Shy
Page 14
The next day, we took turns presenting our findings to the class. I think we sat in chairs at the front of the class, like we were on television, though maybe I’m remembering it wrong, and we actually stayed at our desks. Whatever the set-up, our presentation did not go well. As I listened to Adam tell our new classmates about how easy it is to get your dad to buy you a Sega Genesis when your mom’s living with some other guy, I started to imagine what awful things all these people in front of us might be thinking. I immediately decided they were all judging me, probably thinking I was weak, maybe manipulative, probably a loser.
And I freaked. In the middle of Adam’s presentation, I stood up and walked out of the classroom, muttering, “Keep going. It’s fine.” All eyes were trained on me as I left.
There was a washroom on the other side of the humanities building, where I hid in a stall for what must have been half an hour, certain I ruined my chances of ever gaining the respect of these handsome people I was to spend the next two years studying with.
Adam was left alone at the front of the class to finish the presentation without me.
“I was like: ‘What the fuck did I say?’” he recalls. “I remember thinking you were an attention whore.”
The funny thing is, walking out actually seemed to endear me to my classmates. Sure, they thought I was weird. But I guess it made me approachable.
And they absolutely knew who I was after that.
My lack of a spine proved a serious liability with the assignments, though. All through school I grappled with interviewing, especially. I was terrified to question strangers, and stumbled through the most basic interviews, feeling much the same way I had felt during Adam’s presentation. In later assignments, I couldn’t run away. I would have failed.
“Hi. Um…I’m Ben. Can I ask you some questions? Oh, I’m a reporter. In training. Sorry. I guess I should have said that first. I’m working on something for school. Could I ask you some questions? You don’t have to answer anything you don’t feel like answering.”
I’d recite the most basic questions—the whos and the whats—ten times before dialing a phone number, only to have these questions fly out of my head the moment someone picked up. They were often replaced with awkward pauses. I developed a crippling fear of Jr. B hockey players and small-town nannies. No amount of practice improved my skills.
Somehow, I was still able to get an internship at the Edmonton Journal, an actual newspaper, on the back of a handful of anthropology papers and an interview with the manager editor, during which I focussed heavily on bashing tabloids.
The Journal newsroom was way scarier than journalism school. To survive that first step through the door, I told myself I’d go in, ask a ton of questions, and soak up everything I could. Mistakes would be inevitable, but I’d learn from them. Maybe I’d even get over my fear of interviewing when faced with the real thing.
They sat me near this workhorse of an investigative reporter named Chuck Rusnell, a senior writer who was also a Regina graduate. In my first week, he pulled me aside and told me he’d been listening to my interviews.
They were awful, he said.
I explained that I was nervous. It was like going on stage and forgetting the lines now that there was a proper audience.
Chuck said he’d solved a similar problem. He told me to write out what I was going to say before every interview, no matter how minor, including the preamble.
“Hi. My name is Ben Gelinas. I’m a reporter with the Edmonton Journal,” he told me to type. Then he said to write out five key questions that needed to be asked. Any time I tripped up or got nervous, I could fall back on this script.
It was a simple thing that worked wonders. I started drafting a script every time I had an interview, no matter how inconsequential. If I interviewed someone in person, I would fill the first page of my notebook with the same preamble and five questions.
When I became a crime reporter, this script was how I survived.
Writing about death was the last thing I wanted to do. Not that I minded the scene work. Walking around crime scenes in search of witnesses made me feel like a bit of a gumshoe.
I liked looking for leads. And the gory stuff didn’t really bother me.
I can’t count how many times I got fresh blood on the soles of my shoes for not watching where I walked at a stabbing scene.
The dead were usually covered with a tarp or otherwise concealed by the time the reporters arrived. But there were exceptions. Sometimes the bodies were left uncovered to preserve evidence, eyes agape, top lip curled up, stiffening in the sun or cold. One young man in the driver’s seat of a nice import took what looked like six bullets to his left side while waiting at a red light. From the edge of the tape, you could count the holes in his head. His body stayed behind the wheel for hours while the cops processed the scene, its hands stuck at ten and two, the car still running but frozen in place as the light changed from red to green to red again. When the medical examiner pulled the body from the car, its hands stayed out in front, as if still gripping that wheel.
No matter how recent the death, the victims always looked empty, like something had flittered off and left a shell of a person. They were like mannequins. We were even taught not to call victims “him” or “her” in print, but to instead write “his or her body.”
It was the families they left behind that bothered me. I fretted extensively over interviews with people who wanted to talk to me. Now I regularly reached people on the worst days of their lives. Every time someone died under criminal circumstances, the job required me to find and try to interview those closest to them.
I tried to put off these interviews as much as possible. Once I found a phone number or address, I took a second, or minute, to collect myself. It was absolutely terrifying. I could ruin already ruined lives if I said the wrong thing, and I was the kind of guy who always said the wrong thing.
I did my best to minimize the trauma such an interview might inflict. My scripts always started with something that wouldn’t immediately make them hang up, like, “I’m sorry to have to reach you like this, but I’m writing about what happened to your brother. I need to make sure my report is accurate. And I wanted to give you the opportunity to share your thoughts.”
The vulnerable person on the other end of the phone also needed to know that I was a reporter as soon as possible. It’s a special kind of unethical to pretend you’re not a journalist when trying to get information out of the grieving father, mother, or friend of a dead man. The word “reporter” in particular needed to get way up front. I can’t tell you the number of times people, grieving or not, heard “newspaper” and said, “We already subscribe, thanks,” before hanging up.
I always started with the least controversial questions, purposefully avoiding anything that would hint at death until I’d nailed down a proper biography of the victim. I asked who the dead man was, what he did for a living, and what he meant to those who knew him best. Often, I would get the same answers over and over. A dead man was always kind to everyone, or in the case of more a troubled dead man, always turning his life around. Follow-up questions were often required. I needed concrete examples of how he was kind and how he was turning his life around. I wanted to know the victim as well as possible, so I could understand the full impact of the death.
Only after I built up trust did I start into the more difficult questions: What happened? Why?
These questions were much more likely to upset the person on the other end of the phone. It was always better, if possible, to talk in person. But usually this was impossible. People are hard to reach and hard to count on. If I had them talking, it was best to let them finish.
Sometimes they would burst into tears without warning. That was bad. Worse, though, was accidentally reaching a mother, or father, or brother before the police did. I was not trained to do a proper next of kin notification like the cops or doctors. I’m not sure if there’s a way to train for it.
I kep
t a special script prepared for the rare times it happened, which I based on advice from past cop reporters. I gave the shocked family member the number to the homicide section and got off the phone as quickly as possible. They could call me back if they wanted, but I suggested they do so only after they dealt with the important things.
Every interview was like defusing a bomb. I worded my questions with the utmost care. And I never asked, “How do you feel?” Because, really, how do you think they felt?
I inevitably felt like a monster every time I picked up the phone. But I felt worse writing stories when I wasn’t able to reach a family member.
There was one story involving a highway pursuit by RCMP. A man stole a van in the mountain town of Jasper and was speeding the wrong way down a busy stretch of road. Police followed until he reached a hill. The innocent driver on the other side couldn’t have seen the van barreling toward him. The two men hit head-on. Both burned in the fire.
We were quick to get the name of the innocent man. His family was ready to talk because they were angry.
The name of the man fleeing from police was harder to track down. The burnt body meant RCMP at first had trouble identifying him. And when they finally confirmed it, they issued a release that simply said they wouldn’t be telling anyone his name out of respect for the family.
Out of respect for the innocent man’s family, I started looking for the name. A call to the medical examiner confirmed it. And I started dialing. I called everyone listed with his last name in Alberta and neighbouring provinces. I dug around on Facebook for anyone who could be related, sending messages to all of them, being purposely vague, just saying that I was looking for his relatives. Nothing worked. All I confirmed by the end of the day was his name, and we had to go with it. The short story ran on a back page of the paper:
The medical examiner has identified the second man killed in a RCMP chase near Hinton earlier this month.
Stephen Kenyon, 21, was behind the wheel of a stolen van that collided with an oncoming pickup truck as he sped the wrong way down the Yellowhead with RCMP cruisers in pursuit.
Kenyon was also wanted at the time of the crash on an outstanding warrant for shoplifting.
The collision killed Brad Kerfoot, 30, the driver of the pickup truck.
The crash is still under investigation by the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team, which investigates incidents involving officers that lead to serious injury or death.
The next morning, a woman called me, hysterical and sobbing so loudly into the receiver that all I could hear was static. Between breaths, she asked me where I got off publishing her fiancé’s name, because, really, what right did I have?
I took a deep breath before calmly apologizing to the poor woman. I explained that I had tried to reach her, that the last thing I wanted was to run a story like that.
“You don’t know him,” she cried. “You don’t know him.”
I wanted to run away.
“Tell me about him,” I said instead, surprising myself.
She went quiet for a moment, then whispered, “You really want to know?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Can you come over now?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
I drove over to her friend’s house, where she was staying with her son—Kenyon’s son. She answered the door, her face a raw red, her eyes at the floor. We sat on a couch and stared at the white wall in front of us as we talked. She told me Kenyon was a good father and a hard worker who helped his brother with his roofing business. Then she told me he had shared troubling thoughts with her in the months before his death. She said he feared he was going crazy and he didn’t know what to do. Periodically, we stopped the interview so she could cry a little or attend to her son, who would wander into the room, oblivious. Then she put me on the phone with Kenyon’s brother, who was up on a roof when we talked.
The next day, I wrote a long piece about the man and the family he left behind. I never spoke with them again. I often wonder what they thought of it.
The nervous tone and pregnant pauses that were once inevitable byproducts of my shyness became byproducts of the guilt I felt for having the gall to make these calls.
Strangely, my disposition worked to set the poor people at ease. The worse I felt, the more they seemed to open up.
When someone answered the phone, the tone of my voice went pillow-soft. I spoke slowly and quietly, and didn’t hide the guilt, apologizing not for their loss, but for the rudeness of reaching them to talk about it.
I had to live with myself. And at its core, the job of a crime reporter is morally questionable. The line between the public interest and the exploitation of grief doesn’t seem to exist.
I ultimately decided if I didn’t do it, someone else would. And that someone might not treat the people on the other end of the line as delicately as I did.
After hundreds of these interviews, though, the pressure got to be too heavy. I started lashing out at my friends, coworkers, family, and my poor girlfriend at the time. She was good to me, stayed up with me so many nights as I paced around the house wondering if I’d gotten the tiniest detail wrong in the next day’s homicide story. Sometimes I puked myself hoarse on account of the heartburn. I was convinced I had an ulcer.
I felt personally responsible for the grief of these families. I knew I was contributing to it. And knowing this made the interviews harder and harder.
The stabbing death of one north-side drug dealer in particular broke me. The homicide cops eventually declared his death non-culpable. The details were vague. But it seemed he brought it on himself in some way. It may have been self-defence.
The police said they didn’t have a case.
When his fiancée was called into police headquarters to be told the file would be closed without charges, someone tipped off the TV reporters, who camped outside, waiting for her to come out. When she emerged, they asked her what happened. She began to sob there on the sidewalk as the cameras filmed.
Later that day, I sat with this woman at her kitchen table in a dingy basement apartment. She told me about the phone calls she’d been getting. People were calling her up to say her fiancé deserved what he got. She wondered if they knew he had a kid.
In the middle of our interview, the news came on in the living room. She stopped talking and turned to the TV. As she watched herself cry on camera, she broke down at the table in front of me, drowning out the previously recorded breakdown on display to the whole city at six.
I stared at my hands. Our photographer snapped a photo of her.
In those hellish moments, collecting intimate details from broken strangers, I was absorbed by their agony. My once-crippling shyness no longer mattered. I forgot to be shy. I was able to completely step outside of myself, because, for once, it wasn’t about me. It was about them—their thoughts, emotions, and loss. I was just an interpreter, charged with relaying an unimaginable grief to curious strangers. But what good did it do? Hundreds of interviews brought me no closer to justifying the job. No amount of rationalizing trumped the guilt that constantly haunted me. Eventually, I quit, found a job editing dialogue for video games set in a fantasy world.
Many reporters assigned to cover crime in major cities are in their early twenties, like I was. The few senior reporters who remain in city newsrooms rarely want to cover crime. So the business inevitably feeds off young, cheap blood.
Sometimes I wonder how the new kids on the crime beat are faring. The eager or not-so-eager interns, fresh out of J-school. The Type A twenty-somethings who love the camera. I picture some young reporters I knew, the ones who had no problem rolling the camera while knocking on the door of a victim’s house without warning. I wish I could tell them to just be a little more shy, that maybe it helps.
It’s Okay that Late at Night
WADE BELL
It’s okay that late at night the narrow unmade bed
the birthmark of bitter wine in the valley of the glass
It’s all right to worry that the daily bread will go stale
the water evaporate like the image in the photograph
to want foreign fingers with caresses like magma
rising through sand all right to dream the smell of morning
in the tropics to spend life at both ends of the microscope
It’s okay to need lessons in breathing
All right to send tears to comfort the lost breast
to cool the amputated psyche fog self-consciousness
dilute the shame grown Hollywood monstrous
from a Petri dish of childhood rebukes and ridicule
for the step too far for the word too many
The chair rocked back eventually rocks forward
Daughter of Atlas Maia lived in a cave avoiding company
Zeus exploring the shadowed mountains
discovered her and wooed her in secret
In secret she entertained him
in secret gave birth to Hermes
son of love and the fiery passion
that is the secret of the shy
To hide the stain refill the glass
Will the image back to the photo
Shout the word take the step
Liberate the word take many steps
long full steps will take you far
Amongst the Unseen and Unheard
DEBBIE BATEMAN
IT WORKS BEST in a pine-scented forest or on a dusty country road in the new light of morning. If I manage to remain unnoticed, I spot the wide-eyed deer in the brush, or the coyote skulking in the hay field. I take my glimpse and move on with hushed breath.