Finding Clarity

My name is Clari Drake, but I was born a Dyke. From the time I first walked (at nine months) and talked in compound sentences (18 months) I was destined to be a reporter, someone who moved at breakneck speed and questioned everyone's actions and motives while hiding behind a camera and notebook. It was clear early on that if I were going to land on television (which was my destiny according to Grandma Thorsen) I would have to shed the Dyke thing and shorten my Nordic but otherwise elegant name of Clarissa Thorsen Dyke.

Now that I am 45, it's safe to say that back in my twenties I existed on an age-appropriately shallow plane. I believed my married name of Clari Drake was catchier and ridicule-proof and offered me a better shot of getting a higher Q rating on TV if I ever made it to the evening news.

That was my real goal: reporting the lead story on the nightly Twin-Cities blood-and-guts-news-cast. My drive was not so much for fame as recognition. I wanted to be known as the reporter who always got the story and took down the bad guys in the process. My burning ambition drove me to bust out of my hometown in the Midwest and accomplish this in San Francisco, a top-five market with great Dim Sum and no need for a heavy coat and earmuffs.

Through my 30s, emboldened by a ferocious blend of hubris, sheer will, and great legs, I worked my way up at Action 6 News from writer to weekend reporter until eventually I became the nightly number-one news gal. Tony, my favorite cameraman, worked with the precision of a filmmaker, swathing me in a glorious halo of light, whether in front of a drug den or a train wreck. I had boingy chestnut hair, a 26-inch waistline, nice tits, and the aforementioned legs that my mother used to call, "almost perfect" with an unnerving hint of doubt.

My husband, Andrew Drake, architect, (that's the way he always said it when he thrust his hand forward to meet someone) loved my 30-something gams, especially when they were wrapped, python-tight, around his waist. If I didn't control the situation properly and was squeezed too high up in the bed in our Berkeley bungalow, I would slam repeatedly against the antique headboard. Flawless manicures were critical for those tight shots of my hand scribbling furiously on my reporter's pad, so I couldn't grab the sculpted grooves in the mahogany headboard and risk nail damage. Sometimes I would laugh the laugh and tell Andy to just slow down. Breaking a nail was a serious concern for me back in those days.

One afternoon the news director tossed me a story that altered the course of my life - trite I know, but true. A young man was reported missing in Hunter's Point, one of San Francisco's roughest neighborhoods, and Tony and I were told to hustle it into that night's lead story.

I emerged from the news van in the thick summer fog and wrapped my black trench coat around me – the same one I wore to meet Andy at the airport one night wearing nothing more than thigh-high stockings and stiletto heels – and scanned the tenement with an uncharacteristic sense of fatigue. Before I could make it to the front door of a ground-floor apartment, two police detectives pulled me aside. They had found the young man face down on the waterfront less than a mile away. He had been shot execution-style. The cops figured he might not have been the nice boy his mom believed him to be, considering all that California Snow lining his pants' pockets.

Problem was, the young man's mother didn't yet know this detail – the dead part, not the cocaine part. And these nice detectives weren't going to tell her he wouldn't be home for dinner until after I talked to her. They mumbled something about paperwork, though I knew they were just jerking me around for kicks and giggles. I surveyed the boarded-up windows and shuddered as a sub-woofer pounded out something resembling music in the near distance. All I had to do was coax the woman to give me the perfect sound bite, in the past tense no less, that would stand up for the Ten O'clock news. Then I could eat lunch.

Tony was screwing the camera to the tripod when I slipped inside the news van to search for my notebook. If he noticed I was clutching it, he had the class not to say so. The front seat was lined with candy bar wrappers, Coke cans, toll receipts, and pages torn from reporters' notebooks. The whole scene made me weary in a way I didn't recognize. Tony came around, opened the door and pretended not to notice my pallor.

"Come on," he said without looking at me. "Let's just get this over with."

The boy's mother pushed open the tattered screen door to her apartment while glancing with one walleye toward the cops hovering in their black-and-white. A cardigan in a dreary shade of mauve, a color my mother always warned me to avoid, hung unbelted over a wrinkled white blouse peppered with food stains. Her face was a road map of exhaustion, a sculpture of pain. The woman rubbed her splotched and pasty brown skin, and said, "Come in," inviting me to drive the final nail into that bleakness.

As I sank into a filthy orange velvet sofa the woman took my hand and asked for news of her son. Tony tossed me his best what the fuck are you gonna do now face, which offered me little consolation. So, in an effort to take control of the situation, I placed the woman's hand back on her own lap. We were there to do a story, was how I phrased it. And if she could answer my questions, we'd be out of her way momentarily. It was a superior-white-chick-in-an-expensive-suit kind of move.

Throughout the interview, I ducked and wove and tap-danced and did everything possible to sound sincere and caring without saying, "But what if he were dead, how would you feel then?" My stomach growled audibly, and I could have sworn a flea jumped out of that filthy sofa and bit me on the ass. I gazed at everything in that grungy apartment because looking into the eyes of this innocent woman caught in a vice grip of poverty was an unbearable alternative. Truthfully? As beads of sweat popped out across my forehead, I didn't hear a damn thing she said.

We wrapped up the interview and the urge to cry nearly overwhelmed me. I broke every rule I ever lived by as a journalist and hugged the boy's mother hard before bolting out the front door, trembling so hard I nearly tripped over a toy truck and took a header into the asshole cop who looked me dead in the eye and winked.

A few days later, on a hazy August afternoon, Andy spooned around me in our antique bed in the upstairs bedroom of our bungalow. We had a few hours before I had to report to the station for the three-to-eleven shift. Turning toward him, and cupping his face in my hands, I expressed a longing to feel what that woman had. Not the terror and loss, to be sure. But a love for another human that fueled her hope, even in the face of my phony and shallow questions. Andy's eyes glistened with a thrill that leaped far beyond the possibility of immense physical pleasure. He reminded me that this was something he had wanted for a long time. Wanted for us.

Afterwards, my legs propped up the length of said headboard, my arms stretched Christ-like to the side and my curls spread over Andy's stomach, I chanted, "Swim, swim," to the little men inside.

I liked to joke that once Zach came along, everything got bigger and stayed bigger. This included my boobs, waist, hands, feet, and all four cheeks. It was the only way to cope with the reality that my reporting days were almost certainly in the dust.

The joking was also another way to face the stunning reality that by some nasty, fucked-up quirk of nature, Zachary Michael Drake, my beautiful, beautiful boy, was born with achondroplasia, which is an "inherited skeletal disorder where cartilage is converted to bone." In other words, a fancy way to say he is a dwarf.

The dirty little secret of mothers of children with physical differences is that they feel they somehow caused it: something I ate, something I did. I have never really bounced back from those feelings. When Zach turned one, my mother suggested I snap out of it and return to work part-time. Bad idea. I cried in the ladies room a lot and lacked the edge that had defined me as a reporter. But the folks at the station were polite. So polite about Zach, in fact, as to never ask about him at all.

Truth was Zach was a happy, well-adjusted baby who cuddled, cried, and pooped along with the best of them. I was the one who needed to embrace the new me, which was a softer, fuller, and decidedly more fragile woman. Unconsciously, I believed the best way to deflect cruelty about Zach's stubby arms, legs, torso, and pronounced forehead was to become kinda stubby and pronounced myself. So my feelings for Zach grew in direct proportion to my love for Mother's Double Fudge cookies. By the time I tipped the scale at close to 200 pounds, I figured a second baby might help me branch out into the cute pink and white coated animal crackers. You know, the ones with the rainbow sprinkles on them.

I didn't know it then, but my last day at work began with a wildfire raging out of control just west of Yosemite National Park. Zach was five-years-old and I was enormous with my second son and, I might add, obscenely unphotogenic. But I was also just about the only person left in the building with a union card, so the news director felt obliged to send me to cover the story.

On the scene, the hoards of reporters and crews, known indelicately as a "gang bang," waited for the governor to chopper down. It was all at once a tiresome and routine drill: he'd fly in for the photo-op, make a grand statement, and shove off. The governor flew in Hueys, the big UH1s that did transport duty in Vietnam.

After that long ride to the mountains, I was hungry and grumpy and nothing a blow-dried politician had to say was as exciting as it had been when I was 25. But there wasn't much time to ponder my feelings on the matter. Three choppers began landing at the same time, furiously whipping up dust and threatening to blow my maternity tent to absurd heights. I squeezed my bladder tighter and tighter, using knocked-knees to hold down my dress so no one would have to see my big girl underpants.

Trash blew in every direction. Cameramen began shielding their hardware. Tony switched on the juice while I tried to deliver an impromptu live report. I dug for that old adrenaline rush that once fueled my work, but it wasn't there. Disorientation and indigestion hammered me, and my diaphragm felt like it was stapled to my double chins. High noon in the High Sierra couldn't compete with the idea of being at home in Berkeley, eating Rocky Road with Zach and soaking my piggies in Epsom salts.

Just then, a metal desk chair someone had tossed out of a ranger's cabin got caught up in the vortex of air and began swirling, Dorothy-style, toward our group. With the choppers about 100 feet from the ground, Tony pushed toward me, still taping, but gesticulating that I move away from danger. I waddled as fast as possible, but I was moving backwards and thinking too fast about my gushing words and my bursting bladder to consider my direction. The camera seemed inches from my face, which surely resembled a blowfish. Shouting my ad-lib script through the deafening noise, my left hand cupped over my earpiece, I turned all at once and slammed, crotch first, into the vertical metal post that once held a low-slung chain-link fence.

Much to my mother's horror, I named this baby Zeppo. It was a name that came to me as he was crowning in front of the governor's press secretary who gagged into his monogrammed hankie while the chopper flew me to the nearest Air Force base. Granted, this baby would be more handsome than his funny-looking brother who always stood out in a crowd – I knew that shortly after the last push. But I think the name came to me not because I was cracking up, which was Andy's first fear, but because I loved alliteration. I loved the way those words, Zach and Zeppo, flew off my tongue. I knew that these babies would be the best and funniest part of me. And I also knew on some primal level that I was tumbling, tumbling down, way down, into a dark hole of depression from which no zippy name or high Q rating could rescue me.

Which is just as well, really, because my professional career ended less than a month later on a gag reel circulated to one of those national TV shows where people, like the shut-ins who once sent me fan letters, were now shrieking with laughter at the distorted face of the bloated woman who got fucked by a fence post.

I had one baby yanking on a boob and a kindergartener slamming a truck against my shin while tears of humiliation burned into my cheeks as the studio audience voted for me by pressing the light at their seat. That was my sign off from the news - that crazy, mean, and maniacal business that had defined me, and my place in the world, for most of my adult life.

And it was a neon-colored post-it notes for my sharply shattered ego, that despite my best efforts, I was but an unsophisticated Dyke from Edina, Minnesota. My days of being a tenacious reporter were over.

Or so I thought.

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