The Fiddler in the Subway Read online

  ALSO BY GENE WEINGARTEN

  Old Dogs

  I’m with Stupid (with Gina Barreca)

  The Hypochondriac’s Guide to Life. And Death.

  The Fiddler

  in the

  Subway

  THE TRUE STORY OF WHAT

  HAPPENED WHEN A WORLD-CLASS

  VIOLINIST PLAYED FOR HANDOUTS

  . . . AND OTHER VIRTUOSO

  PERFORMANCES BY AMERICA’S

  FOREMOST FEATURE WRITER

  GENE WEINGARTEN

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Weingarten, Gene.

  The fiddler in the subway/Gene Weingarten.

  p. cm.

  1. American wit and humor. I. Title.

  PN6165.W385 2010

  818'.5407—dc22 2009051668

  ISBN 978-1-4391-8159-1

  ISBN 978-1-4391-8160-7 (ebook)

  Art reprinted by permission of Universal Uclick: Doonesbury © (2004)

  G. B. Trudeau (pp. 236 top and bottom, and p. 242); Doonesbury © (2006) G. B. Trudeau (pp. 245, 252, and 259). The photograph on p. 158 is courtesy of the author.

  Acknowledgments

  All the stories in this collection are published by permission of the Washington Post, where they first appeared. My gratitude goes beyond this small kindness; I am indebted to the newspaper’s publisher and editors for their support of fierce journalism, for their leadership, and, all too many times, for their forbearance.

  I want to thank the people who taught me to write, and to apologize for any plagiarism that may have semi-inadvertently weaseled into my words over the years: Edward Albee, Dave Barry, Mike Bassett, Meyer Berger, Homer Bigart, Madeleine Blais, Margaret Wise Brown, Michael Browning, John Dickson Carr, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Charles Dickens, “Franklin W. Dixon,” Arthur Conan Doyle, Will Elder, Piet Hein, Crockett Johnson, Franz Kafka, Tom Lehrer, the New York Daily News headline writers from 1958 to 1972, Edgar Allan Poe, Rod Serling, Dr. Seuss, Rex Stout, Bill Watterson, and Ruth S. Weingarten.

  Dozens of talented copy editors made my prose presentable; if I try to name them all, I will forget some. Ably standing in for all of them here will be Pat Myers, the world’s funniest copy editor and America’s greatest backstop. She is the Johnny Bench of journalism.

  A newspaper’s librarians make its writers seem omniscient. We are not; we just have the best librarians in the business. I thank them all.

  A good journalist knows when something you’ve written stinks; a good friend will actually tell you. These people are both: Tom Scocca, David Von Drehle, and Hank Stuever. On countless occasions they have saved me from myself.

  And finally, even though his thumbprint is on nearly every page, this is the only place in the book that you will see the name Tom Shroder. That is exactly as it should be. Tom is an editor; his work, by its nature, is occult. The relationship between a writer and his editor is sacrosanct—as private and privileged as that between doctor and patient, lawyer and client, priest and penitent. Tragically, because of this sacred principle I cannot ethically reveal just how much of this book is Tom Shroder’s doing, just how much credit he deserves. Whew.

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Great Zucchini

  The First Father

  The Ghost of the Hardy Boys

  Roger and Me

  The Armpit of America

  My Father’s Vision, Part I

  Snowbound

  A Wing and a Prayer

  Tears for Audrey

  If You Go Chasing Rabbits …

  Fear Itself

  Yankee Doodle Danny

  Pardon My French …

  Doonesbury’s War

  You Go, Girl

  None of the Above

  Fatal Distraction

  An Honorable Affair

  My Father’s Vision, Part II

  The Fiddler in the Subway

  The Fiddler

  in the

  Subway

  Introduction

  I WAS DRUNK THE night I learned to write. It was the end of a bad day at work, which was at The Detroit Free Press, where I was a reporter.

  This was 1978. I was twenty-seven. For weeks, I’d been hanging out at the Detroit Wastewater Treatment Plant, the city’s chronically mismanaged sewage facility. What I had seen there, in a word, stank. There was plenty of sewage but not much treatment. The equipment was obsolete, the bosses were inept, the workers were poorly trained. Instead of turning raw sewage into clean water, the plant was scooping it up, pouring it into vats, performing abracadabra alchemy over it, and then pumping it out into Lake Erie insufficiently altered. At times it was brownish, pungent, and unnervingly… lumpy.

  On the afternoon of the night I would learn to write, I’d finished my reporting and had typed out the first paragraph of the story. Like many young writers, I considered this an opportunity to display the breadth of my vocabulary, the depth of my knowledge, and the extent of my importance. I wrote something like this: “The Detroit Wastewater Treatment facility, long the bane of environmental regulators, continues to be grievously plagued by a thicket of problems involving underfunding and mismanagement, and remains in flagrant violation of federal clean-water standards.”

  I proudly showed this to my editor, the great Hugh McDiarmid. Had I been describing Hugh at the time, I would have called him “crusty,” but today I would avoid both the cliché and the understatement. Calling Hugh “crusty” would be like calling the Nazis “rude.” It just doesn’t capture the half of it.

  Hugh read what I had written, then turned his back on me. “It’s fine,” he said, returning to his own work.

  In reporter-editor patois, “fine” is a word sodden with contempt. It means “adequate.” No writer wants to be told his work is “fine.” “What’s wrong with it?” I asked. Hugh didn’t even turn around. “You’ve been coming back from that place every day, excited about how screwed up it is,” he said. “Your anecdotes were funny. You were really pissed off on behalf of the public. Where’d all the passion go?”

  I did not take this well. I went home and consoled myself with cheap tequila and eventually fell asleep in my own drool.

  At some point during the bleak hours, I got up from my bed, staggered over to my portable typewriter, and b
anged out a new first paragraph. To this day, I don’t remember doing it, but I know I must have because the words were on paper the next morning, and I’d slept the night alone. What I had written, with a few small revisions, became the new top of my story, which would win a national award. This was it:

  “Every day, liquid sewage—three million tons of it from starting points across metro Detroit—roars through subterranean channels into a collecting point five miles down the road from the Renaissance Center, on West Jefferson. Then it hits the fan.”

  That night, I’d learned two lessons. The first is that without passion, you have nothing. The second is that the most important words in your story are the ones you don’t write. They’re the ones you imply—the ones that you cause to pop into the reader’s mind and get her to think “Aha!” That’s how you transform her from a passive observer into an ally. And that’s when you win.

  The meaning of life is that it ends.

  —Franz Kafka

  Kafka nailed it.

  —Me

  Not long after learning to write, I stopped doing it. The proximate cause was a desire to have sex on a regular basis with a particular woman, the one I would eventually marry. She happened to live not in Detroit but in New York, and the only good job I could get there was as an editor. There are worse reasons to make major life decisions.

  I liked editing and kept at it for the next twenty years, which meant I had to learn to think extremely analytically about narrative writing: You can’t tell a professional journalist that what he has done isn’t good enough unless you are prepared to explain why. That requires a coherent philosophy. I had to find one.

  After reading narrative works I admired and narrative works I didn’t, I came to some important conclusions about what distinguished the first group from the second. This led me to adopt something of an eschatological approach to feature writing, which I codified into the Talk. I became famous for the Talk. Writers hated the Talk. I don’t blame them.

  The script seldom varied: The writer would tell me what his story was going to be about, and then I would explain to him, patiently, why he was wrong. Your story, I would say, is going to be about the meaning of life. This tended to take some people aback, particularly when their subject was something ostensibly small—say, the closing of a local amusement park. Usually, a Socratic dialogue would ensue:

  “Well, what is an amusement park about?” I would ask.

  “Fun.”

  “And why do people want to have fun?”

  “To take their mind off their worries.”

  “And what are they worried about?”

  You see where this is going. Pretty soon, through one route or another, we’d arrive at Kafka.

  My method may have been obnoxious and condescending, but my point was on target: A feature story will never be better than pedestrian unless it can use the subject at hand to address a more universal truth. And, as it happens, big truths usually contain somewhere within them the specter of death. Death informs virtually all of literature. We lust and love so we can feel more alive. We build families so we can be immortal. We crave fame, and do good works, so both will outlive us. The Gods of our choosing promise eternity.

  This is the big mystery of life, and any good narrative can be made to grapple with some piece of it, large or small. A writer has to figure out what that piece is before she can begin to report her story. Only then can she know what questions to ask and what things to notice; only then will she see how to test her thesis and how to change it if it is wrong.

  That’s what nonfiction storytelling is about. It is not enough for you to observe and report: You must also think.

  Some lessons I learned by osmosis from the generously gifted writers whose work I stevedored into print over the years at the Miami Herald and the Washington Post. I learned that for a long narrative to have power, it can’t just be delivering information—it needs to create a textured experience, the way a movie does. A writer hasn’t the advantage of a mood-setting soundtrack, or actors who can communicate emotion with an expression or a gesture, but he has something of potentially greater impact: the descriptive power of words. Use them with care; arrange them shrewdly. Remember that sentences have cadence and meter and melody—don’t let them become a one-note lullaby. Interrupt the long with the short, the simple with the complex, and use them all to build a vivid narrative, a theater of the mind that each reader then edits and personalizes for himself. It’s a collaboration, this process. Don’t take your new ally for granted. Don’t bore her, even for an instant.

  When I write now, I consciously structure my stories as though they were movies, with a hill-and-dale topography to keep the reader off-balance but interested. A section with scene and action and presence will usually be followed by a section of reflection and philosophy. Above all, each section will conclude to a purpose: maybe a cliffhanger, or a kick in the gut, or a slap-to-the-forehead revelation. You must get there honestly, so that the moment is earned. I never begin writing a section until I know how it is going to end.

  I learned to write humor almost entirely from Dave Barry, whom I hired and then edited for years. Once, I impulsively asked Dave if there was any rhyme or reason to what he did, any writing rules that he followed. The question surprised both of us; he and I were never much for rules or strictures or limits or templates. Eventually, he decided yes, there was actually one modest principle that he’d adopted almost unconsciously: “I try to put the funniest word at the end of the sentence.”

  He’s so right. I stole that principle from him, and have shamelessly made it my own. When asked today whether there are any good rules for writing humor, I say “Always try to put the funniest word at the end of your sentence underpants.”

  I hate writing. I love having written.

  This is probably the most widely quoted line about being an author. It has been attributed to Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain, Eudora Welty, Neil Simon, Gloria Steinem, Joan Didion, Ernest Hemingway, and William Zinsser.

  I’m happy to credit them all. And they were all correct, but only because they all did most of their writing in the era of the typewriter. Sadly, the “having written” part is now severely devalued. That’s because it is now possible to assemble one’s life’s work in a single electronic file—as I have just done, for this anthology—and then, with a simple click of a mouse, answer one’s own idle, innocent question, such as this one: “Gee, I like the adverb ‘measuredly.’ I wonder how many times I’ve used it?”

  Note to other authors: I do not advise this exercise.

  Most of the stories in this anthology were written after 1997. That’s when I left my last editing job and returned to writing full-time at the Washington Post, filled with precepts I’d crammed into other people’s heads, challenged now to do them on my own. I know that writers I had edited highhandedly were watching me, waiting for a pratfall. I’m sure I supplied a few.

  Rereading this body of work is humbling: I see lines I wished I’d omitted and I long for the answers to some questions I wished I’d asked. But these are works of journalistic nonfiction, inextricable from the times in which they were written. Aside from correcting a couple of minor factual errors, recrafting a particularly inelegant phrase or two, and rectifying the appalling recurrence of “measuredly,” I offer these stories exactly as I wrote them, for better or worse.

  Aspiring feature writers often ask me to critique their work, wanting to know if I think they have talent. The manuscripts they enclose range from the hopeless to the promising, from the threadbare to the luxuriant. I always try to be honest without being cruel.

  Lately their cover letters have been tinged with anxiety. We are in bewildering times for young people who want to make nonfiction writing their careers. Journalism jobs are scarce, and getting scarcer. I deliver the only solace I can, by telling them what I believe: The art of storytelling is as old as civilization. There will always be a hunger for it. Learn to do it well, and somehow, you will find a wa
y to make it pay.

  I tell the most fragile of them that being a good writer mostly means being a good observer and a good thinker, and that, with work, it’s possible to triumph over a lack of innate writing skill. I use myself as an example; I believe I did exactly this.

  There’s one last truth that I don’t tell them, because it’s needlessly disturbing and would serve no pragmatic purpose. I’ll say it now, just once, and be done with it. A real writer is someone for whom writing is a terrible ordeal. That is because he knows, deep down, with an awful clarity, that there are limitless ways to fill a page with words, and that he will never, ever, do it perfectly. On some level, that knowledge haunts him all the time. He will always be juggling words in his head, trying to get them closer to a tantalizing, unreachable ideal.

  It’s a torment you can’t escape. It will reach even into the comfort of a drunken sleep, and it will shake you awake, and send you, heart pumping, to an empty piece of paper.

  If you have that, you can be a good writer. Congratulations, I guess.

  The Great Zucchini

  Asking a writer which of his stories is his favorite is said to be like asking a parent which of his children he loves the most. The question is supposedly an impertinence, an unforgivable diplomatic misstep, an insult to the craft of storytelling and to the art of literature.

  What a load of crap. This is my favorite.

  January 22, 2006

  THE GREAT ZUCCHINI arrived early, as he is apt to do, and began to make demands, as is his custom. He was too warm, so he wanted the thermostat adjusted. It was. He declared the basement family room adequate for his needs, but there was a problem with the room next door. Something had to be done about it.

  The room next door was emblematic of the extraordinary life and times of the Great Zucchini, Washington’s preeminent preschool entertainer. The homeowners, Allison and Donald Cox, Jr., are in their late thirties, with two young children—Lauren, who is five, and Donald III, who goes by Trey, and whose third birthday was being celebrated that day.