Who are we?

And why are we here?

These are the questions reporters never get to ask.

Instead, we cover smaller topics. In my long career as a journalist, over 41 years, I've covered a ton of stories, big and small, but I've never taken on the existential questions, since, how is one to do so, anyway?

In the realm of non-fiction, that is. Non-fiction knows what it is not (fiction) but not what it is. Any writer a notch or two above a hack knows that the presumption that a mere journalist can discover the "truth" is a fiction even more outrageous than fiction itself.

Do you know how it feels to begin a story, say just a little story, about something you know little about? Tonight, I'm recalling my years as a part-time editorial writer for the old San Francisco Examiner, the one founded by William Randolph Hearst.

This was one of my three jobs at that time, the other being my main day job and a teaching post at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism.

The newspaper called me into work just a few times a year, often in summer or around a holiday. At that time, I was going through my first divorce and the collapse of job after job in the violent American media economy.

My memory of this particular editorial was that it was due very close to Christmas, and I know I used my earnings from it to buy the kids presents.

The subject I decided to write about that day was loneliness. I had often experienced this feeling, all of my life. In those years, although I had a new girlfriend whom I loved and with whom I would eventually create a family, I always was worried about my first kids and my first wife.

Were they safe?

My fantasies of controlling reality still governed my behavior at that tender age of the early 40s.

One night, my kids were driven into the inner city by their Mom to meet me and haul away a couple boxes of books I'd carefully acquired for their use. They intended to sell these books at a used bookstore to raise money for their "teen center" in Mill Valley.

As I waited for them to arrive, parked across the street, a dangerous-looking man appeared on the scene. Just then, my two precious teenaged daughters jumped out of their mother's car and ran happily to the front door of the old warehouse where I worked. As I watched, with horror, the scary man I'd spotted earlier pulled a knife out from one of his socks and began to approach my girls.

I gunned the engine of my car, honked the horn, and flashed my headlights and drove straight up on the curb of the sidewalk where he was stalking my girls. Luckily, this panicked him and he left the scene, because otherwise, naturally, I would have had to somehow murder him.

I don't think my daughters ever knew why I acted so strange that night behind the wheel of my car. I didn't have the vocabulary to tell them, as they were still so sweet, so innocent, and so very vulnerable.

***

Back to my editorial project.




I figured the loneliest (and to me, the scariest) place nearby the Examiner was the alley running westward between Fifth and Sixth Streets.

So, I went out there at dusk, still in time to hit my deadline, and walked its length, slowly. I saw men shooting up, and exchanging drugs. I saw people passed out, and people arguing. What I didn't see was anyone representing any kind of threat to me.

Everyone there was in the process of self-destructing.



I no longer remember exactly what I wrote in that (unsigned) editorial. Maybe one of these days I'll find it and republish it here. But I do know that I felt at the time: That I had truly found the loneliest place on earth, just next door to our big, shiny office, an alley where men came to die, slowly, and where I, as a writer, came to witness their demise.

That, my friend, is a story we should never cease to tell.

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