Chapter 17
I promised I would cut to the chase – those events that would change all of our lives that freshman year. Thinking about it like this, it’s more like skipping the chase and cutting to the crash -- the spectacular, end-over-end, metal crunching, gas-tank-exploding conflagration that you are positive no one walks away from.
Well, it’s coming. I promise.
But first I must tell you how our lives unfolded in the early weeks of that first semester, with the summer waning, the all-important football season beginning, the parties ramping up on and off campus – and the hormones of 25,000 college students surging like the tidal rush from a hurricane.
Amanda Livingston wasn’t one to give in to the baser instincts of her hormones and the sexual urgings they stirred. The British are known for their reserve, their stiff-upper lip, if you will. And while Amanda possessed sumptuous lips – and a luscious body, to boot – the cravings that drove her attraction weren’t carnal. These needs were secondary to whatever daddy issues and security needs were locked deep inside the little girl who grew up with a young, single and very attractive mother.
A mother not much older than Amanda was now. A mother ill-equipped to hold that title. A mother who did possess those carnal needs that Amanda attempted to deny and suppress in herself. A young, pretty mother who got very little help in a rough part of London, where people kept to themselves and looked down their noses at single moms, no matter how attractive they were.
Unless that mother happened to be offering something. Something to the men. Men with beady eyes who populated the pubs and had only one thing on their minds. Well, two. Getting drunk was a national pastime in England, after all. But it’s a quiet and more reserved kind of drunk than what we know in America. In England, alcohol is a lonely Londoner’s best friend. And the local pub is a social network and a second living room. It was to this venue that Amanda’s mother sought refuge from all her responsibilities, represented by the blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl at home. Amanda was an unwanted gift from her mother’s older lover. A man of the world, not prone to marry and one never to stay in one place very long. A man Amanda would set off after, leading her to America and all its opportunity. More opportunity than she would have ever have found in her profoundly limiting, class-conscious home country that came off like a picture-postcard to most Americans. But we knew nothing about the realities of a place – and entire society – ordered upon the station and status of one’s birth.
Well, suffice it to say, Amanda lost the maternity lottery. But she had broken free from the class-conscious confinement of her home country. She had come to America. And the wide-open country with its limitless stories to tell and to photograph, were her canvas.
She wanted to be a journalist. Amanda saw it as a higher calling. A noble profession. But it was born of a lonely little girl’s days on the train, riding with her judgmental, scolding mother. Amanda would turn her face to the window and see the houses with their windows lit by warm light. Sometimes, she would see the people inside. She always imagined them as happy. And she wanted to know what that was. What real happiness was. What a real family was, for that matter.
From those early days onward, her focus was outside of herself. Outside of her life. It was on other people and other places. Hers would be a journey. And there is no better way to take a journey than as a journalist. A photojournalist, where one’s camera, press pass and curiosity are license to see the world – and get paid for it, too.
Or at least the profession was once.
Amanda’s photojournalistic heroes were all giants of the late 1960s, 70s and 80s. Their images, always on film, were dispatched from the far corners of the globe, sometimes days after the actual events. But the image, captured in black-and-white on the pages of the newspaper or in color inside a news magazine, was so stop-you-in-your-tracks arresting, so evocative of the moment, yet able to communicate an entire story, that people didn’t care. Because a perfectly captured moment in time can stand for all time. These images operated on an unconscious level, and the all the information and emotion they contained became seared into the brain, just as the shadows of the image remained forever on the mind’s eye. All this, from a single, lingering look at what would become icons of the age: Vietnam. Watergate. African famine. Eastern European genocide. The fall of the Berlin Wall. The Challenger explosion. Civil wars across the globe.
You name it. There’s a searing image to symbolize it. And there was a great photographer behind the lens.
It’s where Amanda one day saw herself. Only, the world had changed. Or sure, the globe still teemed with news. Egypt. Syria. Afghanistan. Ukraine. But the role of the photojournalist had been usurped by the smartphone. Specifically, the ever-ready, any-idiot-can-do-it camera these devices contained.
The result has been a flood of images, all immediately tweeted or shared around the globe seconds after they were taken. In short, it marked the end of news. Because we now learned of events in real time. Why wait for a newspaper, or even a TV news cast? It was all happening right there on social media. Twitter. Facebook. Wherever one looked online.
Now had replaced he news.
Who needed photojournalists? Not when technology turned everyone with a smartphone into one. And any photographer will tell you, ninety percent of the image -- hell, maybe ninety-nine percent – was being in the right place at the right time. Only now, when news broke out, it wasn’t the journalists who were there. It was the people. And they shared their images with the world, not via the Associated Press, Getty Images or any of the old-world media being put out of business by the Internet. But rather on social media, instead.
Still, a girl can dream, can’t she? She can fondle her camera like a lover. She can raise it to her face and enjoy the barrier of protection it provides a shy British girl who once peered into windows from the train.
It was armor, that camera. It made Amanda bold, where she otherwise might break like a little girl who never could do right by her mother. So she would never give it up. Not her dreams. Not her camera. Not journalism, even as it lay on life-support.
So she came here, to Old State, drawn by its once-distinguished journalism school and a recent star graduate who won the Pulitzer Prize at age twenty-four by exposing a sick, child sex abuse scandal going on inside the university’s vaunted football program. One incident of vile sexual assault occurred right inside the football locker room, with an ex-coach and a boy he supposedly was mentoring. But no mentoring was going on in that shower. A crime was. Crimes stretching out over decades, but swept under the rug. Until, the young female reporter, fresh from State and armed with its teachings, kept digging while working for a local rag. Digging until she had the story that would blow the lid off a once-respected coach’s crimes and upend the football culture on an otherwise idyllic and utopian campus that had always been like stepping into a picture-postcard of what college should be.
Amanda came for all of these reasons.
And for him. She came for him.
One of her heroes, now a professor and associate dean.
But what do they say about the disappointment of meeting our heroes?