Cocaine sniffing, quote lifting Jayson Blair got a book deal for being fired from the nation's most respected newspaper. So honest living Vince Guerrieri has one question: Know where I can score some blow?
By Vince Guerrieri
210 west Managing Editor [send email]
This wide wicked world is such a funny place to be
--Woody Guthrie, “I Ain’t Got No Home”
I told my boss the other day that I was going to develop a cocaine habit and start making things up at work. She wasn’t amused, but I gotta do what’s best for me, and this might be my best shot at getting a book deal.
I put her on notice after reading that Jayson Blair would receive a six-figure advance for writing Burning Down My Master’s House, a book about his exploits at the New York Times. Blair quit the Old Gray Lady earlier this year amid rumors of plagiarism. It turned into a full-blown investigation that revealed that he lifted other people’s works and outright made things up. Eventually, two editors – including Howell Raines, the man at the top – resigned because of it.
Jayson Blair’s only a couple of years older than me. We could’ve worked at the college paper together. He didn’t graduate college, fabricated quotes for stories in his internship and wound up with a job at the Times and a cocaine problem. After he quit, he’s getting a six-figure book deal.
I graduated college (with honors, thank you very much). I’ve been known to drink too much, but not as a habit. I’m scrupulously honest and make sure to get my stories right. I make $500 a week before taxes.
I’ve decided now that everything I learned is wrong. Crime does pay and playing by the rules is for suckers. Money talks and bullshit walks. There’s no percentage to doing the right thing, and Jayson Blair’s case is by no means an isolated example.
At one point, Blair was contracted by Esquire to write a review of “The Fabulist,” a movie he’d be in a unique position to review. “The Fabulist” is based on a book by Stephen Glass, who was fired from the New Republic for yep, you guessed it, making things up. For his fabrication, he, like Blair, was awarded a book deal.
I grew up in a town that can generously be described as a moral vacuum. My high school diploma is signed by a convicted felon. The Youngstown City Schools’ treasurer embezzled more than $80,000. The director of the local
sanitary district embezzled more than $2 million. Neither of them will
ever see the inside of a prison cell unless they’re on vacation in San Francisco and tour Alcatraz.
Ken Lay, the CEO of Enron, will never see the inside of a prison cell, either. Neither will many of the other thoroughly corrupt executives who cooked the books for companies like Tyco or Adelphia to the tune of millions, if not billions of dollars. But goddammit, the feds are going to throw the book at Martha Stewart for insider trading. They say she made a whopping $40,000 on a stock deal using insider information. I can sleep better at night knowing this.
Oliver North has a television show. He should have been hanged for treason during the Iran-Contra Affair in the 1980s. If selling arms to Iran when we’re fighting them isn’t giving aid and comfort to the enemy, then I don’t know what is. He’s published more novels than I have, and that pisses me off.
Bill Clinton was almost removed from office. He was disbarred, but that doesn’t seem to hurt his career any. He also got a book deal.
Clinton’s offense was to get a hummer and not admit to it under oath. California Governor Gray Davis is in the midst of a recall because he drove the state into debt. President George W. Bush is allowed to operate unfettered after running up the largest deficit in American history and getting us involved in what appears to be a protracted occupation of Iraq (did I mention that Osama bin Laden is still on the loose?) for spurious reasons.
Priests who violate children are shuffled around with the chance to do more evil. It took a massive scandal in Boston to wake up the country to pedophiles with Roman collars, and their day of justice is finally starting to come around.
Turning now to sports, Pete Rose is banned from baseball for gambling, but players with drug problems are given every chance to rehabilitate. Steve Howe, a pitcher for the Yankees in the 1980's, was banned from baseball for life seven or eight times for a cocaine problem, but he kept coming back. But gambling is still a big no-no, and the only way Pete Rose will get into the Hall of Fame is by buying a ticket like the rest of us.
And don’t get me started on Art Modell. I suffered with the Browns for close to 20 years, through the Fumble and the Drive, and I didn’t get to see the Browns in the Super Bowl. Art Modell leaves Cleveland because he can’t make any money there for Baltimore, discovers that the Cleveland thing wasn’t a fluke because he can’t make any money in Baltimore, and decides to sell the team, but not before he gets the Super Bowl victory that he – and all of Browns Nation – has been looking for.
He celebrated. Browns fans cringed. It’s been almost three goddamn years, and I can still feel the bile creep up my throat when I think of that rat bastard motherfucker holding up the Vince Lombardi trophy.
I believe in a next life because I have to believe there’s an existence better than this one. I believe that what goes around comes around. But if instant karma doesn’t start getting some people soon, I might have to turn to a life of crime.
They’ll never take me alive.