Trial by Fire

I once told Sidney that I’m finding some dirt on Charley Dart. “Yes, Sidney, Charley Dart is not a squeaky clean bureaucrat, I got some info that he has a sordid past. Do you know that he once stole cars and even sold drugs and fireworks to kids?” It wasn’t selling drugs or stealing cars that made Sidney angry, it was that someone would actually sell fireworks to kids. Sidney shook his head and wondered aloud what Washington was coming to in hiring such a bureaucrat. I told Sidney he should write an editorial to expose this evil Charley Dart. Sidney thought it was a wonderful idea. He said he hadn’t felt this energized in years about an editorial.

All my crude plagiarizing had proved my point that no one read this rag. Sidney said the magazine had a modest readership of ten thousand, but I figured Sidney was cooking the circulation numbers to charge more for advertising. He may have printed 10,000 but he probably only mailed about 200 copies on a good month. I had no proof except that we never received one letter from our readers. But Sidney told me I had a bright future ahead of me with his magazine.

I had already been home for two weeks when I called Sidney and told him I needed another week off. I told him my nerves weren’t getting better and I needed to stay home a little longer. Even though Sidney was concerned about my health, he was even more concerned that my feature story on the high fatality rate at railroad crossings was due in a few days. I told him not to worry that I had been working on it at home and I would email it to him in a couple of days. I had found an old story from the Chicago Tribune archives about this very subject — it was from a three-part series, a good 6,000 words.

I knew I couldn’t go back to work until the panic attacks stopped. In the last couple of weeks I tried to go outside, but after a few minutes, my legs would become rubbery and I thought I was going to hyper-ventilate and faint. My only comfort was staying at home. My mother had called me during my second week at home and was concerned that I was becoming an agoraphobic. She suggested that I go to church. “A little prayer might just do the trick” she said.