Excerpts From
By
Leslie Carr
Lucas Miller
Slate eBooks
Excerpted from the paperback book The Slate Diaries, to be published in November 2000 by PublicAffairs Books. Copyright 2000 by Microsoft Corporation.
Cover Illustration by Robert Neubecker.
Leslie Carr, school nurse
Ira Glass, host of This American Life
Lucas Miller, NYPD detective
Karenna Gore Schiff, daughter of the vice president
I edit the “Diary” section of Slate, but I wouldn’t dare contribute to it. This is because my job involves sitting in front of a computer in a tall office building and pecking away at my keyboard all day (I’m pecking right now). Sometimes my mother calls. See, you’ve already heard enough, haven’t you?
To write a Diary for Slate, you don’t have to be famous, and you don’t need any previous publishing experience, though some of our contributors are and have. The most important test is whether your days make for high-quality, detail-rich eavesdropping. Take the four writers who are included in this e-book excerpt. Leslie Carr is a school nurse who wrote in to nominate herself for a stint. Ira Glass, the host of the radio show This American Life, filed his dispatches when he went to Los Angeles to pitch a TV version of the show to studios. Lucas Miller is a detective with the New York City Police Department. One day he innocently e-mailed Slate to dispute a comment Scott Shuger had made in the “Today’s Papers” column, and next thing he knew, we’d signed him up for a Diary (and we’ve kept our tentacles in him: Check our archives for his “Flatfoot” pieces on police misconduct and what cops really think about marijuana). And you may already know who Karenna Gore Schiff is. She wrote this entry when she flew home from her job at Slate for a long weekend to see her folks--and to accompany them to the 1997 presidential inauguration.
No one told these writers what to say in their dispatches. When we sign up Diarists, we just pick a week for them to write, and when that time comes, they e-mail us an entry each weekday describing what they’re up to. Nor are their submissions edited in the traditional sense: After all, they’re supposed to come directly from the source, much like an e-mail a friend would send you after an eventful day (this is why we don’t allow Diaries that are supposedly from bigwigs, but are actually written by their speechwriters or public relations folk). We just check the entries for clarity, make them look presentable, and slap them up on our site a few hours after they land in our in-box.
We’ve been doing the same, week after week, for the past four years. Don’t we get some stinkers? Well, yes--and if you ever see one on Slate, please excuse us. But we left those out of the book, along with a slew of wonderful entries we simply couldn’t fit in. What the full, paperback version of The Slate Diaries does include are 66 other Diaries along with (and just as terrific as) the four in this excerpt. The authors range from Ben Stein to Beck to Bill Gates, from Dave Eggers to David Sedaris, from a UPS driver to a classified-ad writer to a summer camp counselor. And we still commission a fresh Diary each week for the magazine; check back at Slate.com every afternoon for a new installment.
As the current Diary editor, I was charged with writing this note. But I’m a newcomer, even in Slate’s short lifespan. Cyrus Krohn and Judith Shulevitz edited the feature from 1996 to 1999 and are responsible for originally bringing most of the insightful and witty narration collected here to Slate’s pages. Along with the rest of the Slate staff, they are a constant source of enlightenment, and--no insult to our Diarists intended--the best daily company I can imagine.
--Jodi Kantor
Leslie Carr is a school nurse in Pennsylvania.
Day 1
Now that I am back to work as a nurse in two elementary schools after almost 10 years at home with my children, daily life is more circumscribed. There are fewer choices about how my time is spent. I am actually less hassled, less torn in various directions than before. I used to feel that I should be doing 4,000 different things, from cleaning the garage to aerobic exercising. Now it's decided: I go to work. And when I am home, I am better able to relax. Weekends are newly distinguishable from weekdays.
Work is basically fun. If I look at the clock, it's to monitor a pulse or see when to give a dose of medication. It's not to wonder when I'm getting out of here. Since I'm so new, I would do well to model any of the nurses who have been training me. They are energetic and dedicated, with a mission to care for and educate the kids they encounter. It is impressive. There is one in particular—a willowy mommy whose natural resting expression is a smile. I've never seen anything like it. She is upbeat without being false, tender without sappiness. She strikes the perfect pitch with the kids. Her technique for telling malingerers (or frequent fliers, as we call them) to get back to class is lovely and effective and always done with that smile.
When we were tykes, we would never go to the nurse for an itch due to a bug bite or for chapped lips. It was understood that these things were parts of life with which we coped. Now such visits are commonplace. What does it mean? I see it as one of my main functions to reinforce what these kids must already sense is reality in these cases. The child says, "I have a mosquito bite." I say, "Yup. (Pause.) You have a mosquito bite. (Pause.) It's gonna itch today, and it's gonna itch tomorrow. It will probably also itch the next day until it heals." Then, just so they don't think I'm a total meanie, I teach the little trick about scratching around the bite instead of directly over the bite. Dismissed.
I wish this school district allowed the regular administration of Tylenol or ibuprofen as needed. Or, in lieu of that, I wish I had some sort of placebo to give. They're so handy. True, they foster the simple solution idea and promulgate the life view best put forth by the fast food chain "Hot 'N Now," but placebos sure would keep kids in class longer. Forty years ago, my nursery-school teacher had a sack of what she called "bump pills." They were Tootsie Rolls. When we had a boo-boo we got one. Nice deal. One day she accidentally cracked me on the head with a wooden bench and gave me the whole damn bag.
I was a hyperaware child and a stutterer to boot, so being newly immersed in the elementary-school environment makes me more than a little uneasy. I see the kids in classrooms, seats arranged in clusters or horseshoe formations, chewing pencils, jostling in the cafeteria, Hula Hooping in the gym, and I am glad to be over 35 years old. Very glad. The nurse's office was a wonderful refuge for me as a stuttering little girl. I had to run from all the required speaking—from the What I Did Last Summer gig to the seventh-grade reading of Romeo and Juliet in which everyone had a part, up and down the rows of desks, taken in turn, until the turn was mine. I'd bolt when I saw it coming. Nothing like a good stopover in the nurse's office to eat up 30 otherwise most uncomfortable minutes.
Today, if someone similar to my past little self would show up in my office, I'd be likely to draw her a bubble bath and order room service. No matter that it would be cafeteria fare: Chicken Nuggets With Tea Roll, Hash-Brown Potatoes, Winter Mix, Peach Crisp, Milk.
Day 2
OK. This is what and whom I saw today: Three fevers—two raging, one borderline. A principal who had stapled his finger and who proceeded to regress at an alarming speed once he entered my office. A sorry mixture of scabies and chicken pox. Three stomachaches. One old wound to be re-dressed. A diabetic on an insulin pump who became hypoglycemic. A child referred by her teacher because the teacher suspected that the child had not wiped her bottom properly after using the bathroom, and would I investigate that? A sore throat and a splinter. Glasses broken at recess. All the kids who receive daytime medications (only about 15 of them at this school). An asthmatic in distress. Three bumps on the head necessitating calls to the parents (school-district policy).
Calls to the parents can go several different ways. When I called the mother of the child who had broken his glasses, she was annoyed—presumably at me. I wanted to say, "Hey look lady, I didn't break his glasses. I'm letting you know what happened as a courtesy so you can plan your day better, not be surprised, maybe squeeze in a trip to the optician." I did not say this. Instead, I used my step-aside favorite, "Would you like to speak with Jake yourself? He's right here …" Usually the calls go well, and I am received well. Maybe a school nurse is viewed as a benevolent force. People switch into the cooperative mode when they hear it's me on the line, even if they do not initially answer the phone that way. Maybe they are just so relieved that I'm not calling to say that their Chandler or Winston or Dakota just fell head first off of the monkey bars. Although sometimes I am calling to say just that.
I'll never forget when the school nurse called me at home some years ago and said (erroneously) that my sixth-grader had just had what looked like a seizure in class. The floor of the kitchen where I was standing rose up in one plane toward my knees and then tilted around. I heard my voice saying that I'd be right there. The floor settled back down so that I could leave the room. My walking legs were not my own, but they walked me to my car. I thought of that today when I heard a catch of panic in a parent's voice, and I rushed to the part in my message that described how absolutely okey-dokey the child in question was doing.
It was a busy day. On days like this I get all pumped up. I want the kids to remember me; I want to have an impact. A little girl in the hallway smiles at me like we share a secret, but I don't even remember her name. A child with whom I thought I had connected nicely looks past me when I greet her in the lobby. Did our encounter mean nothing to her? Am I one in a series of well-meaning nobodies to her?
I wonder if I am put together in such a way that I can give so much at work without being lauded. Or, put another way, I wonder if I have the inner-directedness to make it as a school nurse. There is no one to say, "Boy, you really sized up that situation with Jimmy." Or, "Wow, you did a swell job convincing that parent to get Mariah seen by a doctor!" It's an isolated position—not much adult company, no peers to bounce around with. There are no murmurs of approval, like from committee members when you volunteer to do something. No witnesses. Just me and the kids, mostly.
I stayed late today documenting everything and tying up loose ends. Driving home, the aromas of burning wood and manure blended in the cold air. The sky was filled with creamsicle-colored clouds.
Day 3
Today I am at my "slow" school, a quiet elementary that houses just two classes each of kindergarten through second grade. Here I have time to look up records, detect patterns of behavior in students, and write this column. It feels luxurious. The editorial powers advise me against focusing on the excessively cute—no easy task at this little school where a kindergartener today complained that he had worse itches than anyone who had ever gone to that school. He then revealed a 3-by-2-inch area of scaly pink skin beneath his sock. "How long has it been bothering you?" I asked. He replied, "Oh, just a few whiles."
I got out of the car upon arrival this morning and, as usual, was met by the wafting scent of the most delectable baked goods. There is actually a dog-food factory a half-mile away that is responsible for this. Things were not what they seemed inside the building, either. There was silence in the lobby and down the hall where I enter, like nothing was going on, like zero movement, no buzz. Turns out there was an ambulance behind the building already carting away a teacher who broke her ankle on the playground before my arrival. The district's head nurse (called to the scene) was out there managing things. This was the most serious health-related event at this particular location this year by far.
There is no medication parade at this school—just two Ritalin recipients and one inhaler on gym day. I am lucky in this regard. The middle-school and high-school nurses roll out carts like stewardesses to dose up the student body at lunch time.
I did height, weight, and vision screening of a first-grade class today and was struck by the lack of maliciousness among the children. We always hear (and often observe) how vicious kids can be, how unforgiving of differences and shortcomings. But it must start later than age 6 or 7. This group treated differences as merely differences ("We are the world …") and not opportunities for stigmatization. One chubby boy announced, "I'm the heaviest one here!" By God, he was. A markedly overweight human being if I ever saw one. However, his statement was not met with taunts, but instead, "My Dad's heavier than you!" "My Aunt Martha is really fat!" "Maybe you won't be next week!" It was downright inspiring.
The inspiration did not penetrate deeply, though, because later I did something, or failed to do something, that left me with a feeling of shame. An 8-year-old boy came into my office with a minor complaint, and right away I could tell he was a stutterer. I wanted to say, "I stutter too!" but I did not say it. I was afraid. Of what? I was afraid he'd have to realize in my presence that there was a strong chance he'd stutter all his life. I was afraid he'd be embarrassed. I was afraid he'd get attached to me and want to visit me every day. I was afraid he'd look to me for something beyond understanding. I was most likely wrong on every single count, and anyway what would have been so terrible if I were right? So much for my vision of rolling out the red carpet to greet my former self! Shame, shame. I hope he comes back again soon. I'll do better.
On the other hand, a victory was scored with a sick and sad little girl who is always sad even when she's not sick. But today she was afflicted, temperature 103, a certain sort of misery creeping through her bones. I was having trouble reaching her mother; there was no father nearby; emergency contacts out of town. The phoning went on for 90 minutes or so, on and off. Finally, I did reach the mother and arranged for her to come to take the child home. I was relieved and happy. As I put down the phone, I spontaneously started to sing a simple song (with about six words) about going home. I did a jig to accompany this. I was having fun and expressing myself. Miss Misery was not buying it. As if she sees a school nurse singing and jigging around every day of the week! In her weary and laconic way she interrupted me asking, "Should I go to my classroom and get my coat and backpack?" Skipping just a beat or two, I said, "Not until I've finished my song," and then she smiled. Her face actually smiled and we met. I finished my song.
Day 4
I arrived this morning to see both daybeds in the health room already taken--by girls who were pretending to be surfers headed out to catch a big one, paddling on their bellies, the beds as boards. I saw them before they saw me. When they did see me, I was embarrassed for them. They leapt into "sick" positions, and the moaning and groaning began. A pathetic display.
After the beach girls returned to class, I received a call from an irate and unreasonable parent. Last week I did vision screenings for a second-grade class. This mother reported that on the evening of that screening, her child had a headache at home. The mother took this to be entirely and absolutely my fault. She demanded to know why I wanted to blind her child. This was not asked rhetorically as part of a rant, but she really wanted my motivation explained. She claimed that if I said her son wore the convex lenses (part of the screening procedure for that age group) for 30 seconds, and her son said he wore them for "a while," then I was calling her son a liar. Wow. I remembered the boy as being very pleasant, cooperative, not irrational or looking for trouble. What would it be like to live with someone like his mother? Anyway, she did not make me cry (as I later learned she had done with another nurse and a teacher), but she did make me sweat.
The father of a first-grader who was pushed at recess happened to be in the building at the time of the pushing incident and accompanied the boy to my office. He had a bloody nose and scraped lips. Within three minutes, Dad said the same thing five different ways. "He's made of iron." "He's tough." "He's a stone." "He's a tough one," accompanied by the tousling of hair and a playful shove to the shoulder, "Right, Buddy?" "He's rock tough." Rock tough? All right already. We get the picture. This is a man who does not want his son to advertise his pain, his dismay. That would be unmanly or unrocklike. This irks me. Everyone, even tough little men, should be given the chance to say "ouch" once in a while and seek some comfort.
It is difficult to believe, but today was something called Slipper Day at my school. The theme has something to do with "slipping into the future" successfully or not letting the future slip away. I don't know. So all students and staff wore bedroom slippers in school. Fuzzy, floppy slippers. Kids are tripping on the steps in clusters. I saw six kids take sliding falls within a few hours, and my office is relatively isolated. I imagine other accidents occurred that I did not see. True, I actually treated only three slipper-related injuries today, and true, nobody asked me, but I vote against Slipper Day.
When I heard a floor-shaking crash this afternoon, I ran into the boys' bathroom in the hallway near my office. The commotion seemed to come from that direction. There I discovered that when a little Kosovar refugee (who can barely speak English) went to exit his stall, the 90-pound bathroom door fell off its hinges. Anyone would have been scared, but Luzim (not real name) was crouched against the back of the stall beside the toilet, shaking his head back and forth, mouthing words silently, cheeks wet with tears. The door had hit his toe as it was settling (not a direct hit, but I did not know that at the time). Luckily, he was not wearing bedroom slippers. Luzim was mostly shocked and confused, probably wondering what he did wrong or if other doors throughout the building were also falling off, remembering God knows what from his experiences in Kosovo, toe throbbing. It felt good to care for him almost wordlessly, to communicate through touch and facial expressions.
At the dinner table at home, my four children want to know all about my patients from school. I tell them about Luzim. There was also someone whose pinky finger was stepped on in the hallway and someone with a dental cavity resembling a mini strip-mine. I describe the technique for checking for lice, which I did twice today. A mother smacked her kindergartener across the face on the way to school, so I dealt with that person, her bruise, and the County Department of Children and Youth. I was actually inundated today with twisted ankles and stomachaches, urinary accidents and nosebleeds. Toward the end of the day, I did not want to see anyone else. I dimmed the lights in the office, but they kept coming. I closed the door, and that did stem the flow somewhat. My own kids are satisfied with these tales from the outside.
Day 5
There are field trips for the fourth grade today, thereby reducing the student population in the building for a while. I've learned to look forward to things like rainy days, which mean no outdoor recess, which in turn means a 75 percent reduction in injuries. I packed the backpacks of first-aid supplies and medications for the field trips. The student who came to pick them up wears a ponytail pulled back so tightly that she looks to be balding at age 10.
I kept a mature fifth-grader (whom I will call Julie) in the health room with me for much of the day. Her temperature rose approximately 0.5 degrees per hour. I was unable to reach her parents or neighbors to take her home. We shared clementines and Hershey's kisses. I pressed her to drink water. She helped me unknot and tie the shoes of the 30 kindergartners I was measuring. It was rather nice. When she left me, she hugged me and said, "Thank you so much for taking care of me." This feels very much like a paycheck. It occurred to me that Julie seemed especially needy and especially grateful for the maternal ministrations, but I put it out of my mind until later, reading her chart, I discovered that her own mother has indeed been very busy. She was "supposed to die" of cancer six months ago but somehow did not.
Along this same sorrowful vein, one of the most worrisome students came to see me this morning. I was merely informed of his existence prior to this date. And suddenly there he was. He has a cardiac condition known as prolonged Q-T syndrome. People with this abnormality have a small but significant chance of developing severe cardiac rhythm disorders that are potentially fatal. It is a disturbance of the heart's electrical system. The Q-T refers to an interval measured on the electrocardiogram (EKG). This condition would explain why this student might complain of chest pain or dizziness. It would also explain why he might abruptly faint or die. It can be an acquired or a hereditary condition. So, I was kneeling down, jamming something into the file cabinet, when I heard a voice say this: "I have long Q-T Syndrome which is what my mother died from last year. Now I'm feeling light-headed, and I think you'd better take my blood pressure."
I looked up over the edge of the desk and saw an adorable 9-year-old, dressed (by the grandparents who are raising him) in a plaid button-down shirt with solid matching vest, tailored pants, and shoes that were not sneakers. He was sporting a gigantic orthodontic appliance, spectacles, and a cowlick. My own heart felt peculiar--but nothing that would show up on an EKG. I didn't know which issue to address first. I slid my eyes over to the CPR cheat sheet hanging on the wall. Judging by his composure and overall lack of distress, I did not feel that I had an emergency on my hands. However, this kid is not known as a complainer, and I am not known for my cardiac expertise. I focused on the physical, checked him out, chatted a bit, let him rest while I observed him. I did not mention his mother again, but I will. First I will get to know him a bit, find out what it's like to be him.
Later today, I vaguely and gradually lost interest in what I was doing. I started handing out ice packs for everything you can imagine. An ice pack goes a long, long way with this age group. Although I usually leave my office windows open (no matter what the weather) to blow the bacteria out into the hallways and dilute the airborne toxins, I think I'm coming down with something. My thorax feels packed with wet cardboard. My eyes are sinking, and I feel lazy in the posture department. I've got a dense head, slight nausea, a feeling that I'm peering out at the world from an enclosure.
Anyone who comes in looking like me in the next three hours gets sent home. No questions asked. I'll probably send myself home after awhile.
Since fall of 1995, Ira Glass has been host of Public Radio International's This American Life.
Day 1
I've flown to Los Angeles today to meet with network executives about doing a version of my radio program on television. Meetings are set up over the next two days with impressively high-level people at ABC, NBC, HBO, WB, Showtime, and Fox. A&E has also expressed interest.
I and my colleagues will be pitching the show. What is striking about this experience is how familiar it is, even though I've never done it. Like most anyone else who grew up in this country, I've seen pitch meetings in movies and TV shows about Hollywood. I've heard actors and directors and writers chat about them on talk shows. I've read--well, no, I haven't read the many You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again tell-alls or the many novels about the customs of Hollywood, but somehow it feels like I have. I have read all those Doonesbury comic strips making fun of this process.
About a week ago I was on network television for the first time. I made a brief appearance on Late Night With David Letterman. It had this same déjŕ vu quality, and for the same reason. By the time we get to be adults in America, by the time we actually appear on David Letterman's program, we've seen so many hundreds of hours of talk shows that, essentially, we have been there before. Simply from watching television, I knew that I'd be pre-interviewed before the show, that the questions and my answers would be roughly planned out in advance, but that David Letterman in particular likes to diverge from these preplanned moments to wander down paths unknown. Simply from watching television I knew the set where they tape Late Night would be very, very cold, because that's the way Mr. Letterman prefers it.
What I didn't know is what a strange physical space it is, the actual Late Night set, in the Ed Sullivan Theater. There's a live audience but they feel very far away. The cameras hover and surround in a way that makes you feel as if you're in an oddly cozy space, more cocoonlike that I'd have imagined. The band is very close to you, but the acoustics of the room are so strange that you can actually talk and be heard while they play. But most surprising of all: When you sit in the guest's chair, Mr. Letterman is sitting very close to you, closer than it looks on television. Or maybe he just seems unusually close because it's unusual to see him in three dimensions.
Interestingly, one of the greatest pleasures of appearing on Late Night With David Letterman actually happened the week before my appearance. It was this. Several times I simply declared to strangers at checkout lines that I was going to be on David Letterman's show Friday. Each time it was like saying "I appear to be one of you mortals, walking here amongst you, but in fact, I'm one of the gods!" As if I had this secret superpower I could reveal to anyone, anytime.
I only tried it three times, and each time it was followed by a rather delicate human moment, in which the person to whom I delivered this important news paused, and then very politely, with quiet tact, summoned the energy to ask the question, "Who are you?" At which point I'd have to say, "Well you know how on these talk shows there's always a bunch of famous people and then there's the guest you've never heard of? I'm the guest you've never heard of!"
That was my role. I was the farmer who grew a potato that happens to look exactly like Pamela Anderson Lee. I was the kid who won the science fair by exploding an ordinary pickle using static electricity.
As to my present mission, I'm here in Los Angeles to sell a one-hour television special/pilot of This American Life. The TV show, if it happens, would have the same form as the radio show: We'd choose a theme, do 4 or 5 stories on that theme. Each story would be filmed in a different visual style. It would look like nothing on TV. The idea is that the stories on the TV program would be the kinds of narratives that we try to do on the radio show: Characters and conflict are introduced fast, and you keep listening because you want to find out what happens. Our hope is that the narratives will be so fiercely compelling that we can be less traditional in the way the visuals work. In many stories they'd be more impressionistic, more like a great rock video, more like Errol Morris, than anything on the TV newsmagazine and documentary programs. The visuals would work the way the background music works on our radio show--to intensify the feeling in the stories.
With me on this little adventure: A TV producer named Jed Alpert, filmmaker Bennett Miller (whose documentary The Cruise is one of my favorite films and very close to the spirit of This American Life: It's funny and moving and surprising and just beautiful to look at--black and white, shot on the cheap with all natural light on digital video, incredibly), and Ann Blanchard, who's an agent from William Morris, a woman I've met only over the phone but who seems to understand This American Life as well as I could ever dream.
We've all talked a bit on the phone about how to structure our pitch. Ann and Jed are pushing toward high-concept ideas like "It's the next step for reality programming on television" or "It's reality programming, done with the compelling narrative arc of fictional TV dramas." All true enough, I guess, though I suppose we should come up with a snappier way to say that second idea, before our meetings start at 10 tomorrow.
When I arrived here in L.A. tonight, I was picked up at the airport by a man who met me at the gate and drove me to the hotel. This is not the way I usually live. He wanted to carry my bags to the car, and I was so stunned by this that at first I didn't let him. Then I let him carry one. I carried two. I know that's completely idiotic, but I couldn't help myself.
His name was Lionel, and he's just moved to L.A. from Hawaii this year. At first it was hard to adjust, he said, he was so used to "island living." That's his actual phrase. I pressed him for details on "island living," but all I got out of him was that he used to go to the beach every day to run and work out, and that he has this huge and I mean huge family that got together most weekends to hang out. Hawaii, though, is like a small town. You get to a certain age and you want to leave. It's too dull. Before he moved here, he'd visited L.A. on vacation. The thought never occurred to me before: Where do people who live in Hawaii go on vacation? What is the even-more-like-paradise place they'd go for a break from all that lush loveliness and perfect weather? The answer, according to Lionel, is often Vegas.
We talked the whole ride. He never heard of my radio show and asked if it was like Howard Stern and I nearly told him it was, not wanting to disappoint him with the truth. I asked him what celebrities he'd had in his car, and because he's so new at it, all the names were TV producers I'd never heard of. He did seem to have some inside information on Baywatch moving to Hawaii, but after a while, talking about this stuff reminded me of the only thing I don't like about Los Angeles. I find the business side of movies and TV--the grosses, the ratings, the stories about how much stuff costs and how much it makes, all that stuff that fills the pages of so many magazines and so many hours of TV time--I find it all completely boring. And here everyone's always talking about it.
I have to admit, though, I did enjoy chatting with Lionel. And as I got out of the car, I thought about something Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, said years ago somewhere. He said he realized he'd made it when he no longer felt obliged to make conversation with the limo drivers.
I cannot imagine that ever happening to me.
Day 2
Over breakfast, our little team reviews what should be said in what order at the four pitch meetings we have scheduled for the day.
Ann, the agent from William Morris, tells Jed and Bennett and me that some execs at these meetings will have actually prepared for the meetings. They'll have listened to tapes she's sent of This American Life and watched Bennett's film. But many of them won't have prepared. It's our job, she says, to politely ignore it if they know nothing about our work.
Ann explains: The way one handles this situation is to tell them everything you think they need to know about your work, prefaced with the phrase "As you know already."
"Everything in this town is pitched with the phrase 'as you know already,' " Ann declares, between bites of omelette.
We talk about what each of the networks we're pitching is probably looking for. The WB only wants a younger demographic. A third of Showtime's audience is African-American. This goes on for a while and finally Bennett pipes up. "Not to be crude, but isn't there some part of their brains that's concerned with winning awards and getting critical acclaim? Wouldn't they view this as an opportunity to buy themselves some integrity?"
That's the spirit.
At our first network meeting, the execs all start to lose interest when I say the word "pretty." This is Ann and Jed's diagnosis in a coffeeshop afterwards. They could feel the mood in the room change, and soon execs were talking about programming the show at midnight on Sunday night, if at all. That is the power of the word "pretty" to strike fear in men's hearts.
I used the word in response to a direct question. An exec who listens regularly to This American Life talked about the fact that one thing that's exciting about the radio show is that one doesn't see the people in the stories. One is left to imagine moments which are described. Could we retain that feeling in a television version of the show?
I replied that I thought we could if the pictures for some of the stories were more impressionistic, more suggestive. If they were more like a rock video, more pretty, less like 60 Minutes.
That scared them, Ann said afterwards. It made it sound too arty. Arty is bad.
By the end of the meeting, she and Jed turned it around, mostly by talking emotionally about making something entirely new on television, something as compelling as a great TV drama, with the irresistible narrative arc of a TV drama, but that happens to be nonfiction. Bennett argued that the current TV newsmagazines all seem to have a rather moribund and formalized sense of how to tell a story. I talked about a TV story I saw on Civil War re-enactors. The researchers who worked on the story had found interesting people to interview, but none of these interviewees stays in the report for very long. The story just flits from person to person. Incredibly, they even found an African-American woman who joins the Civil War re-enactments as a slave. But even she gets only a few moments in the report. There's no space for us to actually get to know anyone, and hear the real story of what happened to them and how it changed them. We never get to know anyone well enough that we can imagine what it'd be like to be in their situation. We never feel much empathy at all.
We continued on these lines for a while, then Ann brought up the idea of winning lots of awards, and soon the meeting was at an end.
Afterwards in the coffeeshop, we reworked the pitch. Ann told me that like anyone else, these execs need to be spoken to in their own language. That we need to compare what we're proposing to 20/20 and ER and The Sopranos.
So, what to do about "pretty"--the word that nearly scotched the deal? How to avoid the word "impressionistic"? What should we say if we're asked again what the show will look like?
We brainstormed, all of us, for a while, five minutes or so.
Finally here's what we came up with. Instead of saying the shots will be pretty, we'd say: "In contrast to TV newsmagazines, this show will not be shot on video but on film. We'll have a real director of photography, just like a movie has, to create more dramatic effects."
"Say 'more dramatic,' not 'more artful.' " Ann and Jed warn me. "Say whatever you want. Just don't say pretty."
Three hours later we're driving across town to another pitch meeting, and we pass the Will Rogers Park. It's all palm trees and bright, gorgeous flowers under a perfect sky.
"That's pretty," I say.
From the back seat Jed declares, "Ira! That word!"
In the driver's seat, steering gently, not moving his eyes off the road, Bennett gently suggests, "I think what you mean to say, Ira, is that the park's shot on film."
The little coffeeshop meeting after our first meeting pays off in the second. In less than 45 minutes, we seem to completely win over the network execs here. They seem truly excited to try something so different on network TV. They're one of the networks that chose not to pick up The Sopranos, which is generally regarded as the best drama on television this year. Since then, they've been trying to make more daring programming choices. This helps our cause.
It's an amazing feeling, when something like this goes so well. At the end of the meeting it feels like we've all been on a really great date, all warmth and a sense of common purpose. "We want to be your home," they declare, standing and shaking our hands.
Later, Ann says the time has never been better to pitch an unusual vision for a TV show, that because of The Sopranos, and the competition from cable and the Internet, and the ratings erosion at the traditional networks, everyone in television realizes now more than ever that trying things no one has ever done before may be essential to their survival. Perhaps for this reason, our other two meetings also go very well.
At day's end, our leading contender is still the second network we saw. If they make an offer, though, we'll still try to get other offers. The goal is to get several bidders, so we have more leverage to structure the deal the way we want.
We had a lovely first date with that second network, they declared their feelings for us, we really liked them.
But tomorrow, in the cool light of a new day, will they call?
Day 3
We visit six networks and two production companies. I'm struck by how normal most of the people seem, how unlike the Hollywood stereotypes, how similar to my colleagues on All Things Considered and Morning Edition. At least on the surface.
The money in Hollywood--and what it buys--is sort of stunning. At dinner my first night in town I meet a screenwriter I like very much who seems like any of a dozen magazine writers I know in Chicago and New York. I'm told later that he's one of the many people who make a living here writing screenplays that never get made into movies. The price for his last screenplay? A quarter-million dollars.
The number is hard to fathom. The year we put This American Life on the air (just four years ago), my staff and I did an entire year of shows for less than that: $243,000 covered all our expenses--outfitting the studio, paying free-lance writers and reporters, buying satellite time to distribute the show to stations, all our meager marketing costs, and our four salaries. It was bare-bones, even by public radio standards, but workable.
When I describe this budget to Ann and Jed, they ask me not to mention it in any meetings with anyone in the state of California.
For the record, Showtime's offices aren't as nice as NPR's in Washington. New Regency's digs--including the production offices for its hit show Buffy the Vampire Slayer--have the friendly handed-down-furniture, makeshift air of a not terribly well-funded congressional race in Iowa. Bare linoleum floors. Fluorescent light.
Everywhere else is lovely, and you feel the wealth that permeates it all. At every meeting some assistant offers us a choice of beverages, a custom I did not observe once in a decade at NPR's headquarters in Washington. There's beautiful original art on the walls and valet parking downstairs. When agents at William Morris park their cars in the agency's lot, attendants wash the cars, handle maintenance, fill the tanks with gas. An agent recently ran out of gas on the freeway simply because he'd been running from meeting to meeting for two days and hadn't stopped in the office. He'd apparently fallen out of the habit of pulling over at a gas station.
Some meetings go well, some go less well. One head of programming visibly fidgets for most of our presentation. Most are very gracious and very smart. At four of the networks, it's mostly pleasantries, our pitch, a few questions, and "we'll be in touch." But at two networks, the executives enter into a substantial and serious discussion of the difficulties they'd imagine we'd face if our show were to go into production. One tells us straight up that we'd have to choose more sensational topics to make it promotable to viewers. The other quizzes us at length about how we'd create interesting visuals for some of the more memorable stories from the radio show, then questions us pointedly about how in the world a show of narratives of everyday life would be promoted to television viewers. What would the promo be? "Coming up tonight--life as we know it"? Wouldn't we need some sort of simple, sensational topic to get people to tune in? It's a valid question and gets to the heart of something we struggled with for a long time on the radio show: how to promote and position the show with listeners so they'd want to tune in?
What divides the skeptical execs from the others? If I understand Ann correctly, some of these networks don't purchase many shows, and the execs who buy the programs are ultimately responsible for seeing that the shows become hits. At other networks, they buy a lot more stuff, produce it, audience-test it, and then decide later on what'll go into their schedule and what won't. It's the execs in the first group who are more skeptical going in.
From our point of view, the skeptical meetings are preferable to the ones with all the glad-handing. At least they're being straight with us about all their doubts, and we get a chance to argue our case. Bennett says that you can imagine that after the glad-handing meetings, the execs all go to a back room where they say all that skeptical stuff to each other anyway, and then consult with Darth Vader, who orders them to destroy us.
It is my second day in Los Angeles, and I'm called by a reporter from Entertainment Weekly who wants to possibly include me in the magazine's annual list of "The 100 Most Creative People in Hollywood." I've been here for less than 48 hours. Word travels fast. I tell this story to Doug Herzog, the guy who picked up South Park for Comedy Central, who recently moved out here from New York to head the Fox Network, and he says that for the first week you're in Hollywood, everyone thinks you're a creative genius. Then everyone decides you're just like them.
I tell the Entertainment Weekly reporter that no deal has been struck quite yet and am promptly downgraded from the List to a sidebar.
We meet with two production houses, and both times it's like finding distant family members. Gail Berman at New Regency begins our meeting by playing Jewish geography with me; she spent a part of her childhood in Baltimore just a few miles from where I grew up. She and the TV people we meet at Brillstein Grey remind me of the best radio producers I know. They're pragmatic and personable; they're about getting things done. They're unpretentious. Again they make it seem like television is not such a different business from the one I'm already in.
Can I mention how great the artwork is at Brillstein Grey? A Jonathan Borofsky here, a Lichtenstein there. I'm sure it makes me seem like a rube but I have to admit I found it sort of thrilling. Also sort of thrilling: At Brillstein Grey I get to meet Susie Fitzgerald, who does The Sopranos, the only TV show I've ever liked enough to make a point to catch every week.
One of the TV people at Brillstein Grey, a former NBC exec named Kevin, tells us the best we can expect from a television deal, if everything goes ahead. There's no way any network will give us a deal where we control the final cut of the show; it's just not done. Any network will want the right to approve the topics, the stories, and the final cut. So the key to the whole thing, he said, is finding someone who understands the show at a network, someone we like and trust, and going into business with them. Kevin was the NBC exec who worked with Michael Moore on TV Nation--a show that, like ours, stood midway between documentary and entertainment. Kevin said they worked it like this: Michael would show him a list of story ideas, and Kevin pretty much approved them all. He'd say, "This one should probably be a bigger story and this one might be shorter." When they had a rough cut of the show, Kevin would make suggestions--make this story shorter, change this or that--and Michael invited him to the editing room to work it out. It was collegial and friendly. "There are lots of smart people at the networks," Kevin said. "You can find one and get into a situation where you can make good work. It is possible to do good work in television."
I'm sure he's right, and I'm encouraged by this, but it's not lost on me that Michael Moore didn't survive long at NBC. As I understand it, his ratings weren't up to network standards and they sent him packing to cable.
Fatigue sets in. We start to get a little punch-drunk from making our little presentation over and over, four times a day.
Waiting for Ann to arrive at yet another network meeting, Bennett proposes an entirely new strategy to use in our pitches. Jed will talk, Ann will talk, he will talk, but I will never utter a word. I'll sit there silently, until the moment when Bennett is excitedly explaining, "It's the music, it's the visuals, it's the story, it's the characters, it's, it's ..."
And then I'll say the only word I say the whole meeting.
"Gesamtkunstwerk."
And he and Jed will both exclaim "Exactly!" And we cross our arms and wait for them to give us a deal.
We don't bother to ask Ann about this one.
Day 4
The network where we had that glorious second meeting called. They want to make a commitment, have another date, move to the next step. No word yet from anyone else.
I flew back to Chicago on the red-eye, got into work late, met with the staff about whether we should construct an entirely new Father's Day show this year, or build one out of a combination of new and old stories. We have nine days to get it together, whichever we decide.
Then we had a half-hour meeting where I talked with everyone about what happened in California. I ran down, in even more detail than you've suffered through here, what happened in each meeting.
The biggest change for me, frankly, is that I went out to Los Angeles thinking perhaps we'd do a one-hour pilot-slash-special, and if it went well, we'd do two to four specials a year and keep doing the radio program every week. I return home considering seriously the option of doing the pilot-slash-special and then if it does well and if we like the show, then we might put the radio show on hiatus for a year and instead do a weekly TV show.
This, of course, wouldn't happen for another year, if we ever get to that point at all. The reasons to do it this way seem clear: Every exec in every meeting told us it'd be difficult to build an audience for specials. Specials are expensive to promote, and it's hard to do effectively. Most networks are moving away from them. My feeling is, if we're going to go to the trouble to make a TV show, we should do it in a way that it can build an audience and be successful. What's the point otherwise? That's why we designed This American Life as a weekly series instead of doing it as two to four specials a year. It's the only way to be a real presence in people's lives, to give people who might like the program a chance to discover it.
Also, television has evolved to the point where it may be possible to do a limited-run series, perhaps a summer replacement series of just 12 shows (like The Sopranos) or perhaps even fewer episodes, and that would allow us all to keep doing the radio show. A few execs told us that launching this as a summer replacement series would be a smart introduction in any case. Summer shows get more attention; it's easier to build numbers.
I hope other networks call.
Tonight I moderated an event at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago featuring Lawrence Weschler and J.S.G. Boggs. Weschler's a friend; Boggs is the subject of his new book. Boggs is an artist who draws money. He draws only one side of a bill. But he doesn't sell these drawings. Instead, he takes a drawing of, say, a $20 bill out with him to a restaurant, and when it comes time to pay the check, he tries to talk the waitress into accepting the drawing of $20 as his payment. He explains that the value of any work of art is set arbitrarily, so he's decided to set the value of the drawing of a $20 bill at $20. If she accepts the drawing she'll have to give him change and a receipt.
Many people don't accept the drawing. Some do. If they do, the next day Boggs provides a copy of the receipt to one of the many people who collect his work, and that person will come hunting down the drawing. The collector will pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for the little drawing. The waitress will clean up.
What I love about this is that it's a con game, run in reverse. If the person falls for the game, they come out of it far wealthier than they went in. As Weschler puts it in his joyous little book, Boggs operates "a sort of floating aesthetical ethical crap game. Or else a sort of fairy-tale virtue test, in which the worthy agreed to sacrifice and [are] subsequently rewarded a hundredfold."
At the beginning of our presentation at the Art Institute, Boggs produced a copy of the Chicago yellow pages. He asked the audience for the name of a local pizza place. On his cell phone he called and ordered some pizzas. When they arrived at the theater, he asked the delivery guy up onstage, and tried to pay for the food with a drawing of a $50 bill. It was, frankly, a little uncomfortable. The guy delivering the pizzas suddenly found himself standing on a stage, lots of people watching, being asked to make a decision: Did he want Boggs to give him $50 in real cash--or did he want the drawing instead? He broke out in a sweat. All the poor guy knew is that if he didn't show up back at work with real American currency to cover those pizzas he took out, he'd be in trouble. He turned down the deal. It was hard not to jump in and just tell him: "You can make a thousand dollars here! Take the drawing!"
In retrospect, I realize I should have altered the game a little, still within Boggs' rules. I could've pulled a $10 bill from my wallet, got three people from the audience to pull 10's from their wallets, and suggested to the pizza guy that if he had $10, we could buy the picture together. He might've been carrying $10 on him. I think Boggs is completely original and inspiring, but asking the pizza guy to front $50 for a drawing might've been a lot to expect. I mean, I've never paid $50 for a drawing.
Boggs' signature at this point is worth a fair amount of money to collectors, when affixed to the right objects. You can download a Boggs bill from his Web site [http://www.jsgboggs.com/] for free and, if you find him, he'll sign it and you can sell it for more than $300 to collectors. After the evening's presentation, many people came up to him asking him to sign this or that. Boggs has a strict policy: He charges $10 per autograph.
A 9-year-old boy in the crowd named Chris Meskauskas really wanted an autograph and invented a scheme to get one. As we adults yammered on during the lecture, Chris got an Art Institute brochure and drew his own $10 bill on the blank back side of it. He copied from a ten-spot he borrowed from his dad. His drawing was in purple pen, and twice the size of a regular $10 bill, but Boggs examined it, showed Chris how to draw a plate number onto a bill, and then accepted Chris' drawing as worth $10 and gave him the autograph. Chris beamed. But that's only because he's too young to have understood our explanation of how much trouble he could get in if he continues down this path of drawing his own money.
Boggs is in enormous trouble with the Treasury Department. Specifically the Secret Service. For most of this decade they've been confiscating his work, harassing him, claiming they're going to build a big counterfeiting case against him but never doing it.
Of course, they never do it. When these cases against Boggs have gone to trial in other countries, he's always won handily. Juries conclude that he's not counterfeiting. No one could mistake his drawings for real bills: They're blank on one side! (Well, blank except for his signature and fingerprint.) He also sometimes monkeys with the wording on the bills, the portraits, and the color (he makes them orange).
Not long ago, Boggs sued the government, saying they were subjecting him to a campaign of harassment and that either they had to bring him to trial on some sort of charges, or they had to return the hundreds of works of his art they'd confiscated. The case has worked its way up to the Supreme Court. He's waiting to find out if they'll hear the case. If they don't, then it'll mean the government is in fact free to just take his property and never bring a trial, ever. I don't feel like I'm leaving the territory of journalistic objectivity to say that somehow this does not seem fair. Our government is seizing his property without any trial, any chance to argue his case, any due process at all.
He's trying to generate some press about all this, but so far the attention he's got is modest.
What's crazy about the whole thing is that he's convinced he'd have stopped drawing U.S. currency years ago, because he's got tired of it, but now he has to keep doing it to keep his income up for this lawsuit. The money drawings are the only thing he creates that earns him the kind of real cash he needs right now. But he's weary of drawing money. He's tried every variation on it. He's ready to move on to other kinds of artistic creation.
In short: If the Treasury Department weren't harassing him, trying to bully him into quitting his money drawings, he'd have quit years ago.
There's some government policy the Clinton administration can be proud of.
A word now about Lawrence Weschler's book Boggs: A Comedy of Values. He's my friend, so it's unbecoming for me to say this publicly, but the book's funny and thought-provoking and a complete pleasure--in addition to being the perfect Father's Day present.
See what two days in the world of commercial broadcasting has done to me?
We all went out to dinner together after the event at the Art Institute, and Erin Hogan of the University of Chicago Press (which is publishing Weschler's book about Boggs) informed me that she's been reading my diary entries on Slate, and as a former Hawaii resident she wanted to inform me that the place Hawaiians go on vacation is not Vegas but Northern California. Marin County. Hawaiians go there, she said, because they like the changes in landscape and because they like the "dramatic weather." By this she meant "bad weather." Back home the weather's the same every day, she told me. Eighty degrees, rains twice a day. They didn't even do weather forecasts during the nightly news when she lived there. Which is, as far as I can tell, exactly the way we're all going to have it in the Kingdom of Heaven during the Afterlife.
Then somehow we got onto the subject of everyone's first jobs, and she revealed that her first job was as a foot model for Liberty House of Hawaii--an old department store on the islands. An art director on the beach noticed her high arches, and she got the cushy-if-dull $8-an-hour gig. Now be honest: Who among us hears a story like that and doesn't ask to see the woman's feet? After much urging from many adults at our table, Erin showed us her feet. They were, we all had to admit, very impressive.
Then Boggs' 23-year-old girlfriend, Meghan, told me about the part she recently played on the Mortal Combat TV show. She was Mileena, the evil ugly twin sister of Kitana, the lovely princess. For this job Meghan got to wear a pink pleather lace-up halter-top bustier with matching choker. She pushed her breasts together with her palms as she explained this, and when I asked again later, so I could write it down, she pushed her breasts together with her palms again. She also got knee-high boots for the part. They would not let her wear the outfit home for her boyfriend. Also on the negative side, the job required that they put a lot of makeup on her face to make her ugly, she told me. People treated her differently, she said.
Meanwhile, Boggs circled the table taking pictures with his new digital camera, which he enjoys with the undisguised pleasure of a kid with a new toy.
It was all very fun. I was glad to be back in Chicago, back home in my normal life, in the high-minded world of public broadcasting.
Lucas Miller is a detective with the New York City Police Department. His "Flatfoot" column appears in Slate.
Day 1
At night I make a little pile of the things I carry around every day. My wallet and keys. My pager. My shield--we call our badges shields here in Fun City, probably because that's the shape of the police officer's badge. Because I am a detective, my shield is different. My FBI buddies tell me that the NYPD detective shield is the most recognized badge in the world. And my gun.
You receive a gun and a shield when you are near graduation at the police academy, on, appropriately, Gun and Shield Day. Eight years ago, I expected the skies to part and the hand of God Himself to present me my police officer's shield and a .38 revolver. If not God, then surely his closest earthbound relative, the Police Commissioner, would be there to convey to me the two coolest objects any kid could have. Instead, we marched down to the basement where some salty old detective was sitting behind a desk. "Miller?" he said, and tossed me a little envelope containing my shield. "Go through that door and see Police Officer Rodriguez. He will give you your gun." Several days later I sat with several thousand of my fellow academy graduates and was exhorted by then-Mayor David Dinkins not to become "the burned-out bullies with billy clubs of old." The crowd, made up mostly of members of the families of my classmates, many of them veteran cops themselves, was a little chilly to Dinkins' remarks. This seemed the wrong place to insult the legions of police officers that went before us.
After the academy, I was assigned to the Sixth Precinct, which contains Greenwich Village. In addition to walking a beat on Bleecker Street, I got sent to riots in Crown Heights, Washington Heights, and Tompkins Square Park. There was some excitement, but it was bracketed by huge amounts of time waiting for something to happen. I guarded dead bodies awaiting detectives and the medical examiner. I guarded crime scenes waiting for, of course, the Crime Scene Unit. I guarded the voting machines on Election Day and primary day. My fellow cops were not burned-out bullies but a mix of earnest young men and a few women, some concentrating on cleaning up New York and some concentrating on earning enough money to raise a family, every single one of them appalled at the sight of a crime victim and willing to risk his life to catch a bad guy.
After working on patrol for about three years, I requested an undercover assignment to the Narcotics Division. I spent the next two and half years buying heroin, cocaine, and marijuana on the Lower East Side and around 42nd Street. Unlike Patrol, Narcotics has one principal purpose: locking up drug dealers. For this reason, it is much more intense than Patrol. No one feels this stress more than the undercover officers. To be honest, I had it pretty easy. Assigned to Manhattan South Narcotics, I worked neighborhoods that were safer than some in Brooklyn and Northern Manhattan. I am a healthy-looking white guy and therefore to some eyes on some blocks possibly a cop. So I am more suited for buying marijuana or pretending to be a stockbroker looking to turn a $10,000 investment in powder into $80,000 than for less pleasant and more challenging assignments like pretending to be a junkie or a street-level heroin dealer.
A year and a half after my assignment to Narcotics, I was promoted to detective. This time, I was sure that there would be some supernatural fanfare involved in the promotion. I walked into the room, a secret room deep in One Police Plaza since we were undercover, and there was that same ancient detective. "Miller? Here you go." He tossed me my detective shield.
I am not undercover anymore. I "rolled over," as we say when cops stop being undercover, as soon as I could. I continue to work in the Narcotics Division, doing a lot of paperwork, trying to pick good cases, and enjoying the NYPD. I remain in love with the City of New York. Of late, there is a growing sense around the office and in the newspapers that she might not love us back, but I don't believe it.
Day 2
I am out in an unmarked car with two fellow detectives. My partners today are Joe, a handsome, wry, dark Irish fellow, and Sean, also Irish, who shares his coloring and general determination with his yellow Labrador retriever. I am in the back seat. Joe is driving. We are enjoying the stereotypical cups of coffee, no doughnuts. Sean says, "Have you guys ever had that Ben and Jerry's ice cream? I never tried it before. My wife brought home this Chubby--"
"Chubby Hubby!" Joe yells and starts waving his hands in the air. The car starts lurching back and forth. Sean catches his coffee cup as it slides off the dashboard. "I love that stuff! I go through like a pint of that a night! You gotta try the Phish Food. The Cookie Dough doesn't have enough cookie dough, though. Too much vanilla, not enough dough. But the Chocolate Fudge Brownie is the best. Oh my God, that stuff is so good. I'm losing control of the car. I have to go find some ice cream."
I pipe in, "I really like the Coffee Coffee Buzz Buzz Buzz."
The car straightens out. Joe cocks his head toward the back seat and says to Sean, "Ah, Miller's got the sophisticated palate."
We are interrupted by the sight of the guy we are looking for. We've watched him buy marijuana a couple of blocks away. Big case. We follow him over to a railing overlooking the East River, where we identify ourselves and request that he hand over the cheeba and not fuck around. Naturally, his reaction is to attempt to pitch his new acquisition into the river, but I catch his hand mid-throw. At this point he tenses up and brings his other hand up like a fighter. Fortunately, as the gravity of the situation envelops him, he relaxes, hands me the drugs, and puts his other hand down. Now, we aren't really that interested in him beyond making a case against the guy who sold him the stuff. Sean puts a friendly hand on his shoulder and asks him, "You got any more weed?"
"No, sir."
Joe asks, "You got ID?"
"Yes, sir."
I ask, "You got any weapons on you?"
"Uh, I have this knife." He withdraws a folding knife. Sean snatches it.
"Let's see that ID," Joe says.
"And this. And this." He is pulling things out from every pocket of his clothing. Knives, blackjacks, little pointed sticks, odd-shaped things that are only identifiable as weapons from the matte-black metal of which they are made. We are getting nervous, but the guy is being pretty docile. He is caught and he probably figures that the easier he makes this on us, the easier we might make it on him. As he takes each thing out, he tells me what it is--kubaton, pakua star, push-dagger. The last thing he takes out is a metal cylinder attached to his keys with some levers on one end.
"Where is that ID?" Joe is getting impatient.
He hands some cards to Joe. The guy actually seems to be enjoying the attention. "Hey, are those Glocks you guys are carrying?"
"What's this?" I hold up the strange cylinder and keys.
Joe, examining two different cards, barks at him, "This says your first name is James and this one says it's Michael. Which is it? James or Michael? This a real license? Where did you get this?"
"What is this?" I ask, still examining the cylinder.
"My first name is James, but people call me by my middle name, Michael, so I put it down for my Florida license. In New York, they wanted my full name for my license. Are you guys taking me to jail?"
"You know, pal, you're not supposed to have two licenses," Sean offers.
As I casually fumble with the strange key chain, I hear a hissing sound, but don't pay much attention. Of course, what I am doing is spraying Mace on Joe and Sean. Obliviously, as they start yelling and coughing, the guy says, "That shoots Mace," and happily waits for our next question. My partners attempt to wash out their eyes with the only liquid on hand, which is coffee, and begin to plan my imminent demise. Our new friend stands there serenely. I begin to imagine the paperwork and questions arising from Macing my partners. The guy asks, "Do you guys really need to take me in? How about I just promise not to do it again?"
Joe manages to glare at me, coffee running down the front of his jacket: "No, you can't just promise not to do it again."
When we are finished with our big arrest, I buy my partners off with ice cream. Joe holds out for Chocolate Fudge Brownie.
Day 3
It is commonly held in the NYPD that life in the department is less like an episode of NYPD Blue and more like an episode of Barney Miller, and there is truth in this. For every day doing something exciting, there are 10 spent doing paperwork, going to court, conducting surveillance, and doing more paperwork. Where the Barney Miller analogy fails is not on that 10th day when a cop does something exciting. It fails on the 100th day, when a cop does something extraordinary. On that day, life is not like NYPD Blue, it is like the best movie you ever saw, only you are the hero. Today was not one of those days. Today, my lieutenant discovered that I was a little unclear about the meaning of "daily" as in "daily activity report." I had to spend some time catching up. A chief at headquarters required some statistics immediately, and I was dispatched to deliver them. I am sorry to report that the most exciting part of the workday was a brief meeting with an assistant district attorney about a year-old arrest. At least I got to relive past glory, even if it wasn't a big case. That wasn't one of those 100th days either.
The most exciting part of the day came at the end. After a great workout at karate, I was gratuitously invited out for a late snack by the prettiest girl in the class. I had so much fun that I lost track of the time. Afterward, I eagerly offered to drive her home. I promptly discovered that I had left my car in a spot whose witching hour had come and the car had been towed away by none other than the Traffic Division of the NYPD.
So as the blood pounded at my temples, I withdrew the $150 necessary to free my car and stalked up the street to find a taxi for me and one for my friend. Lo and behold, this lovely girl offered to accompany me to the most miserable spot on the island of Manhattan, the tow pound. I told her I couldn't possibly expect her to go with me. It really wasn't necessary. I would be all right. Then I realized I was being a very considerate moron. I was going to the Valley of the Shadow of Death to get my car back and I was turning down a traveling companion. I accepted her offer.
We arrived at the tow pound to find it filled with drunks, kids from New Jersey, recent immigrants unaware of the finer points of New York City parking regulations, and several transvestites, all trying to get their cars back. It began to dawn on me that despite my delight at having such an enviable companion, showing a girl this little version of hell might make for a bad first date. She asked me, "Can't you just tell them you're a cop and get your car back?" As I was thinking of an answer, we became aware of the woman ahead of us telling the cashier, "Listen, I am a police officer and I only have $138. Isn't there any way you can help me?" The cashier was shaking her head with what looked to me like satisfaction.
As we were waiting to go get the car, the man behind us turned to his wife and said, "This is un-f---ing-reasonable. Can you believe this? A hundred and fifty dollars! That f---ing Giuliani! I hate him and the cops."
In my most friendly voice, I told him, "Listen, I think this sucks just as much as you do, but it has always been like this. It was like this when Dinkins was mayor and when Koch was mayor and probably before that. I think it always cost one-fifty. And before Rudy, they didn't take credit cards. Also, while NYPD does run the Traffic Division, it is made up mostly of civilians, not cops."
The guy looked at me like I had two heads and he was going to punch me in one of them, then went back to talking to his wife.
A man in a fur coat was yelling and pounding at the window, "What do you mean, I need picture ID? Is this some sort of police state where we have to carry ID? Hey, I am talking to you. Hey!" His wife and another man were trying to soothe an increasingly nervous cashier who seemed to be on the verge of calling in the real police.
I stole a look at my companion. She was having a good time! This was a good show and we had great seats. Albeit expensive ones. We retrieved my car and headed down the West Side Highway with the lights of my city sparkling all around us.
Day 4
One of my partners, Sean, was notified to appear today as the subject of a recent civilian complaint. He is the most soft-spoken of the members of my team, the most popular, and also the senior man, so it came as a surprise to learn that he was "no good."
When I started as a cop, it was commonly held among the police officers I met that if one was an active police officer, one could expect about one civilian complaint a year. Right on schedule, about a year after the academy, I got my first complaint. I was in traffic court. A cop from the neighboring precinct whom I knew from the police academy approached me. He told me he thought the motorist who was contesting one of his tickets was carrying a gun. He asked me to help him stop and frisk the man. We found the man in the waiting room. He did have a bulge on his right side at the waist, under his shirt. We confronted the man and asked him to put his hands on the wall. He complied, and we discovered that he was carrying a very large pager. He was understandably angry at having been waylaid. He vented this anger by calling us every name he could think of. In the barrage of insults, I was unable to apologize for having stopped him mistakenly. Months later I received notice to appear at the Civilian Complaint Review Board. I was informed that he had alleged that we had stopped him for no reason and then smashed his face into a wall. The board ruled that the complaint was unsubstantiated. It could neither be proved nor disproved. That remains my only civilian complaint, but it is on my record and always will be.
It seems as if the belief that one complaint a year is the price of police work has gone out the window. If I had one complaint for each of my eight years, the newspapers would call me a persistent offender.
While working buy and bust, my partner Joe and I, minus the indisposed Sean, witnessed an odd little scene. There was a cluster of men struggling with each other next to a cluster of taxi cabs all facing different directions. We identified ourselves, and the cluster of men unfolded to become three cab drivers holding a very agitated young man. One cabbie had a bloody nose. One was crying his eyes out, and the third and largest one had the young man in a full nelson. All at the same time the drivers tried to tell us what happened. As this was going on, other cabs would pull up and the drivers would leave off shouting at each other, me, and the young man to greet the cabs and presumably tell them everything was under control. What we eventually were able to piece together was that the young man had attempted to stick up the first cab. He had no gun, but when the driver proved reluctant to hand over the cash, the young man sprayed him with Mace. This was witnessed by the second cabbie, who stopped his car in traffic and valiantly tried to apprehend the robber. The young man, quite spry, punched this cabbie in the nose. A third cabbie stopped, and among them they overwhelmed the young man.
The cabbie with the bloody nose kept yelling, "He is killing me!" and pointing to the young man. I believe he was just confusing tense and the severity of his injury. I told the full-nelson cabbie to release his prisoner and pushed the young man over the trunk of one of the cabs. I got my handcuffs on one of his wrists. At this point the man began howling that I was violating his civil rights. As I tried to get the other wrist into the cuffs, he pushed himself off the car and took a swipe at me with his free hand. Joe helped me put him properly in cuffs, and we pushed him back down on the hood of the car to search him. He began screeching that we were doing this only because he was Hispanic. At which point I took a good look at his face. The thing was, he didn't look Hispanic to me.
My second civilian complaint is long overdue.
Karenna Gore wrote this while working as an editorial assistant at Slate. She is a recent graduate of Columbia Law School and chair of GoreNet, a network of young Gore supporters.
I am hiding from my eighth-grade English teacher--she's downstairs, along with hundreds of other celebrants, to kick off the inaugural weekend. Having just emerged from my post-red-eye stupor (Seattle to "the other Washington"), I innocently slumped downstairs for some coffee, right into an episode of This Is Your Life--my old next-door neighbors, long-lost cousins, the veterinarian who revived my dog Coconut after her brush with death. The surreal quality is enhanced by the characters who step out of my television world and into my living room. I just discussed withdrawal from Seattle lattes with the actress who played the mother in National Lampoon's Vacation.
My house, the Naval Observatory--"the compound" or "Twin Anchors" as we like to call it--is completely decked out for the occasion. The tents in the yard are attached to the house by plastic tubes, the deck is encased in clear insulation, volunteers march around purposefully. Times like this remind me of the scene at the end of E.T. when the government takes over Elliot's home and he and E.T. lie side by side on cold metal tables, exposed and shivering.
Not that I'm complaining. Any disadvantage of being the daughter of the vice president pales next to the experiences and opportunities that come my way. The itinerary for this weekend is a chock-full reminder of that and, as I was driven home from the airport at 5 a.m., I admonished myself to appreciate and take advantage of this interesting period of my life.
The least I could do is come up with a better Secret Service code name. Ever since four years ago, when I was put on the spot and told "two syllables" and "It has to start with an s," I have been cringing in the back seat when identified as "Smurfette." I have to act on this now. Snowball? Skycap? (Seriously, SLATEsters, send suggestions for something slick.)
Inaugural plans have been haunting me for weeks, and I lurch between micro-management mode and lead-me-around-I'm-a-smiling-vegetable mode. The latter is definitely best for any event I go to with my parents. Like a lot of things in politics, my behavior can't be a strong positive, but could be an overwhelming negative. There actually isn't much I could accidentally do to mess up the ceremonies this year. I used to fear falling off the stage, but that has become pretty commonplace.
It's odd to put on spangly evening wear at 3:30 p.m., but the Presidential Gala begins at 5 p.m. so they can edit the tape in time for prime time. I went to the rehearsal gala last night with a van load of my friends, and we watched Stevie Wonder test the sound and some random woman in big glasses have her moment in the sun as a Gloria Estefan stand-in. The gala four years ago was a key moment in the tidal wave of change. First I heard my father was running for vice president (while I was in a hotel in Costa Rica); next I watched the election returns in Little Rock; and then I was arm in arm with Michael Jackson and Barbra Streisand on a big stage. Chuck Berry stepped on my foot. Tonight will be different--I have some idea of what to expect. Anyway, I have to hurry; the motorcade leaves in ten minutes.