The Idea Man
West Babylon, New York 1992
The town of West Babylon, Long Island, was no longer young, but it had passed from corn field to deteriorating suburb without making a stop for the bloom of youth. It had no Main Street, just a four-lane highway bordered by the orange, red, and violet-roofed outlets of national chains. These chicken restaurants and copy shops sat higgeldy-piggeldy on their lots, at whatever angle served the whim or profit of their builders. West Babylon was a town that respected movement and progress more than harmony. So did Jason Jellyman, who grew up there. He had new ideas every day, and if they elbowed aside old ideas that was fine, even if those were ideas he himself had come up with the day before. As a four-year-old, he suggested to his father a more efficient way to shave. His father thought it cute, until Jason flew into a rage when he found him not using it. At twelve and at his first sleep-away camp, he rewrote the words to the old campfire songs and tried to persuade the counselors to teach his versions. When attendance was low for the high-school wrestling team he managed, Jason tried to get the guys to dress in makeup and feather boas, like professional wrestlers. The other guys wouldn't go along with that. |
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But having his big ideas rejected never stopped him from advancing them. Big ideas, he was always promised, would be a boon to him in the business world, where ideas were currency. At Long Island University, he learned there was a field where even the dumbest ideas were celebrated: it was called journalism. Its practitioners produced pages and pages of newsprint and magazines and TV news scripts every day and required a great deal of material to fill them; on slow days, under deadline, they were rather open-minded about what they would use. The college paper, a microcosm of the larger industry, used a great number of his stories, and some of them were good. Jason graduated first in his class in the journalism department. But he graduated into the recession of 1992, when magazines were collapsing and journalism jobs were few and far between. The people who got them had gone to schools more prestigious or closer to Manhattan, and nurtured personal connections more carefully. Always focused on the big picture, Jason tended to forget individual names.
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That was how he ended up living at home, and working at the West Babylon News-Guard. His father knew the editor, a Mr. Bankoff, because the News-Guard had an office in the same strip mall as Mr. Jellyman's insurance office and a pizzeria. "Insurance/Pizza" was all the sign said, but everyone knew the weekly News-Guard was there, too. Jason reported to his first day of work full of story ideas, and infatuated with the journalistic canon of ethics. "Just because we're a small-town paper," he told Mr. Bankoff, "doesn't mean we have to look small-town. We can do more than just school board meetings. We can do personality stuff! Candid shots - you know, here's Mayor Fritsch at the Burger King, chowing down on a Whopper." He leaned forward over Mr. Bankoff's desk, and Mr. Bankoff leaned back a little. He had been running the newspaper on his own for many years, with the help of a few freelancers, mostly housewives with English degrees. It had been the idea of the newspaper's distant owner to replace them all with a single reporter, hired cheap. "We can do investigations!" Jason was saying. "Did you know," he said, jumpy in his chair, "that someone has put George Bush campaign signs on municipally-owned median strips? That's a federal crime." Mr. Bankoff nodded, trying not to look overwhelmed.
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And so Jason's career began. He made a few waves with the Bush campaign sign piece - annoying his father, who was ringing doorbells for Bush - and scored again with a report of possible City Hall corruption. The contract for landscaping City Hall with a decorative tulip garden and windmill - West Babylon was proud of its Dutch heritage - had gone to a firm run by a town councilor's son-in-law. Public outrage was muted solely because it was the only landscaping firm in town. A couple of Jason's stories were spiked, including the first in his "town personalities" series: he had interviewed the clerk at the Burn-Your-Bridges Motel, asking if he saw many locals in there. The candid photo idea was also abandoned, after the roving photographer caught the mayor's wife without makeup. But Jason had been making an ambitious impression on the News-Guard for nearly three months before crisis hit. It came in the form of his latest story idea, which was actually a combination of two story ideas. The town was having to spend $25,000, a strain on its budget, to clean up a load of old tires someone had dumped years ago into an estuary to the Atlantic Ocean. It was also preparing a special event for Veteran's Day, adding the names of recently returned Gulf War soldiers to the town memorial. Jason knew one of the soldiers: he was Tom Standage, who had been a senior on the wrestling team when Jason was a freshman. He was also the man who had dumped the tires. |
Tom and his brothers had been had been cleaning out their family's car-repair garage, and they enlisted the other guys on the wrestling team to haul them, in the first half of an evening that was supposed to end up with a raid on a school for troubled girls. Jason had been invited along, but he hadn't gone. He'd never been much interested in girls. But this was interesting; this was a great story. He needed background, like they had taught him in school, and he called up an environmental group in the city and asked them about the pollution caused by abandoned tires. Apparently they were a breeding ground for rats and mosquitoes, and if they caught on fire, rubber runoff might contaminate the ground forever. What if someone someday wanted to build a school or a playground on that site? He called a man who had lost the race for mayor last year, and was always ready to criticize the way the town spent its money. He called City Hall, just to confirm the cost of cleaning up the tires. And then he called Tom Standage. |
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He was back to working at his family's garage. As Jason waited for him to come to the phone, listening to the clank of metal tools, he noticed his jaw was hurting. "This is Jason Jellyman," he said when Tom answered. "Remember me from wrestling?" "Yeah! I think I do," said Tom. "Jason, man! Hi!" "I'm a reporter for the West Babylon News-Guard now." "Oh yeah?" said Tom. "I thought you went to college." "I did." "You went to college, and you're back here? How come?" Jason's jaw was really killing him. "Look, remember that night in high school when the team dumped all your tires in the river?" "Sure," he said cheerfully. "Well, the town has to clean them up, now, and it's going to cost lots of money."
There was silence on the other end of the line. "I guess we shouldn't have done that," Tom said finally. "Do they want me to go pick 'em up?" "No, they have to hire a professional salvage company," Jason told him. "It's going to cost $25,000." "Wow!" said Tom. |
As soon as Jason got off the phone, he went to work on the piece. It flowed, like poetry or a piece of music - he barely had to work on it. It was simply there. And although it is never the reporter's job to write headlines, Jason was so infused with spirit that he wrote one anyway: GULF WAR HERO ADMITS TO ENVIRONMENTAL SABOTAGE. It was a good story. It was a very good story. Jason almost wanted to call up his old journalism professor and tell him about it.He worked on some other stories that week, but he couldn't help daydreaming about this one. He saw himself praised and handed awards for it, possibly sought after for a job at one of the Manhattan papers, maybe interviewed on Good Morning America. The sad tale of the tainted Gulf War hero would put a human face on the national problem of discarded tires. When the lady from the U-Print-It came in on Tuesday to paste up articles into a newspaper. When she left, and Mr. Bankoff was still out of the office making arrangements for a special ad supplement for the Veteran's Day ceremony, Jason sneaked a look for his story. It was not on the front page. He looked inside. It wasn't there. It was not in the paper. He looked in the stacks of typeset, unused stories. It wasn't there, either. He couldn't even find his original on Mr. Bankoff's desk. |
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He sat in the office for awhile, staring forward, thinking. His jaw, and his gums, really hurt. Mr. Bankoff returned about an hour later. "Where's my story?" Jason asked him. And Mr. Bankoff sighed and sat down, and gave him a long, tiresome explanation about advertisers and subscribers, and how they didn't like negative stories, and how the Veteran's Day ceremonies would be a morale boost for the entire community, and how a town like West Babylon, where lots of people were unemployed because of the recession, needed a local newspaper that would deliver pep and encouragement. "I don't mean to discourage you," said Mr. Bankoff. "Really, I don't."
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Jason felt something wet in the corner of his mouth. Reaching up to touch it, he discovered it was blood. He went to the little bathroom the news office shared with the pizzeria, and looked inside his mouth. Way in the back, he saw the crown of a tooth breaking through his gum. It was his first wisdom tooth. He washed his face, and then looked at himself in the mirror. Mr. Bankoff, he said to himself, doesn't want ideas that are good. He wants ideas that will make him look good. This newspaper was not worth his ideas, Jason decided: this town, with its lack of excitement about his scoops, was not worth his time. There must be something much better for him, something much bigger for him, somewhere in the world. He just didn't know what it was, yet.
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