Following Atticus Read online

  I chastised native-born city councilors for attempting to block the mayor’s every move simply because she was a newcomer, and I spent many issues highlighting the clearly defined lines between the natives and newcomers holding political office. I’d often find the richest stories at various board meetings that weren’t always attended by reporters from the other papers. I caught board members doing favors for friends or business associates when they should have recused themselves from the hearing, and I’d send information to the state’s ethics commission. On more than one occasion, board members chose to resign.

  I would often sit shocked as city councilors or other community leaders lied in some televised meeting and thought nothing of it. When I’d report it, they’d act as though I were the one who had crossed the line—and in some ways they were right, I had. I refused to let business happen as it always had happened.

  Their lies knew no bounds. My favorite was when one seething city councilor who was friendly with many local developers argued against the city’s buying several acres of open space that were slated for development. He pointed out that he should care about the land more than anyone else because his brother was buried in the adjoining cemetery. The cemetery was on a hill, and conservationists feared that development of the land would cause the historic burial ground to shift, the land to erode, and some of the graves to crumble. The problem was that the city councilor’s brother was dead, all right, but he was buried elsewhere.

  No one was above criticism, least of all any of the mayors I covered. They offered the best grist for my paper, whether it came to appointing an ethically challenged person to one of the city’s boards—someone whose only qualification was having worked on the mayor’s campaign and helped him or her get elected—or attempting to slide through a land deal for a supporter. The mayors didn’t stick around very long during the Undertoad years. It was usually one two-year term and out.

  But my paper wasn’t all negative. It couldn’t be. While pointing out what was wrong with the city, I also showed what was right with it. I’d support a courageous vote by a councilor or a stance by a mayor. I applauded the better members of the various city boards and commissions and deserving city employees. In a regular column titled “Ten Things to Love About Newburyport,” I listed ten people who were doing good things. It could be a developer who believed in historic preservation, a librarian who took great pride in her work and loved books and the people who read them, or a cashier at the local supermarket who never missed a day of work and greeted nearly every customer by name. Each December I named at least one Person of the Year. There were activists, business leaders, courageous police offers, teachers, and coaches. One year Pete Daigle, the city-hall custodian, won the award because of his gentle nature, his hard work, and his ability to keep his head while others all around him in city government were losing theirs.

  As for my qualifications as a journalist, I had none. I didn’t go to school for journalism, and the only writing I’d ever done was a handful of letters to the editor. I knew little about politics but knew what I didn’t like about politicians. My only background came from my father’s romanticized view of the Kennedys and the Founding Fathers—he thought theirs and not his was the greatest generation.

  My father, Jack Ryan, was politically active, and he conscripted each of his nine children into working for Democratic candidates for any office, national or local. It didn’t matter that we didn’t know a candidate or didn’t want to get involved and would much rather have been out playing with our friends. We were forced to canvass the neighborhoods in our hometown of Medway, Massachusetts, passing out campaign brochures. On weekends we’d have to stand for hours holding signs supporting his favorite candidates. But, like all my brothers and sisters, once I moved away from home, I got as far from politics as I could. I’d had my fill.

  As for Jack Ryan’s political beliefs—they were a bit confusing. He was the liberal Archie Bunker. He believed in equal rights, as long as a minority wasn’t going to be living next door to us in little Medway.

  One summer, while I was working as a student athletic trainer at the University of Iowa and had the chance to spend time with the trainer of the Harlem Globetrotters and some of the players, my father advised me, “Watch your wallet.”

  “Dad, they’re millionaires. I’m making fifty dollars a week and room and board—they don’t need my money.”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s in their blood.”

  When I was in the seventh grade, I had a crush on the only black girl in town. She stood out as striking and exotic in our lily-white town. I told my father about her at dinner one night, and he told me I shouldn’t even think about dating her. It wasn’t a threat, it was just that he thought if we ended up getting married, being half white and half black wouldn’t be fair to our kids. But I was only in seventh grade!

  I can remember him giving me a strange look the night I told him one of my friends in high school was Norman Finkelstein. “You’re friends with a Jew?”

  “Yeah, I like him. What’s wrong with Jews?”

  He shrugged. “I just never knew an Irishman who was friends with a Jew. Usually the Jews stay to themselves.”

  Toward the end of his life, when my father grew too old to take care of himself, I was thrilled by my brother David’s choice of attorney to handle his estate. Even if he could have thought clearly, I’m not sure Dad would have known quite what to think. His name was Ryan Swartz. I couldn’t decide whether Jack Ryan would be pleased by the name Ryan or put off by the Jewish-sounding name of Swartz. David suggested that Dad would be happy, since he believed in the stereotype that a man with a Jewish-sounding last name would definitely be good with money. The only caveat, I’m sure, had he his wits, would have been, “Good choice. Just keep an eye on him.”

  And yet throughout all of this, if my father saw someone who was black or Asian or Puerto Rican or Jewish, or any minority, being attacked, he would come to his or her defense.

  He was a hard man to figure out. I chalk it all up to his generation and to his growing up in the poorest Irish Catholic section of Boston and coming of age during the Great Depression.

  If I told him about a friend who had an Italian last name, he would ask, “Italian?” And if I’d say, “Italian and Jewish,” he would say something like, “Really? A Jew married an Italian?” He’d then get a puzzled look on his face as he tried to figure out how such a thing could possibly have happened in the world he grew up in.

  In the end I didn’t take too much of his guff and laughed off such nonsense, but when I was younger, I thought his opinions were vile. Maturity taught me to make light of his prejudices, with the slightest twist of my own knife. Whenever I was leaving, I’d lean forward to say good-bye and kiss him. Of course he’d squirm when I did this, because he was a homophobe. But that’s partially why I did it. (He once cringed when I told him I was reading Oscar Wilde—“That fag?” You can just imagine how he thought I’d completely lost it when I went to see Michael Feinstein—a gay Jew—in concert! I lied when I told him, “Not to worry, Dad, he’s going to sing ‘Danny Boy.’ ” But oddly enough, that made it okay.)

  Then again, this was the man who cried when Jack and Bobby Kennedy were shot, teared up when Hubert H. Humphrey lost to Nixon, and brought us to Gettysburg and was proud of the Union Army and what it fought for. When he saw how prisoners of George W. Bush’s war on terror were being treated at Abu Ghraib, he said it was the first time in his life he was embarrassed to be an American. And yet he opened bank accounts for all his grandchildren except my sister’s adopted girl, who had “inferior stock” because of the Hispanic blood running through her veins.

  In Jack Ryan’s world, there was only one thing worse than being a gook, a Polack, a guinea, a ’Rican, or a nigger—and that was a Republican.

  My father’s prejudices were only one of the reasons we often went years without speaking. As puzzling as his pol
itics were, they paled in comparison to his conflicting relationships with his children. I don’t doubt that he loved us, even though he never said it and it was often hard to see. But I also believed he resented us.

  I was the youngest of nine children, and by the time I came on the scene, life had pretty much worn my father down. He was mostly a stranger to me; he was that way with all of us. We’d rarely see his tender side. He preferred instead to build walls that would keep us out, and he believed in tough love and frequent beatings. He was often angry and bitter and felt as if life had passed him by.

  He wasn’t always that way, however. When he was a boy, he read book after book that gave wings to his imagination and led to dreams of the exotic lands he would visit and how the world would reveal her secrets to him. He thought of the riches he’d make and how he’d be famous one day. But his first adventure landed him in North Africa, France, and Italy during World War II, and none of the tales from his childhood had prepared him for the horror. He saw arms and legs blown off of men and faces torn apart by bullets, and had too many friends die in his arms. Worse than that were his memories of the people he had killed.

  When the war was over, he came home and married my mother. Less than nine months later, my sister Joanne was born. Then came John, Claire, Eddie, Nancy, David, Jeff, Stephen, and, finally, me. He’d gone from being a young man with big plans to a father in his forties with nine children, married to a wife who ended up wheelchair-bound with multiple sclerosis.

  I was seven years old when my mother died, and I don’t remember her at all, although I can’t help but believe that my father saw her death as life’s latest cruel joke. For a while he did his best to keep the family together. It couldn’t have been easy. He helped us with our homework, read to us in bed, spoiled us every Christmas and on our birthdays, and took us on vacations each year. But the older he grew, the more difficult it all became, and his bitterness always won out.

  In the years following my mother’s death, the beatings lessened but he often looked at us with antipathy, and he invented new ways to be disappointed by us and let us know we wouldn’t amount to much. As the youngest, I watched as one by one my brothers and sisters left the house. They didn’t fly from the nest with high expectations but rather limped from it, their wings clipped. When it was only the two of us remaining at home, he simply had nothing left to give. That’s when I realized that there was something more painful than his beatings and belittlings: his indifference. There would be days, even weeks, when he wouldn’t say a word to me. I couldn’t understand it, but what fifteen-year-old could?

  When he did speak, it was often to criticize me, saying I was too much of a dreamer; that my hopes were too high and I would crash and burn. But hopes and dreams were all I had in those days, and I hung on to them ferociously. And so began a tug-of-war that would last for decades. It was a battle that defined the rest of my life.

  When I left the house, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life; I just knew I didn’t want to be Jack Ryan, and I didn’t want to settle into the half-lives my brothers and sisters had accepted. Don’t get me wrong, they weren’t bad people; they were simply sad people, and I wanted something more. So I set out on an odyssey to find my purpose. The journey often seemed futile, and I became a modern-day gypsy, going from college to college, from job to meaningless job. I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for; I only knew I’d recognize it when I found it. My relationships were equally aimless. I was seeking something through the women I dated, but I couldn’t find it. I was like Tarzan swinging through the jungle, from vine to vine, from woman to woman, holding on just long enough to find someone new, until at last I met Alexis, an interior designer who offered me all the comforts of love and home. However, she cared more about how things looked, while I cared more about how things felt, and the only thing we did well was fight. Ultimately things didn’t work out between us, but we lasted long enough for Alexis to bring me to Newburyport. When we split up, I decided to stay. The city was different from anyplace I’d ever been. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was home.

  Throughout my decade and a half as a wanderer, my father and I often went years without speaking. Occasionally there would be a peace treaty, but none of them ever lasted very long. And yet with all we’d been through—the hurt, anger, and frustration—I learned to have compassion for my father, and strangely enough, I even loved him. Down deep, I believed he did the best he could with the hand he was dealt. But that didn’t change who we were, and we continued to fight.

  When I started the Undertoad, he and I weren’t speaking—but when we reconnected a few years later, he was more than a little pleased, even though he wouldn’t admit it. You see, my father had a habit of writing letters to the editor of the local paper in which he would criticize or support politicians. My brothers and sisters and I were all mortified by his letters. So you can imagine how he must have felt when I made a living out of doing just that—publishing an editorial journal.

  What my father probably wouldn’t have understood was my reason for starting the ’Toad in the first place—to defend the honor of a lesbian mayor. It was one thing to come to the aid of an underdog; it was something entirely different to base your livelihood on it.

  Within a year of that mayor’s reelection, the ’Toad was born, and at first it was free. I was able to quickly raise the price to fifty cents, then a dollar, and finally a dollar and a half. I made a living, albeit a small one, on the sales at newsstands and from subscriptions and advertisements. Sometimes I could even pay my bills. Whenever I thought about quitting, folks in town would do their best to put me out of business and motivate me to continue. They’d boycott my advertisers or they’d spread rumors about me: I was a pedophile, a deadbeat dad, a wife beater, a con artist. At first I was horrified by the rumors, but over time I learned that the best way to handle them was simply to print them on the front page. That’s when the death threats started. These were anonymous and were either mailed to me or placed on the windshield of my car. As for my poor car, my tires were slashed so often that a local garage kept extra tires on hand just for me. My exhaust pipe was once filled with spray insulation foam.

  I never reported the death threats to the police, because I feared that cops might have been the ones writing them. The police department in Newburyport had a long, controversial history, and most politicians were afraid of them, and because of that the officials looked the other way. It was suggested I do the same. This advice came from one of the more influential and controversial members of the police department.

  It was late at night, and we were outside city hall. He said to me, “How about we form an uneasy alliance—you and me? I won’t go after you if you don’t go after me.”

  “But there’s nothing to go after me for,” I told him, trying to keep my voice from shaking.

  “Who says we need something to go after? Besides, everyone’s got something to hide.” And then he winked and stalked off into the shadows of the night.

  I didn’t write about the police after that—not for another year and a half. But my readers wanted to know why, when there was so much to report. The truth is, I was afraid. Eventually, though, the day came when I decided that they were the only bullies in town I hadn’t taken on. And when it came, it was like I’d swung a baseball bat at a hornet’s nest. I used information from the minority of policemen who refused to go along to get along. My paper was filled with the misdeeds of the department, and I sold more copies than ever.

  My readers loved it when I poked fun at a police officer who was caught stealing a bicycle. They found it even more entertaining when one of the department’s expensive new cold-water skin-diving suits went missing. When the officer who took it was discovered, he said he’d borrowed it to fix a crack in his swimming pool. The only problem was that it went missing in the middle of winter.

  Then there was the acting marshal (Newburyport’s version of a
police chief) who was appointed to help clean up the troubled department. But it didn’t take long for everyone to realize he wasn’t the answer when I printed a time sheet in the ’Toad that showed him paying himself when he was actually out playing golf.

  I was criticized a great deal for one story because I refused to print the name of the officer who was cheating on his wife on duty while I named times and places when he was supposed to be working but was throwing himself at another woman. I chose not to print his name in the paper because he and his wife had two small children in school and I didn’t think it would be fair to them. His wife put together the pieces, though, and divorced him.

  Once I started writing about the police, they were in nearly every issue of my paper.

  Writing about local politics was one thing, but taking on the police upped the stress level in my life immeasurably. I was warned not to talk on a cordless phone, because members of the department could park near my apartment and try to listen in on my conversations on their radios. There wasn’t a day when I didn’t fear I might be arrested on some mysterious charge while walking down the street. But the more they came after me, the more intent I was on not giving in. It was the Irish in me, I suppose.

  Officers who were believed to be my sources for stories were ostracized by their brethren. Some were disciplined. One even had charges brought up against him, and they attempted to send him to jail even though he and his wife were expecting their fourth child. Luckily, a judge saw through the accusations and dismissed the case.