of behavior at the Charlotte Times and I will not stand for it. This needs to be a newspaper of the highest standards.”
“I agree. We cannot have our employees subject to that kind of verbal treatment,” Hafer said.
“Ronnie, did you actually say anything to the young woman?” asked Heitman. A sensible question, I thought.
Bullock had taken a penknife from his pocket, opened the blade and was examining it closely. “No,” he said, looking up from the knife. “Maybe I just should have asked directly instead of calling HR.”
Heitman ignored his sarcasm and turned to Hafer. “So there is no allegation that he was verbally abusive or engaged in any kind of sexist behavior directly to her?”
“I don’t know of any.”
“That doesn’t matter,” interjected Carmela. “What matters is his state of mind. Women do not need to be subject to this kind of mental leering. It has gone on forever and it must stop.”
“She’s just jealous I saw her first.” Bullock smirked. “There’s more dykes in her department than there are on the goddam Mississippi!” He began trimming his fingernails with the scissors on his knife.
The assistant sports editor howled.
“This is preposterous!” Carmela shrieked.
“It’s true. You should see her staring at the managing editor’s secretary’s breasts. She sits in a chair beside her desk pretending to have a conversation about personnel issues but she never takes her eyes off ’em.”
“This is libelous!” Carmela shouted, rising out of her chair. “I am not on trial here. I will not be subject to this!”
Walker struggled to get the meeting back under control. “I feel like I’m tryin’ to herd chickens. Let’s stick to the grievance.”
“You can’t punish someone for having bad thoughts or even asking rude questions,” I said. “What Ronnie did was stupid. But who got hurt?”
Heitman took off her glasses and cleared her throat. “John, employees regularly come to you with questions about company benefits and policies.” She said it as statement for him to confirm, a little like a cross-examining lawyer. “And Ronnie’s question was about his pension, correct? Whether he would lose it if he got fired for what would be considered sexual assault or sexual harassment?”
“Well, ostensibly,” Hafer said cautiously. “But I don’t think he was looking for a serious answer.”
Heitman charged ahead. “In the human relations department, are employee matters confidential? You have records about pay, medical claims that sort of thing.”
“Of course. All confidential.”
“If I asked you whether our health insurance covered a particular medical procedure, would that be confidential?”
“Of course.”
“Or how much my pension will be when I retire. Would that be confidential?”
Hafer’s face fell. He could see where this was heading. Bullock could see it, too, and he began to smile.
“Yes. But this is completely different. This wasn’t a serious benefit inquiry. This was a joke!”
“Likely, it was a joke,” said Heitman. “A bad joke, but still a joke. Either that, or it was a serious inquiry to the human relations department which is protected by confidentiality. Like Matt said, who got hurt? Frankly, I don’t see why we are even here.”
Hafer’s face turned beet red. “It was crude and offensive.”
“Does the young woman, the assistant librarian, feel sexually harassed?” Heitman asked.
“Of course not,” Hafer answered. “She doesn’t even know.”
“Do you feel sexually harassed, John? Did Bullock’s remark create a hostile work environment for you?” she probed.
If it was possible, Hafer blushed even deeper. “No, of course not. But Ronnie Bullock was way out of line and this isn’t the first time.”
“He offended you. It seems to be the normal thing would be for you to tell him that and ask for an apology. Have you done that?”
“No. I thought it was a matter for the Discipline Committee.”
“Next time, why don’t you try asking for an apology?” she said sweetly.
Walker asked Bullock if he had anything to add.
“I don’t think there’s much dispute about the facts,” he said. “I only have one question. When did we decide we were going to start policing thoughts and not just actions?”
Bullock and Hafer were dismissed from the meeting and for the next half hour the discussion plowed old ground. I was reminded of a conclusion I’d come to before: for people in the communications business, we’re pretty lousy communicators. One person gets offended and instead of just bringing it up with the individual who committed the alleged offense, a whole committee has to get involved.
Carmela put up a fight but in the end, Heitman’s view prevailed. The committee recommended to management that Ronnie Bullock apologize for expressing an offensive thought and be reminded to avoid sexist language and behavior in the future. There would be no official discipline and nothing would go in his permanent record.
Carmela had her own methods of retribution. “I cannot believe we are going to turn aside our eyes to this indignity! I can tell you that in the future we will have a very difficult time finding room for Ronnie Bullock stories on the front page . . . not that I would expect any in the first place.”
Typical Carmela. But it could have been worse. The whole thing had taken less than two hours. A rough justice had been achieved. As far as Live Toads go, the Ronnie Bullock discipline committee meeting hadn’t been that hard to swallow.
My luck held when a beat reporter called in sick and I was assigned a school board meeting that ended in a fistfight and a front-page byline for me. I had put the finishing touches on it when I looked up to see Walker Burns approaching my cubicle with an expression like the proverbial cat that swallowed the canary.
“Well, Big Shooter,” he said, sitting down and propping his feet on my desk, “you get your wish. Two weeks on Wallace Sampson. No other assignments. Unless the plane crashes.” “Unless the plane crashes” was Walker’s usual qualifier when doling out a project that would take a reporter out of the mainstream of the flow of news for a while. It meant you had freedom to pursue your project exclusively, except in the case of some overwhelming news event like a plane crash.
It was the best news I could have heard. Certainly it was the first good news I’d had in a long while. At least for two weeks, I could leave behind the world of discipline committees, hate mail, daily deadlines, and one-day wonders and count myself among the true big shooters. At least for a while, I had been given the opportunity to do real investigative reporting.
But I was also scared. Brad Hall was taking a chance on me. Walker was taking a chance on me. I was taking a chance on me. My career was dead if this didn’t work out and truth is, my gut was less confident than my mouth. I tried to be cool, like this was an everyday thing, but my throat went dry and I could only croak, “Thanks, man.”
But Walker wasn’t done. “I want to double-team this one. I’m putting you and another reporter on the story, at least for the two weeks.”
I was puzzled. It wasn’t unusual to put two reporters on a story but I knew we were short-staffed and, anyway, this was one story I had developed on my own.
“We’ll cover twice as much ground with two of you,” Walker explained. “And in terms of investigative reporting, you’re a rookie. I want you to have some help.”
“Who?”
“Bullock.”