Twelve Steps in Pittsfield - Bibblings| David Scribner's journal for thought, ideas, commentary, images, fiction observed and imagined

Twelve Steps in Pittsfield

By David Scribner

The other day, I got an e-mail from a former colleague now living in Canada. What the hell happened, she asked. Here's what I told her: The trouble began when I quit smoking. I still count the days, 2,314 as of this date, and I remember it as if it were yesterday. The process of elimination began on a bitter winter Monday. Before leaving my garage apartment, I put on the patch, back of my left shoulder, maximum strength, then drove to the newsroom where I worked. I got through the day without once retreating down the back stairs every hour or so to join the smoking clan on the loading dock. I missed their companionship, especially the guys from the pressroom - that was true deprivation. Those smoking breaks provided the only moments of uninhibited communication in a corporation that made its living on information.

After work, to test my resolve and the power of the patch, I went to a bar down by the railroad tracks where I'd occasionally get a late-night sandwich and a glass of wine, catch up on town gossip with the barmaid or with anyone else hanging out - and smoke. I don't go there any more. The Brewery's been closed since the owner, an ex-cop, knocked up one of his waitresses, and his wife ran him out of town. She sold the manor house on the lake they bought with cocaine money, and went to live in Augusta. People still seem to think he's respectable. He shows up here each year to ride his Harley in a rally to raise money for the disabled, adolescent cancer victims, and battered women and their kids. Once, he tried to run me down in a parking lot with his Lincoln after I'd declined to write a story about his latest renovation - the addition of a "Gentlemen's Club" in a back room called "Club Liquid."

Actually, I didn't want to get involved. He and my town's mayor were schoolyard chums. The mayor was in his friend's bar so much it was dubbed City Hall and it was understood the City Council had a quorum there every lunch, and some nights. The bar owner, I heard, put a mint on mayor's pillow each night. Naturally, the place never got busted. The mayor was also best friends with my boss, the publisher, and their wives walked dogs each morning. Eventually, the mayor got my boss's wife a job in City Hall. In a small town, there are circles within circles and everyone knows everyone's business. The only secrets are the ones people consensually agree not to discuss or report, like the extent of the gay population, the black population, the Latino population or the spread of bigotry, or how poor the people really are. You have to be careful.

On that Monday night, as I was saying, I sat at the end of the bar with my glass of house red, waiting for an irresistible yearning to light up. It didn't arrive. I had another glass, and as I lingered I realized the habit that had faithfully sedated me all those years had stood me up. The patch was working. The polished dark wood of the bar flowed like a river along a bank of bar stools, its surface reflecting fragments of bottles and the rippling image of a basketball game from a big screen TV. I took my glass and walked to a corner table overlooking the tracks. Outside, snow was beginning to fall in great spirals through amber street lamps, and the silver rails gleamed with nothing coming. Life is a white chance, in this town. At the next table, a couple was smoking. I caught a few words of their conversation and ravenously breathed in their exhales. At that moment I became a vicarious smoker. I still am.

Strange things began to happen. Among them, my boss presented me with a smoking jacket, a red paisley smoking jacket, such as you might see a croupier wear in an Atlantic City casino or a piano player in a Holiday Inn lounge. "I don't need it any more, and this is more your style than mine," he said with the lipless grin of a middle school gym teacher who's held a whistle between his teeth for too long. I kept the jacket; it's a memento to bad timing, bad judgment and bad taste.

Then, I stopped watching TV, and that was really going too far. I haven't looked back since but to turn off the medium that mainlines the modern brain with its hypnotic infotainment serum is an act of profound heresy that does not go unpunished. I began to see things I never realized were there and think things I didn't know I knew.

I saw a city of faces blank as manikins. I saw a city and its people exploited like a Third World country by out-of-town chain stores and ownerships. I saw more and more families enslaved by poverty, depression and ignorance, and being told it's all they deserve. I saw others living comfortably because of it and calling themselves culturally enriched. I saw a nation slipping toward fascism. I saw a media blinded by greed and controlled by big business and unwilling to report it. And that's when the real trouble began.

Two items of interest from the Media Desk: It's gratifying, don't you think, in the cause of restoring national unity, to see a Blue State lend a helping hand to a Red State. Several weeks ago, this region's Denver-owned newspaper, The Berkshire Eagle, sent a couple of newsroom staffers to help break a strike by the Newspaper Guild of America at the Vindicator, a paper in Youngstown, Ohio. The Ohio paper isn't controlled, yet, by the Eagle's chain. At the behest of the Eagle's principal corporate handler, the Eagle scabs "volunteered," joining other "volunteers" from papers as far away as Portland, Oregon, and New Orleans, answering the call from Big Media's trade organization. Another one of those "coalitions of the willing."

Secondly, The Eagle has been trying quietly to put the lid on its own little circulation scandal along the lines of the one discovered at Newsday. You won't read about this locally, of course, though it's widely discussed among other New England newsmen. The Eagle's paid circulation was actually 10 to 15 percent less than reported, due to the dumping of papers at schools under the "Newspapers in Education" program, an oxymoronic strategem designed to jack up circulation numbers - and charge advertisers more for it. The same predicament prevails at the chain's other newspapers, too. The papers delivered to schools are technically considered to be paid for, supported by income from such educational events as golf tournaments or excursions to Ireland. In reality, however, the papers languish unopened in dumpsters. Meanwhile, The Eagle determined that sponsorship of local rounds in the national spelling bee competition was too expensive, and dropped it. God forbid that some Berkshire kid might be encouraged to pay attention to language. Why, then someone would have to pay for a trip to Washington for the finals. So much for any real concern for literacy and education.

Some years ago, I'm told, my town, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, was alive with ethnic neighborhoods and ethnic shops, offering a rich variety of cheeses and meats and vegetables and breads, derived from cultures around the world. The community is homogenized now, with a few aberrations like a small Brazilian. Don't you think it's time to reverse cultural entropy? For instance, there isn't a real deli in all of Pittsfield, a city of some 40,000. So let's start with a Kosher deli. And don't be surprised if one doesn't start up soon. There's some real interest, and some real need.

The saga of The Turtle, the anti-terrorist machine whose presence I reported and for which I subsequently lost my job, continues. A week ago, an artist with a downtown studio reported he had seen the device in the cavernous Berkshire Athenaeum garage, as I had revealed recently in this column. "It's blue," he said. "And it's like a giant Humvee, with little slits for windows. They parked it underneath the library." I asked him whether he would do an illustration of it for me, to vindicate my reportorial reputation. "Oh no," he replied. "One time, I criticized the police chief of Great Barrington, and I got into big trouble. The newspaper descraibed me as an eccentric person. I just can't get involved with the authorities. Sorry."

"The downtown decorations must go!" writes a frustrated Vicki Sperlonga, a nurse at Berkshire Medical Center, of the shabby plastic candy canes, candles and wreathes affixed at this time of year - and often remaining until February - to light poles along my town's main downtown thoroughfares. "Most of them don't light up. If Sponge Bob can be stolen, surely they can, too," she said. "They are disgusting. We need help in this town. Wait, I know. Let's open up another Dollar Store and put some really classy stuff up."

Web Site of the Week: From the wizards at LavaMind comes lettersfrombeyond.com, a service to send e-mails (or snail mails) to loved ones after you've died. The Lavaheads have opened a Pandora's box with this one. Imagine being able to tell your spouse, your ex, or your boss what you really think of them - with mortal authority and with no worry about the consequences. LavaMind, by the way, also owns Virtual Pet Cemetery and MyCemetery.com, both, according to a press release, "two of the largest online burial grounds in the world." I guess if you're dead in cyberspace, you're really dead.

News from the Berkshire Social Circuit: Is it my imagination or is Jacuzzi, the witty, winsome and vivacious former Eagle columnist, gaining some weight these days, a lot of weight? Maybe she's missing her appointments at her pal Karen Lee's Pilates Central in Lenox, or maybe being censored by the Eagle agrees with her, or maybe...? I'm calling Ben to find out.

In coming weeks: "Womb of the Future," "The Painted Box" and "Water Wars," fables for our time, plus news you won't find in the newspaper. Send your queries and comments to bibblings@scribbyworld.com, or stop by Digital Blend, 76 North St., Pittsfield, Mass. For more irreverence, go to www.bimbopolitics.com, where Juliane Glantz, Jacuzzi, Ben, and friends hold court.