Suddenly I am totally lost. I’m not inheriting a job or a secret fortune at the end of four years. I’m lugging around a history of family expectations. My parents are already on the road to having two lawyers, a doctor, and a businessman in the family. I lack a sense of purpose that I should have by now. They are worried that I have no idea what I am going to do with the rest of my life. By then, I’m living in Cabot House. It has a shield with three fishes swimming upstream. It makes me think of the Titanic again. Not hopeful. I charge on with premed. I have to major in something.
I run to be house president so I can be in charge of social events. I troll for votes at the dorms, where I’m friendly with everyone. There is this one room of handsome guys. Everyone promises to vote for me, including one lacrosse player named Brad Raymond. His hair is sandy brown. He is friendly enough that day we meet. We are both dating other people. There’s nothing flirty between us. He’s just like, “Sure.” He doesn’t get up off the couch. I like him anyway. He has this intensity. We are both always on our way to something. But he is strategic about it. He is practical. He becomes a friend very quickly. It’s not until we were expecting our first child that he admits he didn’t vote for me.
My junior year I get an internship at WBZ-TV, a Boston television station. This is one place where going to Harvard is of no help, which makes me like it immediately. Gritty newsroom managers aren’t big on snooty kids from Ivy League schools. They need someone to fetch coffee and rip copy I know some Spanish so I get in through their weekly Spanish-language show, Centro. I step into a newsroom for the very first time. What a place. The electricity in the room is overpowering. Everyone is rushing around putting together this complicated puzzle of a newscast. It’s like one of those memorable scenes on Star Trek when the Klingons have entered the zone. An eclectic group of people zooms through space on a mission to someplace. People my age race down the hall cramming three-quarter-inch videotapes into players to cue them up. It is all tape-to-tape editing. Slide it in, spin these big rubber wheels, slam the button, flash red to edit.
When I’m in the studio I know there’s no way I am going back to my life as a student at Harvard. This is important. Things are happening. There is nothing like the feeling of telling someone else’s story, of saying something that needs to be said. In an instant, the shows go live. The anchors begin to talk from behind a little box to the entire city of Boston. It’s downright intoxicating.
I use my premed background to land an interview with the medical unit. The medical reporter is Jeanne Blake. She needs a production assistant. She is a force at WBZ, which means I’ll be in the newsroom if I work for her. Jeanne walks around with the sense of purpose of an athlete, like every day is an emergency. She has blow-dried feathered-back hair. Her eyebrows are manicured and intense and every bone in her face has shape. She is all business. I walk into her office wearing a carefully chosen red suit with a gorgeous Italian handbag. I ooze self-confidence even if I don’t feel it. To this day she remembers how I looked. She asks me what the most important medical story is at this moment. I say, “I think it’s the AIDS epidemic,” and her eyes light up.
I face a series of decisions. Mostly, I need a new direction in life. I really want this job. I tell her I need a decision. Jeanne remembers me saying something like, “I have to know by tonight or I’m going to medical school.” I think I said I had to decide in a week. But I definitely conveyed a sense that this production assistant job was a make-or-break deal. She marches down the hall to the office of the assistant news director and declares they can’t let me get away. They hire me.
I tell Harvard I’m not coming back. I’m a few classes short of graduation but I have a new goal in life. I want to be Jeanne Blake. Some people at the station are a little intimidated by her. The girl is wound tight. I adore her. She looks into the camera like she has something important to say. She is very, very smart, intuitive, cunning, street smart. She is obsessed with getting it right. She doesn’t just move; she charges around like hurricane wind. She flies through life, reeling past obstacles like a superhero in flight. She sets the agenda. A story comes along that no one wants to do and she just does it. She hardly even has to ask people above her for permission to do it. She gets onto something and flies out the door on a mission. I am awed by her sense of purpose.
She is one of the first reporters covering AIDS. She sees a fascinating human story unfolding. She sees this rainbow of humanity afflicted by a mystery virus, a medical whodunit unraveling the lives of people in their prime. No one else is covering it. She gets carte blanche from the bosses. She embarks on this reportorial journey through the ravages of the disease. She follows the destruction of whole communities. She predicts the political inferno over the identity of the afflicted. She exposes the latest snake oil being peddled as the cure. I am mesmerized. Of the five hundred stories she reports on HIV and AIDS, I have a role in about half. I am the girl at the desk making the phone calls, pulling the tapes, organizing this chaotic work life Jeanne keeps so she can go out and shoot stories. I learn so much so quickly. She is in constant motion and I am right behind her.
I tell my interns these days to not be afraid to pick up a little dry cleaning or fetch an occasional café au lait. It’s the little crap that gets you in the door with people. I write notes and tack them to Jeanne’s desk. This person called, this report is coming out, attend this event, and don’t forget this list of appointments. I am so hyper about the notes that one day I leave one that says “Carolyn died.” It doesn’t occur to me that this might just be someone she cares about. Jeanne had reported a story about Carolyn, who had AIDS. She looks at me, appalled by my detachment, and stunned that I put efficiency before compassion. Carolyn is not just a story. She is a person. This is something I never forget. In time, she begins to trust my work and trust my judgment. I become her shadow. She takes me everywhere.
We drive twenty minutes to the local hospital most afternoons. She eats lunch there. We walk in, stand in line, order the same tuna sandwich every time, and then sit to eat and say hello to all the doctors. I sit there poking at the miserable food waiting for her to work a source. IVs dangle from a few arms. Hospital gowns split in the back to reveal the occasional backside. I figure it’s the price you pay to get access to doctors. The food is limp. The smell is medicinal. I’m always hungry because I can’t bear to eat there. I don’t want to piss Jeanne off. One day we get into her car and I snap. I tell her we need to skip the hospital lunch. I can’t do it anymore. I will never eat there again. I demand she not take me there anymore. I worry because I really want to keep this job. She laughs out loud. She’s not there to develop sources. She’s just this oddball who likes their tuna sandwiches.
The most important thing I learn from Jeanne is to never look at individuals as a group. It wasn’t a hard concept to embrace. I had been a victim of that as a kid, reduced to my skin color and the stupid stereotypes created around it. She didn’t give me didactic lectures about how the media shouldn’t paint people with a broad brush. She just doesn’t do it.
While I am at WBZ, a story unfolds that underscores everything she has taught me about not making assumptions about people. Charles “Chuck” Stuart, the manager of a high-end fur store, and his pregnant wife, Carol, a lawyer, are on their way home from a childbirth class. A few hours later she is dead and he is lying in the hospital with a gunshot wound. Their son, delivered two months early by cesarean section, later dies.
Stuart tells police that a black man carjacked them at a red light and made them drive to Mission Hill. Then the “black man” shoots Stuart in the stomach and Carol in the head. Somehow Stuart manages to drive away. There is a frantic 911 tape where a badly wounded Stuart struggles to lead dispatchers to his dying wife. A CBS crew doing an early reality show has a dramatic tape of the response. A frenzy of reporting erupts in the newsroom. It’s all hands on deck. This is big.
The story has all the elements—race, class, and a murder mystery. I am worki
ng in the newsroom so I soak it all up. This is the biggest story to hit Boston in ages. The police fan out across Roxbury, questioning people in search of the “black guy.” The police announce they’ve got their man. Our newsroom comes alive to cover the moment. There are doubters. I only know four black people in the newsroom. I don’t think there were many more at the station. They don’t think Stuart’s story adds up. The “black guy” supposedly thought Stuart was a cop because he had a mobile phone. But he’s a cop driving around Boston with his pregnant wife in the front seat? The doubts don’t seem to resonate in the coverage. The story is a horse race. But it is real life. The rush to get information is intoxicating. Everyone wants to figure it out.
Then the story begins to unravel. Stuart’s brother, Matthew, confesses that he’d helped his brother set the whole thing up because Stuart didn’t want to be a father and feared losing his wife’s salary. A black man’s life is almost destroyed because of his lie. The black community is in a rage. Stuart leaps off a bridge to his death a day after his lie is revealed.
Jeanne takes me out on another story with her. We pull up outside a homeless shelter. It’s across from Boston’s city hospital, located over the morgue. The story is simple. There are a lot of people with HIV losing their homes. They are sick and their immune systems are faltering. They are living in shelters alongside people with TB and other infectious diseases. Our guy sleeps on this super-thin mattress with a dark green army blanket.
We meet Jim. Jeanne has found him through the AIDS Action Committee. He doesn’t look sick. He is pale, though, and sweaty. He has gray bushy hair and a professor’s mustache. He’s white. He wears a hat, thick glasses, a rumpled sweater, and an overcoat. With his shabby briefcase, he looks like a Harvard professor making his way to class. The shelters are only for sleeping. They kick out the men in the morning. Jim is standing on the street. We say “Hi” and he smiles.
Jeanne believes you can take a big giant story and reduce it to one person. She doesn’t need a load of drama or breathless writing, just one good personal story that viewers can connect to. Jim is homeless, sick, and a former intravenous drug user. Jeanne likes him instantly. So do I. He is sweet. He appears to be this friendly, very regular guy, neither frail nor homeless. He worries about his health. He has delicate lungs. He doesn’t want to be around sick people. He is plaintive. Jeanne remarks that he looks like someone you might know already. She wants to tell the larger story through him.
Jim spends his day wandering the streets looking for a place to go to the bathroom. He has a raging infection. “I’ve got the sweats from medication or whatever and diarrhea and you’re fighting to just not embarrass yourself. There’s just no place that you can really go and rest,” he says.
We walk around with Jim. He collects his bimonthly $46 welfare check. He buys a burrito, two tacos, and a Pepsi at Taco Bell. He saves the rest for shampoo, toothpaste, and bus fare back to the homeless shelter. Jim was fired from his job as a checkout clerk at a department store for taking so many sick days. His story haunts Jeanne. She stays up half the night thinking about him. I do, too. He has no place to go to the bathroom. He has diarrhea. “How do you do that?” Jeanne asks. “How do you handle being that sick and not have a place to even go to the bathroom?” The shelters are filling up with guys like Jim. She is obsessive about getting his story right. Her empathy is so obvious it consumes her. It leaks out into her writing. The viewers trust and like Jeanne. She cares about this guy. So they care, too. I just stand there and watch.
The piece airs on TV. I watch. A lot of people watch. The public outcry over who is getting AIDS is drowning out all reason. A lot of folks are lost in the debate over who has the disease and who can catch it. Jeanne just tells a story about a man wandering the streets looking for a place to go to the bathroom. She makes it impossible to walk past this guy. I do a lot of work on that story. I watch when it flashes onto the TV screen. I think about Jim, walking around looking for a bathroom in gray, chilly Boston. Jeanne is so right about this guy. He could be anybody. That’s why people can relate.
Jeanne is writing a book, Risky Times: How to Be AIDS-Smart and Stay Healthy. I do some research. The AIDS crisis is the result of random events. A gambit of biology conspires against vulnerable people. There is the guy who grew up Catholic. He is sick from denial and HIV. He keeps having sex. There is the gay man whose family kicks him out when they find out he is ill. He weeps while we interview him. People keep getting sick. There needs to be a way to dodge this. There has to be something a parent can do to safeguard their child. Jeanne taps into that need in the book. She includes the stories of six Cambridge high school students, including Ben Affleck, who is just fifteen. “I want to be given the chance to become someone. I want to see how the story ends. I don’t want to die,” he says. He is nobody famous at the time. The message is this could happen to you. “Can you get AIDS from a mosquito bite? from a sneeze? from a kiss?” Jeanne’s book asks.
Alison Gertz is also in the book. She grew up on Park Avenue in New York, the granddaughter of the Gertz Department Store founder. She contracts HIV from her first boyfriend and she goes public. Parents are in a panic. That could be my kid. Alison warns other kids about what happened to her. She gives practical advice. I am in the acknowledgments with all the doctors and researchers.
The book lands Jeanne on Oprah. Alison Gertz goes on with her. We ride together in a limo. I try to be perky. She has thrush in her mouth. She is an Upper East Side girl all the way, proud, defiant. She tells her story. Jeanne tells the audience she has written a nonjudgmental book about how to be careful. The audience is captivated. The WBZ news director gives me permission to go as long as I keep it a secret. He says to lie low because I’m just a lowly production assistant and he’s given me the day off with pay to go sit in a talk show audience. I sit in the audience and end up in all the cutaway shots, so, not only does everyone find out I went, I’m even on TV. I am in awe of Jeanne. I know what I want to do in life.
CHAPTER THREE
A PLACE AT THE TABLE
I am supposed to be a recent college grad, class of 1988, making my way to medical school for years of study and application followed by a respectable career. Instead, I’m at WBZ-TV in Boston making $6 an hour, where I live in the world of what’s possible. I rush from one opportunity to the next, grasping at that American promise that hard work and high risk might reap sudden rewards. I am in fast motion once again. I see the newsroom like a mythical starship. I race around its serpentine cubicles. Dusty overhead lights beam down on the reporters as they’re about to spring to life. I dream of putting words in their mouths. I dream of being one of them. I am living my life like a voiceover—direct and declarative, life in the active voice. The place is humming with information, fast decisions, chaos, disorder, and stress. I love every minute I am there.
I apply for a job as a “minority writer trainee.” Jeanne cries. It means we won’t be working together anymore. But she helps me. She has that high-test energy that women need to make it in TV. She sees it in me. The industry isn’t quite ready for her. Maybe it’s ready for me? She teaches me to be strong, “tough” in the eyes of the people around us, but strong is what it really is. The trainee program will teach me to write for TV and it’s the station’s way of increasing the ranks of “minorities.” It is my way in.
The door to the media world—and many other worlds—is opening a small crack wider. Women are rushing through it and blacks and Latinos want in, too. Like a lot of industries, journalism needs to diversify and look more at talent and perspective when they hire and less at connections and traditions. It’s not just about equal opportunity. Journalism needs diverse people to cover a diverse world. But it’s clear that this is neither happening overnight nor easily. The vibe I feel is similar to the one an interracial couple—like my mom and dad—might feel taking a hand-in-hand walk down an American street. Everyone is watching. They tighten their grip. At the same time, they’re dying to just let
go.
I am starting at the very bottom of the ladder of journalism and have my eyes on the top. I write in short TV sentences, the kind of writing you need to be able to read aloud. I am to the point, full of facts. My official title is “minority writer trainee” so I am in no doubt as to where I stand. Once you’ve been tagged a minority, this strange process begins. At times I feel like I have a question mark hovering over my head. Why are you here? Is it your race? Do you have any skills, anyway? I approach each day like a job interview. Nothing comes out of my mouth until I’ve given my thoughts the once-over. The bosses set the bar low. I move it higher. If I hit, I point it out. It’s an act of subtle self-promotion, meaning I won one. But when I’m wrong, I suffer. I demand to know what I need to know to get to the next level. Making long lists of goals, I set and reset expectations.
I wasn’t even born in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy issues Executive Order 10925. He calls on government contractors to take “affirmative action” to ensure people are given jobs without regard to race and treated fairly once they are hired. The Civil Rights Act in 1964 desegregates public facilities, like schools, and enforces voting rights. A year later, Executive Order 11246 enforces affirmative action. I am born in 1966, black, Latina, a child of immigrants, and a girl. These executive orders are about people like me. President Lyndon Johnson talked of centuries of “scars” that could not easily be wiped away. He pledged to create “not just equality as a right and a theory, but also equality as a fact and as a result.”
There are days in the TV station that feel like America is a broad canoe that capsized and I am part of a rescue party thrown in the water to go set it right. I walk around the newsroom with this smart-as-a-whip attitude and this label on my chest. I’m a pioneer and I know it. I know I can’t just do this job well and get moved up. I need to prove myself worthy of this opportunity for which I am immensely grateful. This is a country of chances but not of endless chances.
The Next Big Story: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities Page 4
