Читать книгу Grievances - Mark Ethridge - Страница 11

I showed up for work the next day desperate for a byline and with my stomach churning over Walker Burns’s pending decision. The notice that the newsroom Discipline Committee needed to convene put an immediate dent in the byline hopes, although the meeting did have Live Toad potential.

The Live Toad Theory, developed by Walker, held that if you did something terrible the first thing every day, like swallow a live toad, the rest of the day would invariably go better. There was no way it was going to get worse.

At one time the Charlotte Times disciplined newsroom employees like everybody else: management decided who screwed up and what the consequences should be. Bowing to staff complaints that the process was inconsistent and favored some groups of employees over others, management established an employee-run Discipline Committee to hear evidence in disciplinary cases and make recommendations as to the appropriate outcome. While the recommendations weren’t binding and management retained the right to do whatever it wanted, it seldom overruled the committee. Staffers rotated on and off the committee and, as it happened, this month I was in the barrel along with three others. The process was often petty and humiliating and, if nothing else, it was time away from what we were paid to do: report, edit, take pictures, or design pages. Given my standing in The Great Byline Count, it was time I couldn’t afford to lose.

“Who is it now?” I asked Walker.

“Bullock,” he said with a shrug.

We gathered after first edition deadline in the dark-paneled boardroom beside the publisher’s office on the third floor, away from the prying eyes of the newsroom where there were reporters who could read lips through glass conference room walls. The lighting was low and indirect. I sat at a long conference table, swallowed up in a huge, black, high-backed chair. I felt small, as if I were a kid playing executive.

The other members of the committee were already seated and Walker had just taken his place at the head of the table when Ronnie Bullock walked in dressed, as usual, in khaki pants and a khaki shirt. He looked like a cop. His creased, ruddy face, big hands, and stocky frame gave the appearance of someone who worked outside. He was sixty and although his forehead had expanded a little, he still kept a thick head of reddish-brown hair. I thought of him as a short John Wayne. Newsroom lore said he carried a gun. Bullock nodded to members of the committee and took a chair.

John Hafer, the company’s director of human resources, entered. Always smiling and attentive, Hafer did his best to come across to all employees like he was their understanding advocate and friend. But everyone, including Hafer, knew that the publisher signed his paycheck. I was surprised to see him and I could tell my colleagues were, too.

“John’s here because he is the one who’s ringing the fire bell,” Walker said quickly. Walker was not part of the committee but served as the moderator. “John, let’s get to it.”

“As you know, this involves Ronnie,” he said, nodding at Bullock.

“Again,” huffed Carmela Cruz, the Times’ s diminutive front-page editor known equally for her page-design skills and her general contempt for local news and sexist behavior. No one followed up. The black-haired, black-eyed Carmela was mercurial and most found it best not to engage her.

Hafer knew it, too, and quickly plowed ahead. “It happened yesterday and I felt it best to report it to Walker. It seems we have a new assistant librarian who is, uh . . .” Hafer’s face twisted as he struggled for the right word. “She is, uh . . . She’s very . . .”

“She has a nice ass,” Bullock interrupted helpfully.

“Ronnie, you can’t say that stuff,” Walker said calmly.

“Why not?” said Bullock. “It’s verifiably true. Look at her. How can you not be allowed to say something that’s true?”

“You can think it,” Walker said. “You just can’t say it.” He turned to the committee. “I think what John’s trying to say is that Ronnie found the new assistant librarian very appealing. Would that be a good way to put it?”

“Yeah,” said Hafer, relieved at finding a way to avoid expressing a personal value judgment based on appearance.

“Bullock would find mud appealing if it had breasts,” Carmela hissed. The assistant sports editor chuckled. Carmela shot him a dagger glance and he smothered the laugh into a cough.

“Save the commentary,” Walker sighed. “Go on, John.”

“Well, apparently she was walking through the newsroom yesterday delivering some clip files and she caught Ronnie’s eye. He picked up the phone and called my office and asked me a question which is so offensive I’m not sure I can repeat it.”

“We can handle it, John,” Walker advised.

Bullock interrupted. “Hell, I just asked him a question about my pension.”

Hafer took a deep breath. “Ronnie said he understood that he would certainly be fired if he got up out of his chair and attached his mouth to the left breast of the new assistant librarian. His question to me, as the director of human relations, was whether it would affect his pension.”

The assistant sports editor cackled madly. Walker howled and I even detected a smile from Elaine Heitman, the editor of the Times’s editorial pages.

“I am outraged,” fumed Carmela, a red flush starting from her neck and moving up to her face. “Absolutely outraged. There is no room for that kind of behavior at the Charlotte Times and I will not stand for it. This needs to be a newspaper of the highest standards.”

“I agree. We cannot have our employees subject to that kind of verbal treatment,” Hafer said.

“Ronnie, did you actually say anything to the young woman?” asked Heitman. A sensible question, I thought.

Bullock had taken a penknife from his pocket, opened the blade and was examining it closely. “No,” he said, looking up from the knife. “Maybe I just should have asked directly instead of calling HR.”

Heitman ignored his sarcasm and turned to Hafer. “So there is no allegation that he was verbally abusive or engaged in any kind of sexist behavior directly to her?”

“I don’t know of any.”

“That doesn’t matter,” interjected Carmela. “What matters is his state of mind. Women do not need to be subject to this kind of mental leering. It has gone on forever and it must stop.”

“She’s just jealous I saw her first.” Bullock smirked. “There’s more dykes in her department than there are on the goddam Mississippi!” He began trimming his fingernails with the scissors on his knife.

The assistant sports editor howled.

“This is preposterous!” Carmela shrieked.

“It’s true. You should see her staring at the managing editor’s secretary’s breasts. She sits in a chair beside her desk pretending to have a conversation about personnel issues but she never takes her eyes off ’em.”

“This is libelous!” Carmela shouted, rising out of her chair. “I am not on trial here. I will not be subject to this!”

Walker struggled to get the meeting back under control. “I feel like I’m tryin’ to herd chickens. Let’s stick to the grievance.”

“You can’t punish someone for having bad thoughts or even asking rude questions,” I said. “What Ronnie did was stupid. But who got hurt?”

Heitman took off her glasses and cleared her throat. “John, employees regularly come to you with questions about company benefits and policies.” She said it as statement for him to confirm, a little like a cross-examining lawyer. “And Ronnie’s question was about his pension, correct? Whether he would lose it if he got fired for what would be considered sexual assault or sexual harassment?”

“Well, ostensibly,” Hafer said cautiously. “But I don’t think he was looking for a serious answer.”

Heitman charged ahead. “In the human relations department, are employee matters confidential? You have records about pay, medical claims that sort of thing.”

“Of course. All confidential.”

“If I asked you whether our health insurance covered a particular medical procedure, would that be confidential?”

“Of course.”

“Or how much my pension will be when I retire. Would that be confidential?”

Hafer’s face fell. He could see where this was heading. Bullock could see it, too, and he began to smile.

“Yes. But this is completely different. This wasn’t a serious benefit inquiry. This was a joke!”

“Likely, it was a joke,” said Heitman. “A bad joke, but still a joke. Either that, or it was a serious inquiry to the human relations department which is protected by confidentiality. Like Matt said, who got hurt? Frankly, I don’t see why we are even here.”

Hafer’s face turned beet red. “It was crude and offensive.”

“Does the young woman, the assistant librarian, feel sexually harassed?” Heitman asked.

“Of course not,” Hafer answered. “She doesn’t even know.”

“Do you feel sexually harassed, John? Did Bullock’s remark create a hostile work environment for you?” she probed.

If it was possible, Hafer blushed even deeper. “No, of course not. But Ronnie Bullock was way out of line and this isn’t the first time.”

“He offended you. It seems to be the normal thing would be for you to tell him that and ask for an apology. Have you done that?”

“No. I thought it was a matter for the Discipline Committee.”

“Next time, why don’t you try asking for an apology?” she said sweetly.

Walker asked Bullock if he had anything to add.

“I don’t think there’s much dispute about the facts,” he said. “I only have one question. When did we decide we were going to start policing thoughts and not just actions?”

Bullock and Hafer were dismissed from the meeting and for the next half hour the discussion plowed old ground. I was reminded of a conclusion I’d come to before: for people in the communications business, we’re pretty lousy communicators. One person gets offended and instead of just bringing it up with the individual who committed the alleged offense, a whole committee has to get involved.

Carmela put up a fight but in the end, Heitman’s view prevailed. The committee recommended to management that Ronnie Bullock apologize for expressing an offensive thought and be reminded to avoid sexist language and behavior in the future. There would be no official discipline and nothing would go in his permanent record.

Carmela had her own methods of retribution. “I cannot believe we are going to turn aside our eyes to this indignity! I can tell you that in the future we will have a very difficult time finding room for Ronnie Bullock stories on the front page . . . not that I would expect any in the first place.”

Typical Carmela. But it could have been worse. The whole thing had taken less than two hours. A rough justice had been achieved. As far as Live Toads go, the Ronnie Bullock discipline committee meeting hadn’t been that hard to swallow.

My luck held when a beat reporter called in sick and I was assigned a school board meeting that ended in a fistfight and a front-page byline for me. I had put the finishing touches on it when I looked up to see Walker Burns approaching my cubicle with an expression like the proverbial cat that swallowed the canary.

“Well, Big Shooter,” he said, sitting down and propping his feet on my desk, “you get your wish. Two weeks on Wallace Sampson. No other assignments. Unless the plane crashes.” “Unless the plane crashes” was Walker’s usual qualifier when doling out a project that would take a reporter out of the mainstream of the flow of news for a while. It meant you had freedom to pursue your project exclusively, except in the case of some overwhelming news event like a plane crash.

It was the best news I could have heard. Certainly it was the first good news I’d had in a long while. At least for two weeks, I could leave behind the world of discipline committees, hate mail, daily deadlines, and one-day wonders and count myself among the true big shooters. At least for a while, I had been given the opportunity to do real investigative reporting.

But I was also scared. Brad Hall was taking a chance on me. Walker was taking a chance on me. I was taking a chance on me. My career was dead if this didn’t work out and truth is, my gut was less confident than my mouth. I tried to be cool, like this was an everyday thing, but my throat went dry and I could only croak, “Thanks, man.”

But Walker wasn’t done. “I want to double-team this one. I’m putting you and another reporter on the story, at least for the two weeks.”

I was puzzled. It wasn’t unusual to put two reporters on a story but I knew we were short-staffed and, anyway, this was one story I had developed on my own.

“We’ll cover twice as much ground with two of you,” Walker explained. “And in terms of investigative reporting, you’re a rookie. I want you to have some help.”

“Who?”

“Bullock.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “Bullock? That’s crazy. We’re dealing with black people down there. Bullock’s a redneck. No one will talk to us.”

“Ronnie Bullock might be able to teach you something. He was a damn fine reporter once.”

“Once,” I said sullenly. “Why not someone from the projects team?”

“Because we barely have enough reporters to cover the city council meeting much less some years-old killing in a place far, far away. You tell me this could be a good story and my gut tells me you’re right and I get paid because someone decided that my gut instincts were the ones to listen to. So we’re going to do it. At least, we’re going to take the sniff. That’s all I’m committing to. But whatever we do, we have to fly below the radar. The publisher can’t know we’re putting even one staffer, especially you, on this story, much less two. If I take one of the big boys from the projects team, he’ll notice in a heartbeat.”

Walker paused. “Plus, I’ve got two other reasons.”

“What are they?”

“With the disciplinary crap with Ronnie and all this protest stuff with you, I need to get you both out of the newsroom for a while.”

“What’s the other?”

“This place is drivin’ me loco. I’ve had it with the publisher. I need a new ranch to ride. I’m lookin’ for the story that’ll punch my ticket outta here.”

Lots of us were. But it was still a shock to hear Walker say it. I couldn’t imagine working at the Times without him, but that was a discussion for another time.

There’s no question I would have preferred to go to Hirtsboro alone. And if I did need to have a partner, Ronnie Bullock wouldn’t have made the top ten on my list. But at the end of the day I’d gotten what I’d wanted.

And so was created the unlikely team that would investigate the years-old murder of Wallace Sampson: a rich Yankee blueblood with a social conscience, an occasionally embarrassing redneck reporter throwback, and me.