Wonderful Room (5 page)

I had seen it happen often enough without a cop at the wheel. In the ‘50s, an era of big V-8
engines and no seatbelts or airbags, a multiple-fatality car wreck was more gruesome than a murder. The impact sometimes would drive the engine into the front seat. The steering column would crush the driver‧s chest. His date on the passenger side would slam her head against the steel dashboard. Her skull would shatter like a china teacup.

In a crash that sticks in my mind, three people died. What makes it memorable to me is the piece of scalp and some blond curls stuck with blood to the dashboard and the bits of brain spattered here and there. The kids had been drinking.

That same week, on a bright, sunny afternoon, an ambulance was carrying a woman either to a hospital or home from one. The driver guessed he could get across a railroad track before an oncoming freight train reached the crossing. He was wrong. The locomotive slammed broadside into the ambulance. The driver, the attendant, the patient and pieces of the ambulance were strewn along the track for a quarter of a mile. The train engineer was distraught, but there was nothing he could have done.

I remember another man only because of his odor. A room clerk or a maid found him in his room in a seedy downtown hotel. He had been there a few days with his window closed in the hot El Paso summer, dead. I‧m sure the police found out who he was and why he died, but I don‧t remember. His clothing looked like a salesman‧s. I didn‧t even enter the room. I looked through the door, saw a cop retch, and left.

Which brings me to the floater. Floaters were common in El Paso. Somebody would kill a man and dump him in the Rio Grande. Fish would eat his eyeballs and other tender parts. After a few days, his body would start to decompose and fill with gas and rise to the surface. Somebody would find it and report it to the authorities, or maybe not.

The cops figured this particular floater had been in the water about two weeks. His eyeballs were gone. His body was swollen to at least twice its normal size. His skin was dark gray. There was no way of telling even what race he was. He was barefoot, but otherwise fully clothed. Some toes were missing. Since he had swelled up so, his clothing fit him more snugly than his own skin used to. The cops would have to cut it of him. One of the detectives, as a dare, I think, asked if I would like to watch. I said sure.

They brought the floater, still wet from the river, into a funeral home and laid him on a long, low table. Two detectives, one on each side, began cutting at his shirtsleeves with pocketknives. Sometimes tiny bits of rotten flesh would come loose with the cloth. After a few minutes, when they needed air, the cops stood up and stepped away, and their partners worked with the knives for a while. All the while, the four detectives told each other dirty jokes. Whenever they laughed, they looked at me, and I would laugh, too.

E
d Engledow
called me into the morgue, where all private conversations were held. I had been fired and unfired there not many months ago, so I was nervous. Engledow laid his hand on my shoulder and gave me a sneer that tried to be a smile.

“I‧m giving you a promotion,” he said.

I was 19 years old. I had been a reporter for just a year. “A promotion?” I asked.

“Assistant Sunday editor,” he said. “Second-in-command of the Sunday Department.”

The “Sunday Department” was two desks jammed together in a corner of the newsroom. The Sunday editor, Buddy Halloran, sat at one desk, and his assistant, Mel Geary, sat facing him. Their job was filling the inside pages of the next Sunday paper with canned feature stories from the wire services and the syndicates.

They sat hour after hour, week after week, editing the stuff, marking it into the Sunday dummies and sending it to the composing room. Then they had to read all the page proofs. Buddy and Mel rarely spoke to each other. They almost never left the building. They lived in their own tiny world. The rest of the staff ignored them.

Now Geary had won his release. He was about to move to the city desk as Engledow‧s underling. I was the sucker designated to replace him.

“I don‧t want that job,” I told Engledow.

“A $5 raise goes with it,” he said.

“I‧m a reporter. I don‧t want a desk job. Especially that one.”

Engledow‧s black eyes glinted. He was angry. “I‧ll give you a choice, son. Take it or leave.”

“Take it or leave the
Times?
”

“Yeah.”

I was angry, too. “I‧ll leave,” I said.

“Two weeks notice,” he said.

The word spread quickly. Some reporters resented what had happened to me. Some feared they might be tossed the Geary job. Engledow went into a black funk. He snarled and spent a lot of time staring into his coffee, which he laced from time to time from a bottle of bourbon in his drawer.

This time I didn‧t think of joining the Navy. I was a professional now. I set out to find a new job as a writer. The evening
Herald-Post
was out of the question. Their reporters worked mornings, while I was in class at Texas Western. I phoned every radio station. They said they didn‧t have reporters. Their disk jockeys just ripped the news of the Teletype and read it into the microphone.

“You‧ve a good voice,” said the manager of KHEY, the hillbilly station. “You could be a disk jockey.” He offered to audition me. I said no.

I don‧t remember why I didn‧t call the TV stations. I didn‧t see much TV, so maybe I never thought of it having news.

During a lonely lunch at the Oasis Restaurant, the bright-idea light flashed in my head. I slipped a nickel into the pay phone and called Ed Hochrein.

Hochrein was one of maybe a dozen public relations people who came to the
Times
every day to
drop news releases into a basket on Engledow‧s desk. The releases were long, fulsome things extolling whatever company or charity or club or big shot the PR man had been paid to promote. From time to time, Engledow would grab a handful of them, drop them on an idle reporter‧s desk and say, “Give me a couple of graffs on these.” So the PR guy‧s glowing pages would appear in the paper as a few lines of plain facts. They were filler.

Some PR men would hang around and gossip and joke with the reporters and deskmen. Engledow enjoyed some of them. But he hated Ed Hochrein. I never knew why. His hatred was complete and unebbing.

Hochrein feared Engledow. But his livelihood depended on getting his clients‧ names into the city‧s largest newspaper, so he stepped through the swinging doors, dropped his releases into the basket and tried to withdraw before Engledow shot an insult at him.

I phoned Hochrein and asked him for a job.

There was a pause on the line. Then he said, “Really?”

“Engledow fired me.”

I swear I could hear him smiling. “How much do they pay you over there?” he asked.

“Sixty a week,” I said. It‧s what I would have been paid had I accepted the promotion.

“I‧ll pay you that,” Hochrein said. “Can you start Monday?”

“You bet,” I said. “Tank you.”

I arrived at the
Times
at four o‧clock. It was a busy part of the day. The daytime beat men were batting out their stories, the night people were drifting in. I stood in front of Engledow‧s desk and said loudishly, “I don‧t need two weeks notice. I start a new job Monday.”

“Doing what?” Engledow asked.

“Writing PR for Ed Hochrein.”

He went slack-jawed. So did everybody. The wire machines‧ chatter punctuated a long silence.

“Why the hell you doing that?” Engledow said. “You‧re a goddamn newspaperman!”

“I got to have a job,” I said.

He picked up a piece of copy and swiveled his chair to talk to the wire editor. Back to work. Our conversation was over.

As the night deepened, his funk grew darker.

Near one o‧clock, when the last of us were quitting for the night, Engledow called me into the morgue. “If you turn down Hochrein, you can stay. I‧ll give you the 5-dollar raise.”

“OK,” I said.

Then he and I went to the Stag and had a beer.

E
l Paso
was a small city, maybe 200,000 people, but being a reporter there wasn‧t at all like working in Albuquerque or Denver. Even Dallas or Houston didn‧t offer the drama and adventure that El Paso did. For Juárez lay across the river.

Juárez was bigger than El Paso but didn‧t look it. It still resembled the tacky old adobe town where Pancho Villa fought three battles during the Mexican Revolution. But it was in a foreign country and spoke another language, which made it exotic to tourists and young GIs. And it was a pit of danger and sin, which made it irresistible.

In the ‘50s, if you didn‧t have much money or the right connections, Texas was a hard place to get wicked. Bars couldn‧t legally serve hard liquor, only beer and wine. The few dance floors were at hillbilly honky-tonks on the edge of town. Marijuana and heroin, though more plentiful in El Paso than elsewhere in the U.S., was costly. Strippers couldn‧t uncover much. Whores had to be found through bellhops and taxi drivers.

But in Juárez …

When you crossed the Santa Fe Street Bridge over the Rio Grande, you emerged onto Avenida Juárez, the city‧s main tourist trap. In daylight, the main business there was “curios,” the cheap, useless crap that American tourists can‧t go home without: fake silver-and-turquoise jewelry, straw sombreros, velvet paintings of bullfighters and flamenco dancers, salt-and-pepper shakers with “Souvenir of Old Mexico” on them, garish serapes, shoddy leather
purses and wallets adorned with the Aztec calendar. Pitchmen stood at shop doors, tugging tourists‧ sleeves. “Hey, mister, step inside! Buy your lady a diamond! See it to believe it!”

But as the sun went down, the spiels turned seductive, urgent. “Hey, señores! Take a look! Naked blondes!” Avenida Juárez morphed into a sleazy Cinderella decked in neon, beckoning gullible Americans into the Crystal Palace, El Rancho Escondido and the Tivoli with their big bands and tuxedoed emcees and dirty jokes, or up dark and stinking stairs to raw sex shows in ratty dives.

On side streets where lights were sparse and dim were the real brothels, their names, too raunchy to print here, advertised in flyspecked, sputtering neon above their doors.

And drugs. All you had to do was ask.

People got murdered in Juárez. A hard rain or a coyote would uncover a shallow grave in the desert south of town. An American tourist would wind up naked with his throat cut, a victim of wandering into the wrong section of Juárez alone and in the dark. A bloated floater would be lifted from the river.

Since I could use the big Speed Graphic camera, Engledow sometimes sent me to Juárez to see what I could find about the latest dead, get quotes from the police and shoot a few pictures. My photos were of cops investigating, witnesses pointing and the like. The
Times
didn‧t want pictures of the grisly remains. But the Juárez papers did. Sometimes the entire top half of a front page would be a close-up photograph
of a corpse. Sometimes it was printed in red ink.

I met Juárez reporters and photographers at these scenes. One became a friend. He was Hector Padilla, a reporter for
El Fronterizo.
He looked like a Mexican movie star – wavy hair; sexy mustache, loads of Latin charm – and he was well connected in Juárez. He knew the cops, politicians, rich businessmen, major pimps, everybody.

Hector and I made a pact: If he knew a hot story happening in Juárez, he would call me with the lowdown. If I knew one happening in El Paso, I would call him. We gave each other names and phone numbers. These were always stories about dead bodies.

Our pact had a second part, too.

Working for the
Times
had one perk: free movie passes. Theater managers brought small stacks of them to the newsroom each week and gave them to Mr. Latham, who locked them in his desk. If you approached him humbly and asked politely, he would give you a pair, but only once a week, like a stern father handing over an undeserving child‧s allowance.