My 12-Step Journey into the Addiction of Journalism
A mini-memoir
First I was a preadolescent substitute janitor at a specialty magazine, in a gloomy old three-story house near Vanderbilt where Dad and other men (only men) chronicled the enforcement of Brown v. Board of Education and pounded manual typewriters and mostly just wanted me to empty their ashtrays.
Second, still too young to drive, I wiped wet chrome and steel and glass at a carwash sandwiched between West End and Broadway, grossed less than $150 per 60-hour summer week, met the first ferocious and profane woman of my life, looked away when the owner held his poodle up to the employee water fountain for a slurp.
Third, in a Green Hills Mall basement, I learned the real reason for the season by stuffing so-called summer sausages into the crinkly fake grass of Xmas gift boxes and forming almond-coated balls whose fake blue cheese flavoring left my super-chilled hands reeking like ass.
Fourth was the second janitor gig, first job-related brush with death and first firing, from a store in the same mall whose star salesman enlisted my help with a big furniture delivery; drank Stroh’s tallboys all the way to a house on a gravel road in West Tennessee; guzzled gin with our similarly deranged customer; fell off her porch into shrubbery as we were saying goodbye, several hours behind schedule; and sent our rented box truck sailing off I-40 into darkness.
Fifth, somehow alive and well and back in Green Hills, I plopped battered cod fillets and frozen potato pieces into boiling oil, then dumped the result into pans under heat lamps that turned out to burn skin worse than spattering grease … and even now I occasionally think I see a scar on my right wrist, while at other times it seems to have been swallowed by an age spot.
Sixth found me in a then-distant Nashville suburb, inside a grocery store that was under construction in August and still roofless, inside a massive bakery oven installing insulation whose itchy sweat-borne fibers reached every inch of my bony frame and cured me of construction forever.
Seventh, upon starting college in small-town Indiana, I was assigned to answer calls to the campus cops and dispatch them accordingly — but no one ever called, leaving me alone at night in a windowless room and leading to a shirtless sprawl across a desk for a backrub from a classmate, which ended when an armed coworker arrived ahead of schedule.
Eighth, after dropping out and returning to Music City, I became the lone man at a daycare center near downtown, where my charges were two to five years old and included an old-soul girl who briefed me on the neighborhood rape man and a swishy boy whose mom freaked upon finding him in the dress-up station wearing a dress and heels and maybe lipstick.
Ninth, back in college, I escaped another on-the-job, on-the-road deathtrap: driving a YMCA’s elderly ex-school bus, starting down a long hill with a load of grade-schoolers, feeling the brake pedal ooze sickeningly to the floor, pumping it, pumping it, pumping it, finally feeling it catch.
Tenth, as co-editor of the student newspaper, I opined about our Quaker institution in a way that inspired the dean to rise from his chair and ball up his right fist and charge toward me at a luncheon of muckety-mucks: one of my fondest memories of higher education and self-satisfied folks who espouse nonviolence.
Eleventh (and second firing): In Madison, Wisconsin, my bachelor’s degree qualified me to play host at a semi-fancy new restaurant, whose chef-owner assigned me to keep flipping a cassette so that Pachelbel’s Canon softly and incessantly soothed diners of a certain stratum, but neither of us knew that the tape had been spiked with “Tainted Love” at maximum volume.
Twelfth, up the street at a part-time gay bar, I emptied ashtrays and lugged buckets of ice up nearly vertical stairs and, as the DJ spun “When Doves Cry,” carried 10 glasses with no tray through a sea of tranced-out dancers … and even now I can see myself lying down after last call on a winter’s night, under the flight path, listening to a plane descending into the northwest wind, smelling smoke in my every pore.
There’s more to the story, of course — there always is — but maybe you can begin to see how I began to love digging records out of dark places and asking unwelcome questions and raising hell with facts.
Can’t you?
Copyright©️ 2025 by Brooks Egerton. All rights reserved.
Brooks Egerton is the organizer of Sewanee Spoken Word. His other work, fiction and non, appears in BULL, D Magazine, AC|DC, and The Dallas Morning News.
