So There's This Guy
By Max Linsky
So there's this guy.
There's this guy who travels around the world telling people to take risks they're too scared to take. Your husband's an alcoholic? Talk to him. Your boss is missing the point? Tell her. You're pretty sure your enemy wants you annihilated? Invite him over for dinner.
It's this guy's job to make people feel uncomfortable. It's his job to say the right thing at the wrong time, and then sit back and watch people deal with the repercussions. It's to ask the folks in power—the CEOs and the presidents—if they got to the top by always answering yes.
In this guy's office he's got a picture of himself with Yassir Arafat. This guy has gotta be the only guy who wanted to make the Middle East peace process more uncomfortable.
Yeah, he's got a picture of Arafat in his office. And then he's got a picture of me.
My dad's not a big guy, but he does have a big nose. He's got this loafing, droopy schnoz that starts between his eyes and runs down and out, way out, and then curls back in toward his mouth. It's got hairs flowing out of it and all sortsa other disturbing excretia, but if you can get past them, you'll see a little blue dot right there on the end.
It's a stitch.
Sometime in the 1970s Dad slipped on a patch of ice while looking under the hood of whatever beat-up compact he was driving then. He would have gotten away with just a smack on the pavement if his nose didn't dangle quite so far from his face. But it does. And as he went down, that preposterous snout caught on the very corner of his Massachusetts license plate and it split. Right down the middle.
When he returned to the doctor to get the stitches removed, he was told he'd have to come back again. The end of the wound hadn't healed yet and they were going to have to leave that last stitch in there for a few more days.
This guy never went back.
Maybe he left the stitch in his nose to make people uncomfortable just looking at him. Or maybe he was too busy.
But my guess is that my father wanted to be uncomfortable himself. The dot is small, and most people probably don't even notice it. But he sees the thing every day. And when he walks into boardrooms and conference rooms and coffee rooms, he knows that if you look closely enough, it seems like he woke up that morning, ate his breakfast and stabbed himself in the nose with a blue ballpoint pen.
And that looks stupid.
So that's the guy who raised me.
And that's the guy who told me to come to Poynter.
He's come here, too. They wanted him, schnoz and all, to be on faculty back in the '80s. And when he said no, they stuck him on the advisory board for 15 years.
Driving down here I was sure I had less experience than anyone else. While they were arduously editing their portfolios in October, pouring over their endless clips trying to find the very best five, my job was relatively easy. Take the two published stories I had, photocopy them, and send them in.
But I was far less worried about my inexperience than I was about being "a legacy." This summer wasn't the first time I've followed my dad somewhere.
I've been Marty Linsky's kid just as much as I've been Max in my life.
But coming here was a little different. I wasn't toddling around one of his classrooms, raising my hand when I had to go the bathroom. And some former student wasn't taking me out to breakfast on my way cross-country. This wasn't even like going to live with his friend in South Africa, where at least I'd worked on a farm all day. I had taken a spot. Somebody's place. And they were paying me to do it.
I was nervous that first day. But more than that I was prepared. I was prepared for six weeks of questioning my own validity. Of questioning whether I deserved to be here. I was prepared for that incredible penetrating guilt that most privileged kids, save the Hilton sisters maybe, feel at some point in their lives.
I was ready for six weeks of apologizing.
People made their introductions as we went around the building that first day. Bob Steele pulled me aside and told me to say hi to my folks. Keith said something I think. But that was it.
There weren't any seething looks from the edges of the North Pavilion. No long-winded assurances that "I really did deserve to get here on my on merit." Nobody, save me, seemed to care.
There were some awkward moments, times when other fellows would ask why I was house sitting for the Steeles or going out to dinner with Gregory Favre. "Oh, I'm a legacy," I'd say, and try and explain as nonchalantly as possible that these random faces walking around Poynter were family friends.
And again, I'd wait for those chilly stares—the "you screwed everyone else over" look that I'd expected so much of. And again, they wouldn't come.
You see, nobody else really cared. It turns out that only a handful people even knew who my dad was. And it wasn't him they got to know—it was me.
And that's uncomfortable.
My dad talks a lot in his work about comfort zones. He believes, and I think he's right, that people are only truly tested when they are stripped of all the scaffolding and the crutches and the trusted arms of a friend to fall back on. It's when you've stepped out of the rationalization, crept out on that ledge of honesty and into a position where you can fall, that you see what you're made of. It's hard to do.
And it's easy to spend six weeks feeling guilty. It's easy to tell yourself over and over that nobody expects you to do good work, because nobody thinks you were supposed to be there anyway. It's easy, I realized, to hide behind a father's legacy by telling yourself that no one expects you to come out.
But if nobody else cared who my dad was, how was I supposed to? I didn't even have the fuel to feed my own defense mechanism.
All that was left to do was the work.
I was going to have to take my own risks. I had to go and talk to the kids hanging out on the corner, the same kids I hung out with not so long ago, and ask them what the hell they were doing with themselves. I had to sit there, in my khaki shorts with my notebook in hand, and listen to them figure out if I was a narc. I had to feel old.
I had to stare at my inexperience. I had to sleep with it, bathe with it, eat lunch with it. I had to ask what enterprise reporting was. I had to ask what the AP stylebook was. I had to ask, at least a few times, exactly what ethics are. And then I'd go out on a story and my inexperience would stare right back at me, grinning like a 10-year-old about to say "I told you so." I had to make mistakes. And even worse—I had to admit some of them when I got back.
I had to ask a blind man what the hell he meant when he said he saw me coming. I had to bother him at work and pester his wife and ask them how his blindness dictated their marriage. And then I had to sit there when she asked me who the hell I thought I was. I had to feel insensitive.
And then I had to write about it. I had to take all my biases, all of my missed angles and my butchered quotes and throw them down on the page and try and tell a story. I had to sit there on Thursday mornings while people pointed out my mistakes. I had to feel exposed.
And I had no choice but to do it as myself. And for myself.
I grew up sitting across the breakfast table from this guy whose job it is to challenge people. He makes a living asking people to question themselves. It's direct, face-to-face—he stands right in front of them. And he did it to me every morning for 18 years. Still does whenever I go home.
But he and I haven't gotten a chance to eat breakfast this summer. And I haven't been able to pretend that he was sitting in the back of the room, painting everything I said and everything I wrote with his presence.
This summer I've had to challenge myself. I've had to drop all the painstaking insecurities. Well, maybe not all of them. But I've had to drop a big one.
This summer it hasn't been my dad standing out on that ledge. And it hasn't been his shadow. It's been me. And it's been the work.
I may not be ready to leave a stitch in my nose, and I'll probably clip those unsightly Linsky nose hairs, the ones I've no doubt inherited, when they eventually start growing. But I have learned that it's not the mirror that matters, or the nametag. It's your work, in all of its ugliness and all of its beauty, that gets you through the door.
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