Arrogance and overconfidence don’t work for me. Plain and simple.
I’m not saying I don’t relate to those traits in a human – I do, and I display them from time to time.
I’m saying I don’t like them.
John McHenry looks like the boy-next-door, sure. He’s like a koala bear – cuddly and sweet on the surface, but perfectly happy to cut your throat if you get too close.
If we didn’t live in this pathetic world full of group-think and “team building,” he would never have set foot inside The Chickotee River Dispatch, I guarantee it.
But here I am, holding hands with this person, trying to get more out of him, even though I’m not sure there’s anymore inside.
No, John McHenry does not belong in my newsroom. Not in any newsroom.
But, come to think of it, neither do I.
—
Elyse and I met at the five-year high school reunion.
I remember seeing her from across the room. She’d finished at Ithaca and started a job at the place along the river … the occupational therapy place. I can never remember the name.
It was Thanksgiving and I was three months into my internship at The New York Times – ready to regale my fellow Middle Valley classmates with stories from The Big Apple. Ned, my editor back in New York City, assured me – this after buying him four beers one night after a Knicks game – assured me he’d call just as soon as management made its hiring decisions for the new year.
Of course, I thought I was a shoo-in, so, in my mind, this was a holiday at home and nothing else.
But there she was. We talked, we danced. We got our picture in the weekly paper. We closed down the bar at The Walk Inn, or, as it’s known now, The Riverside.
(I think the new owner lives there now. Anyway …)
I had to be honest with Elyse from the gate: I was going back to New York, and maybe – just maybe – she could join me there at some point?
The weekend turned into a week, which turned into month, which turned into Christmas.
My calls to Ned went unreturned. But my calls to Elyse did not.
We continued to see each other, three or four times a week. In truth, I had begun to ask myself what was more important – the call I’d been waiting for from Ned, or the time I’d been spending with Elyse. But, if I got the call, I knew I was going …
I’d taken a part-time job at The Walk Inn, holiday help for all intents and purposes, managing the front desk and making reservations. Sometimes I even helped out at big events. I spent my nights on her brother, Jimmy’s, couch, my mother relaying messages and saying prayers that I’d get an offer for “the real job,” as she called it.
Well, I did get an offer for “a real job.”
The editor of The Chickotee River Dispatch, my esteemed hometown paper known to my family as “birdcage liner,” had seen Elyse and me in the local weekly at the reunion and tracked me down through the high school front office. When the receptionist told him I had been editor of the MVHS paper, he came knocking.
So much for confidentiality.
Thomas, a bespectacled balding man with full facial hair and chapped lips, hired me on the spot.
I remember walking out of the building and into a classic lake effect blizzard and realizing, suddenly, that the The New York Times felt very, very far away.
I couldn’t very well turn down a job in my field in an area I knew like the back of my hand. But I had run away from here as fast as I could. Northeastern and gone like a shot from a gun. I’d been big-time … I had no interest in covering small town bullshit strawberry festivals and tree plantings, because you know, that’s the kind of crap local news is these days …
Anyway …
The sameness was palpable … stray dogs roamed in the streets, it was like the wild West or something. Literally. The exhaust from the trucks on the highway created a sick slog that hung over the river most mornings. That’s when you knew it was humid … when the pollution would just sit. The drive-through at the new Dunkin’ Donuts caused a rush hour.
Five-thousand people, 40 of them homeless, and a few hundred expats (mostly retirees) from New York City seeking crime-free streets and a police force that was happy to be unchallenged.
That was us, the Middle Valley I always knew, the one I wanted to get away from … and now I was one of them.
The working theory in town was that the city sent its downstate criminals to rehab here so, yeah, there were some young people in from New York. I don’t know if they had jail over-crowding issues, or they were just impatient, but everyone here knew the routine. Stranger comes to town, takes a job at the market packing grocery bags or driving a cab. They keep to themselves. A few months or a year later, they’re gone. Same story.
Most of them were fine, didn’t bother anyone, stayed straight. They’d leave after a few months, going where no one knew. Occasionally, there’d be a spate of b-and-e’s, the cops would get them because you know they stuck out from everyone else, and they’d be sent back.
When I was at The Times, I asked one of the guys in the force if it was true, that the city farmed out the drug addicts and petty criminals and, it turns out, it was. I was always a little sore about that. I never knew if that was the courts or NYPD’s doing, but either way … I didn’t like that they saw us as some sort of latrine.
I never told anyone in town, but who would I tell? After my little performance at the reunion – full of youth and arrogance and misguided confidence – it wasn’t like I had many friends .
Just Elyse.
We set a date, and I came to accept that we’d be here for at least a year before I could get back to the city. We rented the third-floor walk-up above the Chamber of Commerce – very romantic … the river behind it and all, and, most importantly, cheap.
Every night, we sipped wine on the fire escape and made plans. We watched the moon come up over the river, the headlights drifting towards us as cars crossed the bridge into Courthouse Square.
We talked about the future, a future in New York, whether New Jersey was an option (no), whether we should put the kids in private school (no), whether we should send them to camp in the summer. We didn’t agree on anything, but in those moments, it didn’t matter. It was like an aphrodisiac, all of this planning and anticipation.
We did agree, though, that a third-floor walk-up in a small town in rural Upstate New York was no place for a family.
We had been making half-hearted attempts to get back to the church at the time – for the future children. Elyse had been raised Catholic and practiced from time to time, on holidays, with her family at St. Marks in town. I had also been raised Catholic, went through First Communion and Confirmation, like the other kids, but got away from it.
I gave in to going to services, but drew the line at coffee hour. I was a reporter, I told her, I can’t consort. If she wanted to stay, she could. I developed a habit of ducking out after communion and walking home.
She always got me with the sources argument though – a friendly “in,” if you will.
I remember sitting beside her in the pew, shaking my head as Father McConnell, bellowing out the rundown of activities for the week, per usual – “Pot-luck dinner Tuesday, Bingo on Wednesday, Bible Study on Thursday, and the quilting circle will meet Saturday morning at 10 in the church hall on Front Street. Bagels and juice provided by Tess Barrent. Donations welcome. … And for today’s coffee hour, this week, we welcome Pete and Jessica Gaines, new in town from New York City. Pete is settling into his new role as county judge so stop in and say hello.”
One cup, I told Elyse, but that was it.
Gunnar Olafsson