"... Sometimes life's OK"
A massive, overdue update

I.

The Cool Bean Coffee Shop in South Temple is like Flightpath meets the soccer mom.
It sits in the corner of a small, freshly built strip center. There’s track lighting on the ceiling and local art on the walls. As I type, it’s being patronized mostly by a group of blabbering high schoolers.

Next to the front door a singer/songwriter maybe 14 years old is perched behind a mic. Her voice is surprisingly good, able to shift seamlessly between octaves — although she plays guitar about as confidently as a third-time roller skater. I see one of her friends is videotaping the event and giving her thumbs up from behind the camera.

Hidden by the horde of hormoning high schoolers are two tables full of their parents and, in the back corner where I’m sitting, a few college kids with laptops. One guy is already sporting that wild-eyed, fussed-hair look. I bet he’s a grad student.

Behind the sleek granite counter a poor, overworked teenage soul cranks out iced coffee drinks for the ever-regenerating line. I would feel at home if only my laptop would pick up the wi-fi connection, which the girl next to me flaunts by using instant messenger.

This is Temple for you, a strange mix of Austin suburbanite delicacy and Everywhere, U.S.A. Strip malls and highways. SUVs and 18-wheelers. Loads of severely fat people and at least four Christian music stations. A medical school, a couple colleges, and lots of kids looking to where they’ll move next. Hospitality, courtesy, and yet, impersonality. Then for spice, sprinkle in a sizeable black population and a number of military vets.

I found out about this coffee place when I covered the Taste of the Town symphony fundraiser, where they had a table. I think I insulted the owner when one of the first questions I asked him was how a small coffee shop like his competed with entrenched establishments such as Starbucks.

“We don’t really compete with Starbucks,” he said with disapproval. “We’re totally different.”

I shrugged it off. Seemed like a fair question to me, considering Temple is dominated by chain-everything. Eventually, we got to chatting. He gave me a free mocha and a coupon, told me to stop by. Now I’m here, hoping to meet a cute med student.

I see that the crowd has slowly shifted to a group of college dudes with shaggy hair wearing polo shirts. They’re taking turns passing the guitar back and forth, singing (they aren’t bad) and goofing around: heirs to John Mayer’s throne. The rest of the place has cleared out, except for a trickle of people about my age.

If I could find a few more places like this, I think I could grow to actually like this town. Anywhere with even a vague sense of personality is nice. I’d also like to walk into a place besides work and be recognized. It would help to have regular hangouts, to possess them in a sense, call them my own, and make this town feel a little more like home.


II.

I could tell from the get-go that I would be up and down about my job, and by extension my decision to come to Temple. Today was an up day.

This morning my main project was to check on the regulatory investigation into the death of the woman who was left in the back of the van.

(By the way, I should add that my description of how that story played wasn’t entirely accurate: Turns out the Waco paper was also able to get a late quote from the family, plus more specific information from the Texas Dept. of Human Services spokeswoman. I thought my story was better written — no bias there — but they had a couple of nuggets of information I should have included. Call it my Christmas in Cambodia moment.)

I called. The spokeswoman said she’d fax something this afternoon as soon as she had it. I called some other interviews. They weren’t available. I transcribed some old interviews. I went to lunch. I fucked around on the Internet for a while.

Finally, about 4 p.m., the fax comes rolling in, all 18 pages of it. Trouble: sources are hard to come by this late on short notice.

Luckily, everyone I needed to talk to — the spokeswoman, the lawyer for the family, and the receptionist at the nursing home (just to get my requisite “No comment”) — was available. A journalist’s dream.

More importantly, when I sat down to write, I felt in control for the first time. Before, when I’d written a solid story, I had been unsure of myself, like I was crossing a river by leaping from rock to rock. This time I knew where I wanted to go, I knew I had the information I needed, and I cranked it out in a relatively short time: 3.5 hours from fax to finish, including some office discussion (more on that later). The form is becoming easier, finally.

I scooted out of the office on a mild satisfaction high and headed straight to the Cool Bean. Chilled for a bit. Came home about 10:30, hopped the fence to the pool and swam some laps. Cooked probably the best batch of pasta I’ve ever made. About the only thing I didn't do was fuck around and get a triple-double. Still, a good day.

But when I was lying on the floor with Swim-Ear down in my drum, I found myself thinking that this series of stories on this woman’s death are going to make great clips. It is one of the ugly facts of this business that tragedies are blessings. There will always be that mix of feelings about such a story — pride that I told it well; embarrassment that I benefited from it; a coldness in my detachment — so I had better get used to it.

At the same time, I have to think about clips, because I have to look toward moving on. It’s not that this paper is intolerable. There are some things to like about both it (the freedom, for one) and the city (my apartment, for another). But the paper’s greatest flaw, from the highest levels of management to the internal editorial staff, is that it has no push to improve. There are so many things wrong with the paper, but there are also a select few that, if fixed, would improve the Telegram in great leaps. Problem is, no one in the right positions wants to advocate for them. No designer scrutinizes the layout — when even a light redesign would make the single greatest improvement to the paper. No editor suggests we hire a copyeditor, so that we don’t have a front-page story about four people who died in a fire and typos in their obituaries on page 8C. No one has explained to the publisher that it actually makes bad business sense to post only the first two paragraphs of our stories on the Web site, which looks like it was designed with an AOL template anyways.

It is telling, I think, that only the young staffers such as Dana (the photog) and myself (and Lilly when she was here) check on a daily basis to see how our work stacks up against the other area papers that covered the same event.

While there is room to do good work at this paper — and more than a little is done day in, day out — the absence of a general critical eye creates an atmosphere of stagnation that anyone who hopes to move forward simply cannot tolerate for too long, lest they retard their own talents as well.

So I apologize, Hazel Forsythe. Can you ever forgive me for grave robbing?


An illustration

Feel free to stop reading here, if you like. What follows is just me bitching about the job, although I think it does show how this paper inhibits talent and holds itself back. This will be the one and only time, I hope, that I devote space to my gripes.

This week I had my first two front-page photos published.

The first one came on Sunday, at the Taste of the Town fundraiser. They told me to take the shitty, shitty point and shoot digital that the cops beat reporter uses. I took probably six photos, several of them unusable because the shutter response was so delayed, before the freshly charged batteries died on me. Luckily, I got a usable shot of a chocolate fountain. I made my editors aware of the problem.

The next day I got to cover Gen. Tommy Franks’ book signing at a Hastings in Killeen. I arrived a bit early and was stopped at the door by some pudgy twerp with a pony tail pulled back, the sides of his head shaved, and a wimpy little goatee who gave me all kinds of shit because I didn’t have a press badge (which the Telegram doesn’t issue) or a business card (which they haven’t given me yet). He finally allowed me in — by rolling his eyes and waving his head toward the press section, mind you — with my, again, crappy fucking camera and gave me an annoyed look like he was doing me the biggest fucking favor. I thought about shoving a copy of “American Soldier” up his ass and telling him we’d save our free publicity for someone else, but that’s another story for someone with more balls than me.

In the media section: three local news crews, two actual photographers with digital SLRs, another young reporter, and me, the happy journalist tourist taking snapshots for his scrapbook.

Finally Franks shows up, but he says literally five sentences to the media and walks to his table. Everybody scrambles to get a good shot before they kick us out of the area. Eventually, one guy ends up pulling a chair next to a bookcase by the signing table and shooting over it, and I have to follow suit.

Now, as if I didn’t already feel unprofessional enough, I’m standing on a chair, holding the my arms above my head, taking a photograph of the former Commander in Chief of the United States Central Command, who oversaw two wars, with a camera that doesn’t even have a zoom and runs on AA batteries for Christ’s sake. And it’s probably going to run on the front page.

I got something that worked, I wrote a good puff piece, but the whole experience left me feeling like a chump. Unprofessional barely even covers it.

Then at lunch today, Dana tells me that we have a brand new Nikon D2H — god among cameras — just sitting in the supply room waiting for the new photographer to arrive. It’s been there since I got here.

Dana and I bring this up, among other things, later with the editors. Mainly, we’re talking with the ostensible photo editor, D.S.

Now, the sad fact of the matter is that D.S. only has a job because he went to journalism school with the managing editor. He is old and frumpy. He shuffles around and mumbles when he talks to you. But worst of all, he is, to put it lightly, completely incompetent.

So when I raise the point that sending me to an event like the Franks signing with the P&S, it not only hurts the quality of our front-page dom art, it makes me look unprofessional and it makes our paper look bad, too. The other editor, J. the Republican, nods his head and say, “I agree with you on that.” I suggest that on these special occasions, we allow me to take one of the older, back-up digital SLRs and get a real photo.

But D.S. only shakes his head and mumbles something about how he can use the cameras, too, and that he’s been in the business for three decades and, “Well, if we’d had a photo request in place like we’re supposed to, then Dana could have been there instead of at the council meeting.”

“Yeah, but in this case—” Dana tries before he cuts her off.

“And we decided we didn’t want just anyone using D2H, and [the M.E.] agreed with me on that. And once the new photographer gets here next week both photographers are going to have two bodies each, and…”

I tuned him out. It was no use. There was an excuse for anything we could come up with, and I wasn’t going to get my hands on a digital SLR for no other reason than I was a reporter, no matter what the circumstances.

Before when I’d talked to D.S., I just felt uncomfortable. It makes me uneasy to be in the presence of someone approaching the end of an utterly failed career. There are plenty of unspectacular people at the Telegram who do solid work, enjoy what they do, and I’m glad they’re on the staff. But looking at D.S., I always felt a mixture of pity and fear. When you’re just starting out, and you’ve got stars in your eyes, the last thing you want to see is someone just waiting to be buried.

But in a way, he taught me a couple things today. First, if I’m ever in a leadership position, I won’t traffic in excuses. Everyone involved can see right through them, and I’d be much better off admitting to a missed opportunity and finding a way to flexibly deal with remedying the problem.

Watching D.S. shuffle and mumble and prevaricate, I realized his was the push-over mindset that held this paper back. The feeling of unutilized ability and wasted talent only reinforces that, for all the up days like today, they must be numbered if I want to get anywhere worth going.