Chris Jones says

Not All Smurfs and Sunshine

December 16, 2010

 The Brooding Moral Universe of Writer Chris Jones

MATTHEW SCIANITTI

CLICK TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Jones dials a number in Scottsburg, Indiana, and Gail Bond answers with her slow Midwestern twang. “My name is Chris,” he says. “I’m a writer with Esquire and I’d like to write a story about your son’s journey home.”Gail’s voice tightens and she begins to cry. Then Chris cries, too. “I’m a stranger to you, you’re a stranger to me. Just trust me. I’m not going to stain the memory of Joey.” Gail likes that the reporter calls her son Joey. They share a tearful, hour-long conversation.

He tells her about a news story he read on CNN.com about American forward operating bases in Iraq. Members of Sergeant Robert Joe “Joey” Montgomery’s unit had carried him back to base after an improvised explosive device killed him. Montgomery was just a regular guy who ended up a casualty of war, and Chris wondered about his journey home from the desert.

But Gail doesn’t want to be the first person he interviews. She doesn’t want to lay bare her sorrow if no one else will talk. Chris agrees, and then does what he always does: he reports the hell out of the story. He logs thousands of kilometres tracking down every hand that touched the body, speaking to 101 people in all. With each source, Chris repeats the mantra: “I just want to talk to you about your role in that journey—what you did that day, how it affected you. I’ll ask you some strange questions because I want to get it right.”

Five months later, in January 2008, Gail offers a home-cooked meal and Chris heads down Interstate 65 to Scottsburg (population 6,040). He gets to a little ranch-style house on the corner of Elm and South streets. The eight-foot-tall stone slab that marks Joey’s grave is steps away at Scottsburg Cemetery. Gail answers the door, her eyes damp. They embrace. Gail likes Bud Light, one of Chris’s sources told him, and he brings bottles. Turns out she likes cans.

Inside, everything is neat and in place. Chris sits down at the round kitchen table. Gail serves pot roast with potatoes and carrots. It’s rich and hot. She smokes as she watches him eat. Chris wants to tell Gail he felt like he’d come to know Joey during the reporting. Neither fit in when they were in high school, and they would have been friends. But he waits. Instead, he asks her how she found out about Joey’s death. She asks him about Joey’s journey home. It’s not really a formal interview, just two people talking. Gail tells Chris she thinks of him like a son now. Chris tells Gail he feels just like another person helping her son come home.

“I wanted to do right by Joey,” Chris Jones now says of "The Things That Carried Him" which Esquire published in May 2008. In 17,000 words, he told the story of one soldier’s return home, structured backward from his funeral to the moment an IED broke his body. He sprinkled details—a girl in a flowered dress and the two yellow ribbons tied to a tree on Elm Street—that act as emotional cues and lend lyricism to the writing.

The piece won the 2009 National Magazine Award for feature writing. (In 2005, he had won the same prize for “Home,” a story of life inside the International Space Station after the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003.) Jones spent eight months travelling and interviewing for “The Things That Carried Him,” and as with most of his stories, its strength lies in accumulated detail. While he layers just about every sentence with facts, literary flourishes are few, and he rarely indulges in metaphor. His prose is powerful because he draws close to a story, learning intimate aspects about important characters and moments. “In journalism, objectivity as this ideal should be replaced with truth,” he says. “As long as your story is 100 percent accurate, no one can question you.”

Although authenticity is paramount, Jones uses facts to portray a binary world without shades of grey: good-bad, life-death, truth-lies. He might sound judgmental, sometimes even pretentious, but Jones insists he wants readers to feel the human texture of everyday life.

 

Jones doesn’t deny he’s been lucky. If John Fraser, master of the University of Toronto’s Massey College and former editor of Saturday Night, hadn’t found Jones typing in his residence one night while paying him a visit, then Jones wouldn’t have left personal essays underneath Fraser’s office door. If Fraser hadn’t insisted Kenneth Whyte take notice of the urban design graduate student, the National Post’s first editor-in-chief wouldn’t have bargained with sports editor Graham Parley to let Jones join his department.

Yes, Jones benefitted from “the power of the universe,” yet he’s been bold enough to make his own luck too. For instance, in July 2001 he walks into Esquire’s headquarters to score a job. Trying to talk his way past security in front of the elevators, he asks for editor-in-chief David Granger.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No.”

“Then no.”

Jones tells the guard he’s a Toronto journalist in New York to cover the Blue Jays. He has time to kill before the game and he’s a fan of the magazine.

“No.”

As a boy, he learned the rhythm of sentences by copying out books. At the Post, he wrote about boxing, baseball and hot-dog blasters. Jones started reading Esquire in university, hoping to one day craft a sentence like Charles P. Pierce, the magazine’s legendary sportswriter.

“No.”

Dejected, Jones turns toward the front doors, but the janitor stops him.

“You want to work for Esquire?”

“Not as a janitor.”

Ask for Andy Ward, the janitor advises, he’s an avid sports fan. Jones turns around. The guard inexplicably allows him to call Ward, articles editor at the time, who agrees to see Jones. In the two hours before heading up, Jones grabs two boxes of Krispy Kreme Original Glazed doughnuts. Everyone loves doughnuts, right? He gives one box to the janitor and places the other on Ward’s desk, along with a copy of Falling Hard, his 2001 boxing memoir that looks into smashed faces, tarnished champions and bloodlust—and into Jones himself. Though the book contains typos that make him squirm, it was an impressive accomplishment for a journalist in his 20s. Before leaving, he asks Ward to read a Post story called “Blood, Sweat, Tears Are Not Enough,” about Arturo Gatti’s 2001 fight against Oscar De La Hoya.

“Sure, I’ll read it later.”

“Could you read it now? I need to know if I have any chance at this.” Ward relents. “The beginning—‘The ambulance that took Arturo Gatti to the hospital matched his blood-stained trunks, white with blue trim’— is good, but we wouldn’t use as many one-sentence paragraphs.”

“Good. That’s all I need to know.”

Jones leaves. Ward looks at the box. He prefers toasted coconut from Dunkin’ Donuts. But he likes Jones, who begins to e-mail him, and Ward soon appreciates the Canadian’s cheekiness. In March 2002, Ward sends Jones an e-mail. Jones has left the Post after nearly three years, and Pierce is moving on too—soEsquire is “auditioning” writers to take over his monthly column, The Game.

Jones’s first piece, a profile of Barry Zito, looks at the pitcher’s eccentric take on the universe: “Then he laughs the laugh of a young man with a blessed left arm, standing under the hot lights of a television camera with is pants down and his hand in his jock, confident that fate is in his back pocket and an ace is up his sleeve.” For several months before that, Jones and his future wife, Lee, spent his severance money from the Post living an itinerate lifestyle. They travelled to Nova Scotia, Rarotonga and Arizona. He ended up in his parents’ basement. One day, while watching the

2002 MLB All-Star Game, he heard Fox baseball analyst Tim McCarver quote his piece: “His curveball dropped like a broken heart.” Jones was 28 and broke, but he’d made the most of his one chance.

Jones got the gig and so continued to write The Game columns, animating them with an irreverent wit. When golfer Annika Sorenstam  played with the boys, Jones wrote of her attire: “[It] felt a lot like the war had been won but not the battle: A woman was finally allowed to join the PGA Tour, but her knees remained expressly verboten.”

Profiles of celebrities and athletes followed, but when the Columbia space shuttle burned up in the atmosphere in February 2003, Jones wondered about the astronauts stranded on the International Space Station. Their return journey became the focus of his first long-form narrative for Esquire. “Home,” published in the survival-themed July.

2004 issue, has a natural, uncomplicated arc: astronauts live in space; their ride home explodes; they complete a dramatic re-entry in an old Russian capsule and land.

Like many writers, Jones sees every section of a story like a scene from a movie. But in this piece, he also erases the barrier between characters and reader by using an old trick: he replaced names of astronauts Kenneth Bowersox and Donald Pettit and cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin with the more intimate second-person pronoun: “You ring the ship’s bell, mounted on a bracket in Destiny, seven times for seven astronauts. The ringing still echoing in your ears, each of you finds a corner in which to try to come out the other side of your grief.”

Comfortable telling a story only when he has too much material to choose from, Jones interviewed Pettit many times to get the second person just right. “He does not hesitate to go back and back and back to find out more,” says Esquire’s deputy editor, Peter Griffin. In 2005, Jones scored a writer-at-large contract, which gave him latitude to pitch stories he’s passionate about.

Yearning to write more long narratives, he expanded “Home” into a book, Out of Orbit, in 2007. Length lets Jones repeat details, which he calls “echoes.” The blurred fence posts, blue nitrile gloves and blue bag of medication in “The Strange Happiness of the Emergency Medic”; the single piece of paper on the ocean floor in “The End of Mystery”; the interplay between the red and blue in “Big Game Hunter”—all of these echoes colour filmic scenes. He loathes injecting scenes with devices that insist “This is where you cry!” He calls that “Oliver Stone-ing” readers. But there have been occasions when the footage Jones has constructed seems, well, constructed. “TV’s Crowning Moment of Awesome,” about the day Terry Kniess won The Price Is Right’s grand prize with a perfect bid, is a rare occasion when Jones does Oliver Stone his readers. The piece’s plot twist, which suggests an audience member may have helped Kniess win, seems too contrived, as if to instruct readers “This is where you gasp!”

Although not especially thrilled to write celebrity profiles, Jones burrows in to find the person away from the spotlight. In “Don’t You Just Want to Punch Colin Farrell?” he comes to respect the actor’s desire to be a good father. In “How a Young Man Lives” he admires running back Clinton Portis’s appreciation for his fleeting moment at the apex of professional football. But one recent profile, above all, revealed his own particular worldview….

Jones stands in front of Roger Ebert’s bathroom mirror. He tries on another of Ebert’s sport coats; this one is single-breasted and navy blue. Jones must look formal tonight because Ebert and his wife Chaz have invited him to an eight o’clock dinner at the University Club of Chicago. Jones doesn’t like proper haircuts and suits; he likes long, thick sideburns and clothes from Old Navy. He wasn’t expecting a fancy dinner and the coat is big; it’s like he’s a kid wearing his dad’s clothes.

Jones pitched an Ebert profile to Griffin, but Esquire’s editor-in-chief, David Granger, wanted Taylor Swift. Now 37, Jones has inherited the mantle of “young” writer-at-large and often writes profiles of comely female celebrities. Swift it was. Then Jones caught a break—she cancelled—and a few weeks later he was in a Chicago hotel room, awaiting an e-mail invitation to Ebert’s Lincoln Park brownstone. Jones wanted to understand how the 68-year-old lived his life after cancer had taken his lower jaw. When the movie critic shuffled slowly into his front room, Jones was surprised by Ebert’s gauntness.

When they arrive at the University Club, Jones and the Eberts take a seat in the middle of the Gothic-style dining room. Immediately, the maître d’ rushes over and whispers to Chaz. He looks sharply at Jones, who’s wearing checkered Vans slip-ons. They have to go. The maître d’ offers an alternative. Jones now feels like a moron wearing a borrowed jacket and a courtesy pair of leather shoes. But he starts laughing when Ebert scribbles down fun memories of friends and premieres. Around the mute Ebert, Jones is especially quiet. Then he blows it, praising the buttered scallops and the red wine. Embarrassed, Jones says, “I’m sorry, Roger.” Ebert shakes his head, scribbles on a page, and hands the torn sheet to him: No, no. You’re eating for me.

The interview with the man who can’t talk, “Roger Ebert: The Essential Man,” became one of the most talked about magazine stories of 2010 and revealed how close Jones gets to his subjects. He practically fawns: “We have a habit of turning sentimental about celebrities who are struck down—Muhammad Ali, Christopher Reeve—transforming them into mystics. Still, it’s almost impossible to sit beside Roger Ebert, lifting blue Post-It notes from his fingertips, and not feel as though he’s become something more than he was.” Ebert later writes in his blog about Jones, “You sense the person there. He’s not holding his subjects at arm’s length.”

Jones concedes his enthusiasm, but argues that an intimate connection helps a writer build emotional tethers between words and reader. “How could you take that sheet from Ebert’s hands,” he asks, “and not feel something?” He says he writes his best stories when he’s grown attached to the subject. “The Essential Man” forced Jones to catalogue everything he ate and said. “The Strange Happiness of the Emergency Medic” made him think about becoming a paramedic. And “The Things That Carried Him” helped him understand the anguish of a mother who smokes alone at her kitchen table and thinks of her dead son. Andrea Pitzer, editor of Harvard University’s Nieman Storyboard, says Jones can afford to get close to his subjects because he is writing about the human experience, not about immediate policy issues. “The farther you are from your story having a precise impact on the national debate happening in the moment,” she says, “the more your story is about connecting on an intimate level with another human being.”

Nevertheless, Jones admits his attachments can affect the writing. When he wrote the scene at the port mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in “The Things That Carried Him,” Jones didn’t want to mention that Montgomery lost both his legs, because he didn’t want Bond to know. But Griffin wanted Jones to leave it in, and he did. Joey’s mother says, “Chris wanted to protect me.” There is a bigger risk when a writer invests so much in a story. In 2007, Tom Junod wrote an article about a man who called himself a professional military assassin. But Esquire’s fact-checker discovered the man’s life story was myriad outrageous lies. Junod rewrote the entire piece, entitled “Mercenary,” and exposed the fraud. Jones says he’d do the same, but the cautionary tale doesn’t sway him: “Sometimes journalism schools and journalism profs ask journalists not to be human beings.”

Jones isn’t being pretentious when he says that; in fact, he often prefaces his thoughts on journalism with “I know this is going to sound arrogant…,” and when he was a visiting professor at the University of Montana in 2009, his syllabus for a narrative non-fiction course declared: “Please understand that I’m a one-chance kind of guy. Students who miss appointments, don’t actively participate in class, or blow deadlines will be knocked to a lower place in my mental masthead. But if I see that you care about your work and your future, you will not find a better ally than me. That’s the deal.”

The Deal is a codification of his Manichaean view of the world: Jones is a lover and Jones is a fighter. Jones the lover talks about the moments of affection people share in “Arrivals at the Airport: An Idea for Our Time”; has a debate about footnotes with his wife in “The Kept Wife"; and smokes dope and plays poker with NFL running back Ricky Williams in “The Runaway.” Jones just wants everything and everyone to be okay, but insists, “It’s not like I believe every story should be Smurfs and sunshine.”

And not every story is. Jones the fighter defends Ebert from tactless barbs from conservative blogger Caleb Howe, who makes fun of the critic’s cancer in an Esquire blog post called “Roger Ebert’s Tea Party Rebuke Wasn’t Nearly Enough”; relishes a bar fight “In Defense of the Fistfight”; and stands up for his students after Montana’s football coach, Bobby Hauck, chastises them for pursuing a story about his overindulged, bullying players.

Jones the fighter likes pushing our sense of retribution. Near the end of Falling Hard, he wrote about an intoxicated man harassing passengers on a train from Montreal to Toronto. Jones beat him to death with his writing: “My boot will be shiny with blood. I’ll swing it into his face one last time. His head will implode.” It was a little nauseating and a little crazy.

But he doesn’t mind going all the way. When Jones first learned to box, he discovered most people stop their fists at the face. “You’ve got to punch through,” he says, “to the back of the head.” Case in point: in a 2003 profile of Tiger Woods, Jones reduces the world’s best golfer to a “down on love” sulk and a condescending sniff. What’s more, he warns worshiping fans: “It’s as though we’re looking at him through the wrong end of our microscopes.”

Woods gets it again in two shorter essays, including “Where to Find the Salvation of Tiger Woods,” which came after the golfer’s philandering hit the news. Jones tries to make the story relatable, likening the superstar to his older brother, also caught in an affair. “We wish he hadn’t written that,” says the writer’s father, John. “The comparison between our son and

Woods is erroneous.” But Jones disagrees. “I paralleled Tiger’s and my brother’s situations because I felt they had been similar kinds of people, people who had been geeks growing up who had suddenly blossomed into those world-beaters and who had tried everything to hide their geek cards and it all came crumbling down when they seemed to have it all.”

Ultimately, Jones wants his readers to compare his stories to their own lives and make judgements. “Maybe somebody reads that Woods story and decides to call off the affair he was going to have that night.”

But not everybody appreciates his uncompromising take on life: his brother hasn’t spoken to him since.

Jones and I meet in the lobby of downtown Ottawa’s Holiday Inn. He’s reading the newspaper, so unassuming in his oversized green Bermuda shorts and wrinkled zip-up sweater that I walk past him twice. He stands up, extends his hand, white teeth gleaming through a thick beard. “I should shave it,” he says, “but I forget.” For a guy who’s spent most of his life in Ontario, he sure has a sugary West Coast inflection.

As we saunter to the Elgin Street Diner, Jones walks in flip-flops like a landlocked surfer. He’s disarmingly nonchalant, but still intimidating. By 26, he’d written about the bulls in Pamplona, Lance Armstrong’s French domination and the joys of San Diego’s surf. Sure, the short-term wealth of the Post’s early years allowed Jones to report anything, but he never half-assed it. Stephen Brunt, sports columnist for The Globe and Mail, acted as chaperone when Jones first covered boxing and now calls him “the most talented guy that’s come into the business in 20 years.”

We sit down next to the neon lights by the diner’s front window. I ask him about the time doctors removed his gallbladder before he interviewed George Clooney. “So Cedars-Sinai, the world’s greatest hospital, or whatever they bill themselves as, dropped my friggin’ gallbladder on my chest,” he says. “And then billed me $48,000.”

We laugh. But soon he’s dramatic. He says he doesn’t believe in an afterlife, or that he’ll live long, so he obsesses over his work, insisting he only has so many words. “Stories never get a second chance.” Jones’s voice turns softer and more sheepish when he says his work isn’t as good as Junod’s and Pierce’s. Then he’s suddenly earnest when talking about the magazines he writes for: Esquire, ESPN The Magazine,The Walrus and Canadian Geographic. He’s hot, he says, and can’t waste any words. Jones’s self-critical nature helps keep him great, his dad tells me, but all this talk of an early demise is “pure bullshit.”

After dinner we grab a pint at the Royal Oak on Bank Street, the same bar he wrote about in “In Defense of the Fistfight.” Over there is where I dragged Jericho outside, he tells me. I tell him everyone says his writing always seems effortless. (Even Parley says his feature story drafts for the Post were “so clean you practically didn’t have to touch them.”) Jones hates to hear people say that. “It’s tough for me.”

Why?

“I don’t know, it just is.”

“He bleeds those stories,” says Griffin, “because they mean so much to him.”

The tape recorder is off now. We guzzle pints and talk about a humourous wrapping paper venture Jones and a buddy are devising. Our curvy brunette waitress joins the conversation. I say the idea is funny given what Jones does.

Why, what do you do?” she asks.

“I’m a writer.”

“Really?”

This is Jones’s favourite bar in the city. He knows our waitress but has never talked about work.

“Anywhere I would know?”

“Esquire.”

Jones says it doesn’t bother him that she doesn’t know he’s a writer.

“Writers don’t have their names up in lights.”

Yet it does bother him. He even talks about his fondness for awards and all things shiny: “If I ate a great burger at a restaurant, why wouldn’t I want to go back and eat it again?” Recognition and validation keep him going. He cares what people think, but he despairs that he’ll get so few opportunities to write stories like “The Things That Carried Him.” “That tells me he’s still a young man,” says Walrus editor John Macfarlane. “If he continues to work at it, he will discover that he has lots of words left.”

After I leave, Jones goes home to work. In the night silence, he sits at his kitchen table. He always loses track of time when he writes. All that matters are the words and getting them right. “You can have the most beautiful words in the universe,” he’ll tell me in a later interview, “but if they’re false, then it’s meaningless.”

Every detail means something to him. He often keeps beside him talismanic objects associated with people he’s interviewed so he never forgets. There are the blue Post-It notes Ebert scribbled answers on. There’s the NASA mission patch Don Pettit gave him. And there’s the photo of Gail.