Our Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

How to End Suffering

The second surgery turned out to be no big deal, but nevertheless I spent the following week feeling hung over and unenthused -- like about anything. Leibniz defined suffering as “diminish motion,” which suddenly gave me an idea and I got busy rewriting an early scene in Oikos Gnosis:

Oikos Gnosis

(a book about economics)

Chapter 3

Detroit, 1979

Scene II:

In 1979, Benjamin T. Profante was a newspaper reporter in Detroit. Everybody called him Benny.

It was his job to know what was going on and he wanted to do a good job. It seemed to him like the natural thing to do. Do a good job. He’d been raised in the 50s on the Idea of Progress -- the almost universal idea back then that if you pulled your boots up in the morning, made it to work on time and did a good job that you had a right to expect things to work out for the best and that if they didn’t you had a right to complain. If the old man had a ten-foot wooden rowboat, you should be able to expect a twelve-foot aluminum outfit with a 5 hp Evinrude outboard for trolling for Northern Pike.

Benny was considered an up-and-comer. While working his way up through a series of small-town dailies before hitting the big time in Detroit, he’d won awards for investigative reporting. The 70s had been a good time to be an investigative reporter after Woodward and Bernstein played by Dustin Hoffman and what’s-his-name made it look glamorous. Whenever he met a girl in a singles bar frequented by young professionals he always told her that he was an investigative reporter and imagined that she was impressed.

A young guy, just 31, in a business dominated by older guys with holes in their socks and dog-eared notebooks crammed with contact numbers collected over the decades, Benny liked to hang out in unusual places and was good at coming up with unusual slants to breaking stories. In the business, it was called “instinct,” or a “nose for news.” Everybody said that Benny had it. Benny said he was just curious, that was all. That and that he wanted to do a good job.

Benny hadn’t started out by chasing the dream of becoming an award-winning investigative reporter. It was just something that happened along the way. Actually, he’d started out with the dream of becoming a famous writer like the ones who wrote the stories his father read to him and his brothers as they were growing up in their small town at the edge of the northern woods -- Hemingway’s stories about the Two Heart River country in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula where Benny caught his first trout,  or Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” about not surviving an unforgiving Alaskan night.

After first hearing the Beatle’s “Paperback Writer” in high school, Benny decided that that’s what he wanted to do -- become a famous writer. Alone in his room at night he would imagine what he would say on the Johnny Carson Show and people back in the old home town would tell their children stories about when they’d played neighborhood games with a famous writer.

The dream was morphogenic. It was why he quit college in his junior year. College deferments were ending, but after he got a high number in the 1969 draft lottery and knew he wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam, he was free to choose. His family and a high school sweetheart were expecting him to get a teaching degree and come back home. But he decided to take off.

From what he’d learned from his college professors, he got the impression that that’s what famous writers did before they became famous -- they took off… in one way or another.

Benny told “the Professor” about his decision. Professor Jon Heikkinen, whom everybody called “the Professor” -- Professor of Modern American Literature -- had kind of taken Benny under his wing during his college years in the late 60s. He first met the young student in a remedial writing class he taught for incoming freshmen who thought a sentence was anything between two periods. One day he asked the class to write a short essay about their dreams for the future. Benny was the only student ever in all the remedial writing classes the Professor had ever taught who said he wanted to be a famous writer.

The Professor decided to keep an eye on him.

They had coffee sometimes in the campus cafeteria and talked about writing. It didn’t take long before Benny became a regular at the famous weekend parties the Professor and his wife threw at their home overlooking the southern shore of Lake Superior. She was a professor, too, of mathematics. She said the most cryptic things, like thoughts have mass and that there’s no such thing as empty space. Everybody called her Dr. Rebecca.

When the Professor told Dr. Rebecca about what Benny had decided to do, she nodded and poured herself a glass of wine. She liked Benny. He was curious about everything. She wasn’t surprised.

It was the Professor who first suggested to Benny that he might want to consider becoming a newspaper reporter first. He said had some connections downstate and could help him get his foot in the door.

“But I want to be a famous writer,” Benny protested.

“Lots of famous writers were newspaper reporters early in their careers,” the Professor returned. “You can learn lots about writing working as a newspaper reporter, mainly about how to do it even when you’re hung over and don’t feel like it.”