“Oh, this is perfect. Homeless man meets guardian angel who pulls him off the street into this wonderful art gallery and rehabilitates him. Keep going.”
“Well, the studio was only six-hundred square feet. I was living out of it at the time.”
“Oh, this is tasty,” she said.
“Uh-huh. So, he came to my art therapy classes and kept developing his craft, and all the paintings he created he did within the last four months of his life. He got himself clean from drugs, and he died saving my life.”
“Wait. You’re showcasing the paintings of a dead homeless man who got clean and saved your life. Are you serious? Where has this story been all my career? How did he save your life, Miss Ryan?”
“There was an art student selling drugs out of one of my classes. There were some guys who came around threatening me, and he defended me.”
“The dead homeless man,” she said.
I cringed at the way she was describing John, but if this got him the exposure and the respect he deserved for his artwork, I was willing to stomach it.
“Yes. His name’s John, by the way.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it. So, he saved you from these drug-running thugs,” she said.
“Yeah, but it eventually caught up to him. He went after them to make sure they never came back, and they killed him, injected him with a lethal dose of heroin after he’d been clean for months to make it look like an overdose.”
“Oh, wow. Hell, I could do an entire week’s worth of articles on this story. Where in L.A. did all this take place? I’ll have to corroborate and cross-check with the police department,” she said.
“Well, the police wouldn’t listen to me about the conversation
I overheard going on. I was the one who called nine one one after I realized what the guys were doing to him, but the police didn’t believe me. They saw the pockmarks on his arms and wrote him off. It’s not just a story about artwork and heroism, it’s a story of redemption, of going to the greatest possible lengths to prove your worth or however you want to twist it,” I said.
“Look, Miss Ryan. I can’t print hearsay. If it’s not corroborated by the police, I can’t run it.”
“But that’s what happened,” I said.
“I’m a journalist, not a gossip columnist. I’d look like an idiot running something the police had physical records to disprove,” she said.
“You’re an entertainment reporter,” I said. “Isn’t hearsay what you dabble in?”
The phone call fell silent, and I thought she was going to hang up on me. I was getting annoyed with her, with the way she was addressing John and the way she was boiling this beautiful story down to nothing but points she could garner with her boss. I knew this story had potential and part of me wanted to tell her I’d go to someone else with it, but for whatever the reason, I stayed on the phone with her.
“Miss Ryan, I get it. Your cute little love story with your unrequited love for your dead artist and how he saved your life is driving you to showcase his artwork.”
“I wasn’t in love with him. Not even close,” I said.
“Hearsay, right?” she said.
I could practically hear her grin pouring through the phone.
I wanted to tell her I was in love with his brother and that John’s death was the catalyst that started our journey toward one another. I wanted to tell her about how John’s death made us better people and made us reach out to the community to help anyone we could to keep the positive aspects of his memory alive. I wanted to regale her with all the details I knew she would simply soak up and bask in.
But I knew I couldn’t do any of that without Bryan’s permission first.
“It’s a good story, and it’s a true one,” I said. “What if you kept his death out of it? I mean, how he died, the supposed hearsay part.”
“Actual hearsay,” she said, “until you can prove otherwise. Look, sweetheart, that’s the hook of the whole story. A dead artist with his work being showcased by someone who pulled him off the street is nice and all, but the hook that’ll get the public’s attention is the heroism, the way he saved your life. But it can’t be corroborated, so it’s useless.”
“It’s not useless, and it did happen,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter if it did. If you can’t prove it, it can’t be run,” she said.
I wanted to tell her about Bryan. About how this man’s brother was the man I’d fallen in love with. About how John’s brother had helped me build this gallery and how our connection to him brought us together not once but twice. I wanted to spill our entire story to her to convince her to run it, so I could advertise John’s gallery professionally. I was determined to get her to see it. She might’ve been annoying and snobby for someone who simply wrote on entertainment and pop culture affecting the San Diego area, but I’d done some research on her ever since she first appeared in my gallery.