Adventures with 'the Urinal'

Like the waning daylight of fall, dark days have fallen upon the mean little suburb where I live next to O’Hare International Airport. Earlier this month, a 47-year-old man was brutally stabbed to death in front of his senile wife in his trailer home next to our old high school. Like a dog that bears witness to a terrible crime but cannot talk, the wife, who suffers from early onset Alzheimer disease, has been unable to provide any useful clues to the local police.

A week later, a 61-year-old man was struck and killed by a reckless driver as he attempted to cross a busy street in the downtown business district during the early morning hours. Like communities all across America, our streets and intersections are no longer pedestrian-friendly, as traffic patterns and roads are now designed to move a shitload of cars as quickly as possible. Lights are timed so that pedestrians have less than thirty seconds to cross busy intersections, as cars whip around rounded curbs. God help you if you are elderly, disabled or obese. If the light changes while you are still in the middle of the intersection, you are fucked.

These stories have been recounted in our community newspaper, the Journal, which is published every Wednesday and Friday. The Journal Topics and News is an entrenched, family-owned publishing company that ascribes to the lowest standards of journalism. It is the joke of the local journalism community, and most residents refer to the paper as ‘the Urinal.' Full of typos, grammatical errors and misspelled sensationalistic headlines, the Urinal is the rag to read if you want to find out what our Mafia-run city council is up to, or which neighbors recently got busted for growing pot.

The most popular feature in the Urinal is “Speak Out,” where local residents anonymously debate the important issues of the day, both local and global. Our city’s overdevelopment of condos (we got condos coming out the ass), troublesome squirrels, local TV news anchors who talk to fast, O’Hare runway expansion, 666, George W. Bush, the war in Iraq, and immigrants who refuse to learn English and shoplift at neighborhood garage sales -- are just a few of the ongoing arguments splashed across the pages of “Speak Out.”

There are several means by which readers can voice their opinions in “Speak Out,” including calling and ranting on the Urinal’s answering machine, submitting snail mail written in crayon, and my own personal favorite, the anonymous e-mail. The comments people leave are often illiterate, unintentionally funny or are otherwise submitted by cranks.

Last summer, I had a record five crank letters published in one edition of “Speak Out.” The first suggested that instead of spending hundreds of dollars on filtering software, that our public library install booths around its public computers so that perverts could masturbate in privacy when viewing porn on the Internet, instead of violating the constitutional rights of children and the elderly. Others concerned obese people riding electric scooters in the supermarket (“I’m tired of them running over my toes”); Comcast’s emergency weather bulletins pre-empting television programming and the proliferation of bum camps in the Cook County forest preserves. After watching the large number of overweight Americans streaming past President Reagan’s casket as it lay in state in the U.S. Capitol rotunda, I suggested that a more fitting memorial to the late president would be for Americans to "get off their lazy, fat butts and exercise."

But the story of the 47-year-old man who was stabbed multiple times through the neck really grabbed me. Nick was a blue-collar guy who was left permanently disabled by a childhood accident. He quit his job working for a local paving company to care for his 53-year-old wife after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. According to the Urinal, police said Nick was a “known crack-cocaine user” who was most likely murdered because he owed money to drug dealers or a drug deal that went bad. He was last seen alive cashing his disability check at a local bank, and he was found with his pockets turned inside out. Police described his friends as “low-lifes,” implying that Nick was a “low life” also. His body was discovered by police during a well-being check, after his family called him at home and his wife told them that Nick had been "asleep on the floor” for the past twelve hours.

Nick’s sister, who shares my first name, said the family was hoping to air his story on “America’s Most Wanted.” She described him as a “teddy bear” and said she couldn’t understand anyone who would want to commit such a horrible act of violence on her brother. The police chief said that detectives had interviewed “40 persons of interest” and the local Crimestoppers put up a $1,000 reward for information leading to solving the murder.

I don’t know, maybe it was because I grew up with a couple hundred guys like Nick. They aren’t the brightest bulbs in the box, but they’re good guys, always ready to help me fix my car, beat the shit out of trespassers lurking near my home, roll up my car windows when it starts to rain, buy me a beer, or give me an honest opinion. They get up at 4:30 in the morning and work long hours at jobs of hard, physical labor while many of us sit on our asses all day in front of computers in heated and air-conditioned offices. These guys may not make the best life choices or decisions, but like all of us, if they did the best they could at the moment.

Nick wasn’t some beautiful, white pregnant woman who suddenly turned up missing on Christmas Eve, but a bearded, beer-bellied, unemployed laborer with hip problems who tried to do right by his wife when she became ill. It’s the ongoing assault of the middle class, with jobs being outsourced and lifetimes of assets being wiped out when loved ones get sick. So I sent an e-mail to the editor of the Urinal asking him to pass along my contact information to Nick’s sister, offering my assistance in getting her brother’s story aired on “America’s Most Wanted.” We all attended the same high school during the ‘70s, and chances are that we passed each other in the halls, or sat waiting in the dean’s office together.

My professional skills are for the most part pretty useless. My abilities to write puff pieces for community newspapers and marketing brochures do little to help further society, other than to make some cranky white guy even richer. If I were to find myself stranded on a desert island, I’d probably starve to death or get attacked by wild animals.

About a week later, I got a call from a reporter at the Urinal. She was actually pretty cool, and I found out from her that the rest of the staff looked forward to my crank letters to “Speak Out.” It was pretty awkward, because usually I'm the one asking the really stupid questions. I wasn’t comfortable with the situation at all when she told me that the crackpot publisher wanted to do a story about my helping this family get their story on AMW. I hadn’t even talked to Nick’s sister yet, and asked for her number. I asked the reporter to please wait until we actually did something. She assured me she would.

Nick’s sister told me she was too distraught from cleaning out his trailer to meet me for coffee. I had done some research on AMW and some other organizations, and because he may have been engaged in illegal activity at the time of his death, his story probably wouldn't meet their qualifications for assistance. I had a million questions to ask Nick’s sister, plus some suggestions for putting the heat on local police and anyone else in the community who might be withholding information.

Last Wednesday, my friend Karol called me laughing her ass off. She told me to turn to page 6 in the Urinal, and I thought she was referring to my latest crank letter to “Speak Out” comparing our mayor to Johnny Sack on “The Sopranos.” I just about shit when I saw the headline: “Qwest to put murder case on AMW.”

The article was all about how I was tapping into “my extensive network of contacts in the TV industry.” Hey, I know a gay guy who works for a popular, nationally syndicated, daytime TV show in L.A.! The article got worse. Somehow, I ended up knowing Nick in high school and was vice president of media relations for some corporation. It was like reading something in the National Enquirer.

I immediately fired off an e-mail to Nick’s sister, apologizing for the article, how I never said half the shit they had me saying, and that I was in no way seeking publicity for myself. I told her I would never exploit her family’s tragedy. She wrote me back telling me not to worry about it and that the police had told her to quit talking to people about the investigation. She said she was furious with the Urinal for printing that her brother was a “known crack-cocaine user” and trying to pass off her brother’s murder as just “another druggie that no one had to worry about.” She said her brother only took drugs prescribed by his doctor, and that he had no criminal record of any kind. She wrote of her seething anger and the horrible pain that was inflicted upon her mother. She said the cops did not appreciate at all the loving tribute that a more reputable paper had written about her brother. She said when she’s ready to talk about it, I’ll be the first person she’ll call.

I sent her some numbers of some support groups for families of homicide victims. I was so angry at what the Urinal has been printing about Nick that I wanted to go over to that office and kick that weasley, self-righteous, Christian motherfucker publisher’s ass. Most likely some jerk-off cop in the police department made some offhand comment about Nick being a crack-cocaine user and this idiot bought it. Even if he was just a pothead, like half the town is, I’m tired of potheads being demonized by our hypocritical politicians and an overhyped multi-billion dollar drug testing industry. I’m sure Jeffrey Skilling passed Enron’s fucking pee test and look what a schmuck he turned out to be.

I don’t think I’ll be wasting any more of my time with the Urinal. They’re still sending me two papers a week and I haven’t renewed my subscription in over a year. The sad thing is Nick’s sister said I was the only person from our town that offered any compassion or sympathy to her family. I hope I never become a victim of a violent crime.