I slept poorly that night. It was like I didn’t know where to put my arms. They seemed to be getting in the way of the rest of my body.
Because I couldn’t get comfortable, my mind started racing. I did everything I could not to think about bloody chickens. Instead I speculated about Garnett’s quest. Might it be dangerous? Whose phone number did he give them in case of an emergency?
A friend of mine who knew us as a recent item had broached concern about him being a good decade older than me. I never thought about the age issue when we were together, only when we were apart. And we were often apart in those days.
Life being such a compromise, I tried to clear my head by mentally debating whether it was better to land a man with nerves of steel or abs of steel.
That was no way to drift off to sleep, so I tried concentrating on work. Not fascinating things like murder and mayhem, but tedious tasks like transcribing interviews or carrying tripods up stairs.
I thought back on my conversation with Miles about our legal recourse to get the gun-carry permit data. He’d been discouraging.
This wasn’t a case of a government agency stonewalling by withholding clearly public information—they often do that in hopes newsies will move on in search of an easier story. In this case, the data was plainly deemed private by law. To get formal access, we’d have to get the law changed or get a judge to strike it down.
“That’s not going to happen,” Miles said. “The NRA will lobby and appeal this issue forever. We wouldn’t stand a chance.”
So I needed to find a back door to the gun permit information. But right now, I needed to think of something hypnotic, or I’d never reach REM sleep before morning.
Unbidden, the image of spinning wind turbines came to mind. Behind the sedative motion I started hearing songs with wind in the lyrics, almost like lullabies.
The music started with the sweeping prairie melody “They Call the Wind Mariah” from the musical Paint Your Wagon. Then I found myself wondering if Elton John’s observation on living your life like a candle in the wind might be an apt sound track for my own memoir. Before I could come to any conclusion, Bette Midler was advising me to find a hero who could be the wind beneath my wings.
The last thing I remember is Bob Dylan telling me the answer was blowin’ in the wind.
But if it was, I fell asleep before I could hear it.
The next morning, windmills still on my mind, I went into my home library and pulled Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote from the shelf. Written more than four hundred years ago during Spain’s golden age, it’s widely considered one of the most influential novels of all time. I kept a special collection of dusty books—best sellers of yesteryear—because I believed there to be no truly new themes in literature, and I liked to line up breakout books from today next to their kindred noted predecessors.
By chronicling the chivalric adventures of his man of La Mancha, Cervantes expressed his belief that we all have a mission to try to right the wrongs of our world. Though endearing in his exploits, Don Quixote failed more often than he succeeded.
While knights have been out of style for centuries, when it comes to fighting injustice (and this is not something I go around telling people, because it sounds pompous), I regard investigative journalists as modern-day white knights. Idealists in a decadent society. Or I used to feel such zeal. Now cost and time have taken titanic hits as news audiences decline and a panic sweeps the industry like the black plague once swept Europe.
Okay, maybe that comparison is a bit of an exaggeration. Journalists aren’t perishing, they’re merely being laid off. But there’s no doubt the once chivalrous goal of newsrooms—comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable—has changed for those newsies left behind.
Nowadays, it’s feed the beast.
I put Cervantes’s classic on a stack by my bed to page through later. I brushed my teeth, primped in the mirror, and left to face an increasingly hungry monster.