Tere Figueras Negrete - Witz End

 

My first real job at the Miami Herald was covering the graveyard shift on the police beat. I was this chubby, overprotected Cuban girl from Kendall. Any Cuban girls from Kendall? Yeah. All right. [audience cheers]

 

[audience laughter] Pretty much everyone. So, who had managed to Forrest Gump her way into this really cool job. I spent the whole first year feeling like I was on just shaky ground. So, they sat me next to the two most veteran crime reporters of the newspaper. On one side was Elaine Del Valle. Just brash and bold and whose default method of reporting was just like screaming into her phone in Spanish, like if she was being burned at the stake by Fidel Castro, just like passion. [audience laughter] 

 

And then, on the other side was Arnold Markowitz. Arnie or Witz, if he really, really liked you. He was wild with like a shock of white hair, and this white beard that he would claw in frustration if someone is being especially dumb or stupid. I was frequently both. Because Arnie was hard of hearing, he had rigged up his desk phone to this bright white light, like the kind of thing a tugboat would need to navigate foggy conditions. It was fucking ridiculous. 

 

So, every time the phone would ring, the light would flash in my face, and Arnie would pick up the phone and scream, "Markowitz, whatcha got?" It was terrifying. [audience chuckles] But he was a legend. Unstoppable, unscoopable. Every criminal and cop knew him. I was determined to impress him. So, that first summer, Arnie gets a call, a tip that there was a break in a cold case he had covered years ago, decades. There was a guy who had disappeared on the way to an Indian casino at the edge of the Everglades. Arnie gets a tip that they found his car at the bottom of a canal off of chrome. So, he sends me out to go to the crime scene and see if they pulled any remains from this submerged car. 

 

So, I'm driving out to Homestead in the middle of the night, in the middle of a thunderstorm, somehow managed to talk my way into the crime scene. I'm standing there ankle deep in mud, and they're winching up this old sedan, and one of the cops opens the car door, and sure enough, it's a tangle of bones and muck and weeds. Did I mention the bones? Yeah. 

 

So, I scribble in my notebook and I get the hell out of there. Because by now, it's 10 minutes to deadline, and I have to call Arnie to file my feed. Only my phone is dead, of course. So, I am driving in a blind panic in the rain, just completely unhinged, praying for a payphone. You guys remember payphones? [audience chuckles] And then, I see, in the distance, a Denny's, like Valhalla in the distance, Denny's with a payphone in front of it. So, I screech up like a maniac, jump out of the car, and I run for the payphone. I notice out of the corner of my eye, this group of potheads just hanging outside the Denny's potheads do. But I don't even pay attention to them. I throw my coins in the phone and I call Arnie.

 

He picks up, "Markowitz, whatcha got?" I tell him everything. The car, the canal, the bones. But because Arnie's hard of hearing, I have to yell all of this at the top of my lungs. [audience laughter] So, if you were happen to be one of those potheads at that Denny's on that dark and stormy night, this is what you would have seen. A chubby Cuban girl from Kendall, her legs caked in mud, her eyes streaked with rain and tears and mascara, wailing into a payphone like a banshee. "They found his bones, but not a skull. His bones, God damn it, in the car, they found the bones." [audience chuckles] 

 

So, I like to think that years later, they still talk about me, like those guys, [audience chuckles] like, "Bro, remember that girl at the Denny's?" [audience laughter] "Yeah, bro, she totally murdered someone, right?" [audience laughter] So, the next day at work, I get to my desk, and there's a note on my keyboard that says just simply, "Figueras, welcome to the craft. Signed Witz." It was the best love letter a man has ever written me.