Our

Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

I spent hours working on my column this week. No luck. It was hopeless, like all I was seeing was what it was like at the end of the line. All I was doing was rearranging bits and pieces of old news, producing nothing new.

So I did what I often do when I get like that… I worked some on my novel.

It’s called “The Biggest Story in the World.” It’s about Benny.

I started going back over the first chapter. It was 1,400 words long. When I was finished, it was 510 words.

It’s about doing something crazy when you get to the end of the line. Here it is:

Chapter 1

The Prize

Benny tracked dangerous animals in the woods, following their scent. He’d been warned. One morning he found a bullet hole in the side of his car. Earlier, he’d been roughed up by some East St. Louis toughs who worked for the county official who’d been defrauding the county to finance his “other life,” out of sight of his unsuspecting wife.  

In the end, the county official went to jail and his little gang of toughs had to find real jobs and Benny won the biggest prize.

The 70s were a good time to be an investigative reporter: not just a reporter, but an investigative reporter. It was after Woodward and Bernstein, played by Dustin Hoffman and what’s his name, made it look glamorous.

Benny was 26 years old and stoned.

It was 1976, the nation’s Bicentennial, so the Inland Daily Press Association decided to celebrate it by holding its annual Awards Ceremony aboard the replica of an 18^th century Mississippi Riverboat paddle-wheeler docked along the St. Louis riverfront, in the water to avoid state gambling laws. The boat had a casino and a ballroom, where the awards would be handed out with pomp and applause. The winners had already been notified to make sure they were there. Benny had won first place in the category of investigative reporting.

After everybody was good and liquored up the time came to hand out the awards. A booming mechanical voice pierced through the noise of a Dixieland band and the shrieks and hubbub coming from the casino area.

From where he was leaning up against the boat’s ornate railings, Benny looked out at the St. Louis skyline, the Gateway Arch, where European immigrants began their journeys west up the Missouri into the unknown Western frontier.

Looking down, the waters of the continent’s land between the mountains silently washed around and past the boat as if it had never existed. Benny wondered: “What exists.” He was high on the free booze brought to him by a cocktail waitress in a short dress. “All this is for me,” he said to her. “Sure, mister,” she said.

“The awards ceremony is about to begin,” the voice over the loudspeaker announced again. “Everybody please proceed to the main banquet hall. Drinks will be served at your tables.”

The winners of the top prizes were being seated at the head table on a raised platform looking out and over the noisy banquet hall. The master of ceremonies asked everybody to settle down so the awards ceremony could begin, but there was one empty seat at the head table. People started looking around and asking: “Where’s Benny, Benny Profante?”

Somebody said they’d seen him leaning over the railing not twenty minutes before. Nobody said it, but some thought that maybe he’d gone overboard and was in the river.

But then some others said they’d seen him staggering down the gangplank like a drunken sailor.

The Greyhound depot was a 15-minute walk from the riverfront, but it took Benny a couple hours, stopping by jazz clubs he liked to frequent. He got on the first bus going to a place he’d never been before.

Like in the Beatles song, he had dreamed of becoming a paperback writer, not an investigative reporter, which was just something he had to do along the way.