Burning Out

            by Jacob Schneider

 

            My initiation into the rank of student journalists was quick and painless. Rich, an unshaven Asian engineering major purporting to be the editor-in-chief, asked me three simple questions concerning my background (There’s a place named Weed?), my major (You seem like a pretty smart guy, so why English?), and my opinion of the “adult entertainment” section of the classifieds. Apparently satisfied by my lucid, if wooden, responses, he passed me a shot of Jagermeister and proclaimed me a member of the prestigious staff of the Daily Californian.

            It wasn’t the first time I’d been offered alcohol since my arrival at UC Berkeley. Hardly two hours after I moved my few possessions into my Unit 1 double, my next-door neighbor offered me a beer. A minute later, after I politely declined the booze, claiming an upset stomach, my RA, a sun-bleached senior from Southern California, knocked on my door.

            “Nothing happened today,” he said.

            “Wha—”
            “I mean nothing happened. No drinking, no talking. You haven’t seen anyone since you moved in.”

            The encounter exemplified the tense environment on campus that fall. Cal was in the throes of a campus-wide moratorium on drinking, and in particular underage drinking. The measure was largely symbolic—after all, underage drinking was illegal no matter what—but after a few highly publicized hazing incidents at Cal’s usually mild frats, the UC police were ramping up efforts to crack down on undergraduate debauchery. The increase in police patrols and disciplinary measures drew the ire of students, who felt that the administration was taking away their college experience and reacted by flouting the limitations whenever they could. As a breathless editorial in the Daily Cal’s orientation issue entitled “Animal House of Cards” put it:

 

“This insane policy is only driving drinking underground and turning students against their RAs and administrators. Wouldn’t the university rather have underage binge drinking out in the open where it can be regulated? How many students will die because of this disastrous idea?”

 

A little melodramatic, perhaps, but reflective of the atmosphere on campus. We incoming freshmen were the most confused. Without the familiar wild trappings of the college experience, my first month of school was extremely lonely. I arrived on campus from the woodsy town of Weed—four hours north on Interstate 5—knowing no one else at the university. After four weeks of aimlessly wandering the now-silent frat row while my crew-recruit roommate—who had made it clear from the moment he arrived that he wasn’t in need of friends—scored with yet another girl, I decided that I needed to reach out more. The Daily Cal seemed like a good bet both because I fancied myself an artist and because it paid (the most reliable draw for a poor college student).

            My first assignment was to profile a candidate for student government. I met her at a coffee shop on Bancroft one rainy afternoon and took copious notes on my new iBook. She represented a group of students called “Demanding Educational Access” (or as its posters put it, “the cool DEA”). Their platform involved unlimited affirmative action and the replacement of dorms with student-run urban farms. She spit as she spoke through her coffee and hadn’t shaved her underarms. I hoped that my article wouldn’t show that I was rooting against her.

            The profile ran below the fold of the next day’s paper, next to a particularly unflattering photo of my subject at a PETA rally and under a bold news story about a drug bust at Unit 1. The article said that a sophomore had been arrested for hoarding nearly $5,000 worth of speed under his bed in the dorms. He wouldn’t have been caught except that his roommate had come across the pills, thought it was aspirin, and checked himself into the Tang Center two hours later with suspicious symptoms.

I’d been instructed to go into the Daily Cal office that afternoon for an individualized critique with my editor. Josh was a sickly, skinny, Jewish-looking senior with thick glasses and an insatiable nicotine addiction. He rolled his own cigarettes with a bag of American Spirit tobacco he kept under a “No Smoking” sign on his desk. On the window above facing Sproul Plaza, he had a poster that said “I want a Pulitzer so bad it burns.” He and a few senior minions who seemed to live in the newsroom, subsisting on fast food and beer from a moldy mini-fridge in the corner. They ruled in shifts. While Josh rolled smokes and listened to the police scanner, his cronies napped under a jacket on a ratty secondhand couch. I assumed that while I wasn’t there, they gave him a break.

            When I reached the newsroom, I found Josh and a buddy throwing darts at Jessica Simpson’s Playboy centerfold on the wall.

            “Jimmy, it’s time me and you had a smoke,” he said. One of the unadvertised benefits of working at the Daily Cal was access to a balcony overlooking Sproul Plaza and the intersection of Bancroft and Telegraph. Sproul Plaza was rarely disappointing; most days, some student group or another had something loud going on. There were also a few local characters to fill the void. My personal favorite was Happy Happy Man, an elderly Asian man who yelled “Happy happy happy” while encouraging you to read the gibberish on his giant black poster board. The balcony was perfect for dropping water balloons on unsuspecting Asian tourists and smoking, both of which I saw happen on a regular basis.

            “Man, we rocked the front page, man. I knew we’d have a connection,” he said, taking a couple of pre-rolled smokes out of his jacket.

            “That was a nice article. How did you talk to so many people just last night?”

            He gave me a light.

            “Man, me and the UC police, we’ve got a connection.”

            “A connection?”

            “Yeah, a connection. That’s what I said, right? We’re just, I don’ t know…connected. Yeah” I couldn’t tell if he was drunk or messing with me. His hands were shaking, his whole body vibrating, in fact. I was a little bit surprised that he managed to play darts in that condition. His cigarette dropped from his fingers and he leaned over to pick it up. When he looked back up, he eyes were squinting. “You’ve got to understand that news is out there for those who grab it. That’s what I do grab it. Who’s the newsmaker? I’m the newsmaker.”

            “What are you trying to tell me?”

            “I’m trying to tell you what it takes to make it here.” He turned to go back into the building. “Alright, man. It’s time for me to go back to nailing my little bunny Jessica. Just remember, don’t let me down, man. Don’t let go of the connection.”

 

*                      *                      *

 

            That night, I was jolted awake by a phone call.

            “Hey, man, what are you doing right now?” It was Josh. He sounded very awake.

            “What the fuck?” I couldn’t think.

            “How does some speed sound to you?” he asked.

            “What?” I was confused. He started laughing hysterically. Was he offering me drugs? If so, coffee sounded a lot better. I turned on the light and looked over at my alarm clock. Three-twelve. Some blond bimbo was in bed with my roommate.

            “Get your ass to Clark Kerr right away. Drug bust. Just came in over the scanner. This is your first big story. Don’t screw it up.” He hung up abruptly.

            I grabbed a cup of coffee at the machine in the lobby of my dorm and set off through the dark streets of Southside. A UC police car was parked in front of Clark Kerr. In the lobby, I met a crew cut woman in a windbreaker. She was writing on a clipboard and looked to be in her mid-forties.

            “Hey, you must be the Daily Cal cub. I know Josh is about to graduate, but I didn’t think he’d pass the torch so soon.” She flashed a warm but reserved smile. “I’m Officer Sanders, badge number 577. Follow me. You missed all the action, but I can catch you up.”

            She led me down a dark stairwell into the basement. A mass of yellow police tape surrounded an open cabinet in the corner.

            “We found it down here,” she said. “Largest cocaine haul I’ve seen in twenty years on the force. Believe me, in twenty years at this job, you see a lot of cocaine. But I don’t know where it came from. It was like fucking Colombia down here. I was tempted to take some myself. Mind if I smoke?”

            “No.” I though the whole exchange was a little bit out of character for a cop. “Where did you take it?”

            “Downtown. To the chief’s house. Back out to People’s Park to sell it again. Who the fuck knows? Josh said you were cool. I’m glad he sent you. Time to get someone else in on this.”

            I got the necessary quotes about the horror of teenage drug abuse and left the scene as quickly as I could. Had a cop really just sworn at me? Had she also joked about pilfering drugs? I thought back to what she had said: “Josh said you were cool.” What could she possibly have meant.

            I felt numb and as soon as I got back to my dorm, I took a cold shower just to make sure I wasn’t just dreaming. By the time I got back in bed at six a.m., I’d formulated a hypothesis. In the course of his reporting, Josh had gotten close to this particular cop and she tipped him off whenever a hot story was breaking. That would explain the scoop he got on the speed bust earlier that week and why she felt so comfortable talking freely with a reporter. A little bit sketchy maybe, but not entirely unethical. As Josh had put it, he’s the newsmaker.

            After I finished my morning classes, I stopped by the Daily Cal offices to write my article. In one corner, a trio of pale, skinny guys wearing thick, dark glasses and depressed grimaces (the kind of guys who quoted Nietzsche and always wrote glowing reviews of Radiohead CDs) were laying out the next day’s Arts section. Josh wasn’t at his desk and when I asked, someone told me that he was “out back, but don’t worry about it.” The door to the photo room was closed, but I could hear a conversation inside.

            Eventually, he burst out of the photo room, followed closely by Officer Sanders of the UC police. The Arts people looked up from their computers momentarily, then remembered that they were depressed and went back to their business with sighs.

            “Jimmy, my boy, how was your misadventure up at Clark Kerr last night?” Josh asked. “Man, I’m telling you. With the school the way it is, we can bank on this drug stuff. Man, this here article is going to blow up.” He tapped my computer screen quickly and grabbed a dart.

            I wanted to ask him why he was meeting with a UC cop. I wanted to ask him why he knew about the drug busts so quickly after they were committed. I wanted to ask him the truth, but I couldn’t. Honestly, his enthusiasm worked on me. I knew that he was right. The campus would love my article. I was breaking news. I was a good journalist, a whistleblower, an advocate of the democratic process. And that’s all that mattered.

            Right?

 

*                      *                      *

  

            For the next couple of months, Josh called me a couple times a week with drug bust tips. Cal had always had a little bit of a reputation when it came to the substances, but I was introduced to an underworld that I hadn’t even known existed. People began to recognize my byline and my classmates began to look at me with some respect. Sometimes someone would stop me on the street and ask me for drugs. I always responded that I didn’t have any, and they would give me a knowing grin, a punch on the shoulder, and move on. The truth was, I didn’t have any information to give them, and I didn’t even know how I’d become the go-to guy for narcotics. Even if they’d persisted, I couldn’t even have told them who my contacts were. I got all of my information either from Josh or Officer Sanders. I enjoyed the attention I got, but it made me nervous. Every time I asked Josh where our information was coming from, he would give me some crap about connections and stroke my journalistic ego. I went home for the semester break eager for a month of simple solitude in Weed, away from the complications of college life.

            The big call came about a week into the next semester. I hadn’t been by the Daily Cal newsroom and I was seriously considering just letting my reporting career, and all of my anxiety, slip away.

            “Jim, man,” Josh yelled into the phone at one a.m. “You’ve got to get to the R.S.F. There’s a fucking meth lab. A whole fucking meth lab.” His excitement was contagious. I’d never covered a story of that magnitude.

            I got to the scene ten minutes later. Three police cars and a paddy wagon were parked up on the sidewalk. Officer Sanders and two other cops were searching three people up against the wall of the building. That was a first. I’d never actually seen the drug dealers on the scene. When the cops finished their search, I tentatively approached one of the perps, a tall blond guy with a mohawk and multiple piercings.

             “Where did you get your stuff?” I asked, after introducing myself. He looked me in the eye and spit on the ground in disdain.

            “Where do you think?”

            “What do you mean?” I actually didn’t know.

            “That’s enough,” exclaimed Sanders. “Kid shouldn’t have been talking in the first place.”

            “Wha—“

            “I said: that’s enough.” She gave me a long, menacing stare. “I thought Josh said you were cool. With that, she pushed the students into her cruiser and drove away.

            I didn’t know what she’d meant. What had Josh told her about me? What had I implicated myself in? I ran to the Daily Cal office and burst into the newsroom. It was empty. It seems that Josh did not, in fact, sleep there. I turned on the fluorescent lights and slowly approached his desk.

            The police scanner was crackling and when I turned it up I could hear the message clearly: “Sanders to Daily Cal, Sanders to Daily Cal. Can someone come in?” In the top drawer I found his bag of American Spirit and his rolling papers. I decided that I needed a cigarette badly and pulled the first paper off the top. I was about to roll the tobacco in it when I noticed that it had writing on it. A list of names. Each one followed by the name of a drug in parentheses. There was also a column with a date and amount in dollars. The list included all of the recent busts. And I could see against the dark window above: “I want a Pulitzer so bad it burns.”

 

*                      *                      *

 

            Ironically, even though it was that story that won all of the accolades, not the drug bust scoops, Josh did engineer his Pulitzer. The next day, I put the article on the desk of the editor-in-chief and told him to either run it or I’d take it somewhere else more public. He ran it and it was big news for about a week. Between the UC Police internal affairs investigation and Josh’s federal trial, the entire plot—from Josh’s scheming to Sanders’ corruption—was revealed in excruciating detail and I was cast as the whistle-blowing hero. When the dust settled, I got Josh’s job and used it as a springboard to get an internship at the Oakland Tribune, where I still am today.

            I’m an editor now, so I don’t get out and do much reporting these days, but last week a story came across my desk that I couldn’t pass up. Josh was released from federal prison having served his twenty years (minus four for good behavior) for possession of narcotics and conspiracy to distribute. There was a good sob story in it—the high-flying college student whose life was ruined by one little mistake. I met him at his parent’s home in Castro Valley after calling ahead. Prison had changed him, hardened him. He was reticent to talk and spent most of the interview sucking on a cigarette. He didn’t seem to recognize me and I didn’t see any reason to make myself known.

            But that night as I wrote the article, I couldn’t get that one thing that he’d said that first week at the Daily Cal. “I’m the newsmaker,” he’d insisted.

            Yes, I thought, and you still are.