I sat in the lounge of the dorm as my colleagues debated whether to spend their last Friday night at a bar or go see a movie. I was scared.
To the left, I eavesdropped on a conversation between two visual journalists, both members of the Poynter Institute’s 2007 summer fellowship. One of them, Tory Hargro, was interviewed by a large daily and was confident about his performance. He felt good because at the end of the interview, the editor asked him to take a drug test.
“Oh yeah, and they did the background check,” he said.
Background check? His words sent me slinking into the corner of the of the industrial-quality couch. I clasped my hands over my mouth and whispered to God to take away the pain below my gut.
Please, God, tell me I’m not doomed. Promise me that this amazing experience wasn’t actually the quiet sunny eye of the hurricane.
The clouds have rolled in before, after another promising interview with a newspaper.
I’ve seen the results of my background check. It’s a laser-printed black text on white paper circled with a yellow highlighter.
Conviction, Pima County Superior Court, June 27, 2003.
I have a felony.
For those who knew me in the five years leading up to my arrest, this is no surprise. Everything bad that happened came with a warning, a wag from the finger of God telling me to not do it again.
A cop once let me off after pulled me over for screaming 153 mph on the freeway in my Mitsubishi Eclipse. I was 19, returning from the bars in Canada and was going fast enough that not even his cruiser, which was equipped with a throaty 5.7-liter Corvette engine, could catch me.
Fast-forward to October 2000 and into November 2001. I got busted three times for driving under the influence. After the third arrest I was charged with felony endangerment because my SUV collided with two teens in an old up pickup truck. I spent 119 days in jail and got on top of my addiction to alcohol.
I parlayed my story into an award-winning feature I wrote for Tucson Weekly. The state liked my story so much they created a television public service announcement starring me. With all that behind, I was sanctified from the evil spirits that ruled my life.
Wrong.
I still have a felony.
The issue came up at Poynter the first day I was touring the beat with my team. We were discussing a conversational centerpiece of my car, the ignition interlock. It looks like a universal remote, sounds like a vintage handheld game and requires that I submit to breath tests while driving to prove I’m not drunk. One of my teammates, photojournalist Jason Fritz, asked, “Don’t you think newspapers are going to look into your past and not want to hire you?”
I shrugged off his assumptions with the assurance that Poynter wouldn’t have accepted me if they thought I was hopeless. The faculty knows everything; the legal saga was the foundation of my application portfolio. But deep inside it ate at the pit of my stomach, a piranha with fiery teeth, like the ulcer I got from thinking about it all the time and starving myself because I worried so much.
“I don’t know, man,” Fritz said. “Newspapers have to be pretty careful about that.”
Maybe he was right. Maybe it was a mistake to quit my newsroom job in Tucson and drive more than 2,000 miles to get the snot beat out of me by editors for six weeks. Maybe this was another blunder I should add to the mountainous pile of reasons to give up and go to a vocational school just like my high school counselor suggested.
Poynter washed away those fears for a while. The first few weeks were time to bask in my love for journalism and take on the opportunity to get better at it. It took me a couple of weeks to let my guard down, stop obsessing about my dream jobs and tackle the structural gremlins that plagued my copy. The day of triumph finally came when writing coach Kelly McBride edited my last beat-reporting assignment.
“This fellowship has been a soaring success for you,” McBride said. My first story was a mess. It wasn’t even published. My last piece cleared the editing process in record time.
Redemption was in sight.
A few days later I found out a few of the newspaper recruiters requested interviews with me.
I could almost taste it.
Then, that night in the dorm’s lounge, Hargro’s conversation inadvertently reinforced the shame that comes with doing something stupid enough to be officially labeled a criminal.
I have a felony.
Several editors and recruiters have reassured me that if I am honest and upfront, many newsrooms will still be willing to give me a shot. However there are these dark moments, when logic fails me, when the shame and embarrassment of my past dominate my thoughts. That’s when I convince myself that no one will hire me, no matter how badly I want to tell stories about people, their lives and their communities.
I spent that night and following morning scrawling notes on the only legal pad I brought from home. It’s my connection tablet, my time to ask God questions. The following afternoon, the answer came from my closest friend here, writing fellow Kalen Ponche.
“You’re not the only one freaking out, Arek,” Ponche said softly with a smile, her head tilted in reassurance. “You can’t say you’re different from everyone else.”
She was right. All of us are afraid of something as we step back into the world, whether it’s not having enough experience, enough personality to connect with readers or enough chances to get the attention of recruiters.
Hargro is a minister and a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I asked him what he feared and he paused from his usual hypnotized glare into another fantastic Web project. His eyes gazed toward the windows of the newsroom. He fears his career will get in the way of his relationship with God.
But fear not, he told me. The decisions I made from that point onward reflect who I am today. One mistake seared into my history in the eyes of an Arizona court is forgivable in the eyes of God.
Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows, Matthew 10:29:31.
I went to Mass for the first time in more than a year. The homily fit like Cinderella’s slipper: Don’t judge yourself by your successes but by the pain and anguish you went through to get there.
Fame, fortune and glamour no longer matter. My life as a journalist is devoted to using the same strength that got me through conviction, jail time and humiliation. Now I want to stick up for the underdogs of society who live in communities facing great turmoil, cities like Detroit, Memphis and New Orleans. I was brought here for that reason.
I will never forget it and my felony.
I will also never forget how much it’s helped me.
