Begin to Exit Here by John Welter Page A

quiet, peevish tone, “Kurt, I know you’re pissed off about the amount of attention we’ve been paying to this shopping center, but it’s just responsible journalism to find out as much as we can.”
    â€œNo it’s not,” I said with quiet anger. “Someone capriciously decides we’ll write about a story and never let it die. If it were responsible journalism to find out as much as we can, we’d do a story on the formation of the Earth and how, over hundreds of millions of years, natural gas was produced, discovered, and eventually used to bake the breads and pies that our readers can’t buy anymore from the store that blew up.”
    â€œYou’re pissing me off, Kurt,” she said.
    â€œGood. We share that emotion,” I said. “I have to finish my story on what the fire marshall says, then begin my three-part series on cakes and pies in North America; plus try to find out if the drop in water pressure as firefighters tried putting out the fire is attributable to poor rural planning for water lines, then call someone from the Institute of State to see if anyone could be criminally negligent for allowing Earth to exist. I’m busy.”
    Lisa doubled her fist, as if to slug me. Exhaling slowly, she said, “Maybe you need a break. Maybe you should go to Stanley’s and have a long beer.”
    â€œI don’t drink anymore,” I said.
    â€œYou don’t? That’s wonderful. But how do you relax?”
    â€œI take my girlfriend’s nine-millimeter Beretta out in the country and shoot at army helicopters. Then we go dancing. Relax? Reporters aren’t allowed to relax. The world is too urgent. News is too crucial. Now I have to call a psychiatrist at the university to ask if counseling groups have been formed locally to deal with the trauma of exploding shopping centers. The news never stops.”
    I was quiet, then, and exhausted, and I leaned my forehead onto the cool glass screen of my computer. I felt bad for Lisa, this nice woman who only hoped to be a good reporter and a good bureau chief and who now sat tiredly on my desk, staring at me with a kind of bewildered sadness, and it was my fault.
    â€œI’m sorry,” I said, rubbing my head back and forthon the computer screen, like it was medicine. “You didn’t deserve any of that. I apologize.”
    â€œYou don’t need to,” she said in a sort of worried tone. “We’ve been working this story to death. You’re right. Sometimes I don’t know why I went to journalism school.”
    â€œI didn’t. I studied English. That’s even worse.”
    â€œIt is? Why?” she said, smiling a little.
    â€œAt least with a degree in journalism, people think it’s a sensible discipline and you have a moderately decent chance of being hired and taken seriously. People think English is just art, empty crap. Do you know what my first career was when I got my degree in English?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI was a salad girl,” I said.
    â€œA
salad
girl? How could you be a salad girl?”
    â€œWell, I wasn’t actually a girl, of course, but I couldn’t get a job anywhere, at first. I gradually realized that employers didn’t
care
that I had a degree in English, and maybe held it against me. What? You studied
lit
erature? Capitalism has no use for Chaucer or Twain or any of that poetic dog shit about being alive that you so earnestly wasted your time on in college. Boy, was I an extraneous man. So one day, when nobody else would hire me, I got hired in a cafeteria in Kansas City to prepare tossed salads. It was the position of a salad girl, because usually girls or women did it. For fun, I started calling myself a salad girl.”
    Lisa smiled at me sort of peacefully then, and wasquiet, as if thinking over my stupid adventures as a salad girl, and I remembered I’d been nasty and unreasonably angry with her, so I