Headlines
Susan Balée

Five nights a week I wrestle murder and mayhem into a shape that can be consumed by a drowsy person trying to sip his or her morning coffee, toast a bagel, and perhaps feed a child or pet at the same time. What I mean is, I work on the Metropolitan copy desk of our city’s biggest daily paper. Every day, beat writers file stories and the slot editors distribute them to people like me, a rim editor—the first line of defense in a daily battle to save reporters from themselves and their stories from embarrassing errors of fact, grammar, or spelling.

Most of the stories we edit are simply the background noise of a big city: Drive-by shootings, robberies gone awry (or aright), bodies found in the river downstream from the Walt Whitman or the Ben Franklin Bridge, schools that are failing (or, more rarely, succeeding), politicians who are wrangling with each other over taxes or real estate or their never-ending quest to get reelected.

I say “background noise” not because I’m insensitive to murder or suicide or even the graduation of children who cannot read our paper, but simply because most of the stories we see on the Metro Desk repeat the same plotlines every week with only the characters changing.

In addition to checking that the story makes sense logically, that the names are spelled consistently, and the grammar is solid, copy editors also write the headlines. This tends to be the hardest part of the job because we never know how much space we have, but it’s never enough. When the story is a brief—a news item encapsulated in a paragraph—writing a “hed” is tougher still.

Of course I know that the brief doesn’t ever tell the real story: Who knows the years of torture that end with someone donning a noose, leaping off a bridge, picking up a gun, finding the crack house, the dark alley, the silent woods? I envision all the stories behind the briefs that will never be written and I write the headline that will: “Hanged youth found by dog walkers in Pennypack Park.” And that’s it. If the sleepy child screams because the Fruit Loops are all gone, or if the subscriber spills the coffee while trying to smear some cream cheese on the bagel, they’ll never see it at all, but it won’t matter. The background noise of the city is always humming; the robberies and shootings happen all the time. There will be other stories that look just like this one at a first, brief glance.

As the years I’ve spent at this job have passed, I’ve begun to feel like I’m part of the background noise of the city, too. My days are neatly divided into two compartments: the hours from midnight until 3 in the afternoon when I enjoy a “personal life,” in my apartment on Pine with my partner, Griff; and the hours from 3:30-Midnight when I work at the paper converting other people’s tragedies into paragraphs.

Nothing touches me at work—I have my desk at the farthest reaches of our department and I wear headphones while I tap the keyboard so no one talks to me. Good thing we’re all on computers now, even though the terms “slot” and “rim” hearken back to a much earlier era of newspaper work. Before computers, all the editors sat at a big table—the slots were at the head of the table, in the “slots” between the two sides, and the lower editors, the “rims,” were…well, you can figure it out. I’m only too glad that I don’t have to take my place at that table. Now all my interacting, except for page proofing, happens in front of my own monitor.

Some of the other editors like to chat, or walk out to Whole Foods together, or share pictures from their vacations. Not me. Every now and then some newbie tries to draw me out while we’re all standing around waiting for the proofs to spit out of the printer. “Doing anything special this weekend, Gary?” someone might ask me, or “Can you believe the Sixers traded Iverson?” My answers are guaranteed to smother further questions: “No” and “I don’t watch sports.”

If it were possible, I’d be invisible. As it is, I don’t give them any clues. Nobody can even tell my age: I’ve got light hair—not red, not blonde, not grey—and my face has few lines. Shaving takes me less than five minutes every couple of days. Like my colleagues, I wear jeans and sports shirts to work. I could be thirty, I could be fifty. They don’t know. They don’t know if I’ve got any family, either, but I’m sure they doubt it.

Griffin and I are homebodies, but now and then I’ve crossed paths with one of my colleagues in the Italian Market or at one of the bookstores around Rittenhouse Square and I’ve seen the quick glances they bestow on my companion. Griffin calls himself “Sabine” at the drag shows he competes in and even in regular street clothes—or, rather, straight clothes—his slender five-foot three-inch frame, delicate hands, and long blonde curls provoke double takes. It’s even tougher for people to finally decide his gender because, quite frequently, some of Sabine’s purple eye shadow still lingers on Griffin’s long-lashed eyelids.

If someone from work sees us, sees that odd, quiet Gary Budd is obviously with this strangely-sexed individual with the eye shadow, the pink tank top, the slender hands, and the baritone voice, it takes me only a second to know what they’re thinking as they look at us: “Ah—he’s gay, but still in the closet. That explains it.”

Well, that’s about as accurate as a headline on a brief. It’s factual but unimaginative. There’s so much more to my story, and it all came back to me the night Craig Schultz, our Burbs slot, sent me a brief about the arrest of Lucien Hartman for molesting a boy that he had been tutoring in French at his little house near the train tracks in Jenkintown. Poor, pitiable Lucien, how well I remembered him as my father’s misfit friend and charity project.

For my father, for Lucien, and for myself, I had kept a secret that should have charmed Lucien’s life even as it suffocated my own. Yet, they say that no good deed goes unpunished and here was the proof in black and white on my monitor. Tomorrow it would be on the breakfast tables of hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

“Gary,” Schultz yelled at me from across the room. I had been ignoring the alerts he’d been popping onto my screen for the last half hour. Removing my headphones, I turned to nod at him. Schultz was pointing at his watch, reminding me that our deadlines were fast approaching. “HARTMAN12 needs to be on slot status soon,” he called across the room and a couple of the other rims cast covert glances at the two of us. It was rare indeed that I messed up at work. “Student accuses tutor in sex probe,” I typed quickly in the headline box and sent the story to slot. I knew that this was just the beginning of the paper’s coverage of Lucien’s case and I wondered how far into the past the police investigation would go.

For me, at least, it went back to the summer of 1973, when I was twelve and trying to square my life with my father’s expectations of me. Already things hadn’t turned out the way Raymond Budd intended. For one thing, I remained his and Darlene Budd’s only child although, upstanding Catholics that they were, they had planned on a large brood. As a child, I felt the weight of those absences every evening when we convened for dinner at our little house. The empty chairs around the long, dark table seemed accusatory, the too large platter of cabbage and corned beef steamed out a sour reproach—one child and two parents could barely make a dent in it. For me, the worst was the sound of our three knives and forks scraping on the plates in the otherwise quiet room. Other children would have filled the air with words and laughter; I might have escaped scrutiny, my mother’s misery, my father’s nightly homilies.

“Daily is done,” Craig called out, letting us know our shift had ended—another paper, conceived in the morning, composed during the day, edited and proofed in the course of the evening had now been sent through to the presses in Conshohocken. In a matter of hours, the delivery trucks would be making their rounds with bound stacks of newsprint that would be further parceled out among the merchant and home delivery people. In the way the scent of perfume disperses to every molecule in a room, every neighborhood in our region would soon be seeded with newspapers. By tomorrow night, those same papers would be in recycling bins or birdcages, superseded by what came after. History.

“Life makes a mockery of us all,” my father used to say at those quiet meals. “Man proposes and God disposes.” Mother and I nodded; who could dispute it? But my ebullient father, with his blond crew cut, wide-set blue eyes and boyish face, did not seem inclined to give in to the sad truths he quoted. A mechanic by day, his powerful fingers with their black crescent nails deconstructed the nightly loaf of bread into a sea of crumbs. He could make or break things.

“You’re the last of the Budds, Gary.”

My mother sighed, her pale face obscured behind long brown bangs.

“It’s not your fault, Darlene,” Ray said to her, “it’s just a fact. He’s the last boy in my line and he’s got to make it count and I’ve got to make it count.”

The lower half of my body used to squirm under the table at this point in the sermon. “You’re going to marry and have all the little Budds, Gary—the buds on our tree of life.” My mother sighed loudly, but I could see the tree, branching out and blooming. “But until then, we’ll adopt.”

My fork clattered loudly on the porcelain. My mother’s head shot up and her eyes widened. I could see the water gathering there. I knew she felt like a failure for not being able to make babies after me, and yet she refused to consider raising other people’s children. My father could not budge her on that point.

Dad reached out to touch her hand. “I’m not talking about kids,” he said, “just people who need help. People we can nurture and set straight and send on their way.”

Mother relaxed, but I wondered: What the hell did he mean?

“I’ve already found us someone to adopt,” he said, “and Father Corrigan agrees. It’s that feller with the drinking problem, the one they threw out of McSweeney’s.”

My mother pushed her hair back, interested. “The old teacher,” she said. “Hartman. They fired him from the high school for public drunkenness.”

Public drunkenness. Outside the newsroom, I crossed the street and ducked past the open door of Westy’s Tavern. Drunks spilled out of its door with the smoke and beer fumes. I could hear the thwack of a cue ball breaking the triangle. My colleagues dispersed quickly, some walking down Callowhill toward the Parkway, others melting into the shadows around their cars in the company lot. I crossed through the wind sluicing down Vine to the shelter of Hahneman Hospital on the far side. The city loomed ahead, and deep within the thicket of buildings nestled our brownstone on Pine St., and, deeper inside that, Griffin. I pictured him waiting in our bedroom there with the sandalwood incense burning.

“Our” bedroom. That’s what my room became once my father installed Lucien Hartman in the other twin bed. Our house was a two-bedroom bungalow that my parents bought when they were married. Had other children followed my birth, our family would have moved to a bigger house. But our family never expanded, so our house didn’t either. For this reason, my parents decided to bunk a grown man in the same bedroom with their adolescent son. At least, years later, that is how I rationalize it.

The first time I saw Lucien, he was sitting stunned and shaky on the bed, enduring his second day without booze or cigarettes. He was pale, with even paler eyes, black lank hair, and he smelled of the alcohol still sweating out of him and sour laundry. He was pitiable, but I hated him, and at that moment, my plan formed. I would find a girl to marry as soon as possible and begin having little Budds. The sooner the new brood could be established, the sooner my dad would come to his senses and give up his ridiculous plan to adopt bums like Lucien Hartman and install them in my bedroom. I had heard that people in Ireland often got married as young as fourteen, particularly if the girl was already with child. I hoped to impregnate the first girl in our Christ the King congregation who would give me the opportunity.

It was easier than I thought. Elizabeth McIlhenny followed me into the cloakroom the first time I asked. In fact, she crushed me into the forest of parkas and windbreakers with practiced speed. Before I could so much as kiss her, she had a freckled breast out and jiggling in one hand while her other was busy diving into my pants. Frankly, in the dim light coming through the vented door of the cloakroom, the pink-eyed orb staring at me resembled a Cyclops, a monster. Further, Lizzie McIlhenny’s groping through the flap in my Fruit of the Looms hurt. The pleasant hardness I felt sometimes upon waking from forgotten dreams was not going to come from her probing fingers. Before I could register my revulsion, she had me pinned against the wall and her lips locked over my mouth. Her tongue assaulted me, her naked nipple brushed my arm, and the combination of soft flesh and bologna-smelling breath made me gag. I shoved her away from me as hard as I could and her head smacked into the opposite wall. Her response: A swift kick to where it hurt the most. The only thing that stopped us from a full-blown fistfight among the coats was the sound of Sister Regina Edward’s cane tapping around in the outer room. However, if looks could kill, I would certainly not have survived that morning.

Instead, I lived and had to trudge home tainted with disappointment. Impregnating a girl took some doing after all. And in my room, Lucien slept deeply on his twin bed, a magazine on the floor beneath his dangling hand. What could the bum be reading, I wondered? When I slipped it carefully away from the floor beside his bed and the pages fell open, a new world opened before me. Every dream I’d ever forgotten grew vivid in my mind. Hell and heaven lay before me.

There would be no more Budds. That was what I knew when I opened Lucien’s magazine and the naked boys cavorting beneath my eyes transformed me. I had never felt desire with such force, such specificity. Lucien awakened in time to see it all and suddenly he was no longer a disgusting interloper, but someone with whom I shared a secret. Horrified, I discovered his touch gratified me in unimaginable ways. Lucien Hartman revealed me to myself.

If it’s difficult now for me to separate love and death—the beloved and fulfilling from the putrid and decaying—that, too, is Lucien’s fault. At my father’s request, he gave me French lessons and “l’amour” and “la mort” always sounded the same on my tongue. I despised the man, yet loved the effect of his caressing fingers and his soft lips below my waist. And when I came, this, too, was death.

“Le petit mort—the little death,” Lucien breathed, his eyes bright and beady as a hungry dog. We both knew it was my first time. “That is the moment when you leave your senses completely. You are dead to the world, for a little while.”

He stroked my hip and I shoved his long fingers away. “I will be dead if my father finds out,” I groaned. “And so will you.” I could see that scared him, but didn’t know then how wrong I could be. I suffered many little deaths during those months with Lucien. Unfortunately, I always came back to my same old life.

I never touched Lucien, no matter how much he pleaded. At least I knew the difference between sex and love. I love Griffin; I can’t keep my fingers from his golden skin, his taut little belly, the hardness we share. He is my lover because I love him.

Lucien stories continued to fill my queue at work; because I had handled the first one, Craig Schultz was sending me all the subsequent articles. Lucien, I learned, had shown the same magazines I saw to other boys. To tune out my memories, I turned up the volume on the opera I was listening to—Nosferatu with music by Alva Henderson and words by Dana Gioia—and thought of what bloodsuckers I had chosen to work among.

In my ears, young Eric sang his first aria in tones so plaintive I thought I might weep:

What do I want?
I ache with desire.
I twist in its thorns.
I burn in its fire.
I hunger. I thirst.
But all that I want
Are the ordinary things
That every day brings
To anyone else.

But not to me, I thought, fixing a bad break and adding a comma. Not to me or to Lucien, not back then in that deeply Catholic community in the early 1970s.

“FBI found child pornography on suspect’s computer,” I typed. From magazines to the Internet Lucien had gone. Perhaps he was too old when the revolution began to find a man to settle down with. Or perhaps he really always had preferred children, boys who themselves were uncertain and tentative. Boys who were like Lucien himself. But that did not explain the boy who was accusing him. Boys like me would never have ratted him out for fear of their own secrets spilling.

When I put the headphones back on, Skuller and Eric were singing together, but it was Skuller’s voice I listened for:

You have no father. I have no son
To help me do what must be done.
Become my partner.
Together we’ll make
Profit from all we undertake.

Someone shouted my name and I had to pull the headphones off again. “Reporter on that Hartman story,” Craig called out, transferring the call. I picked it up.

“Hey, are you the person editing my story?”

“Yes. My name is Gary Budd,” I said. Of course, I knew the reporter’s name—he had a byline, but we editors worked behind the scenes.

“Okay, Gary, I’ve got to insert something in this piece. See the second graf?”

”Yeah. The one about the downloaded porn.”

“That one. Add that the FBI also found boxes and boxes of old pedophile magazines in the guy’s house. Some of ‘em dated back to the ‘60s.”

“Got it,” I said, and heard my voice shake. To cover it up, I laughed and said, “He could make some money on e-Bay.”

The reporter chuckled. “You bet. Some of these defrocked priests could get a bidding war going, hey?”

“Right,” I said, suddenly not wanting to talk another nanosecond to this guy. I hated him, hated myself. “Well, we’re on deadline, so….” We hung up. I have no father, I have no son, I thought.

My father did not live to meet Griffin. He never understood my failure to marry and provide the Budds and I never had the courage to explain it to him. I think my mother knew that I was as barren in my own way as she had been in hers. Later I learned that the condition she had that led to so many miscarriages and her ultimate decision to have a hysterectomy was called “incompetent cervix.” I know she felt incompetent, but she was also stubborn. She loved my father and she could not risk his caring too deeply about another woman’s children—that was why she refused to take in children but agreed to Dad’s plan to help Lucien and the series of misfits that followed him.

I understood my mother perfectly for we had a similar relationship to my father. I could not tell him who I really was for fear that he would no longer love me. That was the risk I wouldn’t take, so I put my own life on hold. After he died, I lived with Mother until well into my 30s when at last I met Griffin at the Black Banana and my life moved forward again for the first time in decades. By then it was the 1990s and “Gay” was chic at last. Griffin loved my reticence and I loved his fearlessness: He was Out with a capital “O.”

The night on the copy desk was moving towards its inevitable conclusion. We were reading proofs. I had changed the hed on Lucien’s story to “FBI finds child porn at tutor’s home.” We don’t proof the stories we edit so someone else had mine. “Radar reads only,” Craig called out, “we’re over deadline.” He tugged a checked proof out of my hand as he passed and called over to the news desk, “The B-1 front is good.”

The moon hovered behind Billy Penn’s shoulder where he stood atop City Hall illuminating my walk home. As the moon fell beneath the skyline and the only light in our room came from the halogen lamp on Griffin’s sewing table, I told him about Lucien and the stories I’d been editing, how sick they were making me feel.

Griffin was trying to make a seam in his new satin dress invisible, but I knew he was listening to me, even if his eyes and fingers were otherwise engaged. “How old is this boy accusing Lucien of molesting him?” he asked. The needle flashed beneath the little lamp, the circle of light seeming to spotlight Griffin’s deft stitches, his clever fingers.

“He’s a high school kid at that Quaker school. A junior. Why? Do you think at his age he can make a rational choice?” My voice had gone up an octave, for no clear reason. “He said Lucien started raping him the first week.”

Griffin looked up at me and bit off the end of the black thread. “He said. But he studied with the guy for three semesters. Why did he keep enrolling?”

I had to rub my throat, the muscles were cording so tightly. For once Griffin seemed so clueless. “He kept enrolling because his parents were too stupid to see what was happening, that’s why. Better parents would have known.”

I began to cough—too much damn sandalwood incense in our room. Griffin had dropped his dress and it rustled to the floor. “Who are we talking about, Gary?” he asked, reaching out.

I was coughing so hard I thought I would puke; tears were streaming down my cheeks. “Don’t touch me,” I coughed, when Griffin tried to put his arms around me.

The compassion in his eyes made me close my own. He was saying, “You were only twelve, Gary—something different is happening here.” I slapped his hands away and he stepped back.

“You don’t know,” I said, and my coughing stopped.

His head was on one side as he studied me. We were both panting. Then he spoke again, “I didn’t know your father, but….”

I didn’t let him finish, because that was when I turned my back on him, stepped through the door and slammed it after me. I stood there for a second but heard nothing. I lay on the couch for hours before falling asleep, but he never opened the door.

*********

My father’s garage smelled of spilled oil, burned rubber, and scorched electrical cords. There I learned to change oil, clean battery caps, and rotate tires. But my mind was never in the work and so my fingers often failed me. One afternoon, after I’d dropped my wrench for the third time in ten minutes, Dad called me over to the office. “You’re a head man, Gary,” he said, his fingers splayed out over a stack of blue and white work orders.

“What do you mean, Dad?” My foot hurt from where I’d dropped the wrench on it.

“I mean you’re not meant to work with your hands. You’re going to do something with your mind, like Lucien.”

“Lucien,” I mumbled. “What do you know about his mind, Dad?”

My father’s blackened fingers squeezed my shoulders and a smile lit his face. He hadn’t heard me at all. “You should do whatever makes you happy,” he said. “That’s all I want for my son.”

“You mean you don’t care what I do? I can do anything?”

“Well, not anything.” His hand was sliding off my shoulder, the grin getting lopsided. “I mean you can’t rob banks. You can’t do anything that a good Catholic wouldn’t do. Talk to Lucien—maybe you can be a teacher, like he is.”

I could barely hear my own father, the blood rushed through my ears so loudly. “Are you blind?” I wanted to shout. “Don’t you know who you’ve put in the same room with your son? Did you want this to happen?” But I could see that he didn’t know, was as innocent as all of my mother’s unborn children. So I swallowed whatever other words I might have spoken. For now I knew something: Raymond Budd only wanted to deal with problems that he could solve.

But some things are insoluble, whether you know it or not. My father had never saved Lucien, he’d only enabled him. And I had never saved anyone by my silence about what went on in my childhood bedroom. It all seemed, now, like such a waste of energy. The only person who came out ahead was my father: When Lucien went on to become the Quaker school’s tutor for mediocre students of French—finally moving out my room into his own studio apartment—Dad must have felt he’d turned a misspent life around.

Griffin woke me with a peacock feather late the next morning. The weak light of late fall reached across the living room floor as Griffin continued to tickle me until I leapt up with a grunt and wrapped his lithe body in a half-nelson. “Finally,” he said. His minty breath caressed my cheek as he kissed me and I tried not to breathe my dragon fumes on him. “You working the lunch shift today?” I asked as he wriggled lightly out of my grip.

“Yeah. Then I have to finish that dress. Sabine doesn’t go on until after midnight, so I’m hoping you can get to the Air Command in time to help zip me up.”

“I’ll be there,” I said. I wanted to say more, but I didn’t.

A few minutes later, I was eating oatmeal in my boxers and Griffin was dressed in his black dress pants, white shirt, and the dark-gray micofiber overcoat I’d given him last Christmas. Before he opened the door to leave, I heard myself blurt out, “Wait.”

Some things cannot go without saying. I had learned that lesson with my father and I didn’t want to relearn it with Griffin. His bright, boyish face beamed in the half-light of our apartment. He did not move a muscle as I came to him, then knelt and put my arms around his legs. I could feel him gently stroking my hair as I wept against his trousers and tried to tell him how much I loved him, how glad I was I had met him, how he had saved me.

He shushed me like a mother would her baby. “It’s all right, it’s all right, Gary. I love you, too. Come to the show tonight, you’ll see. Shhh, honey. Don’t cry. What happened with Lucien wasn’t your fault, it just happened.”

Of course Griffin had got to the heart of it. Once he left and the breeze that came in the door when he shut it died away, I even thought of going out to Jenkintown to see the old pedophile. After all, I knew where Lucien lived—our paper had published the block of the street he lived on and it wouldn’t be hard to get an exact address with a Lexis-Nexis search.

But I’m not confrontational and I never have been. What would I say to him? And what would he say to me? I’d had my chance to tell on him—and expose myself—to my father, and I had not taken it. It was a sin of omission and who could tell, in the long run, if it was as damaging as the sin of commission that preceded it? We Catholics have so many paths to guilt, we never fail to find it.

If I have any power at all in my life, it’s as a writer of headlines. That night, as my colleagues burbled around me, crunching on potato chips and shouting beneath the green and white uniforms on the television screen, Craig Schultz sent me another story about Lucien Hartman.

I read this one about seven times before I wrote the hed for it. When I sent it to slot, I felt a chapter of my life coming to an end. An hour later, I saw it on proof and noted that Schultz had not changed a word: “Former student kills tutor in sex case.” It was over. Lucien was gone.

Craig was slipping into his Eagles jacket, because daily was done and it was time to leave. I had a weird thought: In the city of brotherly love, this is one of my brothers. Craig Schultz is fat, fortyish, and balding. He’s married with three kids and is as doughy and predictable as a street-vendor’s pretzel. Still, he has never given up on me, no matter how abrupt my answers to his friendly queries. “Doing anything this weekend?” he asked me, his ruddy open face the portrait of cheesesteak-fed honesty.

“Yes,” I said, smiling back at him. “My partner is performing in a drag show downtown tonight and I’m meeting him after work.”

Craig’s pleasant face didn’t register a jot of surprise, but I certainly surprised myself.