The Chicken Zoo, part 2: The job (a non-fiction novel)

[This story is based on my experiences as a reporter for The Delaware State News from 1990-93. Some names and dates have been changed. This was part of my unpublished novel, "The Chicken Zoo," that I wrote five years ago.]

I headed back to Dover. I stared out ahead, as focused on the road as I could be. My hands were still shaking a bit, but I calmed down rather quickly. I rationalized to myself – I mean, they were kids, right? What’s the worst that could happen to me?

I shook myself out of my trance and found the cell phone sitting on the seat. I hate those things. The word has it that they give you cancer. I’m so neurotic about cancer that I wouldn’t hold it next to my face. I never make a call on them – I only let people call me. That way I reduce the chances of me getting brain cancer by 50 percent, right? Whatever. I knew I had to get a hold of my boss, Jenny Cunningham. I was waiting for the last possible moment to call her, hoping that she’d eventually call me first. She’s pretty neurotic, too – one of those anal-retentive types. If things aren’t super-organized, she goes into a full-scale, convulsive panic-attack. Yeah, I know. I had to call her. I hadn’t talked to her for hours, and knowing Jenny, she was probably sitting by her phone the whole time waiting for it to ring.

So I punched the numbers. Suddenly, there was a ring. Was I calling myself?

I pushed the “send” button, and heard a voice. “Hello? Hello!”

“Hello? Jenny?”

“Tom?” Jenny said. “I can barely hear you.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I think this phone is bad.”

“No, hun, I think it’s because you’re holding it too far from your face…please move it closer to your face.”

Sigh. Fine. I guess I can tolerate a few minutes of radiation beams, I thought.

“How’s this?” I asked.

“Much better,” she said. “How’s it going?”

“All right, I guess.”

“What did you find out,” she said.

“Well, somebody got killed.”

“I figured that,” Jenny said. “What about it.”

“I don’t know – the cops wouldn’t say much.”

“What about the neighbors.”

“Oh, man, they were wacky…”

“Careful there,” she said. “They’re our readership base..”

“Do they even know how to read?”

“Tom, please,” she said. “Enough of the bullshit…tell me what they said.”

“Well, I mean, this is really unbelievable,” I said. “They said it might be connected to this Jim Jones thing – ”

Jenny stopped me. “Christ, the Jim Jones thing!” she said. “All right, well, hurry up…I’m not at the office, by the way. I’m at the Heartbreak Hotel.”

“The Heartbreak Hotel?” I said. “Where’s that.”

“It’s in the downtown, right across from the jail, on Governors Avenue. You won’t miss it. Meet me there in about 15 minutes.”

“All right. But can you give me directions?”

“You’re a reporter,” she said. “You’re supposed to figure these things out.”

Click, went the phone. Thanks, lady. OK, so now my assignment is to find directions to a bar. When I got out of college, I dreamed of working fro The Associated Press, dodging bombs in Beirut and interviewing the victims. Nope. Instead I’m trying to find my way to a bar in Delaware.

Fuck it. I drove, because what else was I going to do? Maybe it wouldn’t be hard to find, I thought. This wasn’t like driving in New York City.

When I first drove down there, just days earlier, I was struck by how flat and empty this place is. I mean, yeah, Delaware is small. But so is Rhode Island, and in Rhode Island, there are things to do. When I headed down U.S., I saw occasional shopping centers and conveniences stores. But everything else was flat, flat, flat, stretching out to the horizon. There weren’t even any trees. Just what looked like farmland that wasn’t even being used. The most interesting thing I saw was a liquor store with a message sign outside that said: “Get your guns and beer here.” Underneath that, it said, “Better dead than red” (wasn’t the Cold War over?).
I kept seeing these signs that said “Dover, 20 miles,” and then “Dover, 10 miles.” I got all the way down to one mile, expecting to see skyscrapers or something. Shit, I was hoping I’d at least see a town. Finally it said “Welcome to Dover.” But all I saw was a strip of fast-food restaurants and cheap motels, and a 100,000-seat racetrack. The fast-food joints were lined up like the animals on Noah’s Ark (two McDonald’s, two Burger Kings, two Wendy’s, two Hardee’s). This is the state capital, I thought? I started to wonder whether the state capital itself was in a shopping mall, and maybe the governor’s office was a drive-thru.

Well, it wasn’t that bad. But it was bad enough, and small enough that I couldn’t get lost. So when I headed out of Driftwood Beach, and saw a collection of collection of buildings, some big trucks and a highway up ahead, I knew exactly where I was. I knew that was Dover, and all I needed to do was to be a little enterprising and ask somebody for directions.

I got on Route 13, drove into a supermarket parking lot and saw and old guy pushing a shopping cart out of the store. Man, he was so old that he looked he should have been in the cart, being pushed. He didn’t look too happy, either. But was so desperate that I tried him, anyway. I pulled right up to him, and rolled down my car window.

“Excuse me, sir,” I called out. “Can you help me?”

He slowed up and turned his head, slowly. It was bent over the cart, and he was trying to get his frail body to push this heavy cart between two parked cars.

“What the hell do you want?” he said.

“Sir?”

“What is it?”

“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “Can you help me find the Heartbreak Hotel?”

“What are you from, Wilmington?” he blurted out.

“Sir?”

“What is it that you want?” the man said. “Why are you here?”

“I’m looking for the Heartbreak Hotel.”

“God almighty, what is it, is everybody too cheap to buy a map nowadays?”

OK, so I was trying really hard not to get upset. I mean, really hard. He was just having a bad day. He did not represent the opinions of the state as a whole. I mean, I just had to be nice to this guy. Otherwise, I had to get out of the car, go inside the supermarket and ask one of those dopey cashiers.

“Sir,” I said, “I’m really sorry. I understand how you feel … would you like me to help you with your shopping cart?”

“No, no, no,” he said. “I’m just having a bad day. A lot of traffic out there…. The idiots who run this city built all these goddamn shopping centers and roads and now it takes a half-hour just to run down to Acme to get a bottle of milk…”

“I see…”

“It’s just looking a little too much Wilmington.”

“Wilmington, sir? Isn’t that north of here?”

“Yeah, it’s about an hour north,” he said. “That’s the state’s power base. Home of DuPont. I used to work for them, for 40 years of my life. Then those slimy bastards laid me off….”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“The governor – he spends all his time up there. They call this the state capital. Yeah. Ha. Then why the hell doesn’t the governor come down here once in a while, and run the state? I think they just want to turn Delaware into one big Wilmington, and rename it.”

“Sir, I hate to interrupt,” I said. “Can you give me directions?”

“Oh, sorry,” the man said, then pointing toward a series of trees and small buildings set back from the highway. “You gotta make a right here, then make your fourth left.”

“Right.”

“Then head down that road – Governors Avenue it’s called – and look for the jail. It’s on your left.”

“How will I know it’s the jail?”

“Oh, you won’t miss the jail,” he said. “It’s in-between a sub-shop and a barber.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Well, thanks.”

“Uh, wait, one more thing,” the man said.

“What’s that?”

“Are you sure you’re not from Wilmington?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“OK, just checking,” he said, “Her voice didn’t sound like you was from here…”

“Why is that important?”

The man didn’t answer. He pushed the car out from the narrow space between the cars, and continued his slow walk. Maybe he didn’t hear me.

I was through with that. I got what I wanted, I hoped. I followed Governors Avenue, right on down. Right through the town, the downtown. Hey, a town, I thought. I finally found the town. There were houses dating back a couple of centuries. They were well-preserved, as was the capital building. It was a stately, colonial structure. Like other capital buildings, it had a small dome, a clock tower and a statue up top. But it was certainly much smaller and less busy than, say, the same buildings in Trenton or Washington D.C. for that matter. It didn’t have the same “buzz” as those places either. There were no people walking outside. There were no streets protests or fairs, no Frisbee-players or softball games. There wasn’t even a hot-dog cart to feed people. There were just a few old buildings with cars parked next to them, quiet and peaceful except for the occasional cars that drove by and struggled to get a parking space. Just like a shopping mall.

A block south was the jail. The jail. Christ, he was right. Right in between the subshop and the barber shop. In fact, it was right in the middle of everything, right in the middle of the downtown. My God. Couldn’t they think of a better location than this? I was suddenly reminded of those scenes from Clint Eastwood westerns like “Hang ’em High,” and I could see local townsfolk in the 1880s being dragged here for their execution. Only now there was a bunch of black guys playing basketball behind barbed wire. One of them noticed me gawking at them after I pulled up and parked the car.

“What’s your problem?” the guy yelled.

“Nothing,” I replied.

He smiled. So did I. Then he stuck up his middle finger and started laughing. I frowned. He kept laughing and returned to his game.

Yeah, right. Nice place. Luckily, the Heartbreak Hotel was only a short walk across the street. One look at that place, however, and I kind of felt like I had to get over there in a hurry. The place looked like it was ready to fall to the ground. Or, at least part of it did. The back half had this look like it was sinking. Outside, the paint was chipping from top-to-bottom, and in some spots it looked like holes were rotting right through the wood. Nice. Great place for a business meeting, right?

I walked in and humored myself, figuring it couldn’t get any worse. Well, it did. I stumbled over a foot-deep dip in the entranceway. I could feel my knee buckle as I set my foot in it. I didn’t mean to do that, but I did.

“Ouch!” I yelped. “What the hell was that?”

A sixty-something man in the lobby stood nearby, and started laughing.

“Watch it there, clumsy!” the man said.

“What the hell is this?” I said.

“It’s old,” the man said.

“Yeah, I see that…”

The man smiled. “Where you from?”

“New Jersey.”

“Yeah, up near Wilmington…”

“Huh?”

He laughed. “You that new reporter for The State News?”

“Yeah,” I said. “How did you know?”

“Your date’s here.”

“Who?”

He laughed again, then stuck out his hand. I shook it. “I’m Guy,” he said, “I own this dump.”

Too bad for him, I thought. Here it was, lunch hour, and there was hardly anybody here.

“Where is everybody?” I asked.

He laughed again. He had this big, cheesy, smile. It was like one of those sick misery smiles, like an undertaker's grin, And he laughed like he was a Dover version of Nero with his violin.

“That’s Dover… I’m taking in $200 a day,” he said. “The way it’s going, I might be out of business by the end of the year.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Hey, what am I going to do?” he said. “Everybody’s feeling it. Then they put that big godammned Wal-Mart on Route 13. Now everybody’s suffering.”

“Oh yeah, I saw that – I think it was between the McDonald’s and the Hardee’s, right?”

“Hey, whatever,” he said. “I guess you’re looking for Jenny, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You know her well, huh?”

“Sure do,” he said. “In Dover, we know everybody.”

Behind him, and as if it was on cue, the woman’s bathroom door swung open. Jenny appeared.

“Hey!” she said, excitedly. “How’s it going? Follow me.”

I did. We went to the dinging area, if you want to call it that (three picnic tables and an old wooden stove that was never used). At least the floor was flat.

Jenny pointed out her table, and picked up her three empty beer bottles and put them on another table. She had her fourth in her hand.

“We may be here a while,” she said. “Go ahead and get something to eat. I’m going to the juke box.”

I walked over to the bar and faced the baretender, who was wiping his hands on a dirty rag. I ordered a hamburger and fries, and waited. I didn’t wait long. He left for not even a minute, and produced the plate with my platter. It looked like it had been waiting their for him – the grease that had dripped out of the burger had already hardened into a while crusty material. It was like he knew I was coming.

The bartender seemed so willing to get rid of it. He thrust it rather hurriedly into my hands. And when he did, the plate vibrated and dumped a fry on the counter. I reached out to put it back on his plate, but the bartender reached first, and snatched it back.

"Hey, I was going to eat that," I said.

"I wouldn't," he replied, smiling.

He smiled, and disappeared into the back room, again. I walked back to Jenny’s table, plopped it in front of me and didn’t touch a bite of it. Hell, no. But, yeah, I was too chicken to ask for my money back.

Jenny picked her songs and sat. She was fortysomething but, hey, she was quite a looker. Her breasts and but were big, and she wore a leather coat and pants. Her black dress was low-cut. My eyes were in those boobs and, oh yeah, she noticed. She didn’t do anything to discourage it, either. But there was something steely and oft-putting about her, though. Yeah, her wardrobe was inviting, but her lips were so tight, and her chin always had this kind of chiseled look. She was like stone, like a statue in an S&M club. I felt it was a little too much like falling in love with the high school teacher, personally. Only this one chugged beer and smoked like a fiend.

“I’m ready,” she declared as she sat, and sipped some more beer. “Let’s get down to business…”

“OK.”

“First, let me give you this,” she said.

It was a memo. Bosses love memo. I was here for what, three days, and this was only my first. Consider myself lucky. This one had a title: “We Pledge” it said at the top. OK, I thought. Whatever. Let’s read it and see what this is all about.

The Delaware State News is the downstate daily that pledges to be a source of accurate news and information for the central Delaware readership. We pledge to be trustworthy, loyal and faithful to our readers.

“What’s this for?” I asked.

Jenny drank some beer, and wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “Well, we felt it was important to have a motto, of sorts,” she said. “Sort of a all-for-one, one-for-all kind of philosophy…I think it also creates an aura of discipline and respect that reporters should have…”
She lost me here. I didn’t really care. How bad could a memo be? I really didn’t want to get into a philosophical argument with somebody who was chugging beer and showing six inches of cleavage.

Jenny finished her beer, and signaled Guy for another. Then she downed that one, too, leaving about a quarter of it..

“So, how was the murder?” she asked, wiping her lips again.

“The murder?” I said. “Right. Well, let me tell you. I couldn’t make this stuff up.”

“Well, I already heard about it,” Jenny said. “Look, out here, this kind of crazy shit happens all the time.”

Man, I felt. That was discouraging. I couldn’t quit this.

“Yeah,” I said. “But what about a fat guy with cigarette burns on his chest, lying in the sand? Does that happen all the time?”

“Well, once we had a guy who had a heart attack after somebody stuck a lighted cigarette in his eye.”

“Wow,” I said. “OK, well, that’s certainly hard to top…”

“…And the cops didn’t show up until the next day.”

“Christ,” I said. “What’s the deal with that, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Jenny said. I seemed to strike a nerve with that statement, because her eyes seemed to drift off.

“Sometimes I wonder why I stick around here,” she said, drinking her beer and puffing on her smoke. “I mean, I have a brain. I could have been a lawyer, even a doctor. But, what am I doing? Sticking around here and writing about trailer trash.”

I’m such a nudge. I heard that and I wanted to play lawyer.

“I thought you didn’t like criticizing the readers?” I said. I just wanted to know when was it allowed, and when it wasn’t allowed.

“Yeah, well, I can do it because I went to high school with them.”

OK, I thought. That’s hard to dispute.

“Right,” I said, uneasily. “You grew up around here, right?”

“Oh yeah,” she said, drinking more. “In fact – you know what’s funny – I grew up in a trailer.”

“Really?” I said. “What was that like?”

“What do you mean what was that like?” she said. “What do I look like, a fucking alien?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean anything,” I said. “I never knew anybody who lived in a trailer.”

“Hey, it’s all right,” she said. “I get it all the fucking time.”

“I could imagine.”

“In a way, I’m proud of it,” she said. “All my friends lived in them, too. But I’m the only one who’s an executive – if you can call an editor an executive. Everybody else, they’re working in Wal-Mart and shit like that….They get excited if they’re promoted to retail sales.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” I said.

“Times were hard,” she told me. “But I think I proved that if you work hard, and make the right connections, you can succeed. It all depends on you, and how you approach your career.”

She emptied her bottle, and ordered another.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m just burned out,” she said, slugging back some more. She was getting more disoriented, it seemed. With each minute, she was getting clumsy with the way she was holding the bottle. When I first got there, she was cleaning bottles from the table. Now she was spilling drops of beer on her dress.

“I do this seven days a week, really,” she said, not missing a beat, even as she spilled a big dropped right between her boobs. I pretended to care about what she was talking about. But watching this little wet-T-shirt contest was too good.

She drank some more, and then spilled some more. This was a big drop, and she finally noticed.

She asked for some napkins, and woke me out of my trance. Damn.

“Could you hand me some napkins?” she said.

“Huh?”

“Some napkins… over there, on that table.”

“Uh, yeah, right.” I reached over, grabbed some and handed them to her.

“Um, well, do you ever think about getting out?” I asked.

Jenny sipped her beer. “Nah,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know, I’m not usually this negative. I get the whole community-service thing. I think that’s what we’re doing – or at least, that’s what I tell myself. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t do it.”

“Right.”

“But in southern Delaware we’re it,” she said. “And what’s important is not what you’re covering, because the people around here, you know, they’ll hear about it, whatever it is. They’ll talk to each other, the whole thing. But what’s important is not what you’re covering, but how you’re covering it.”

Jenny finished her beer. Now there was silence. No signaling for another. I was a little surprised. A half hour into this and I thought it was just part of her reflexes. Now it was just the two of us, sitting there, looking around the room but not looking at each other. She puffed on her cigarettes, and her eyes grew red and heavy.

“OK, here’s your assignment,” she said, slurring slightly.

“OK, what’s that.”

“Follow this up,” she said. “You’re job from here on in will be to write about this. Write it, crack it, break it open. We need a big splash.”

I was stunned. A high-profile murder case? Only the big boys do that. Or so I thought. That’s the way it is in the movies. I should have just taken the ball and run with it. But I’ve been accused of having a big mouth before. Besides, she seemed to be a little too dismissive of the thing. It was like she just had had it. It was like she was just ready to crawl into bed. Does she know what she’s getting into? Who the hell is Jim Jones, really?”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” she said. “I want a fresh face on this. Besides, you’re getting $9 an hour, so you’re worth it.”

She then smiled and sucked down the rest, emptying yet another. She was done.

“Yeah, but I mean, this doesn’t seem like any ordinary murder,” I said. “I mean, I’ve heard of Jim Jones, a little bit.”

“Yeah, and you probably heard how he and his waste-product friends turned a colony of Dover Air Force Base employees into looney tunes….”

“Yeah, I did…”

“I mean, this guy, what’s his name? Cramner? He’s a Jones Boy. I’ve heard of him…”

“That’s right,” I said. “Small state, huh?.”

“It has nothing to do that,” she said. “Look, I was here when the whole thing happened. I know all about Jim Jones. Christ, it was the front page of every fucking paper when it happened.”

“Did you cover it?”

“No. I wanted to,” she said. “They gave it to somebody else … hey, fuck, whatever? I mean, everybody wanted to cover it. It was hot for a few days there – the whole town was talking about, treating it like some big carnival, especially when the planes came in and dumped the bodies off at the mortuary.”

Jenny reached under the seat, and pulled out a stack of papers from pocket book. They were copies of a Newsweek magazine article she made years back, she said. But she saved them all these years, she said, because she wanted to remind herself of everything of, for and about Jim Jones.

She pushed my untouched hamburger and fries to the side, and slipped the papers in front of me.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Read the first few graphs.”

So I did.

Alert! Alert! Alert! Everyone to the pavilion!" The Rev. Jim Jones was on the loudspeaker, summoning the members of his Peoples Temple to their last communion. Dutifully, they gathered round; some of them, without a doubt, knew what was in store. "Everyone has to die," said Jones. "If you love me as much as I love you, we must all die or be destroyed from the outside." Mothers grasped their children to their breasts. "What have they done?" one screamed. Jones ordered his medical team to bring out "the potion," a battered tub of strawberry Flavour-aide, laced with tranquilizers and cyanide. "Bring the babies first," he commanded.
At the fringes of the huge crowd, armed guards fingered guns and bows and arrows. Some families edged forward voluntarily. Others held their ground. The guards moved in, grabbing babies from recalcitrant mothers and holding them up to let "nurses" spray the poison down their throats with hypodermics. A man showed a gun into the ribs of Rauletter Paul, who was clutching her year-old son, Robert Jr. "You dumb bitch," he shouted. "You better do it or we're going to shoot your ass off." Tears streaming down her face, she shot the poison into the baby's mouth, and he immediately began to scream and go into convulsions.

Sick. My God. Little babies. Little tiny babies. Sick.

“I can’t read anymore,” I said.

Jenny leaned back, lit up a cigarette, took a big drag and blew the smoke up toward the ceiling.

“Now imagine a big C-130 flies into your backyard, and dumps this on you,” she said.

“Christ.”

“This is what we had,” she said. “I read that over and over again. That could have been me writing that … I had big dreams, you know. I always saw myself working for The New York Times, busting crime and the whole deal. You know, I was young at the time, and I saw that as a big-ticket thing.”

I was still a little stunned, you I just felt like yessing her do death. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with someone who was so self-absorbed.

“I see.” I said.

“But that’s the fucking breaks,” she said, blowing more smoke toward the ceiling “Nothing I can do about it now.”

“Right.”

“But I can certainly help you,” she said. “Maybe this will be like payback time, you know what mean?

“Payback time?”

“Nevermind that,” she said, dismissively. Jenny’s eyes were sagging, and her chiseled look seemed ready to crumble. She didn’t seem to be ready for analytical thought. I just played along.

“The first thing you should do is talk to people who knew this guy,” she said. “You know, people who worked at the base.”

“Who’s going to talk to me from there?”

“Nobody,” she said. “I’m saying that you’re going to have to talk to people who used to work there…past tense, right?”

“OK.” I pulled out my pad, which I had stuck in my back pocket earlier, and prepared to take notes.

“Well, I know a guy named Chad who should be able to help you.”

“Chad?” I asked. “Who’s that?”

“He was a guy who worked at the base…I don’t know much about him, personally. He owns a bar in Rehoboth Beach, just like my family did. He and I used to compete against each other, in a way. He used to work in the mortuary and, boy, he used to tell me some stories…”

“Rehoboth Beach?” I asked. “Where’s that?”

“Where’s Rehoboth Beach?” she said, incredulously. “C’mon I. You can do better than that.”
She took my pad, wrote his telephone number on a sheet, and tore it off.

“Here it is,” she said, handing it to me. “Give him a call. I’m sure he could point you in the right direction.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Now, let’s get the fuck out of here.”

“Is that it?”

“That’s it for now,” she said. “Just give me the cell phone.”

I had shoved them in side pocket, and gave it to her. Jenny then pulled out her long chain of keys, and twirled them around her finger as she headed for the door. She stumbled as she walked through the big dip in the floor. The bartender reached out to help her, but she waved him off.

She kept stumbling all the way to her car. I quickly followed her, right up to when she got in her Lexus, and positioned herself behind the wheel.

“Are you sure you can do this?” I asked, talking through the shut window on her car door.

"Just get the fuck in your car, and shut the hell up!”

I sat, and said nothing. Her eyes were really red now, and her slurred speech was practically incomprehensible.

“Really,” I said. “I can just get my car later.”

She didn’t listen. Her windows were shut tight. Her world was in front of her. She turned the ignition, and slipped out of the parking space with easy precision. Once on the road, I watched her, and grew envious – if not impressed – as she hovered between the lines like a pro.