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| “Our paper put an ad in Editor & Publisher last year looking for a journalist who
‘makes readers let their morning coffee go cold.’ Can you believe that? We don’t even get overtime. I worked 65 hours last month one week.” “You gotta be willing to pour your soul into it here. There’s no comp time. Our editor has the ego of Gatsby character. Smug sucker. He sleeps at his desk. Every once and a while somebody will slam a door, just to have a laugh and wake him up from sleepytime.” “I heard about a publisher this one paper hired, a yachtsman who commutes 300 miles, and during the week he lives in the old janitor’s quarters above the paper. This pretty much sums up his commitment tot he community. He cut the staff in the newsroom from 20 to 12.” “I can’t beat that.” “Our newsroom is run much like an elementary school or primary school classroom is run by the teacher. There are a lot of ‘don’ts.’ Keep those desks clean and neat. Write on both sides of the notebook pad paper. Quit using so many pens. Don’t ever break stride and run across the newsroom. The publisher caught me playing air-guitar once in the newsroom to a Dwight Yoakam Country Music Television video. I didn’t give a crap. They quit letting us use the TV anymore.” “We can’t eat or drink at the desk. They monitor our Internet use. The editor is a control freak. The city editor will smile while he sticks a knife in your back, badmouthing you to the staff in meetings you miss.” “If you don’t win a press award here, you’re history quick. There will be a mass exodus soon. For peanuts.” “Our head senior reporter had leads like ‘Rumors abound.’ ‘Sources say.’” “Remember The Wolf?” “Of course. The day he got fired? Slamming the phone down all he time, biting his lip all the time? Howling at deadline? Sure. He’s known in five states.” “Our photographer got drunk one Saturday and mixed the wrong chemicals and screwed up a batch of film with a live tornado shot. AP material! It had all our candidate shots on that roll. Raw soup. He’s twisting in the wind now.” “The cat looks at this rag, sniff its fanny, coughs up hairballs and moments later is scratching the masthead. Scrimp city.” “Our editor is a prima donna. I’m a grunt. I hope somebody buys us soon.” “It’s great here, if you’re 22 years old with an IQ of three and don’t mind being bossed around by a 23-year-old city editor with one year’s experience. One of our copy editors wears a bulletproof vest, believe it or not. I heard about tha guy, they said, walks around at night in a Nazi uniform, goosestepping. He got fired last month. He spends his afternoons at a local bar. One reporter’s got VD.” “One publisher I heard of ran in a primary once for a state legislative seat, which tells you something about his objectivity.” “My eyes hurt. I get headaches from the computer I’ve got, an old Compugraphic. Our chairs are broke. The budget is always amended twice before deadline. Our editor’s best idea last year was to break up the newsroom into sections, sending reporters to 12 counties, making them drive inordinate amounts of time even though there was a reporter there to cover something anyway. Our editorial policy is like between Grit and National Enquirer.” ********** 1997 Horry County, “When you cross the river, you’d better bring a lawyer with you.” The head of the Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce, the chairman, was right. Primordial luck was in my favor at the video store. Ferrying my wife to the airport this morning at 7 a.m., I wondered about the chances of me getting “Ghosts of Mississippi,” and lo and behold when I went to turn in “The Relic” early, there it sat on the shelf, the only copy in. As I approached the check-out counter with it tucked under my shoulder, while I was digging for change and cash, the clerk informed me that my 6:55 p.m. visit would engage the $1 back policy of early returns. This one guy in the store asked me about my POINT T-shirt with the whorehouse story on the front. “How did you get that?” Peeling off three dollar bills, I squinted into the July sun, and said, “I wrote it and got fired.” The female clerk looked puzzled, clearly interrupted in her change-counting mode and she placed her hand on the receipt as it exited the dot-matrix printer, rubbing it with two fingers and it moved through her palm. “You’re kidding? How much did it cost?” “It cost me my job,” I said. It only cost $15 at Kinko’s, and anybody can do it. By this time a small crowd had wandered up, staring at my white T-shirt which had the POINT story embossed on it. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about the stories. I lose sleep, tossing and turning, reviewing the circumstances of my firing in my head, and then when sleep drops it black cloak over my consciousness, bringing stealth to my disconcerting thoughts, nightmares form like tornado clouds, the same one about me being back at the paper getting fired all over again. Just a few months ago I strained, lifting three stacks of our newspapers from the van, and as I looked up, the red “Morning News” sign glared in irises. Our paper was being printed in Florence now, and it was like I was working for the Florence Morning News again. My ex-boss has just been transferred to Dalton, Ga. so there is a void in my anger, no contiguous target of my emotion, no release. Andrews Meadows, a business reporter at The State in Columbia, later moved to the Atlanta paper, but before his departure, he emailed me on Tuesday, Aug. 31 at 6:34 a.m. “Subject: Your hero.” “Sing to the tune of the Jeffersons,” Andrew wrote. “Well we movin’ on up, movin’ on up to a deluxe apartment in ...Beckley, W. Va.? I wonder if B-O-B will be working in Beckley soon. Bet.” The rest was an AP story out of Beckley, saying Frank Sayles Jr., “a former South Carolina journalist,” had been named editor of The Register-Herald. I showered their staff with my www.deadmule.com story on my firing until one staffer finally mustered enough courage to reply “no mas.” “We are fortunate to have a journalist if Frank’s stature join our organization,” publisher Steve Smith was quoted. What luck. “Sayles has also served as editor of the Valdosta (Ga.) Daily Times, managing editor of the Bluefield (W. Va.) Daily Telegraph, city editor of The Post & Courier in Charleston, S.C. and editor and advertising director of the Tazewell County (Va.) Free Press. “This is a kind of homecoming for me. It’s the third time I’ve lived in this region,” Sayles was quoted. ********** I wake up in the middle of the night, twitching, then shaking in convulsions, cursing in gibberish and swinging at the wall. My chilling reoccurring nightmare has been that I’m working again as a general assignment reporter with a column at the Florence Morning News, and I get fired again - over, and over, and over. So the other day, my irises are open, focusing as I lift a stack of newspapers up from a van and a blurred logo comes into focus, “Morning News.” In actuality, they’ve really changed their name, and the newspaper I work at now gets our paper printed at the former Florence Morning News. I sometimes agree to drive the paper to Florence, and it is a nightmare which has indeed become horrific reality. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about the stories. I lose sleep, tossing and turning, reviewing the circumstances of my firing in my head, and then when sleep drops its dark cloak over my consciousness, bringing stealth to my disconcerting thoughts, nightmares form like coal-black summer tornado clouds, the same one about me being back at the paper getting fired all over again. Sometimes I end the dream with me still employed. In some versions I pick a fight with everyone. I never blow up and shoot everyone in the newsroom or anything. The worst version is when I’m still working there when I wake up. Or that I’m still living in the cankered motel bungalow behind Buddy’s Truck Stop where a hooker is pissed at me, the only bar patron during a tornado storm, for taunting her about what twisters can do as the clouds turn black outside and our ears pop. There’s that funny atmospheric surge in the air, popping my ear’s with pressure, as hair stands up on my arm. She walks outside. I roll the empty sixth Bud on its gooseneck base, smashing a Salem Ultra Light into the red ashtray in the empty bar. ******* POINT February 1995/unedited Rotting ham hocks mask the putrid smell of two brothers’ corpses, buried beneath the shack, and the secret of a crack addict as beer cradles my id. The murderer had nearly cut off a woman’s head after she grabbed at a bag of crack last January. The sheriff called me to the scene on my day off - the suspect had confessed. As I sit in the unemployment line, I recall the warmth of my crackling black Rockports the coroner said to burn since a corpse there had AIDS. I’m here because of “Pros & Cons,” a story published in the February POINT. Primordial tension, shame cloaked in ersatz confidence; a black guy behind me breaks in line ahead of me like there’s no tomorrow. {“Does your conscious ever bother you, when somebody calls my name? Try to think of all that I’ve gone through, and hang your head in shame ... you should go somewhere and hide your face, and hang your head in shame ... when you said I was the only one, was it just your little game? Now look back at all the harm you’ve done, and hang your head in shame.” - Doc Watson’s “Hang Your Head in Shame” on “Memories” [FEB. 1994]: “Durnit! What is this Talk Back crap?!” There was a big lump in my throat, the one I always get when I’m on the verge of being fired. Swallowing would telegraph weakness. There’s a shortness of breath, a constriction of facial muscles and the sphincter. Somebody’s holding your head below. Drowning in the Irby Street office of Florence Morning News managing editor Frank Sayles. I asked why he was cursing me to hint that continuation would mean trouble. Nobody cusses me. “Durnit, because I want to, that’s why!” (Good enough reason, Skeebo, you crimson-cheeked Jabba the Hut Roger Ebert- look-alike.) “Let me tell you something. You are this close to me kicking you out of the building. I thought you were a team player. (Long pause.) You’re off the whorehouse story. I’m assigning it to someone else. (He never did.) You’ll get some credit. But from here on you are to make no more telephone calls and ask no more questions about the Trucker’s Motel. You got it?!” I wasn’t getting fired after all. He was just busting my chops and had ceased using the Lord’s name in vain. Trying to look confident and nonplused under nihilistic circumstances is virtually impossible, like a blind man trying to cheat at poker. You see, a $1.5 million libel suit against our paper was in appeals. My head was throbbing like a cam at the Lake View Dirt Track Speedway after a night of drinking and vomiting. I had called the WBTW TV-13 call-in show Talk Back to ask Democratic gubernatorial candidates what they think about prostitution and that I was doing an investigative story on Marlboro County. This was not Georgetown’s Sunset Lodge. I had first seen a letter from a state prisoner on assistant editor Tonyia McGirt’s desk. Sayles worked with me for several weeks but began to drag his feet when it came to trotting my two stories to the company lawyer for review. Having called the bordello owner, and now I was out on a snapping limb my boss was sawing off at the trunk. A photographer had taken a color photo. Story tagline: “MAIN STORY.SUNDAY.DNE1$.” Reprimand: I wrote a Reporter’s Notebook editorial column on the killed bordello story. Metro Editor Bob Pepalis said no more questions or “out the door.” It’s New Year’s Eve 1999, and I just found a Reporter’s Notebook that the Florence Morning News editors killed. “12-16-94.18:28:42.REPORT-NOTE” - and what am I doing reading a file I’m not supposed to read? They stole one of my killed stories once and jammed it in another reporter’s story, so I was wondering about the status of this column, which never ran. At the top of the file, editorial page editor Richard Whiting had typed in a little note. “BOB: KNOW YOU DID NOT SEE THIS YET, SO I KICKED IT BACK TO YOU. HE WROTE IT EARLY (NOT DUE TO RUN UNTIL NOV. 13)” - Oh yeah, “he” is me, the enemy. “Kicking” is like killing a story - you don’t do it, but you suggest another editor do it. It’s like what you do to a ball, but it sails a longer way down the highway. While I was in the hospital, I picked up the paper and found a medical feature about the Florence hospital’s outstanding MRI program. The article surfaced after a hospital doctor bitched in the editor’s office about an article I had done about a private MRI operation. The editor’s wife worked for the hospital and later for the chamber of commerce. “Reporter’s Notebook for Tim Bullard” It felt like a pulled gut muscle at first. Then the stomach feels like it’s full of gnashing razors or swallowed concertina wire. If you’ve never been in a hospital, for God’s sake, don’t get diverticulitis. “We’ve got to make a decision,” the Mullins physician said. Oh no, they’re going to put me in the hospital. First of all, the Mullins Hospital is the best hospital in the world because any medical facility that can keep you from the netherworld makes life here seem like heaven on earth. First they slap you in a wheelchair, then a needle is jabbed into your vein for a war zone blood count. Sky-high and feeding on 500 mg. of antibiotics like a starving child on an ant teat, the infection earned a 3-gram IV dose of super-unleaded since the oral $70 medicine wasn’t doing the trick. The first order of business was an IV of delicious wet saline and dextrose, “liquid steak in a bag.” Try 102-temp and six days without food on the Gandhi bag diet. “Like most reporters, you’re full of it,” Dr. Garner told me. Rupture would mean a farm purchase. I was scared as a polecat in a pit bull cage. When the nurse asked me about stool aroma, I said, “Well honey, you won’t believe it, but it’s a little like Giorgio cologne.” It was nice eating peanuts at Margaret’s Lounge in Mullins while it lasted. Life was good when I could eat popcorn, but it’s history too. I loved maize like a hog loves corn. No berries, strawberries, seeds, sesame seeds in my Chinese or anything that can get between those ruptured bicycle tire bubbles in my colon and infect. You have to start buying a lot of fiber for regularity, vegetable laxative and these things called “fresh fruits and vegetables.” I learned health care professionals have long hours, get puked on and get ordered around by irritable patients. I heard fake stories about a ghost nurse who enters a dying patient’s room, a bed than remains warm long after someone succumbs and a haunted third floor room. In bed you recall dreams of socialized medicine, the Demerol needle my tensed butt bent, the lady with cancer grabbing for the balloon I gave her, the person who died, the soft hand of the beautiful nurse who held my hand as the needle punctured my sensitive skin, the harrowing pin cushion IV search from needlefest hell, drenching fever sweat, grabbing at spent food on returning dirty trays, TV’s zipperhead Geraldo vs. ultra-cool Paul Drake, licking bouillon bowls clean, Aetna insurance and the heart-stopping bill. Paid sick days pay the bills. Sleep is as hard to come by in a hospital as liquor at a prayer meeting. Everyone calls; you talk, but you’re worn out from staying up all night awaiting a 5 a.m. blood stick-up. You pray like a fiend, but when they wheel you out, it’s joyous freedom to stick with the new diet and brag about future weight loss. Footnote: They put me on a high-fiber diet, so you can become a bran man. Eating an apple a day and vitamins really does keep “you-know-who” away and keeps you from the gallows pole. According to the National Digestive Diseases Information Clearing House, diverticulosis is a condition in which these outpouchings form in the intestines, and the pouches, called diverticula, are the size of peas, appearing in the weaker areas of the bowels, often in the lower colon or large bowel. Most folks with it do not have any symptoms. They many never know they have it. Some might feel a tenderness or muscles spasms. Pain may occur in the lower left side of the abdomen. Three days after the free POINT story ran, I was fired Sunday, Feb. 12. “Information on a news story which Mr. Bullard gathered while on FMN time and while acting as a representative for the FMN was given without authorization to another publication,” Sayles wrote the ESC. I was a bad man after Reprimand #1 and six more warnings. We were told we could freelance for money. “I don’t want to see any of this on your expense sheet,” FMN publisher John Miller had told me. “The unemployment line is full of comedians.” A blue cap on his head, Horace Page, 61, of Dillon County, tried to smile as I repeated that last sentence, but his mind at 9:15 a.m. was on his former job at Dixiana Inc. in Dillon. “I’d rather be working. I miss the crowd too. When you get used to a job, you meet a lot of friends. It was a temporary layoff. I never had lost a job.” With 34 years at Dixiana, Page admits to no fancy education. Now he fishes. “My nephew always goes with me,” he bragged. A three-year-old’s blond hair softly falls as her white mother combs it and dad’s chin is in his hand, leaning over the ESC counter with a Cowboys T-shirt. A black dude in shades has a Fighting Irish sweatshirt on. Groans, 12 deep in line. Ten-minute courtships, fake pine panel decor, long faces, blurping phones, a pregnant woman, a short-staffed elderly clerk vs. acid-tongued jobless. It’s like a doctor’s office. Most souls appear calm and quiet smiles absent, raging brains popping with pathos, angst and pitiful, webbed dignity, proletariat stench, the weary aura of desperate despair and the abbreviated eye contact of caged deer. Eager to hock my Eagle Scout medal, a Ford Repo Man hovers. A mental health visit; the first $174 ESC check arrives - I pay my landlady - “Got a job yet?” at the bar; ESC sign “Disturbing behavior will not be tolerated in this office, violators prosecuted, enforced by the sheriff.” Duty, honor, nobility. My career strobes ... Gregory Allman’s mid-interview powderbreak; Merle Watson squeezing a cutter, slicing the Watauga Democrat van’s stuck foot brake cable outside a mountain studio so I can get the unchecked-out van back; a Jesse Helms interview about a death squad leader; helping EMS on a Boone trucker suicide story; Tiny Tim singing “Tiptoe” over the phone; blowing drunken smoke over Sam Donaldson’s on-camera shoulder at Wake Forest’s Bush-Dukakis debate; Patient Zero; David Beasley’s off-the- record answer about the bordello; the cathouse’s owner telling me once Randy Travis had visited. False advertising is better than none at all as business booms. No one has a franchise on the truth, except a liar. ******************* When Bruce Willis comes to Myrtle Beach, he sure knows how to throw a party. I wish I had missed this party. When Planet Hollywood and the Official All-Star Cafe, located next door off U.S. 17 Bypass at 29th Ave. South, teamed up for a grand opening Sunday, April 14, 1997, the stars fell out of the sky on the Grand Strand. Women swooned over Patrick Swayze, who attributed his success and longevity to his wife, Lisa. Monica Seles was followed by a covey of musclebound lifeguards, her rear covered with no breach in security. Will Smith did the shag with Dan Cortese, former UNC football star, on stage. Jennifer Love Hewitt (“Party of Five”) tossed caps into the crowd. Andre Agassi, sans Brooke Shields, married his flame a few weeks after the opening. Joe Montana faked the crowd out, aiming a pigskin toss toward one side of the throng, but rifling it to the opposite side. There was Luke Perry, who attended a ribbon-cutting with Tiger Woods at the Cafe the next day, and other Cafe supporters Ken Griffey Jr., Emerson Fittipaldi, Seles and Agassi. Woods cut the ribbon with Myrtle Beach Mayor Bob Grissom the day after the young pro golfer captured the Masters in record-setting fashion. “It’s kind of a trip right now,” Woods told a crowd of fans. “I’m still on Cloud Nine from yesterday. I tell you one thing though, I don’t know how many of you are golfers out there, to be honest with you guys, yesterday was a great moment for myself, but when I knew that I had won the tournament is when I hugged my mom and pop. As you probably saw on TV, I just lost it and started crying big-time. It was an amazing day. My jacket? Oh, I slept with it last night. It never left me. It’s kind of interesting because when I was walking up 18, I had a whirl of emotions going through me that I have won.” The Cafe features Arnold Palmer’s autographed golf club, Babe Ruth’s Yankees “Old Timers” silver pitcher, Billie Jean King’s tennis racquet, Bing Crosby’s autographed jacket from the Pebble Beach Golf Pro-Am, Joe Frazier’s boxing trunks and robe, Richard Petty’s autographed helmet, a Tiger Woods section, Troy Aikman’s autographed helmet, Seles’ autographed racquet from the 1996 Australian Open, Terry Labonte’s apparel, Shaquille O’Neal’s L.A. Lakers jersey, Griffey’s equipment, Wayne Gretzky’s hockey stick and game ticket from the game in which he tied Gordie Howe’s NHL record of 801 career goals and other memorabilia. Restaurateur Robert Earl of Orlando, Fla. began the chain, having taken over the Hard Rock Cafe, Dec. 14, 1995 in Times Square. On Dec. 14, 1996 the Las Vegas location opened. Earl is the son of British singer Robert Earl Senior. Other locations include Atlantic City, Melbourne, Orlando, Chicago, Southfield, Mich., Atlanta and Miami. Planet Hollywood Myrtle Beach had opened in Horry County Friday, Nov. 22, 1996. Principal shareholders include Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger (“Batman”), Whoopi Goldberg, Sylvester Stallone, Demi Moore, film producer Keith Barish (“The Fugitive”) and restaurateur Robert Earl. This 43rd venue of the chain came in the year of the fifth anniversary of the first Planet Hollywood (New York). Hours are 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. seven days a week. Seating 360, the 16,020 square feet restaurant features three themed dining rooms and a mezzanine bar area with a rippling wall of bubbling blue water. There’s the Sci-Fi Room and the Adventure Room. Look for the Munsters’ costumes, Audrey Hepburn’s black kid leather boots from “My Fair Lady,” the antique Porsche driven by Perry in “Beverly Hills 90210,” Ginger’s beaded Download 2.99 Mb. Share with your friends:
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