Apprehensions & Convictions

by Mark Johnson

  Then he departs from the script.

  “And before we leave, I’d like to recognize Mark Johnson, United Way’s campaign and public relations director. Mark put together this wonderful audiovisual presentation. Isn’t it great?” More applause. “I think he did a heckuva job. Maybe the best I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been volunteering for United Way my whole career. Mark, stand up! He’s in the back by the projector. Stand up, Mark. Wave so we can all see you.” The crowd turns to look at me, and the applause increases. My eyes well up with emotion, as they do still, decades later, at the mere memory of it.

  I had always dreamed of being a hero, just like the heroes I watched each week on the family TV of my childhood: Roy Rogers, Sky King, Sea Hunt, Dragnet. As an adolescent, my favorites were 77 Sunset Strip, Peter Gunn, and Adam-12. In my early teens I loved Vic Morrow’s Sergeant Saunders in Combat! and wished I had been a part of World War II.

  Eventually, of course, I outgrew childish dreams of heroics. Realizing the long odds of saving lives as a cowboy, a cop, or in combat, I settled for the more modest aspiration of just “making a difference.” As a Boy Scout, I had earned the God and Country Award, which required service work in the church. I became president of my church youth group and was elected a deacon at age sixteen. I got to know my pastor, Mr. Huey, and began giving thought to following in his footsteps. At his suggestion I became an inner-city Head Start volunteer at a program housed in an urban church, and through friends I made there, I visited other downtown congregations. I was transported by the fiery, rhythmic delivery of the Word by black preachers and by the spontaneous, joyful response in the pews. I loved clapping and swaying with the choirs.

  As I advanced into my later teen years, however, I encountered a major stumbling block to making a difference by aspiring to the clergy: sin. Lust, to be specific: the temptations of the flesh.

  As a college freshman majoring in architecture, I dreamed of making a difference in the blighted neighborhoods I had come to know in my Sunday morning sojourns to the rough neighborhoods of north St. Louis: I would redesign urban housing. The infamous Pruitt-Igoe towers in the worst part of the St. Louis ghetto were nationally reviled for their filth, crime, and spirit-deadening uninhabitability. I knew people who lived there. Through outreach, citizen input, sensitive active listening, and revolutionary design, I would make a difference in the inner city by transforming urban housing, thereby restoring community, dignity, and civility, and probably eradicate poverty and racial strife in the process.

  However, in the second semester of my sophomore year in the School of Environmental Design, I encountered a major stumbling block to my dreams of urban renewal through architecture: calculus.

  Although I eventually passed calculus, I gave up architecture. Discouraged, disoriented, despairing, and by then utterly dissolute (having discovered the instant ease and comfort produced by a cold pitcher of Coors and a bag of weed), I informed my folks that I would no longer waste their money on tuition and instead would join the Marines to serve my country in the jungles of Viet Nam. I secretly hoped the corps would turn me into a hero, or at least a man (if not a casualty).

  Alas, I encountered yet another stumbling block to my dreams of battlefield sacrifice and glory: Dad. He insisted that I carry on, at least until I earned a diploma in something, and then if I still wanted to join the Marines, fine. With a degree, I could be more useful to the corps and make a greater difference, as an officer. I switched majors to English Lit (which had been my favorite subject and in which I’d always excelled) and justified it with vague dreams of “making a difference” by touching the hearts and minds of men through authoring the next great American novel.

  By the time I had graduated, Viet Nam was over. With no sense of direction, I stumbled into a series of jobs that offered little sense of mission, usefulness, satisfaction, or pride (especially to one of such grandiose and narcissistic aspiration), and my drinking accelerated. The drinking, of course, steadily degraded my job performance and undermined my young marriage to Nancy, who was really the only one who had any remaining hope for me.

  In my fourth job since graduating (after six months in Brussels, Belgium, at a corporate-kickback job arranged for me by Dad, then six months driving a cab and a year as a short-haul delivery trucker in Denver), I wrecked a company car in the Oklahoma Panhandle, which wasn’t even in my sales territory. I wiggled my way out of that mess with the help of an understanding (and equally alcoholic) boss, then switched jobs and got fired from that one six months later, when Nancy was just weeks away from delivering our first child. I wrote freelance stories for the Rodeo Sports News, and Nancy got me some assignments at the weekend magazine of the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, where she worked as a full-time reporter. Together, we made just enough to stay above water.

  Then I got a break, just a month before the birth of our first child, Peter. The Pikes Peak United Way needed a PR director—mostly, just someone who could write brochure copy, speeches, and press releases with a decent command of grammar and a willingness to work for $14,000 a year. I had minimal knowledge of United Way: a vague notion that it ran an annual campaign for nonprofits like the Boy Scouts and the Red Cross. But I had always assumed (mistakenly—as do many) that all nonprofits were by definition run by volunteers.

  At last, I had found a way to make a difference. The phrase was at the heart of the United Way mission and permeated the corporate culture. I was meeting real-life, everyday heroes, like Manny Gonzalez. It was my job to give the Mannys of the world the recognition they deserve, and to inspire others to emulate them, and to support their heroism.

  My life turned around, my sense of purpose, my sense of myself, restored. I even stopped drinking, so grateful was I to be useful to something good, something important, something greater than myself.

  It had been a good run, for more than two decades. But then I found myself looking at fifty, and it didn’t seem to be working any more. Pete was grown and gone, as was my daughter, Kate, born just eighteen months after Pete. United Way seemed neither united nor the way to make a meaningful difference, in my life or anyone else’s, much less in the wider community.

  After seven years of steady growth and success at the Pikes Peak United Way, I had been pushed out of the nest by my boss and mentor to become an executive director of my own local United Way. I had landed in Waukesha, Wisconsin, a wealthy suburb of Milwaukee. Eight more successful years passed, as my little family grew and my annual campaigns reached ever-higher goals.

  But I grew restless. I had lived the first five years of my life in a little Mississippi River town just outside New Orleans. Sweet, tender memories of Gulf Coast life in Luling, Louisiana, beckoned. After suffering through seven brutal Wisconsin winters, I longed for warmer climes, more diversity, and the simple, gentle rhythms of the Deep South. Several interviews for exec director openings in other communities around the country (including a disastrous one with the United Way in Baton Rouge) eventually resulted in an offer that seemed made for me. Despite Nancy’s lengthy crying jag, we decided we would decamp from the suburbs of the upper Midwest for Mobile, Alabama.

  “Isn’t that a really backward place?” all our friends had asked. For me, it was a calling, a mission. For Nancy, it was foolhardy, and very scary. Her first instinct was to call the synagogue in Mobile.

  “Is it okay being Jewish in the Deep South?” she inquired.

  “Sure,” they’d said, amused. So south we came.

  Now after eight years at the helm of the United Way of Southwest Alabama, I’m sitting in my executive office, seething. My face is red, heart pounding, hands trembling with rage. I’ve just returned from the monthly meeting of United Way’s board of directors. And I’ve got issues.

  The reason Mobile’s United Way doesn’t work like the one in Wisconsin, or my first one in Colorado Springs, is that it’s a larger community, with larger problems, and more intractable ones: race, poverty, ignorance. I’ve been grinding my way through
the past eight years here, and we’ve grown the campaign totals by nearly 40 percent, to more than $7 million, but there ain’t nobody happy about it, and the community’s toughest challenges have grown rather than diminished. The givers are feeling as though their pockets have been picked; the agencies are pissed off at United Way because of our requirements for more accountability, higher performance, and true unity.

  At the board meeting I had produced prima facie evidence of an agency’s violation of its contract with United Way, grounds for expelling the agency and withholding further allocations from the annual United Way campaign. The violating member agency? Boy Scouts of America.

  A nonprofit agency seeking a piece of United Way’s multimillion-dollar annual campaign pie signs a contract. A key condition of the contract is the agency’s agreement to refrain from its own fund-raising during the United Way campaign from September through mid-November of each year, to avoid cannibalizing the united appeal. The Boy Scouts had flagrantly violated this rule repeatedly, holding big special events and broad, public fund drives for Scouting every fall, even conducting corporate solicitations and a few limited workplace payroll deduction campaigns (the inviolable sanctum sanctorum of United Way). Compounding the injury, the BSA had ignored our repeated requests to improve and increase programming for underserved—especially inner-city, minority—youth.

  “We do character building,” they’d sniff. “Our experience has shown us that the Scouting model has limited appeal to certain demographics. You run a great community chest appeal. With all due respect, stick to fund-raising and leave youth programming to us.”

  Those damn Boy Scouts. Scouting might have been the reason I went into charity work in the first place. And now the Boy Scouts is the reason I’m getting out: the damn Scout exec, in my opinion a corpulent, complacent careerist making the highest salary of all member–agency execs, named Doug Stout—Smug Doug, the Stout Scout—lording over a diminishing fiefdom of white middle-class boys and supported by the southern white aristocracy of Mobile.

  The BSA wasn’t alone in thumbing its nose at United Way. In other communities, the Salvation Army and the Red Cross, the other two agencies with the strongest brand recognition (and the strongest boards) occasionally colluded with the Scouts to challenge United Way. But it was most often the Scouts, and always started by the Scouts. I had reported this to my board. The extent to which these big, well-known agencies, which already get the lion’s share of the campaign pot anyway, compete with the united appeal is exactly the extent to which our revenues are diminished and our ability to address underserved and emerging needs is limited.

  “In a tangible, measureable way,” I had concluded to the board, “they are impeding our very mission!” I had expected the usual, idealistic argument that “philanthropy is not a zero-sum game, blah-zay, blah, blah,” but there came not even that in response. There was no response. Nothing.

  Instead, silence engulfed the boardroom, broken only by the clearing of throats, the shuffling of papers. Brows furrowed. People of lesser influence gauged the reactions of those with greater influence. I had expected my case to provoke a lively debate, which I’d hoped would develop into a call to arms; it’s met instead with a call to table the issue and adjourn. A chorus of relieved voices seconds the motion. I feel like the turd in the punch bowl.

  So I’m sitting in my office, unable to shut off the loop in my head replaying the meeting. I see the writing on the wall, and I’m wishing I had a pint of Beam in my bottom drawer.

  Several months later I had done all of the things I knew to do: kept all controversy off the board agenda, hit the punching bag in my garage for hours, been solicitous and self-effacing with the executive committee of the board, hit lots and lots of my Living Sober group meetings, worked the heck out of my 12 steps to recovery. I had talked and argued with my recovery mentor and at his direction written a fearless and thorough moral inventory of myself, looking for where I was the problem, and talked and argued endlessly with Nancy.

  “Let’s just get the hell out of Dodge,” she’d say. “Get on with another United Way, someplace where they value education and they change as they need to and they move forward. Someplace with more Jews. You wanted to go where the problems are toughest, and this is what you’ve got.”

  We had moved before, but things had seemed to work out better. Not this time. I knew the “geographic cure” wouldn’t work any better for a career in crisis than it does for chronic alcoholism. I had reflected deeply on twenty-three years of United Way work: literally, a hundred million dollars’ worth of campaigns in three different communities. Hundreds of speeches made, meetings convened, interviews given, editorials and slogans and films produced, agencies funded, programs created. Tens of thousands of pledge cards and brochures printed, contributions collected and allocated, and needy people served. What did it all add up to? Were these communities any better off for these efforts? In the last twenty-three years, in all three communities where I’d been the United Way guy, poverty had increased, as had teen pregnancy and illiteracy and divorce and disease and drug abuse and child neglect and high school dropouts and juvenile delinquents and wife beatings and homelessness and mentally ill zombies walking the streets and frail, elderly homebound folks needing wheelchair ramps and . . . especially here, in Mobile. But (God knows why) I like it here.

  Clearly, though, other than raising more money and volunteers every year, I wasn’t making much of a difference with United Way. And United Way wasn’t making much of a difference in the community.

  I interviewed with a couple of other United Ways. Got a nice offer to join the staff in New Orleans, one of my all-time favorite places in the world. But I knew I was getting stale, and the boardroom maneuverings, politics, and personalities would be part of the job at every United Way. Getting out of town was not the answer. I knew I was just one step ahead of the United Way lynch mob; it would catch up to me no matter where I went. Instead of growing healthy communities, effective services and programs, and hope, I had grown frustrated, hopeless, and bitter. A change of scenery wouldn’t change the problem. The problem was me.

  As ol’ Red, my recovery sponsor, would say, “The problem with the geographic cure is, no matter where ya go, there y’are.”

  The truth was, I had become as strident, unbending, and self-righteous as Smug Doug. I could try to dial it back, disengage, become a caretaker of the organization rather than a champion of it, but I knew that would just sicken, embitter, and eventually cripple me (to say nothing of the damage to the organization). No, it had become my way or the highway, and all indications were that my board was about to invite me to take I-65 northbound, back to the Yankee ways from whence I came.

  My sponsor Red—a guy who hasn’t taken a drink for more than thirty-five years, a retired railroad brakeman whose judgment I trust more than my oldest best friends, more than my United Way mentors and colleagues around the country, more even than my wife (who is well intentioned but hardly objective in matters this close to home)—had observed a pattern emerging in me during the years since we’d been going to meetings together.

  “Let’s see if I got this right,” Red said. “You’ve come to me with gripes about the Boy Scouts, the Sally, the Red Cross, the beat-up-wives place, the Cancer Society, the mayor and city council, the old-money Mardi Gras societies, the Chamber of Commerce, mosta the doctors and lawyers in town, several bank presidents, the newspaper, and the TV newspeople. Left anybody out?”

  I shook my head.

  “Oh, now wait, I remember a few more,” Red declared. He had run out of fingers, so he started over with his first hand to enumerate the next batch of enemies. “The environmentals. The save-the-whales-and-puppies folks. The starving kids in Africa. The goddamn hospitals and universities who can name buildings after people who give ’em money. Oh yeah! And the public schools. The state mental health board and department of human services. And let’s not forget those chintzy foundations who just hoard their money!”
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  I nodded and heaved a big hopeless sigh. I had ranted against them all, over and over.

  “See anything in common?” Red asked. “This is one helluva resentment list. Beats any I ever saw!” Red shook his head slowly in grinning wonderment. “Now, other’n you, what do all these enemies have in common? What ties ’em all together?”

  I was at a loss. Red was silent for a long time, letting me puzzle it out. I shrugged, utterly clueless, despairing.

  Finally, Red said, “It’s your job, is what it is. It’s what you do that ties all this mess up together. Now I’m just an old railroader, and I don’t know much about boardrooms, or politics, or charity. But I know this: your job is gonna get you drunk.”

  3

  Psychic Payne

  I’d rather have a bottle in fronta me than a frontal lobotomy.

  —variously attributed to Tom Waits, Dorothy Parker, and Jerry Jeff Walker

  So give a guy with a messiah complex and a three-page enemies list a firearm and the authority to use lethal force. Might could work.

  I quit my job. Ended my twenty-three-year career. It was September 2002. I filled out applications for the Mobile and Prichard Police Departments and, as a backup, traveled to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Nancy and I both have cousins, to apply for the APD and the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office.

  “Trading campaign and cajole for command and control,” I wrote an old buddy, a guy I’ve known since kindergarten. Ernie thought it sounded like a cool idea.

  “Replacing cadge & dun with a badge and a gun,” I added. My kids, Pete and Kate, thought it was an awesome idea.

  When you tie it up in a cute little ditty or two like that, it might even seem, like, inspired. Destiny, even.

  Unless maybe you’re my wife. What I might consider destiny, Nancy’s inclined to label “magical thinking.” She’s a hard-boiled type, a skeptic by nature. Green eyed, petite, and pretty, Nancy’s pretty tough and disarmingly forthright. The first-generation daughter of German Holocaust survivors, Nancy had an already-excellent, built-in bullshit detector that she finely tuned while working as a reporter for over two decades, with the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post, then with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.