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I almost choked on my coffee this morning when I read Thom Cole’s “Up Front” column, ”Flamethrower Gets the Boot,” in today’s Albuquerque Journal.
“Rule No. 1 for a government spokesman: Don’t threaten to burn down a reporter’s house.”
“Rule No. 2: If you’re going to threaten a reporter with arson, don’t leave the message on a telephone answering machine.”
“Dennis Domrzalski, public information officer for the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, violated both those rules. He is now out of a job.”
Holy crap!
Here’s the short story: Domrzalski got wind that KRQE reporter Tim Maestas was going to do what he believed would be an unflattering, unfair story about MRGCD’s embattled chief engineer and CEO Subhas Shah. So he called up Maestas and when he got an answering machine, he left a message. And the gist of it was: If you’re going to do such a story, “I’ll come over and burn your fucking house down! I’m tired of this shit! Call me back.”
And that’s when the coffee threatened to come out through my nose. I was laughing that hard.
Wait, no! I realize that sounds terrible! I mean, if you didn’t know Domrzalski, and he left you a message like that, then you would be legitimately freaked out. Absolutely. No question. But if you knew Domrzalski, well, things might be different. You might laugh and shake your head and say, “Oh, Dennis! You crazy mother#&^%#@!”
But Maestas and Domrzalski — they weren’t bros. And the answering machine message made its way to the news director at KRQE and back to the MRGCD, and before long Domrzalski got canned.
Dennis Domrzalski was the news editor at Weekly Alibi when I took my first newspaper job there in 1999. Hired as the food editor, I was fresh from spending two years working in kitchens. So everything in the editorial department was new to me — except Dennis. The profanity. The shouting. The booze. The off-color jokes. Dennis could have been a line cook in a previous life. He made me feel at home.
And if any of you ever visited that old Alibi editorial office upstairs on Wellesley Drive in Nob Hill, you’ll know that it was… how to put this nicely… very informal. It wasn’t just Dennis. There was lots of profanity, shouting — even profanity-laced shouting. The differences were always a matter of volume and intensity. Dennis was a little bit of a bull in a china shop. Except the Alibi was no china shop…
Dennis was laid off from the Alibi a few years later, and he began writing for the New Mexico Business Weekly. When I was fired from the Alibi in 2005, he called me up and wrote about it for NMBW. I remember the conversation clearly. I was still in shock. Still upset. I think I was barely coherent, but he was nice about it.
I thought of that call this morning as I dialed Dennis.
As I expected, Dennis didn’t hold back.
“Oh yeah, I’m gonna leave a message on a guy’s [answering machine] telling him I’m gonna burn down his house and then I’m gonna go do it. If this were back in Chicago, they would have fucking laughed and said, fuuuuck yoooou!” he said.
Did I mention Dennis is from Chicago? It’s one of the first things you notice about him. The accent. The no B.S., get-straight-to-the-point attitude. Dennis doesn’t beat around the bush. He’s not particularly tactful. And as I said to him today, he has no filter.
And as he explained to me, at the time he made that fateful phone call to the KRQE reporter, Dennis was suffering from an extreme bout of gout. He was in pain, he hadn’t slept in days, and he wasn’t thinking clearly.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: I’ve been in pain and I haven’t slept, but I’ve never called up a TV reporter and threatened to burn down his house!
And that is a very adept observation.
Dennis doesn’t deny that he did this thing. And he admits it was a really bad thing.
Also, there’s no question in my mind that he never, ever would have set fire to Maestas’ house. And there’s no question in my mind that Dennis wasn’t trying to intimidate Maestas’ with the threat. He was just… expressing his frustration in a very, very, unprofessional way.
But I’m not Maestas. I’m not reporting on Dennis’s boss. And a crazy man didn’t just leave me a crazy message.
“It was a moment of temporary insanity,” Dennis told me. “That’s just life. You just lose it. Anybody who thinks you can always stay in control is full of shit.”
He says he called Maestas and apologized after leaving the first message. He called the news director and apologized as well. But it wasn’t enough.
We talked for about half an hour, and toward the end of the conversation he got a little emotional and a little philosophical.
“People have to understand that I am from a different era and from a different place. Where I grew up, the city of Chicago, it was a working class town, basically a giant factory. No one took shit from each other, you fought back when someone messed with you. It was a rough and tumble and two-fisted city. And I loved it.”
He was on a roll, so I just stayed quiet and let him talk.
“People swore at each other. We vented. Then we walked away and we had beers together. And when I first got into the news biz 30 years ago, people were still drinking on the job, there were fist fights in the news rooms, people dealt with each other on a very human level. There wasn’t this façade shit. Everybody understood that we all had frailties, flaws and indiscretions and we were tolerant of it… How I long for those days. Now we’re supposed to be like zombies or robots and shit.”
And that’s when I realized something that had never occurred to me before. Living life with my family is just like living with Dennis in a Chicago factory fight. (Or something like that.) I mean to say, that’s the way we deal with pressure, too. There’s LOTS OF YELLING! Maybe some crying. MORE YELLING! And then: OK. That’s settled. Who wants to go out for Vietnamese? All done. We don’t simmer. We forgive and we forget and we move on.
I hope that’s what Maestas and Domrzalski are doing now.
