
But I wanted to write, and the only way I knew how to get paid to write was to become a journalist. So I sent my resume to The Gazette, a local newspaper, and was thrilled when they called.
My interview with the Gazette editor was very exciting. I showed up and did my best to convince her that I’d eventually become a star reporter if only she’d give me a chance.
“What sentence would you write about a group of people at a courthouse rally if there were 20,014 attendees?” she asked. “Say you wanted to let readers know how many people were there without giving an exact figure.”
I considered the odd question. “I would say, ‘More than 20,000 attendees rallied at the courthouse.'”
“Oh good,” she said. “Too many people use the word ‘over’ instead of ‘more than.’ It’s just not right.”
“Oh, I can’t stand that,” I said.
We bonded over the misuse of “over” and I was hired as a news reporter for The Gazette.
I couldn’t believe my good fortune. All I had to do was show up in the newsroom, check the wire, and write. I would use older articles from my drawer as “background” for my story, and usually only had to draft a couple of paragraphs to create a full “new” story.
The news was dreadfully dull. I went to council meetings to cover city budgets and building renovations. Sometimes I’d unearth community outrage, and sometimes I interviewed people about their jobs for “feature” articles.
Features were my favorites. I could barely stay awake for the council meetings, but I sure did have fun being a reporter.
It was a bit challenging to get used to the schedule. Unless I’d scheduled a morning interview, I was at The Gazette from 9:00 to 5:00. Every day! Sometimes I would pretend I had an interview so I could sleep late and show up as though writing a feature.
No one caught on.
After three months of this incredibly fun job, I slept too late and didn’t get to work until noon.
When I arrived, the office was abuzz with excitement.
I headed for my desk but the editor directed me into her office.
“Where were you?”
Uh-oh. “I was interviewing someone but they never showed up.”
“For three hours?”
“I was supposed to meet him at 11….” I said, trailing off.
“Then you should have been here at 9,” she said. “There was a bank robbery this morning in your territory. It was your story.”
“Oh!” I said. “I’ll go right now and….”
“Someone else covered it,” she said. “You’re fired.”
The following week, I was back at the temp agency begging for work.
