Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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Mortification
The other day, the guy on the bar stool next to me said he was sick
and tired of journalists making stuff up.
Not all journalists do that, I protested.
“Sez who, ya chowderhead, ya,” he growled in the kind of endearing local
patois that gives a person instant credibility. “Youse guys are always
falsificatin’ things and if you ain’t, you’re stealin’ ’em, like glances
at a pretty dame over your wife’s shoulder,” he added, employing a charmingly
homespun if oddly archaic metaphor.
I studied his face. He looked half black, half white and half Latino,
a cross section of people in the Washington Post circulation area. He spoke
with raw wisdom burnished on the half-deserted streets of the capital city,
where the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized
upon a gurney.
“Only bad journalists plagiarize,” I said. I bought him a Blatz, and
we got to jawing, me and him. Guys like him and me, we say things like
“me and him” because bad grammar is a sign of being a “real person.”
My new friend belched. It was the sound of a refrigerator being pushed
across a linoleum floor. Then he loosened his size 42 tan Naugahyde belt
and drew the back of his meaty, freckled hand across his mouth to mop the
froth from his lips, gestures that are so adjectivally detailed they cannot
possibly be made up.
Then he told me this story: Several years ago, while working as a garbage
man in D.C., he hauled a big can out of a driveway, and just as he was
about to sling the contents into the grinder at the back of the truck,
something made him look down. Maybe it was his crucifix, which got tangled
in the handle of the garbage can. Maybe it was God. Maybe it was just dumb
luck. Maybe it was whatever you call the thing that tangles up a crucifix
in a garbage can and then tangles up your life so bad it hurts real good,
like pyorrhea. Whatever it was, it didn’t make much sense, but if you’re
reading kind of fast and aren’t kind of smart it kind of makes you think,
don’t it?
So he looks down and inside the garbage can is a baby, her curly head
and Kewpie doll mouth just inches from the ravenous jaws of the grinder,
which is busy turning veal bones and Brillo into blobby mincemeat.
Now my friend the garbage man had done a lot of bad things, even once
tried suicide. So he thought he’d do at least one good deed before he died.
This is a man who had once pistol-whipped a pimp, who had once been a guard
at Treblinka, who once blinded six cows and a hamster out of sheer cussedness.
But get this: He cradles the baby gently in his vein-roped arms, and takes
her home to his cold-water flat.
“I figures, I have to dummy up or some pencil-pusher is gonna take this
kid away from me and put her in a foster home with a proper mom and pop,
but they’ll treat her like crap because to them she’s just a monthly paycheck
instead of the most precious thing on Earth that was thrown away like garbage,”
he says, using a vulgarity mild enough to be printed in a family newspaper,
while expressing a populist mistrust of bureaucracy.
So he raises her into womanhood, in secret. He has her teeth straightened
and teaches her to ride a pony and handle a stick shift and play the accordion
and write a business letter and dress with muted good taste, until she
becomes a beautiful, accomplished young woman who one day walks off in
Gucci pumps to make her way in the world.
He watches her go, smiling and waving, and he says to himself, Now I
know I have a heart, because it’s breaking.
My new friend got up from the bar stool and walked to the door. He turned
around, framed against the light of a full moon. In that doorway, backlit,
seen in stark chiaroscuro, he looked like the Grim Reaper, or Hopalong
Cassidy, or some goddamn slumming angel.
“That girl,” he said, “grew up to be Monica Lewinsky.”
And he walked unsteadily out into the soiled night.
Me, I headed for the office. I had a big-city column to write.
(Weingarten is a writer for The Washington Post, where this article
originally appeared. ©1998, The Washington Post. Reprinted with permission.)
