Kathryn Perez

From a letter to my sister and brother-in-law,
September 29, 1990:

It’s late at night, and I’ve been reading, trying to catch up on some time to myself, which I seem to have very little of these days. Now at 1:30 AM it’s so quiet my little room with the low ceiling, windows looking out into the woody backyard and garden, once he pride of the elderly lady, who once owned the garage apartment, where I live now. It’s my own secure retreat for a while. I like it, be ever so humble a hovel.

Tonight I’ve already counted about five trains roaring by a couple of blocks away through the middle of downtown, whistles blaring in the still of the night, hardly disturbing a soul I guess, people are so used to sleeping through the commotion. Probably they think they’re dreaming. Sometimes about midnight or 1 AM when I’m alone working at the paper on deadline and getting it ready to be sent to the printing plant, a train will seem to come out of nowhere, and the building shakes and trembles momentarily as it speeds by only about 100 feet from the front door. What an experience…!

This is a tale of one long-ago, but never forgotten, dingy and depressing little apartment. Oddly, this nondescript rental became both a symbol and a sanctuary for me in a small town where I was the editor of the local weekly newspaper. I lived there from June of 1990 until October 1991 in what seems like another life to me now.

I never imagined that job and that town would be the brief, but intense, focus of my life and work. It also marked the end of a newspaper career that had begun back in 1975. I didn’t realize it at the time, of course.

I ended up living in that town near the end of the most unsettling, traumatic, and unpredictable decade of my life — the years from the Fall of 1983 until the end of 1994. I realize now more than ever, that each year of that decade held a distinct series of trials and tribulations that were formative parts of my life’s long sojourn. I often refer to those years as the time of “wandering in the wilderness” with everything that implies.

That was the decade I had no permanent job. Everything I ended up doing was temporary or transient. Each event, place, job, and the individual people I got to know, were situated in distinct way stations and mileposts along this river of time we’re all floating down to the sea of our ultimate destinations.

What I was doing always seemed to me the only recourse during each specific time period, purely from the standpoint of a job or career. On the surface, every decision, and every town or city I lived in during that decade, was a disaster in some major way, so I left to try to start over in some other, more congenial, place or job. There were exceptions, but I lived in so many different places. I encountered a series of noxious, even toxic people who both scared and repelled me. But I also met some very fine and decent people and treasured my brief friendships with them. We were destined to meet. They helped me in so many ways and enriched my life beyond measure. But they are all memories now. None of us managed to keep up with the other and this is a great regret and mystery, but an unchangeable fact.

It turned out, ironically, that these people and jobs and places were not only fated to cross my path in life, but necessary for the lessons I absolutely needed to learn, and for what life had to teach me. Without the dark valleys to traverse, I would have never emerged into the light of freedom from seemingly endless wandering and transience, and the eventual discovery, or, I should say, the miraculous acquisition of the job that became my true life’s work, and which gave me the strength and confidence, and later, the fulfillment that resulted in ten years of caregiving for my mother as she gradually and heartbreakingly deteriorated from diabetes and dementia. If I had not come out of and endured the trials of that decade, which culminated in many months of debilitating depression, I would either not be here now, or else I would be a far different person .

The bookends of that most terribly uncertain and formative decade, during which I traveled solo on road trips around the country six times, were a triumphal peak of happiness and accomplishment in the Spring of 1983 after the conclusion of my third year of teaching at a small private school, and the awful and bizarre series of events that led to depression and the complete loss of confidence in myself ten years later in the Fall of 1993.

It’s almost as if I know all the time stamps for each and every job and apartment, as well as each personal and professional disaster, including a devastatingly traumatic event that occurred at the end of the summer of 1989. I’ve never been able to write about. The road trips were my saving grace.

The forlorn little ground-floor garage apartment, was one of six apartments I lived in during the 1980s when I was in my thirties and still a relatively young man, at least from the viewpoint now of old age. I could write extensively about them all because each was a completely different experience, and each revealed so much about me and the circumstances I found myself in during those times. Each was a place that cried out, “This is only temporary. You’ll get through it.”

Some background on the newspaper editor job. I landed it after being unemployed for eight months. I was desperate for a job. I felt my mental health slipping. Not just depression but an exquisitely subtle sense of losing my mind to the stressful unknown I was trapped in month after month. I had exhausted my usual avenues for finding jobs. I was in New Orleans living at my brother’s place.

Completely out of the blue, my aunt in South Carolina called and told me about an editor position in a nearby town. Almost immediately I was on the phone with my future boss. They needed an editor as badly as I needed a job. Within days I had moved back to South Carolina and was working at the paper. It was a total whirlwind of events. I had no time whatsoever to have doubts or second thoughts, which itself was a blessing given in disguise.

However, I had not worked at a newspaper for at least a dozen years, although I had gotten my master’s degree in journalism at the end of 1989. What I wanted to do was teach journalism. It’s a wonder I was able to finish the degree, given the traumatic event I mentioned that had befallen me at the end of the summer of that year.

I knew immediately when I got to the newspaper office on Main Street that this was a huge work load and responsibility to take on. The first week I was there I was expected to put out a 24-page broadsheet weekly newspaper with every type of news and feature story, sports, announcements and more. I had a reporter to help me initially, but when the owners of the paper saw after about three weeks that I could churn out a paper with part-time helpers, they sent the reporter to another paper in the chain. This was typical of the way small newspaper chains handled employees, like they were draft horses instead of real and vulnerable human beings. I was so angry that when the head honchos showed up for an inspection visit a couple of months later, I told one of them they had “pulled the rug from under me.” Remember, I brazenly said this because I knew how desperate they were to get an editor and start turning the paper around.

I had to do it all myself. It’s astonishing how every bit of my former newspaper writing, editing skills and prior experience, came back to me almost instantaneously, Along with this came the knowledge that I had to succeed at this job because the alternative was more time unemployed, and creeping depression and feelings of worthlessness.

I knew I could do the work, even if it meant working 60 or more hours a week, with no overtime, naturally. But not a month into the job I quickly discovered that the small city had more than its share of crime, government corruption and crack cocaine dealing. Sparing you the sordid details, I immediately felt stressed because I was it — a one-person news staff. I had to cover and write all the news and feature stories, any editorials, a weekly column, and keep track of the free lance contributors, and lastly do the actual production of the copy for the layout sheets, write all the headlines and more. I certainly had no time to do any investigative reporting, which frankly should have been done in that town in particular.

Early on, I also had confirmed my hunch that this was a very strange place, full of odd and even sinister goings on. To intimidate me, two local goons with the political establishment in the town (the local mob, so to speak), met with me at a local pizza restaurant not long after I had started on the job, and proceeded to fill me in on what I should know about the town and surrounding county. They said some things in particular that literally raised the hair on the back of my neck. I’ve long since forgotten what specifically they said, only that I was repulsed by them. I never had any more dealings with those two after that, and only saw them once or twice. But they were under the radar operators. For a long time afterwards, I simply could not fathom all the implications of that meeting. But unemployment and desperation gave me a kind of super-human resolve to do the job, however imperfectly, given the resources I had at hand.

I think many small towns are like this — very insular and protective of the status quo. And, with lots of corruption that has gone on forever in these places, part of the “good old boy” system of running things. I was a potentially disruptive outsider who knew very little about the place. That was true. I certainly didn’t have a chance to look into things before I had to hit the ground running and put out the paper.

I spent 15 months in that town and met and got to know some very fine people. The staff at the paper were great to work with and I liked them all. I worked as hard as I could, but was under a clouds from Day One because of the expectations and all of the news that needed to be covered, and which I could not possibly cover to the extent a more fully staffed newsroom would have allowed.

This was going to be another temporary job but how long I could hold out, I had no idea. But I was going to do my best.

I needed a place to live and there are never many rental options in small towns, but I was lucky to find the perfect place because I had a very strong feeling this job, like all the others, would be temporary. As I have already noted, it was a tiny ground-floor garage apartment. It was located on the property of a lady who had died, and whose estate was handling the eventual sale of her property. My rental check of $135 monthly was sent to the estate executor in another city. Apparently the rent was so low because it had never been raised. And fortunately, the low cost of living enabled me to put aside some money for my eventual move to the Seattle area after my time was up at the paper.

I would describe the place as basic. It was unfurnished, so I had to borrow a spare twin mattress from my boss who lived in a nice house on Main Street with his wife and young son. I got along well with them, even socialized the first couple of months, then that ended.

I placed the mattress on cinder blocks in the tiny back bedroom, and used a storage box for a nightstand to place my reading lamp on. I had three or four boxes of books and utensils and that was pretty much it. I placed a card table and folding chair in the living room. I think I had a TV in there, but I can’t remember. I had lots of cassette tapes and a trusty cassette player/radio. The ceilings were only 7 feet high, so at 6’2” I didn’t have much room overhead. There were electric baseboard heaters in the two rooms and an ancient, loud window air conditioning unit in the bedroom. The bathroom and kitchen were tiny. The shower was about 3’x3’ (9 sq ft)and I could just barely squeeze in. I got used to it. In the tiny kitchen I fixed my morning coffee and oatmeal with a banana and orange juice, and wore out my Sharp Carousel microwave heating up Budget Gourmet Swedish meatball frozen dinners. I can’t quite explain why I got hooked on those dinners. There were also two excellent restaurants, a home cooking buffet place in the middle of downtown, and an exceptional barbecue buffet two miles out of town. Next store to the newspaper was a bakery where I popped in at least 2-3 times a day to get ice tea and delicious homemade cookies and muffins. This caused me to gain weight, even though I burned most of it off with my long and exhausting work weeks.

Most people would likely flinch at my living conditions, but if you had been living with extreme frugality and simplicity for the past six years, had traveled a lot, and knew your job was in all likelihood going to be temporary, it was a doable arrangement.

The best part about the place was the location and surroundings. The garage apartment and house were on at least an acre of land that had gardens and woods. The lady who had lived in the house had obviously been a gardener. But the gardens surrounding the garage apartment were overgrown, but with a lush, wild and unkempt beauty all their own. Daffodils, irises, and hydrangeas popped up in the spring and summer of 1991, and azaleas bloomed as well. All these were hopeful and welcome signs.

The apartment was located on a quiet street near downtown, and only minutes from where I worked. It all seemed at times like my own private 1-acre Nature sanctuary. Many a night I had the bedroom window open so I could enjoy listening to the night sounds of crickets and frogs, while a breeze gently cooled me as I relaxed on my mattress on perfect Spring and Autumn evenings reading under the light of a single lamp located atop my empty storage box makeshift nightstand. .

This was indeed my “sanctuary,” where I shut out the small-town stresses of being a newspaper editor. Every Tuesday night was production night, and I was invariably there at the office until 3 or 4 am putting the last touches on that week’s paper, and firming down all the waxed strips of copy that had to be pasted onto large layout sheets. This was just before computers arrived and everything became all electronic. But not then. I was there at the end of an era.

One staff person helped me until about midnight every production night, and then drove 29 miles home to the town where she and her family lived. That was sheer dedication and selflessness. Madness, even. I could not have put out the paper without her. She was one of those truly special people you meet and keep up with for a while and then lose contact with, sadly. You always wonder what happened to them. You never forget them. She deeply touched my life and made a stressful job bearable, and with her help, even fun. How could I ever forget that every Tuesday night about 8, before the rush to get the paper ready for the trip to the printer, she would drive over to the Sonic Drive-In and bring back back supper of chili cheese hotdogs with slaw, hash rounds and rootbeer. So delicious.

When I finally left the office at 3 am most weeks, I drove the short distance to my little sanctuary apartment, so relieved to sink exhausted, but relieved, and with a feeling of immense accomplishment, into my spartan mattress bed, turn out the light, and toss and turn briefly, worrying about mistakes in the paper I may not have caught caught, until I fell into a deep sleep.

I would invariably get up about ten am later that morning, since I could come into the office late having worked all night. I headed to a Huddle House and treated myself to a huge ham and cheese omelet with hash browns and toast. Week after week. I have always been a creature of habit, no matter where I lived or what kind of job I had. .

I fell into to a comfortable routine in that town, and was actually becoming attached to the paper, but I was always mindful of the fact that it couldn’t last much longer. I didn’t want it to.

Any decision of my own to leave was pre-empted one day after I had been there a year. One of the generally disliked newspaper chain publishers called me in to a meeting, and said the paper didn’t have enough crime news and photos of wrecked cars on the front page. He thought that would result in more papers being sold, and he might have been right. But as far as I could tell our circulation was doing well. I told this big boss that what he described wasn’t my philosophy of a community newspaper. We amicably agreed I would part ways with the paper. Foolishly perhaps, I agreed to stay on until they found a new editor. That ended up being three months.

They got an experienced editor who I liked. But he apparently knew enough about the town through his connections that I heard he hid a gun in his file cabinet. Not something I would have done.

Within just a few days of his arrival, I was gone from that town and making my plans to drive out to the Seattle area to find another newspaper job. That didn’t happen, and I worked a temp job for more than a year, but had the great pleasure of often seeing and being with my sister and brother-in-law and their adorable 2-year-old daughter. I lived in a city and surroundings of great natural beauty that held everything I love about a place. I made good friends at my temporary job. But it was not to be the place where I finally put down roots. That would soon be Charleston, and a place to call home at last. In late Spring 1993 I packed my bags for a long road trip back east.

I’m not sure what my legacy was from my 15 months at the newspaper in that small town I had left for good in the fall of 1991. I’ve only been back there once in the past 34 years, and don’t have any plans to visit again. I hear it is a lot nicer place now. I learned important life lessons there. I’m guessing the garage apartment has been torn down. For me it was “home sweet home” for a time, a quiet retreat in the middle of town, and another way station on a very long and winding road of life.