Johnnie is looking for $5.08 - the price of a half-gallon of Thunderbird wine.. Once again, Johnnie needs $5.08 to buy a half-gallon of Thunderbird wine."
Stephen Glass wrote these words in the June 6, 1991, issue of The Summer Pennsylvanian. They are the first and last lines of "A Day on the Streets," his page-seven piece about spending 24 hours with West Philly homeless men. The point was simple: technically, a day may have elapsed for Johnnie and his drinking, crack-smoking friends, but a day means nothing for those whose time flows unmarked in the beating sun. For Glass, the time since he wrote those words has been marked with major crests and greater troughs. In 1992, a student press association named "A Day on the Streets" the best collegiate feature of the previous year. Glass became executive editor of the school paper in 1993, graduated in 1994 and rose through the ranks of Washington journalism, landing associate editor at The New Republic - known as the in-flight magazine of Air Force One - within four years.
Then he was found out and fired.
Brian Newberry sees the roots of the fall. He was the SP photography editor, and lone photographer, in 1991. He recently was read a passage from Glass's 1991 account of homeless men. "I used to subscribe to The New Republic, too, so I remember reading his articles," Newberry said. "And that sounds like exactly the type of thing he was later writing at The New Republic.. In retrospect, it does sound pretty suspect. But you have to remember: at the time, we were all college kids."
***
In May of 1991, Philadelphia dripped through 12 days of 90 degrees or more. By June, it was 97 and schools were shutting for fear of students collapsing during achievement tests. "It's hard to read a lot of pages," fifth-grader Madinah McWilliams told an Inquirer reporter, "because sweat was popping up on your back like little bugs."
At night, little burning crack rocks were popping up under copper mesh pads in pipes all over the city. In May, a North Philadelphia gang was indicted for grossing $3.5 million in crack sales. By June, one out of every six babies in Philly was being born to a crack-smoking mother. And then, the epidemic had a name: early on the morning of June 1, the lead singer of The Temptations walked into a three-story stucco house at 52nd and Viola with $40,000 he had made off a recent tour of England. He smoked 10 vials of crack with a friend and collapsed. He was taken to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was pronounced dead.
The whole episode made for news for the small editorial staff of the SP. It was four days later - June 5. At 40th and Walnut, the top three editors scribbled and measured and edited, rushing to prepare the next day's issue in an air-conditioned office six minutes southeast of that three-story crack house. Their job was to put out a weekly paper for Penn students - even though most everyone had already gone home for the summer.
Drew Zoller stayed back because he'd be going abroad to Edinburgh for his upcoming junior year, which meant he'd miss the chance to be a Daily Pennsylvanian editor. Drew had looked around the "jungle," that bustling paper office, and decided he wasn't so into it. An econ major, Drew wanted to go into business down the road. And now he could study in Scotland for a year, which he had wanted to do anyway. So he allowed the editorship for which he had been working - the one for which he wrote all those student government articles - to slip away. And when his bosses Peter and Helen asked him if he wanted to work on the '91 summer paper, he thought: this is the closest I'm going to get to being a regular editor.
They named him summer editor-in-chief.
They named Matt Selman, a DP beat reporter, summer features editor. Matt was also entering junior year, but for a kid of 20, he sounded old, and Drew appreciated it. They'd sit in the backyard of Drew's summer house, this unofficial AEPI dig on 41st, and shoot the shit. And Drew would laugh at Matt's world-weary, I've-seen-it-all attitude and maybe call Matt a "cultural anthropologic critic" because Matt sounded jaded for a kid their age and because Matt would over-analyze the hell out of TV shows and movies.
"What is most amazing about Terminator 2 is that it is able to look insightfully into the nature of humanity," Matt would write in a summer review, "and paint the tragic dichotomy between its loving creativity and mechanical self-destructiveness so stirringly on a violent canvas."
And then there was Steve Glass, the managing editor. Having just finished freshman year, Steve was the youngest of the top three editors on the nine-man staff. But Drew was leaving the paper for a year - forever, really - and he didn't think of up-and-comer Steve as competition. Besides, Steve was a great guy to hang out with, a complement to Matt. For if Matt was the sardonic hipster, Steve was the straight-laced one, always dressed in a Polo, khakis and horn-rimmed glasses. Always trying to please. In the backyard, Steve would go around asking, "Are you mad at me?" Then Matt and Drew would sit back and they would laugh, and then Steve would laugh, too, as if maybe he hadn't been that concerned to begin with. Then they would go back to the paper and write.
As they wrote the June 6 issue, they knew they needed an article on that Temptations singer who'd smoked 10 vials and collapsed. He did have a connection to the school: pronounced dead at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. So the three head editors ran 10 small paragraphs on the top-right of page two. Maybe another time they would have given it more space, but for this issue they had a different article that really reflected the grittiness of that early summer, all the humid stickiness and the crack rocks and the smoke, and to that article they devoted all of page seven and half of 10.
***
It was a few days earlier, in late May, when Steve proposed the piece. He said he wanted to spend 24 hours with a homeless person and just write about the guy's experiences as a feature. Drew and Matt liked the idea.
So on June 1, Newberry and Steve visited Johnnie, this homeless guy who hung around 40th and Walnut, by the McDonald's known as McDeath and the Burger King known as Murder King. Johnnie had apparently lived near the University for more than 10 years. But in the past year, he had grown accustomed to shouting greetings at Steve when Steve passed by. Steve would be walking to the paper and suddenly he'd hear, "Hey, Steve, buddy! How ya doing?"
Newberry and Steve found Johnnie by the Wawa between 39th and 40th on Walnut. He was wearing cut-off denim shorts and a dark University of Pennsylvania t-shirt, with a seal on the upper-left chest. The t-shirt clung to his large arms and shoulders. His Reebok high-tops had seen better days, and he wore a Chicago Bears hat.
Newberry snapped a few photos of Steve sitting on a bench, talking to Johnnie. Steve was wearing a DP t-shirt that read "Best in the Nation," which was tucked into his khakis. He wore lace-up shoes. Steve had a pen in one hand and a pad in another. Newberry left after taking about 15 shots.
The next day Steve saw Newberry and told him that it had been a crazy night and that he had visited a crack house. Steve wrote all this into the story, and when he showed it to Drew that week, Drew decided he wasn't going to interfere with Steve's big feature. This was Steve's chance to impress, to go beyond his usual policy pieces (of which he ultimately wrote more than 200 for the DP), and Drew wasn't going to edit it, aside from some typos and maybe a few suggestions. Matt wasn't going to edit Steve's feature for content. It was an extension of unspoken policy, because the top three editors thought of themselves as co-editors-in-chief, despite their different titles. Because they thought of themselves as a "triumvirate" of buddies, a trio. They went to movies together. They played pool in Drew's basement. And when the three guys wanted to get a game together, they wrote in a text-box in the back of the paper, "Hey Wimps! Any of you tough enough to take on the Summer Pennsylvanian softball team? The SP staff welcomes any and all would-be challengers. Call 898-6585 and ask for 'Slugger' Selman, 'Roller' Zoller or 'Spaz' Glass if you feel like challenging fate. Loser buys the beer."
They ran the homeless piece June 6, written by Steve and edited by Steve, with one picture of Johnnie on a bench, taken by Newberry.
***
"Johnnie is the leader of his 'posse,' a club of several dozen homeless people that has its own intricate rules and traditions. They used to meet at a clubhouse in a condemned home, but it burned down twice. All members of the club identify their allegiance by donning an American Heart Association button and a Zenith Data Systems painter's cap.. Club members enjoy citing their hero, Kenny Rogers, as best expressing the philosophy of surviving on the streets. Twice that day June and Johnnie sang 'The Gambler' in chorus."
This is the most quoted passage from "A Day on the Streets." Which is to say it has been quoted a few times, by the few writers who think Glass might have started lying earlier - before he fabricated all or parts of 27 pieces for The New Republic in the mid '90s.
The notion of a homeless 'club' with matching buttons and caps seems prima facie absurd," wrote Samuel Hughes in The Pennsylvania Gazette, a Penn alumni magazine. "Kenny Rogers seems a rather unlikely hero for African-American homeless men."
Drew Zoller disagreed. "I don't know what's prima facie ridiculous about that," he said recently, thinking back on the summer. "I mean, that was a popular song. If it was true, it doesn't seem all that shocking to me. His criticism was that it crossed racial lines, so they wouldn't revere Kenny Rogers, but I don't know. They might have."
No one doubts that Johnnie existed. Brian Newberry captured him on film, and everyone at the paper at least knew of him. Like Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who was in Glass's class at Penn ('94) and edited a section of 34th Street. "They say in all the best lies there's a kernel of truth," she said. "And I think one of the reasons he was able to get away with that particular story was because there was this guy Johnnie and he'd kinda not harass Steve but, I mean, he was always hanging around." Erdely went on to write professionally, at times about Glass. In an August 1998 Philadelphia Magazine article, she singled out "A Day on the Streets" as the start of a trend. "The article marked Glass's first use of a formula he would apply again and again in his professional career," she wrote. "The intrepid reporter infiltrates an organization, then documents its rituals in stunning detail."
At The New Republic, Glass wrote about infiltrating a group of bond-traders who built shrines to Alan Greenspan; a group of Bill Clinton-haters that included a man trying to prove Clinton was a gay woman; a group of young conservatives ditching a convention's keynote address to harass fat girls (or 'beached whales,'), smoke pot, drink and have sex.
"A Day on the Streets" features some odd rituals. Glass wrote that the "posse" of dozens of homeless wore Zenith Data Systems painter's caps to identify their allegiance. Zenith Data Systems was a computer company that sold more than 1 million PCs and laptops to the Department of Defense in the late '80s and early '90s. But the DP photo archives do contain a negative of June, another homeless man whom Glass described in his piece, wearing what appears to be a painter's cap with an indecipherable logo, maybe of Zenith Data Systems.
However, Johnnie, Glass's main character, is wearing a Chicago Bears hat in the picture. And it seems unlikely that dozens of homeless men had procured dozens of the same computer company caps, especially since that company targeted the government as a main consumer. Perhaps, then, it's not Glass's ritual that's odd here, but the ritual's scale. It's easy to imagine Johnnie and June singing Kenny Rogers and wearing matching pins and hats. But it's not so easy to imagine 36 homeless men wearing matching pins and hats, with formalized rules and an official clubhouse. And then, there are the story's other moments, when the homeless sleep, at times with prostitutes, as cockroaches scuttle on them and bats fly overhead.
***
The days seemed to blur into each other in the summer of '91. Each week's deadline seemed to follow the last one immediately, as if there never had been time to leave the office, never time to stop running from one event to the next. And so Drew was failing his summer school course - Econ 3 - which he thought would help him in school. The problem was he couldn't stay awake during class. During the final, he fell asleep. And got a D.
Putting out a weekly paper was a bitch. Drew and Matt and Steve would put codes with brackets into the computer to order it to print copy a certain size. Then they'd cut the copy, put it on a board and check whether it fit. If it didn't, they'd go back to the machine. Sometimes Steve would make a mistake or do something that could have been a mistake. And he'd ask Matt, "Are you mad at me?" And Matt would come back with any one of his responses.
"No, I am not mad at you, you passive-aggressive wuss!"
"If you say 'Are you mad at me?' one more time I will smack you."
"Yes, Steve, I am mad at you."
Matt and Steve would explore the other floors of the paper's offices. They had always thought the mezzanine contained juicy story-worthy items. It was owned by Penn. One day they broke in - only to find medical files. Then there was the day Matt got the press pass to see the Philly premiere of the new Andrew Dice Clay movie. Dice had just sold out two concerts at Madison Square Garden and made them into a film. The Philly theater filled with these drunk, psychotic fans. And there was a giveaway before the show where a prize was hidden under a random seat. Of course, it was Steve's seat, and he looked under it to find the sleeveless "Diceman" T-shirt. Steve put it on over what Matt called his "trademark button-down nerdwear," and Steve stood to model for the Diceheads. It made them angry that an obvious non-Dicehead had won the prize. Several fans offered to buy the shirt, while others threatened to take it by force. And Matt, well, he was thinking: shit - these 600 beery southies are going to tear off Steve's clothes.
***
"Johnnie, June and Chuck.bend over and insert the crack crystals into a glass pipe which is also filled with shavings from a brillo pad that act as filters. A long metal stick called 'the pusher' is used to insert the crack. After they light the pipe, they hold the smoke in their lungs for as long as possible."
Drew Zoller remembers the criticism. "I have a very good friend from then who I am still in touch with," he said. "At the time [he] was involved with [the homeless] and, in fact, he's still very involved in homelessness issues. And he was furious with that article because he thought the article was crap and he thought it was bullshit and made up."
Stephen Glass had a way of playing to the times. During the height of Monica-gate, Glass found a group of conspiring Clinton-haters. During the height of the bull market, Glass found Greenspan-worshippers. During the height of a Philly crack epidemic, Glass found a group of crack-smoking homeless men?
Drew Zoller's friend doubted it - and also doubted homeless men's involvement in the crack wave.
"[My friend] was also upset because he had the sense that it didn't accurately represent the majority of homeless people's experiences," Zoller said. "He would say something like, 'Well most homeless people aren't winos and drug addicts. Most homeless people are single mothers with kids living in the streets.' Which I think is true. So putting that article together . was dishonest in the sense that that perspective is a very small percentage of what truly the homelessness experience is like."
Yet the idea that Glass had made it up "never crossed" Zoller's mind in '91. Selman attributes that to the nature of the paper. "It could have been faked," he said. "That Johnnie guy certainly recognized him on the street when we ran into him together. We were all a little skeptical. But we were putting out a 16-page broadsheet once a week during summer in West Philadelphia. This meant going to free movies and giving them bad reviews and eating at free restaurants and giving them good reviews. We weren't exactly Edward R. Murrow."
No, they weren't Murrow. But the SP won three awards the following year from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association (the DP won 22). And after that summer, Glass's 24-hour account "made him a DP legend," according to Sabrina Rubin Erdely.
It's unlikely we'll ever know how the legend started. Glass refuses to be interviewed today. And it seems perverse to scrutinize the roots of Glass's fabrications. He lied, he has been shamed and he no longer has any credibility. It seems to be enough, as if the man couldn't deserve anymore in this lifetime. On the phone, Glass's mother sounded worn. "That's not going to happen," she said meekly, when asked whether Stephen might agree to an interview. Then Michele Glass hung up.
But to DP alumni, it's about more than a man and his parents now. It's about setting the record straight again - with a full account from the beginning of what was fabricated and when, so the public can regain trust in the stained institution of journalism. Sure, Erdely had long esteemed Glass. But she changed her mind when the consequences of his actions became clearer, when the distance of time finally set in, six years after the scandal broke. "Even as the evidence mounted against him . I struggled to make sense of his actions," she wrote in a 2004 Pennsylvania Gazette article. "I resisted the explanation I've come to believe since then: that the adorable little weenie I knew from our days at The Daily Pennsylvanian was nothing but a con artist."
***
Drew and Matt found Steve adorable, when it came down to it. Yeah, they were worried about Steve's "A Day on the Streets." But not because it might have been untrue; they were worried that Steve could have gotten mugged.
Drew would go on to get a D in Econ 3 and study abroad in Scotland. He would then go into consulting for a while, before moving to New York and inventing the Cordster. It attaches to the back of iPods and cell phones, storing headphones without tangling them.
Matt would leave the newspaper after the summer of '91, defecting to Street, where he'd become editor-in-chief. And when he had to get a job, he joined the writing staff of The Simpsons, with which he has won four Emmys. Matt wonders why no one has written an article about him, since no one suspects he's pathological and he has won those four Emmys. But Matt does love Drew's Cordster. And about Steve, he says, "In some ways I sympathize with Steve. When not weaving intricate chrysalises of deception that would bring about his own destruction and ultimately erode the public trust in the media thus hastening the decay of modern civilization, he was 10 times the journalist I ever was."
As for the third? Well, after the scandal broke, Steve would move back in with his parents in Illinois for a few months. Then he'd return to Washington and continue taking the law classes at Georgetown that he had begun while at The New Republic. And in 1999 or 2000, he'd go to a basketball game with Drew and Peter Spiegel, the DP managing editor who'd assigned the summer '91 jobs in the first place. Peter had had tickets to the game, and he knew Drew and Steve were living in D.C. at the time. So they went and they watched, and Drew thought Steve was surprisingly similar to the way he had been. Fun and interesting and nice. The topic of journalism never came up. And so on another night in Washington, Drew went out to dinner with Steve. And soon after, Steve moved to New York.
Today, Steve lives in Los Angeles. As does Matt, who recently ran into Steve at a party of mutual friends. Matt ribbed Steve about him being a maniac who forever sullied the journalistic profession. And when Steve took it in stride, Matt thought: "He could always absorb whatever abuse you threw at him. No matter what mean thing you said about his pants or his personality or whatever, he'd suck it up, like a beaten dog happy to get an open-fisted punch in the ear." And so Matt had this conversation with Steve that he can't remember exactly but that he recalls went something like this.
STEVE: This is my girlfriend.
MATT: You liar.
STEVE: It's great to see you again.
MATT: Another lie.
STEVE: How long have you been in LA?
MATT: Can't you just tell me the truth? Just once?
But even after they laughed, Steve seemed to feel bad about what Matt dubbed his "colossal acts of professional fraud." Then Matt made a confession, too: even though he thought Steve was "a journalistic version of a mother hamster eating her own babies," he himself had been "dining out" on Steve. Name-dropping him everywhere. Telling people he had insider knowledge of the "infamous ultra-liar." All going back to that summer of '91, when they tried to break into the mezzanine.
It could have started that summer, on those gritty days, amidst all the humid stickiness and the crack rocks and the smoke. And if it did, that's a tragedy - because Steve was part of the SP Triumvirate that summer, a group of college guys that didn't need a day on the streets or Thunderbird or Johnnie. Drew and Matt - they already had all they needed in their third, and they adored the hell out of Steve.
15 years later, one gets the sense they still do.
