The diverging paths of small-town pals
On my first real day as a cop reporter for the Shreveport Journal, I rolled into the Bossier City Police Department about 4 a.m., and the first thing I saw was a high school classmate with his hands cuffed behind his back, struggling and bent over the counter that held the department’s “book-in book” — the ledger where officers recorded the names of those they had deposited in the jail and what charges were contemplated against them.
This was a problem because I had been instructed to quietly look at the book-in book and write down in my official reporter’s notebook the names of those who had been incarcerated overnight for suspected felonies. The guy who trained me, a legendary police reporter named Gary Hines, had suggested that I do this quickly and quietly, without calling undue attention to myself.
The desk sergeant was a good enough guy, Gary said, but he was a little garrulous, and I would be on a tight schedule.
The next stop was the Bossier Parish sheriff’s department in the courthouse 11 miles north. Then I had to run back downtown to be at the office to file an overnight police beat story by 6:30 a.m.
But I couldn’t do anything stealthily because Larry [REDACTED], a Buzzcocks fan I’d occasionally played pickup basketball with and against, was jacked up with his chest covering the book I needed to look at, his head craned to the side, his legs flailing as a weary middle-aged patrolman sought to bring him under control, with the presumably garrulous desk sergeant having stood up and backed away from the disturbance in his area.
As I tentatively moved toward the desk, I entered Larry’s peripheral vision. He immediately stopped when he caught sight of me, called my name and asked when I got back in town. I explained to him — and the various uniformed individuals who had entered the foyer to lend assis
tance and/or see what the fuss was about — that I was the Journal’s new police reporter and that I had come to check on whoever had been arrested overnight.
“Will I be in the newspaper?” Larry asked.
“Depends on what you did,” I said. “Was it a felony?”
“Narcotics,” the weary officer answered. “Schedule II.”
“Yeah, well probably, Larry,” I said. “Possession,” Larry said. “With intent to distribute,” the officer said.
“I need to see the book,” I said.
I tell this story fairly often, because it’s true, but sometimes I embellish it a little and have Larry express disappointment that things hadn’t worked out better for me. After all, the last he’d heard of me, I was in law school; he might have expected to encounter me in a courtroom rather than a police station.
In high school, Larry and I weren’t that different, both products of the suburbs, kids for whom their parents and teachers held expectations. He was not under-privileged in any significant way that I was aware; his parents were together and he drove a used Triumph TR7 that — a year or so after our cop shop encounter — he put it in a ditch. Officers responding to the scene of the accident found him underneath the car flicking a lighter, apparently trying to set the car on fire. His parents arranged for him to go to rehab after that.
A few weeks after he got out he was asleep in his fireproof car in the parking lot of a Shreveport nightclub late at night when a young woman knocked on his window and asked for his help escaping from an abusive boyfriend. Larry opened his door and stood up, and took a shotgun blast square in the chest.
He made the newspaper again.
I thought about Larry when I was reading Monica Potts’ “The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America.”
Potts is one of those Arkansans who, in Charles Portis’ notable phrase, achieved “escape velocity.” When she was in high school, she attended a summer program at Barnard College in New York. Then she went to Bryn Mawr, then back to New York, and on to Washington.
She became a journalist, a senior politics reporter for the website FiveThirtyEight, specializing in writing about poverty issues and especially the ways women were stunted by the lack of opportunity and societal expectations that they marry early and devote themselves to their inevitable children.
Then she came home. And reconnected with her childhood friend Darci Brawner.
Darci had been Monica’s friend since first grade. Their paths diverged in high school, as “boy crazy” Darci’s interests became more pluralistic and Monica hewed to the nerdy good-girl path. In the book’s prologue, she writes about meeting up with Darci after her erstwhile friend tracked her down on Facebook, and finding her living in a rickety trailer with a man she’d known for a few weeks, unemployed, smelling of alcohol, addicted to crystal meth and opiates — Darci, with whom she’d plotted escape from Clinton (Van Buren County) and its narrowness, the friend she’d taken to be as bright and competent and funny as herself.
Like Monica, Darci had been a straight-A student and good athlete. Like Monica, Darci wanted out. But she never left. She really never had the chance.
In the book’s prologue, Potts the journalist (as opposed to Monica, the character in the memoir), points to the decline in life expectancy among “the least educated white Americans, women in particular” in recent years. She cites a 2015 study by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton that attributes this drop to “a trio of ailments they called ‘deaths of despair’” — suicides and drug- and alcohol-related deaths.
“Words like malaise and despair hint at stories that can’t be told with data and statistics,” Potts writes. Clinton, “with its aging, shrinking population, governed by a small group of people who worshipped at the same churches as their parents and who had knit around themselves an ever thicker and tighter web of personal and political self-deceits,” seemed the embodiment of these trends. So she came back to look for the women behind the statistics.
“For many years, I had avoided Darci on purpose. When I’d left home at 18, she’d been kicked out of high school weeks before graduation, or at least that was how I remembered it,” Potts writes.
“Before I left for college, we said a painful goodbye at a funeral, a painful capstone to an often painful childhood. I was eager to leave, to close the book on Clinton and the people in it. Thereafter … I tried not to think about what I’d left behind, what life was like for the people I loved. I sensed, from little things I heard, that Darci’s life had not gone as she’d hoped.”
Potts is a supple writer who avoids the sentimentality that seems endemic to up-from-poverty memoirs; she neither romanticizes nor sensationalizes the hardness of living poor in podunk, in a world devoid of role models where the only paths to the middle class for young women are teaching and nursing, where it’s easier to get meth than liquor. She wisely assumes a supporting role in the unfolding drama, focusing not on the story of how she overcame but on how her friend has been, so far, thwarted.
A couple of weeks ago, Potts was at WordsWorth Books in Little Rock, to promote her book. My wife Karen interviewed her on the store’s little stage.
It was a full house; they had to turn away latecomers who hadn’t reserved seats in advance.
I sat in front, next to a chair that held Karen’s purse.
And on the other side of that purse sat Darci Brawner.
With “The Forgotten Girls,” Potts has ended up with something other than the metrics-driven narrative she might have envisioned, something more elegiac and personal and moving. It is Darci’s story. And despite all the crime and messiness, it is not a tragedy.
And it is not over.