A Cup of Water Under My Bed Page 15

  I stare at the carpet. He continues. “What’s remarkable is that when you look across socioeconomic levels, black boys consistently do badly in school. It doesn’t matter if they’re living in Westchester or Harlem.”

  The air around me grows thin, choking.

  “By comparison,” he says, “Chinese kids do well in school even when they just got here yesterday.” He chuckles. “It’s like it’s genetic.”

  I glance at him to make sure he is really here in the room with me, that he has actually said those words. I don’t expect to see the familiar face of the skinny man I have known for two months. Surely his words have distorted his forehead and his eyelids and his nostrils. But no such thing has happened. He is still the same man with the flaco face and a high-up job at an important institution. A Mr. Uribe. He grins at me, like we’re best friends.

  In Times Square, the taxis blare, the trucks screech, the tourists squeal and position themselves for photos. It’s August and the air is thick with humidity and the grease of hotdogs being sold by street vendors. The tourists point their cameras at each other and then up at the billboards. They have come from all parts of the country and the world to be here under these towering ads and bright lights, and as I watch them I begin to consider that maybe I don’t want to be here.

  It’s not because of Mr. Flaco the Racist. Or Mr. Uribe the Killer. I don’t know what it is. The streets vibrate with too many people, and the billboards tower over us with white faces, white teeth, white summer cotton, and I find that I don’t have the words. As much as I want to leave, I can’t.

  This is my big opportunity, the moment I have been preparing for my whole life. People like me, from the community I come from, we don’t just get to work at the New York Times. Rosa Parks sat down, Martin Luther King Jr. stood up, and my parents paid for Catholic high school so I could be here. Whatever I do, I can’t say no. I have to say yes, yes, and yes again.

  When Gail asks if I want to pursue this journalism business, I say yes, and I find myself with a year-long internship on the third floor reporting for the metro desk.

  Newsrooms are set up like mazes.

  It is an endless series of desks and television screens, and everywhere you turn is another white man. You are meant to be the intern who gets lost and can’t find the elevators, or at least I am. Looking out across the third floor, I see only receding hairlines, white foreheads, and bushy eyebrows. Somewhere in that I am supposed to find an editor with a name like Bob or Jennifer. Locating my new desk—amid the clacking of keyboards and droning of television news—becomes my accomplishment that first week.

  It doesn’t take long, though, to see that I am missing a crucial asset: a talent for talking to white men.

  I have a good deal of experience with white women. I learned their mannerisms right alongside lessons in English, algebra, and chemistry. If I count my entire schooling starting with kindergarten, that is nineteen years of studying white women. It is easy, then, to now make small talk with them. I nod sympathetically about children, inquire about their favorite movies, commiserate about the morning commute.

  But white men are different.

  After two weeks in the newsroom, I see that talking to white men boils down to a crude combination of cracking jokes about children and the morning commute, referring to sports teams and events at random, and imparting snide comments about this book or that article. It is especially impressive if you can comment on something buried deep in a news story, since everyone knows that no one actually reads the story to the end. Talking to white men, then, has a pattern, a set of rules, but try as I might, I can’t learn them. My mind blanks when they joke with me. I find myself nodding and looking the other way, hoping they will leave me alone.

  What’s worse is that I have absolutely no instinct for reporting. None.

  “Here’s the news release,” an editor tells me. “I need copy by three.”

  I nod, sit at my computer, and look at the paper. Something about a food-borne illness. I stare at the words and wonder what I’m supposed to do.

  Writing an opinion, even a stiff editorial, comes easily to me. My mind immediately reaches for questions, important points, people to interview. But reporting produces in me a condition akin to stage fright. My body freezes, my mind stares at a blank white wall. Even though I’m doing exactly what I would do in the editorial department, here in the newsroom, without the option of forming an opinion, I have to remind myself of what to do: make calls, ask questions, quote, summarize, send to editor, wait.

  After that first story, editors send me to get quotes from people on the street about an increase in subway fares. Then to interview people on the street about the mayor’s new idea to ban loud noises. Then to take the subway to Brooklyn, because a fire there has killed a black child. Then to a Latino event to get the governor’s reaction. Eight hours become ten, eleven, twelve. The copy editors call at seven, eight, and nine at night.

  In the morning, I board the subway, exhausted. I spot that day’s paper in someone’s hands. A small thrill comes into my heart. Someone is about to read one of my stories. But the woman scans the headlines, flips the pages, and then folds the paper and stores it in her bag.

  That’s it. Twelve hours of work—by hundreds of reporters, stringers, editors, copy editors, designers, and deliverymen—were considered for a total of five seconds by a white woman on the Number 6 train. I meet humility for the first time, and I hate it.

  One of the other young reporters decides that we need to meet with veterans at the paper for informal conversations about the business. This is her code for “I’m trying to move up,” and the rest of us agree that it’s a good idea. Someone from the powers-that-be says we can meet on the fourteenth floor, where the big private events happen.

  I arrive early. I want to enjoy the quiet here, the cathedral windows, the sense that the city and even the newsroom, with its ringing phones and chatty television screens, are at a distance.

  The veteran reporter steps into the room. He’s an older man with a kind voice and gentle smile. We exchange a hello, but then his eyebrows furrow. He’s staring at a door off to the side of the room. “Is the stairwell through there?” he asks.

  “I think so.”

  He’s lost now in his own world as he walks over and props the door open. I follow him. In the stairwell, he pauses at one of the windows, mentions the editor, the white man who killed himself, and grows silent.

  The window pane here is dusty and viejo. It’s late in the afternoon, and the light bathes the parapets of the building and even, I suppose, the place where the man met his final moment. The older reporter stares out the window, then inspects the frame and sighs deeply, and I begin to understand that I believed the TV shows I watched as a child. I believed bad things didn’t happen to white people, not in places like this. But now here is the window, the man grieving, the light golden and punishing.

  While I’m reporting for the Times, my father is spending his days in the basement where he’s made a room of his own, apart from my mother and tías. He has his beer, his radio, even a mattress so he can take naps. He has set up a shower for himself.

  I am afraid of finding him dead in the basement one day. Already once, he drank too much, fell, and cut his head open, and we had to rush him to the emergency room. But there is no use trying to get him out of the basement. It is a blessing that he lets me take him now for a visit to the doctor.

  The waiting room is large enough for about fifty people, but it doesn’t have a television, so everyone looks bored and restless. Papi is dressed in dark jeans, construction boots, and a flannel button-down shirt over a white Hanes T-shirt. He asks me about the New York Times, and I confide that I’m not liking it. He stares at the floor and says nothing.

  Inside, he sits on the examination table, and I take the chair reserved for spouses or parents. I figure my father won’t say anything about what I shared, but then without my prompting, he comments, “Tú piensas que a mí me gust
a mi trabajo? A mí no me gusta mi trabajo. A tu mamá tampoco.”

  That is what I record in my journal that night: “Do you think I like my work? I don’t like my work. Your mother doesn’t like hers either.”

  When the doctor arrives, I begin moving back and forth between Spanish and English admonishments: stop drinking, stop smoking, eat more vegetables, more fruits, more oranges.

  “Oranges?” my father exclaims in Spanish. “No. That’s all I ate in Cuba, only oranges. No oranges.”

  The doctor and I look at each other. After so many years of working in our community, he knows, like I do, that there is no use in arguing against memory.

  Nor do I disagree with my father about whether or not people should have work they enjoy. But the next morning, I notice I have a hard time getting out of bed. Not an impossible time. Just a heaviness about me, as if the air itself were an open hand holding me down.

  It’s a cool night in November and I am walking on the Upper East Side, past doormen and women in three-inch heels hailing cabs and men in their fifties walking dogs the size of their briefcases. I am, as usual, lost in my inner world. I am contemplating a conversation or rewriting an article or wondering about the origin of three-inch heels. I am acutely aware of the streets in Manhattan, of the way darkness never wins here, not even at night, but is always kept at bay by street lamps and the bobbing headlights of taxis and limos and buses. The city is a blitz of lights and sounds and smells, but I have learned to shut it out, to be in my own quiet place.

  Tonight, however, is different.

  I turn a corner, and the city yanks me from my inner world. Fifty feet up in the air is Kermit the Frog, his belly nearly touching the top of the street lamps, his fingers reaching to tap the windows of high rise buildings, his inflated balloon body covering a chunk of the Manhattan street.

  It’s the night before Thanksgiving Day, and the balloons are being prepared for their annual walk in the Macy’s parade. It’s the sort of the thing that can only happen in New York, not the balloons but finding their giant faces and hands around the corner, the way they make even this city feel small, insignificant. It feels magical and bizarre too, how the world can contain all of this, the plastic green frog, the memories and the oranges, the dead white man.

  Editors were invented for several reasons, one of which is to torture interns.

  It’s a metro editor who decides that interns will spend time on the police beat helping to cover New York City’s homicides, rapes, and robberies. The work mostly involves chatting with white police officers in charge of information they won’t give you unless the two of you get along and they consider you something of a person they’d want to have a beer with. To say that I’m terrible at this would be putting it kindly.

  The rest of the work, at least for me, involves watching a veteran reporter with reddish curls call the families of crime victims and say in a mournful tone, “I’m sorry for your loss. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”

  The first few times, I stare at him, and when it’s no longer polite to do so, I pretend to read online while listening to him. He sounds genuine and compassionate during every phone call. He modulates the tone of his voice, and I note how his English is comforting, the way a hand-rolled cigar feels, as if the earth has been gathered up, made compact, held steady. His voice reaches out to the other person, yes, but it also allows for mutual silence and then directs back to the questions, the information that’s needed, the interview.

  Then, the call is over, the moment has passed, and he’s on to other calls, detectives, cops, higher-ups, and he’s issuing orders, because another paper caught a piece of information we should have, and I’m off to the Bronx for a story about a young man named Buddha.

  The hierarchy of pain has nuances.

  The fact that Buddha murdered someone is news, because the victim was a child. If the child had been a few years older, if he had been not a child but instead a young black man, the editor would have said, “Victim and perp knew each other,” which is the preferred way to explain that black men killing each other in the Bronx is not news.

  But Buddha murdered a child, and he did so three days after Christmas, on a day when the news was slow.

  He’s in jail now, Buddha. It’s his mother we are after. Me and reporters and stringers for local newspapers. I interview the neighbors and note the holiday decorations (“Peace and Joy”). Later, the district attorney’s office will say that Buddha got his name because he was tall and fat, and that three days after Christmas, Buddha was bruised, not on his body but somewhere else. His heart or his ego. Another man, another tall, overweight black man had teased Buddha. Words were thrust back and forth between them, threatened to erupt into fists, into gunshots, but the women stepped in. The novias. And the air became if not calm, then, at least, still. Buddha and the man parted ways.

  But Buddha followed him, not the man, but the man’s little cousin, thirteen-year-old Brandon. In an elevator, Buddha towered over the youngster, and while boasting of how he planned to hurt the other man, his mirror image, Buddha shoved Brandon against the wall of the elevator and shot him in the head.

  The elevator reached the twelfth floor. It was after midnight. The door must have opened then, mechanically, indifferently, and spilt the boy’s blood.

  Now the elevator door creaks open and Buddha’s mother steps into the narrow hallway. She’s pushing a shopping cart. It has two six packs of beer. She refuses, however, to talk to us as she opens the door to her apartment. She’s a heavy black woman with colorless eyes and deep lines set in her face, and my first thought is that no one is going to tell her story, the story of how she probably falls asleep at night in front of the television set with a can of beer still open, like my father, and how she raised a family here so many hundreds of feet above the Bronx, and how she bathed Buddha when he was an infant and fed him WIC baby formula and now all she wants to do is smack him.

  There are also the other stories, the ones about how these neighborhoods were set up, how white men decided where black families would live, how it came to be that Buddha grew up in a place where you carry a gun to come and go from home and kill a boy who looks like a younger version of yourself.

  I don’t have words for these other stories, only the feeling of them inside of me like pebbles piled at the corner of a child’s desk.

  There were other black reporters in the newsroom at the New York Times besides Jayson Blair. When I think back to that time, though, to the spring of 2003, I can only see Jayson.

  He is writing front-page stories for the paper about Iraq War veterans. I know he was once an intern like me, but what I haven’t figured out yet is if he’s quiet and withdrawn because he’s brilliant or if something is wrong with him. The fact that he wears long sweaters instead of shirts and ties unsettles me. It isn’t the sort of thing a white man would do here, let alone a young black man. I keep wanting to tuck his shirt in. I tease him once or twice about being short. He’s polite, but it’s clearly a sore point with him, and I leave him alone.

  It turns out, though, that he has good reason to keep to himself. Jayson is drinking, lying, and plagiarizing his stories. Front-page stories.

  “Did you hear?” another intern asks me.

  I nod. “Crazy.” I figure the paper will run an apology and move on.

  But there isn’t an apology. The story unravels. The anxieties of white people, the ones kept behind private doors, burst and the other newspapers report them: Jayson only got as far as he did because he’s black. A fellow intern comes up to me, irritated. “Why are people thinking it’s okay to say racist shit in front of me?”

  She’s holding a cup of coffee. We both glance across the newsroom, across the cubicles and the tops of people’s heads. I have no way, none really, of knowing who in the room is a Mr. Flaco, and this is part of the agreement we make by working here, as people of color. We don’t know who harbors doubts about our capacity to think and work and write. We don’t know
, not really, who we can trust.

  Jayson, meanwhile, is rumored to be shut away in his apartment, and as a friend of mine puts it, the white people do then what they always do when they get nervous: they call a meeting.

  The meeting is held on Forty-Fourth Street, in a theater. I get in line along with hundreds of reporters and administrative staff and editors. The executive editor and managing editor and publisher sit before us on a stage. They’re going to explain what happened. Sort of.

  There isn’t an easy way to tell us that someone who was mentally unstable managed to get a job at the world’s most recognized newspaper and snuck lies past more than one or two or even three editors. I sit in the audience and inspect my identification card. I don’t like sports where a person is put in a ring to get beat up. Besides, no one is going to talk about race. Not in an honest way.

  But I’m wrong.

  The executive editor, Howell Raines, has the mic. He’s from the South, he reminds us, a place where a man has to choose where he stands on race. “Does that mean I personally favored Jayson? Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama with those convictions, gave him one chance too many. . . .”

  I wince and I pray that he won’t go there, because if he does it will not be cute. It will not be understood by the hundreds of white people in the theater. But he does it. He goes there.

  Did he, as a white man from Alabama, give a young black man too many chances? “When I look into my own heart for the truth of that,” he admits, “the answer is yes.”

  It’s been eight years since that day in the theater, and I’m thinking again about a white man confessing to his own people that he cared about the black community, that he thought he could single-handedly change a hierarchy. I’m thinking about the whiteness of the news organization and how that whiteness reproduced itself with every hire, every promotion, but that is not a scandal.

  He left, the editor. He was fired and the metro editor—a white man who once told me that community-based organizations, the ones helping poor people of color, were no longer relevant—was hailed as a savior because he had tried to stop Jayson from writing for the paper.