The Someone You’re Not – Introduction

• Reviews
• Introduction
• Table of contents

Introduction: Suspending Disbelief

I’m proud to welcome you to my fourth collection. The pub date coincides roughly
with the anniversary of the evening, thirty-three years ago, when Watergate investigator
Bob Woodward summoned me to his fishbowl of a glass office in the newsroom of the
Washington Post. Forgive me if I reminisce.

For just under a year I’d been working full time on the graveyard shift as a copy boy,
doing my best to cadge freelance assignments during the days. I’d come to Washington
from Atlanta for an abortive, three week stint in law school, an unwitting stow-away on
the bandwagon carrying President Jimmy Carter’s peanut mafia into town. Previously I’d
majored in history with a minor in creative writing, spent two years editing college
publications and served a transformative internship at the pioneering alt-weekly Creative
Loafing. (How clever it felt to be able to say I’d actually worked at a place called
Creative Loafing—until the afternoon the legendary executive editor of the Post, Ben
Bradlee, bid me to recite my curriculum vitae.)

Now I was perched on the seat-edge of one of the egg-shaped chairs that populated
the acre-square newsroom, in the office of this living historical figure. He’d taken down a
crooked president and inspired a generation of boomer kids to become reporters. This
was the late seventies, an era when journalism felt more like Hemingway than TMZ, a
calling at once macho and noble. Following his investigative triumphs, Woodward was
trying his hand at management. As assistant managing editor of the Metro section, he was
being groomed for Bradlee’s job.

As you may remember, Woodward was played in the movie version of his book, All
the President’s Men, by the actor Robert Redford. One afternoon the matinee idol would
come to visit Woodward in his fishbowl. As it happened there was a copy machine right
behind it. The line of female employees—from all floors of the building—waiting to
make copies snaked past the National desk and all the way back to Business. The real-life
Woodward has a broad forehead and a broad Midwestern accent normally associated with
a rube. In person (unless you’re being interrogated, as I would be a few years later, in
connection with Janet Cooke’s Pulitzer scandal—see “Janet’s World” in Scary Monsters
and Super Freaks) there is no hint of his relentless killer instinct. He chewed gum and
walked slew-footed, with his head thrown back, like a guy exhaling smoke from an
expensive cigar. On his strolls through the rows of desks in his Metro fiefdom, he’d stop
at your chair and mug for several full seconds. “Hihowareya?” he’d say, sounding like
the church lady’s husband. Sometimes he’d ask the same personal question two days in a
row—which mattered not a bit, because you were talking to Bob-frickin-Woodward! He
even showed up some Sunday mornings to play co-ed touch football in the field just
north of the Washington Monument, which all of us junior media titans enjoyed calling
the Stone Bone. When my parents came to visit, Woodward even autographed a book for
them, easing to some degree the pain of my law school debacle, I am sure.

On this evening in the late summer of 1978—right around deadline on Wednesday,
September 12 to be exact—I was running on fumes. I’d been up most of the night
working my shift on the city desk—answering phones, logging tips, fetching food and
coffee, taking modest dictation, running copies of corrections lists around the building.
(My favorite stop was the typesetters on four. Most of them were deaf; their furious and
animated signing amid the din of the machines and conveyor belts and Orwell-like
pneumatic tubes carrying copy in plastic capsules from the newsroom was like a
cacophonous silent dance of hands and animated faces. I still have on my desk the two
lines of lead type that spell out my Post byline, gifted by a fourth floor friend.)

Since the moment I’d entered the Post’s employ—denied a job at first for my failure
to pass the spelling and typing tests administered upstairs in human resources—I’d waged
a relentless, if well-mannered, campaign to get myself promoted to reporter. I did
everything I was asked and always more—I stayed late, volunteered for scut work, ran
errands at actual double time, offered a suggestion where needed, took initiative,
sometimes too much. If there was a job posted, I applied—religion news aide, assistant
city editor, Moscow bureau chief: the Post was a union shop, they were required to
interview any union member who signed up. If there was a section that used stringers, I
went to see the editor with a list of ideas. I even wrote a whole (awful) story for the Post
magazine on spec about “handicapped people,” having been inspired by the courage of
my blind cousin. If some of the older editors asked me along after work for wee-hours
hard drinking I went. If some of the younger writers invited me to party I showed. At
night I’d handle my shift in a tee-shirt and jeans. During the day I’d dress in one of my
two suits and find a vacant desk from which to work my stories. It got to the point where
these famously driven Washington journos were starting to notice my prodigious work
ethic. “Are you sleeping under a desk?” someone asked.

Not to mention the catastrophic early onset of male pattern baldness at age 21.
Looking back, it might have been one of those gifts in disguise. Without hair, I looked
older and less healthy, more in line with the other sleep-deprived go-getters who were my
older role models in the newsroom. All of us wore our eye-bags like badges of our
unflagging fidelity to the mother Post.

At the moment, in Woodward’s office, I was wearing my three piece Glen plaid law
school interview suit and no shoes. I’d spent the hot, Indian summer day trampling
through landfills in Virginia and Maryland, and a sewage treatment plant in DC, hunting
for evidence of U.S. government-owned furniture and office equipment that had been
illegally removed by a garbage hauling firm from a storage area at the U.S. Department
of Agriculture—part of an investigation I’d undertaken during my off hours. My crusty
wingtips were stashed in an airtight film bag in the copy aide station. I know I must have
reeked.

Fortunately, in this particular line of work, smelling like sludge is sometimes a plus.
Beneath the fold of this morning’s paper was my first front-page story. The previous day,
I’d sat for nearly eight hours in a windowsill at U.S.D.A. headquarters, at 14th Street and
Independence Avenue SW, staking out the dumpsters three stories down in the internal
courtyard. Late in the afternoon, my confidence flagging, my ass killing me, I witnessed
at last the act of theft a whistle-blowing secretary had called the city desk late one night
to report. (That I kept the tip for myself instead of handing it over to the night city editor
is another long bit; besides journalism, the Post was all about office politics, played for
keeps by people who covered the D.C. professionals. My first mentor at the paper, Tom
Sherwood, had instructed, “People here don’t stab you in the back, they stab you in the
chest.” More valuable training for life.)

When Woodward had summoned me to his fishbowl, I was sitting at somebody’s
borrowed desk, typing—on an IBM Selectric self-correcting typewriter and six-ply paper
—the second day follow-up to my story: The General Services Administration had
undertaken an investigation into the theft of the furniture. I was 22 and probably high on
methane fumes. I’d hardly slept for the last eleven months. Woodward knew me fairly
well; I’d stalked and dogged and cajoled him at every opportunity. I’d even attended a
party or two at his house, albeit as a sub class of invitee, a member of the support staff.
(And once, at football, I got him with a pretty good cross-body block.) For months I’d
written features and small town news stories and police shorts. Every time I scored a
byline I’d stolen into this very fishbowl at night and left the clipping on his keyboard
with a note. (How many times do you figure I rewrote those notes?) Finally, with this
investigation, I had the kind of story it took to get noticed at the Post. To get noticed by
Bob Woodward.

He sat on the edge of his desk and looked down at me, his thin lips upturned into a
wizened smirk. His chewing gum crackled and snapped. He pointed to my article on the
front page. “You’ve done what I said you had to do: You’ve proven yourself
indispensable to the Washington Post.”

I felt faint and out of breath, a little nauseous. I was never very good talking to
teachers. “Does this mean I get a raise?”

The bestselling author looked at me peevishly, like maybe he’d just made a huge
mistake. “You can have what I get: One dollar a year.”

Though it would be some time before I was given an actual desk, business card,
nameplate, and phone number—I was too young to care or understand at the time, but
Woodward had bestowed upon me this battlefield promotion without the necessary
clearance from the business side; there was no actual “reporter slot” for me to fill— I thus
began in earnest a period I now see as my six years of journalism graduate studies at one
of the very finest newspapers in the world. I remain a proud alum.

***

Years later, I was doing a story for Esquire about the entertainer Roseanne Barr.
Once labled television’s “domestic goddess,” she’d grown increasingly erratic. During
the course of an interview at her snow-dusted cabin at Lake Arrowhead, CA, she revealed
to me that she suffered from multiple personality disorder. Over the next six months or so
we did a longer piece. (“The Multitudes of Roseanne,” Revenge of the Donut Boys.)

One day I had to call her, I can’t remember why. Maybe to make arrangements for
our next meeting. As usual I was put on hold by one of her minions for twenty minutes.
As usual when she finally picked up, there was no salutation.

“All hate is just fear,” she sneered, appropois of nothing. “All fear is insecurity.”

Over the course of my career, I’ve met a number of people you might think of as
mad geniuses. With Roseanne it always felt like I was a step slow. She’d taken to calling
me “You Idiot.” Somehow, it felt like a term of endearment. I asked her to repeat herself.

“What are you, deaf now, too?”

All hate is just fear. All fear is insecurity.

Warming my hands by the cultural fires of so many diverse characters and groups
and settings over nearly four decades in journalism, I’ve observed how strongly our
world depends upon our hate and fear, our cultural stereotypes and clannish platitudes,
our political correctness, our mythology and pat misunderstandings, our notions of what
is supposed to be true, what is considered to be true, what other people say you should
think and do, what is gospel.

No matter where I have gone, by keeping my mind open—I call it suspending
disbelief– I have unfailingly returned home from every assignment with a new sort of
understanding, a new insight, something I’d never have even imagined unless I’d walked
without judgment the proverbial mile in someone elses’s shoes. You can’t know what
your neighbor is saying if you’re yelling back at him… or avoiding him… or trying to
kill him. You have to listen, even if it hurts. At least then maybe you’ll really know who
and what you’re dealing with.

Pulling together the titles for this collection— a list on my computer screen, playing
idly with different fonts as people do—my eyes came to rest on the headline of my
favorite piece in this batch, “The Someone You’re Not.” The assignment and the headline
were courtesy of my wonderful Esquire editor of fifteen years, Peter Griffin. When I got
the call, I was going through the unexpected breakup of my two-decade marriage. Due to
the nasty circumstances, I’d been advised not to vacate my house. Confined here, talking
on the phone to Ray Towler, a man just released from prison—in advance of my own
release and subsequent journey to visit him in Cleveland—I couldn’t help feeling as if
Ray and I were on the same path, sharing the first steps of different journeys toward new
and, hopefully, better lives.

As sometimes happens in the writing game, I stared at the symbols on my screen for
a while and a thought sputtered to life. The Someone You’re Not: All of the articles in this
collection share the same theme—the notion that everyday people, and newsmakers alike,
are rarely who we make them out to be. Not Todd Marinovich. Not Paris Hilton. Not you
or me. In real life, everything and everyone is deeper and richer and more complicated.

Labeled, lampooned, lumped into category, judged out-of-context, ridiculed,
embarrassed, or merely over-simplified, every subject in this gathering of pieces is
someone who feels grossly misunderstood, publicly or privately, in one way or another. I
think of it as under-understood. People just don’t take the time. They’re too busy being
focused on themselves, on the the trials of everyday life. It’s just easier to subscribe to the
common wisdom. We all do it, consciously or not. The world is too big to have things
otherwise.

Thankfully, my editors and the publications they represent—starting with Woodward
and the Post, and on through today with David Granger and Griffin at Esquire—have
afforded me the time to look deeply. By learning to suspend my disbelief, I’ve tried to
move past conventional understanding, past stereotypes—past hate and fear and
insecurity. I’ve tried to learn how not to judge—at least for long enough to hear a person
out. Invariably, when I do, I’ve always found something to love, or at least to understand
—a way to relate to the essential human core that unites us all.

–Mike Sager, La Jolla, CA, August 15, 2012