are many bad ways to wake up: surely one of the worst of them is by looking into the floodlight from a police car. I was in a field, some farmer's field next to a power plant just outside Lawrence, Kansas. I was sleeping there next to my car, before driving into Kansas City the next morning. The policemen somehow saw my car from the road, and they pulled up right in front of it and I didn't even wake up. I was lying on the ground on the passenger side of the car, and when I did wake up, one policeman was in the front seat, I guess looking for drugs, and the other was 40 feet away in the hayfield, and I don't know why he was out there unless he had his gun pulled, covering his partner. He said I scared him when I woke up so suddenly, I sat straight up, boom! Awake! and I bet he nearly shot me dead. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * They wanted to know what I was doing sleeping in the field, and I told them that I didn't like motels, which was only partly true, so I decided to tell them that I was born there, in Lawrence, but that I don't live there anymore. This was completely true, but somehow didn't achieve the level of meaning I had hoped it would. They asked me what I was going to do in Kansas City, and I said I was going to interview the Mayor at 11 am. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * I told them that I was a producer for a radio program. I told them the name of the program and the name of the host, and they'd heard of him. You'd know who he is, too, if I were to say his name, but I have decided not to say his name and call him The Friendly Man instead, because this is his persona. I told the policemen that every weekday morning The Friendly Man has a five-minute feed on one of the networks, and 12 million people listen. His stories are, as a rule, upbeat and positive. Their general theme is that people are taking responsibility for their lives, their community, their country. The Friendly Man always has good news, and the good news is that America just keeps getting better and better. Both policemen said that they had heard the program and that they liked The Friendly Man, and so they decided that they liked me as well, and that it was okay to sleep in the field, sorry to have bothered you. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * I was hired by one of The Friendly Man's executive producers. Her job was to corral radio producers like myself from around the country into conducting interviews and writing scripts for stories that had been found by her flock of computer researchers, also from around the country. Some people are surprised to hear that The Friendly Man doesn't actually produce the stories he tells, but in reality, he just doesn't have the time, what with the television show now, and the specials and so on. It's not that he doesn't want to write his stories, it's not that he can't. It's just that he's really busy just now being The Friendly Man, and you shouldn't expect him to come up with all his own material. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The way it works is that The Friendly Man is in New York with maybe a couple of editors and an engineer, and his executive producer is in San Francisco with fax machines and e-mail, and the researchers are all over the place looking for story ideas through computer searches. When the researcher finds what looks like an appropriate story, say on a local newspaper with a website, he calls the people in the story on the phone and talks to them for awhile. Then he writes out a story synopsis, which is sent to The Friendly Man for approval. Once approved, the story goes to a producer, and the producer is in charge of conducting basically the same interviews again, on tape this time, and then editing the tape and writing a script, two and a half minutes long, which is reviewed by the executive producers in San Francisco and sent to The Friendly Man in New York City so he can read it on the air. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The first story I produced for The Friendly Man was in Tucson, Arizona. It was about some people in Tucson who were helping to make America a better place...it doesn't matter what the story was about, what matters is that I had to do all the interviews over the phone--there wasn't enough money to send me to Tucson. I found an audio engineer in Tucson and had him go to the locations and hold a microphone up to the subjects while I talked to them on the phone. Then he sent me the tape, which I edited, and then I wrote the script without ever meeting the people I was writing about, or the person I was writing for, for that matter. Basically all I did was just fill in the researchers' synopsis with quotes, and actually that was all I was supposed to do. When I made a suggestion for changing the story, a change that I thought would make it better, the executive producer said that she would try not to get upset with me because this was my first story and maybe I didn't understand my role. The story had been approved as written in the synopsis; there were to be no changes, no additional narratives, or discoveries. I was but the producer/writer, one of many cogs in the wheel. For me to suggest a change was like suggesting that everyone else had made a mistake. I apologized and did the story as ordered. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * After this first story I asked the executive producer if I could go on the road, drive around and collect interviews, actually meet the people and see what they were doing, and then come back and produce the stories. She gave me four stories, at a distance of 3,000 miles. They would pay the mileage, but would give nothing else up front. The food and lodging were to be at my expense, and so I was sleeping out. It was the first week of July, and so warm at night you could sleep on the grass without a bag or a blanket. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * At 11 am on the morning after the incident with the police, I was standing in the Mayor's Office on the top floor of the Kansas City, Missouri Municipal Building. It's a skyscraper, built on top of the highest hill in the area, so looking out the window I could see most of the city--the buildings and the railroad tracks and the Missouri River making a big oxbow right through town. When the mayor came in I didn't tell him that I used to live there. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * We sat at a long wooden table, a conference table, in tall chairs. Mayor Emanuel Cleaver, also a Methodist minister, was a black mayor in a black town. I'd come to ask him about his summertime midnight basketball program. The program, like all midnight basketball programs, was designed to reduce the crime rate by keeping juveniles off the streets. And, like with some of the other programs, the crime rate hadn't gotten any better, except during the time that the kids were actually playing basketball. The Mayor's opponents were saying that the program was pork, that the 100 thousand dollars a year could be better spent elsewhere. I asked the mayor about this and he was adamant, even passionate, about the value of teaching kids to play basketball. He said that team sports teach kids the best values, they learn to cooperate and play by the rules, they learn to problem-solve through cooperation: by playing they learn to love the game, and through the love of the game they learn to love themselves and each other. He said that a few of the kids had gone to college on basketball scholarships, and that this gave hope to everybody in the community--a community where hope was like a foreign language and that that alone was worth it, even a bargain at $100,000. He said, you go to the games. It's mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers, you'll see the whole community there. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * He was right. Over on the East Side, the poor side of town, there were games going on in a community center, and the place was packed, and the games were good--little eight- and nine-year-olds passing the ball and making plays and running hard the whole game. They loved the game: they were the game. I interviewed coaches, kids and parents and everything was going fine, things really were getting better and better in America, but then just before I left, I was talking to a father about his son and somebody, I think probably a little kid, took my three rechargeable batteries and a digital audio tape with the mayor's interview on it out of my bag and out of the building. And they were gone. The batteries were worth 250 dollars and could be replaced, but the interview with the mayor was gone for good. Some little kid looked in my bag and these things were like eggs in a basket, anyone older would have just taken the bag. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * I walked around the neighborhood for awhile, trying to figure out what to do. The next day was a Saturday, and I doubted the mayor would be at his office, which would mean that I would have to wait til Monday. But I had appointments for interviews on Monday morning for another story in St. Louis, 300 miles to the East. And then there was the fact that I had been robbed by a kid while doing a story about a program that reduces juvenile crime. The story as it was written by the researcher in the synopsis was all about how black people were improving their lives and making things better by playing basketball. But the reality of the situation--at least as I saw it--was that these people were poor, that they'd been poor for a long time and that they were probably going to stay poor for a long time. So I called the executive producer and left her a message saying that maybe she should consider scrapping the basketball story, and that I was going on to St. Louis, and would call her from there. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The story in St. Louis was also about poor black people, only in St. Louis it was old poor black people, people who lived in a nursing home and had started their own private economy wherein they would get paid for helping each other out, by washing clothes or cooking meals, or even reading books and stories out loud at bedtime. But they didn't get paid in real money, they got paid in what they called "time dollars", which could only be exchanged between themselves or cashed in at a special community store for food, clothing and other necessary items. The old people liked the time dollar program, they were much happier than before they had the time dollar program. This is what the researcher had written in the synopsis. And this is how things seemed for most of the morning I was there doing interviews. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * My first interview was with the woman who set everything up. She was a well-educated white upper-middle-class lady who worked for a large charitable organization as a local manager of its programs, such as the time dollar store in the old folks' home. She had written a brochure explaining the program, very nicely produced, and they had won an award, an award I can't remember, but the award is probably what the researcher first spotted in his computer search. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * This woman was very nervous, and I couldn't tell if it was because she was just nervous being interviewed, or if she was nervous being surrounded by poor black people, or if she was just nervous by nature. I talked to her for awhile and then she introduced me to some women who actually participated in the time dollar program. They told me that they do things like call up old people around town and ask them if they feel okay, if they're sick or something, or clean and dry a neighbor's clothes before he goes to the hospital in the morning, or cook for someone who has bad asthma. And then they could use the time dollars to buy stuff they needed. They were friendly ladies, and it was just like it said in the synopsis, neighbors helping neighbors and getting paid to do it. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * So I asked them if we could go over and see the store, the place where they buy everything, and they sort of hemmed and hawed about it and said there was a key, and they'd have to get it, and then we were talking about grandchildren and arthritis, the weather in Mississippi, and I was wondering if maybe they didn't want to go to the store, so I asked again and they said it was a couple of blocks away and it was raining. I was a little worried at this point, because the store was in my synopsis, there had to be some tape of the store in my story, and so I explained my predicament, and begged them as best I could if we could go there. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * We borrowed some umbrellas and walked over to the building that housed the store. It was a one-story warehouse, brick and concrete, a few windows. Inside we went down a hallway that separated two large rooms, each packed with desks and office people, stacks of paper, stacks of folders, desks, fans, lots of desk lights, people typing on real typewriters, adding machines, very suspicious. One side looked like the Bulgarian Foreign Trade Department, the other side like the Lithuanian Shipping Commission. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Down at the far dark end of the hall was a large metal cabinet with two full-length doors closed by a padlock. One of the ladies opened the lock and inside were four shelves. The top one held bottles of fabric softener, the next was full of baby wipes, another had some paper plates and plastic silverware, and the bottom had bathroom deodorizer. That was it, that was the store. I had imagined something between a 7-11 and a thrift store, and I didn't understand, I didn't understand how any of this was working, the story disintegrated into baby wipes and picnic forks. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * I thanked the ladies and left the building and called the executive producer. I didn't want to tell her about the baby wipes and the fabric softener: there was no use in telling her that something was wrong, and that maybe the whole story was a sham. But I did want to ask her if it would be okay if I left the store out of the story--that maybe the story should be that these people just like to help each other and that the time-money thing wasn't so important. But she never let me get to it. She was upset, very upset about the message I left on her machine Friday night. It had ruined her whole weekend. She was distraught and nearly hysterical, everyone was distraught and nearly hysterical, and it was my fault--my fault to have taken my eyes off my equipment, my fault to have been robbed, my fault to have left town without completing the story assignment. She said that I had led her to believe that I was a professional, but that no professional would behave in such a manner. She said this twice, the subtext being that the Friendly Man can only use professional producers, and therefore I was fired unless, maybe, I went back to Kansas City to re-interview the Mayor. My job was to do what I was told, just as their job was to do what they were told, just as the Friendly Man's job was to do what he was told, because the audience, the 12 million listeners, had something they wanted to be told: that America is a good place with decent people, never mind the screaming coming from the basement. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * So I got in my car and drove 300 miles west to Kansas City. I could have told them to go fuck themselves, but I didn't. I went back because I didn't want to be fired by the Friendly Man. I had been fired by other, less well-known "friendly men" and it was always like being branded, scorned as the one who ran. I was tired of that, tired of being broke and not having any work. My wife, my family, they were tired of it too. I decided that I wanted to be a professional, I wanted to be a team player. I wanted to take responsibility for my life, my community and my country and get ahead and go someplace with my career and be happy. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * I drove back to Kansas City and got in late at night. I drove through the big buildings downtown, the streets lit yellow and vacant. I drove along the parkways, past fountains and parks, and I drove by my grandmother's house and down to the Country Club Plaza where I slept without a bag or blanket on the lawn, on the long esplanade in front of the Nelson Art Museum. If I was to be bothered by the police, I would tell them that I was a radio producer working for The Friendly Man and that I had a meeting with the Mayor in the morning. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BACK TO PAY - - - - - - -