told me to write to Alex. It was Alex who gave me his story. It was that story that got my story onto the front page of The Courier-Mail. ‘REBEL WITHOUT A PAUSE’ the headline read on my 2500-word exclusive on the life and times of the recently released Rebels leader, Alex Bermudez. I didn’t get a byline for the yarn but that’s all right. The piece was changed dramatically by the editor, Brian Robertson, on account of me filling it with what Brian called ‘flowery bullshit’.
‘How did you possibly jag a sit-down interview with Alex Bermudez?’ Brian asked at his desk, reading my printed draft that I had mailed him with a cover letter describing, again, my desire to write for The Courier-Mail’s esteemed crime-writing team.
‘I wrote him letters in prison that cheered him up on the days he was down,’ I said.
‘How long were you writing him letters?’
‘From about the age of ten until I was thirteen.’
‘Why did you start writing letters to Alex Bermudez?’
‘My babysitter told me it might mean a lot to someone like him because he didn’t have any family or friends writing to him.’
‘He didn’t have any family or friends writing to him because he’s a highly dangerous, possibly sociopathic convicted criminal,’ Brian said. ‘I take it your babysitter wasn’t the Mary Poppins type?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘he wasn’t.’
‘How do I know this isn’t a load of bullshit fantasy from a bullshit kid who wants to come work for me?’
Alex knew he would say that. I passed Brian a phone number for Alex.
I watched him across the desk as he spoke to Alex Bermudez on the phone, confirming the details and quotes in the story.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘I see . . . Yeah, I think we can run it.’
He nodded, staring at me blankly. ‘Well, no, Mr Bermudez, I’m afraid it won’t be “word for word” because the kid writes like he wants to be fuckin’ Leo Tolstoy and he buried the lead down in the nineteenth paragraph. And, furthermore, no newspaper of mine will ever open a page-one story with a quote from a fuckin’ poem!’
Alex had suggested opening with this quote from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the poem I sent him in the prison mail:
Oh, come with old Khayyám, and leave the Wise
To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;
One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown forever dies.
He said he had learned that poem by heart. He said he had leaned on that poem through his lag. He said it brought him wisdom and comfort. He said it brought him out of the hole, like it brought Slim out of the hole, four decades before him. That quote was a thematic emotional thread through my piece because it spoke of Alex’s regrets for the things he’d done to others which were threaded to the things he’d had done to him as a boy.
‘Do you like it?’ I asked Brian.
‘No,’ Brian said flatly. ‘It’s a fawning fuckin’ sob story about a fuckin’ crim cryin’ into his bucket over his life of A-grade professional scumbaggery.’
He cast his eyes back over my story draft.
‘But it has its moments,’ he said. ‘How much you lookin’ for?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Payment?’ he said. ‘How much per word?’
‘I don’t want any money for it,’ I said.
He placed the draft on his desk. Sighed.
‘I want to write for your crime team,’ I said.
He dropped his head, rubbed his eyes.
‘You’re not a crime writer, kid,’ Brian said.
‘But I just wrote you 2500 exclusive words on one of Queensland’s most notorious criminals?’
‘Yeah, and five hundred of those words were about the colour of Alex’s eyes and the intensity of his gaze and the way he fuckin’ dressed and the fuckin’ boat dreams he had in the slammer.’
‘That was a metaphor for him drowning inside and longing for freedom.’
‘Well, it made me long for a fuckin’ bucket, mate. I’ll give it to ya straight so ya don’t waste any more time on it: the truth is, kid, crime reporters are born, not made, and you weren’t born a crime reporter. You’ll never be a crime reporter and you’ll probably never be a news reporter for that matter, because you have too many thoughts swimming around in too small a head. A good news reporter has only one thing on their mind.’
‘The unvarnished truth?’ I said.
‘Well, yeah . . . but he’s thinking about something else even before that.’