Vengeance

When I was a young reporter at the Daily Breeze in the industrial armpit of Torrance, California, one of our many duties was to format the TV soaps for inclusion in the paper. My late colleague Bea Nyburg and I used to laugh ourselves senseless at the Spanish-language episodes of the genre, as they all without exception featured vengeance.

Vengeance must be the most stupid of all the motives. It is self-destructive, devoid of insight, alarmingly lacking in compassion. Before my Daily Breeze days, I was briefly a police reporter in San Pedro for the smallest of the Copley Newspapers chain, the "San Pedro News-Pilot," a thrice-weekly evening newspaper known not-too-affectionately as the "Fishwrapper." I had the distinction of having the shortest-ever stay at the Fishwrapper before promotion, but I am still nostalgic about my three months there.

Among the chief delights was to peruse the morning police blotter in search of copy for the 11 a.m. deadline. I often found tales of passion, bluntly told in policese, involving the demise of a woman by a lover mad with jealousy. The tragedy of these stories have remained in my mind these 23 years. I felt sorry for the invariably lower-class victims, and also a little sadness for the perpetrators; could they not have just let it go? Moved away?

The maudlin lack of pretense, the absence of any attempt to cover up the emotions, the failure to employ self-reflection -- all this was fascinating in a depressing way. I in no way envied the players in these tales, seeing clearly their dreadful comeuppances. Landing in the police blotter was no road to glory. Even as subjects of my baroque pen, nothing could have raised their fate to more than a 5-inch mention in the Fishwrapper.