"Journalist."
This is a true story about a journalist, and I don't care.
A long time ago, I was assisting a famous humanitarian-type
professor in a course about literary and documentary
ethics, and this guy Adam was enrolled.
He wasn't in my discussion group.
There were like eight groups and like 200 people
there to listen to the lectures, but somehow Adam
decided he liked me, of all people,
and started approaching me outside the beautifully
repurposed soda factory where the class met.
He was handsome, I knew, but for some reason
it didn't matter to me even though he was my age
and had completed a degree at a fancy university I had once
wanted to go to.
I wanted to go to that university
the same way you imagine you want
to be a famous actress, when what you mean
is that you want to feel important.
So we chatted a few times I found pretty boring,
and then he asked if I would like to--
I don't remember-- something.
And I told him no, but I was walking home.
And if he wanted, he could walk with me
and hang out in the yard while I was gardening.
It's worth mentioning here that I
was one of the only white people living
in a neighborhood with a lot of Black and Mexican people,
and I was one of the only people in the neighborhood who
had anything to do with the university.
I had been told by people in my neighborhood
that I'm very, very white.
Adam, too, was white, white, white.
So Adam took me up on my idea, walked along home with me,
and he was cool with my dog.
And it turned out he knew a lot more than I did about plants.
He'd watch me and say this or that while I was poking around,
and a pattern emerged.
After class, he'd come up to me.
I'd say, well, I'm doing this or that,
usually moving things around in my garden
or taking the dog to the woods.
Come along if you want, and he started teaching me
about plants we passed in the woods, wild white ginger,
rattlesnake orchids.
He brought me clippings from his place
which he was having to sell because of the divorce
he was going through, and he was saddest of all
to lose all his plants.
One afternoon, he kissed me in the hallway near the bathroom.
I was really angry about that, but then I
started wondering what my problem was.
He showed me a picture of his parents in a Life magazine
spread from the '60s.
He said they were friends with the Kennedys.
He was always asking me if I thought
he could be a good writer, and I said
I thought he could be a good journalist.
He kept asking me, and I kept saying the same thing
in different ways.
So after he kissed me and I was so mad about it, part of me
started wanting him to kiss me again,
maybe because of the handsome part, maybe because
of the university part, maybe because of the Kennedys,
or maybe the knowledge of plants.
And at that point, the whole dynamic
shifted because he was so fucked up about his divorce,
and I was just so fucked up in general.
Let's see where this is going.
Shots rang out in the neighborhood one day
while I was gardening in my yard with my dog watching,
and my dog was killed.
It was really crazy, caught on video, a total media event,
and after I made a call across the country to this one person
I used to be in love with, I called Adam.
He's the one who lifted my dog onto my truck
and drove us to the woods, and he's
the one who directed the bush-hog in the night
to dig a hole and shine its headlamps while we
moved the body.
And he helped me cover the plot with rocks.
The rocks were there to keep it from getting dug up.
Then I didn't hear from him, and then he
told me in our last telephone conversation
that he just couldn't take my level of pain,
a phrase that stood out to me.
But now he's a journalist.
He has a nice place in the city, and he flies all over the world
and does stories about things like little brown girls being
sold into prostitution.
He's one of those journalists who presents every story
without any ambiguity at all and who
finds stories to tell in which there
is no way to locate more than one way to feel about anything.