March 16 - 23, 2000
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Artistic offense
A writer, a Web site, and a violent fantasy raise some disquieting questions about free speech in the workplace
by Dan Kennedy
NEWMARKET, NH -- The last thing Chris Elliott intended when he published his short story "Full Contact Retail" in the Web publication Thump City was to become a martyr for free speech. To him, and to Thump City editor Bob Lord, "Full Contact Retail" is strictly a work of fiction -- a violent fantasy, to be sure, but also the work of a serious writer who has penned an unpublished novel and aspires to national recognition.
That recognition may come. These days, though, Elliott's biggest concern is paying the rent. That's because "Full Contact Retail" made a splash in a way that was entirely unanticipated.
It cost him his job.
"Full Contact Retail" is the story of an inventory-control manager who shows up at corporate headquarters one morning with a semi-automatic weapon and starts shooting. The company sells bathroom appliances. Its stores are located in the South. But those are about the only differences between Elliott's fictional setting and musical-instrument retailer Daddy's Junky Music, a $33 million business where Elliott had worked off and on since 1983, most recently as the director of used inventory -- a position strikingly similar to that of his imaginary gunman.
The story was posted in November but sat pretty much unnoticed until Elliott, in Daddy's company newsletter, invited his co-workers to check out Thump City, a slickly designed Web site with an estimated several thousand readers that offers fiction, satire, and music reviews. Some read the story. And at least a few were terrified. Elliott was asked to have "Full Contact Retail" removed from the Web site and to write a letter of apology to Daddy's employees. He complied. Next, he was told that if he wanted to keep his job, he'd have to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. He refused. On February 18, about a week after the uproar began, Elliott was terminated -- fired, as he puts it, though his former employer says Elliott actually quit, since he declined to take the shrink test.
"I tried to state my case that I have always defined myself as an artist, that I don't write to get things off my chest," says Elliott, a 41-year-old Yale graduate who performed in bands in Boston and San Francisco during the 1980s. "We're in a period of post-Columbine backlash. A couple of employees felt that I was acting out some kind of homicidal fantasies, and that I was a deep and abiding danger to them. The government can't limit free speech, but private companies can."
Adds Lord, a 23-year-old musician who puts out Thump City on a Dell laptop from his second-floor apartment: "By proxy, they're saying to artists, `There are some things you can say and there are some things you can't say. And by our rules, you can't say very much.' Where the hell is it going to end? Where are you going to draw the line?"
But to Fred Bramante, Daddy's founder and CEO, the issue has nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with the safety of his employees. "A number of individuals here were very freaked out by the story, questioning whether it was a harmless story or someone's real feelings and whether it was an implied threat or not," says Bramante in his Elvis-and-guitar-festooned office in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Bramante, 53, who is also running for the fourth time for governor of New Hampshire (he ran the first time as an independent, the last three as a Republican), speaks with emotion about the loss of someone he refers to as "one of my favorite employees" and "one of my pets."
"I feel terrible about it," he says. "I feel like I've lost a friend. But I have an obligation to provide a safe working environment. He [Elliott] created a hostile working environment."
Yet if Bramante were truly worried about safety -- his own and that of his employees -- you'd think he would have added security after getting rid of a potentially homicidal employee. He has not, explaining that he considered it and didn't think it was necessary. You'd also think Bramante would have personally been troubled by Elliott's fiction. Instead, he says, "I have no reason to believe that he meant this in any other way than it was just a story."
Thus it would appear that Bramante sacrificed Elliott not so much to protect his workers but, rather, to mollify a few skittish employees and to maintain a sense of harmony. That's his right -- the First Amendment does not extend into the workplace. But it's unfortunate that Bramante, who makes his living from the musical artists who come into his stores, took such a hard line when confronted with disquieting art from a long-time, trusted employee.
As free-speech parables go, the Ballad of Chris Elliott is far from being a clear-cut morality play. "This is a tough case in many ways," says Lewis Maltby, president of the Princeton, New Jersey-based National Work Rights Institute, a spin-off from the American Civil Liberties Union. Maltby is accustomed to advocating on behalf of workers who've been fired for exercising their First Amendment rights -- an employee who refuses to donate to a political campaign, for example, or who is spied at a protest rally that doesn't meet with his employer's approval. Given the reality of workplace violence, though, Maltby is not prepared to criticize Bramante."You can't completely blame an employer for firing an employee who fantasizes about killing," Maltby says. The fact that Elliott used the Daddy's company newsletter to promote Thump City, Maltby adds, "makes it just a little bit tougher. It wouldn't be crazy to call that a threat."
This ambiguity argues for the wisdom of treating cases like Elliott's on a case-by-case basis, evaluating them carefully rather than with a blanket policy. Elliott was not a new employee caught sending out death threats. He was a veteran worker, a star salesman and database whiz well known within Daddy's for his writing ability. "Full Contact Retail" is just one of about 20 Elliott stories that appear on Thump City, and it's far from the only one to feature his sense of the macabre. Consider, for instance, this Elliott title: "Ridicule the Dead: A How-To Guide to Having More Fun at Wakes and Funerals."
John Breneman, Sunday editor of the Portsmouth Herald and a contributor to Thump City, says what surprised him most was the lack of judgment by Daddy's management. "I've known Chris for a period of years," says Breneman, a former editor of the Cambridge Chronicle. "While he has a lively imagination, he certainly is a nonviolent person. I would suspect that folks who worked with him would know that about him too. I'd like to think we're in a world where people can separate fiction from reality."
Fred Bramante may be well intentioned, but even his own version of what happened does not square with the notion that his actions were motivated by the need to protect his employees. He ordered up the psychological profile, he says, on the recommendation of the state's human-rights commission (which declined to comment for this article), company lawyers, and police officials, yet he admits he didn't personally believe it was necessary except to placate others. "He [Elliott] needed to find a way to help me to help him calm this thing down. It was his responsibility to help me fix it," he says. Bramante does add, though, that given Elliott's intransigence over resolving the controversy, he now thinks maybe Elliott really does need a psychological evaluation.
It is also worth noting that Elliott's is not the only type of situation in which Bramante can envision taking action against an employee for exercising his free-speech rights outside of the workplace. "Let's say we had an employee who was an active member of the American Nazi Party," he muses. "I don't know how we would handle it. But would we look at it? We probably would."
Claire Ebel, executive director of the ACLU's New Hampshire branch, sees the conflict between Elliott and Daddy's Junky Music as a pure free-speech issue.
"If writing violent fiction were evidence of a psychological imbalance, Stephen King would have been involuntarily committed years ago," Ebel says. "When authors write, when artists paint, when musicians write, they draw upon the life experiences that they have. We do not assume that a novelist is a serial killer because she or he has written a novel about serial killers."
Adds Barbara Ehrenreich, a leftist author who recently wrote about the lack of workplace freedom for the New York Times Magazine: "It's appalling, and it's another sign, I think, of the employers' sense that they can intrude into the rest of your life -- that they've got your whole person when they employ you. They've got your mind and your soul and your imagination, too."
BOB LORD has put together a multimedia presentation about Elliott's plight on Thump City that ends with this cheery message to Daddy's Junky Music: DRINK PISS WITH YOUR CHEESE. Not that it's likely to have much effect on Daddy's business, or, for that matter, on Fred Bramante's gubernatorial campaign.
Chris Elliott concedes that he made one mistake. In transforming Daddy's Junky Music into the fictional Scrubby Tubs Bath and Kitchen, he failed to change the name of the receptionist, who, in the story, gets blown away. He says he feels bad about it (Bramante: "You tell me you're not freaking out if you're her and her husband") and notes that he changed her name in the version that's currently up on the Web site. But Elliott staunchly defends the creative process that went into "Full Contact Retail." "Any writer at any time is a Dr. Frankenstein of sorts," Elliott says -- mixing and matching qualities of acquaintances to construct imaginary characters.
More than anything, Elliott seems hurt -- hurt by the notion that anyone could think he's a threat, hurt that he could be ordered to take a psychiatric test by someone he's worked with and been close to for many years. "I've always defined myself as a humanist above all else," Elliott says. "A lover of life who's attuned to the possibility of joy. The notion of exercising unfair physical advantage over anybody is just repugnant to me."
Bramante seems hurt too. He takes me on a tour of his warehouse, where circular DON'T BE CRUEL signs are posted here and there, emphasizing his strong stand against any type of workplace harassment. Wearing a tie with little basketballs and baskets on it, limping slightly from an old high-school football injury, Bramante comes across as a sympathetic, caring employer who tried to do the right thing.
"This is our loss," Bramante says. "I think it's Chris's loss, too. But it's a loss for us. It's one I tried to avoid."
Adds a friend of Bramante's, Democratic activist and radio talk-show host Deborah "Arnie" Arnesen: "He's a real jewel of a human being. Fred is so loyal to his workers. He's incredibly protective of them."
Chris Elliott's case is strewn with ambiguities and contradictions. On the one hand, he wrote a skillful short story, a serious piece of art that he hopes to sell to a national publication, and lost his job over it. On the other hand, he scared the hell out of some of his co-workers. And he did it at a time when the Web is held up in the news media as a source of terror -- as a place where Columbine killers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris played out their dark fantasies, and where, closer to home, the man who stalked and killed Nashua resident Amy Boyer last year tracked his progress toward her murder.
But to read "Full Contact Retail" is to come away with the clear impression that it is exactly what Elliott says it is: a story, a fiction, and fairly skillfully executed at that -- no different, really, from the violent entertainment that blares out of our TV sets and is projected onto movie screens. It says much about our culture that a few of Elliott's former colleagues saw it not as a story but, rather, as a matter of life and death.
It's too bad that Bramante chose to force Elliott to prove he's not crazy as a condition of keeping his job. It's too bad that Bramante didn't issue a ringing defense of artistic freedom. In the end, though, what Bramante did wasn't particularly surprising. What Elliott wanted may have been more than any employer could reasonably be expected to give.
Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com
Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here
