Loving on Megyn Kelly

 

        

        

         Megyn Kelly is kind of a hottie—that is, an attractive woman—but not for the reason you think. Speaking as a black male who has a wide variety of experience with a wide variety of women including a lot of white chicks, it’s not her blonde hair—if it is blonde or just artful highlights—or her trim figure that attracts. That is so yesterday. It’s not the hint of boob that the camera pans to, or the white-girl nose and lips. 

The media are all into how men today are lost and being crushed by women but what is really happening is we’re re-grouping. We're re-creating ourselves and, more and more, letting women take care of business. We’re trying not to act like fools anymore and part of that is not showing interest and indeed not being interested. Or not for the obvious reasons. Big tits and blonde hair for example, although those attributes will always have followers, are no longer the agenda-setters that they used to be. Strong women are suddenly the ones who beta males like me—we are the majority, after all—are looking for. Women have other assets to bring to the table than what they sit on at the table. 

That’s Megyn Flynn. It’s her intellect and personality that most attracts. You wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers but you wouldn’t turn off her podcast, either, for not sharing your views. Speaking as a liberal—even radical—black male.

The reason to raise the issue of Megyn’s attractiveness is that she’s gotten a lot hotter since the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran. After noting her closeness to the Trump administration she has nonetheless not been reluctant to call bullshit and question the administration’s motives and/or logic. And to question our relationship to Israel which, increasingly, appears to be unhealthy—for us. She has repeated various times, as well, early and often, that American women are opposed to the war. Even if guys, as usual, despite our new touchy-feeliness, like to see those planes taking off from the carriers, headed for Tehran. 

And although Megyn didn’t say this specifically, the U.S. now finds itself in the peculiar position of perhaps killing a lot more innocent Iranian civilians, who are supposed to be among our major concerns with the Khamenei regime, than the ayatollahs ever did.

You may say, well, how is that different from the liberal media who have also opposed the Iran War? There are a couple of major distinctions. 

First, the liberal media condemns everything that Donald Trump does. If the President says, “Today is Tuesday,” the New York Times will quickly publish documentary evidence that the day of the week is actually Thursday. By complaining about everything that Donald Trump stands for, the Times has lost a lot of credibility. This is especially true because the newspaper of record, as well as American media in general, has pushed the Israeli narrative, falsely, for decades. Benjamin Netanyahu is not a victim. He’s a predator who, by the way, has never even been completely profiled by the Times. The newspaper of record has also been pushing an anti-Iran narrative for years, showing particular glee about U.S.-Israeli infrastructure, intelligence and worm attacks. Because Israel has been American media’s darling, long after reporters knew better. 

Is this an appropriate time to mention that the NYT is a Jewish-owned/managed publication, and executive editor Joe Kahn’s family has business interests in Israel? Or, by making these remarks, does one become guilty, once gain, of antisemitism? Oh please.

Megyn Kelly also differs from “the mainstream media” because she can walk and chew gum at the same time, to quote LBJ. MSNBC el al, all the usual liberal suspects, are incapable of making exceptions, as is the case with the Times. They follow the playbook and condemn anything that is not on the Democratic Party agenda. So, too, on the subject of Iran/Israel. The major enabler of the Israelis historically have been Democrats, whether the subject has been arms, financial aid, or sharing of intelligence. The Republicans are latecomers to the love affair with Israel, but as with the Iraq War, which a lot of Dems also favored, the party’s policy platform is now whatever Tel Aviv wants, Tel Aviv gets.

Megyn is kind of cool though, even if she is a Republican. (She self-identifies as an independent, btw.) She has balls and, occasionally, a potty mouth. She's a wonderful combination of brains, experience and, well, cattiness. She’s not afraid to go after other women which is super-enjoyable if you’re a guy. She even goes after black women which is practically unheard of among white female talking heads. She recently dissed Michelle Obama, who is one of my favorite people in the whole world. But, for one thing, Michelle may have deserved it and, two, frankly, the former first lady has successfully fended off more shit than any ten white women combined. In other words she'll survive Megyn's attacks and, frankly, no one should be above the fray.

As a Texan, in the recent Democratic Senate primary, my money was on Jasmine Crockett. But Megyn pointed out after the election that Crockett has a lot of queenie-type behaviors, kind of like a black princess. As a New Black Male, who no longer allows that little weenie—actually it’s quite large by white standards—to run my life? Black people who struggle for and achieve success and then start acting like the white people we have opposed for centuries get on my last nerve. For that reason, when Megyn also goes after the other Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, my ears perk up and there’s a smile on my face.

What’s scary about Megan Kelly? Speaking in the vein that she’s good but not perfect? 

She never has black or Latino or Asian guests on her podcast. At least in my experience as a viewer. One hesitates to call her racist but she doesn’t seem to praise anyone who isn’t white, either. That’s a bad sign. She strikes me, frankly—speaking as a black guy who knows the competition—she strikes me as a white chick who doesn’t have any friends or associates outside her own community. 

If true, that itself is the saddest commentary of all.

        No diggity.

The White Lady has a Black Problem Part 1

        The New York Times has a race problem. The Times is known throughout the black intelligentsia as “The White Lady,” who today finds herself in the peculiar and embarrassing position of pushing a diversity narrative for others that has not been applied in her own newsroom. Or in the pages of the newspaper, actually. 

According to the Times’ own race numbers, last updated in 2024, the news staff is approximately two-thirds white in a country where Caucasians are in the lower 50s and declining rapidly. This is actually an improvement because in past decades the newspaper’s white staff has been 90%. Go back beyond that and the Times didn’t hire blacks or Latinos at all, except as window dressing, like, to point out the lone black person at a typewriter in the back of the newsroom when the mayor or another dignitary was taking a tour. The features of the “peculiar institution,” as slavery was known in years past, have been adopted by a different peculiar industry, American journalism. 

Today in the premier newsroom in the world—the NYT—blacks and specifically Latinos are both far below their percentages in the population while Jews who represent 3% of the US population are, according to some estimates, ten-fold too highly represented in the White Lady’s ranks. What’s up with that? The Times doesn’t track its Jewish percentage, or at least doesn’t publicize it, but historically the major editors, columnists and investigative types, to say nothing of the publisher, which is the Sulzberger family, have been Jews. With a sprinkling of WASPs. 

The peculiar position of the Sulzbergers is that the same diversity standards the Times pushes in its reportage do not apply among its own hires. This is actually not news but is instead something that we see every day among the higher ranks of American journalism. Reporters at the Washington Post, National Public Radio, Pro Publica, the New Yorker el al want to complain about the decline of diversity due to the Trump administration—ICE attacks or what have you, erosion of affirmative action on college campuses—but the journalists doing the complaining are almost invariably white, often Jewish—the so-called “white saviors” who are so common among reporters in recent years. Nowhere is that more true than the White Lady herself. And includes the publication’s reportage. 

In fact the Times’ credibility problem with black people just manifested itself twice in an ugly and wholly discriminatory way, first with its coverage of the death of civil rights icon and former presidential candidate the Reverend Jesse Jackson of Chicago. To set the scene. 

Over the course of three days, the Times published some 20 pieces on Jackson’s death, 17 of which were written by whites, overwhelmingly Jews, including the main story by Peter Applebome, former White Lady columnist and Atlanta bureau chief, a self-promoting Jewish expert on African Americans who wrote the main obituary and who chose as the first person to quote in the story—about this black civil rights icon’s death—a Jewish political organizer from Chicago named Rose. A more accurate and far shorter take on Jesse Jackson’s racial trajectory will be presented below but it’s useful to note first that Jewish beliefs about black people are often based upon ignorance and upon Jews’ own delusional view that they are somehow owners of the black narrative in this country. Wrong, bro. Although it is a belief that is on permanent display at the Times. But just because you read it in the newspaper doesn’t mean it’s true. 

And that will lead to the second incident to be discussed, another recent story by the White Lady. But first, suffice it to say that Jews don’t “know” us—black people—despite Jewish protestations to the contrary, any more than anyone from any race or culture knows any other race or culture. Jews are tourists in the hood, in other words, just as American black people are when, for example, we visit Tel Aviv. But you can’t tell the Times that, or the New Yorker for that matter where Editor-in-Chief David Remnick who is Jewish and has been accused  by his own staff of racism in hiring, yet considers himself another expert on black people, having published four books, depending on you count, on the black peep, including a biography of Barack Obama. 

Interestingly, just a year or two ago, veteran black journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates said—while mentioning his desire to write about Palestine and the Palis’ struggle with the Israelis—he said he was warned off and told by journalist/friends that he didn’t have the knowledge base to write about the Middle East. That hasn’t stopped Jewish “experts,” bro, who are more than willing to opine on African Americans they know very little about. 

A recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography Jonathan Eig, the Jewish sportswriter from Dallas who is now the white press’s go-to foremost authority on Martin Luther King Jr.? Eig also has a series of children’s books written in the person of a little black girl. This certainly has nothing to do with cultural appropriation or any wish on Eig’s part to exploit the black narrative for his own profit. God forbid. How do we know that? Because the principal New York Times book reviewer Dwight Garner wrote in his White Lady review of Eig’s MLK book that the tome is now “the authoritative biography” of Martin Luther King. Without actually explaining how the white guy Garner is in a position to make that judgment about the white guy Eig on the subject of the black leader MLK. 

Anyway, doubly interesting is that Mr. Coates, who at the time of his pronouncement about wanting to write about Palestine was at The Atlantic, where the editor-in-chief is former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg. Coates now writes for Vanity Fair. Enough said. 

American Jews love nothing more than to recall Jewish efforts to help African Americans during the civil rights era, including two Jewish Freedom Riders who got their tickets cancelled in Mississippi, alongside countless blacks, but Jews somehow totally ignore those hundreds of black G.I.s who died in combat in Europe during World War Two, while freeing Jews. The Tuskegee Airman for example were not flying over Mississippi, bro, although those missions might have been useful too. Instead they were flying and dying over Germany, in order to free Jews. It’s remarkable that a people like the Jews, who have promised never to forget the past, are so quick to forget what has been done for them but not to them. 

Anyway, on the third day of Times coverage of Reverend Jackson’s death, the subject finally became something that black people might have found more interesting. In a piece by the Jewish journalist Jonathan Mahler, who is another of the Times’ experts on black people, the story was called “How a Stray Quote of Jesse Jackson’s Led to a Rupture Between Black and Jewish Voters,” did you read that? During his 1984 run for the presidency Jackson famously referred to Jews as “Hymies” and New York City as “Hymietown,” which was clearly inappropriate (brought to light by a black Washington Post reporter, fyi) but was also indicative of African American dissatisfaction with the Jewish narrative of blacks in this country. Which includes the proposition that any disagreement with Jews is unacceptable. 

Jews spend a lot of time in black business without being invited. Part of the reason is financial, once we accept contributions, whether political or to our educational institutions, the camel’s nose is under the tent. But wither, exactly, the hymie epithet? 

In the 1960s and 1970s Jews were forced out of some civil rights groups, by black activists, lest we forget, for being patronizing and attempting to run black organizations. As if we are their inferiors and needed their direction. Which the Times did not mention in its exploration of Jesse Jackson’s sins, even though Jackson was very suspicious of the Jewish role in black civil rights. The Mahler piece continued, as background: 

“A natural alliance between two largely liberal minority groups, each with a history of discrimination, had come under pressure from the country’s changing political dynamics. In New York City, a 1968 struggle over the control of public schools in largely Black neighborhoods prompted the firing of a group of predominantly Jewish teachers — spurring a citywide strike led by the Jewish head of the teachers union.” One point of contention is that African Americans are arguably not that liberal. We believe in fairness but also in many of the same traditional values as conservatives, including family ad faith. And forgive one for wondering why Jews were in charge of black instruction? And why it was so disconcerting to Jews that black educators wanted the task of educating black children? It was a different time, leave it at that. What’s interesting in the Mahler piece is that any break in black-Jewish relations can be attributed to actions by blacks, never anything that Jews have done. 

Let’s see. The Times has, almost singlehandedly, just ended the mayoralty of an African American in New York, who got too close to Muslim Turkey, and Jews contributed significantly to the recent reelection losses of two black Democratic members of Congress who had the temerity to criticize Israel. But if blacks who are such a key demographic of the Democratic Party—as we are reminded endlessly by the White Lady—if we question Jews or criticize Jews we automatically becomes antisemites. Or we’re “ungrateful.” Please.

If on the other hand they criticize us it is because they're smarter or more upright morally/ethically. Really? This standard also applies to Hollywood, btw. During the uproar over the Gaza war, as blacks began to stand up for the Palestinians—and correctly so—television star Juliana Margueiles who is Jewish said we were “brainwashed.” It’s actually Jews who have been brainwashed, in part by the White Lady herself, to believe the decades of Israeli b.s., which only now is coming to light as a wide swath of the American public questions support of the Jewish State. But enough of Gaza and onto Chicago, and later New York, the aforesaid “Hymietown.” Let a black person opine briefly on our own peeps, for a change. 

Chicago was the black melting pot and has formed so many ambitious black leaders including Oprah, Michael Jordan, Revered Jackson, Elijah Muhammad and, most famously, Barack and Michelle Obama. In this context too the newspaper of record doesn’t know what it’s talking about. One might say, if one wished to be crude, the White Lady is a lying bitch. And Times Square is where she sells her ass, not to be judgmental. 

This white publication attempts to portray itself as an expert on all things African American, which is simply not true. A more credible Jesse Jackson narrative, for example, like many other black Americans’ stories, is not that difficult to understand or recount if the source has culture competence, which Times people mostly do not. (The White Lady, btw, recently ran an opinion piece by one black writer and two Jews that “African American” should no longer be used, in favor of exclusive use of “black"; now we know because the White Lady has spoken.) But on to Chicago.

My mother and father were both born in Texas but grew up in Chicago after their families migrated, part of the move of blacks from the South to the northern states and the Midwest during the early 20th century, in order to escape Jim Crow. To set the scene.

Chicago was where so many escaping black families ended up. My father used to recount being a kid in Chicago in the 1920s and watching as an expensive car pulled up in the black hood and the back door opened and sitting there was Al Capone, with a  large bag of coins, which he threw handfuls of, at passing Negroes. Who scurried to pick up the money. Capone was insuring that if he came to trial and any blacks appeared on the jury, they knew to vote not guilty. 

My mother who was a gifted observer and storyteller had a favorite saying about the Windy City where she spent her childhood, before moving to California like so many others. “Chicago has,” she liked to repeat, “the meanest niggers in the world.”

 What she meant by “mean nigger” is what we often still mean today, formidable. Like Michael Jordan, or Oprah. Ambitious. Smart. Capable. White people don’t understand that, unless they’re told by us. Chicago has created a lot of mean niggers with and without the assistance of Jewish political operatives. What Times coverage also failed to note at Reverend Jackson’s passing is that Jesse Jackson was part of the generation of black people who first grew tired of Jewish efforts at control and condescension towards us. 

One of the only telling comments in the White Lady’s coverage, those 20-odd stories, was by the black writer Michael Eric Dyson who recounted that among Reverend Jackson’s economic campaigns was getting CBS to desegregate and hire blacks. 

One likes to think that if Jackson were still alive and in his prime he would have taken on the White Lady too.  

Guerrilla Journalism (Work in Progress)

CHAPTER 1, X is for Xavier`

           What were Jenna and/or Barbara Bush doing, back in the day, in that car on Lavaca Street just up from the Texas Governor’s Mansion when a cop’s red and blue lights came thru the back window? What they were doing, without knowing it, was initiating, you could say, a case of corruption that would involve Austin police and the Bush family and lead an important Latino journalist to lose his job for trying to pursue the story. To set the scene. It’s unclear if it was both of the First Children or just one because the girls, when they were out and about in Austin, were sometimes together and serving as their own posse. You could guess that it was just Jenna because she had a wilder reputation while Barbara was said to be more studious but let’s say, for the purposes of discussion, that it was both. After all Barbara may have gotten away with a lot of shit—like an unauthorized sleepover by a boy at the Mansion when the sisters were students at Austin High—because everyone naturally blamed Jenna. Not to be judgmental of either of the twins. 

Another question that will also turn out to be important to this narrative is do you know what bodyguards are really there for? Not just to protect the wealthy and important but to keep them from doing dumb shit or to get them out of trouble after they’ve done it. Does that make sense?

So, like, not all the circumstances of the police stop are clear. There may have been intervention of an unidentified high public official whose full name features a “W,” like for example George W. Bush? And may have involved the Texas Department of Public Safety or the U.S. Secret Service, depending on if the unidentified high public official was living in the Governor’s Mansion or in the White House at the time. The stop of the Bush boopsie(s) by Austin police, whatever was going on in the car, which was illegal, well, let’s put it this way: the pigs would have taken a nigger or a Mexican to jail but not the Governor’s daughters or the President’s little darlings, you feel me? To set the scene. 

What is known is that there was weed present in the car which would not be a big deal today but was at the time and would have meant that somebody was arrested. What we also know is that as APD was actually getting ready to do its job and put handcuffs on Miss(es) Bush, a chase car arrived with a Bush protective detail. What we don’t know is if the bodyguards were summoned by a panic button, some kind of electronic alert that was activated, or if the chase car was actually following the car with the weed. What we do know is the name of the reporter who heard about the incident and tried to get to the bottom of why the Bush girl(s) didn’t go to jail like anyone else. He was Guillermo X. Garcia and he was the Texas bureau guy for USA Today, stationed in Austin. We know that the “X” stands for Xavier. We also know that eventually he got a call from his boss in New York telling him to come to the office and, per Guillermo, “bring the computer,” that is his work computer. And we know that's when he got fired.

CHAPTER 2, Booty Called

  Guillermo was a predator. And a very good reporter. He was the best reporter it was my pleasure to meet in fifty years in the business. If he says he got fucked by the Bush Family he probably did because Guillermo fucked a lot of people himself—they all deserved it—and he knows what it's like. Mostly though Guillermo didn't say much about the traffic stop on Lavaca Street. He always kept his cards close to his chest about his stories and about his life and if you asked him something he'd turn it back on you and ask, like, “What do you want to know that for?” 

Guillermo is from Laredo, old school Latino. They just don’t talk about shit. June Griffin who was Guillermo’s wife—she’s an Austin girl, btw, they raised three boys together after meeting in Mexico City when Guillermo was the Mexico correspondent for Cox Newspapers, which includes the Austin American-Statesman and the Atlanta daily newspapers? June was working at the Mexico City News at the time they hooked up although later, while raising the kids, she studied acting and became a sex-bomb in B-movies. Anyway, June came up to me one day after they had been married like ten years and said that she had just learned, from Guillermo’s sister, that Guillermo had an older brother who was killed in Vietnam. You can imagine how June felt, you know what women are like about sharing and all that, but that’s just what old school Latinos are like. Whether it’s traffic stops or family history. And it didn't bother me that Guillermo hadn't told me either. Usually guys are totally cool with not sharing. Sometimes we wish there was more of it.

Guillermo’s middle brother, named Fausto, just died a year or two ago and the obit online mentioned that he was a pilot in Vietnam and it said specifically in the obituary that Fausto, who became an inspector for the Customs Service, riding out on a boat to meet freighters arriving at the Port of New Orleans, the obit said that Fausto “never talked about” his time in Vietnam, either. Literally. Although Guillermo never told me, the oldest brother who was killed was apparently also a pilot. The only hint that Guillermo ever gave was once, when we were talking about dropping bombs from a plane, in a journalistic context, and he said that is the most vulnerable time for the pilot because the aircraft has to slow down and fly straight in order to drop the ordinance accurately. And another time he mentioned that Latinos had the highest casualty rate of U.S. grunts in Vietnam. To set the scene.

You may say, so, like, why don’t you just ask Guillermo what happened? Because we’re no longer sharing. 

We’re no longer talking, actually, it happens, but guys aren’t like chicks who have to lay blame. Neither of us is at fault. Our relationship was complicated by West Texas geography. So, like, what happened is that we met in Alpine, in Brewster County, home to nothing in particular, to do some heavy drinking and dope smoking? Which would have been a perfect time to discuss events on Lavaca Street back in the day. Kind of like those dude movies or chick flicks where friends of either sex get together to renew ties and commit bad behavior away from spouses. This kind of road trip is actually a much more dangerous activity than you may realize, you can renew ties or break bonds altogether. To set the scene. Guillermo and me hadn’t seen each other for a while when we hooked up. 

So, like, one night we went up to McDonald Observatory in the mountains of nearby Jeff Davis County, watched Skylab or the International Space Station or whatever it was orbit overhead, with the naked eye, and then headed back down the desolate mountain road and by the time we reached Alpine again we were no longer each other’s favorite people. The take home is that friendships can have expiration dates just like marriages. Shit happens. Guys get over it and move on.

But if you were to ask me? Me not being old school Latino and all? It’s that damn machismo—that black people call cheesmo—that is common among a certain ethnic group, not to point fingers or anything. In a nutshell, despite our great masculinity, black men are not afraid to cry. We run our mouthes just like chicks do too, but what we say lacks the bitchiness. If this really were a buddy movie, think of me as the Denzel Washington character, with Guillermo played by Bernicio Del Toro. Bernicio is pretty cool, and all, especially in the first Sicaro movie. But in my defense, there’s only one Denzel, you feel me? 

So, like, it’s too bad because Guillermo and me were more similar than even we ever knew. He had the Republicans—the Bush family—undue influence and official misconduct. For me it was the Democrats—the Hobby family—perjury and manslaughter. Both stories were fueled by drugs. Another similarity is that the perps in both were white chicks who, in my modest opinion, have replaced white men as the principal bad guys in the modern world. The difference between the two? The Texas establishment got Guillermo, but shouldn’t have, and didn’t get me, but should have.

CHAPTER 3, The Judge on the Telephone

Once, on my way to an interview at a building across the street from the Texas Capitol—well, like, this building had a cool little parking garage, underground out of the heat, and there was an empty parking space that was more than adequate for my motorcycle. So, well, like, that’s where my bike ended up. And then the parking attendant came over with this expression on his face that you would probably see on the face of a Muslim if he caught you desecrating the Koran or a priest if he caught you hitting on a nun: not just disapproval, but the parking attendant's head turned painfully to the side, looking at me with an expression approaching disbelief, almost horror. “That,” he informed me, “is Lady Bird’s spot,” belonging to President Johnson’s widow, who owned the building. Well, fuck me. The point is Austin was a small town occupied by a lot of powerful people, who sometimes ended up on the police blotter, although there was no indication that Lady Bird Johnson was one of those, like she smoked dope or got caught drunk driving or whatever.

Still, as a police reporter, which was my first job, and then as the courts reporter, chasing public officials became my bread-and-butter, my meal ticket, like Guillermo’s, although only part-time. Like when you recognized someone’s name after an arrest, or more likely heard someone’s name involved in something but the person didn’t get charged? Wrongdoing in public life was a pretty good assignment in this town even then, actually, as you can imagine. Guillermo was the expert in the American-Statesman newsroom but for me at the beginning it was only my backup gig. 

My beat was certainly never “black people” per se, but there were only two Negroes working the City Desk at the time, back in the day, and because we knew the culture and would do a better job than white reporters we did a lot of Eastside coverage as well. Sometimes it was just a form of translation, like, white people have a lot of curiosity even today about African Americans and sometimes your job is merely to interpret the culture, to translate and especially to let white people know when they’re treading on dangerous ground, you feel me? Like, no, you don't want to go there, or, that over there, that's quicksand, my friend. Or it's the jungle. Although that’s no longer an accurate description now that East Austin has been gentrified.

For me the work also often meant writing about "firsts," first black this, first black that, as White Society tried to make us believe we were being integrated into the Chamber of Commerce culture of the town. The aftermaths of police shootings, certainly, then as now, listening to the dead Negro’s mother ask why they had to shoot him six times, you know, if he was unarmed? It was always the same shit, basically the same story, just as it is today. Someone still has to write it. One weekend, me covering cops but new to the job and Guillermo as my backup, we went to a police shooting. Black guy of course, dead on the ground outside a house, he was unarmed, Guillermo was shocked, one of the few times but yeah, presumably because Guillermo was from the border and there were no niggers down there to shoot. Although this was my first police shooting as a reporter it wasn’t my first exposure to white cops with guns as an African American. Most cop killings of black men were shot in the back. Because the brother was unarmed and doing what unarmed black guys do best, running. Only later would the Austin police start using the “I thought he was reaching for something” justification. Not all the gunfire was one-way, however.

It was particularly frustrating covering the police because the local pigs were determined to make all the same mistakes dealing with the Black Man that every other southern police force had already made. The last cop in Austin to be killed in the line of duty, a year or two before my arrival on the scene, was a Latino who was machine-gunned by a white drug dealer. But the one before that was a white guy who started hassling Muslims selling the Nation of Islam newspaper Muhammad Speaks downtown on Congress Avenue, in other words soul brothers, strong black males like me. Couldn’t have helped the guy who got hit with AK-47 fire—when somebody empties an assault rifle into your chest it’s a karma moment, God is telling you to lie down. But having completed my newspaper internship in Atlanta, the so-called Black Mecca, and knowing a little bit about the Nation of Islam, if anybody had bothered to ask me prior to the fatal encounter my advice would have been don’t fuck with the Nation. Cop or no—magnum on your hip or venerable .38, you may not live long enough to use it. Those Muslim brothers don’t play around. If you mess with them or disrespect their religion, someone is going to end up on the ground, probably facedown and perhaps bleeding out. Oh well. The message got passed on to the police directly, just a little late to help the aforesaid officer. And, interestingly, those Muslim cats selling the Nation newspaper were unarmed too but they were problem-solvers and in the struggle they took the white cop's gun and shot him with it. So, like, there was like some racial polarization in the city, yes, you could say that. 

The American-Statesman newsroom was in a shitty building at what is now Republic Square, in front of what is now the federal courthouse. The building looked like a very long doublewide trailer and included the printing plant. Today everyone is jaded about the press but at the time of my arrival as a newly-hired reporter, people still bought the newspaper and read the editorials and discussed what was in them. Our desks were in rows in the newsroom, no cubicles, and the City Desk was literally a row of desks with a lot of telephones in the center of the room. Sitting at the desk in front of me was the political editor, a white cat named Ford who left right after my arrival, he went to be press secretary for the new Republican governor who people talked about like he had horns and a tail. Which it actually turned out he did have. 

        Sitting in front of the political editor was Guillermo who became my role model and my in-house source of weed, not that that's important here. There was also a black police reporter who sold weed but his shit was not as good as Guillermo's and was more expensive. In fact Guillermo never even charged me and he became my best friend. Not to get all sentimental.

There was a scanner to load our stories, written on typewriters, into the nascent computer system. The only computers belonged to editors, in order to do their thing or write headlines or whatever. You did the actual reporting using the telephone or by in-person interviews or by going to the courthouse and pulling files. Watching Guillermo, since he was my role model and all, every once in a while he hung up the telephone, rose to standing next to his desk, bent his elbows and reached out like he was grabbing someone around the hips. Then he thrust forward his own hips. It meant that Guillermo had just fucked someone or was about to fuck someone. It was kind of beautiful, actually, that hip thrust. Today reporters like to trade influence and if a reporter, who is usually liberal, goes after anyone it will be a Republican or a Latino or black Democrat, because we're considered expendable. But back then everyone in Texas was still a Democrat, except the new governor. So, like, if you wanted to draw blood in print, the target was almost always a white D not a R. Which didn’t bother me or Guillermo in the least as reporters of color.

For example: have you heard of the Texas Railroad Commission, that regulates oil and gas production in the Lone Star State? 

       The Railroad Commission is a three-member statewide elected body that OPEC was based upon, and also the Mexican drug cartels, because the whole idea of energy production, like with drug sales, is limiting competition and maximizing profits. Shortly after my arrival, Guillermo wrote a great investigative story that the Commission had set the price of natural gas in a private meeting, an executive session actually, instead of a public vote as the law required. It was a big deal because the three commissioner had broken the law and could have been prosecuted and they even came to the newsroom to complain to the editor about Guillermo’s nefarious story. Which was totally accurate and the editor listened politely and then said, basically, to the members of the Texas Railroad Commission, go fuck yourself. All three guys were Democrats but conservative Democrats which were kind of like Republicans are today. Which also taught me something about Guillermo’s methods. Sometime later Guillermo introduced me to his best friend from Laredo, a Latino guy named Robert, who happened to work for the Texas Railroad Commission.

It’s my bet, although Guillermo didn’t tell me, this is what happened in the case of the Bush traffic stop on Lavaca Street too. So, like, the chase car, full of state troopers, appeared at the stop. The Austin police were getting ready to do their duty and take the Miss(es) Bush in, and the troopers said fuck you, no you’re not. APD was pretty pissed off but what were they going to do, get in a gunfight with the Texas Department of Public Safety? Guillermo got tipped off by a Latino cop. The local police department was just starting to diversity, a few niggers but a lot more Latinos, and some of them reached higher ranks and it was my belief that’s how Guillermo got turned onto the Bush story in the first place. How cool is that? That kind of intra-ethnic leaking is a lot more common that you think, even now. Practically all Jewish reporters are tied into the Jewish network and getting leaks from other Jews. And there were black officials who would tell me things that they wouldn’t tell a white reporter.

Overall, just a few decades ago reporting was still an intimate experience in this town. Interviews were still one-on-one, you knew the people you were fucking or about to fuck, very often you looked them in the eye when you gave those first and final shoves. Which is what Guillermo taught me, as my preceptor you could call him. For me on my beat, covering the courts also meant dealing with the alphabet agencies of the federal government, FBI, DEA, ATF, IRS as well as the Secret Service which had a big detail in town to cover President Johnson’s family and the LBJ Ranch. It was kind of cool but also kind of scary for a young blood like me. Very often my sympathies were not with the authorities, you know?

One day the City Desk clerk called me to the telephone. She said there was a judge on the telephone for me. You might think, “Oh wow,” that’s cool, but being a 22-year-old African American thug my reaction was more, like, “Oh shit. What did I do?”

It was a federal judge. A white cat named Sessions, calling from his chambers in San Antonio. It was a different age, what can you say?

He told me that he had just been appointed Chief Judge of the Western District of Texas, that includes Austin, Waco, San Antonio and El Paso. He wanted me to do “a little write-up,” no shit, about his appointment. After the warm pee stopped running down my leg, what was there to do, except say, “Yes, Your Honor.” And hope that if he ever found standing in front of him at sentencing, he would remember, fondly, his little write-up.

The interesting thing is that a couple of years later Judge Sessions was appointed Director of the FBI by President Reagan. Sessions’ tenure in D.C. eventually ended in scandal, apparently caused by some behaviors of Mrs. Sessions, which proves my whole point, doesn’t it? Guillermo and my reporting careers covered what can be called The Era of the Bad Girl. In just our time in the saddle, women were going from saints to sinners, from princesses to perpetrators. As they were being liberated, women were beginning to do much of the same illegal and/or evil shit that guys have been doing all along, which made me personally feel like some of my life choices weren't so terrible after all. Does that make sense? 

Meanwhile Guillermo was about to get his own call from a federal judge reaching out to the City Desk and wanting to talk to an editor. To set the scene.

CHAPTER 4, Another Federal Judge on the Phone

        Readers talked about a vast rightwing effort to dumb down the left- leaning citizens of the city. They talked conspiracy, they talked cabal. But you were closer to the truth if you though herb, cold beer, sun and the lake. Pussy. Dick. Warm weather for the two to meet. There were a lot better things to do in this town than dig through records in the courthouse or rewrite copy. 

The location attracted talented writers, that was part of the appeal of River City, but once people hit town the lifestyle went to work in unexpected ways. You just stopped wanting to work. Had nothing to do with being slackers per se, it was a purely rational decision. There was better shit to do. The District Attorney once helped to recruit a police chief for the city. This is a true story, or mostly true, he told me about it in one of our tete-a-tetes in his office one day as he was approaching retirement. The new police chief was from Small Town, California and took the job reluctantly because he didn’t really approve of the Texas capital city, he thought Austin was degenerate in some sense and called the residents “hippies.” And then a year or two after coming here—the prosecutor told me—the chief bought a couple of acres in the Hill Country and was talking about retiring to the ranch to raise a few head. It was that way with reporters too. 

They might arrive fired-up with ambition but people got comfortable here, they started spending time on the water, learning how to jet ski, drinking on the patio at Scholz’s. Maybe they started sampling local produce—for whatever reason there’s always been good herb in this town and in a certain circle that’s important. There were moments of brilliance in the newsroom even during my tenure but no one could be bothered to put out a decent newspaper day after day, that would be too much like work. Good enough was usually good enough. 

The city was laidback and maybe that has disappeared now but at the time relaxation was a religion. We weren’t journalists then, for the record, we were reporters, a job description that was not entirely kosher, not like now that the job is fashionable and people are better-educated but inexperienced in the ways of the world, then it was the reverse: we were too experienced but not well-enough schooled to make sense of what we saw. Or know how to express it. A lot like the cops we covered: questionable formal education, a skill set acquired mostly on the job, our own bars and our own bulls/bitches, and a reputation for not being particularly good in polite society. A lot of drinking—a lot of drinking and a lot of fucking, actually, not that there's anything wrong with that—and a lot of divorces. If you had any sense you were looking for a way up, or out. 

In the Statesman newsroom of me and Guillermo’s youth the questionable influence actually started at the top. Editor Ray Mariotti's major reputation outside work was as a bar-fighter. Ray was best known as the guy you wanted to have your back if things got nasty when you went out at night, after putting the newspaper to bed. He fucked anything that moved which made him kind of a hero for young reporters, but his command of the five W’s or his understanding of the inverted pyramid writing style, although impeccable was not teachable. He had learned his trade as city editor in Miami Beach, that was his day job while he spent most of his free time at the dog track. 

So, like, the thing about us being uneducated, maybe that was not entirely true. Sitting to my right a couple of desks over were two Stanford graduates, Glenn Garvin who did investigations and Linda Anthony, an incredibly hot little thing who wrote an expose on massage parlors by working as a masseuse. No lie. Linda studied Chinese at Stanford, so they told me— she was probably the only masseuse working in America who studied Mandarin at a top-tier private university. Truth be known, Linda kind of owned the newspaper, or a big part of it, the name she didn’t use was Cox, Linda Anthony Cox, or Linda Cox Anthony, the Cox part belonging to “Cox Enterprises,” or “Cox Media,” or “Cox Communications,” or “Cox Newspapers,” not sure what corporate logo they were using at the time but owners of the Austin and Waco newspapers, dailies in Palm Beach and Miami Beach, and Dayton, Ohio where the founding publisher Colonel Cox late of the Union Army had been governor—and Atlanta Newspapers, where my journalism apprenticeship took place, as well as a couple of ad-filled throwaways in California that were probably more profitable than Austin and Atlanta combined. With certain notable exceptions like the rock n’ roll critic Ed Ward who arrived on the bus from Rolling Stone, who was also first-rate, and Linda, who was a class act, we were mostly in the Mariotti mode. Can’t speak for everybody but if we weren’t working at a newspaper most of us would have been at the track with Ray. 

It wasn't just a class thing but you could explain it that way as well as any other. Because we weren’t entirely “acceptable” didn’t mean we didn’t have power or stand close to power. As mentioned above, just after my arrival the guy sitting at the desk in front of me was tapped as the new governor's press secretary. Eventually, a few years down the road, Bill Cryer who supervised me, or tried to supervise me, became Governor Richard’s press secretary. No one asked me to be spokesman for an administration but that was cool, it wasn’t my scene, wouldn’t have looked good anyway: arrogant young nigger is more acceptable today than it was then. Besides, my plan was grander than misleading the press, not that Bill did that or not that there’s anything wrong if he did. My idea, this may sound crazy, was to create a new kind of journalism. Call me a dreamer, call me an innovator—call me a thug. 

My idea was to tap that sweet spot between reporting and crime: getting the story by any means possible, which most everybody was already doing anyhow, including fucking sources if need be, sometimes even if it wasn’t necessary, that was the easy part at the Capitol, finding somebody to screw—but actually stepping over the proverbial line into prosecutable criminality. That was my goal. But not getting caught. Because only amateurs get caught, which is what prematurely ended my promising career as a burglar in California, before coming home to Texas. This new approach to journalism, if it worked, seemed to offer whole new vistas for “getting the story.” 

For example Guillermo went to federal court to look at a file. So, like, he got the file mixed up with his own papers and left the courthouse with the federal papers lost among his own. Remember, it was still a paper age and people carried briefcases full of paper. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. So, like, Linda Anthony who was city editor by then, well, she kinda got a call from the presiding federal judge in Austin, a Republican former state representative named Nowlin, appointed to the bench by President Reagan, who lived near Linda, the judge not Reagan, and apparently knew her, like, socially? 

So, like, it was a courtesy call, yeah, a courtesy let’s call it: the judge tells Linda, like, Guillermo can bring the file back to the courthouse, “or I can send the marshals out to collect it,” words to that effect. The unspoken understanding was that if the United States Marshal Service has to be sent to the American-Statesman newsroom to retrieve a court file they will collect Guillermo too while they're there. So, like, this was a mistake on my friend’s part. He simply forgot to return the file. But my idea and, in all modesty it’s pretty revolutionary: suppose you wanted to do shit like that on purpose? Instead of suppressing thug-like tendencies, suppose a nigger played to his strengths? That was my notion, call it prosecutable if you will. 

Anyone who is dishonest when honesty is easier is fucked up, that’s my view, but if you’re dishonest when it’s more difficult, maybe, and more rewarding, certainly, when the price is right so to speak? If you show a willingness to go where no thug has gone before—you’re someone to be reckoned with. That became my goal. To be good in a bad way, or just plain bad: Dishonesty as a rule, as a philosophy of life if you like, yielded some early results but success was, frankly, disappointing early on. We're being honest here. 

Chasing a story about a drug-related shooting on the lake where Willie Nelson’s son Billy was present for example? Trying to track down witnesses, someone gave me the address of a couple who had been at the lake house when the gunplay started. No one answered the door at their home, day after day, but there was a telephone bill one afternoon in the mailbox and it seemed to me like a good idea to, kind of, take it. So, like, there were these calls back and forth from the couple’s home to East Texas which is where, after a long drive, they were located for an interview. My tradecraft was good and my balls didn’t disappoint either: Saw an opportunity and took it. 

The problem was that the Greater Austin Organized Crime Unit had the couple’s house under surveillance because the pigs wanted to talk to them too and, sometime later, me getting ready to burn the boys in the Organized Crime Unit on another story, and calling for comment—those undercover pricks told me they'd seen me take a letter out of the mailbox and isn't that, like, a federal crime? That’s what they asked, like they didn’t know. A rhetorical inquiry, in other words. How is that for unethical behavior? How is that for dishonesty? If you can’t trust the police whom can you trust? That’s why the work we do in the Fourth Estate is so important. Who else is going to protect the public and expose abuses by those in power? Anyway, that was the birth of this revolutionary idea, a concept that could have changed journalism forever. Instead of waiting for someone to leak what you need or having to dig through tax records or campaign contributions, why not just wait until dark, go to the office in question and break in? 

You can even grow your game organically. The lazy man’s way to investigative journalism, so to speak, and potentially easier because, instead of breaking a window, isn’t it just as good if someone leaves a door unlocked? And almost immediately there was a chance to try my system out, sudden mayhem, a “good murder,” as we say in the trade: a killing in a trailer park up near Ft. Hood, the largest military base in the free world, or so we are told. 

A teenaged kid, boy or girl, can’t remember which, must have been a boy, he was in love and his parents had forbidden him to see her whoever she was, or vice versa. So, like, these crazy mixed-up kids did what any red-blooded American teenagers would do and killed the entire family before running away. Got as far as Dallas, maybe. By the time the City Desk heard about it and sent me up to Ft. Hood—me the closest warm body when the assistant city editor looked up from the telephone which is how the best assignments are made, there’s no one else in the newsroom? The cops had already left the scene and the trailer was sealed. Not the trashcan though, which was outside the yellow tape of the crime scene. 

In the can was a letter that the pigs had missed despite their affection for trash, from the kid to his/her squeeze about how he/she couldn’t take it anymore and they had to run away. Would have made a great story, a lot of teenaged angst—the layout people in the newsroom would have said the only missing ingredient was bloodstains. Something stopped me from writing the story though, even with the tacit, recent okay of the United States Supreme Court that trash, once it’s set out for collection, is fair game. It was just somehow hard to get used to the idea that you could put the contents of someone’s garbage can in the morning newspaper even though some people might say that, in daily journalism, that's exactly what we do every day. 

For me the blockage was purely psychological which is often true of would-be innovators. Most of life’s barriers are mental, that’s my view now, and this reluctance stayed with me for some time, truth be known. And even at the time it occurred to me there had to be a better way than dumpster-diving for leads. There was nothing to do but wait my chance. Eventually some unwanted disclosure would come my way that wouldn’t require me to get my hands dirty. 

So, like, to fast forward to that life-changing experience, to the moment when journalism as we knew it changed forever, the circumstances were these: we had to take turns covering the pig pen on the weekend and my plan was not nefarious at the start, to be perfectly clear. That came later. Mine is a practical soul, and living in a Southern state it’s always best to try to be a good nigger until it becomes time to be a bad one, in case there’s a trial later, because the jury, especially in this town, will be white. That day it just turned out that the transition from Good Negro to Bad Nigger was particularly swift. Police always say that crime is largely a matter of opportunity and, in my modest opinion, so is criminal journalism. You see something and you make a grab for it and run like hell. 

CHAPTER 5, Birth of the New Journalism

 At the City Desk there was a police scanner turned down low but still loud enough that the assistant city editor could listen with one ear while he was reading copy or taking a call from a crazy or chewing somebody’s ass. And he heard this call one morning for the coroner’s wagon to go to the State Hospital to pick up a body. 

Then as now some things never change, ASH, the Austin State Hospital as it was officially known, was a mess. Mysterious deaths, thefts of drugs, sexual assaults—the only people more dangerous than the patients were the staff. The director of nursing told me she bought hemostats by the dozen but they disappeared in days because the nurses were using them for roach clips. That kind of place. So, the coroner's wagon was called out to pick up a body and the City Desk sent me to find out why. An editor smelled a story. 

That was the system at the time. The weekend guy at the desk, it would have been Lee, was half-listening to the scanner, and something caught his interest. Not scientific but reasonably effective, yeah. At ASH, someone directed me to the administration building but the secretary there somehow mistook me, for whatever reason, for the Travis County medical examiner’s investigator. It was her mistake: not by word or deed was there ever any attempt to mislead her or anyone else. Not because of any ethical restraint on my part but because the thought hadn't occurred to me yet. That would come later. There was no attempt to correct the bitch, either. 

That wasn’t my responsibility, it was my view then and it’s my view now. It’s not like it helped anyway. The secretary told me to sit down over in an easy chair in a corner of her office, to wait for some people to come out of a meeting, and the next person to actually come through the front door was this guy named Norm who was a supervisor in the medical examiner’s office. She told him to take a seat too “over there with your investigator” and Norm, who knew me pretty good, not like we were drinking buddies or anything, not like we had shared the sacred herb or done a trio with the same chick, not that well, but well enough to identify me as an employee of the Travis County Medical Examiner's Office, or not, told her "That’s not Dr. Bayardo’s investigator, that’s a reporter from the Statesman." Words to that effect. He said the name of the newspaper as if it were repugnant, an object of fear or dread. 

The atmosphere deteriorated pretty quickly from that point, certainly. There were some raised voices, yes, that may also be true. They kicked me out of the building, actually. That’s true too. 

And a day or two later, over at the Medical Examiner’s Office across the street from the courthouse, me making the rounds, Norm was looking pretty smug, acting like he had me by the nuts, and he said, like, the medical examiner’s investigator is a licensed peace officer of the State of Texas and if you try anything like that again you’ll be arrested and charged with impersonation of a police officer, and my attitude was, whatever, motherfucker, without actually voicing the “motherfucker” part—giving it right back to Norm because it was their mistake not mine and it was my feeling, like, this is completely do-able, being an arrogant Young Blood is called for, and justified, a high-minded Travis County jury would understand the difference even if this bitch standing in front of me did not. And, "If Dr. Bayardo wants to call Ray Mariotti or the City Desk to complain, here’s my card," the number is on the front let-me-dial-it-for-you-motherfucker without the let-me-dial-it-for-you-motherfucker part. 

It was my belief that the newspaper would have supported me, yeah, would have backed my play, one of the few times but yes. Not, like, for opening other people’s mail—no, probably not, because of the Postal Inspectors and all that, although the newspaper might still have been liable for lawyer’s fees since my arrest would have been on the clock, that would have been my argument if it went to court, you had to consider every angle in judging Cox Media's support, you feel me? 

Or not even for dumpster-diving because that would be embarrassing to Cox Newspapers or the Cox Corporation or Linda Cox Anthony. But for allowing a public official to make a mistake that might have led to a scoop? Yeah, motherfucker. Because Ray Mariotti was a good newspaperman, or moderately good, and a better bar brawler and this would have come under the brawling heading: he would have told those bitches Norm and Dr. Bayardo to get fucked and then he would have taken me aside in a private meeting, you know, and like, bitch-slapped me. Not for my attempt which he would have respected but for getting caught. Because only amateurs get caught. That's the great life lesson that newspaper work reinforced for me that afternoon at the State Hospital and later at the Medical Examiner's Office: don't get caught. 

The whole episode taught me one other important thing, too. The City Desk was right. There was something about this death at the hospital that was making everybody nervous. People died there all the time. Malpractice was the only practice. What was so special about another floater in a sea of bad psychiatric care? 

When you smell a story like that you start running your traps early on, the conventional ones first, specifically interviews at the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation, the bureaucracy of state government that ASH was a part of at the time. Basically you always want to give a State of Texas official a chance to lie early, which they usually jump at, so you have their version of events to work against and later you can add a few paragraphs about a cover-up that might get the story moved to Page One. That’s been my standard operating procedure, basically unchanged through the decades. Always give an official a chance to cover his ass. Sometimes the cover-up actually has more dramatic value than whatever they are covering up, usually in fact. Next there were interviews with mental health advocates who didn’t really know anything specific but could provide background. A long painful interview with the family of the patient followed, in Houston, a wealthy family, actually, named Shipley who owned a chain of donut shops. 

The dead teen was autistic, people understood the condition even less then than now and he was just old enough, like seventeen, to be placed on an adult ward. The family had resources to care of him at home but they had been led to believe the state would provide the best treatment for their son. A big mistake, what can you say in hindsight except it was the kind of error that people don’t make so much today. At the State Hospital they loaded the kid with Thorazine until he was chilled out, or whatever, doing the Thorazine Shuffle or whatever they wanted—the doctors and nurses—a compliant patient population would be the best guess. But then they gave him too much medication and he choked on his own vomit. The Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation did an internal investigation under pressure from the press—and buried the report. 

Fast forward again. So, like, one morning about 7 a.m., just any morning in this capital city, like, probably twenty years before you were born if you're a hipster recently moved to the city, as so many are. There, at the Mental Health and Mental Retardation’s headquarters on 45th Street, basically around the corner from the hospital: a state trooper arrived and unlocked the front door of the building. He didn’t notice me waiting across the street in an American-Statesman staff car that was unmarked but looked semi-official, a good thing if the trooper looked around which he didn’t. The pig’s departure was my cue to get moving. Security technology of the day was a big chain and a padlock. There were no closed-circuit cameras, no door code or password to get in. The trooper just opened the front door and left. No one had shown up yet for work. 

The office of the deputy commissioner whose name was on the report was one floor up on the left and this fact was already known to me because the motherfucker had given me an interview in which he said absolutely nothing but took an hour to say it, which was also my opportunity to scope out the building. His door was locked but his secretary’s desk and the filing cabinet were in an unenclosed area, kind of an alcove. Nobody was in the building. Except me. Offices still contained filing cabinets at the time and they were, not to get sentimental or anything, a beautiful thing. 

The report was filed under the kid’s last name. Duh. Took it, copied it at the newspaper and brought it back the next day at the same time. Waited for the trooper to do his duty again and leave. My feet got a little cold, sure, on the return trip. Ethics aside—my sense of right and wrong is always foremost in mind, but it's my sense of right and wrong, not The Man's sense of right and wrong, nor your's or your aunt's—and returning something you’ve stolen wasn't, in my opinion, worth going to prison for. You don’t want to tempt fate or the Texas criminal justice system. So, like, can’t remember if there were noises in the building or someone showed up early, would like to think it was the latter, but my nerves got to me, one of the few times in my life, and instead of going upstairs and putting the file back in the cabinet where it had come from, there was a desk closer to the front door that belonged to an assistant commissioner who also had given me an interview and that’s where the report somehow ended up. Ran like hell, frankly, after dropping the file on the poor bastard’s desk. Fuck him, the assistant commissioner, that was my feeling at the time—although he was actually a pretty good guy. Kenny was his name, Kenny Dudley, passed away just a few years ago, may he rest in peace. 

We ran into each other once, me and the guy who almost took the fall for the leaked report, and he said that he had been blamed because the file was found on his secretary’s desk and he barely managed to convince people it wasn’t him who gave it to the press. Only his innate good nature and the fact that his father was former campaign manager for Governor Smith saved him. He didn't say that, about his dad, but that was the background so you don't think of me as a complete jerk, a complete asswipe—it's not like me setting up a housekeeper, right, or a lowly secretary, to take the fall. You leave it on the secretary's desk the secretary's boss not the secretary will get blamed, everybody knows that, that's how the system works. 

This guy Kenny had some resources to protect himself, don't lose any sleep, he was the kind of guy who would get out of trouble whether he did it or not, the kind of guy you want to blame if you just have to burn somebody, even accidentally. So, this is actually my feeling, and maybe he wouldn't have agreed, but leaving the file on his desk could even be viewed as a very moral decision on my part. So, like, aim high and miss high: Kenny hadn't done it, right, he was innocent and innocence can be a great source of inner strength, not to get spiritual or anything, people would look into his eyes and believe him when he said he didn't do it, that was my thinking at the time, sprinting for the door of the American-Statesman staff car and later sitting in the newspaper parking lot after firing up a fat joint and taking a few deep hits. Some months passed by the time we ran into each other and he asked me, like, who really leaked the report? Like, nobody, dude. My journalistic ethics prevented me from revealing that at the time. The secret is now out: nobody. 

And so it goes, every day fraught with danger, making decisions on right and wrong that could affect the course of history in the former Texas Republic. That was officially the birth of Gangster Journalism—if you asked me to put a date on it. My preference is actually to say “Guerrilla Journalism” because it conveys more Che Guevara or Malcolm X than John Dillinger or Public Enemy, although Dillinger was a revolutionary too in his own way. Years from now when historians interested in the form ask about the origins of this New School of Reporting—my response will be that it was born that morning, in Austin, Texas, me running out of the Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation headquarters with a file under my arm and my dick ten inches long. A paradigm shifted that morning, if you ask me, no fucking doubt. A search for sources would still be important. But even more important: leave no witnesses. 

When you’re going after a government agency at first no one wants to talk except to lie to you or give you the company line, like at Mental Health and Mental Retardation. If they talk to you at all it’s not like they’re going to break down and say anything important except the early lies which you still want to be sure and get down on paper or on tape. 

        Most Texas state officials can talk for hours and not say anything at all, especially the higher up you go, it’s like a prerequisite for the job. It’s a little like talking to a chick in a bar, to use that analogy, sex, which is my favorite analogy actually. There can be a lot of long meaningful looks and endearing words but most of the time you don’t get anything like what you were hoping for. The unwillingness to grant interviews actually increases in direct proportion to the importance of the story. And they, the bureaucrats, can sense that something is up if they’re any good, they know why you’re calling before you call, or they explicitly ask what it’s about and all you can do is lie which is okay with me personally, in my private life, but lying like a mofo is simply not a workable long term policy if you want to stay in this business and keep your credibility which is important to me. Even if you want to be a thug you want to be the kind of thug a chick can trust if she’s thinking of giving up some pussy, to use that analogy again, sex. You don't want her to give it up to just any nigger, but if she got to lie down with an indiscriminate Negro it's better if it's you, you feel me? And the only way to get those benefits is to establish a sense of trust. That means not telling any lie that can be checked. Unless it's really really really important. 

Part of the problem when you’re dealing with a deputy commissioner for example, or an assistant director of the department because the director or the top boss refuses to see you—you’re going to visit them at their office, right? You’re on his or her home field. That's where his defenses are strongest. If you could get him or her to come to the newsroom it would be completely different, he or she would be face to face with the power of the press: phones ringing, story meetings, foul language and a hung-over belligerent staff. In the case of a newspaper like the Statesman a managing editor, for instance—this is completely hypothetical—who owes his bookie and doesn’t have the money, or an assistant managing editor who’s fucking the City Desk clerk who sells home-made meth to the staff at $10 a gram. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it doesn’t happen. The sex and the drugs, sure, but state officials don’t come to you, you have to go see them. How to turn the tables? How do you get them nervous enough to make a mistake? 

My plan was pretty simple: do the interview at home. Not mine—their's. 

So, the idea was actually pretty successful, yeah. Not to beat my own drum or anything. Much more successful than going through dumpsters, certainly, which can also be part of the Search for Truth, sometimes you do have to take a dive in the trash. Anyway, you’d hit ‘em in the evening when the shock value alone of a reporter showing up at the front door of their house was worth a few blurted confessions. He or she had no aides, no assistants, no press guy or girl or assistant general counsel sitting in on the interview, and the great seal of the State of Texas was not on the wall at his or her back. No backup at all. Timing was critical. By arriving in the evening you were pretty sure they’d had their first couple of drinks after work, the only question was did you want to get to them before or after dinner? Is low blood sugar a good or a bad thing? Did one of the doctors from the State Hospital that way about 8 p.m. at his house in Tarrytown, that’s what gave me the idea in the first place. Showed up like the FBI with a warrant and it must have been a glucose imbalance because he spilled some important beans. Shock and awe, sure, but he also wanted to get rid of me—and the best way to do that was to feed me something first. It was just an experiment but turned out well, he was in fact the one who first told me that the report on the poor kid’s death was buried because it was bad. Which was good. Very good, in this business. 

Anyway, if you have artistic sensibilities or intellectual pretensions or even if you just need an extra move—you wanna add some juke to your jive—you want to see can you use a technique elsewhere, in another piece. Does this have wider applicability, in other words? Does it belong in your permanent bag of tricks?

CHAPTER 6, Shovel Fast and High

        A state official’s arrest for drunk driving is the great equalizer at the Texas Capitol and ends more than a few careers. And, in a way, it’s worse than being busted for corruption because of the humiliation. The best part was seeing someone’s name in the newspaper the day after the arrest. But this was not revenge, this is incredibly important, nor is it partisan, it's not about party affiliation, a chance to fuck with any major state official, Republican or Democrat, like, what reporter is going to say no? Not me. So, like, it’s not racial, it's not about skin color, it's not political or religious, it's not about creed or philosophical beliefs either. It’s about power. And hypocrisy which in this town always seems to go together with power. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. 

Basically there were two on-going debates among reporters in the city although the same questions had been asked and answered many times before, everywhere newspaper people get together to drink and talk. The setting of the debates which is important was usually a bar after work and after one drink too many. To get most reporters of my acquaintance to focus on anything other than deadline, pussy, dick, weed or alcohol required a little of the last two, cannabis and ETOH, to loosen tongues and channel inhibitions. Using both was twice as effective. 

Reporters are notoriously un-introspective. It’s as if every story occurs isolated from every other story until we’re intoxicated and then it’s somehow all connected. The question at hand was whether whatever we were presently seeing at the Capitol—whatever scandal or selling short of the public trust was being exposed at the moment—was the result of real evil, mere bad intentions, an actual effort to screw the people of Texas or just another innocent fuck-up in a system that no one knew how to control? That was the question on the bar stools around me. 

Certainly the cover-ups were intentional, everyone agreed on that, even the "public affairs specialists" or public relations/ad agency people who came to drink with us and had been reporters in earlier careers, before they went for the money. Government employees do nothing better than cover their own asses, that was the consensus at our end of the bar. The first sign of trouble or any hint of interest by the press or by a legislative committee, shovel fast and high was the administrative rule. If the first victim of war is truth the first victim of scandal is responsibility, no one wants to have the finger leveled at him or herself, least of all the people who gave the orders in the first place. But the original mistake, the original act or omission that required the cover-up was very often believed to be a mistake or human error. That was the opinion “in my circle.” 

The newly-arrived Republicans were right, it seemed, we told each other at the bar: Error is built into government and the more government there is the bigger the error. And it's the most difficult problem in the world to fix. 

        Those who have most at risk, the stakeholders in a given government office, a regulatory agency for example, are those who are specifically monitored by the agency and are barred from running it, as much as they would like to. There’s always a division of interests between the people affected by the actions of government and those who are actually tasked with making the public's decisions. For that reason mistakes are designed into the system. It’s as if someone can control the movements of your car but if there’s a crash that person is unhurt while you’re injured or left holding the repair bill. There are a lot of errors, a lot of accidents—a lot of injuries but generally not to the people who have their hands on the steering wheel. Most often the conspiracy that gets everyone upset doesn’t even begin until the cover-up starts. But what difference does that make? That was my question at the time, sipping a cold one at the bar or out on the patio at the lake. 

So, like, at least in my opinion—call me hardcore—even if the error was accidental or because no one was paying attention or because “no one knows what’s really going on in Austin,” as they like to say in Midland and in Dallas, in Lubbock and in Longview—that didn’t change anything. Whoever got caught still needed to take the fall. 

Someone always needs to take the fall, that’s the American way, that’s what separates us from the Macedonians or the Serbo-Croatians or the Bolivians whose officials are not called to account. Especially in this town you need to have a fall guy: the good people of River City like everything in a nice pretty package, if there's a black person standing nearby he can usually be relied upon to be found guilty but if not him somebody else has to step up. At the state Capitol someone always pays a high price even if it’s not the person responsible. Which is what the Hobbys did after the statehouse fire. They found a fall guy.

That’s why a fall guy or girl has turned out to be so important, someone who can take the community’s guilt on his or her shoulders and allow the good people of ATX to shrug away responsibility and on Monday morning move forward in the sunny promise of life in the Hill Country. Not to be critical or anything. Not to be judgmental. But that was always the way it was, before crusading journalists of color, me and Guillermo, stepped forward and demanded accountability, calling a ho a ho. 

Adding support to this view, we all agreed, drinking our drinks and shooting the shit, scratching our balls or vulvas as the case may be, still bellied up to the bar, whatever the error was it was always much worse than what appeared in the newspaper the next morning. Months, sometimes years later you would hear the awful truth and whatever really happened was astonishing only because what we had heard or proven and reported was never the whole story. Not even close. Watergate, not to harp on that, not to beat President Nixon’s dead horse, has turned out through the years courtesy of later revelations to be much worse than anything the editors of the Washington Post imagined at the time. It wasn’t a mere fuck-up that went viral and had to be covered up. It wasn’t mere conspiracy. There was real evil in the room— that happened to be the Oval Office, actually. You just didn’t know that at the time. Or you didn’t know how evil. 

This theory was impossible to prove impartially of course, even with alcohol on board. Even with Watergate still in our short-term memories, even after two or three long tokes in the alley behind the Texas Chili Parlor or with a blowjob on the agenda or having just been given—at a time when you’d think a working reporter would be more susceptible to persuasion about life’s possibilities, good and bad. No sale. It doesn't end there, though. Because, well, call me a dreamer, but a better description? Call me a thug. Even in the realm of public affairs it takes a thug to spot a thug. Especially in the realm of public affairs. 

Sometimes it takes a wrongdoer—to recognize wrongdoing. That fact persuaded me to see Texas, in other words the whole Capitol complex that represented the state, the legislative and administrative ends of Lone Star government, for what it really is, a large continuing criminal enterprise responsible for more wrongdoing than the Mexican Mafia and potentially much much more profitable. Look for example at the Texas prison system, the Department of Criminal Justice as it is now known—the Texas Department of Corrections as it was more prosaically called back in the day: a hundred thousand inmates, the prisoners themselves allegedly the dregs of society (not my personal opinion but we won’t argue that here) only controlled by guns, water hoses, pepper spray and clubs. 

Hundreds of million of dollars spent annually on food, medicine and utilities—guards’ salaries—the prison commissaries selling over-priced shit to people who can’t shop anywhere else—illicit drugs and illicit sex between guards and inmates, not to mention executions of the guilty and innocent, enough going down on any given day to make certain that there were not only scandals but continuous scandals, even if only by mistake. And how does a bureaucracy deal with continuous scandals? By continuous cover-up. That was my theory. 

Instead of depressing me, this widespread and constant wrongdoing made me feel warm inside and helped wake me up in the morning with a smile, like getting a sunrise-brightening hummer from a willing girlfriend, or puffing on a break-of-dawn spliff. And my opening question in most visits with officials, rather crass now, certainly, looking back from today’s PC world, was, “What’s the dirt?” 

Btw, you had to be able to tell yourself as you walked into an interview that this person or that one deserved to be fucked because they themselves were fuckers or hopefully even, in Texas terms, “pig-fuckers” and therefore not worthy of compassion or respect. You had to be able to make this judgment fairly quickly and target people in state or local government if that’s how you made your living. It’s that simple. Working in Texas, justifying my methods was pretty easy, it took about three minutes every morning, five minutes on Sunday instead of an hour going to Mass. The calculus was equally brief entering an interview room, a state official's inner office for example, deciding as you took your seat how you were going to treat the motherfucker and most often you treated him or her like a motherfucker. 

Yet, even reporters can’t do their work without some kind of rules, some kind of ethics, some kind of belief in what we’re doing—unless you work for television news. Put it this way: How can you climb through the window of a state office building after hours if you doubt yourself or your cause? And so it was that, gradually, as my game got tight, the doubt evaporated, as my faith in Black Jesus took shape and became everlasting, fucking with white public officials started to feel good and gave me a sense of righteousness. This isn’t about me—it’s about Guillermo and this city—the small town we lived in, Austin, Texas. 

But because of the inherent sensitivity of the black male, which is only now being recognized and appreciated—our heightened awareness of the suffering of others is finally now being given its due—this is going to be hard for me to admit because it’s so not me, at least not now, since God entered my life. But drugs occasionally became a refuge for me, back in the day, as is true for so many people who feel too much pain. 

Seeing so many wrongs in the world, much of it on Congress Avenue a few blocks north of the Colorado River, the pain more or less kept a doobie in my hand 24-7, for a period of time. Weed developed an inordinate role in my daily affairs just to deal with the hurt, you feel me? So much so that my efforts— besides trying to get to the bottom of corruption in the State of Texas, which was a full-time motherfuckin' job, believe me—became directed at finding the source of my relief, of my joy, in Mexico: south, southward in search of El Valle de la Hierba, as it was called—only rumored to exist—a whole mountain valley of primo herb growing wild. To me those trips were my only solace, my only real refuge from a solitary struggle with The Man. And there, Guillermo Garcia also was my guide. He told me that a train left every evening for Mexico City from Nuevo Laredo, across the Rio Grande from his home town. $10 to the capital, and another ten dollars to Oaxaca where the weed grew wild.

After one trip in search of the source the bus dropped me off back downtown, back home so to speak, on Congress Avenue, at the bus station in this heartless bitch of a small town. Looking up there was just a whisp of smoke rising from the east side of the Texas Capitol. The flames were out but ashes still smoldering. That smoke would change my life forever. Those ashes taught me that some shit you see in this town is both sin and crime, especially at the Capitol. 

You feel me? 

CHAPTER 7, In Case of Fire

        February 6, 1983: the Texas Capitol almost burned to the ground after fire broke out during the cooking of cocaine by a guest or guests in an apartment in the East Wing. 

The lieutenant governor’s youngest child, Katherine Hobby, aka Katie, was in the apartment with three friends from a riding school in New Caney, outside Houston, when the big burn began. Five a.m. in private quarters in the statehouse and there was only limited adult supervision. 

That was the hardest part of the story. That was the story. Once you got past the idea of freebasing and Kate Hobby, daughter of the lite governor, the rest of the piece was easy. You have to have testicles to do this job, that's my best advice to young reporters. You got to have big ones that hang low like mine. If you’re a female you got to have intestinal fortitude and be prepared to be called a fucking bitch and even be a hard-hearted evil-doing motherfucking bitch—but still a lady!—when the time comes. 

Other reporters, male and female, no matter what they had heard or could prove could not get past the familial connection here, could not wrap their heads around the central idea, did not have the intestinal fortitude to belly up to the concept of the lieutenant governor of Texas, scion of one of the oldest and most important families in the state— and hundreds of millions of dollars in party-related damage to a Lone Star landmark, the most important landmark in Texas next to the Alamo. The lieutenant governor’s family and—two dead. My own approach was to see these facts as a civil rights issue. A black person would have been charged, tried and executed. Wealthy whites walked away from murder. 

We'll never know for sure exactly what happened, for a reason that will be made clear, but it probably wasn't hygienic and almost certainly involved a pipe. Despite the mind-blowing nature of the accusation it’s become the accepted version of events. Drugs . . . fire . . . coverup . . . the Texas Capitol. Burn, baby, burn, yeah motherfucker. And it would be easy to take complete credit but the black man is not selfish—hardly egotistical at all, our unpaid time in The Man's service has left us humble and modest. Standing on Congress Avenue, looking up at the half-torched seat of state government and wondering why somebody couldn’t do the job right: black men are best viewed as collaborators and team players and there’s also great inner strength to go along with the humility, but certainly my willingness, alone and unaided, in this hipster-heavy self-righteous white bitch-filled Southern city, me alone standing toe to toe with powerful Caucasian Interests and slugging it out—courage did have something to do with getting to the truth. This is no time for false modesty, because sometimes it takes a Negro to get a tough job done. But this particular story—truth be told—was crowd- sourced. Sourced and edited by word of mouth. 

All you had to do was write down what you heard on Congress Avenue anywhere north of the river, you could have printed the whispers and rumblings on the street and gotten pretty close, yeah, without breaking a sweat. 

Even as the Texas Democratic establishment got its act together and chose a fall guy—Zenith Radio Corporation of America—there were rumors that the fix was in. Everybody knew or suspected something, even the homeless on the Drag would tell you, asking for a dollar, or two, rolling their eyes heavenward in search of a missing Savior, shocked and awed by the audacious lies of a system that was also denying them their rightful place in the sun, “Oh man, it was freebasin’. They was freebasing in the Capitol!” 

This version of events, the correct version as it turned out, was first spread by firemen who were hampered by the Attorney General from finding out what started the flames but did anyway. The only pertinent question to ask now and at the time: Can you believe that shit? Because, at first, it was all so surreal. They were smoking what? You could not have convinced me. Even with the help of the sacred herb to put the facts in perspective, to give my imagination wings, it just seemed too far-fetched. Certainly something was going on behind the scenes, a titanic struggle even—but it was unclear what that was all about. The Attorney General announced to the world that a Zenith television located in the lieutenant governor’s Capitol apartment short-circuited and almost burned down the heart of Texas. The calculus was devastating for the company, win or lose if Zenith were merely accused in a high-profile trial of making a product that nearly burned down the state capitol, true or not, it would fuck the company’s trademark and perhaps kill Zenith's electronics business forever. 

The whole process was realpolitik and real “bidness” at its worst, a lynching of the first order, a royal rat-fucking by the State of Texas and exactly the sort of thing the justice system normally does to black people but this time the victim was a major white-owned corporation. Enter the Black Journalist, sworn enemy of oppression no matter the color of the victim. There would be a reckoning. Somebody was going down. 

So, like, there was still a doobie in my hand 24-7 but unlike the Hobbys my smoking materials were always safely extinguished. Again, let me repeat, who could believe that shit? The rumors were so frequent, so loud and so persistent that any cop reporter with any sense would think they weren’t true. Then an interview made me change direction, made me a believer in conspiracy so to speak, not that it takes much around the State Capitol or anywhere else in River City. The interviewee was the best political mind at the Capitol, a woman, a white woman: one who did not claim to be a liberal or wear her heart on her sleeve like a garden-variety Hill Country do-gooder. The woman in question had busted balls effectively as mayor and before that school board president. Her name was, well, it depended on the decade, she was married a few times. When we first met her married name was "McClellan,” Carole McClellan, and she was mayor of this capital city. 

In her later years she was better known as Carole Strayhorn, Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, after serving on the Railroad Commission tpp, and she was principal nemesis to Governor Rick Perry. In between, back in the day she was a Rylander, like the supermarket chain, she married into the family and, professionally at least, her day job was as a member of the Texas Board of Insurance. That’s where we hooked up, during her gig at the Insurance Board and like spontaneous sex, it was good. 

Carole Rylander and future Governor Ann Richards were friends but these two women were opposites in every political respect. Richards was administratively-challenged yet able to connect with people even in a television audience while Rylander’s administrative game was tight and she was good one-on-one but had poor media presence. Both had sources and knowledge about how the world really works, especially this corner of it, ATX, but Rylander had the edge on pedigree. Her late father was Page Keeton, longtime dean of the University of Texas Law School, immortalized by a street named after him near campus. Carole Keeton/ McClellan/Rylander/Strayhorn was friends with everyone in town, it seemed, through her dad or after her own three terms as mayor—and her time on the Austin school board. She knew everyone. She also knew everything that happened within Austin city limits. If you wanted to know what was going on in town, what policy was what, whose ox was being gored, or how the pieces fit together, she was the person you needed to talk to. 

By the time of our interview she was on the three-member board regulating the profitable insurance industry in the state, as the Democratic Party pulled out the stops to keep one of its most valuable players in the fold. It was said in later years when she was on the Railroad Commission, as a Republican, that Carole Rylander, by then Carole Strayhorn, had the most complete files of political intelligence at the Capitol. She'd been in the power structure for decades, both parties, born and raised in influence you could say, and when we met in her office in one of the state’s anonymous towers behind the Capitol, yeah, intelligence was on my mind, it was always on my mind. But not even in a wet dream could she have been a better source. In later years she came to be known as “Granny,” kind of her nickname, one that even she adopted, and also back in the day—that day, that afternoon at the Insurance Board there was already something auntie-ish about her, not quite yet grandmotherly. She was like a jolly no-nonsense young woman who would later became a jolly no-nonsense old lady. The interview ended. 

It was still the legislative session, not long after the fire, the shock had worn off and people were busy dealing with the practicalities of having nowhere for the Senate to meet, the fire had pretty much gutted the entire East Wing. What the flames hadn't rendered useless the firehoses had damaged. Everything was a mess, there was the destruction by the flames and almost as bad was the water damage, as if the Colorado River had overrun its banks. 

The fire actually took place with a new governor on board, Mark White, who had to hold all the pieces together while simultaneously enduring his first legislative session as leader of the state. Practically every conversation in Austin included mention of the blaze. This one, the conversation between Commissioner Rylander and me was no different. We had our talk which was confidential and she walked me to the door. So, like, leaving her office, my comment was something about the settlement of the suit against Zenith. About putting the fire behind us. And Rylander’s response was extraordinary. 

She didn’t say anything but she laughed spontaneously—not hee hee hee, something less than a guffaw, more like a chortle, and true to her later reputation for being Granny-like the way she laughed you expected her to follow through with an “Oh my goodness!” or “Fiddlesticks!” or something equally old-fashioned, a well-bred Southern woman of a certain age’s way of saying bullshit. But she didn’t say anything at all. 

Further questioning yielded no comment and her face went stony. Our chat was over. She had responded instinctively but would not follow through either on or off the record. Strayhorn’s chortle was important for only one reason, it was what you might call an informed chortle. 

The State Fire Marshal who investigated the fire's origins worked for the Insurance Board. He answered directly to Commissioner Rylander and her two fellow board members. Rylander’s earlier comments had been off the record but the laughter was fair game. 

Suddenly, the fire was on my list—was my list—a working vein of political shit, perhaps leading to the mother lode of impropriety in the State of Texas that we in the press knew existed because there were footprints everywhere: ripped and torn bodies lying in committee rooms and on the campaign trail, but few actual sightings of the thugs involved.

Until now. 

Chapter 8, Huevos Grandes

So, like, covering the police beat at the Statesman had never been my idea of fun. The only good part was cruising the streets at night in a radio-equipped car, big antenna sticking out the back, a police scanner on the dashboard, looking for crashes and shootings or any other kind of mayhem—causing mayhem, yes, if it was a good night.

When you pulled up to the curb in an American-Statesman sedan, black wall tires and two-way radio antenna on the back, people thought you were a cop but the truth was, you could tell them in complete honesty, “No ma'am. I’m here to fuck with the police.” 

The worst part of the evening was going by the police station. You had to stick your head in and say hello to the watch commander at least once every evening, not to keep on good relations with the pigs but to keep the night commander honest because if there was something we were entitled to know, like the cops shooting someone, but that the police didn’t necessarily want in the newspaper the next day—or ever—you didn’t want the commander to have the excuse later that he hadn’t seen you to tell you about it. You had to make the rounds, to show the flag so to speak, and keep the pigs honest. 

Most nights the watch commander was Captain Wilkes, an ugly old evil white man with a third-grade education who, technically, was Prince of River City at night. Captain Wilkes was from somewhere rural, you could see that straight off, maybe the pinewoods out east near the Louisiana state line, or a farm up in the Panhandle, someplace out in the country which to me as a city boy meant he was a pig-fucker, not in the metaphorical sense of the word but literally, as in an unnaturally close relationship with four-legged animals. Captain Wilkes was about 110, 112 years old, to my young eyes, he wore these granny glasses like an accountant or a 19th century one-room schoolteacher. You could tell he didn’t have much use for me or the Negro race in general and most nights, after peeking in, saying hello, asking if his people had killed anybody interesting, my efforts were directed at keeping away from the motherfucker until the next shift when the cycle repeated itself. 

Captain Wilkes' desk was near a show-up room and briefing area where the bluesuits began the evening and a lot of the nightshift troops, when they weren’t on the Eastside beating black people's heads, hung out around the captain's desk kissing his wrinkled ass—and trading stories. Cops are the only people who bullshit more than newspaper people, you know? So, like, one night Wilkes wasn’t at his desk, or hadn't scared me away yet, and that was the night someone gave me the critical information, provided me the critical knowledge base that helped crack the case of the Capitol fire. This was actually before the fire, yeah, a couple of years at least, me still filling in, covering cops for the American- Stateswoman on weekends, mostly nights: from 3 or 4 pm until the last press run. 

So, like, that night Wilkes wasn’t there but the troops were. They were hanging out, talking shit, joking about the public in the insecure way the police do because they know the citizens hate them more than they hate the citizens. Although it’s close. That night Captain Wilkes stepped away to give himself an enema or whatever, or to milk his prostate, and a couple of the senior officers took me into the show-up room and my thought was this is it, they’re going to hang me from a light fixture, because up until that point my relations with P.D. were strained due to no fault of my own. Instead—these two cops, Officer Frick and Detective Frack—they tried to convince me what a good job the police really do! Like, dude, the discussion was doomed to go nowhere from the start, there was no more chance of them changing my views of the police force than my chance of changing their views of reporters or niggers. Like, dream on. 

But they gave it a good try and actually started off pretty well by dishing dirt on the FBI. They said, like, FBI agents aren’t real detectives. The FBI has the big reputation and all, these two puercos told me, but if you leave an agent in a room with a dead body and come back twenty-four hours later he’ll be no closer to solving the crime than the day before because FBI agents aren’t detectives. Is that a good or a bad thing? That was my question at the time. These two cops said that the FBI closes most of their cases by paying informants, rewards and "financial incentives," and actually that has turned out to be my opinion as well after sitting through trials and reading the files—the FBI does its best work with snitches, spending cash, getting people to flip, which is what these two pigs explained, getting people to betray each other, not that there’s anything wrong with that because that's kind of my job description too: getting people to turn on each other, not to be jaded or anything. So, like, me and these two cochinos started talking cases. 

And one of the two, must have been the detective not the uniform, went to the blackboard in the show-up room where the police begin their nightly grind and he started to write on the board with chalk. He said he was going to teach me all that most investigators ever need to know to solve a case and it amounted to one thing: timing. The hands of a clock, literally. He drew the clock and it was recognizable not as art or anything but you knew what it was or supposed to be, a way of keeping track of time. Whatever the version of events, whatever people are telling you about how that body got on the ground—or whatever you’re investigating—where the suspects were for example when whatever happened that you're looking into happened, you should be able to account for the minutes. 

Whatever the scenario for how something went down the first test is: do the times line up with what people are saying? It’s the most basic question in detective work, this puerco white detective said, and when the minutes don’t add up you know someone is lying. That was his rap, and that was where the account about how the fire in the lieutenant governor’s apartment started actually fell apart. None of the times actually fit. 

Joel Quintanilla, the Capitol policeman who was the first to answer the alarm in the apartment, who died later from the results of smoke inhalation, said he was called in from patrol just after five a.m. for a report of smoke. Like 5:05. Okay, let's begin there. Start the clock running. 

The couple named Waterman who owned the “barn” where Miss Hobby rode and who were sleeping in a guest bedroom of the apartment said they were awakened by exploding light bulbs as the other guest, Mathew Hansen, Miss Hobby’s riding instructor, beat on the walls calling for help. The Watermans also said it was just after 5 a.m. and in their deposition they said they knew the time because of a watch with a luminous dial. But the fire department did not receive a call until 5:27 and only a few minutes later did Miss Hobby step out from the apartment into the arms of her rescuers, telling them she had been asleep. But she was reported to be fully dressed and investigators found her bed, like Mathew Hansen’s, had not been slept in. Anyway, so, like, details like these. Made you suspicious, you feel me, and for good reason because someone was lying big time. 

The actual interview to complete the story was scheduled with Governor White. He had no role in the fire but my plan was, frankly, to ambush him. Hit him upside his head with a big stick and go through his pockets, kind of. That is Gangster Journalism, you do what you gotta do and never mind if you take out a few innocent bystanders on the street, that's just collateral damage, in this case named Mark White. 

Got an appointment with the governor under the pretext of talking about his legislative initiatives, whatever those were. The only reason the governor was willing to give me an interview was Gov. White's press secretary was an old wire service reporter named Ann Arnold, a white lady who liked me and got me the interview, and that made me feel guilty, betraying a trust and all. But most of my life has been lived under a cloud of guilt, being an un-convicted felon and all, so this was nothing new. What follows is going to sound pretty tacky—just a warning ahead of time. It won't be pretty, just so you know in advance. So, like, my idea was to sit Governor White down and hit him with his “knowledge” of the real cause of the fire and how he knew about the cover-up. Get indignant with the big guy, in other words. The goal was to have him deny helping deceive the People of Texas but admit the real cause of the fire, something that seemed do-able, you know, if you could catch him early, before that critical first cup of coffee. 

The key was to act as if everything was already uncovered and then hint at his part in the deception and hope he would roll over with his feet in the air like the armadillos you see on the side of the road going to San Antonio? Somebody more dishonest than White would have seen me coming a mile away but Mark White was honest, or reasonably honest, so there was a chance, you know—in fact there was a pretty good opportunity to drag in the entire Democratic leadership on the theory that if you threw mud on everybody it was going to stick to someone. Which is kind of Journalism 101, old school now, not the sophisticated reporting that has become the hallmark of this Black Journalist since those early, journeyman days. Even a no comment direct from the governor would be a great addition to the piece. 

He agreed to see me. His legislative program? Yeah.

A couple of days before my appointment one of Governor White’s security people called to get my DOB, to run me through the system, and make sure there were no outstanding warrants and no cause for concern one-to-one for the Big Guy—and that freaked me out, like, big time. Like, my sphincter held, but just barely. 

Luckily my sister was working in law enforcement in L.A. and she had managed a year or two earlier to get my record as a young offender expunged and my next arrest, in Austin, hadn’t happened yet, so with the help of a fat one, the best Oaxacan Gold, my breathing rate slowed down and the palpitations stopped, even though that was close, you know? Then something incredible happened. Kind of embarrassed now even to admit it's true. In retrospect, well —it’s never happened since, that's a promise. 

But, you know, kind of—in a way —my conscience kicked in. This is just so embarrassing to admit, but started to feel bad about blindsiding Governor White. Met him once early in my career, when he was attorney general, on a story that pitted him against the then-governor, a Republican lowlife oilman from Dallas named Clements, may he roast in petroleum-burning Hell. Anyway, so, like, it didn’t seem right to repay Attorney General White's previous kindness granting me an interview by bending over Governor White on something he had nothing to do with. There's such a thing as bad karma in my work and my feeling was, fuck with state elected officials, sure, no problem, but not with Allah, you know? In an interview with the fire chief before my appointment with White the chief told me that Mark White, awakened across the street at the Governor's Mansion by the sound of sirens, came over in his pajamas or bathrobe or whatever and helped drag hoses when the flames were still out of control. Seemed like a decent guy which isn’t the same as a good governor and doing him wrong just seemed wrong to me—like an earlier visit to Willie Nelson’s house to grill him about his felonious kid. Kind of similar, you know, at least that was my feeling at the time. In my ethical scoring system this was about a two or three out of ten on the righteousness scale, while my preference is to work in the four to five range— opening locked drawers, that kind of thing, but not genuine, certifiable damnable evil, unless it would provide material for a movie script or a book deal. 

So, like, my good side kicked in, the better angels of my mercy, and all, what Abraham Lincoln talked about, which is never far below the surface in the black man, a certain righteousness. Called Governor White's press secretary to cancel the interview. Not expecting any moral points for that, or anything, by the way, no reward for doing the right thing, there's certainly a heavier weight on the other side of the scale, but there it is. Did the right thing. And got ready to do the wrong one, you dig? 

You could still catch Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby in the morning, if you were of a mind to chat with the President of the Texas Senate, walking to or from his apartment in West Austin. He had given up his residence in the Capitol completely. As part of the renovation and repair of fire damage the living quarters that had been the lieutenant governor's apartment were converted into offices, a rich man’s mea culpa for the sins of his child. But the most important Hobby to talk to from my point of view, to solicit comment from, was not the lieutenant governor. It was Katie herself. This was the nut of the story, for the nut paragraph, the hard part, getting comment from the people you're trying to screw when they know you're trying to screw them. Not to be Old School or anything. 

It's become common practice in recent years with everyone so media-conscious to talk to a lawyer or official spokesman or family friend to get a response, that is if they have no sense because the best response is still, “no comment.” Today you talk to the press guy. Or girl. 

But back in the day a series of city editors had taught me to look the motherfucker who was the subject of the story in the eye and ask him or her, face to face, whether what's going to be published is accurate: we're going to print this and this and this and do you have anything to say? My analogy would be it's like sex, it's actually kind of like fucking, you do it face to face most of the time although it's also nice when you get somebody to bend over. 

At least get 'em on the phone, you hear me, we didn't have email back then, getting to the rich and powerful was actually easier then than now. There were certain givens that narrowed down a search. The Hobbys back in the day were like the Bushes or Clintons are today, or the Kennedys were back back in the day, as a reporter you kind of knew where they were at all times even if you didn’t care. In this case the task was not just to know where Katie was but to get her alone and waterboard the little bitch if possible although we didn't really know what waterboarding was back then, either, we called it giving someone “the third degree”: hit her with the hard questions and see how she held up. So to speak. Because this wasn't just any teenager. This wouldn't be like talking to Boopsie or Muffin or Brittany at the mall. Katie Hobby was the child of privilege and power, a double threat, a member of the most important family in the state at the time which meant that finding her and questioning her could both be problematic. But if you could catch her without Daddy and get her rattled, upset her patrician rhythm, you might say, disturb her sense of privilege in which she could do no wrong or face no consequences, the result could be juicy. 

Couldn’t afford to go running around Houston either, believe me, not as a freelancer, just showing up at the gate of the Big House in River Oaks or wherever, not likely, no way, because that would involve an unwanted meeting with a state trooper or bodyguard. Houston is not Austin, in the Bayou City the VIPs have somebody armed between them and the common people, in Austin, back then, no. Besides it was my bet that Katie didn’t live at home anymore. 

If my estimate was right she had just finished high school, that summer after the fire —me putting the story together a month or two after the fact. Like many college- bound kids she’d put a little distance between herself and Mom and Dad. My bet was Austin, a kind of return to the scene of the crime—or the Ivy League. If she was away at Harvard or wherever there was nothing to do. My budget wouldn't afford a bus ticket to Boston. But if she was at UT she could be found and sweated. Bamboo under her well-manicured fingernails or whatever else came to mind. A friend of mine was Travis County constable who worked out of the courthouse and he had a microfilm list of all utility hookups which is what he used when he had to track down people who didn’t want to be found, to serve them with subpoenas or warrants. Utility hookups are a reliable tool for the young reporter in his or her search for the truth, by the way. 

In Kate’s case she might not be living with her parents but they would probably still be paying the rent and utilities. That meant looking for a Hobby hook-up other than Daddy's townhouse in West Austin. An idea came to mind to simplify the process even more. Feel pretty bad about this now but it seemed like a good idea at the time, to put my actions in context. Was feeling pretty low, personally, at that point in my moral development. Not that that’s important now. Not that that's an excuse for what you're about to hear. The black man was feeling down and blue—not that you should care. But, specifically, that attack of conscience about blindsiding the governor? It led to an attack of conscience about not blindsiding the governor. If you’re a gangster and you take your work seriously you feel it’s necessary to do something inappropriate on every story, especially the big ones. You want to keep your hand in, so to speak. 

So far, like, my game on the Capitol fire was entirely within bounds, which was pretty disappointing. No sharp elbows, no off sides, no jabs or anything below the belt. No referee's whistle. No red cards or even a yellow. So, like, right before the story ran, like, my friend Bad Nigger made his presence known and, you know, when that happens, when Bad Nigger comes to town there’s nothing to do but go with him, accept the-devil-made-me-do-it not just as an excuse but as reason for being. Show your gang colors, so to speak. What does that mean, exactly, in white English? Bad Nigger not me made that call to Betty King, Secretary of the Texas Senate. Just so you know and don't think badly of the wrong person. 

Betty King’s job was to run the Senate administratively that Lieutenant Governor Hobby ran officially as President and presiding officer. Mrs. King arranged offices and meals and saw that legislation ended up where it needed to go and generally did a complex job of massaging egos and catering to 31 really demanding personalities as well as the lieutenant governor himself. Especially the lieutenant governor. So, like, Bad Nigger called her office one afternoon and told whoever answered, like, “I’m a friend of Katie’s”—which brought Secretary King to the phone pretty damn quick. Sounds really bad now, really unethical, what Bad Nigger did, but it felt pretty good at the time, per the Negro involved. And most important it worked. Yeah. 

So, like, it’s hard for a brother to pass for a white guy in person but many people of color have the gift of imitating white speech and can sound convincingly pale. My voice is now a deeply masculine bass-baritone that you would naturally associate with a strong black male but at the time, in my relative youth, not all my testosterone was yet on board and my voice sometimes hit higher ranges, kind of like the Temptations you might say, or Michael Jackson. So, like, in the call to Ms. King, my name was Trey or Chance or Travis—or “Kyle,” that’s always been one of my favorite Texas white boy handles, something like that, can’t remember exactly. A guy’s name no one would question out on the ranch. Cody. 

Cody is pretty good but that evokes more, what, southern Colorado? Would you agree? 

Or Colt—that's a pretty common name now, never actually met one in the flesh, two or four legs, but my rap was nonetheless convincing: that me and Katie went to high school together, St. John’s in Houston, which was in her statement, and like, being in Austin for a few days—we used to be pretty good friends, me and Katie, back at St. John’s —and, like, you know Miss King, is she around because, “I would kind of like to see her, we were close in school, you know?" Words to that effect. All bullshit but, and this is what was important, it sounded good. 

A good analogy is actually sex: You got to earn pussy, in other words, because none of these bitches is giving it away. You have to make a run at a ho to have any hope at all. And this should not have worked, truth be told. Try shit like that today and the call will be recorded and traced and the police kicking in your door by the time you hang up. Shiiiiit. But Miss King was absolutely unsuspicious. It was a different age, what can you say? 

Technologically-speaking there was no caller ID—people didn’t need it because nobody did wrong on the telephone except the occasional heavy-breathing. Bomb scares had gone in and out of fashion and there were practically never any bombs. Al Qaeda hadn't yet been invented. The Viet Cong were ten thousand miles away, while the Black Panthers were mostly in prison or in the ground. If you called the office of the Secretary of the Texas Senate and said you were a friend of the daughter of the presiding officer and your name was Travis or Kyle, or whatever, chances were you were what you said you were and not a semi-felonious young Negro trying to bust the ovaries of the state’s First Daughter. The only problem was Katie was not in Austin, nor even in the Ivy League. She was on the East Coast, yes, as a freshman at the University of Virginia. That was what Secretary of the Senate Betty King said. 

“Can I give you her number?” 

“You sure can. Thank you much, Miss King.” 

Some shit like that. Feel really bad about it now but my second great life's lesson, which had actually taken root some time before, lying works. Really well. It's the one technology that never goes out of date. 

Did some checking with East Coast friends: My question was why U of V? An acquaintance who was a graduate of Harvard and moved in well-funded circles told me that the University of Virginia and on the West Coast the University of California at Berkeley were the two public universities where the rich and powerful sent their kids if the kid was going to attend a public college. So, LIKE, it wasn’t exile or something like that? It wasn't like a super-grounding or punishment of some kind? Katie wasn't sent away to Charlottesville for four years for fucking up on Spring Break in Austin? It wasn’t like doing time? No? Too bad. 

Called the number in Virginia that night. And Kate Hobby answered. My luck was still holding, yeah. Is the Negro's game tight or what? Had Allah taken an interest in my mission? 

Something told me before dialing the number that the little bitch would answer the phone and she did. So, like, gave her my rap, the reason for the call, even my real name and she didn’t miss a beat. She didn’t even ask who gave me her number which was cool, like, because you don’t want to have to lie unless you have to lie. Although you’re willing to tell a big one if needed, but only if needed, at the risk of repeating myself, because that's Guerrilla J or Gangster J or whatever game you're running. You have to forget the rules of the White Man's world, by the way, if you're a Black Journalist you only need to remain true to the Black Creed which unequivocally calls for fucking powerful white people any way you can any chance you get. 

Katie said that she wouldn’t mind talking about that terrible night, my words not her's, but it was her roommate’s birthday and she was getting everything ready for the party. That’s what she told me, no lie. “Can you call back later?” she asked. Really self-possessed. Didn’t sound so much like a kid at all. 

In her deposition in State of Texas vs. Zenith Radio Corporation she sounded the same way, sure of herself, self- possessed even though she was a teenager at the time. Now people might call it coaching. In the deposition she had lied through her teeth of course, nothing made sense, especially not the declaration about no drugs being present in the apartment but it looked good in print, you know? Which should have put me on guard during our telephone conversation. Because she lied to me that night too. Called back three or four hours later, after the birthday party, and one of her roommates answered, a little hostile, yeah, like she’d been waiting for the call and the message was "Katie- doesn’t-want-to-talk-to-you and fuck-you-for- telephoning," without the fuck you part. She was reasonably cool about it but that was the message. Katie had faked me out completely. 

And me, a pro—having lied to some pretty big names myself, including most recently the Secretary of the Texas Senate—it was embarrassing, you know? Katie was only like 18 or 19, in there, still a kid, and instead of just hanging up and calling Daddy she played me. And sounded pretty good doing it. 

She probably could have given me lessons in deceiving people or running games on Negroes, you really had to admire her precocious grasp of technique. Must have learned from her father, that was my feeling at the time. So, like, my response to the roommate was, you know, “Kate promised, are you sure? Go ask her again to make sure this is not a mistake.” And my voice was calm and reasonable, like it was all a misunderstanding, still using my white voice, by the way, although willing to admit my connection to the Negro race if asked, if it would help which it would not. The roommate was suddenly uncertain. 

Her tone softened and she stepped away and you heard voices in the background. She came back to the telephone. “She doesn’t want to talk to you.” 

Caucasians are always so dishonest, have you noticed? That's what upset me most about the whole episode. Not to be racist or anything but those people can’t tell the truth if their lives depend on it. That’s actually what got under the Black Journalist’s skin. Why can’t white people be more like African-Americans, simple and uncalculating and with the fundamental goodness of children? Like Nigger Jim in Huckleberry Finn not Huck himself. That’s what white liberals always say, right, black people are fundamentally good at heart—and we really know how to handle a vacuum cleaner. Anyway, that was the Capitol fire. It required some legwork, certainly. Mostly it required the ability to think like a thug. Or like a rich powerful Texas patriarch trying to protect his family which in this case amounted to the same thing, thinking like a criminal. 

But, and this is critical, a criminal who doesn’t have to consider the risk of prison, which is what this is all about, yeah. The story was a bitch only because the Capitol is a bitch and it was do-able only because Austin is a small town. That’s my theory. It was my best story and got me as close to the mother lode, to the source of all evil in Texas—that the Koran tells us exists—as any Negro will ever come, short of a trip to the Texas Department of Corrections. That’s my take, believe what you will. 

Covering official wrongdoing and all, it was a pretty good period for me professionally, not to brag or anything, inventing criminal journalism and all, although nobody gave me credit at the time only because they didn’t know my methods. Until now. Because, like, there were no witnesses. And how often do you get to fuck the most important family in the state, let me ask you that—although my preference, if you had given me a choice, would have been the Bushes like Guillermo tried to do, not the Hobbys. Because the fire was an accident, sort of: Katie may have gotten away with murder but the Bushes got away with mass murder—genocide in Iraq, and it was purely intentional. That's evil, what W did in Iraq, but you can’t have everything, you can't even have real justice, a paradigm had definitely shifted though, that’s my view. Most reporters try to think like cops or detectives or secret agents but you really want to think like a thug. Luckily that's easy for me. 

How to put this in terms the non-reporter can understand? Sex is a good analogy, actually. Suppose for example there’s a guy who thinks his wife is cheating. What does he do? He starts acting like a private detective who specializes in marital infidelity, if anyone even does that shit anymore. 

Following her, checking receipts for hotel rooms, maybe looking at her phone if it isn't locked. My concept was entirely different. Get in character for the role. Act like a woman who’s cheating on her husband—and you’ll catch the bitch every time. 

See for example what clothes she's wearing when she's going out "for lunch with girlfriends." Does her outfit include panties and what do they look like? Give her a long look in the eyes at the dinner table, the way women do to their faithless husbands, and see who blinks first. Don't put a tracking device on her car, save yourself the trip to Radio Shack, don't go technological, go psychological and she'll give it up inside half an hour. She wants to tell you, she wants to confess just like a mark wants to be cheated. 

Look for example for tears at a non-teary moment, that's always a big clue with chicks, that’s my experience. But before you get started you need to ask yourself one question: Is infidelity actually the worst of your problems? Do you really want to know? Anyway, something happened that took the icing off the cake. That’s the way it always is, right, in some sense? It's karma. Stories change you—even the ones you don’t write. So, went up to Georgetown, next door in Williamson County. Had an encounter there in Georgetown that kind of bummed me out post my Capitol fire high. With a black Baptist minister, of all people. Yeah, after the fire. 

CHAPTER 9, A Thank You Note from Governor Richards

So, this was like a little after the fire, probably right after, the Statesman was no longer my employer but it still might have been their car that got me to Georgetown. One night Bad Nigger, in need of a ride, simply entered the newspaper office and borrowed the keys to a staff car even though the Statesman’s name was no longer on his paycheck. The newsroom was always open but if you went in about 3 a.m. no one was there and the keys to the staff cars were kept in the City Desk clerk’s top right drawer. Is that too much information? 

Can’t recall how we ran into each other, me and the Baptist minister, churches are not my normal venue, it doesn’t matter now anyway. But it happened in Williamson County, aka the Lord’s Country. Somehow, Allah got me there for my comeuppance, modesty going before the fall. 

The minister’s son, as it turned out, had been sent down, like 25 years to do in prison, a long trip to Huntsville, a sentence like that is basically the death penalty, on a charge of rape of a white woman. To set the scene. 

The father, the Baptist minister, said his son didn’t do the deed. The sex was consensual, that was his argument or there was no sex at all. So, he asked me to help free his son for a crime he didn’t commit. And you know, this Baptist Negro, humble and all, a man of the cloth, near tears, what could you do but promise you would check it out? 

And suppose you never did? 

That's how they did/do a nigger in Willco, Williamson County, even today, they set your ass up. Suppose the white girl gave up some pussy to a brother, regretted it afterwards and shouted rape. That was the most probable scenario to check out. Worse had happened before and happens still. 

,Maybe this chick even convinced herself that he forced himself on her even though her hips were moving at the time. You feel me? Georgetown was a lot like Austin in that respect, white juries sending down young black men, except that in Williamson County nobody tried to convince himself or herself they were really liberals, like they do here in the capital city. In Georgetown they are given white sheets at birth and wear them. So, you can make all kinds of excuses. 

Truth is, it was just too hard to work in that environment: there was a better chance, in other words, the bear would get you than you'd get the bear. So, basically, you sold the kid out. Lied to the father, promised to look into it and never did. Like, not your best moment as a Black Journalist or a black man? And not even success at the Capitol chasing the Hobbys could make that right. And suppose you’ve kind of been trying to make up for it ever since? 

Not to get psychological or anything. 

Spent a few weeks instead, back in the day, for example, at the Center for American History, when W was governor, looking at Ann Richard’s official correspondence from her four prior years in the Mansion. A complete waste of time from the standpoint of a story to write or a deadline to meet but there were three pieces of paper that fixed my attention and made worthwhile the time spent going through blue-ribbon proclamations and drafts of forgotten speeches. One was a letter from the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, a Republican who had sworn Richards in after the last Democratic electoral sweep. In the letter, handwritten and angry, the chief justice accused Gov. Richards of having sent to his chambers her enforcer to persuade the judge to resign. It was a kind of hardball you wouldn’t have associated with the ladylike governor but the judge wrote to Ann to call her bluff. The correspondence was instructive for what it told about the governor more than the judge: Richards’ political instincts had taken her so far but no farther. Democrats not Republicans were the endangered species at the statehouse and she didn’t have a clue. 

The other correspondence was also vintage Richards, in the form of two thank you notes. Ann’s father died just after her loss and there in the file, from like the month after W won, right before Richards ceded office, was a handwritten condolence from George W. Bush and a copy of Ann’s thank you note in return. No mention of the election which had been dirty, not particularly dirty by Texas standards but dirty enough, and reading the exchange of letters taught me something that my parents should have but did not, that there are some things you can never let go of, courtesy and respect for family loss being two, even after a statewide pissing match like a general election. Ann Richards was always a lady even when she tried to play hardball. W, despite many faults, being a war criminal for one, was a gentleman: a Nazi, ultimately, but a well-bred one. 

Technology not politics nor good manners was for me the arbiter of this time of change. Computers, certainly. God created snoops but the Internet made us dangerous. Email was coming. (Oh my God! You actually wrote that? Score again!) Mostly for me it was about the tradecraft not the story, that's true. That’s what sent me out day after day. That, and the principal that everybody is equal, black, white, brown and yellow, and anybody can take a fall. That’s what makes this country great. We all fall down, we all disappoint, the only difference is who’s there to put it in the newspaper in the morning. And me, a thuggish little nigger from nowhere, instead of doing time somewhere after a bust—because that would have been my future if not for the Fourth Estate—society gave me a chance to fuck with people who were way above my social level? Can you believe that shit? People who might otherwise be serving on my jury. Is there an Allah or what? 

Instead of them passing judgment on me, it was me judging them. That’s what it means to be equal, to be in a society where one can rise above humble origins. That’s what reporting gave me, not to get sentimental or anything.