“What the hell is this, George?” the shout would come.
The morning paper provided his main source for the endless stream of assignments that flew on white sheets to reporters’ desks. By eight-thirty, when reporters were moving into their cubicles with coffee cups and their own papers in hand, he had already cut his to shreds. He clipped the stories to the assignment sheets along with his suggestions of whom to call or, if he already made the calls, whom to interview on camera. He set the times, lined up the people, posed the questions, if he had the time.
The newspaper stories that ran on to other pages, and most of them did, were cut in strange geometrical shapes, circumventing, bordering the backs of other stories which also must be cut. That took time, the cutting. If it was impossible to save the stories with scissors, he made copies of their second page continuation and cut the copies instead.
Under his system, the evening newscasts were filled with stories at least twenty-four hours old and already fed numerous times to the public by radio news. Oh, there might be some variation, a national story made local. There might be some updating, press conferences held after the newsmakers realized television was interested.
Sometimes the news was even older, days, weeks, months old. He had a hold list that some claimed had run for years. He wanted it long, this list of stories already completed and waiting for that perfect hole in some future newscast. Bad quality video or audio, problems long ago solved or forgotten, he didn’t care. Any story worked when you had a space to fill.
Sometimes, when the panic high to get more stories didn’t override everything else, he could feel the satisfaction that another newscast had been filled. It was a satisfaction not shared by others.
“Man, you don’t understand,” Steve Kramer told him. “It’s only time. It’ll get filled no matter how many stories you pump out. It’ll get filled somehow. It has to.”
No, he didn’t understand that, not at all. He wanted more than enough stores. He wanted too many stories because too many was never enough.
“Debbie, what have I got you on?” he called out.
“That abortion thing and something about mentally retarded people getting married.”
“Interesting combination, George,” Ellen’s voice reached over the cubicles.
He smiled to himself.
8
“She hears voices.”
That is how her father first brought her into his office. He held this big girl by the hand and, as though presenting his daughter at the altar, handed her over to him.
He saw how the man took stock of him, head to toe, how he judged and hoped all in that one look.
“I really don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “I hope you can help. Doctor Cohen told me you were the man to call.”
Cohen made his own call. “Known the girl since she was a baby. Hanson is a good man, a good friend. She says she needs a doctor. From what he tells me, I think she’s right.”
*
Debbie stopped only once in her drive from the border and that was to fall onto a motel bed in a room frozen with air conditioning. Six hours later she was back in her van and counting hard. She could almost reach one hundred and seventy before losing track of the count. The fear would fill in the void and the voice would begin again.
“You didn’t even love him and now there is no one,” she called to herself from the end of the tunnel.
“And I didn’t go away, did I? I’ll never go away, never,” the voice promised.
Her father was not home when she finally reached the house. She didn’t bother to unload the few things from the van. She took a bath and began to cook an evening meal.
“I’m glad you’re back,” he said after his first surprised hug.
“Michael stayed down there,” she told him.
He said nothing. He had not seen her for six months and that visit lasted only a few days.
“You’re a little too close to your father,” Michael told her. “Try breaking away for a while, be on your own.”
“Are you okay?” her father asked.
“Yes, Dad. Why?”
“You look a little drawn or something.” His blue eyes searched shyly for hers.
“I think I need a doctor, Dad. I think I need a doctor bad. Hey,” she tried to laugh, “it rhymes. Dad, bad.”
The tears poured from her eyes.
*
“I really don’t hear voices. It is my voice I hear,” she told him after the father left her with the assurance that he would be back for her.
“It’s like talking to myself. You know?”
“What are you saying to yourself?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “That I don’t love Michael, I guess. He’s the man I was living with and we went to Baja. I left him there and came home.”
“Is that when this voice started, after you left him?”
“No, before, a little before.”
“And what did it say?”
“That I didn’t love him.”
“Is that what frightened you, that you didn’t love him?”
She nodded.
“Why?”
“Because,” she said as her eyes filled and her mouth crumbled, “because I don’t love anybody else. And,” she raised her brimming eyes to his, “nobody loves me.”
“What about your father, Debbie? Doesn’t he love you?’
“Yes,” she said, “but he has to, doesn’t he? And something else.”
“What is that?’
“Sometimes I don’t know who I am.”
He leaned toward her, hands clasped together.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” she licked her lips, “I know who I am, my name and where I live and all that. But, I don’t know what else I am. Does that sound crazy?”
“No, Debbie,” he leaned back again. “It sounds like something we can talk about, but it doesn’t sound crazy.”
“Good,” she said, her face relaxing. “I don’t want to be crazy.”
She tried to smile and he realized how pretty she was.
*
She was different from so many of the others he saw, the middle-aged women with their flustering and endless words that said only, “What do I do now that I am worthless, now that the children are gone, now that my husband has gotten young and hard and plays tennis?”
She was different from the girls the parents sent, not understating the glib mouths and mean eyes, the dope and the drinking. Those girls were filled with disdain toward the parents who sent them. Well placed, he often thought.
When he sat trying to concentrate on the women who came with their frightened faces and the men considering face lifts and the children who laughed at him and almost everyone else, he often thought about Debbie and when she would be back sitting in the chair across from him.
“I want the fear to go away,” she told him each visit. “I want it to go away and not come back.”
“It will,” he promised.
“When?”
“When you no longer need it.”
The next question came slowly, after thought.
“Why do I need it?”
“I think it’s a way of warning yourself, of telling yourself what you’re doing is wrong for you and you need to change or move away from it. It’s like your instinct talking and when you don’t listen, it starts yelling.”
She watched him.
“It could be that you needed to come home and this was the only way you would let yourself. Is that possible?”
Her eyes were wide on his.
“When will the fear go away?” That was the answer she wanted, the only answer.
It took her three months to find a job, the beginning of the self-worth he wanted for her. He watched as she faced the rejection from the jobs she didn’t get and as she exercised the instinct against the jobs that were not right for her. Finally, she made the connection, at a radio station and everything seemed to change.
�
�It’s great,” she laughed with excitement. “Really great. I guess it’s something I wanted to do, this news, you know?”
He nodded.
“I mean, I can write. I love to write. I did in college and they said I might get a chance at the station, to write news. That’s something, isn’t it?”
“It’s more than something,” he told her.
“I know I’ll only be typing for them and answering phones but I could get a chance to do other things, you know? Couldn’t I?”
“Of course. Why not? And you really like this news idea?”
“Yes, I do,” she said, sitting straight up. It’s honest, that’s what it is. All you’re supposed to do is find the truth and report it. That’s what the news is, the truth. It’s the only place you get paid for telling the truth.”
She fell back in the chair.
“Gosh, I am happy.” She laughed.
“I didn’t know you liked to write, Debbie. You’ve never said anything about it. Do you write a lot?”
“Not now, but I worked on my high school paper and on the college paper my first year. The second year I didn’t and then I left. With Michael.”
She picked up the tiny blue glass bird on the table next to the chair. It was something she did every session.
“I like this bird,” she said.
“Tell me more about the writing.”
“Oh, it’s not so much. I wrote some short stories and poems. I think you have to be real sad to write poems.”
He nodded. “Ever try to get your poems or the stories published?”
“No.” She put the bird back on the table.
“Why not?”
“They aren’t very good.”
“How do you know?”
“I know,” she sighed. The sadness was back. “I know.”
Finding a job was the task he set for her. Finding out what led her to a psychotic episode was the one he set for himself.
*
“Tell me about your mother. What do you remember about her?”
“I don’t remember too much. I was only five when she died. I do remember lots of people in the house and Dad hugging me. That’s all, really.”
Her mother died on her way to the grocery store, hit at a stoplight. The death seemed to have been handled as well as it could be. There had been housekeepers, not too many over the years, to care for the girl when her father was at work. He was a lawyer and able to come home almost every day for lunch. Later, when he became a judge, he still made time for his daughter.
“She is better.” It was almost a question asked by the tall man with the tired blue eyes who made a few of his own visits to the office.
“Is she much like her mother?”
Kurt Hanson smiled, apparently without fear or suspicion of what the question might mean or what the answer could expose.
“No. Her mother was out-going, gregarious. She had something going on all the time.” He smiled with the memory.
“Debbie was a happy child, but she was different from her mother, not that same exuberance, passion.” He paused.
“I think she’s more like me,” he said. “We’re both rather low-keyed.” He covered the glass bird with one hand.
“My feeling is that this thing, this thing going on now, started with that man.”
“Michael?”
“Yes. He was too damn old for her. Not a bad fellow. I didn’t dislike him. I didn’t know him. I did know he wasn’t right for her. My God, he was more my contemporary than hers.” He shook his head.
“I talked to her about it, about the age difference. She didn’t have much experience with men or boys and I was worried about her. Then she drops out of school and takes off with him. He was her adviser or teacher, maybe both. I’m not quite sure but it wasn’t right. I know that. He was in a position of authority.”
The doctor gave a non-committal nod.
“He was going to be a lumberjack or fisherman. That type, you know. In the end, never doing much of anything. I am surprised he was able to teach, if that’s what he did. I got to the point where I stopped talking to her about it, about him. But, she knew how I felt.
“It isn’t easy,” the tall man concluded, “raising a child without a mother. Never is, I would suppose.”
*
“Do you think of her often?”
“No,” she said and bit at her lower lip.
“Does that make you sad?”
“Yes.” She reached for the box of tissues.
“Tell me.”
“She was so wonderful. She was little and beautiful. I look like my Dad, big like him.”
He chuckled.
“I have this picture of her when she was about my age now and she is smiling or laughing, I guess. Laughing. You can see how happy she was. Gosh,” she cried and put the tissue over her eyes. “Gosh, that is sad.”
“What?” he asked softly.
“She was so happy.”
“And she died,” he finished for her.
“Yup. And she died,” she said and loudly blew her nose.
*
He wasn’t sure he should get her back to the fear that brought her to him. It was anxiety, panic beyond it, the dope, the highs, the strange place with nothing to do and being with this man who apparently planned to do nothing. No sense of safety. Anxiety finally pushed to terror.
Still, she had been strong and rational enough to get out and to ask for help. And, the job was definitely making a difference.
“I think I really can do it,” she told him.
She told the station manager the same thing when the call came in and the reporter was out.
“I can do it. Let me go,” she begged.
She brought back a story, one short throwaway story but she put it together and it aired. Management now had a fill-in reporter for the price of an office girl who retyped the wire copy for the morning man, answered the phones, and did the filing.
“I love it,” she told him.
“It seems like the type of work where you could go far, if you wanted to,” he told her.
Why wouldn’t she go far? Most of the reporters he saw on the evening news didn’t have the brightness, the glow of this girl.
“What about television?” he asked. “I would think there is a lot of opportunity there.”
“Oh gosh,” she blushed, “getting into television is a whole different thing. I hear them talking about it at the station. I think everybody wants to go into television, even if they don’t say so.”
“I think they would be interested in someone like you.”
She gave a small nod.
“Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know if I’m good enough.”
The voices or that voice that called to her from the end of her tunnel was gone. She told him that, gone.
*
“Are you ever afraid anymore?”
“No voice,” she said.
“I know, but the fear, the counting?”
“No. Sometimes I’m scared but not like before. It stopped when I started coming here.”
“Do you know why?”
“Why it stopped?”
He nodded.
“Because I was frightened and now I’m not. Everything is so much better now. I feel good about everything.”
He wanted another six months with her, at least, six months without the fear and panic. They had been together less than a year.
*
“How will you feel about leaving?”
“Okay.” She smiled. “I mean, I’ll miss you but …”
“But?”
“Well, you’re not cheap.” She laughed.
“Come on, Debbie. How will you feel?”
“I will miss you,” she said. “You are my friend.”
*
He did get his six months before the opening came in Bakersfield and it was television.
“It’s a great place, I mean, the station,” she rushed to tell him when she returned from the interview trip. “I
t’s nice, the country. I mean, it’s flat and dry but I like it, lots of farms.”
Her joy radiated. The office filled with her light.
“I could rent a little house or something. It doesn’t pay much but it’s a start.” She stopped abruptly.
“I’m glad for you,” he told her. He also told the father he thought she would be fine.
“And all of that about the voices and being frightened, why did it happen?” the father asked.
“Youth, strange circumstances, no one reasonable to turn to. She left herself in a position of having no one to trust except this man and he was more of a child than she was. And, she saw that. What Debbie needs is stability, work, a plan. Most of us do. To be honest, I would like her to stay for a few more months, but she wants this job badly and I don’t think it would be productive for me to suggest she put it on hold.”
Oh. he would miss this tall, sweet girl with her legs long in the chair, her eyes peering up at him in confusion or laughter.
“Don’t fear the fear,” she sang it.
“Yes, and trust yourself and your instincts. Your instincts are good, Debbie. Use them. If something inside you says this person or this situation is not right for you, back off and take another look. Listen to that voice.”
“Not the bad voice?” she asked quickly, almost too quickly.
“No, no. Just that sense of what is good for you. And start seeing people. Men too.” He smiled.
“Remember,” he added, “you can always call me if you need to, for a kind of a tune-up. I’m always here.”
The blue eyes filled and, like a shy child, she turned her face away.
“I love you,” she said. “You know that.”
He felt his own sadness. “I know, Debbie. I know.”
*
Her father helped her pack the van he gave her the year she left for college.
“An old van?” he had asked her. “Are you sure?”
“Like a hippy,” she said. “A VW hippy van. That’s what I want.”
When they found the van, her hippy van, she laughed with joy as she got in the driver’s seat.
“It’s all I’ve ever wanted,” she told him. “I will never want anything else ever again.”
The Best in the West Page 6
