Pulit

When I was four and a commercial came on, after a segment of the latest war correspondence from Vietnam, and I got up from my belly and made a declaration to my mother, father and brother.

“When I grow up, I’m getting a Pulit Surprise.”

This is not a family story. I remember distinctly. I remember on which spot of the carpeting I stood in the front room, where my brother was lounging reading some sort of hot rod car magazine and precisely which position and how far apart my parents were seated on the couch.

I might have made this statement around the time that footage from the cameraman who was shot dead while filming a battle was aired, camera held from down in the grasses, aimed across an open field in the jungle, rapid gunfire, then the camera fell sideways and laid there. When I saw that, I asked, and my father explained, what had happened to the cameraman and what he had been doing there – – what his job was – – after I insistently peppered him.

And I whispered my response, dreamy-eyed.

“I want to do that.”

And my father’s face washed with horror.

I remember the night when I said I wanted a Pulitzer clearly because they all laughed and I burned with anger at that. This is why it seared into me. They weren’t laughing at me, but were more like, “Aww, isn’t she cute,” which I found several degrees more infuriating.

But by the time I was eight, I knew exactly what a Pulitzer was and how to say it. I knew who Joseph Pulitzer was and could quote verbatim the St. Louis Post-Dispatch credo and regularly did so, just for the feel of the words pouring thick, bittersweet over my tongue. Any time I found a relevant moment in which to inject it into the conversation, people stopped and listened in awe.

We will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.

That was the same year they sent me for all that testing.

I got stomach ulcers that year, which is how all that testing got started.

I remember telling my teacher at school about how they made me drink, when searching for a diagnosis of my stomach ailment, a big huge glass of lumpy liquid that they said I should think of as a milk shake and how ridiculous I thought that advice was, because it tasted like chalk.

“How would you know what chalk tastes like,” she sharply accused.

I looked at her like she was a very stupid two-year-old and slowly and precisely enunciated, “It tasted. Like chalk. Smells.”

That’s the year I realized, which may have contributed to me getting ulcers, after I made a funny quip on the playground incorporating some current event into the conversation, maybe something to do with Spiro Agnew or something, which befuddled the little girls around me, that, no, no one would ever catch up, as I had been waiting for, and that I never would have anyone really to talk to. Not even the teachers, I thought, as I looked around the playground at them chaperoning recess, one by one, considering whether they might get it.

It was a devastating realization. I remember the spot of concrete I stood on behind Remington Elementary at the moment it hit me, where, to the right, most of the students were happily throwing big squishy red dodgeballs at one another. Some, gleefully, I noted, as hard as they could. I could point out for you the location where each of the three teachers were just then, when my eyes scanned the scene, as all but one of the little girls around me screwed up their faces after I explained the joke to them, then shrugged and ran away to go play with others, and I looked at each of the teachers, wondering if they might get it.

One.

Two.

Three.

No.

No.

Unknown, but unlikely.

I entirely gave up hope in finding carefree conversation in my environment, that morning.

It was the same year my mother used my vocabulary score from some of that testing – – which included weekly meetings with a psychologist, which I was so relieved to meet because he never once crinkled up his face to convey the message of pressure to conform I was so accustomed to seeing everywhere in my world, that went on for months every mid-week throughout the schoolyear that included Rorschach testing and a series of drawings of scenes that he asked me to tell him the stories of, while he made notes – – to brag to the other PTA mothers about.

“Twenty-third grade level,” and she would stiffen straight upright with a nose-high smile supercilious, as if it were her own score. As if she were responsible for it.

It was the same year my third-grade teacher beseeched my mother in the hall, for what seemed a full minute, as the other children ran around seeking mothers and siblings at the end of the school day, not wanting to let my mother leave until she fully understood, telling my mother that I needed more than I was getting, I suppose, and desperately implored her, begging her to see.

“She has to be a writer,” her last-ditch words.

While I stood, little, hands clasped at my chest, hoping, hoping, hoping.

But my mother, beyond annoyed, turned and stormed off without me, leaving my head too heavy to hold, then to lift anyway and scurry after her.

To be punished at home, with petty silence over that scene, for two weeks.

The same year I started biting my cuticles, usually not knowing I was doing so until I tore through a nerve or noticed blood dripping into webs of fingers or onto my wrist or someone else did. The same year the others saw who I was and the social shunning started showing more openly.

But I then began a plan in my mind and by the time I was twelve, I knew what a Public Service Pulitzer was and had my whole life figured. University. Journalist. Travel the world. Civil strife and war coverage. Then back to the States, when I physically slowed, in my thirties. Washington. American government. Later, in my forties, polishing nonfiction novels while listening to Cat Stevens during months’ long summers on a wraparound porch in a seaside rental in Maine.

But my middle school guidance counselor beat all those ideas out of me. It took some time, as I was determined. Once frustrated enough with me, he asked, “Do your parents even own anything?” and I answered about the property on which our house stood. So, he asked if I thought they would sell it, “so that you can go to a university,” priggishly.

And I knew they wouldn’t. Fear suddenly flooded through me when it dawned on me that he might call and tell them what I had been asking about that day. I was already, and had been for years, on the edge of a good ole fashioned full-on Amish shunning from my people. She always was uppity, the regular phrase around the neighborhood and in outer family circles, regarding me. I didn’t need more of that. Please don’t tell, I thought, and the blood drained out of my face at the thought of what my parents would say or do to me for asking him about college.

Once good and sure he had seen my total defeat, he moved ahead.

“If you’re really interested in journalism, you should take typing in high school,” he said, as he turned his back, picked up a pen and scribbled at his desk. Then, as he turned back and handed me a hall pass, finished, with a cruel smile, “Maybe you can get a job as a secretary at the Post-Dispatch.”

I decided, instead, to begin doing drugs and drinking, just like the rest of the kids from my neighborhood did. That week. Dedicatedly. Since I already had fallen so far behind them.

However, when in my mid-thirties, I inadvertently and almost against my will fell into journalism as an undergrad, then ended up eventually stringing for the Post, since I was out of the Saint Louis Community College and commuter-campus UM-St. Louis systems, therefore, no staff position, because, well, snobbery, or, more precisely, economic-class nepotism. And while in that function one Saturday afternoon I stood waiting for the elevator in the near-empty building on North Tucker next to a classically attractive, suited-up, young man. I looked up, appreciating his face and the height of him and he looked back at mine and then, when to my neck and farther downward, I reframed beyond him and began to read the words of Joseph Pulitzer. Once he satisfied himself with images, he saw my eyes again and noticed my refocus and followed my gaze to the quote carved into the grand granite wall. When he finished reading and looked over at me, we stood in our respective beauty and communion in the worth of the words and breathed deeply in a moment of reverence.

Then I said, “They should probably get someone in here to spackle over all that.”

He was surprised by his own burst forth chuckle.

Then his smile fell hard far away down.

And he nodded sadly, in agreement.

We rode the elevator in silence. I got off on the third floor, into the newsroom, and wrote about a NORML event. I remember my favorite editor, Tat, asked if I might have gotten too close to the product, when he found I misspelled the surname Moore in my copy. And where I sat. And where his fuzzy-headed silhouette stood in front of the yellow afternoon coming through filmy windows when he said it. And how we each half-smiled but didn’t laugh because we both were far too cool and jaded for that.

And I remember, just before I left, looking across the newsroom over to the copy desk, after Tat told me, they killed it. And I remember his disapproving grimace, begrudging shrug and slight shake of his head when he answered my nonverbal query, why, with, they wouldn’t say, and his look, when my jaw dropped open, that silently answered, don’t ask.

Too straightforwardly told for West County, I suspected.

Those at the copy desk, too ashamed of themselves to say so.

And justly ashamed, I said to myself.

And the attractive young man of six-four went on to the fifth floor, I imagine, if I remember right where the executives sat, I presumed by the looks of his suit, to make important decisions and consider influences in regard to stock prices and profit and what advertisers might think of things, perhaps between email exchanges and phone calls with family and friends about upcoming vacations. How lovely it would be, I can only imagine, but would be surprised, if in Maine.

Photo credit: Digital Buggu.