But They Were Copulating Like Rabid Weasels!
My Thwarted Moment Of Crack Investigative Reporting, High School Style
Like many impressionable teenagers who came of age during the Watergate era, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein enthralled me. Their dogged investigation to uncover all the facts of President Nixon’s crimes were nothing less than inspirational. I wore out my copy of All The President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein’s book about their Watergate investigation, reading and rereading the book until the paperback finally fell apart.
When the movie adaptation came out, my butt was glued to my theater seat all day as I watched the story unfold four times in a row. This was back in the glory days of moviegoing when you paid only once to take in the feature picture as many times as you wanted. Adding to their investigative reporting aura was Woodward and Bernstein’s reliance on a secret high-level government source they nicknamed “Deep Throat” in honor of the 1972 porno chic movie everyone was talking about.
I was a voracious newspaper junkie back then (still am). For me, Woodward and Bernstein turned journalism into something more than just telling stories. A good writer could do something with his work.
Being a teenager, I was also smitten with the writerly image as gleaned from watching old movies on the late late show. I had the romantic stereotyped notion that being a reporter meant banging on a typewriter all night, forgoing showers, and fueling the muse by downing over-brewed cups of black and bitter coffee that had just enough jolt to keep me writing hour upon hour. (Chain smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap rye held no appeal.) Oh, the stories I would write, the scandals I would uncover, the powers-that-be who would fear what shot out from my gun-metal gray typewriter. I set my sights on becoming the Woodward and Bernstein of my high school newspaper. At least I had the Bernstein part down.
“Do we stand for the same things The Chronicle stands for, Mr. Bernstein?” Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), Citizen Kane (1941)
Reality was different. Junior year I volunteered my talents as a reporter for the school’s weekly tabloid. The paper’s advisor, whom I’ll call Mr. Kane, was a fresh-out-of-college English teacher in his mid-twenties. He was something of a self-styled hipster of late 1970s vintage, with bushy sideburns, wispy mustache, and polyester plaid pants that were all the rage back then. Though I longed for journalistic glory, the stories he assigned me were standard puff pieces. Profiles of teachers. Activities of various school clubs. Reports on school board meetings. An interview with The Prom King and The Prom Queen. The latter did not go over well. The Prom King and The Prom Queen were the dream couple of every suburban American high school. Me? Not so much.
Puberty was my horror that came to its raging hormonal peak when I was 17. My changing voice refused to settle down. It was a pathetic mixture Mickey Mouse squeeks and Porky Pig stutter. Add to that an uncontrollable sweating condition. A torrent of perspiration would trickle down my sides from beneath my armpits. The backs and underarms of my shirts looked like oversaturated sponges. I took to wearing a jacket all day long in a desperate and mostly unsuccessful attempt to camouflage my personal shame.
As for my face, it was a ravaged field of bursting red acne. Cheekbones disappeared, replaced by oversized pimples. My nose seemed to double in size at least one a month. Chin, neck, forehead, nothing on my face could escape the onslaught.
Of course The Prom King and The Prom Queen were the epitome 1970s Burt Reynolds and Farrah Fawcett physical perfection, refined through the teenage form. I had all the appeal of a decomposing zombie pulled from a scratched-up print of Night of the Living Dead. The Prom King and The Prom Queen traveled in social circles far above my lowly station. This “exclusive” interview I was forced to conduct was a high school cultural equivalent of a train wreck smashing into a tire fire blazing on top of a toxic waste dump leaking into the malfunctioning nuclear power plant next door.
The Prom King (also Varsity Quarterback, surprise, surprise) smirked his way through my Q&A while The Prom Queen (Head Cheerleader, like you were expecting anything less) couldn’t restrain an uncontrollable giggle. I’ll spare you the details. As the interview mercifully wrapped up The Prom King pointed his elbow at me, then said to The Prom Queen, “Are you hungry for a Sausage Pizza? I really could use a Sausage Pizza!” The Prom Queen managed to get out a breathy “oh, leave him alone,” before bursting into a whole new level of giggling.
A Dish Best Served Cold
The story I wrote from my notes that night was the journalistic equivalent of an acrostic poem. If you caught the right combo of words I scattered throughout the paragraphs, you’d learn that a rip-roaring social disease was turning The Prom King and The Prom Queen’s brains into a worm-filled mess with the consistency of rotted pineapples. And though I gave it a valiant try, I just couldn’t concoct a similar and much-desired allusion to The Prom Queen’s botched abortion as performed by The Prom King in a rat-infested abandoned warehouse.
Regardless, this sweet revenge (which no one ever caught on to) was a “eureka” moment. I was wasting my talents. I needed something big. I wanted my Watergate. Where was my Deep Throat secretly feeding me top secret information for stories guaranteed to grab readers thanks to my audacious investigative writing skills?
Though I continued toiling on the inane assignments foisted on me by Mr. Kane, I kept my eyes and ears open. Something had to be out there. It wasn’t going to find me. I was an investigative journalist, goddammit. My great story might be lurking in dangerous places. I wasn’t going to let something as minor as “personal safety” stop me from finding that elusive story that would make my bones. A good reporter goes where the action is and I knew where to find that action. Instinct led me to the most notorious locale in the entire school: The 109 John.
The 109 John was my school’s disreputable first floor bathroom. It was the domain of greasers, punks, and other ne’er-do-wells, a near-mythical danger zone for kids of my stature, both in the physical sense as well as the adolescent pecking order. The bathroom’ walls, filled with obscenities and crude pictures, were a sort of teenaged version of cave paintings. Study them long enough and you’d learn a lot about the primitive culture that was high school.
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Cartoonish depictions of copulation were 109 John de rigueur. Most were unmemorable. Then, on a spring day during senior year, something unusual jumped out at me from one of these drawings. The male it depicted wore thick glasses, topped by bushy eyebrows and a big honking nose that looked like what a British friend of mine likes to call a “man root.” The female had mathematical equations spewing from her hoo-hah. In the shadowy reflections within The 109 John, the couple bore a striking resemblance to the school superintendent and the Honors Algebra teacher. Of course! Bathroom graffiti does not lie. Mr. Superintendent and Ms. Algebra must be engaged in some kind of torrid affair. This was a scandal worthy of my unrestrained genius.
“If Your Mother Says She Loves You, Check It Out (motto of the Chicago City News Bureau)
Still, like any good reporter, I had to get to get another source for this blistering academic entanglement. The carnal debauchery implied by these X-rated scribbles demanded confirmation. Woodward and Bernstein got their stories from that elusive insider Deep Throat. As it turns out, my high school had its own version of Deep Throat: our lone security guard. He was greasy individual who always wore a heavy black leather motorcycle jacket no matter what the weather. His hair was stringy, long, black, and shiny. His penchant for cheap Old Spice knock-off cologne meant you could smell him before you saw him. His eyes were constantly darting, always on the lookout for trouble. If anyone knew anything tawdry goings-on beneath the school’s gleaming surface it had to be our security guard, whom I shall call Deep Throat II.
I stayed after school one Friday, pretending to study at the library during its late hours. I was really biding my time, waiting for the hallways and corridors to empty out. Around seven o’clock I was the last student left in the library, maybe the only student in the whole school. I correctly figured that no one would be around the building that late at the end of the week.
Pen and notebook in hand, I went to the dank school basement where they stuck Deep Throat II’s office. You could hear water dripping somewhere within the walls. Machinery of unknown origins clanked and echoed. This underground lair provided perfect atmosphere for Deep Throat II’s base of operations. I proceeded with caution My overactive sweat glands kicked into high gear. Then I saw him. Deep Throat II was locking his office door. A barren lightbulb cast jagged shallows off his face.
“Hey, can I talk to you…” I blurted.
He jumped. “Jesus Christ, kid. Who are you? You scared the shit out of me.”
“Sir, I’m a reporter for the school paper and…”
“Get lost.”
I remained a man on his mission. “No. I have a question for you.” My squeaky stutter turned confident.
“I said ‘get lost.’”
“And I said ‘no.’ I’m a reporter and I have a question. What do you know about Mr. Superintendent and Ms. Alge...”
Deep Throat II didn’t let me finish. His scowl turned into a mixture of cynicism and contempt. “Oh that,” he said. “Yeah, he’s banging the shit out of Ms. Algebra.” I asked if he had any proof. “Simple, kid,” Deep Throat II replied. “Go to The Purple Hotel. Sunday morning, maybe seven fifteen, seven thirty. Wait in the lobby. You’ll see those two fucks coming out of the elevator, but not together. They’ve been screwing each other’s brains out all night. Been at it for at least a year now. Fuck their spouses. Fuck their kids. All they want to fuck is each other.”
Once Upon A Time In Suburbia
The Purple Hotel, 4500 West Touhy Avenue, in Lincolnwood, Illinois. Everyone knew the place. It was a garish slab of a building, notable for its ugly purple brickwork jutting from the exterior. It opened with a flourish in 1961, a real showcase of a suburban hotel. In its early years The Purple Hotel’s lounge featured high class entertainment. Perry Como, Roberta Flack, and a young Barry Manilow all played there. The hotel ballrooms hosted many a wedding reception and bar mitzvah party, countless conventions and conferences.
The Purple Hotel was an ideal traveler’s waystation, located right off the expressway between downtown Chicago and O’Hare Airport. Overnight guests came and went. The occasional celebrity stayed at The Purple Hotel when they had a gig in the area. It’s where the Chicago Bulls put up Michael Jordan when they first brought him to town as a rookie.
In the 1990s, with its the faux opulence fading fast, The Purple Hotel turned into a flashpoint of local infamy. A top Chicago mobster got whacked in the parking lot, a hit that was never solved. Rumor had it the mobster was about to sing to the feds in order to save his skin. Bad career move on his part.
A high profile capo getting clipped in broad daylight just a few yards from its main entrance was more or less the beginning of The Purple Hotel’s end. In its final years, The Purple Hotel was filled with mice, mold, and cocaine-driven sex parties hosted by a sleazy politico. There was a hail Mary to save the building by adding The Purple Hotel to the National Register for Historic Landmarks in July 2013. It was vainglorious move. Plagued by leaking roofs, cracked windows, and other infrastructure maladies, The Purple Hotel was leveled just one month later.
A Quick Aside.
When I say my school’s security guard was another Deep Throat, I’m not kidding. Allegedly. A few years after I graduated, he got busted for selling pornography to teenagers. And not just Deep Throat Deep Throat. Rumor had it that Deep Throat II made the films himself at his apartment, with high school kids as “actors” who were paid for their services with beer and pot. For the record, I cannot verify the veracity nor mendacity of these tales.
We Return To Our Story
Armed with Deep Throat II’s information, I pedaled my bicycle to The Purple Hotel on three successive Sundays, arriving at seven o’clock each morning. The desk clerk ignored me. I sat in a chair about twelve feet from elevator, just off the hotel lobby. For that added “investigative journalist” touch, I kept my face hidden inside comics section of The Chicago Tribune. I would periodically look at my watch. Five minutes. Ten minutes.
And then…Yahtzee.
Deep Throat II’s story was on the money. At 7:15 AM Mr. Superintendent exited the elevator, a smile on his pinched face, battered briefcase under his arm. He walked out the hotel door to the parking lot. At 7:25 AM Ms. Algebra exited. She too had a smile, plus a small suitcase.
It was a consistent routine for the pair throughout my three-week vigil. You could set your watch by it. It was sex and scandal and sin on Sundays, everything a teenage investigative reporter could dream of drooling over. I had the goods to bring down my high school administration and math department. My own little Watergate was coming to life.
That night I blasted away on the keyboard of the old Royal Quiet DeLuxe I had inherited from my aunt. The thing stank of her cigarettes and cheap perfume, albeit she had died six years beforehand. Slugs hit the typewriter ribbon, committing words to paper, my fingers practically setting off sparks. This was nothing short of an investigative masterpiece, with me as the star journalist. “What,” I posited to readers, “might you see should be in The Purple Hotel lobby at the crack of dawn every Sunday? The answer will astound you.”
Tawdry, less Woodward and Bernstein and more like the National Enquirer but thrilling nevertheless. I typed and retyped the story several times throughout the night to ensure that it would be perfect. No typos. No jumped keystrokes. This was a real story from a real journalist.
Stop The Presses
The next morning, sleep-deprived yet fired up by adrenaline, I strode into Mr. Kane’s office unannounced. “Don’t you knock?” he asked. I ignored his curmudgeonly attitude, thrusting my red hot exclusive into his hands.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Read it and find out.” My voice was bursting with pride. I watched with giddy anticipation as he read my beauty of a lede line.
Mr. Kane got through page one, eyes widening slightly. Okay, I thought, he’s impressed. But then his eyes narrowed into slits. He skimmed pages two and three, stopped at page four, and flung the entire fifteen pages smack on his desk. I was shocked. Mr. Kane wasn’t enthralled with my keen reporter’s instincts. He was furious.
“Nice work, Scoop Brady,” he said. “You expect me to print this?” His wispy mustache quivered on either side of his top lip.
“Ye-e-ss?” I stammered.
“Why in the hell do you think we should publish this?” Mr. Kane’s face grew red and shiny, a perfect match for his open-necked polyester shirt.
I steeled up with the journalistic ire every reporter requires when facing a belligerent editor. “Because it’s a great story. Who wouldn’t want to know about this? We could bring down the whole administration. Expose hypocrisies. Show the students the truth about who really runs this school.”
He stopped me before I could recite any more cliches. “Wrong. You know what you have here? A lot of crap from a bored teenager who’s got nothing else to do on his Sunday mornings.”
“But it happened. I saw it three Sundays in a row.”
“That doesn't prove anything. All you have is a couple of people leaving a hotel on a Sunday morning at different times. You don't know what they’ve been up to. You got nothing but inuendo and too many adverbs.”
“But you don’t understand! It…”
He cut me off. “No, buddy,” he shot back. “You don’t understand. I said you got nothing but innuendo. You know what that word means? ‘Innuendo?’” He ripped my brilliant reporting into shreds, then slammed it into the wastebasket by his desk. “No way in hell will I print this shit. Get out of my office. And don't come back. I don't need hacks like you. I want real reporters. Get out. And close the door behind you.”
I was mortified but did as I was told. As I closed the door, I heard him mutter "Not losing my job because Sausage Pizza found out Mr. Superintendent and Ms. Algebra are fucking each other’s brains out.”
Omigod, I thought. He knew about this all along. He’s sitting on the story of the year. He’s suppressing the news. Mr. Kane wasn’t Ben Bradlee to my Carl Bernstein. He was my high school’s version of Richard Nixon’s coverup crew.
My investigative reporting career was finished. But I wasn’t done. “I'll show you, Mr. Kane,” I thought. “I'll show you. I’m going to be a great writer. I’m going to do more as a writer than you ever could dream you’ll do.”
Mr. Kane be damned. Nothing could stop me. A writer rejected is a writer reborn.
Punchline
For the record, certain aspects of this story are true. Puberty transformed me into hideous, sweaty, acne-ridden mess. My high school’s security guard really did get busted for pornography a few years after I graduated. The Purple Hotel was a real local landmark. My high school’s 109 John had a reputation for danger. I’m no kin to Carl Bernstein.
But Mr. Kane never existed. I never wrote for the school paper. The superintendent and the Honors Algebra teacher weren’t secretly banging each other into a froth like rabid weasels. This story is 100 percent false.
Except the parts that aren’t.
Story Links:
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin is home to all of Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s notes and papers from their Watergate reporting.
Deep Throat’s story. No, not that Deep Throat. You can find that on your own. I’m talking about Woodward and Bernstein’s Deep Throat.
The history of The Purple Hotel in Lincolnwood, IL, according to Wikipedia
Thanks for reading The Typewriter's Collage. Connect with me at Twitter/X, Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram at the handle @RealArnieB. I’m on LinkedIn and Facebookunder my real name. While you’re at it, be sure to take a peek at my website, www.arniebernstein.com.
Fake it until you make it or break it. That’s what the comment section if for.
And because you made it this far, here’s your bonus content. Before he faked his death on May 16, 1984, Andy Kaufman was one of the many celebrities who stayed at The Purple Hotel. It was his home away from home during the production at Chicago’s public television station of his PBS special “The Andy Kaufman Show.”