Nancy Rommelmann

Sleeping with Famous Men

Last night read "Sleeping with Famous Men," Elizabeth Kaye's memoir of [see title]. Kaye is a journalist (and a fine writer; I recommend her memoir, Mid-Life: Notes from the Halfway Mark), and while reading I thought about how many bullets I've dodged when it mattered. (Lightly riddled, by chouce, from before it mattered.) This morning came upon Sexile in Guyville, in Gawker. (Note: did not bring a toothbrush? Bull.)

Want to discuss but on the run. In the meantime, your thoughts?

Remembering Cathy Seipp Redux

Our brilliant and generous and irascible friend Cathy Seipp died five years ago today. We still miss her, for the small kindnesses and the big voice, the brunches and the opinions, and for her inimitable skill at bringing together what Matt Welch called, "the unlike-minded weirdos." Thank you, Cathy.

A group of us are tweeting #MissSeipp and Facebooking and blogging today, March 21, about Cathy. Join in, will you?

Below is a remembrance of Our MissSeipp, published in 2008 at LA Observed.

Today is the one-year anniversary of the death of our friend Cathy Seipp. I say "our" because she so impacted her core group of friends, of which Matt Welch wrote on this date last year, "[Cathy] deserves all the credit in the world for creating this community of unlike-minded weirdoes around her." Indeed, Cathy had put me in touch with Matt and his wife Emmanuelle Richard three years earlier, when I had some questions about health insurance. Cathy radically disagreed with Matt and Emmanuelle's semi-positive position on socialized medicine (Emmanuelle is from France), a view I shared, and I think she threw us together with the idea that we might talk some sense into each other; that, or give her the opportunity to sit us down as a group and scold us, something we all would have thoroughly enjoyed. Cathy also was my initial liaison to Jackie Danicki; they'd met through blogging; had some face-time in London, face-time I admired and wanted to emulate, and did.

I'd actually met Cathy many years earlier, when I was still reading scripts for a living. I desperately wanted to be a journalist, and so, would type out articles at home, and fax them cold to publications around LA. No one ever answered me, but one.

"This is Catherine Seipp," the woman on the phone said. "I got your article. It's good. Now, what do you want me to do with it?"

Cathy was at Buzz at the time, and I told her, I wanted her to publish it, whereupon she gently but pointedly told me, that's not the way it worked; you sell the idea, and then write it. "This way, you get paid -- or at least get a kill fee."

I didn't know what a kill fee was, but she'd given me a strategy.

Within the year, I was a columnist at Buzz, where Cathy was both a columnist and a contributing writer. She also scared the hell out of me. She had an opinion about everything: the LA Times (which she notoriously skewered each month, under the byline Margo Magee); writing for Hustler (yay); same-sex marriage (nay); the texture of the chicken at our monthly contributers' lunches at Maple Drive. I remember mentioning at one such lunch in 1995 that the magazine was sending Hillary Johnson and me and our two small children to Las Vegas, to write about how the city was becoming kid-friendly.

"That's a sin," Cathy said from across the table. I thought she was kidding. When she repeated it, I knew she was not.

During the next five years, Cathy and I became friends, then good friends. We met for monthly breakfasts at Kokomo at the Farmers Market, a group that included Hillary, Cathy, Amy Alkon, Jill Stewart, Sandra Tsing Loh, Denise Hamilton, Monica Corcoran, Kerry Madden, Emmanuelle, other writers in town for a reading or a story. We called it the Writer Girls breakfast, though I don't think there was any edict about men coming or not coming; I do recall seeing Ross Johnson there once; also, David Rensin and Luke Ford. Though perhaps there was an edict, as I can't imagine Cathy not having one.

To say Cathy was the center of this group is to state the obvious; she was the one who sent the email invites, to which she expected an RSVP. I remember more than once someone showing up who had not, and Cathy disapprovingly raising her eyebrows, and then gently if pointedly remarking that it really is better if you RSVP, so that we know how many tables we need. Really, it's out of courtesy for the servers.

Cathy and I knew each other as colleagues, as friends; as mothers. We both had daughters born in 1989, and before I met my husband in 1997, had for the most part raised them ourselves, on what we earned as freelancers. We didn't need to beat this point, but a point it was. I don't know if it contributed to my being one of the handful of writer girls whom Amy called, in June of 2002, to say Cathy had lung cancer.

"She only wants a few people to know," Amy told me, and that the surgery would be at Cedars. I called Cathy. She told me, she'd found out really as a fluke: she had asthma, and had not been able to shake a cough, and the doctor had decided to do a chest x-ray, which he looked at and then, promptly walked her down the hall to oncology. I do recall Cathy telling me, "The doctor said, if the surgery takes 30 minutes, it means he couldn't get it. If it takes an hour, he could."

Cathy said that when she came out of the anesthesia, she'd asked the nurse, "How long did it take?"

"Forty-five minutes," the nurse told her.

"Which you can imagine, was very frustrating." This was Cathy, the day after surgery, in her hospital bed, surrounded by her family. I'd walked into the room holding a poundcake, whereupon Cathy said, "That's so kind of you, and Nancy, do you remember my mother?"

Picture this scene: a room full of shellshocked people who know the surgeon could not get the cancer; that the prognosis is bad. And Cathy, making introductions, making sure the older folks have seats, sending someone down the hall for ice. Her composure was surreal. I think of it often, especially when I am being a weakling. I think of Hillary walking in with the gift of a peignoir, so that Cathy might look beautiful as she convelesced, and Cathy -- still covered in mecurichrome or whatever that yellow stuff is they paint on you during surgery -- holding it up to her chest, commenting on how pretty it was, and how thoughtful. I think of Jill Stewart, with Cathy when she was wheeled to her room post-surgery, telling the nurse, "You need to get her some painkillers," and when the nurses dillydallied, Jill charging after them down the hall, saying, "YOU NEED TO GET HER PAINKILLERS, NOW!"

And how do I know this story? Because Cathy told it to me; she told all the cancer stories; the funny ones, the terrible ones. Cancer was now part of the narrative, and we were not going to be namby-pamby about it; we were not going to wear pink ribbons and tiptoe around. As she famously announced at a party, "I just want to let everyone know having cancer hasn't made me a better person."

I have written previously about this woman's courage.

I think of her rather as a dance mistress in this. Her friends who knew about the cancer reacted with varying degrees of emotional spasticity: to ask or not to ask about the new chemo? Is bringing over more food annoying or nice? Oh my god, Maia? How much crying is not okay? But whether in person or psychically, one sensed Cathy clapping her hands, and saying, "None of this. We are not going to freak out; we are not going to lie on the floor and throw a tantrum. We are going to do this dance this way."

And we did. We nearly always did what Cathy wanted us to do.

This became a difficult toward the end of her life. She was very sick; some of us questioned the rationality of continuing treatment -- she was on her third round of chemo, plus radiation to shrink the tumors simply so she would not be in such unbearable pain. Maybe we should look into a visiting nurse? Hospice? But Cathy did not want that, and as Sandra so wisely said, who were we to question Cathy on decisions concerning Cathy? And so Amy took her to chemo, as did Emmanuelle, who also created a Google schedule called Team Cathy, so that people could drive, bring food, pick up Maia from the train. If you die in your 40s, and if you were, as Cathy was, the centerpiece of your group, you are surrounded by robust, capable people who are going to do everything they can to save your life, though we all knew, there would be no saving. There would only be attempts at comfort. I flew in from Portland for a week last Feburary to be with Cathy, to basically drink milkshakes with her and dish the dirt and take naps. Jackie came from London the following week and did the same.

In the weeks leading to Cathy's death, it was as though we -- the weirdoes, the writer girls, Cathy's myriad other friends, and the masses teeming over at Cathy's World, a veritable clusterfuck of folks posting 200, 300, 968 comments on whatever Mistress Cathy wrote -- became a buzzing hive. Thouands of phone calls and emails and blog posts passed in the days leading up to her death. Maybe this is the way it always is, but I -- and many of Cathy's friends, most of us in our 30s and 40s -- had not experienced the protracted death of a friend; we did not know how to sit on our hands; we had to keep trying, just as Cathy was.

On March 21 2007, just after 2 pm, I was at the public library when my cell phone rang. It was Emmanuelle, the third time we'd spoken that day, this time to tell me, Cathy had died. I sank down in a nook between the wall and a bookcase; asked Emmanuelle if she were okay; she said yes, but there were still things that needed to be done. Of course.

These things included to continue talking about Cathy, a conversation that reached such a din by the next day, Technorati listed "Cathy Seipp" as its #1 search, a fact we cheered and which certainly Cathy would have loved, though I also imagine her saying, "Well, yes."

Sandra was recently in Portland, and we spent time together, including a few hours at Ristretto talking about work, kids, and of course, Cathy. Sandra was at the hospital during the days preceding Cathy's death, a time that was -- no surprise -- attended, with various degrees of decorum, by the unlike-minded weirdoes and others. There are few people in the world who can tell a story like Sandra; the grand accents; the sweeping mannerisms; the spot-on caricatures were all there, and as I sat there listening, I realized, I had cried, but I was also laughing. And you might think, what a terrible thing, laughing at the narrative of your friend's death. And maybe it is a terrible thing, but it didn't feel terrible; it felt like a continuation of Cathy, and in truth I think she would only want; would most certainly demand that we continue the narration of her life, which includes her death.

I spoke yesterday to Amy, who said, "I find myself mentioning her as often as I can. I just want her here, and for people to know about her." Me, too.

 

Going to Gacy

This article, my first feature, appeared on the cover of the LA Weekly in September 1994, before the Weekly put their pieces online. This is a cut-and-paste, so forgive the digital transfer glyphs and copy-edits. The piece will appear in Forty Bucks and a Dream (Dymaxicon 2012).

GOING TO GACY 

A cross-country journal to shake the devil's hand

I once read that serial killer John Wayne Gacy's brain was missing. Someone had stolen it. Following Gacy's execution, the brain was extracted in hopes that probing the gray matter might shed some light on why killers kill. Though the theft is ludicrous, it also makes sense. The public had an insatiable appetite for Gacy while he lived; post-mortem, we were still trying to get a piece of him.

I've got mine: a pack of prison cigarettes and several photographs from when I visited Gacy in May 1994. The following week, the No. 1 serial killer of our time was executed for thirty-three murders he committed throughout the 1970s, most of which included handcuffing young men --- some of whom were lured to Gacy's home for paid sex, others with the promise of employment in Gacy's contracting company --- to a specially made board, then choking them to death with a knotted rope over a matter of hours or sometimes days. He stuffed twenty-seven of the bodies into the crawlspace beneath his Chicago-area home; two were found buried in his yard, four in the nearby river. Once a pillar of his Des Plains community, Gacy denied the murders; in 1980, a jury found otherwise and sentenced Gacy to death. His fight to postpone the inevitable ended when the state of Illinois rejected his final appeal; the May 10 execution took place as scheduled.

Before his death, family, friends and people he had never met besieged Gacy for mementoes. One was a 26-year-old musician and artist from Los Angeles, with whom Gacy had been corresponding for two years. On Gacy's urging, Rick Gaez made the 1,500-mile journey to visit his pen pal "before it was too late." Rick asked me, a casual friend who also was a writer, to accompany him and document the encounter.

I took a lot of flak for it. Wasn't I scared, wasn't I sickened? How could I explain I was looking forward to it? A crime-TV junkie, I can tell you every schedule change America's Most Wanted has made in the past two years. The re-enactments, especially the ones involving murder, drive me off the couch screaming, "You sick fuck!" at the perp's mug shot. No matter how heinous the crime, I look. Meeting Gacy meant facing the horror I'd only so far confronted on the nightly news, my front door double-locked.

The anticipation made me feel as though I were filling with helium. Certainly, I had never knowingly courted a murderer. Going to Gacy was walking into the den of the beast. Shackled, de-fanged, yes, but even under the most proscribed circumstances, it was thrilling.

We took to the road to meet a killer.

Driving out of Los Angeles in a rented Tempo, forsaking natural disasters for ones man-made, I try to remember Gacy's 1978 arrest. I vaguely recall some big white man in handcuffs, sheet-draped bodies bobbing past prying cameras. But it was a world away from New York City, where we'd recently been held hostage by local serial killer Son of Sam. Daring to stay out past midnight became a nervy drama; the killer could be anywhere. With our nightly lives hanging in the balance, the city crackled.

Cruising through Death Valley, Rick agrees part of Gacy's allure was the proximity to danger. But insists the initial contact was predicated on something more tangible: the killer's art.

"In 1992, I saw one of Gacy's paintings. It was odd, really bright and flat,” Rick says. “I knew I wanted one, so I wrote him, and enclosed a picture of myself when I was seventeen, really clean-shaven and pretty and boyish, figuring that's about what he goes for."

Rick knew he fit the profile of Gacy's victims --- young, good-looking --- and used this to entice Gacy into painting his portrait, which Gacy did, at a discount. But why would Rick, the product of a close-knit Catholic family, a popular guy very much on the L.A. scene, keep communicating with a middle-aged sex offender and serial killer?

"I've always been attracted to extremes, to deviants. Like my father said, 'You never know how cold the devil's hand is until you shake it.' When I got the opportunity to shake Gacy's hand, I took it. People think it's wrong, but that's a judgment call on their part. Why shouldn't I communicate with this guy? He's part of 20th-century history, and I'm getting to meet him."

Why Gacy? Why not the Pope?

"The Pope is boring, and anyway, meeting Gacy puts a little black in my life. Growing up in Orange County, life was comfortable, boring, suburban. Writing Gacy was like becoming a punker when we were kids, shouting 'Fuck you!' just to break the monotony."

I ask how the letter- writing started.

"He sent me a questionnaire, stuff like ‘Favorite Movie,’ and sent me his responses. I started to get a letter every month or so, and my girlfriend and I would just laugh, it was so weird. And all my friends thought it was wild; they couldn't believe I was writing this guy. They all wanted to, but nobody actually did. The people I know are talkers, no one's a walker. No one follows through with the things they say they're going to do. But I was really glad no one else wrote him. I think the novelty would've worn off if seven of my friends had said, 'Dude, I got a letter from him, too.’ '."”

Gacy letter to Rick, April 30, 1993: "I think what I enjoy about your letters is you're open and honest . . . t... you live in a town that is based on fantasy, so you're right, you have a lot of phony people, but some honest ones, too. Hell, I seem to have found one . . ...." 

Once in Vegas, we bypass the glitzy Golden Nugget for the dustier El Cortez, where geriatric gamblers play the slots, dropping in nickels with the slow determination of cows at a salt lick. Rick and I head to Glitter Gulch, where the girls dance topless to trash-rock. For $1 tips, they grind with various degrees of enthusiasm, each failing to get a lap dance out of the young farmer to my right, who sits stock-still each time a silicone-inflamed mammary hits his nose. I chat up two Aussies who say they are part of a band called the Hoo Doo Gurus. When I them we're headed to see Gacy, they shout "Fair dinkum!" and I think: Because Gacy killed in the 1970s, I am sitting in a strip joint in Vegas in 1994. The, "If a butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing . . . ..." theory of chaos occurs to me, but this feels like an easy out. In the here and now: We are taking a piggyback ride on the backs of thirty-three dead boys, contributing to the cottage industry Gacy has become.

It's serial killers who make the banner headlines, who get our attention, sometimes for decades. Gacy languished fifteen years on death row, and his popularity only went up. He is the basis of books, of films; a 900 number gave listeners twenty minutes of Gacy proclaiming his innocence. He wrote 23,000 letters, painted more than 2,400 paintings. Rick owns four, including an unsettling clown-skull emboldened by the words "Live While You Live."

Whereas we won't let inside the proselytizing Jehovah's Witness, we opened the door to Gacy . . . … sort of. We don't want full-on confrontation; no one is going to pay to be locked in a basement with John Gacy. We want a peek, a holographic image just clear enough to simulate a sense of peril.

Gacy letter to Rick, February. 28th, 1993: "You asked how I spend my many hours, hell, there are days I don't have the time I need. I have to answer 85[j4] letters this week, plus do some 35 paintings I am working on since we had a show in Florida and thought we would do well but the response has been overwhelming . . . ..."  

Riding out of Vegas in a whirl of dirt devils, I fill out the questionnaire Gacy has requested; apparently, he likes to know with whom he is dealing. Some of the questions are ironic ("Behind My Back Tthey Say . . ...." "Advice for Children"), some patent, like "Greatest Fear," to which I write, "That my daughter will be abducted." But I catch myself: Wwhat if Gacy is part of some underground network of psychopaths who do one another's bidding, and he calls someone in California, and they find out where I live?. It is irrational, but I double-cross- out my answer.

I ask Rick if he was ever scared of Gacy.

"Yeah, a little. Everything was cool until I got this call on my machine, an automated operator saying 'This is a collect call from Menard Correctional from—” Then I heard this voice say 'John Gacy.' And he kept calling, four times a day. It was really scary --- I'd been tracked down. But I figured, what the hell; I'm out here in Los Angeles, he can't do anything to me. It's funny, but speaking to him on the phone actually humanized him. Then, when I started having trouble with my girlfriend, it just seemed easier to talk to Gacy, a stranger, than to my friends. In one of my loneliest moments, he called. It was really weird, but also very comforting. That's when I decided: This guy has been nothing but good to me. Regardless of what he's done before, what he's been convicted of, I wanted to reciprocate. I wanted to visit him."

The inclination to imbue the incarcerated with special insight into our private lives is not uncommon. In northern California, Richard Ramirez ("The Night Stalker"), a murderer and Satanist who killed as many as thirty, is coveted by dozens of women. For them, the relationship with Ramirez proves ideal: they choose when to be accessible, they don't have sex with Ramirez; they fill in the blanks. In other words, they're in control, just as Rick is in control of his relationship with Gacy. After all, killers call collect.

Gacy letter to Rick, November. 14th, 1993: "I hope our conversation put things in a better light for you . . . ... but don't assume I have all the right answers, just giving you food for thought from my own experiences. But that's what friends are for, to share not only in the good times but when someone is down as well."

We pull into Albuquerque late, squatting at a University of New Mexico house for the night. The four inhabitants, young men in their mid-twenties, have an opinion on our destination. Safe in their daily lives as graduate students, fueled by too much Shaeffer and not enough sleep, they let us have it.

"If I was going to meet Gacy, I'd just piss in his face and tell him he was a wanker faggot piece of shit. If people want to get to know him, then they respect him. Kurt Cobain killed himself and nobody even remembers it. It depressed millions of people, and now it's over. But Gacy goes on. It's fucked."

"That America finds Gacy entertaining doesn't bother me at all. Anyway, I'm against the death penalty."

"How can you be against the death penalty? What if it was your kid he butt-fucked and killed? How can you have any compassion for this guy?"

"Hook him up to the monkey machines!"

I expect the yelling to escalate, maybe they will start breaking the furniture, but they don’t. They deflate.

"Well, maybe we're so down on the guy 'cause he did what we only think about doing."

"Hell, I'd probably be happier if I'd offed eight or ten people from my life."

The young men go silent, stewing in undigested feelings for a stranger who had the guts to do what they fantasize about. Serial killer as someone on whom to pin a grudging respect: overlook the act; glorify the actor.

Gacy letter, March 30, 1993: "80 % of what is known about me is fantasy and hype so as the greedy media can make money off this blood-thirsty society we live in . . . ... the people who are down on you for writing me ought to get a life as they haven't amounted to anything thus far."

Making that long trek through Texas, Rick talks about why he and Gacy kept it up.

"It was very entertaining. I wouldn't have kept writing him if it weren't. The letters became part of my weekly routine, and I thought, 'If I want him to play hardball, I'm going to have to play.' If I wanted more juicy or gruesome things…"

He wanted gruesome things?

"I thought I wanted anything, so I started share more personal stuff. I'm a musician, doing all kinds of crazy stuff, and he's a very social guy. He started to live vicariously through me. He's locked up --- what else can he do? We'd talk about sex, partying, I didn't mind. The more we talked, the more I thought he might come clean with me; that he might admit his crimes and that he enjoyed them. That was the optimum goal . . . ... to hear really perverse things."

Like rubbernecking on the highway, hoping the accident is really bad?

"Exactly. But Gacy hasn't cracked yet. I guess that's why people stay interested. Not admitting his guilt is the smartest thing he can do. It's good business."

We pull into tiny Shamrock, Texas in a driving rain, and run for the "Members Only" hotel -lounge, where the locals are eager to show off, including a drunk grandmother who hangs a moon and asks Rick to look at her “tattoo of a mouse."

"I don't see anything but your big white butt,” he says. “There's no mouse."

"That's 'cause my pussy eat it!"

The big-screen TV cuts in with CNN's coverage of the upcoming trial, whereby Gacy's lawyer will challenge the May 10 execution, saying it violates the Illinois state constitution guaranteeing each citizen "the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

The bar patrons howl. They're absorbed by the process of Gacy, the footage of his capture, the legal entanglements; how “that that asshole is still alive shows just how screwed the legal system is." They take offense to him personally, and shout vituperative, boozy epithets at the television. The exception is a wallpaper-hanger on the barstool next to me, who hangs his head.

"This man is still a human being. He deserves to be understood. I guess people are fascinated because they're trying to understand what made him do it."

Understand, or be entertained? This month's brutal tragedy is next month's made-for-TV weeper. The NBA finals are interrupted by O.J.'s Bronco ride to nowhere. Both Jeffrey Dahmer's father and Gary Gilmore's brother have books out this year. Killers provide hours of media-feed, the frisson missing from our day-to-day lives, a target at which we aim our rage. Just tell us when to tune in.

Gacy letter to Rick, January 1. 1st, 1994: "The (execution) date of May 10th was set by the state, I guess as a Christmas present . . .... I am an embarrassment to the justice system, but I won't give up fighting . . ...."

We slide into Oklahoma, to the home of my in-laws, Native Americans who raise an eyebrow when I tell them where we're headed. ("You sure you gonna be comin' out of there in one piece?") They bring me to Bible Study at Okmulgee Baptist Indian Church, a clapboard house in the bottoms. The preacher speaks, in Creek, in English, about sin, about forgiveness. He welcomes me; the parishioners pray my road will be a straight one. I am asked to stand, to shake everyone's hand; I hold down the lump in my throat. I imagine people across America praying for Gacy's soul. My daughter’s uncle tells me, that's true, though another couple, real Bible-thumpers, tell me they believe in "an eye for an eye." With Jesus, all avenues are open.

Driving Interstate 40 through Missouri, pretty highway dotted with auto graveyards and buffalo-burger shacks, I ask Rick if he ever finds Gacy's clear culpability distressing.

"No. There was nothing I could do about that."

Not being able to do anything about the crimes means he can dismiss them?

“Oh, come on! We completely dismiss murder at this point as a ‘social problem.’ You turn on the TV, and some kid in South Central shoots some other kid. It's not even real anymore. You can't even take it seriously it's so redundant. I know what Gacy did, I'm aware of it and it's disgusting, of course, but that's not who I'm dealing with."

He admires him as a friend, rather than, as a killer.

"I guess. I think people relate to him because everyone would love to kill someone, and you almost admire the person who actually goes through with it. I'm passive by nature. Friends of mine do the macho thing --- tattoos and muscle cars and guns --- but I'm not violent, not confrontational. But it doesn't stop me from communicating with a killer, not at all."

Rick acknowledges it is the repellent nature of Gacy’s crimes that initially attracted him to the man, but not now. Now, he says, he feels more like a caretaker.

"Sometimes. I find myself defending the guy because everyone's so automatically down on him. It’s like, 'Gee, you hate a serial killer? What a stretch.' Maybe part of the reason I tell people he's a good guy is to justify my relationship to him, but he's honestly been very good to me, very kind. He's like your friend's dad who tells the dirty jokes."

Gacy letter to Rick, February. 26, 1994: "Big fucking deal, so you're getting laid. I know you don't want to be the bottom man, having it slipped between the tight hot buns until the sweat is beading all over your body and you chew a hole in the pillow when he is slamming it in and out and you're wondering why you waited so long to find out what good clean fun it can be and so exciting to feel your massive rock hard cock doing a number on the sheets as the clear precum surfaces just before you feel your balls drawn up to the point until your love muscle seems like a steel driven spike as you release spurt after spurt onto the sheet against your belly while your buns are experiencing the other dripping hard muscle expand going in and out until you feel that warm creamy load explode inside you and you feel like you never had before. Well, now that I have your attention, ha ha . . . ..."

The oldies station plays a medley of "Johnny Angel" and "You're the Devil in Disguise" as we speed over the Mississippi River into Chester, Illinois. Braced atop the cliffs is Menard Correctional Center, impregnable and almost beautiful on a full moon night. Windows of light stare like so many yellow eyes. I am mesmerized. The man responsible for so much misery and terror waits inside for us.

The following morning Rick and I make our way to the prison, an imposing brick fortress surrounded by a triple -wall of razor wire. A musical moaning comes from the windows. After we are buzzed in with a stunning jolt, a thickset prison matron asks for ID and tells us to fill out forms. Four intercom calls later, we're told Gacy's used up his visits for the month; that our names are not on the list; that because Gacy's being executed within the month he cannot receive visitors; that only members of the immediate family are being allowed in; that Gacy is allowed another round of visitors starting on the first of the month, three days away. We can visit then -- —if they don't move him up to Joliet during that time. No guarantees. We sense she'd like to slam the big iron door in our faces and backpedal without protest.

Rick sees the irony of the situation.

"Saying we're friends of Gacy's and would like to see the guy before he's killed must be hilarious to the guards. Like they're gonna give Gacy what he wants. They're probably thinking, ‘'Wwe're almost rid of this asshole. Fuck him.’ '."

"You folks ain't from around here." The waitress at the local diner pours us coffee. We figure we'll play it cool in a town as small as Chester (pop. 6,000), and tell her we're in town to do a story on Gacy, but not Rick's intimate relationship with the killer. The fry-cook ambles from the kitchen when he hears Gacy's name.

"When's he gonna get it, May 10? I'm gonna have a special that day, 'fried goose'. Haw!"

The waitress nods.

"Citizens paid to put up a sign years ago, when Gacy was first gonna get burned, sayin' 'It'll be a hot day in January when Gacy fries!'"

Customers are enthusiastic when speaking about Gacy. This one's sister used to take him his medication ("I don't know what fer, probably so he could sleep at night"), that one knows “for a fact” that Gacy , "don't do his own paintings." All gripe about the high cost of keeping him alive.

"Those are our tax dollars keeping that man breathing. I say they shoulda killed him the day they caught him. And good riddance."

There are two bars in Chester. We choose Molly's Moon, the kind of bar where when I ask where I can get a nice plate of pasta, I'm directed to a place that serves a nice plate of possum. We drink cheap cocktails and listen to tales of Menard's most notorious prisoner. Eighty-four- year-old man-about-town Gus hits us with his best Gacy story.

"Gacy flew a young woman out here from back East. She was pretty and kinda loud, bragging about how Gacy was payin' for her hotel and everything. Well, she got real drunk, and started shaking around. So she comes up to me, tellin' how she's gonna see Gacy, and I says to her, 'I wouldn't be on so much 'bout Gacy. We here in Chester think he shoulda been burnt a long time ago.' We never did see her again."

My barstool neighbor is a major at Menard Correctional. His shoulder occasionally bumps mine. It feels like a cinderblock.

"Been there fifteen years, seen when they brought Gacy in, through the back way, all the media out front. He's a model prisoner; most death-row inmates are. I guess people are fascinated because it's weird, but at the same time, it's real."

Another slug of beer, and the major's hand travels to my thigh. "If Gacy don't get fried, they oughta get rid of the death penalty. Sometimes it gets me really angry."

He's got a death-lock on my knee just as an auto parts salesman joins in the conversation.

"Yeah, it's really bad they're gonna take Gacy up to Joliet, after these guards here put up with him all these years. They ought to put Gacy in the prison yard and give every one of those men who had to deal with him one round."

I jerk loose. The major doesn't react as he turns back to his beer.

There are tornado-watch winds outside. They whistle, and then it booms. We have a lightning storm. For hours the skies north of the Mississippi flash, illuminating the prison on the hill in electric white.

We drive to St. Louis, to a club where we by chance meet another of Gacy's regular correspondents. Chuck has been writing Gacy for a year, though isn't quite sure why.

"I was fascinated with the guy, fascinated and disgusted. Sick as it is, I thought it was cool to write him. Look, I don't have any respect for what's he's done, but I dig talking with him. We mostly talk about the Chicago Bears, and Kentucky Fried Chicken [where Gacy was a "Colonel" in the early 1960s]. I own one of his paintings, and I did an article about him in the fanzine I publish. But really, I don't know why I write him."

Chuck's buddy is drunk, and disgusted by the lot of us.

"You're all full of shit, writing about this. People are so fucking bored that they'll read this Gacy crap. It's all about selling magazines. It's wrong. It's fucking wrong."

I ask, if he had five minutes to wait in a dentist's office, and Time magazine had articles on health care, Haiti and Gacy, which would he read? He says he would read about Gacy, but blames that on the media.

"It's all a fucking business, making money on people's misery."

Gacy sells because most people have the same low opinion of the guy. He's the great unifier; we cover our collective mouth at the stench of thirty-three kids murdered. We choke on and then regurgitate the carnage in an effort to inspect the great unknown: death. Like animals sniffing at offal, getting a whiff of what's ahead.

Passing back over the Mississippi's choppy current, my gut gets tight. Rick is likewise nervous as we climb up the hill to the prison. It's dawning on him he's not going to meet just Gacy "the friend," but Gacy the killer, in a killer's house. All week, Rick's subjectivity has been challenged. Gacy's crimes, like bloody flags, have been waved before us again and again.

And again, we are denied access. This time, it is Gacy's call: he's got relatives there, and will not bump them to see us. Leaving the prison, I ask Rick whether he Gacy is manipulating him, something he has proved pretty good at. Rick chews on this.

"No. I don't believe he'd have me come all this way just to fuck with me."

"Hey! I heard they're moving Gacy to Joliet tonight at midnight!" the bartender in Molly's Moon shouts. A cheer goes up. Chester's population is unified in wanting to “see Gacy burn." There's a party planned for May 10; T-shirts have been printed. I sense a mob mentality, and realize this is the flipside to Gacy's celebrity: After we've examined his crimes, we want to be involved in his demise. John Wayne Gacy: scrutinized, patronized, and obliterated. Evil incarnate given a purgatorial punt.

We get to the prison the next morning my seven. Things look like they will go smoothly until the arrival of a flash trio, two heavily made-up and obese women and a man who reminds me of Mephistopheles, overdressed and dandified and with a pointy Van Dyke. They have come to see Gacy and another death row inmate named John P. They have been here before; they write letters and accept collect calls and fly in monthly. They are, we realize, death row groupies. It's decided Rick and I will see Gacy, while the trio hang with John P. in the adjoining visitors’ room.

“And we can kinda go back and forth. Hey, both are good guys. I know what they've supposedly done, but we've found evidence that supports each man's innocence," says the man, who says he's a lawyer. The women, who are "hair designers," dig the physical attention they get from appreciative inmates.

"John P. spends all day working out with weights. He's got a build that's like 'Wow!'” says the one with the black bouffant. “Last time I was here, I sat on his lap and, ya know, gave ‘it’ a squeeze, just so I'd know what I was dealing with!"

She laughs, her two- hundred- pound-plus frame shimmying braless beneath a completely transparent mesh top.

"Hey, better to be looked over than overlooked, right? Come on, I'll show you how this is done."

The five of us go through the routine: leave all belongings, frisk-down, buzz through the main gate into the prison itself. There's yelling coming from the windows, catcalls for the woman in the mesh -top. She waves at faces she cannot see, acknowledging her captive audience. After tossing ten bucks into vending machines ("Get Gacy sweets --- he likes candy"), we are ushered up a narrow winding stairwell with walls of stone, which are wet. There is clanging from all parts of the prison --- keys, locks; steel- toed boots. There is shouting from prisoners we cannot see, angry voices, pleading voices. For the first time, I feel anxious. The walls of the stairwell are very close, and I think, what if this isolation was your life? There is a quickening in my ribcage. It feels like a hummingbird trying to get out.

We enter the visitors’ area, six rooms lining a tiny hallway. Gacy is not there, but John P. is. A big Italian imprisoned for a contract killing, he flirts loudly, first with the woman in the mesh -top ("Baby, those aren't tits, they're rafts!"), then with me, taking my hand in his cuffed hands, saying Gacy is a lucky man to have "such a beautiful visitor."

Rick and I wait in our eight-by-eight-foot room. There are three chairs, a trash bin and a can for butts. No guards, no bars. It does not seem like the venue in which to meet a serial killer. I do not speak. I am conjuring the man about to enter, and in my mind he is nine feet tall and raging; there is no rationalizing with him. Were the circumstances different, there would be no one to hear, no one to help. The hummingbird is bashing itself to bits as I hear a lock give, a shuffling of feet, a heavy breath . . . ...

John Wayne Gacy --- squat, gray, about as imposing as your dry cleaner --- enters carrying two packs of Pyramid -brand cigarettes. He apologizes for his handcuffs, explaining they're "just one more way the prison system chooses to humiliate people." Rick is up and half-embracing Gacy when the prisoner takes my hand.

"I'm really sorry you kids had so much trouble getting in. Hey, I brought you some smokes; they make 'em here in the prison. So, Rick, you finally made it. Stayin' out of trouble, working hard? I'm a workaholic; only sleep about three hours a night. 'Course, nobody knows that. The media paints a picture of me as a devil with blood coming from my mouth . . ...."

Without the creepy music, the chilling intro, Gacy is a fat man in drab prison clothing. Still, there is a nervous flutter as I remind myself what he's capable of. Only right now, he's goofing off, pantomiming horns and a tongue dripping with blood.

"Do I look like a monster to you?"

Lighting our cigarettes and buying us sodas, Gacy looks like the popular Midwestern contractor he once was. That was the way he lured his victims: he was a regular guy, a Charlie Vanilla with a bawdy sense of humor and a big appetite for life.

"Did I tell you that Geraldo's wife visited me, wanted me to go on his show? I told her, 'The only way your husband can interview me is if he gets on his knees and talks into my mic.' Yeah, Geraldo's a phony. I can spot phonies a mile off. They go to a gallery in Beverly Hills and spend twenty thousand dollars on a painting of mine, when they could write my nephew and get one for two hundred. Everybody wants a piece of me, but nobody wants to admit it. I got a lot of famous people who own my work. Oliver Stone, Robert DeNiro, Robin Williams, John Waters, Johnny Depp. Oh, he's such a little faggot. When they asked him about the painting he bought, he talked about how 'eerie and creepy' it was; that the clown's eyes 'followed him around the room.’'. What a phony."

Gacy orders us two prison lunches. The guard enters with the trays, and asks Gacy what he wants for his last meal. Gacy says he doesn't want to think about that, then smiles and shouts into the next room.

"I want John P., with an apple in his mouth!"

"You wish!" the hit man calls back.

As I wolf down Menard McNuggets, it occurs to me Gacy might be jealous I've come along. He doesn't get Rick all to himself. Or maybe that's not the point. Maybe it's an audience he wants, any audience. He engages in a form of manly flirtation, guffawing as he asks if Rick wants to be his "bunk boy"; tells me "the tongue is the most sensual part of the body." Every line sounds scripted. It's a taping of “The Gacy Show,” and the master of ceremonies has us where he wants us. Mid-chew, I notice Gacy staring at me.

"I think Rick's a very sentimental guy, don't you? He's always been very open, very honest. And I've been that way with him. Hey, I never denied that I was bisexual. The media's been all over that, saying I was gay. My preference is women, but I never turned down an opportunity. What about you, Nancy, have you ever been with another girl? How did it happen? You can tell me . . . ..."

Gacy asks as if it's the most natural request in the world,; as if I should see the benefits of having him --- wiser, older, more experienced --- as a confidant. Gacy as nasty father figure; he wants it hard and he wants it now, May 10 is but a week away. So we talk sex, what extremes we've flirted with, what we would and would not do. In the end, Gacy has a longer laundry list than either Rick or me.

"To me, nothing is taboo. As long as you don't force yourself on anybody, it's okay. My first wife and I, we were swingers, but my second wife, she was confused. When I told her I was bisexual, she just didn't get it. We'd go to the bowling alley, and she'd point to a guy and ask, 'Do you like that one?' And I'd say, 'Carol, it don't work that way.' What can I say? I never refused a blowjob. I'm very open-minded. I feel very fatherly toward the kids I write. I take a genuine interest in their lives. I've had kids write to me who wanted to commit suicide, and I've talked four of them out of it. I lost one, though."

Gacy looks down, as though this genuinely grieves him. The crocodile tears I anticipate do not come.

"I used to work as a clown, you know, 'cause I loved making little kids laugh. The media got a good sound bite out of it, 'cause I said, 'Clowns get away with murder.' I'd said that in the context of how everyone lets a clown do whatever they want. I'd be walking in a parade, wearing my clown outfit, and I could do anything. I could go up and pinch some guy's wife's tits, and he'd say, 'Hey, isn't that funny --- the clown pinched her tits!' That's why I said clowns get away with murder."

When Gacy leaves the room for a phone call, I ask Rick in a whisper what he thinks.

"He seems like such a nice guy, but also slick."

Is he scared?

"Sort of. One minute, I think, 'This is it? This is John Gacy?' But then I think, 'Any minute now, he could take his pen and reach over and stab me in the eye and then kill you, all before the guards could get in here . . . ...' "

Fabricating fear keeps it titillating; a tiny trill goes up my spine as Gacy re-enters.

"Sorry, kids, that was my lawyer. He thinks we might get the stay of execution. I'm keeping a positive attitude."

Gacy goes on to speak about his children ("My son was fourteen when I was arrested, and it really did a number on him"), his alibis ("Three of the killings they say I did, I wasn't even in town when they happened!"), his position as favorite flogging-boy ("They asked me if I wanted to file an Executive appeal with the Governor. After the way he's used me as a political football? I told him he can kiss my ass!"). He opens an enormous leather-bound book and shows us his meticulous lists: daily schedules, what he's eaten, with whom he's corresponded. There are legal documents, including one that claims execution by lethal injection is "unusually cruel.”

As the visit stretches over five hours, I get spacey. But Gacy does not weary; on the contrary, he's gaining momentum, pushing harder. The party-guy, the three-time Jaycee 'Man of the Year' is on the podium, and he's not going to squander it, not at this juncture. He is ravenous to communicate, to verbally get his nut.

"Ask anything you want. I'm not ashamed of anything I've ever done."

He is goading us to ask questions that have been asked a thousand times before, wanting to reiterate the patent alibis ("My employees had keys to my house. Like I told the cops, these people could've put those bodies there!"). But I can see that Rick, initially enamored of Gacy's crimes but eventually adopting him as a friend, is a little freaked, a little exhausted. He will not take a dip in the bloodbath.

"Okay, John, if you got out tomorrow, where would you go?"

"Not Disneyland."

Humor from the clown, but it's rehearsed; I can hear it.

"How do you feel about the May 10 deadline?"

Silence. Gacy bites into the Ho-Ho we've brought him.

"Well, there's no point in being negative, right? You know the Serenity quote? Well, I say a little different: 'God grant me the strength to change the things I can, to accept the things I cannot --- and fuck the rest.'"

Gacy chuckles, but his eyes are losing focus, his conversation growing rhetorical.

"You know, they accuse me of killing all these boys, young guys from, what, twenty-five to fifteen or fourteen? Now why would I do that? I had all the sex I needed, I didn't need to kill nobody for it."

With his cuffed hands, Gacy sketches a picture on a matchbook.

"You know, I used to give these big dinners for the Elks, hundreds of people. I love people. I love kids. I remember when I was working at a hospital as Pogo the Clown. I walked into this room, and this boy was in traction. He’d been hit by a car, and he was just lying there, his mom at his side. So I come in and start joking with him, pretending I'm gonna fool with his apparatus, and the kid smiles. I look over, and his mom's crying. I apologize, thinking maybe I offended her or something. But she says, 'No, it's just that's the first time he's smiled in ten days.' I tell you, I went down the hall with tears in my eyes, I just felt so good."

He slides over the matchbook with the doodle. It’s Hitler in profile.

"Here, Rick, for you."

I look at Gacy, trying to marry the man with the monster, the social creature with the sociopath. This gregarious contractor from Illinois has directly destroyed thousands of lives, indirectly influenced millions more. And he is still reaching out. And we are reaching back. Rick toys with a silver saint’s medal hanging from a chain around his neck.

"John? Can I give you this?"

Gacy leans in close.

"Well, I'll tell ya, they've got a video -camera trained on us, and they won't allow it. Maybe you can sneak it to me in the hall. Hey, let's get some pictures."

A guard snaps off six Polaroids, Gacy smiling like he is at a convention. He pulls out some photos of himself as a clown, signing them to Rick and me, and one for my four-year- old daughter ("As you go through life . . . ... 'Smile,' from Patches the Clown, a.k.a. John Wayne Gacy").

"Two o'clock - let's go!" a guard yells from the hall.

I see Rick intent on slipping Gacy the medal, but as we say what will surely be our final goodbye, Gacy's eyes are down the hall. For all his talk about "honest and open," the man has tossed the mask, the one that says he cares about you, really. He has slammed the door, there is no real way in. As if we would take it if there were.

"I got an appeal coming up this week. I'm keeping a positive attitude."

We cannot make eye contact.

Rick keeps his medal.

Passing over the muddy Mississippi for the last time, Rick and I are dazed, and drive fifteen minutes before we realize a cop is trying to pull us over. We don't tell him where we've been, that we are late for a plane; we have already missed it. Rick drives slower. I ask if Gacy was what he expected.

"Not really. He was kind of on autopilot. When you're on the phone, you can't see his eyes; in person, you see it's rehearsed, it's an act. He doesn't spill anything he doesn't want to spill."

Did he get what he wanted?

"Yes and no. I had wanted him to like me, and I think he really did. When he showed us that phone list, and I was number seven out of three hundred? That made me feel special. But I also wanted him to trust me, to be the one he'd share exclusive things with. And that didn't happen. Still, the best part of the relationship was coming out here and seeing him.”

Why the best part?

“I have something really valuable that no one can buy, that no one can take away. I have the memory of meeting him."

I look at Rick. He has specks of black dirt across his cheekbones, streaks of it on his neck. I smell like B.O. We are too tired to talk.

"It's odd,” Rick says as swing into the airport. “Closing this Gacy thing was the reason for coming, but meeting him also made me realize I've been wasting a lot of time the past few years. I don't want to do that anymore. It seems like this is the end of a chapter of my life. And Gacy was the marker."

Serial killer as catalyst, as vital guide, "Live While You Live."

Gacy letter to Rick, February. 26, 1994: "Hey, life is an adventure, and when we close our eyes to it, we are the ones who lose out . . . ... anyone can talk, what you have to do is experience it, then decide . . . ..."

Back in Los Angeles, everyone wants to know: Was he scary? Was it great? Have we got a spare autograph, a drop of his blood? They don't want to hear that the man was pleasant if prurient, more unsettling than scary. They want the savage, the tabloid-rendition. They want to smell the blood.

Rick and I and the rest of America tune in early for the May 10 execution. The network news shows college kids waving "Gacy's Gonna Fry!" signs behind Citizens Against the Death Penalty. CNN reports Gacy is "in denial.” The local channel plays To Catch a Killer, a cheesy Canadian production of Gacy's life and crimes.

We cruise the channels, stopping at an interview with "a Hollywood director and producer who wishes to remain anonymous." The blackened form speaks with a lisp and explains he wrote Gacy to "get into the mind of a serial killer, as research for my next film." He corresponded just long enough to buy a painting of Gacy's, then immediately stopped writing. But "Gacy somehow got my phone number, so I changed it. I had no interest in speaking with him." He's now interested in selling Gacy's artwork to the highest bidder.

It's 10:01 when they break into scheduled programming: we're "Live!" outside Joliet. The execution is underway; the three drugs, delivered intravenously, ought to kill Gacy in about twenty minutes. They will, we are told, break in with a report when it is over. At 10:30, there is still is no word. Eleven, and still nothing, and I think, maybe Gacy is simply refusing to die; his hold is that powerful. At 11:20, the deed is done. Gacy is gone.

Rick changes channels.

"I heard on Howard Stern today how some guy bought $7300 worth of Gacy's paintings, and burnt them, to set an example for parents. If that's how he wants to deal with the man, that's fine. I did what I set out to do. I met him, said goodbye; finished what I started. It's over."

Of course, it's not over. For weeks, I have the lurking sense that Gacy is not really dead. That by executing him we have not eliminated him. His legacy will endure because, after all, isn't that what we've been sucking on for the past fifteen years? Not the real -deal, but a facsimile. (Picture Jeffrey Dahmer slack-jawed in the courtroom, Charles Manson babbling for clemency, pathetic placeboes of their former selves.)

I came face-to-face with Gacy and was not introduced to this human being's phenomenal capacity for cruelty. Evil did not open its door. That is not its nature. True evil germinates in dark isolation, not the alchemic light of the media. By the time I got to Gacy, he'd been converted to a caricature, a clown playing one last show for an audience crowing for the finale, and the next act.

Just tell us when to tune in. If we can name our enemy, we can hate him, and participate in his defeat. All we ask is a chance to stand near the pyre as the paper image we spend so much time creating explodes in a furious wall of flame.

---

"Tough-Ass Reporter"

I'll take it.

Michael Totten, Libya, and "The Road to Fatima Gate"

When I moved to Portland from Los Angeles, in 2004, I knew no other writers here. I had, however, been given an introduction, by Matt Welch, to Michael Totten, a blogger writing about the Middle East. Michael and I were not covering the same terrain, but nevertheless, met for a coffee at the then-rather wonderful Gotham Building Tavern, and made what might be considered small shop-talk. It was not until we were walking to our respective cars that we really got going, about how serious each of us was about the work we do; about sharing opportunities, and about what it was like to be a very ambitious journalist in a town that preferred its news within a 20-mile radius (or from wire service). A friendship was born.

Over the years, I have watched, in awe, Michael make his career: beholden to no one, on his own terms, and on his own dime, often with money donated by his loyal, many-thousands fan-base. We have, at least a half-dozen times, spoken of the books we are working on, how we want to publish them, how we don't, and when the hell was all this going to happen?

It is happening in March 2011, for each of us. My novel, The Bad Mother, is being released March 1. Michael's book, The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel, is now available for pre-order. You can read a sample chapter here.

Or, you can read one of the very finest pieces of journalism you will encounter, "In the Land of the Brother Leader," a piece Michael orginally wrote for the LA Weekly, about his time in Libya, a piece with special resonance right now.

Congratulations, Michael x 

The Dream of the 90s is Alive in Portland

I have never before had the experience of laughing out of my mind, but only on the inside. This did it. It's a promo for the IFC series "Portlandia," passed on to me by a reader, who thought I might like it (boy, you can say that again) in light of my recent article, "Is Portland the New Neverland?" Enjoy.

 

Adventures in Freelancing

Been away a bit; sold my truck; bought a car for myself, and a truck for the business. Conducted two interviews; wrote a book review; refereed a book reading; was part of an event I shall decline to name but to say its sadness and ability to enrage knows no end; read an ancillary piece about said event that made me want to vomit; completely rebranded Ristretto Roasters; changed the business from an LLC to an S-Corps, and am relieved see my father-in-law out of the hospital after a scary three days. Din and I feel a hundred.

Which made me all the more dee-lighted to open an email from my dear friend Jackie Danicki, to the video below, made by writer Lauren Lipton. I swear on my daughter's perfect little noggin, nearly everything in it, with the exception of the exact subject matter, has happened to me. Enjoy.

 

Is Portland the New Neverland?

My article, for the Sunday Oregonian Opinion section, is online now.

The opening:

A recent episode of the AMC series "Mad Men" showed its female characters navigating a husband's departure for Vietnam and the land mines awaiting career women in 1964.

"I realized, watching it, these women were all 26," says Paige Prather, who moved to Portland in August and who is also 26 years old. Unlike her TV sisterhood, Prather, who has a bachelor's degree in anthropology, has not picked a profession. Unmarried, living rent-free in her sister's attic, she is looking for part-time work in customer service, or a full-time position in the arts. Graduate school also looms as a possibility. The crazy-making multiplicity of her situation is not lost on her.

"I sometimes think we're the scatterbrained generation," says Prather. "You have so many choices, and you know what you end up doing? Nothing. You become the DJ-fashion-designing-knitting-coffee-maker."

It was an interesting piece to report, and I am fortunate to have profiled six people about their experience of making it (or not) as 20-somethings in Portland, a city with the "tantalizing insinuation, much heralded in the media, that young people here make their passions their professions, in coffee and beer, music and bikes, progressive politics and as stewards of the land."

Let me know what you think, and/or join two of the people I profiled -- Matt Davis and Kate Williams -- and me this Monday at noon Pacific Time, for a webchat at OregonLive. 

More on David Carr and the Pillaging of the Tribune

Every day we see evidence of people promulgating information that supports their view of the world, and what information they want others to know, and how they want the money to flow. 

As someone who disseminates information, the more work I do, the more I question my information: why is this person telling me this? What outcome does he or she want? It is my job to allow readers to come to their own conclusions, while taking responsibility for the information and how I have constructed it, always in an effort to make things clear, which nearly always first requires a whole lot of mucking around in the dark.

That's the journalist's job: to work from murkiness to clarity with one's best efforts. That's immutable; what every good writer knows, which makes David Carr's story, "At Flagging Tribune, Tales of a Bankrupt Culture," all more heartbreaking. Yes, my jaw dropped when I read about the bonuses. But people grabbing bits of the pie before it's gone is expected and babyish, the simplest idea in the room.

What I did not expect to see ravaged, and with such disdain, is the writing of stories, and how and what is offered. What really pissed me off is Tribune execs' pretending they understand how new technologies will allow us to do this in better ways, a stance that is risible considering their track record. Read the whole thing. You can also get a taste by reading the kicker, below, in which Carr perfectly captures the contempt of people deliberately or not (and I think it is deliberate) destroying what they do not understand and can never command.

The [Tribune] company recently announced the creation of a new local news format in which there would be no on-air anchors and few live reports. The newscasts will rely on narration over a stream of clips, a Web-centric approach that has the added benefit of requiring fewer bodies to produce.

“The TV revolution is upon us — and the new Tribune Company is leading the resistance,” the announcement read. And judging from the job posting for “anti-establishment producer/editors,” the company has some very strong ideas about who those revolutionaries should be: “Don’t sell us on your solid newsroom experience. We don’t care. Or your exclusive, breaking news coverage. We’ll pass.”

Joy [Part 1]

We began receiving the NYT Weekender this week, thus avoiding my driving to the two Ristretto locations and cherry-picking the sections I want before anyone snags them. Most of the paper wound up on the sofa, where I can read it at my leisure throughout the week. This morning at 6:30, over a cup of Nicaragua coffee my husband roasted yesterday, it was the Sports section, an article about John Updike's essay on the great Ted Williams. It was nice enough to read about how Updike came to be at Williams' last game, and the reverence and playfulness and seriousness with which he wrote his first and last piece on baseball, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu", which appeared in The New Yorker in 1960, but what I really took from it was a renewed sense of joy, via this quote (emphasis mine):

[T]he essay is never precious or self-consciously literary, the way a lot of subsequent Fenway prose became, penned by earnest, heavy-breathing scribes clustered in Updike’s shadow. Roger Angell, who began writing about baseball for The New Yorker two years after Updike, and whose career has had an astonishing longevity — he’s the Ripken or Gehrig to Updike’s blazing youthful phenom — has said that “Hub Fans” most of all supplied him with a tone: colloquial, attentive, unashamed of feeling or of striving for an elegant turn of phrase. It seems obvious now, but Updike was one of the first to show that you don’t have to write down about sports or empurple them, either. 

I have a library ladder in my office, just to the right of where I sit at my desk. Currently occupying its second rung is "The Thinker's Thesaurus," which Ilearned existed when I saw it on the bookshelf in which Christopher Hitchens was posed at his desk. The only thesaurus I have ever owned is a generic copy of Roget's, printed on pulp paper and bought from a street vendor in New York in the early 1980s for five dollars. At its worst, a thesaurus is a faux form of productive procrastination; at its best, it gets you out of the word-rut you plopped yourself in and helps you think. Or so I thought. The Thinker's Thesaurus turns out to be series of illustrative and author Peter Meltzer-subjective journeys, via other authors' quotes. The funniest comment I read about the book is that the quotes show consistentanti-Bill Clintonism (note: "pepperpot" is not listed as a qualifier for "portly," though there is "stomachy," which I adore). The book has provided me with much pleasure, and last week, made me remember that I love to write.

It's been a little easy to forget this. Only those still lying abed with their pillows over their heads do not acknowledge that the venues in which to run 6,000-essays about baseball grow slender and slenderer still. Fear not, I am not here to complain, only to admit that perhaps the experience of seeing five of my seven favorite editors dismissed in the past year; of writing solid pieces for one-sixth the money, felt like a punch in the eye. Feels pretty much healed today.

To come: Joy [Part 2], wherein I wonder whether anxious wives start making homemade eggrolls

Bethany Storro Burns Own Face with Acid, and It is Not a Mystery Why

Two weeks ago, Bethany Storro claimed a black woman walked up to her in a parking lot and threw acid in her face. It was front page news in Vancouver, WA (where the alleged attack took place) and Portland, and evidently sent shock-waves as far as the Oprah Winfrey show, which was scheduled to feature Storro today. Instead, Storro is again on the front pages, admitting she did it to herself.

This does not come as a surprise. A colleague at Willamette Week emailed me last week to say, local writer Marcus Griffith had been questioning Storro's account; that female fabulists seemed to be an arena I spenda good deal of time in; what did I think? I called him from New York to say, absolutely I can believe Storro did this to herself, and would be like to see the three-inch thick folder of clippings I keep, called, "Obese White Women Liars"? It is a phenom, probably a book, probably one that should be talked about on Oprah. This, though people initially prefer to jump into bed with "the victim," to have a sort of pillow party with prayers and tears and support, as can be seen in the comments here, as can the pasting Griffith comes in for, being called a "Dirty Lowlife Scumbag" for questioning Storro's story. News flash, folks: this is what journalists do, or are supposed to do.

It seems that all I do these days is write about liars, false prophets and sociopaths, and the people who believe these people's stories despite remarkable evidence to the contrary. [An interesting discussion about this continued, here.] The more I write about fantasists and charlatans, the less mysterious their reasoning becomes.

This morning, the Vancouver police are apparently still baffled that a woman would make this up. That the force spent many hours and dollars on a goose chase. They do not yet say, they are angry. They say, instead, of Storro, "It's obvious to everybody here that she's got a fragile mental state." They have also just announced, they might bring charges against her. And I think they should.

But here's a bet: there will be cries that we should not further persecute someone who is obviously in enough pain to disfigure herself in a bid for attention. That had -- and I might call this the Laura Albert rationale -- Storro only been given the love and support she needed, she would not have had to resort to such drastic measures, and that she did only proves, we were not there for her when she needed it.

Why Not to Follow a Cult Leader - "The Rajneesh Chronicles"

I am fortunate to be writing for an editor at the Oregonian who lets me dig into ideas I find important to disseminate and/or debunk. One of my favorite (least favorite?) is anything having to do with liars who convince others to believe their lies in order to amass personal power. I sometimes think I could write a book called, "Cult Leadership for Dummies," the actions of these charlatans and sociopaths are so proscribed and tawdry and small, a sort of one-two-three in which the manipulator worms his or her way in, worms and worms and worms until the host maggoty and broken. We cannot always protect people from being foolish and weak, but we can and must alert them at every turn not to be so. The opening from today's offering, a Q & A with the author Win McCormack, in the re-release of "The Rajneesh Chronicles."

It is axiomatic that each generation gets the guru it deserves. In the 1970s, fired up by freedoms proffered by the sexual revolution and women's lib, voyeurs to the Beatles' and the Beach Boys' spiritual brushes with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, those seeking a pleasurable enlightenment looked east.

There was someone looking back, someone who, in theory, had feathered a nest just for them. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh preached an admixture of mysticism and the Human Potential Movement, and bound it with a goo of free love. "Know your sexuality," read a Rajneesh ad in Time magazine, "and one day you will stumble upon your spirituality."

The message proved irresistible to thousands of Westerners. And if, upon arriving at Rajneesh's communes, life proved less than idyllic, with encounter groups devolving into sanctioned gang rapes, and meditation giving way to 120-hour unpaid workweeks, and sterilization and abortions strongly encouraged if not demanded due to Rajneesh considering the institution of family "a symbol of all that is ugly," then perhaps these were the costs of building a better world.

Read the rest here.

Do You Read the Newspaper Online?

At the risk of sounding like dodo brain #92/asking a question that's been posed for a decade: do you read a daily paper online? I read plenty/link plenty. But we still get a daily paper (The Oregonian) delivered, and I still try to read the New York Times every day, in its paper form, "try" because I no longer have it delivered at home, but a copy to each of the shops. This latter is an imperfect system, in that people often steal the paper (if I catch the person who keeps taking the Sunday Magazine, I am going to give them a giant tongue lashing), or I don't feel I have the time to linger and read.

I've been traveling a lot this year, to bigger cities, NY and SF and LA. When I was in NY last week, I felt great. I felt like myself, with an endless number of museums and restaurants and places and people to interface with, if I so chose. This is another reason why Matt Davis's goodbye, Portland post resonated with me. One of Matt's commenters astutely wrote, Matt is going where there stories are, to New Orleans. (He will make his bones there, as I made mine in LA.) Portland is not a big enough city, there is too little cultural collision and too many people with thin skins here to really sink your teeth in and do serious journalism (to say nothing of local places willing to publish it). A recent example: a little nothing piece I wrote for the O, in which I quoted a local PR person, who in several emails to me had a quasi-nervous breakdown because she thought the piece did not show her in the best possible light. I did my best to explain, the piece was not about her. A long-ago example: the editor of a paper I was writing criticism for musing aloud at a staff meeting that if the paper were to run anything negative about a venue, perhaps the paper should call the night before and alert them, a suggestion that made the editor I worked directly beneath bust a nut.

Anyway, two things happened this morning: I took the time to read much of the New York Times while standing at the new stand-up bar at Ristretto Beaumont, and drove home with two thoughts: one, I want to make a bunch of money soon and buy a place in New York, where I can spend more time and where, perhaps, Tafv can live. And two, I might start reading the Times online, on a daily basis -- something, by the way, I am willing to pay for. Politically, I realize we are all supposed to stand up and screech that the web is meant to be free, god dammit, and going behind a pay-wall -- which the Times plans to do later this year -- is as antediluvian and anti-progress as it comes. But here's the thing: as a journalist, I know first-hand how decimating not having any money to support a publication is; I had four -- four! -- of my editors (at the LA Weekly, Wired, Bon Appetit and City Arts) downsized out of jobs last year in a four-month period. That's a lot of freakin' cake not coming my way, kids. Also, I don't expect to get everything I want for free. I will be on the frontlines shouting, "Huzzah!" when the web is better monetized for writing and writers, and certainly, there are individuals and larger sites that have figured out how to make the finances work through traditional channels, i.e., ads and backers. I am also in the fortunate position to still have work. But the money? Do we really want to have this conversation first thing in the morning?

While I enjoy the range afforded by reading the paper online -- the skipping, the photos, the videos -- I also know I blow off more than when I read the paper in hand, and am divided about the idea of defaulting always to My News, divided because I see this as a good thing (deeper knowledge about fewer issues) and bad (where is Pakistan, again?).So: do you read the Times or a comparable paper online, and if so, what have you gained, what have you lost? And, any tips for me?

NB: Yes, I aware there will almost certainly be no print papers within the decade.

NB: And yes, I am aware that the medium that is slowly killing journalism as we've known it has created  the opportunity to have this conversation here, for which I am most grateful and which I find both fulfilling and full of infinite possibilities, yes.

What Communism Wrought

Six or seven years ago, we were having, as we often did in our home in Los Angeles, a few interesting people over for drinks. We would drink in the basement, where there was a full bar, and I mean a real old-fashioned wood bar, with room for eight of ten people at the rail and brass nameplates where the regulars had sat. The house had, decades earlier, been a Shriners hall, and when they left, they left the bar. Anyway, on this evening, two of the remaining people at evening's end were the political cartoonist Roman Genn, and Stuart Swezey, who owned Amok Books. I wasn't there for the beginning of the conversation, but could not help but hear the midpoint, as Roman's voice was rising; this, because Stuart was apparently expressing his admiration for communism, as it existed in the former Soviet Union.

"You're fucking kidding me," said Roman, who grew up in Moscow, and as a political cartoonist, had numerous run-ins with the police state until immigrating, in 1991, at the age of 19, to the US. "Have you BEEN there?" he asked Stuart. "Have you LIVED under this regime?"

Stuart had not, but he would not be divested of his idea that communism was a beautiful dream, all that equality, and sure, it hadn't worked out, but the ideal...

"No! No fucking ideal!" Roman was saying. Roman is a very, very funny guy, and he tried, a little, to inject some levity into explaining to Stuart that he had no idea what he was talking about, a position I roundly seconded, believing then as I only more strongly believe now, that communism is the very worst of the worst*, that it will only and only can lead to oppression and mass murder. (For a quick tour 'round, try Martin Amis's Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million.)

I am recalling this today for two reasons: I am in New York, at my mother's apartment, at the breakfast table where I used to debate communism with my late stepfather,  David Levine, a lifelong communist and someone who felt as Swezey did. Always a great way to start the day. And also, because of today's NYT front page story, about journalists around Moscow being beaten, stabbed, having their brains kicked in and worse when they call out the authorities for any reason, at which point others in authority not only do not press charges against the assailants, but against the journalists. Want change? they seem to say. Fuck you. Here's a kick in the teeth instead.

*As David posits in the comments, Nazi fascism was worse, to which I will add, it was no picnic under Pol Pot. But aside from wackadoos and hate groups, you don't have people waxing poetic -- as they do about communism -- about how utopian it would have been if only those terror regimes had worked out.

A Writers' Writer: John McPhee

I dreamt last week that, in the course of and for my work, I needed to read someone named Rebecca Mead. When I woke up, I wondered who she was and if she were even a writer. I googled her; she's a staff writer for The New Yorker, so it is likely I've seen her byline but it had not stuck. I immediately went out and bought her book, and also downloaded from The New Yorker site three of her articles. One is a profile of the current director of the Metropolitan Museum, and Mead wrote (in a separate piece) that when she was doing her research, she "read with pleasure--and considerable envy--John McPhee's lengthy, fascinating profile of Thomas P. Hoving, who was the museum's director from 1967 until 1977."

You can, if you subscribe to The New Yorker, read the whole thing online, as the magazine has digitally archived every page of every issue. The first thing you will notice, if you get to the Hoving profile, which runs sixty pages, is how very many ads there are in the magazine; leafing through these is a museum experience in itself. But downloading and printing would have been a veritable bear, and so I bought a collection that contains the essay, which I read in one big gulp yesterday morning. This is the very finest writing of its kind: perfectly paced and measured, masterfully constructed, illuminating, playful. Superb in every way, it made me realize what the phrase "trip the light fantastic" means, or can mean.

Extra bonus: if you have an iPhone, you can download the images Hoving refers to as you read.

Alexander McQueen's Final Bow

Cathy Horyn on Alexander McQueen. Fine, fine journalism.

Michael Totten, "Twenty Years After the Fall of the Tyrant"

My admiration for my friend Michael Totten grows exponentially with the number of countries he travels to and writes about. He's made his career as an international correspondant under his own terms, and is as good as anyone writing in the field. Today's post is about Romania, twenty years after the fall of Ceausescu. Here, you will find Michael speaking with members of Parliment, and attending a Bucharest press conference where Joe Biden expresses his appreciation for Romania's troops alongside America's in Afghanistan, in Iraq.

What also marks Michael's brilliance, for me, is his range of scholarship, as when he observes how Romania's urban landscapes so brutally reflect the ugliness that is totalitarianism.

The brilliant Anthony Daniels, who now writes under the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, loathes ghastly brutalist architecture as much as I do. He properly blames the Swiss architect Le Corbusier and his baleful influence for wrecking so many once beautiful cities like Bucharest and even marring cities like London.

"Le Corbusier was to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform," Daniels recently wrote in City Journal. "In one sense, he had less excuse for his activities than Pol Pot: for unlike the Cambodian, he possessed great talent, even genius. Unfortunately, he turned his gifts to destructive ends, and it is no coincidence that he willingly served both Stalin and Vichy." Le Corbusier, he says, "was the enemy of mankind" and "does not belong so much to the history of architecture as to that of totalitarianism."

...

On a blank gray wall in the parking lot across from my hotel, an artist painted cogs in a machine the size of Godzilla chewing the city to pieces.

photo by Michael Totten

Go read the whole thing.

The Modern Family Falls Apart

The older I get, the more of a crock of shit I realize the whole, "we can have it all!" cri de couer of the 70s was. You know what? If you have kids, and you work, you surely can have it all, and then some, as Katie Rosman writes in today's Wall Street Journal, about when she left her two little kids in New York with their dad, in order to cover a story in LA. Oh, the tears, the nightmares, the betrayal! Here's her four-year-old, talking to his teacher:

Teacher: How are you?
Son: Not good.
Teacher: What’s wrong?
Son: I had a bad dream last night.
Teacher: What happened in the dream?
Son: I dreamed my mommy worked at the Wall Street Journal.

Don't get me wrong; I love my work; I love that my daughter grew up with a mother that worked; I'm glad this is pretty much the norm and think we -- the larger we -- are  generally the better for it. But no one should delude themselves into thinking that children are behind this idea, not when they're little. They want you around, and they tell you, and show you, for instance, here's Tafv, when she was four, and I'd just returned home from ten days on the road, during which I drove to interview John Wayne Gacy.

Mama, why did you leave me?

I had to work baby.

But why?

I had a story to do, honey. I'm home now.

But I dreamt you got in a car, a big car, and I was in the street and I could see you through the back window, and I started running after the car, and you were just looking at me out the window, and the car was going faster, and I was crying, and running, and trying to grab onto the back of the car.

This was sixteen years ago that she first told me this dream, and it still feels like getting hit in the throat with a rock. It probably helps that she told it to me again dozens of times over the years; she did not forget, and neither did I.

 

Christopher Hitchens, Matt Taibbi, Mark Bowden... Nancy Rommelmann?

Apparently, this is the company I run with: my article on sexting, "Anatomy of a Child Pornographer," for Reason magazine, named amongst the Best Journalism 2009. Yup.

Another Soldier of God Bites the Dust

My pal Joel Millman has a nice piece in the Wall Street Journal about Laura Silsby, the American charged with child abduction for trying to take 33 children out of Haiti, first on the grounds they were orphans, then with the claims that their parents consented, hoping the children would have a shot at better lives. What a brutal choice that would be, but in any event, the piece clearly shows that Silsby, whatever you think of her intentions, was unqualified to do the job for the most pedestrian of reasons, including the inability to float her own businesses or keep her house out of foreclosure, a multi-million dollar runaway kid center that smells like pure delusion, and an unforgivable naivete about international law. Silsby has not, in the past, let her inadequacies faze her, as when she told a creditor unsuccessfully trying to collect a $320,o00 debt, "But for God, we wouldn't be getting through this tough time."

Silsby's created another tough time for herself, one the State Department is having to foot at least part of the bill for, saying it will "continue to provide appropriate consular assistance and to monitor the developments in the legal case." I don't know about you, but I don't feel like paying for others' salvation fantasies. If you read the comments on the WSJ site, you will see this attitude identified as the heart of the problem.

What do you think?