Note: This is the first part of a chapter for “The American Peasant” that I’ve been working on for a few weeks. The second half is too rough to post.
I hand my reporter’s notebook to Marion Elliott, the city editor and my boss. He opens the notebook, flips through its pages and hands it back to me.
“You know the rules,” he says, rolling his eyes a bit as he says “rules.” “I can’t give you an empty notebook until you turn in a full one.”
The last two pages of my notebook are blank, and I’m assigned to cover a meeting of the Simpsonville City Council that night. I tear out the two empty pages, put them in Marion’s garbage can and hand the notebook back to him.
“No empty pages.”
Marion sighs, gets out his keys and heads to the smoking room at the back of the newsroom to unlock the cabinet of office supplies. He puts my full notebook in the cabinet and retrieves an empty one.
“Thanks,” I say, sincerely. Marion continues to chew his Doublemint gum – the only food I ever saw him eat – and smiles back at me.
It was 1990, and the newspaper I worked for, The Greenville (S.C.) News, was in financial trouble. Maybe it was because of the national newspaper recession going on. Or maybe the newspaper’s editor-in-chief (not Marion) had spent too much money that year on the paper’s capitol bureau, which had been digging up government documents in the landfill.
Or maybe the paper was still recovering financially from the editor’s previous genius idea: the “pope tab.”
Pope John Paul II was the first pope to visit the Bible Belt, and he stopped in Columbia, S.C., in late 1987 for an ecumenical conference. This, the editor decided, was big news. Though Greenville is 100 miles away from Columbia, The Greenville News had designs on being a statewide newspaper, with bureaus all over the state. And so he decided to cover the pope’s visit in a big way.
How big? They planned a “pope tab” – an entire special section of the newspaper printed in a semi-magazine format. Tabs are expensive to make and have earlier deadlines than the rest of the paper. The editor sent an army of photographers and reporters to cover the pontiff’s visit. But the editor was worried that the throngs of pope-goers would prevent the photographers from getting out of Columbia with their film and back to the newsroom in time.
So they made a plan. They hired a bunch of kids with bicycles. As soon as the photographers had the images they needed, they would give the film to the kids, who would bike through the crowds and the wall-to-wall traffic to the airport. There, the kids would hand the film to the pilot of a chartered plane who would fly the film to Greenville, easily making the paper’s print deadline.
Also, the paper hired a helicopter to photograph the swarm of Southerners craning their necks for a peek at the pontiff.
But the editor-in-chief had forgotten one important fact. At the time, South Carolina was 2 percent Catholic – the least Catholic state in the Union.
So here’s how it went down: The photographers took photos of the pope and handed the film to the bike-riding kids, who spirited it off to the airport. Then the photographers got in their cars and drove back to Greenville. There was no traffic because attendance was – I’m being nice here – light. They made it back to the newsroom before their film had even landed at the Greenville airport.
Most of the photos from the helicopter were of a single clutch of people waving to the chopper.
Expenses like these (uhh, perhaps) might explain why management threatened to lay off a bunch of reporters if we didn’t all keep the newsroom’s expenses down. This was why reporters had to turn in a full notebook to get an empty one. And turn in an empty shitty pen to receive a full shitty pen.
Oh, and I just remembered: We also weren’t allowed to make outgoing long-distance calls without editor approval. If we needed to talk to someone in, say, the state capital, the editors suggested we write a letter to the source and ask them to call us (on their dime).
One night as many of the reporters gathered at our local bar, which offered $10 pitchers of White Russians, one of them asked a good question: When will the people who make the bad decisions suffer the consequences of them?
Great question. Quick answer: Never.
Follow-up question. Is there anything we can do about it?
Answering that question required years of thought. And three psychedelic trips.
My third psychedelic trip was in a forest in winter. The sky was clear, and the trees were bare, so the light and harsh shadows were weird enough, even without a heroic dose of albino penis envy mushrooms. After a short walk into the woods, I came across an impressive log on the forest floor and sat on it.
I won’t bore you with the hallucinations before and after said log, because the log is the thing that pushes the story forward. After perching on the log for a while, I slowly slid my tuckus to the forest floor and examined its bark as close as my eyes would focus.
It was a city. Though the forest appeared to be sleeping, the bark overflowed with activity. Bugs shuttled though narrow chutes on the surface, eating the plant matter and moving with purpose up and down the bark.
One of the things that psychedelics do is change the way I see color. Moss (sexy, sexy moss) turns a green that I’d never noticed before. Even now – years later – I am fixated on that color. Dead sober, that green is still there for me to enjoy whenever I encounter that f&%$able herbaceous bryophyte.
Back at the log, these bugs were obviously red, blue and shiny. Even though I had never noticed them as anything before except bug brown.
In addition to broadening my color spectrum, mushrooms make me feel empathy in surprising ways, especially to trees, which is odd because I am certain trees hate me (I am basically the Jeffrey Dahmer of the tree world – who also happens to teach other aspiring serial killers). And as I watched the bugs munch the bark, I considered how they saw their world.
I blinked once, and then I knew. Of course. It’s obvious. Like these bugs, we have to feast on the carcasses left behind.
But what are the carcasses, my good stoned sir?
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