by Noah Davis

Part of a month-long series on terrible trips, great journeys and getting lost.

When we were planning a trip to the 2006 World Cup — and, as you’ll see, I use “planned” in the loosest sense of the word — I did not picture a friend and me sleeping in a ball pit at the base of a slide in a kid’s play area on an overnight ferry steaming from northern Germany to southern Sweden. There were four, sometimes five, of us on the trip. We were a year out of college and more or less broke, so we decided to save money by not paying to sleep anywhere. I expected some strange arrangements to present themselves, but a ball pit? I did not see that coming.

The idea to go to the World Cup installed itself in our heads four years before. We spent three weeks during the early summer of 2002 watching three games a night. The tournament was held that year in South Korea and Japan, which meant the matches were shown live at 2 a.m., 4:30 a.m., and 7 a.m. on the East Coast. We did not get a lot of sleep. Luckily, our summer jobs had not yet started, although even if they had, I suspect we would have simply arrived bleary-eyed. We became, strangely, surprisingly, remarkably dedicated to that World Cup. It was this secret, cool thing we did while the rest of the country was sleeping.

When the United States defeated Mexico to reach the quarterfinal, we burst out of my friend’s basement into the early morning Providence light. We were ready to celebrate with an equally excited crowd. Instead, we found ourselves completely alone on Blackstone Blvd. Next time, we said enthusiastically to each other, we should go.

***

For three and a half years, Geoff and I invited nearly everyone we met to the World Cup with us. Friends, acquaintances, girls we kissed, strangers at bars. If you ask enough of them, they will come. Two of them, our high-school friends Andrew and Jeremy, did. Geoff’s college friend, Tom, also signed on. We bought plane tickets in January, booked a rental car through Avis in March, and filled two, two-liter soda bottles with Castillo Rum (a going away present from the bar where we worked) and Coke in June. Then, we jumped on a plane. We had high hopes for the American squad, ranked (ridiculously) 5th in the world, and no expectations for the trip.

The plan, vaguely, was to meet Jeremy and Tom, both already in Germany, in Gelsenkirchen on June 12, the day of the first United States game. We thought, optimistically, it would be simple to spot two people among the throngs of Red, White, and Blue dressed supporters streaming into the train station of the former coal mining town. It wasn’t. The Czech Republic, the US’s opponents on the night, share our colors. There were thousands upon thousands of arriving supporters. But the eternal optimism of 22-year-old dudes prevailed. Somehow, we managed to find Tom and then Jeremy.

A couple rounds of pints and “Star Spangled Banners” later, we headed to an abandoned field where the tournament planner had set up a huge projection screen to show the game, which was being played just up the road at Schalke 04’s Veltins-Arena. Our quintet was confident. We lacked tickets for the match — getting those would require a) money, which we didn’t have and b) organization months prior, with which we hadn’t bothered — but we could watch Landon Donovan, Claudio Reyna, and Brian McBride on the screen in front of us. (One of the most serendipitous aspects of the whole serundipitious trip was the presence of big screens playing games everywhere to support the ticketless masses. Germany, unlike some of her visitors, was organized.) There were additional American fans milling around the dirt field but we were soundly outnumbered. It didn’t matter. Nobody outside of the small American contingent believed in the US’s chances, and we didn’t care. We were in Germany to kick ass and take names, a fact we told the Czech supporters standing next to us.

Then, the game started. The Czech’s Jan Koller scored in the first five minutes, and it was clear the Americans were massively outmatched. We quietly watched the rest of the destruction, Tomáš Rosický diagonal ball after diagonal ball. 3–0 Czech Republic, and it wasn’t that close. It was sad. But there were two group games to go. And, you know, we were in Germany with four good friends. So we went to a bar. There are reasons to celebrate, even when there aren’t.

***

The summer of 2006 was a strange time to be an American in Germany. We (the United States) had elected George W. Bush to a second term after what was increasingly obviously a disastrous first four years. The Europeans couldn’t understand this. Frankly, neither could we but our little group was American (obviously, loudly so), and we became representatives of the Bush Doctrine even though none of us voted for the President, supported him, or approved of his methods. The intricacies of the American political system are difficult to explain, especially when you’re wearing the Stars and Stripes, talking to [pick a group of Europeans] at a loud bar, and all anyone really wants to do is watch soccer. Eventually, we accepted it and moved on. “Nobody likes us, we don’t care,” became a rallying cry, one that was both ironic and far too true.

***

Western Europe becomes rather small when you have four or five drivers willing to reach excessive rates of speed on the Autobahn (and a crew whose primary sleeping space is the backseat). We started driving to random countries the day they had a game and watching in bars or viewing areas with the home fans. If you can’t beat them, join them and cheer for them for a couple hours. A friend from high school was living in Rotterdam, and we had time before the next US game, so we went. We bought blue and orange Dutch gear (made by Nike), orange hairspray (produced locally), and rode borrowed bikes to a stiflingly hot covered tent. We stood packed from shoulder to shoulder with our adopted countrymen. They accepted us wholeheartedly. When Robin van Persie hit a blistering ball that found the back of the net against Côte d’Ivoire, we celebrated like we were Dutch. Why not? We sort of were. And winning is far more fun than 3–0 defeats.

Later, we picked a Swiss border town, drove there, and watched Schweizer Nati contest a match while huddling under a large tent with 75 confused residents. We weren’t wearing red and white, an oversight on our part. They let us stay, mostly because we were so supportive of the team’s star, Alexander Frei. Also, it was pouring outside, and the Swiss were too polite to throw us out into the weather. When the game ended, we said our dankes and drove away. We parked at a train station down the road and fell asleep. Two border guards armed with bright flashlights and one very large, menacing dog woke us up at 3 a.m. We showed them our passports and, after a protracted internal debate, they decided that if we were crazy enough to stay there, they weren’t going to stop us. The next morning, we “showered” in Lake Constance. We agreed this was a low-point, although mostly because it really hurt to walk barefoot over the rocks.

***

Andrew, Tom, and I went to get ice in Kaiserslautern before the US-Italy game. The case of beers we purchased was sold warm (per custom), and we needed to cool them (per being Americans). A butcher looked confused by our request but sold us a bag that he chopped from the depths of his freezer. (Yes, he actually went into the freezer, cut some large blocks into smaller ones, put them in an extra plastic bag and handed the thing to us with a disgusted look that said, “Here, you weirdos. Now please leave.”) When we returned to the car, Jeremy and Geoff were nowhere to be found. Had they been arrested for playing “Born in the USA” too loudly? Or too ironically? Not ironically enough? Whatever. The beers needing chilling. We figured they would turn up, eventually.

They did, giddily bouncing out of a house right in front of our car 45 minutes later. Each was simultaneously spitting out a rapid-fire explanation for the absence, but we eventually managed to understand that there they were, jamming to The Boss and minding their own business, when a man came out of the establishment — possibly to ask them to turn down the music — and, subsequently, invited them in for a beer. Which is how they ended up imbibing in the bar room of a German fraternity.

We joined them, then spent the afternoon eating sausage, shooting the shit, and comparing stories. Our affable host Güntar, who spoke in a mix of English and German, occasionally said things Tom refused to translate because they were so racist. (Later, Tom very quietly informed us the Nazi party started in some of these fraternity establishments.) A one point, a couple families who were involved with the frat arrived with children in tow, which made us feel marginally better about the whole thing. Afternoon wore into evening, and the five of us took our leave to watch US-Italy. Güntar made us promise to return to spend the night. We reluctantly agreed, with little intention of doing so.

Once again, we didn’t have tickets so we found the viewing area. It was overflowing with Italian supporters. We continued walking, locating a spot outside of the corrugated metal wall with a view of the large screen that was showing the game. Four Americans from South Carolina were close. Our groups merged, driven together by the 4,000 Italians surrounding us. One of our new friends had climbed a tree before we arrived and strung up an American flag. It was a couple yards above an Italian flag. “Look at their flag. Not nearly as high,” he said into our video camera. We laughed. We chanted “USA, USA” and cracked more pints of pils, glancing around at the unfriendly masses. We wondered if we’d have to fight our way out of the mob if the Americans won. Or if they lost. Or really, for any reason. Tom, not inappropriately, made a reference to the Battle of Thermopylae. We laughed, more nervously this time.

The US did not win. They fought bravely, heroically even, earning a 1–1 draw. By the end of the match, the American’s plucky performance on the field and our general enthusiasm off it seemed to have won over many people in our area. (Thankfully, they missed the string of profanities we spewed toward Daniele De Rossi after he elbowed McBride.) We were obnoxious Americans, but at least we were cheeky and fun obnoxious Americans. That played well in the World Cup world, where supporting your country is everything.

Somehow, Güntar found us in the throng after the match, and once again extended his invitation to sleep at the fraternity. Geoff and I were convinced we were going to be murdered — blame Hostel, released six months prior — but we accepted nonetheless. It seemed rude not to. We did not die, but perhaps because Jeremy stayed up all night drinking with our host and talking about World War II. Apparently, it got emotional around 4 a.m.

***

The summer of 2006 was also a strange time to be a German, especially a German teenager. We learned this while visiting the school where Tom was teaching. There were four days between the match against Italy and one with Ghana, and we were desperately in need of a shower and a place to sleep that wasn’t the car, so we drove to Güstrow, a small town 40 miles south of the Baltic Sea. We talked to Tom’s high school classes about life in America, and the 16-year-olds told us how they were, cautiously, proud of their country for the first time in their lives. The World Cup was well-organized, and the young German squad was surprisingly playing exciting, attractive soccer. Nationalism was still, and would remain, a touchy subject for Germany, but we could see how happy they were to have something positive to claim as their own.

***

If you wanted to pick a good time to drive into Nuremberg, I wouldn’t choose the middle of the night. There is plenty of awful history and at least one giant, foreboding concrete structure that is downright terrifying at 4 in the morning. None of this, however, stopped us from joining a 300-person, Red, White, and Blue march through the streets 12 hours after we arrived.

The US needed a victory over Ghana and some help from Italy to advance, and we decided we were going to buy tickets no matter the cost. Despite FIFA’s best efforts to prevent scalping, we found two separate people willing to sell us a pair each at exorbitantly inflated prices. We worried about the difference between the names on the tickets — mine: Katharina Bannasch — and our own, but we bought them anyway. And luckily, no one bothered to check at the stadium.

Before the game, we joined the majority of the American contingent at a bar somewhere in Nuremberg. Spirits were high despite the team’s poor results. We were drinking pints, juggling soccer balls, and singing the national anthem. The meetup had no discernible central organization, but 90 minutes or so before game-time, people slowly started filtering out of the bar and walking to the train station. They were chanting. We joined the loose, red-white-and-blue-clad pack and wound our way through the cobblestone streets. The town’s residents observed with a look that I can only qualify as: WTF?

The US, of course, lost. We were distraught. Our quartet walked the four miles back from the stadium in silence. The reality — that we had flown 6,000 miles and spent thousands of dollars we barely had to watch the US dramatically underperform — came crashing down. They were supposed to at least make it out of the group stage. You can’t follow a team that’s no longer in a tournament. We had another week without anything to do. Back in the town square, we sat in silence for awhile, fuming and ripping chain-smoking cheap cigars (yeah) while the Brazilians — there are always Brazilians, everywhere, at major soccer tournaments — drove around honking their horns in celebration.

***

The ferry from just north of Hamburg to Malmö takes seven hours, which is most of a night, and the best sleeping spots are taken quickly by experienced riders. Our group — exhausted, depressed, hungover, filthy, and unable to understand German or Swedish — was in no shape to battle for the prime areas. We found a couple thin benches and sat talking about the trip. Despite the American’s inability to play well, we were trying to stay positive. The further we got from Nuremburg, the more it became clear that this trip was never really about the soccer. We had another week to explore Europe, a car, and really nothing on the schedule. We decided to keep with the general plan, which was to have no plan at all. We tried to get some sleep. Andrew and Jeremy took the benches. Geoff and I wandered off to find somewhere else. That somewhere else happened to be the ball pit. We thought it would be comfortable. It wasn’t.

We arrived in Malmö, drove to Stockholm, and paid for two hotel rooms for that night. We wandered around the city, wondering why everyone was so tall and why the sun never seemed to set. We got some dinner, then went to the hotel to sleep. We crashed hard. It was wonderful. The next morning, we got up, drove aimlessly until we found a fjord, jumped into the frigid water so we could say we jumped into a fjord in Sweden, and continued on our merry way back to the ferry, refreshed and rejuvenated. We avoided the ball pit on the return trip.

Previously in series: Portraits From A Cross-Country Road Trip, Fly Fishing The Universe, A Chat With A Person Who Has Been To Disney Parks 40 Times and Hiking The Grand Canyon In A Day

Noah Davis is frequently lost.

I have been avoiding discussing the bizarre story out of Lincoln, Nebraska, where a woman said her home was broken into by three masked men and slurs were carved on her. That is because stories where people carve things into people generally turn out to be… well, Ashley Todd, never forget! Right now, local police are saying strange things like “it was too early to tell whether the attack was a hoax.” So, I do not know anything and I have no opinion.

But I am pretty convinced that this anti-gay car-bombing did occur in Oklahoma this week, and that’s pretty weird too, so, there’s that! Oh and this assault in DC and this one in Edmonton and this bar shooting in Indiana. Busy, busy.

“If hamsters are anything like their human counterparts, keeping your TV or computer on at night while you sleep in the same room could not only disrupt your sleep — it could lead to clinical depression.”

This is sweet and all but I can’t imagine any scenario that doesn’t play out badly for the hen.

The Perils Of Storytelling As A Stranger: A Chat With Tom Scocca

Tom Scocca’s Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future has just come out in paperback. This distinctive American’s-eye-view of China’s capital is bracingly cerebral without didacticism, intimate and touching without the slightest trace of “self-realization.” I loved it.

Maria Bustillos: There is so much I want to know about your book, and about China. How long has it been since you were last there? How has the book been received? How old is [your son] Mack, [who was born in China], now?

Tom Scocca: We haven’t been back since I was doing the epilogue, in May 2010. The book’s been received pretty well, I think. Or the people who don’t like it haven’t sought me out to say so, at least.

Mack is now 5, and an older brother.

MB: Congratulations!!! Always nice to have a baby about.

So, what struck me most about Beijing Welcomes You when I first read it was the matter of “foreignness,” which you examined from a number of perspectives. I’ve had occasion to think about these aspects of it often and often.

The Mike Daisey business, for example; it was almost as if Daisey had never left the States; he took all his first-world perspectives with him to China, and brought them back undisturbed. Stayed “foreign” himself.

TS: The Daisey thing was offensively white in many different ways.

MB: Offensively “white” or offensively “American”? Or offensively “PC”?

TS: Offensively White American.

The writer who cooks up composite characters and adds vivid details to their lives is condescending to them, because they’re not real people.

MB: He had an agenda that way superseded his interest in engaging with anyone. They were actors in a drama he felt it “important” to produce.

TS: Right. And his story is more important than any other (more accurate) stories anyone else might tell.

MB: Yeah. Rob Schmitz, the NPR guy who broke the story, gave a very nuanced account. I thought he was generous to Daisey, understanding the motives but flatly rejecting the tactics.

TS: Another irritating aspect to Daisey — the message that lamestream journalists weren’t able to get or handle the truth, but he could saunter right up to the factory gates and blow the whole thing wide open. Powered only by his innocence.

I mean, look, I’m not a China correspondent. That’s sort of a central part of the book.

MB: It was remarkable how Schmitz popped that bubble so easily. Also, the thing about you is that you are really the anti-Daisey in every way I can think of. Your book is effectively about getting your imagination (and the reader’s) over to the “other side.”

TS: Well, Daisey forgot that his translator was a real person. Who could ever track down one particular Chinese person in China? How could you possibly check his stories? No other white people were there! Therefore he himself was the only witness.

TS: It’s a basic premise of propagandistic Chinese nationalism that Western reporters tell lies about China to conform to their preordained storylines. So next time someone writes a story that genuinely shows abuses, the Chinese will point to Daisey.

MB: In addition to being a basic premise of Chinese propaganda, though, that’s an accurate assessment, right? This is almost inevitable for anyone, from any country; you’re stuck seeing things using the necessarily limited understanding you have.

I talked with Emmett Carson, who runs the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a few months back, and he is pretty firm on the big-picture upside of Chinese industrial development. I felt the same way when I used to be a product developer traveling over there, but now I’m more ambivalent. I would love to know what you think about it.

TS: The question of the upside of Chinese industrial development feeds into a question I try to deal with some in the book, which is the scalability of our Western material standards of the good life.

TS: China argues, impeccably from a fairness standpoint, that Western countries got rich by deforesting and polluting and otherwise ravaging their environments, and that it’s hypocritical for us to criticize them for this ugly and toxic step along their own road to prosperity.

MB: This was one part of your argument that lost me, a bit. Not-impeccable for two reasons: 1) there is new, increased awareness of the ultimate cost of this kind of “prosperity” and 2) the vast difference in scale between the two projects.

TS: That’s why I specified “from a fairness standpoint.”

MB: (Also, the good life? Or the not-so-great life. So weird to me how nobody ever even tries to think of alternatives, just this one lame trajectory.)

TS: We are, unquestionably, asking China not to do what we did. Even though it worked for us.

But part of the reason we are asking that is not that we wish to see China remain relatively backward and weak, but that, as you say, we’ve figured out that despoiling the environment is a bad idea, and it’s especially bad and dangerous if the environment being despoiled is the size of China’s (which is to say: a measurably large chunk of the world’s).

Yet, you know, we’re not dialing down our own standard of living to share some of that with the Chinese.

MB: In effect that’s exactly we’re doing, though. That’s the argument that Emmet Carson (an economist, by training) and many other observers are making. If only because we’re the chief enablers of China’s rapid industrialization, as high-volume importers and also because US firms run so many Chinese factories. There’s a school of thought that says our standards must “fall” if everyone else’s are to “rise.”

And this is clearly happening now, as the direct result of sending so much of our manufacturing to Asia: sharing some of our “prosperity.”

TS: Beijing is being destroyed by passenger cars. Roads are impassable, the car-borne pollution is choking — but still four-fifths of Beijingers don’t have personal automobiles.

So are we going to end up in a world where Americans and Chinese people have the same number of passenger cars per capita?

MB: Clearly not, we’ll all croak first, right? Shouldn’t we all just figure out something else that would be more fun, more elegant, less harmful, more pleasant? For Chinese people, for Americans?

TS: Unless Americans start driving many fewer cars per person.

MB: Or unless cars themselves change. If we cared enough to sort it out together, maybe we could make cars that would go ten thousand miles on a gallon of gas. Those who stand to benefit from preventing that, will prevent it.

MB: The times I spent working in Taiwan and China, I found it hypnotically weird that everyone was my height and that I was the only white (ish) person for days. This is unnerving to someone from LA.

TS: When was that?

MB: Early to mid-90s; mostly in and near Taipei, but some time on the mainland. One time after I’d been there for a matter of weeks, I finally saw a black guy in the street and practically burst into tears of homesickness and happiness.

TS: Only out in the provinces did I have that lone-white-person feeling. Like down in the sticks in Yunnan, schoolchildren followed me down the street in curiosity.

MB: Dang.

TS: I mean, there were plenty of times in Beijing that I was the only white person around. But not all day long.

MB: This I’ve been dying to ask you, because I have never understood it even a little bit. Please explain your understanding of the economic/political tensions between Taiwan and China.

TS: Oh, lordy. Well, the thing normal American discourse is unclear on is that the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China are reciprocally in agreement. It’s just whether the One True China has one renegade province or 31 renegade provinces.
(Provinces, autonomous regions, municipalities.)

MB: The individual guys who live and work there, e.g. who are agents or run factories, seem permanently nervous about their political situation — it seems precarious, but how, exactly? And if there is agreement, why?

TS: There’s a certain willingness to put up with the contradiction between those two points of view, even though to Americans it seems to be the very definition of a reason for armed hostilities.

Of all the dire predictions in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, the one that seemed furthest off base was that the PRC might be emboldened to storm across the strait and subjugate Taiwan.

It doesn’t seem at all unimaginable that both sides will eventually converge on some sort of authoritarian plutocratic consensus. Or maybe democracy! But either way, it could work itself out without conquest.

NONFICTION VS. REPORTING

MB: Let’s get back to nonfiction. I found that a lot of the most compelling parts of your book are to do with intensely personal reactions to things: yelling at people to get in line, making soup for your baby, running the bureaucratic gantlet.

That seems like a big part of the reason Mike Daisey’s stage show got through to people: they want to hear stories about personal things. It makes the place come alive, you can ID as a reader, feel yourself in the place. Reports of your own lungs hurting move the reader in a much different way from just hearing about the air pollution in Beijing.

Please comment on the rightful place of the personal in “nonfiction” or “reporting.” (Sorry about the scare quotes, I just mean, “or whatever we want to call these things.”)

TS: It’s tricky. I’m not much of an oversharer, in general. Lots of first-person writing drives me up the wall. “Modern Love” is, to me, basically an ongoing crime against humanity. But first-person pronouns aren’t the same thing as rampaging authorial ego, necessarily.

MB:: I wouldn’t call you an oversharer, but you had best cop to a very intense degree of authorial intimacy with the reader (that is to say I am about to bawl right now, just thinking of your eulogy for your father, for example. And so many places in your book, as well.)

TS: Well, this book in particular is about being a subjective observer, with serious limits to my access to information, in an unfamiliar setting. I didn’t have any useful background understanding of Beijing; I had only the vaguest sense of how the city was even put together (Tian’anmen Square, ring roads, Forbidden City or something). I had almost no language skills, except pretty good mimetic handwriting for characters.

So I was coming into it unable to feign any sort of authority. The first sentence of the book is sort of my capitulation to that truth — that whatever I ended up understanding about this place and this time, I was going to have to build from the most idiotically basic premises. There are people out there who are comfortable unfurling blanket truths about What China Means or whatever. I set out to patch together a quilt. I think after a couple of years there, a lot of note-taking, and a childbirth, it ended up being kind of a large and thick quilt, but it was no use pretending it wasn’t made up of lots of scraps stitched together.

And my ignorance, from the outset, made me more or less the target audience for the story that China was trying to tell me (or show me).

TS: For starters, being functionally illiterate is a very unusual and bracing experience, for a writer.

MB: “Like a baby,” as David Foster Wallace said. I was practically insulted the first time that happened to me (in Brazil, when I was twelve.)

TS: And I don’t remember being a baby. I learned to read when my older brother did, so I basically have no memories of a time when I wasn’t able to take up written information. Till I got off the plane in Beijing, I mean.

MB: I remember being a baby. My sharpest memory of it is the horrific taste of the plastic seal on my mobile.

THE OVER-UNDER OF PARENTING

TS: One reason the Underparenting column declined in frequency — speaking of oversharing — is that there came a point when most of the good funny stories about Mack would have had to deal with his crazy, crazy precociousness.

MB: That’s just the thing: I don’t know you but I know so much about you, from your writing. It’s super personal. You love that little boy, for example. It is an emotion, it’s like a golden ball of light that comes from your heart right into the reader’s heart.

TS: Like it was mind-blowing and cute when I’d come into his room in the middle of the night and he’d have turned up the dimmer on his light and be asleep on the floor surrounded by open books.

MB: I have a lot of ambivalence about “reporting” that would exclude that.

TS: At AGE TWO. But it just feels like a terrible humblebrag to get into the complications of that stuff. Luckily, Dominic is a box of rocks.

MB: That’s the stuff!

TS: When Dominic runs into something painful or startling, his response is, “Huh! Interesting! Let me try that again and see what happened!”

MB: My godson is like that!! He is shaped like a small fire hydrant and rates about the same on the Mohs scale, also.

TS: All of which is teaching me that people who are judgmental about how other people’s babies act should probably hold their fire till they see how the rest of their babies turn out. The boys are just wired up totally differently.

MB: The part about Mack’s birth in your book is really haunting, really beautiful. It’s stayed with me. Do you guys speak Chinese at home?

TS: We speak principally English, sprinkled with Chinese. The Chinese part tends to be commands or endearments.

MB: This is interesting to me because I grew up in two languages myself, but because of my love of English, I became more “American,” because more Anglophone. Your character changes in a different language, don’t you find?

TS: It’s hard for me to judge, because I’m good at English but very bad at Chinese. So in Chinese I tend to say very conventional and agreeable things.

MB: Er yeah, that would make a marked change from your English, Mr. Scocca.

CHINA NOW

MB: In closing, I’ve been reading a lot of stories like this one lately, about the growing strength of China’s environmental movement.

MB: Expat journalists like Kaiser Kuo, do you know that guy? I am a fan. This keynote address he made to a group of college-bound Chinese high-school grads, many of whom were coming to North America for school, was very revealing. “Build bridges!” he said. “Resist the urge to be offended by some people’s attitudes about China.”

This is just exactly what we tell American kids about their home country, when they go abroad!

TS: Kaiser? Yeah, I know Kaiser. I went and saw his AC/DC tribute band in Beijing. The electricity kept blowing out.

MB: Oo! Were they any good?!

TS: They were. AC/DC isn’t my thing, but they were good at it.

MB: I am so thrilled to know this. He and Schmitz, I thought, seem very undeceived generally. Apparently they used to work together at ChinaNow.com.

The condition of the press in China seems a lot worse than ours, on the face of what we can see from here, but I constantly wonder whether we’re not just as anaesthetized and controlled in our own way. That Steve Almond piece in The Baffler about Jon Stewart really resonated, I thought.

TS: It sort of did, but I enjoyed Alex Pareene’s dismissal of it on Twitter, too.

MB: Oh my god. Furthermore, nobody is exactly following Steve Almond onto the ramparts either.

What is to be done?

TS: Try to write about the situation and see what happens, I guess.

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

I’m batting a full “zero out of twelve” on the Booker Prize longlist! I’m basically illiterate.

“The happiest region of the whole UK is the most northerly — Shetland, Orkney and the Outer Hebrides. Some islands see only around 1,000 hours of sunshine a year compared to a UK average of 1,340 hours. And when one reads those international lists of the happiest countries, top of the league tend to be places like Norway, Sweden, Canada, Denmark and Finland. There is no correlation between well-being and warm weather — if anything it looks like the opposite.”
 — It turns out nice weather does not make you any happier. You know why? Because NOTHING makes you happier. And why would it? You’re on a treadmill of poor choices and mistakes until your legs finally give out and the whole thing mercifully comes to a stop. I’ll concede that it’s probably more pleasant to grind out your quotidian routine of suffering and regret under cloudless skies, but let’s not kid ourselves that there’s really anything that makes it worthwhile.

Photo by Elenamiv, via Shutterstock

“I love Brooklyn. It’s adorable, with great places to eat, but they also have that in Manhattan.”
 — And that was the day that everything stopped making sense forever.

It’s easy to look at our media industrial complex and forget that its members were once young and hungry, that they had to hustle, grease sources and report stories within an inch of life. One can imagine these scrappers delirious just to see a byline buried on B4 or, God forbid, a sidebar. They sammy glicked their way through the newsroom. No one exited the womb a star.

Even so, these people seem to exist only in the ever-present. We see Juan Williams as Hannity’s graying foil — who sold out for the change in Roger Ailes’ pocket — but not the guy who, in 1987, churned out a gorgeous profile of a lawyer on Reagan’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission named Clarence Thomas. We know Tucker Carlson as the proprietor of “a one-stop shop for Trayvon Trutherism,” not as the precocious striver who marshaled his significant gifts to chronicle a Liberian road trip and the abortion of Down syndrome babies. And Brit Hume — grave, phlegmatic Brit Hume… Can you see Brit as Jack Anderson’s “leg man”? You can’t, but he was.

Which brings us to The New York Times, whose stable of op-ed writers occupy, it is often said, the most valuable editorial real estate in America. As a bunch, they seem tactically devoid of the rough edges that made their salad days work such an energetic pleasure. Nicholas Kristof, long before he epitomized The White Savior Industrial Complex, would lead off a story on Japanese war atrocities with this kick to the gut: “He is a cheerful old farmer who jokes as he serves rice cakes made by his wife, and then he switches easily to explaining what it is like to cut open a 30-year-old man who is tied naked to a bed and dissect him alive, without anesthetic.” And Thomas Friedman, back when Matt Taibbi was still in junior high, could deliver a Beirut massacre tick-tock in which he observed buildings “bulldozed atop the bodies inside them. Some bodies were bulldozed into huge sandpiles, with arms and legs poking out in spots. In some areas the militiamen made neat piles of rubble and corrugated iron sheets to hide the corpses.” To borrow James Wood’s keen phrase, this work hummed with “the riot of life.”

That quality liberally imbues the early work of another veteran Timesman, Maureen Dowd. From her current in-house glamour shot, you would not necessarily guess that this was a reporter who, starting out at the Times, happily dove neck-deep in the muck. It was not long after Anna Quindlen picked her up from Time, where she’d worked for two years as a reporter — a few weeks shy of Christmas 1983, after less than a year at the paper — that Dowd, then 31, wrote a story that decades later has lost none of its oomph. “FOR VICTIMS OF AIDS, SUPPORT IN A LONELY SIEGE” is unrelentingly brutal. It didn’t win any awards, hasn’t been anthologized. And it almost, just maybe, cost Dowd her job.

At the time, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a social-services organization focused on people with AIDS, was founded in Larry Kramer’s living room. Now, with a paid staff of 12, a board of directors and hundreds of volunteers, GMHC was for afflicted gay men the only game in town. The day Dowd’s story hit the streets there had been 2,803 cases nationwide and 1,261 in New York alone. While the mayor, Ed Koch, was willing to serve on Dianne Feinstein’s AIDS Task Force of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and supported federal research, he wouldn’t authorize hospice care for the afflicted homeless; he demanded that GMHC pay $2 million to repurpose an abandoned high school as an “AIDS service center”; and, two years into the epidemic, the city wouldn’t allocate funds for education or services.

***

“Dowd’s clique,” that circle of friends all working at

The Times — described by Ariel Levy in 2005 as “think Heathers, but nice” — hadn’t yet quite formed. Dowd’s pal, Michiko Kakutani, had been destroying authors in the Times’ Books pages for a couple of years. But Alessandra Stanley, a sometime collaborator to whom she’d been close since their Time days, wouldn’t show up until 1990, and friend Frank Bruni arrived in 1995.

Six weeks before the AIDS story was published, Dowd had gotten her first byline as a general assignment reporter on the Metro desk. Fairly unremarkable, it’s about Columbia University’s just-completed Computer Science Building, on which $5.6 million was spent. It’s notable mostly for the prediction of Arno Penzias, a vice president of research for Bell Laboratories and a Nobel Laureate in physics. “By 1986, there will be more microprocessors being produced than McDonald’s hamburgers,” he told Dowd. “The Dick Tracy wrist radio is not that far away.”

Raised in Washington D.C., Dowd had been working there before she moved to New York for the New York Times gig. As a new reporter, she told me, “I thought maybe I should look kind of preppy, so I went and brought a duck sweater — you know, a sweater with a duck on it — from Talbot’s.” On her way to Columbia she missed her subway stop and ended up in Harlem. “And they were like, You do not belong here with that stupid duck sweater on. So then I got rid of the duck sweater.”

Back then, Dowd filed every couple of days: on a new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, Marcus Garvey, Philip Roth (“ROTH’S REAL FATHER LIKES HIS BOOKS”), landmarks (“THE CHELSEA HOTEL, ‘KOOKY BUY NICE,’ TURNS 100”). Fourteen “silly features,” is how she puts it.

The profile of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, edited by James Gleick, was conceived as a story about the organization’s “buddies system,” volunteers tasked to comfort dying men. Dowd was not expected to spend much time on it, maybe two days. She ended up taking three weeks. “You could have done a two-day feature on it,” she allowed. But, she said, “When you cover a news story like that, at a moment like that, that turns out to be this horrible, you know, plague for one segment of society, it’s just a very gut-wrenching experience.”

The story begins with Mr. Lamb, a patient at New York University Medical Center. He would die three weeks before publication:

Cold in a warm hospital room, Stephen Lamb pulled his yellow blanket tighter around his emaciated body.

Dowd observes, “nurses and orderlies in hospitals who are so loath to enter the rooms of AIDS patients that they let the food trays pile up outside the door, leave trash baskets overflowing, or neglect patients lying in their own urine or excrement.”

She observes the yearnings of a man who, like Mr. Lamb, would die before the story got to print:

Allan Kendric, 46, a landscape architect from Queens, used to worry that he had little to say to his patient, a 30-year-old horticulturist from Brooklyn. “My life is so full,” Mr. Kendric said. “His whole experience is sitting in his bed in his lonely hospital room.”

On one recent visit, as the two sat silently, the young man asked Mr. Kendric softly: “Can you hold me for a minute? Nobody ever holds me anymore.”

Dowd’s story didn’t make A1, though it did jump off the front of the Metro section. I told her I was pleasantly surprised the story was allotted so much space, almost 3,000 words, given executive editor Abraham “Abe” Rosenthal’s well-known homophobia. As Charles Kaiser once said, “Everyone below Rosenthal spent all of their time trying to figure out what to do to cater to his prejudices. One of these widely perceived prejudices was Abe’s homophobia. So editors throughout the paper would keep stories concerning gays out of the paper.”

Dowd says she wasn’t aware of the homophobia. She doesn’t dispute Kaiser’s account, and others, but “I just had no knowledge of it at the time. I’ve read about it since and don’t doubt the accounts. I just didn’t experience it. Obviously, I wouldn’t have been in a position to.” To some extent, her view of the institutional homophobia was shaped by her friendship with Jeffrey Schmalz, a gay Times editor close to Arthur Sulzberger. He was “very powerful,” Dowd said, and a “really important person at the paper. So I didn’t see the homophobia because Jeff was just this person you thought would be running the Times someday. I think he would have ended up as the executive editor.” (Schmalz, who had AIDS, died in 1993.)

Dowd believed the paper “was good for gays. I didn’t realize until I read the accounts later that to some people it wasn’t.”

Gleick, who has nothing but kind words for Dowd (“fresh and exciting and a joy to work with”), gently disputed this. Like Kaiser, he was aware of “pressure” in the newsroom to “never to print anything that could be construed as approving of homosexuals or homosexuality.” The most pernicious result of this edict, says Gleick, was the Times’ “shameful slowness to notice AIDS. She and I both would have known that.”

According to Dowd, long after the story ran — she doesn’t remember exactly when — Gleick told her that her job had been in “some jeopardy.” Not, strangely enough, on account of the subject matter, but because it had taken so long to finish. The erstwhile editor disputed this, too. Said Gleick: “I don’t remember saying anything like that, and presumably someone’s exaggerating: either her memory, or me in youthful exuberance. Her job was never in jeopardy.”

***

Reporting, the actual shoe leather stuff, is a young person’s game. At some point in a successful writer’s career, the desire to live only in one’s own head, to not have to pick up phone, must be tempting. Dowd hasn’t succumbed to the temptation, yet. She calls plenty of people, but few of them, rather understandably, want to end up in her column. When we talked, Dowd was most animated, not about the Gay Men’s Health Crisis story, but another piece, that ran on B1 on November 25, 1983. She’d been sent to cover the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade: “I was so excited I went to every balloon party the night before and the parade. And I had to interview, like, forty kids until I got the one cynical little New York girl who was, like, Natalie Wood in Miracle on 34th Street. But I did the work because I knew what I wanted.”

Of course, there were some precocious veterans on hand. When Superman wobbled maneuvering a corner on Central Park West, 7-year-old Jennifer Terban looked up in disdain.

“He should take flying lessons again,” she said. “I hate it when they tilt. Superman got hit in the face last year and Bullwinkle got caught in a tree.”

Jennifer gave only glancing notice to the grand finale of Santa Claus and his elves to the tune of “Jingle Bells.” “He’s not really Santa,”’ she said. “He’s just a fat man with a beard.’”

And she got what she wanted, particularly in those early days at the Times — during which she may, or may not, have been on the cusp of canning — that Dowd calls “my favorite part of my career.” She continued writing like a madwoman, profiling Paul Newman, the new bohemia and New York’s late-night scene. The latter story, which appeared a year after the AIDS story, is magnificent: she managed to tell the story of what it was like to be in New York in the early 80s in a svelte 5,112 words.

Clubs are no longer merely places to drink and dance. You gotta have a gimmick, an idea behind the night. At Heartbreak, cigarette girls jive their way through couples jitterbugging to 50’s rock ’n’ roll. At Visage, near the river on West 56th, mermaids and King Neptune descend on a swing from the ceiling into a pool; close to the dance floor, Hell’s Angels ice-skate on a miniature portable rink.

Area, the hottest of them all, is totally redecorated every five weeks, when the theme changes. The club was outfitted with pink flamingos and giant Tide boxes for the suburban period; with wrestlers and trampolines for sports; with Mao posters and a huge sculpture of a hand with scarlet fingernails for the color red.

But finally, in 1986, she decamped for Washington, for politics and a Pulitzer. The dying men of NYU Medical Center were another lifetime. But why, I wondered, did she walk away? Had she made an effort to stay on the AIDS beat?

She did not, but she wishes she had. “I don’t even know if I would have had the power to persuade them to do an AIDS beat at that early date,” she said. “You know, in years past I’ve often wished I had at least kept it as a part-time beat.” She was, said Dowd with a touch of regret, on “a different path to politics, but in my parallel, Gwyneth Paltrow Sliding Doors universe, I would have stuck with that beat.”

Elon Green is a contributing editor to Longform.

“A genetic process that went wrong 500 million years ago led to the evolution of humans and other vertebrates.”
 — I KNEW life was some kind of cosmic fuck-up! I KNEW IT ALL ALONG! I mean, it had to be. Now where do I go to get my money back?