The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

I saw lots of horror films when I was a kid (you probably guessed that). I was an easy target, and most of them scared me to death. It was dark, the images were so much bigger than you were, and the sound was so loud that the scares continued even when you shut your eyes. On TV, the scare quotient tended to be lower. There were commercials to break the rhythm of the thing, and the worst parts were sometimes snipped out to avoid giving complexes to any little shavers who might be watching (alas, already too late for me; I’d seen the dead woman rising out of the tub in Diabolique). As a last resort, you could always go into the kitchen and grab a Hires out of the fridge, lingering until the scary music was replaced by some local huckster screaming, ‘Cars, cars, cars! No credit check! We’ll sell to ANYONE!’

One film I saw on TV did the job¸ however. At least the first hour or so of its seventy-seven-minute run did; the denouement wrecked the whole thing, and to this day I wish somebody would remake it and carry its hair-raising premise right through to the end. That film has perhaps the best horror-movie title of all time: I Bury the Living.

I was thinking of that movie when I wrote this story.

Obits

Keep it clear, and keep it in a straight line.

That was the gospel according to Vern Higgins, who headed up the journalism department at the University of Rhode Island, where I got my degree. A lot of what I heard at school went in one ear and out the other, but not that, because Professor Higgins hammered on it. He said that people need clarity and concision in order to start the process of understanding.

Your real job as journalists, he told his classes, is to give people the facts that allow them to make decisions and go forward. So don’t be fancy. Don’t go all twee and hifalutin. Start at the start, lay the middle out neatly, so the facts of each event lead logically to the next, and end at the end. Which, in reporting, he emphasized, is always the end for now. And don’t you ever sink to that lazy crap about how some people believe or the general consensus of opinion is. A source for each fact, that’s the rule. Then write it all in plain English, unadorned and unvarnished. Flights of rhetoric belong on the op-ed page.

I doubt if anyone will believe what follows, and my career at Neon Circus had very little to do with good writing, but I intend to do my best here: the facts of each event leading to the next. Beginning, middle, and end.

The end for now, at least.

Good reporting always begins with the five Ws: who, what, when, where, and why if you can find out. In my case, the why’s a tough one.

The who is easy enough, though; your less-than-fearless narrator is Michael Anderson. I was twenty-seven at the time these things happened. I graduated from URI with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism. For two years after college I lived with my parents in Brooklyn and worked for one of those Daily Shopper freebies, rewriting newswire items to break up the ads and coupons. I kept my résumé (such as it was) in constant rotation, but none of the papers in New York, Connecticut, or New Jersey wanted me. This didn’t completely surprise my parents or me, not because my grades were lousy (they weren’t), and not because my clip folder – mostly stories from the URI student newspaper, The Good 5 Cent Cigar – were badly written (a couple of them won awards), but because newspapers weren’t hiring. Quite the opposite.

(If Professor Higgins saw all these parentheses, he’d kill me.)

My parents began urging me – gently, gently – to start looking for some other kind of job. ‘In a related field,’ my father said in his most diplomatic voice. ‘Maybe advertising.’

‘Advertising isn’t news,’ I said. ‘Advertising is anti-news.’ But I caught his drift: he had visions of me still grabbing midnight snacks out of their fridge when I was forty. Slacker Deluxe.

Reluctantly, I began making a list of possible advertising firms that might like to hire a young copywriter with good chops but no experience. Then, on the night before I planned to begin sending out copies of my résumé to the firms on that list, I had a goofy idea. Sometimes – often – I lie awake nights wondering how different my life might have been if that idea had never crossed my mind.