Second Chances

I have a recurring dream in which I am dawdling at my desk in the newsroom, having been idle for more than a week, showing up stoned and doodling between 8 and noon, then taking two hour lunches, sitting in the park at Lake Elizabeth, then dropping back into the office to show my face before quitting time, a poseur of a genuine fourth-estate worker bee, wondering when my editor would stroll over and fire me.

The dream bears an odd resemblance to dreams others have reported in which they have a final exam or term paper to deliver for a class they have missed for the duration, spending valuable undergraduate time at the beach or trolling the off-campus bars. And I often had a spin-off nightmare in which I was standing before my undergraduates, lecturing on an author whose work I had truly read for the first time the night before, only to be corrected for my obvious shortcomings as a professor by a sorority girl who sat dutifully in the front row with a stack of Cliff's Notes.

Today, after years of recovery work and counseling, I am delighted to report that my self esteem has officially been raised to the level of "low". I don't believe I could have survived my furtive newshound years without the help of Second Chance.

Today, the recovery agency has five locations in the East Bay, but when I was covering Newark for The Argus they had but a tiny house located near city hall on Thornton Avenue. My beat, as assigned by editor Linn Brown, included the entire city of Newark, a small industrial suburb surrounded on three sides by the sprawling bedroom community of Fremont and on its fourth edge by the San Francisco Bay. Fremont residents called Newark the "hole in the doughnut", while Newark officials preferred the notion that their little town was the "pearl in the oyster".

Such was the folklore of the day. When Brown assigned me to cover the Newark Chamber of Commerce, I complained that little happened there that might be newsworthy. He said I was to go and "fly the flag" for The Argus, that I just might pick up scuttlebutt for a story. The Newark Chamber was headed that year by an orthodontist with plenty of jokes to offend women and minorities, and if you didn't laugh when he uttered one, you were asked to drop a dollar in the "joke jar", the proceeds of which financed one of the municipal charities.

Most days, I drove by City Hall and sniffed around the city manager's office for stories. I relied on the manager, a straight-forward albeit heavily self-promotional figure that actually ran the city while elected councilmen and women relied on him to explain what was really happening and how to vote. On Monday nights, I covered the Planning Commission, an appointed board of members who were closely allied with elected council members and were awaiting their turn to ascend to the council when terms ran out for their pals.

Wednesdays I covered the council meetings. I also had the beat to the design review and public safety commissions, where much of the legwork was done to smooth over relations with developers who were broadening the hole-in-the-doughnut's industrial base. Brown told me to produce at least a story a week from each agency, along with feature and human interest pieces I could drum up from the town's mostly blue-collar populace; for instance, a piece on a woman who had collected and rolled the largest ball of rubber bands in the Western Hemisphere, or the barber who built a homemade airplane using a bathtub as the fuselage.

At the western terminus of town lie the Dumbarton Bridge (made famous in the film Harold and Maude). I l1ved across the bridge in Palo Alto, in a house filled with several Stanford brainiacs in their senior years, a massage therapist with a cat named Sat-Nam (Sanskrit for God Almighty), an airline hostess, and the daughter of a family that ran a Chinese restaurant made famous in Sunset Magazine and later busted by the health department after dog carcasses were found in their dumpster.

Hence, I led a double life. By day I toiled (by varying degrees) for The Argus, wearing slacks and buttoned collars and dress shoes, by night I wore my hippie-apocalypse attire of blue-bib coveralls and nothing else. Editor Brown once suggested that we wear ties in the office, so I wrapped one around my forehead. I did keep a loud tie with a pink hula girl on it in my car in case I had to cover a meeting.

By day, I drove from meeting to meeting, chased after police and fire emergencies we heard over the scanner, and drove by the mortuary to round up obituaries. The funeral home owner, a respectable queen who obviously dressed professionally at other times, answered the office door one night in a gold lame jump-suit with the zipper open to his navel.

By night, I drove through the toll plaza to the Dumbarton, paid my fare, and immediately opened the glove box to a stash that changed my amplitude on the way home as I tossed the tie in the back seat, cranked up the radio, and spaced out on the waves and salt bubbles on the bay.

That kind of schizophrenia cannot hold. There was no center. At night I'd play with my housemates, strolling the forested lanes of Palo Alto, buzzing through samurai triple-features at the Varsity Theatre, gobbling up books and records at the shops, finishing up the munchies with a cone of mocha-orange-chip ice cream from Swensens.

On Fridays, we dressed casually at The Argus, unless we had a meeting to cover, and the staff would drive out to Lake Elizabeth for a picnic lunch. Brown would bring a bottle of Cribari, an inexpensive wine known for the photo of its owner--an Italian who held the record for the world's largest nose--on the label. We'd drink hearty, often so heartily that Keith Jones would sit behind his IBM Selectric and laugh away the afternoon, regaling us with stories about Lancaster and the Pennsylvania Dutch. One Friday afternoon, he vomited into the keyboard.

I can't remember how I ended up with the recovery institution beat. But one day, apparently, Brown added it to my responsibilities that had grown to include a regional transit district (BART), the local community college, and the area's congressional seat. But I do remember driving over to the small, rustic house in Newark with its friendly facade and cheery front porch with chairs and empty coffee cans for cigarette butts.

I was greeted by a chipper woman in casual dress who eschewed make-up and a bra in what I had determined was the mid-1970s feminist uniform. But Diane was kind to me despite my judgment, and we sat in the cozy living room of the house, surrounded by oh-so-many posters with cornball recovery jargon on them: Keep It Simple, Let Go and Let God, One Day at a Time. I had no idea about recovery programs and was baffled with their 12 steps or commandments written on what appeared to be window shades that you rolled down from where they were mounted on the walls.

We had a pleasant talk and I learned the ground rules: I could write about anyone there, but could not refer to them by last names, I could not take any photographs, and I could drop in most any time of the day for coffee and conversation. I took them up on it, and I always wrote good things about Second Chance. They, like other social service agencies, were in constant struggle for limited funding, but I became their champion--not so much for their cause, but among all my beats, the women in the agency always treated me with goodwill.

Wherever you went as a journalist, the moment you told anyone that you worked as a reporter, they'd clam up. You'd see an instant shift in their comfort level as they receded into guarded behavior. But at Second Chance, they were delighted when I came over, even if just to camp out for an hour on their couch, hiding out from Brown and the newsroom. It seemed that they knew all about me. If the simple act of hiding out and writing kind things in exchange reflected a gross neglect of journalistic ethics, I was having it.

I had a similar arrangement with the owners of a Szechuan restaurant for which I had penned a glowing review. The family had escaped the Communists and fled to sanctuary in Peru, then moved to the East Bay. It was a colorful tale, told by a slacker, who enjoyed a sumptuous meal every time thereafter when I visited the place.

Toward the end, I was not writing very much for The Argus, borne out if exaggerated a little by my recurring nightmare. I would stockpile feature stories--timeless personality profiles--in the top drawer of my locked desk, and magically produce them whenever Brown suspected I had been a slacker. And I stockpiled my paychecks, too, planning for an escape to teach English in Japan.

A few years ago, having found my own recovery, I sought out Diane and the others at the sprawling new Second Chance offices located in the pearl of the oyster. I told them my news and how grateful I had been for their tush-eating, second-hand couches and coffee.

The argus (argos) in Greek mythology was a monster with multiple sets of eyes who could see everything in its vicinity. Later, in gratitude for the monster's visionary help, the goddess of love Hera put the eyes of the argus into the colorful tail of the peacock.

I was an unreliable source as a journalist in those days. But now I see.

Gonzo Instructs

Jane Fonda walked to where I stood in the aisle of the Liberal Caucus room and put her hand on my arm. For a moment, I thought it was a kind gesture.

"Miss Fonda," I said, reaching for the notebook in my jeans pocket, "Do you have a second?"

"No," she snapped and used my elbow as a fulcrum for shoving past me.

At that moment it was clear that I was a nobody. We had driven five days across country, Proton and I, doing our best to stay loaded all the way. We were intent on mirroring our Gonzo journalist idol Hunter S. Thompson. No matter that we had gone to see Thompson at Stanford and the guy was too drunk to speak. He wobbled at the microphone, uttered a barrage of profanity in a garbled rant, and left early. Nonetheless, Proton (a fellow newshound from the East Bay daily where I worked) and I packed our clothes, an assortment of illegal drugs, and a road atlas into his Volkswagen van, and drove to New York City where we had press passes to cover the 1976 Democratic Convention.

Now, spun out in the aisle of the Liberal Caucus room, I watched the aft end of Ted Turner's future bride disappear into the crowd and fell, crestfallen, into my seat. I wasn't much of a newshound anyway and the week of mindless driving had left me a dumb spectator. Proton had raced off after Candace Bergen, a strikingly beautiful actress who, cameras draped around her neck, was working the convention as a photojournalist.

I sat in my seat, listened to Rep. John Conyers review platform planks that in no way would ever be supported by Jimmy Carter. After the Nixon horror-show and brain numbing Ford years, you'd think the country was ready to try liberalism again, but the way the caucus was headed, it was clear that Reaganism was a suggestion away from reality. The liberals would have to accept a plate of leftovers here in New York, a reality that rinsed away whatever ambitions I had left to write anything of my experience.

I found Proton and we left to tour the streets of Manhattan. We went along the central post office, past buildings with lion statues and colonnades draped with patriotic bunting. We passed the throngs of protesters and lobbyists--signs proclaiming everything from legalizing prostitution to tirades against abortion--and made our way to Times Square. I had thought the convention floor a zoo, but walking the New York streets was more entertaining.

We came upon a movie theatre showing a crime drama. In those days there were no video trailers, so it was enticing to see a scene from the film played out on an outdoor screen. In the clip, a man had his victim pinned against a wall and was running the bit from a power drill in and out of his thigh. A closeup showed the bit corkscrewing into the man's bleeding leg.

"No big deal," said a passerby in a thick Brooklyn accent. "You see that stuff all the time."

Later in the afternoon we returned to the convention floor, sated with pizza and pretzels dipped in mustard that we rounded up from sidewalk peddlers. Reporters crowded around Senator Kennedy, who held forth, ruddy as a beet, at a corner of the hall. At the platform a speaker from Florida rambled along in tinny monotone about objections to the welfare plank.

That night in our motel room, Proton and I divvied up the four-way hit of paper acid that we had ferried out from the Bay Area. In the morning, Carter would announce his running mate, which everyone expected would be Walter Mondale, so there was nothing to miss. We would have breakfast, then gobble the acid and walk the convention floor for a while. I had already bought a ticket on the afternoon Metroliner to Washington, so I wasn't staying anyhow. I planned to take the high-speed train to D.C., where I'd stay with a member of Rep. Don Edwards' staff. Edwards was a powerful liberal--had led the Judiciary Committee's call for Nixon's impeachment. Edwards had an office in part of the Bay Area that I covered, and I had come to know his staff. In fact, I had come to really know two of his secretaries, which fully demonstrated my commitment to narcissism.

After breakfast, Proton and I loaded up the ponies of transcendence and went our separate ways. I would be flying home to the Bay Area while he would drive the VW to his family in Kentucky. I must admit, I never really liked LSD. The first hour of giddiness very much appealed to me, but the subsequent hours of melting at the whim of a drug I couldn't control scared me to death. I typically spent most of the time wishing it was over. But we had agreed to do Gonzo journalism and I wouldn't wimp out.

And during the hour of giddiness I found myself in front of the bank of microphones when Carter dragged Mondale on-stage. Mondale's face waxed and waned in acidic throbs. Mondale had a lion's head, huge and shaggy. My body rang like a struck temple bell. The blare of spotlights and the sudden bursts from motorized cameras made me dizzy. I had to go.

After a few hours wandering with dubious judgment through Times Square, I found my way to Grand Central and found my seat on the Metroliner. I had done well to book a plush chair by a picture window. Waiters came up and down the aisles with cocktails and snacks. And I raced along between New York and Washington at a furious clip, the countryside streaming out the window like a painting in rain. In fact, it had begun to rain. And when we pulled into D.C. there was a furious summer thunderstorm, lightening forking down atop the Capitol Building and all across the Mall.

I found the phone number to Edwards' staffer at the Rayburn Building and called from the station. Sadly, the staffer wasn't there. The Congressman himself answered the phone. I was dumbstruck. He was delighted to speak with me. He wanted to know the latest scoop from the Convention. I could feel another door of great opportunity closing on me, slammed shut by my own idiocy.

I told him I would come see him in the morning, that I couldn't talk now as I was under the weather, which was amazingly true on many counts. The storm crashed down around me and after I hung up, I took a cab to the staffer's home in the Virginia suburbs.

What had seemed so glamorous in Thompson looked shabby on me. Of course I would not go see the Congressman in the morning. I had nothing to report, save to say that in the name of God I would never try acid again. Even so, I still had plenty to experience in a long career of self-sabotage. It was July 1976, the nation's birthday.

-30-

I recently received a very kind letter from my Aunt Naomi. She had been divorced from my Uncle Mort when I was in my early teens and I had not had any communication with her since. In her note, he remarked that she heard that I had become a writer, that I had always been a writer and had wanted to be one when she and my uncle gave me a thesaurus when I graduated junior high school.

At Porter Junior High we celebrated career dress-up day once a year. You'd come to school wearing the clothes that best reflected your highest aspirations. Mine had been to become Edward R. Murrow. I found a fedora, wrote the word "press" on a small index card, and wedged it into the hatband. I imagined myself trooping up the steps to the CBS studios on Manhattan, notepad in-hand, hurrying to beat the competition with my latest scoop.

By the end of my first year of college, I had already amassed a considerable portfolio of stories, culled from interviews with Katharine Ross, Ray Bradbury, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. I had a press pass that let me into the great venues of Los Angeles, the Hollywood Bowl, the Cinerama Theatre (where I attended the opening of the film Woodstock), the Pantages, the Greek Theatre, the Ice House in Pasadena (where I'd brush elbows with emerging bands and comics), and the Shrine Auditorium. I had been to the opening of Hair, a concert of little-known Loggins and Messina, and covered anti-war marches along the Sunset Strip. By my senior year, I had transferred to San Jose State, where I amassed clips of anti-war riots, marches for Civil Rights, and the burial of a brand new Ford Pinto to wage an environmental protest. I was ready for great things.

Hardly a week following graduation I took a job with a small-town daily in Davis, a college community just west of Sacramento. We had an afternoon deadline, which meant I drove to work around 5:30 am, wrote six or seven news stories, then drove to Woodland, where a competitor paper was printed in the morning. I'd buy a copy, race back to my newsroom along Route 113, and re-write any stories that we might have missed.

My editor at The Enterprise was young, energetic, and a great mentor. But our publisher believed that the role of the paper was to echo the concerns of business and advertisers, which meant that everything I wrote passed through his heavy filter. He would re-write quotes or facts that cast the slightest aspersions on local businesses and their push for economic growth. Not an unusual role for a paper, but in a town exceptionally devoted to preserving the environment and stemming growth in the mid-1970s, it was the kiss of death. The mayor, Bob Black, had been arrested for laying his body across the railroad tracks in town through which munitions trains carried weapons westward to the Vietnam War. Now he led an effort to stem town expansion and spur the development of open space and parks.

I would cover a meeting where the council voted to stem growth, write the quotes accurately only to have them corrupted by my publisher. After a fashion, it was difficult to get anyone over at city hall to talk to me. But on the morning of September 15, 1975, I finally had my coup.

I drove to Sacramento to witness the arrival of President Gerald Ford at the state capitol. I wore my press pass in my coat pocket and carried a large format camera. Shortly after Ford arrived, I took positions with the press corps, and followed him and his secret service agents across the capitol grounds. Just outside the east entry, we passed a woman dressed in a hooded red robe.

It was Lynnette "Squeaky" Fromme, former member of the Mansion Family, who muttered something about the country going to pieces, pulled out a .45 Colt pistol and took aim. Two secret servicemen tackled her while the rest formed a wedge and spirited the President into the Capitol. I ran to a telephone and phoned in my story. We were an hour ahead of deadline and it would make the afternoon edition.

But my publisher, unsure of my ability to get facts strait, or with the right slant, decided to hold the story, awaiting confirmation of the assassination attempt by the wire services. He held it beyond deadline, and my account ran a day late.

Seventeen days later, I took my notebook with me to San Francisco. Ford was speaking at the St. Francis Hotel and I hoped to run into Megan Marshack, a college friend who was now covering the White House for AP Radio. As we waited for Ford outside the hotel we watched the secret service prepare Ford's limo. The moment the President emerged, Sarah Jane Moore was barely 40 feet away when she fired at shot at him. She was carrying a .45 automatic, 113 rounds of ammo, but the secret service got to her before she could fire a second shot. Again, my paper held my account until they could get a wire story. I had been an eyewitness to two assassination attempts and lost two scoops.

The summer of '76 I went to the Ford White House, courtesy of a press pass from Megan. As I sat in the press office, I saw a bunch of hard-drinking, bloated correspondents who awaited for "official" documents to come from the Press Secretary before heading to their typewriters and telephones. At that moment I knew that even at the apex of my career, I would be a fetch-it scribe for the interests of people in power.

It soured me. And four months later I walked into my office at my new daily paper in the Bay Area and pasted up a huge poster of Nelson Rockefeller. Under the portrait was a refrain from Daniel Webster about preserving the health of the union by breaking up large, corrupt interest groups. My editor, pissed, took it down. There was a clear rectangle now on a wall, a spot surrounded by bumper stickers, posters, press releases, and sports photos.

In the place where the poster had been, I pasted my resignation letter.