It’s a little after seven and just a minute into the Wednesday edition of KTVU-TV’s Mornings on Two program when I first realize something isn’t right.
Fifty feet from my desk in the sprawling Channel 2 newsroom, Frank Somerville and Laura Zimmerman are giving voice to the words that I, as their news writer, have fed them via the teleprompter scripts rolling just in front of their set. Serious and concerned, our two anchors are peering into Camera One, updating a much-talked-about shooting on a local commuter train—our lead story this morning, and one our executive producer, Rosemarie, has entrusted me to write.
The problem is, at this same moment, a chorus of groans is rising across the newsroom. I have, it would seem, screwed up the story.
Like a desperate lawyer in a courtroom, I shuffle through my notes, scrambling to piece together my blunder. As best I can figure, the groans had started when Laura—or was it Frank?—mentioned that the victim had died from his gunshot wounds. Hadn’t he?
Son of a bitch. It says right here in the wires that he’s in critical condition.
And now, I know, so am I.
Screw-ups are inevitable in live TV. This, however, is a big one, and I’m all but certain I’ll be hearing about—
“JEFF BELL. See me in the control room. Jeff!”
Rosemarie’s voice punches through the newsroom loudspeakers like a right hook to the face. My face. The crowd goes wild without a sound, the way coworkers do when they get to witness a good knockout blow from the boss. If there was any doubt before as to just what idiot was responsible for the morning’s egregious writing error, there isn’t any longer.
“This cannot happen,” Ro says, very matter-of-fact-like, as I pull up a chair next to her in the NASA-style control room that serves as command central for Channel 2’s newscasts. I know this is going to be awkward; the two of us have always had a great working relationship.
“I am so sorry—” I start to say.
Ro looks up from her computer screen briefly, just long enough for me to see the disappointment written all over her face.
“This is just so unlike you,” she says. “I guess I don’t understand how you could let it happen.”
I shake my head in mock bewilderment. I know damn well just how I’ve let it happen.
Two days later, Ro again summons me to the control room, again because I’ve managed to screw up another key story—this time giving a crucial newsmaker the wrong last name—and again I know exactly how I’ve managed to do it.
The problem is there’s no way I can share this explanation with my boss.
What am I going to say? “Well, uh, here’s the thing, Ro, as silly as this may sound, I, uh, I’m having some trouble concentrating because, well, because of these boats taking up all the space in my head.” No way would she or anyone else ever understand if I explained that, instead of playing back the raw news footage I’m supposed to be reviewing, I am playing back my own personal tapes, and without the aid of our state-of-the-art video machines.
I’ve been doing this playback thing, mentally re-creating the whole boat incident, almost nonstop since the mishap eleven days ago now. I do it in bed when I should be sleeping. I do it in the shower and while I’m shaving. And, although Ro is never going to hear this from me, I do it for eight hours a night at my computer terminal in the Channel 2 newsroom.
Play. Rewind. Play. Rewind.
The scariest part, and the thing I just don’t get, is that I simply cannot stop myself—not even after seeing how destructive the whole attention-sapping process is. Somehow, the doubt keeps driving me back for more, like an evil whispering voice reminding me that if I can’t figure it out now, I’ll have to spend the rest of my life wondering what happened. Are you really prepared to live like that, questioning forever whether the cabin cruiser might sink?
“And here’s the rest of it,” I’d have to tell Ro. “I’m just not getting any sleep. None.” The image playbacks, of course, have a lot to do with this. But there’s another factor, too. Instead of going home for naps after my overnight shifts, I am spending my mornings back at the marina, looking for any physical clues that my virtual tapes can’t provide.
For hours on end, I sit in my car in the marina parking lot, scoping out The Boat and the cabin cruiser, assessing their relative heights, the distance between them, and any and all other relevant measures. I take countless walks up and down the docks, trying to grasp just what had happened that fateful afternoon. I scour The Boat from its transom to its bow and back to its transom again, hunting for tangible signs of damage, for proof that Matt had been either right or wrong about our encounter. But most of all, I hide out below deck, just out of view of the rest of the harbor, staring off at the cabin cruiser berthed fifty feet across the waterway.
None of this feels right to me, especially when I find myself peering through binoculars at the cabin cruiser’s bow, combing it inch by inch—while pretending to check weather conditions on the horizon, just in case I am caught. This is not normal behavior. I realize this. But much as I can’t stop myself from replaying the looped images, I also can’t seem to keep myself from taking one more walk along the dock or stealing one more peek at the bow through my high-powered field glasses.
On my way home from Channel 2 each morning, I try to keep going straight when I approach the Oyster Point exit on southbound 101, try to keep the steering wheel from turning slightly to the right. But I can’t. I am no longer steering my own car or, for that matter, my own life. Fear and doubt are driving me now. Back to the scene of the crime again and again.
With each successive visit, the marina becomes more of a prison. It’s almost as if I am doing time there, serving some kind of self-imposed sentence I don’t understand. I want to stay away from the harbor when I’m not there, and get away from it when I am, but somehow neither is an option. And so I keep going back, always for what I promise myself will be a quick visit, and always for what turns out to be the better part of the day.
Sometimes, when I’m hiding out below deck and staring off into space, my worst childhood boat memories seem to flood the cabin, sweeping me back in time. I can see myself, a ten-year-old kid, scrambling to help Dad anchor The Boat behind a small island in the Sacramento Delta. Mom and I are in an inflatable life raft, rowing like crazy to drop the anchor where Dad wants it to be. But we haven’t done it right, and Dad is shouting directions to do it again.
“Come on, goddammit, we haven’t got all day!”
The Boat is swinging like a kite in the wind, so the pressure is on me, along with Mom—who is now covered with river mud and bruised from the anchor—to figure things out quickly. We give it our best shot, then row as fast as we can back to The Boat, where we help Dad and my sister, Mandi, pull the slack out of the anchor line hand over hand. Finally we are set.
And then again, perhaps we are not.
“Goddammit, son of a bitch, motherfucking …” My father is barking out a string of obscenities, as he does when things aren’t going just as planned. The words are directed at no one in particular. Not Mom. Not Mandi. Not me. Just the world. Still, they are so charged, so full of venom, that each of us will do anything to fix whatever is wrong, to somehow find a way to make the words stop.
In this case, the anchor-line angles happen to be wrong. The buoy-bottle line still has too much slack in it.
Mom and I know what to do. We climb back into the life raft, row back to the buoy, hoist the heavy galvanized anchor back out of the water, and drop it back down to the river bottom once more.
Thankfully, the third time’s the charm. But Mom and I have made a mess of the cockpit with all the thick mud from our legs and our feet. We’ll need to scrub the decks just as soon as possible. I’m guessing we’ll also need to polish the hull where the rubber raft is now banging into it. None of this is too serious, but what I discover next is: there, right in front of me, is a one-inch scratch in the fiberglass cockpit where the excess anchor chain now lies. Dad sees what I’m looking at and shakes his head. I hang mine low, knowing it was probably my fault. I have screwed up again, and again let down my father.
Maybe Dad should explain to Ro why I can’t seem to get her news stories right.
Fall turns to winter before I know it, and Christmas, New Year’s, and Valentine’s Day roll through like San Francisco’s fast-moving fog banks. I settle into a pattern, rationing my time-consuming playbacks at Channel 2, relishing my weekend airtime on KSFO, and doing my best to stay clear of The Boat.
Meanwhile I struggle to understand what has happened to me. How could I have spent three solid months consumed by a mistake I know is behind me? Yet the more time passes, the more guilty I feel. And the more guilty I feel, the more determined I grow to know what, if any, damage I’ve caused. I want more than anything to confess my concerns to the owners of the cabin cruiser. I have absolutely no evidence, though. No case to make to them.
In mid-March our extended family gathers at our house in San Bruno to celebrate Nicole’s second birthday. She is on cloud nine with the attention. Samantha and I are glowing with pride. It’s lunchtime, and a dozen or so of us are sitting around the table wearing ridiculous party hats, catching up on one another’s lives. Soon the conversation turns to Dad’s single-engine plane and the fact that someone at the airport recently put a ding in it without the common courtesy of leaving a note, making the whole thing, as he puts it, a true “hit and run.”
BAM!
An invisible two-by-four smacks me over the head.
Oh my God, that’s it, I decide. “Hit and run”—that’s what I have done.
I am dizzy in an instant, and the voices around me become one loud buzz, as if I’m listening to them through a long cardboard tube. The room disappears as Nicole makes a face about something and all the adults start to giggle.
The conversation moves along to some other subject.
But I am frozen. My skin is clammy. I wonder for a second if I will actually pass out.
Fear. Shame. Guilt. Horror. A flood of emotions washes over me at once, but until I notice the salty taste at the corners of my mouth, I don’t even realize that my eyes have started to leak. Fortunately, no one else at the table has noticed, so I excuse myself and make my way to the downstairs bathroom.
The tile floor is cold. But it’s the only makeshift bed I have at my disposal. Curled up in a little ball now, I let it all out, trying only to muffle the sounds that might give me away.
So there it is: you may be guilty of a hit and run.
It’s that familiar voice I’ve dubbed Doubt, the one that tells me I need to review my tapes, or pay another visit to The Boat in search of damage.
You’ve got to confess, it taunts. Come clean now or you’ll never sleep another night of your life.
You’re wrong, Doubt, I rationalize. The cabin cruiser owner was onboard at the time of the mishap. He even helped fend us off. Surely he would have been in the best position to know whether or not there was any serious contact.
Well, what if that man was just a passerby who climbed aboard the cabin cruiser to lend a hand and really didn’t care what happened to the boat? The real owners may have no clue …
But Josh and I talked to someone aboard the cabin cruiser later that day, explaining exactly what had happened with our two boats.
You didn’t mention the creaking …
But the two of us looked over the cabin cruiser together, and I’ve combed it with my binoculars countless times since. Never have I seen a single sign of any obvious damage.
Like you’d be able to spot the damage on an old wreck like that … and what if you’re missing something?
Suddenly there’s a tap on the door.
“Honey, are you all right?”
“Uh, yeah,” I answer my clearly concerned wife. I check my watch and scramble to peel myself off the bathroom floor.
“We’re ready to do birthday cake now. We’re just waiting for you.”
“Right. I’ll, uh, be out in a second,” I say, not knowing how I could possibly step out of this room even if I had the rest of the day to get ready.