Several days ago, I determined it long past time to go through the stray bins of my old newspaper and magazine clips and throw out the stuff I never liked, and eliminate all the many duplicates, and then shove the remaining assortment into a single box, back again into the back of a closet, to sit there indefinitely once more. It was astonishing how much paper I recycled.
In the middle of this dusty assortment, I found a stray item, out of place there, the least conventional cover letter I have ever sent. The little story at the heart of it is true in every way. Not exaggerated, not embellished. Just how it happened.
In reproducing it here, I cut off the last third of the letter, which was specific to the newspaper I was applying to – and which, unbelievably, granted me, and flew me into town for, an interview because of it. I’ve thought about this once-bygone letter many times since, especially lately, as it ultimately landed me the best job I ever had, as features editor at the Key West Citizen.
The picture above is what Google Maps shows, at street-level, for the letter’s same location today. The house is long gone, and there are a bunch of newer trees on the edge of the property. Otherwise, it’s still just a bunch of nothing.
I’ve changed the text in only the most modest of ways, to reflect how A.P. style guidelines have shifted in the 30-plus years since.
I include it today as I am right now mired in the task of writing a set of cover letters that encompass my full career, as I look for additional work going forward. Would that I could find another place where I thought I could send something like this piece, to again become the foundation of a new working relationship. That quite clearly would be the job for me. Alas, etc.
If you breathed with your mouth open, you sucked bugs into your lungs.
There was one light out there in the darkness. I was sitting under it, at a metal desk in an otherwise empty trailer, its windows and front door wide open. No air conditioning, not even a fan. It was a Saturday night, August 1992. This was the South.
The single-wide oven I was cooking in was one of six stuck in the middle of that night, in the middle of a fallow farm field, in the middle of a patch of nowhere that went by the name of Chicod, N.C. That’s pronounced SHl-cod. Notice how it sounds a little like swearing. It should.
The bottom desk drawers were filled with old invoices and a dozen or more books of checks, a joint account with one name belonging to the former business partner of my sister’s former boyfriend, formerly a chiropractor seven miles down U.S. 43 in Greenville, N.C., where I lived. AII the checks were cut in half. The top drawer held copies of JUGGS magazine, left by the gross little buzz-cut Nazi from the dayshift. “For company,” he’d said, grinning. He had the kind of mouth where when he smiled, his lips stuck to his teeth.
In one hour, at 1 a.m., I would be relieved by some teenage clown who drove a pickup and wore a baseball cap. I forget the team. I forget the kind of truck. I remember that he smelled like beer. He kept a gun in his glove compartment. I forget the caliber.
Myself, I had only a stick. It was like a shillelagh, really, thin and hard, found on a boyhood camping trip and whittled free of bark, except at the grip point. The hitting end was stained red, where at a party some years ago, it was used to stir PJ, something I refuse to drink.
At midnight on the last day of a weeklong gig as a Rent-A-Cop in an overgrown field bordered by six hotly disputed trailers, a punch-stained stick is little comfort against the dark.
The trailers belonged to a Greenville bank, collected against a defaulted loan. The borrower had bought these plain metal homes in partnership with that Greenville chiropractor, then offered them for sale, dirt cheap, money up front. The customers would have them once the paperwork cleared.
The paperwork was bunk. It was the shady entrepreneur who cleared, right out of town, with tens of thousands of dollars. Other people’s dollars. And now those sad souls were showing up wanting their trailers. The bank’s trailers.
I was there in that field – for $6 an hour, cash, which averages out to $1 per trailer – to make sure nobody snuck in by night with a freight-hauling truck to take any of them away. The bank had the law on its side. And here I was to prove it, Johnny Hired Law.
I was employed by Pro-Tek Security, run by a guy who used to work for my uncle, the campus cop. I had quit my day job to prep for the LSAT. I was a warm body. I was broke. Good enough.
So at midnight, I went out again on my hourly rounds, flashlight swinging in my left hand, stick in my right. I was sure it would happen tonight. “I’m just a guy doing a job,” I would say. I’d rehearsed this speech. My eyes registered every shadow as some dumb schmuck my heart went out to, from where it was lodged in my throat. .
But once again, no one showed. No one had since the very first day’s ugly encounter with two carloads of one family, the guy at the wheel of the front car stone drunk and blisteringly angry.
Finishing up my final rounds, I stopped at the northern edge of the field, near the intersection of Worthington Road and U.S. 43, watching the eastbound traffic, pretending I was with them, headed toward the coast. I did this every night. But tonight, something was going on in the ramshackle farmhouse that bordered the highway. Its windows were open, and through a scrappy hedgerow, I could see TV light flickering in a dark room. The show was in Spanish. Two Hispanic men, migrant farmers, were sitting on a couch talking and drinking beer. And laughing. I didn’t get what they were saying, but I understood the laughter.
At the other end of the house, a light spilled from another open window where music was playing. I pulled myself away from those laughing men and walked toward that light. The music, also in Spanish, was tinny, coming from a tiny radio. A young woman was singing along. She had a glorious voice, just glorious.
I stood there for a long time, listening, and looking back at the halo of bugs circling the rectangles of light spilling from the office trailer.
And then I went back inside and wrote it all down
“Epiphanies are funky,” L.A. Weekly columnist Michael Ventura once wrote. I’ll give him that. Mine tasted like moths, flying ants and June bugs.
Later, on the drive back to Greenville, I stopped and bought a six-pack of Genny Cream Ale. I drank the first one in my shower, rinsing my mouth out and still hearing that woman’s sweet singing in my head as I washed swatted bugs from my hair. You might say I’ve been trying to get the bugs out ever since.
