All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found

by Philip Connors

  She went on record that McDonald’s played no role in their eventual breakup.

  I called officials at McDonald’s corporate headquarters, who declined to comment. I called a woman at McClip, the barbershop inside the McDonald’s headquarters building, where Holden told me he’d had his hair cut several times. The stylist remembered him immediately. She said Holden was enamored of the fact of getting his hair cut in the same chair where the McDonald’s CEO got his trim. In fact, once every six or eight weeks for nearly two years in the early 1990s, Peter Holden had made the 725-mile trip from his home in Virginia to Oak Brook, Illinois, to get a twelve-dollar haircut.

  Thus did I come to write my first story for the Wall Street Journal, a front-pager, an A-hed, a humorous and lighthearted tale of one man’s obsession that would turn out to represent the crowning achievement of my career in journalism, though I couldn’t have known it at the time. The headline read:

  Not All McDonald’s Are Carbon Copies, a Collector Attests:

  Peter Holden Eats at 10,893 and, Like a Wine Lover, Enjoys Subtle Differences

  That day the recipients of my fax deliveries, some of whom had yet to acknowledge my existence, dared to make eye contact. Some even whispered words of encouragement. It felt like my coming-out party, minus most of the things that make a party a party. Just before lunch, my telephone rang. It was a literary agent. He asked if I’d considered turning my story into a book. I told him I was flattered by the idea but I thought it wouldn’t make much of a book. There were some details I wished I could have added if I’d had more space, but not many.

  The agent said I was probably right. Maybe the thing to do, he said, is find ten other obsessed people and write stories about them and package them in a book of short pieces.

  Maybe, I said.

  The week after my story about Holden appeared, an assistant managing editor stopped by my desk and told me that he hoped to see more of my byline in the paper. Since my phone wasn’t ringing with more good tips, I became the guy to whom editors turned when they needed someone to write a small item on deadline. I wrote one, for instance, about a medical study on the dangers of cigar smoking. The headline read: “Cigar Smokers Face Increased Risk of Cancer, Study Says.” I thought this was pretty obvious, but the medical editor assured me it was breaking news.

  After my first few months on the job, Francine Schwadel called me into her office and gave me a performance review. She said I did a very fine job of handing out faxes and was proving myself to be a diligent reporter. If I showed patience, I would one day be promoted and could move on to something more important than handing out faxes.

  For a moment I was taken with the thought of someone bringing faxes to me.

  I finished the term of my sublet, rented a moving van, and moved what little I owned in one trip to Bed-Stuy. To celebrate, I went for a few beers and a burger at McHale’s, my farewell visit as a resident of the neighborhood, though I knew I’d always return, no matter where I lived in the city. Three hours later, feeling a little queasy, I decided to splurge on a taxi home.

  Where to? the driver said.

  When I told him the address, he said, Where’s that?

  Bed-Stuy.

  He looked at me in the mirror.

  I think I can find it.

  I hope so, I said. I’ve only been there twice.

  He scribbled on his clipboard, reset the meter. A few moments later, stopped at a red light, he looked at me in the mirror again.

  You know someone there?

  I don’t know anyone there. I just moved there this afternoon.

  What for? The price?

  Two bedrooms for eight hundred bucks.

  Sweet deal, he said. But you’re aware that ain’t your neighborhood.

  He was one of the few white-ethnic cabbies I’d seen in the city—Irish, apparently, from the name on the license on the back of his seat—but even so the sternness of his tone surprised me.

  Yeah, haven’t seen too many pale faces in the neighborhood, I said.

  You’re not going to, he said.

  We drove in silence over the East River, the diorama of the city skyline receding behind us. He found the address without trouble.

  Remember this, he said, turning to face me. When you need a lift, tell your driver to use the Williamsburg Bridge. It’s the quickest and easiest way. You come onto Broadway and look for Woodhull. Right after the hospital hang a right and you’re on Marcus Garvey. Five minutes and you’re home.

  Thanks, appreciate that, I said.

  Let me tell you something else, he said. A lot of drivers won’t want to come out here. It’s a no-man’s-land for getting a fare back to the city. Watch how many taxis you see in the street. I’m telling you there won’t be many. Easiest way to shirk a fare is to say, I don’t know how to get there. So you’d better know for them.

  Until then I hadn’t felt the tiniest tremor of fear about my move. To be afraid, I thought, would have been to admit to a streak of latent racism, and I didn’t believe I was racist. Nonetheless a veil of suspicion dropped between me and the neighborhood all of a sudden. Worried, I cast about for points in my favor, as if polishing my make-believe résumé of racial sensitivity. At the age of seventeen I’d read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and was so moved I went out and bought a T-shirt with his face silk-screened on the front. In Minneapolis, in 1992, I’d marched alongside some deodorant-averse white people to protest the verdict in the beating of Rodney King. In college I’d judged Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech the greatest of American orations. As a result of my liberal arts education, I’d gained some acquaintance with the works of Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, names unknown in the house where I’d grown up. I owned several dozen jazz albums, from King Oliver to Sonny Rollins. In the greatest NBA rivalry of my lifetime I’d been on the side of the Lakers over the Celtics—Magic trumping Bird, Showtime all the way. Maybe this collection of random facts would cohere into a signal of my harmlessness and emanate from my being on the streets, discernible via ESP on the lower frequencies. Surely my new neighbors would recognize a kindred soul, a fellow American acquainted with the deep meaning of the blues. Class kinship would trump racial difference, that old dream of the democratic socialists.

  Then again, the way the cabbie spoke, with a note of warning in his voice—as if he’d sniffed the provinces on me and felt compelled to protect me from my ignorance—clued me in to the fact that my choice of neighborhood was unlikely to be viewed by its longtime residents as a compensatory counterweight to the fact of my employment at the flagship paper of Dow Jones & Company, unless I wore a sandwich board announcing my motives on my walks to and from the subway. My family and friends were bemused that someone of my political persuasion would end up working at the Wall Street Journal, and the few colleagues at the paper with whom I shared the news of my new residence were just as baffled that I would choose to live someplace where I so obviously did not belong. At the newspaper the mere mention of whose name evoked images of power, I had none; in a neighborhood that stood as a stark example of powerlessness, I had the look of a man with more power than anyone by far. Walking down Marcus Garvey Boulevard each morning to the train, wearing a suit and tie on my journey between these worlds, I felt myself traversing the righteous path of the outcast. It was a kind of performance, a daily tightrope walk across a yawning chasm, a journey both precarious and surreal, and I savored every delicious and delirious second of it.

  Once I convinced myself I would be welcomed in Bed-Stuy, it was only a short leap to imagine myself saved in Bed-Stuy. By being called to the surface of things, by being forced to rise out of self-obsession and deal with the tangible world around me as something other than a bad joke, maybe I could begin the work of forgetting the phone calls I hadn’t made, the words I hadn’t said. Maybe, by some miraculous encounter in the streets, I’d be granted the forgiveness I couldn’t grant myself—or, failing that, endure my punishment
and emerge reborn.

  White Boy

  Monroe Street marked the northern edge of those stately brownstones that gave Bed-Stuy its architectural charm. Not just Monroe Street, but my side of Monroe Street. Across the street to the north most of the houses were wooden or vinyl-sided, and some had been abandoned, plywood nailed over their windows. A little farther north the Marcy Houses loomed, aesthetic monstrosities that always put me in mind of medium-security prison architecture, but taller. Jay Z had grown up there, but at the time I couldn’t have told you the first thing about Jay Z, even though “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” had been playing all over the city for a year.

  There were three businesses on the corner of Monroe and Marcus Garvey: the Fried Chicken Palace, a Chinese takeout, and a tiny bodega. Up the avenue, just before the projects, was the only grocery store within walking distance. I shopped there twice, once in ignorance and a second time in desperation. The fruits and vegetables looked secondhand. A box of macaroni and cheese sold for about twice what it would’ve cost on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The neighborhood, it turned out, was what sociologists called a food desert.

  One night I went to the Chinese takeout. The kitchen was sealed behind a wall of bulletproof glass so opaque that only the smells of food and fryer oil gave away the fact that the men in back, barely visible as white blurs, were cooking and not stamping license plates. I ordered the chicken lo mein and stood back to wait. Loitering was not encouraged. There was no place to sit. If you wanted to eat on the premises you could set your food on a chest-high shelf along the wall.

  A man said to me, Hey, I saw you the other day.

  He was short—maybe five-five—and wore thick glasses. The skin on his face was mottled pink in places, as if he’d had a series of skin grafts that hadn’t quite worked out.

  In the bodega across the street, I said.

  What are you doing here?

  Getting dinner.

  No, I mean here, he said, waving his arm to take in the whole neighborhood.

  I live here.

  You buy a house?

  I rent.

  He stared at me with a look of profound confusion. He opened his mouth as if to speak but couldn’t find the words.

  A friend of mine put me in touch with the landlord, I said. He wanted to rent to people he knew, or people his friends knew. And the price was right. My name’s Phil—I extended my hand—what’s yours?

  He told me and said, I been in the neighborhood forty-six years. Born and raised.

  I’m a short-timer by comparison.

  What do you do?

  There were five or six people standing around waiting for food, and they were all looking at me. I tried to think of something to say—other than the truth—but nothing clever came to mind.

  I work at the Wall Street Journal, I said.

  Shit, he said. Trading stocks and making stacks of cash.

  No, I said—and here I did lie, for reasons that were inexplicable; the lie just came to my lips and escaped in an instant—I write about people who trade stocks.

  A journalist? he said. A journalist? He squinted and turned up his nose. Throwing mud at people, he said. Draggin’ ’em through the dirt. Ruinin’ people’s right to make a living. A journalist. He turned and spat on the floor as if the word had dirtied his mouth.

  I’d written five or six pieces in my time at the paper, most of them tiny spot-news fillers, things I could tap out at the margins of my days. I was still first and foremost a fax boy, earning barely twenty grand a year, but I was making myself sound like some kind of big shot. Still, I knew I couldn’t backtrack without looking like a fool.

  I throw mud at people who deserve mud flung at them, I said.

  He smiled and looked around the room. He raised his arm and gestured toward me. I thought he might be about to hit me, and my arms tensed, ready to deflect his punch. Instead he said, as if he were the arbiter of such things, as if he knew he held my fate in his hands but decided to let me slide: This guy’s all right.

  The woman behind the bulletproof glass called out my order. I stepped up and paid through the little cash-exchange hole. He sidled up as I put the change in my wallet.

  Will you give me a dollar, man?

  Give you a dollar?

  Yeah, man, just a dollar.

  Again I felt myself performing, everyone waiting to see what I’d say. I thought I’d do well to avoid establishing a reputation as the white boy in the neighborhood who went around giving away his money.

  No, man, I worked hard for this dollar.

  Come on, man.

  I need this dollar. I need to buy lunch tomorrow. I need to pay my rent.

  Okay, okay, he said, palms up in a gesture of surrender.

  I’ll see you around, though, I said.

  That’s right you will, he said. Every day.

  I never saw him again.

  Less than a year into my tenure at the Journal, I learned of a job opening on the Leisure & Arts page. It was listed on the company’s internal Web site, a copyediting job, repairing split infinitives and run-on sentences. I fastened with unreasoning hope on the notion that the job—and the raise that came with it—could be mine.

  My hope vanished the moment I learned that, in order to get the job, I would first have to sit for an interview with Bob Bartley, the editorial page editor of the paper, who oversaw hiring for the Leisure & Arts page, which he otherwise supervised with benign neglect. Bob Bartley was among the most influential American journalists of the second half of the twentieth century, although his name was not widely known outside of New York and Washington. He was fairly soft-spoken, and his posture was not what you’d call ideal. He rarely smiled, but when he did he looked like a cat who’d just swallowed your canary.

  Bob Bartley’s two abiding obsessions were taxes and weapons. He thought taxes should be cut always and everywhere, except for poor people, on whom they should be raised as a disincentive to being poor, and as for weapons he thought America should build as many as possible. The more weapons we had, in his view, the less likely we were to need them. But he believed that occasionally we needed them to bomb other nations that were trying to develop them too, because those nations couldn’t be trusted not to use them. In order to further thwart the nations that, unlike ours, couldn’t be trusted not to use their weapons, he thought we should spend however many trillions it took to build a missile-defense shield, that sci-fi umbrella that would protect America from the rain of other nations’ missiles. Bob Bartley believed that with tax cuts, lots of weapons, and a missile-defense shield, Americans would remain safe, happy, and prosperous.

  Bob Bartley had been writing editorials about these ideas for almost thirty years.

  Someone once made a joke about editorial writers. Why is writing an editorial like pissing yourself in a blue serge suit? Because it gives you a warm feeling, and nobody notices what you’ve done.

  Bob Bartley was no trouser-wetter, though. From what I could discern he never had warm feelings, and people in power tended to notice what he wrote.

  The arena in which he’d had his greatest influence was tax policy. He was American journalism’s leading proponent of trickle-down economics: by cutting taxes on rich people and raising them for poor people, he argued, more money would end up not only in the hands of rich people but—because the rich people would spend it on housekeepers and yachts—in the hands of people who kept houses and built fancy boats. Because everyone would be making more money, the government would generate more revenue in taxes, even though the top tax rates were lower. Since bloating government coffers with more taxpayer money was actually a bad thing, an evil outcome of sound policy, the government would be obliged to funnel the extra tax revenues to bomb-building projects—in effect throwing the money away, since it created wealth, in the form of weapons, that could only be used once, if at all, and then only to destroy, never to create more wealth, which thus ran counter to the essence of capitalism, wealth creating wealth—
while at the same time cutting programs for poor people and generally running the machinery of government with an incompetence bordering on malice, which would make poor people angry at the government and entice them to vote for Republicans, just like most rich people did, ensuring Republican rule forever.

  Despite the baroque strangeness of some of his ideas, Bob Bartley had once won a Pulitzer Prize.

  When I first joined the paper, Bob Bartley was in the late, hysterical stages of his obsession with Bill Clinton. Bob Bartley’s editorial page had printed enough editorials about Whitewater to fill three thousand pages in six anthologies. Bob Bartley was proud of these books, even though no one bought them. He thought Whitewater was comparable to Watergate; he was hoping to bring down a president, in the manner of Woodward and Bernstein, and perhaps win another Pulitzer Prize. But despite his three thousand pages of editorials, the Whitewater investigation devolved into an absurd argument about whether fellatio is actually sex, and the president did not resign and was not forced from office, although Bob Bartley was adamant that he should have been, because Bob Bartley did not approve of extramarital fellatio, at least not for Democrats. When a reporter had asked him whether he and his editorial page would’ve attacked Newt Gingrich or another prominent Republican faced with similar charges of sexual misconduct, Bob Bartley admitted that “we would have defended them. That’s the way it is.”

  I was nervous when I went to Bob Bartley’s office. My internship at the Nation featured prominently on my résumé. While the work I had done there was utterly harmless to the spread of corporate capitalism, the Nation was known to say kind things about socialists. Bob Bartley detested socialists.