One Life

As I've been launching a major spring cleaning initiative around here lately, I'm unearthing all kinds of books, letters, documents, photos, bottle cap collections, coin collections, and God knows what else tucked away in the corners of this surprisingly accommodating flat.

The first image is of my Mom and Dad meeting my fourth child soon after his birth. I now realize this moment as the pivotal event in my life that it was. It had been 13 years since I had become the parent of a new person.

This little man had a different Mom, of course. I'd fallen totally in love with her, which was not hard to do, because she was charming, beautiful, talented and much more emotionally available than anyone I had ever encountered by that stage of my life.

It also was love at first sight for me; I remember the moment to this day. I was ~36 and already the father of three kids, and quite happily married, so of course I did not act on my impulse. She was 28 at the time, and surrounded by (count them) no less than three male admirers in our office when I first caught sight of her.

I never acted on my attraction, nor did I confess it. Instead, I denied it, and if I felt it popping up into my consciousness in subsequent years, as we worked together, I immediately suppressed this illicit attraction, and did my best to maintain a sustainable state of denial.

But, five+ years later I finally broke down, and kissed her for the first time -- in Paris, of all places, since that is where she was living at the time. It's quite a romantic story, really, but tonight I'll leave it at that, and move on to the next photo.



There now, I'm coming hazily into view. The year is 1994 and the season is fall. This lovely little boy has been born in the midst of much drama in my professional life. (Have I mentioned that in my own quiet way, I am quite the drama queen?)

Well, some back-story may be in order, then. I had been passed over by the board of directors of Mother Jones for the position of Editor in Chief in 1992, a year after I joined their staff and soon after I'd gotten remarried. I learned of this news via a voice message left on my home phone while I was on my honeymoon in the Sierra with the future mother of this beautiful baby.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. When I heard this news, by checking my voicemail, something deep inside me broke, and a sense of hope that had always sustained me shattered. For the one and only time in my life that I can recall, I became physically violent. After my bride and I had drank more than was our custom, enough so my pain should have been salved, I recall punching walls, throwing furniture, and breaking stuff.

Not exactly exemplary behavior for a "distinguished" journalist at the age of 47, and I am not proud to mention it. I had worn my wedding suit to the MoJo Board meeting in Chicago, just a few weeks after this lovely lady and I sealed our deal; plus I had taken my precious 11-year-old son, who endured long periods of waiting while the board had their way with me.

I had assumed the job was mine. After all, the only reason I had joined the magazine when I did was that the then-Editor in Chief confided to me he would be leaving in a year's time (which he did) and the position would therefore be mine.

At that point in what people would call my "career," but I call my distraction, anything less than the top job anywhere would have been an insult. But, as it turned out, another journalist had the inside track for the MoJo job, unknown to me. Afterwards, a mutual friend whom I had listed as a reference confessed that he didn't know how to differentiate between the two of us, and felt that he had helped in the process of undermining me, unwittingly, by not taking a stand.

I was later informed that I lost the job by one vote on the divided board.

After I calmed down, and left some money for the mountain hotel to pay for repairs, I returned to San Francisco and agreed to stay with the magazine. The board had been so seriously split that they wished to explore the concept of a "dream team" of editors -- their first choice and me. Of course, he would be in charge.

Always the sucker for these kinds of appeals, I agreed, partly because a hefty raise was involved in the deal. Plus, despite our unfortunate competition for the top job, I kind of liked this guy, his vision, and his willingness to try new things.

I lasted exactly one year in that job, which was a combination of Managing Editor/Investigative Editor. By the end of that period, I felt betrayed, undermined, devalued and blamed for things beyond my control. Worst of all, I found myself unable to even convince my colleagues of the merits of an investigative story I'd commissioned that documented how "socially conscious" clothing companies were exploiting workers in sweatshops in the Third World to create their fancy clothes for progressive consumers here in the Land of the Free.

This was, to me, a classic investigative piece, challenging our assumptions, and one that any honest journalist would die for. The reporter had done her homework; the cases were well documented, and there was no valid reason, editorially, to spike the story.

But spiked it was, and do you want to know why? Because a certain prominent leftist writer and friend of Mother Jones found out about the piece and complained that it would embarrass a major backer of the non-profit magazine, and therefore should not be done.

This opponent of investigative reporting later became the dean of a prestigious journalism school.

In an extremely improbable turn of events, the very same friend who had lured me into the Lion's Pit at Mother Jones soon became this new dean's right-hand man.

And I quite suddenly lost my long-running adjunct lecturer position teaching investigative reporting at said illustrious university, a job I had been doing for over ten years. No explanation from either of them was ever forthcoming; my course was simply reassigned to others, which objectively was not necessarily a bad thing to do. But, under the circumstances, the clear conclusion for me to draw was that I was being shafted.

Also, the timing, for me and my family, hurt, because my subsequent job at Wired Digital suddenly evaporated as the first step in a takeover of the company by unfriendly investors, who eliminated dozens of people, including ultimately, founders Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe.

So, this was one of the difficult transitions in my "career;" lots of emotional damage was done in the process.

But I fear I have gotten seriously ahead of myself here, because I never finished the story of how I quit Mother Jones. That was truly one of the lowest moments of a long, lonely career as a writer and editor.

I was so shocked at the overt hostility directed my way by someone I had considered a friend -- a colleague who on the day in question turned against me, and trashed my intention to publish the aforementioned sweatshop article, criticizing me as not bringing in the right kind of investigative articles.

The editorial meeting that day was a long one, and when we adjourned for a break, I walked out of the office, never to return, as an employee, again. I walked a mile or so to my home on Bernal Heights. My wife was not home. Then, I walked back to my office, grabbed my car, and started driving north.

I drove and I drove, much as any person trying to escape a nightmare tries to do.
I was way up north when I finally stopped for a dinner in a roadside cafe. After I ate the food, which I think was a patty melt with fries, I considered my options, and slowly turned myself around to head south.

After all, I had nowhere to escape to, and I had to come to grips with explaining to my still-new wife that I was quitting the job that provided our only reliable monthly income, just at the point where she had entered a creative writing program, seeking her MFA. I knew the news would frighten her, which is one reason I had tried to flee reality that night.

Of course, you can run but you can't hide. At the point when I was turning my car around, and rebounding home, to the Bay Area, I remembered that my oldest daughter (then in high school) would need a ride to school the next morning, 20 miles south in San Francisco. Somehow, in my horrible haze of ineffable sadness, I made it back down to near her Mom's house in Mill Valley, and got a few minutes of fitful sleep in the chilly hours before dawn.

As it turned out, my daughter, worried, had called my new wife to ask where I was, and the answer she received was "I don't know. I think your Dad may be in some trouble."

Within minutes of that call, I was pulling up outside of her mother's house on Northern Avenue in the old Tam Valley section of Mill Valley, and then I drove her to school at Lowell, where she was a superstar academically.

After that, I retreated home to our bungalow on Elsie Street and broke down in my wife's arms. So many failures! So many disappointments!

It would take a long, long time before I could begin to appreciate these experiences for what they are...just part of the natural thousands of sadnesses and the thousands of joys that populate our living years.



I love this last photo, showing my parents with my (then) four kids. Regardless of all the noise swirling through of the above stories, they occurred contemporaneously with my efforts to create a second nuclear family, and I never lost sight of what and whom I truly cared about.

Honestly, I am glad the MoJo board chose that other guy. He was the right guy at the right time. And, for the dean position, the university can have that guy, too.

Because at the end of it all, I remained untamed. I identified closely with those wild animals that trainers try to present as acceptable to their visitors.

Unlike most good men, I don't believe we have the luxury to debate what to do about global warming, say, or reconstructing the Gulf Coast after Katrina. I don't think we have time to debate the fine points of these crises.

Thus, I speak out, and in the process, become expendable.

That is the true story of my life as a journalist.


Oh, by the way, there was a postscript about that story that was spiked. It was published finally by The Nation and won an award.

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