When I was a young reporter and I heard a story, my  editor would ask me “how does it smell?,” and I would say it smelled good or it smelled bad, like a week old fish in the summer.

If it smelled bad, he would say “spike it,” and he would take my story, typed on carbon paper, and he would impale it on a metal spike, where it would spend the rest of its days until the night custodian came and tossed the stories in the trash, clearing the spike for more stories that smelled bad. We heard them all the time,  the spike was never empty. My  editor, a great editor and teacher who had given his life to his little paper,  said it was the purpose of every journalist to see that the stories that smelled bad never made it to the people who read the paper.

What we didn’t put in the paper was just as important as what we did, he said. That was the whole point of things, he said, how stories smelled.

 I am not one for nostalgia, it is a trap, I love my life as it is, but I do see that the mission and ethos of journalism is very different now.  Stories that smell bad make it to people all of the time, and I am sorry for that, it is confusing and disturbing for people to read stories and have no idea whether or not they might be true. This is a story about a story that is not true. It is  a parable about a horse, a carriage driver, a tourist from Oklahoma and a story that smells like a week-old fish in the summer.

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Mark Twain wrote once that there were rules to telling an outrageous or false story – he told many and was proud of it.

First, he said, the story had to have some truth in it to be plausible. All good stories deserve to be embellished, he said, but they can’t be made up out of whole cloth. If they are, they just stink, people will smell them. There should be at least one true fact.

Then, he said, the really good bull had to be well written, so that the clarity of the language might obscure the fog of fact.

A fake story must be well thought out, to withstand skepticism and challenge, he said. If it isn’t true, at least it will sound good, that is often good enough for most people.

And do not, he warned, ever underestimate your readers, they are smarter than you might think.

Timing is also important, he added, fake yarns ought to be told at just the right time. Good stories must follow at least the minimum standards of language and style.

Finally, detail was especially important when it came to the really good yarns, Twain said, because details lend authenticity to a false tale.

I am a great lover of Mark Twain, of course, and a proud practitioner of the art of embellishment. I think bullshit has never been given the place it deserves in the snooty world of high culture, it is an art form all of its own.  My readers know that I never lie, never invent, but am not beyond embellishment and am also proud of it. A good story can always use a bit of shining and polishing before it goes out into the world, it ought to look its best. But it also ought to be true.

If it is based on nothing, or is an outright lie, it will collapse of its own dead weight, like a deflated balloon. The story told by the Oklahoma tourist of the rise and fall of Spartacus breaks every rule of Twain’s. It is a rotten fish of a story, it smells and squirms, it is greasy and gross. There is not one fact in it that is true – maybe one – it was horribly written. A five-year-old wouldn’t buy it for a minute, there is no good detail, and it insults the intelligence of everyone who reads it. It was printed on every news blog and in every newspaper in New York City.

This is, in fact, the story of the story that was so bad it ate itself.

For a story-teller, a story this bad is disappointing. PETA could have come up with so many good  stories with just a little bit of imagination – a horse who was worked to death in Central Park and was sent to auction to die; a horse who died of depression, pining for the wild;  a horse who withered from loneliness, unable to eat with the other horses each night; a horse that collapsed from lung disease from breathing city fumes, a greedy driver who cheated a blind old lady from Poland out of her Broadway theater money during a carriage ride, a horse who stumbled and fell into the reservoir in Central Park, a cruel driver who starved his horse and sold his hay for profit. Think of the PETA press conferences, the NYClass  fund-raisers with the mayor.

Those would have been great stories, hard to check out, emotional, heart-wrenching. But the Oklahoma tourist and the story of the bus,  the evil driver trying to save a few bucks on his carriage? Please. You can get better stuff from Amazon for free any day of the week written by brooding teenagers in their high school creative writing classes.

I was thinking last night of writing a letter to PETA, the People For the Ethical Treatment Of Animals,  expressing my disappointment in the story that group told at a press conference on Thursday about the fallen horse Spartacus and the incident on Central Park South. It was a sorry tale that spawned a hundred stories and at least two demonstrations, as well as the enthusiastic interest of the mayor of New York City, still unflinching every day in his determination to remind us he knows nothing about animals.

The story PETA put out – told by the mystical vanishing Oklahoma tourist –  went like this:

The tourist from Oklahoma was walking along Central Park South when she witnessed what she said was the worst case of animal abuse she had ever seen – a horse lying down next to a toppled carriage. The horse, she said, had been hit by a bus.  She did not offer to help or assist the drivers or the horse, she did not call to other people to intervene or call the police or the A.S.P.C.A, she did what any true animal lover would, of course do, she e-mailed a photo and long text message to PETA, while carefully observing the abuse in front of her. The horse and the carriage were knocked over, she said.  Rather than getting the horse up, which she said they could easily have done,  the Oklahoma tourist said she overheard the driver and some other “men, if you want to call them that,” worrying about the cost of repairing the carriage  and leaving the horse lying on the ground, trapped in his harness.

After awhile, she said, the bad man made the horse get up. But minutes before that, she said, “one man suggested cutting the carriage and the other said no because it would come out of his pocket (he clearly had one concern, of which the horse was not.)” Of which the horse was not?  These drivers are worthy of the great child-starving villains in the stories of another great tale-spinner, Charles Dickens. Oklahoma tourist, you are no Charles Dickens.

“To top off the whole event,” she said, “the men proceed to strap the horse back into harnesses and continue to work even though he was clearly limping and hurt!!!” To top off the whole event? Three exclamation points!!!!!!

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The mayor and the animal rights groups and much of the media pounced on this report like a barn cat on a fat mouse. This made it crystal clear, they said, that carriage horses do not belong in New York. Without a doubt, said the mayor, it is not safe for a horse to fall down and then get up. It is dangerous for human beings. The story of the horse who fell down and then got up became an instant horror story  in the hands of the visitor from Oklahoma in Thursday. It was “horrible,” said PETA at the first of many hurried press conferences, “tragic” said the animal rights group NYClass, who repeated the Oklahoma visitor’s account the notion that the driver could have “gotten the horse up in two seconds,” but was too busy worrying about his carriage.  (Nobody told the horse he was experiencing a tragedy, he was back in the stables eating hay within an  hour waiting for his medical exam.)

There was an instant demonstration that afternoon near the Plaza Hotel, another Monday in front of New York’s City Hall, where the mayor’s wife was seen kissing and hugging the still-outraged officials from the animal rights groups and their celebrities. The incident, said one of the speakers, shows that horses were dangerous to people.

TV Star (“Biggest Loser”) Jillian Michaels addressed the rally. She launched into some of the make-it-up-as-you-go animal biology that has characterized the animal rights crusade against the horses. “What people do not understand,” she said, “is that by nature, horses are prey animals and this means they do not belong in city traffic.” They are, she said, a danger to humans. This was another of those statements that would have given my editor some pause, and many horse people to gag on their oatmeal this morning, but did not give a single New York reporter any pause. Horses are prey animals, but they are not a danger to human beings. No human has ever been killed by a carriage horse in New York, not one in 150 years.

Horses are staunch herbivores – just like donkeys, their cousins – and do not prey on any form of animal. Coyotes, wolves and mountain lions are known to prey on horses and their foals. Humans are perhaps the greatest threat to them, as the Carriage Horse controversy demonstrates.

What people probably do understand is that dogs really are predatory animals, and are a danger to humans. They run into cars often and attack and kill things all of the time – other small dogs, cats, mice, small animals, and they bite thousands of people in New York City every year as well. I guess that dogs do not belong in city traffic or on city streets.

Does reality matter in a spun yarn, I wondered? Nearly 300 New Yorkers killed in accidents in New York just last year. What people don’t understand is that people do not belong in city traffic. No horse has died in an accident in the past 20 years.

Now, here’s the thing, or things about our fishy story.

– First off, I’ve been to Oklahoma a few times, and they just don’t talk like PETA press releases there. For one thing, they don’t care all that much for animal rights activists in Oklahoma, there are not many there, and they don’t hold too many demonstrations. They do not have a single mayor on their team there, insofar as is known. For another, the people in Oklahoma know enough about horses to know that you don’t let them get up right away when the fall, you make sure their harness is clear and they are calm.

I called my friend Scotty Hanlon, who writes a column about Oklahoma for a weekly newspaper and manages a country music band in the town of Ponca City.  I read him the quotes from the Oklahoma tourist and PETA.

He cleared his throat and spit, I think. “I can tell you she ain’t from here,” he said, “everybody here knows you don’t let a horse get up quick after a fall, and she also talks funny.”  People in New York, he said, “must be drinking bad water to believe horse— like that. If she is really from here, she ought to stay there.” I think Scotty ought to be a reporter here.

– Then there is the bus. Our Oklahoma tourist was the only one of thousands of people around the Plaza Hotel who saw one hit a horse. The drivers didn’t, the MTA reports there were no bus accidents in Manhattan that day, and that buses do not pick or drop off riders across from the Plaza Hotel,  the police knew nothing about an incident with a bus, and there wasn’t a scratch on the horse. It would disturb me if my primary source on a story saw a bus that wasn’t there.

Keeping Twain’s plausibility quotient in mind, I closed my eyes and tried to picture what would happen to a horse, driver and carriage if it had been hit by a bus. Surely, there would be a scratch on somebody or something – a bus, the driver, the carriage, or the horse. A bruise maybe, or a chipped tooth? The worst case of animal abuse ever ought to leave some kind of mark.

If you study the accident reports in New York City this year and last, which I have, you will see that a number of people were hit by MTA buses. They did not lie and down and get up in two minutes without a scratch, believe me. They all ended up in hospitals, most never came home. What people need to understand is that buses and people are not safe in New York City streets.

– The Oklahoma tourist didn’t do much research, perhaps she had no time. Tony Salerno, the driver and the carriage owner was the only person who might be worried about the carriage’s cost.  The problem is he doesn’t speak much English. Salerno is an immigrant from Palermo, Italy. He speaks broken English, it is hard to understand him when he is right in front of you, let alone bending down and worried about  a fallen horse yards away. The tourist didn’t seem to notice Salerno’s heavy accent and limited command of English. She also did not know that the carriage is not expensive, the horse is, and much more valuable. Carriages can be repaired, even rebuilt, in days. Horses take a long time to find and replace, they are the money-earners.  If Salerno was as greedy and money-obsessed as the Oklahoma tourist claimed, he would have certainly tended to the horse first and not the carriage.

That makes the story smell even more.

– Then there’s the limping. No one saw the horse limp, not the drivers, the eyewitnesses, or the vet that examined him just minutes after he returned to the stable. Nobody saw the horse go back to work, which would have been both illegal and suicidal for the drivers – imagine the video of Spartacus limping through Central Park with some Oklahoma tourists riding in the carriage, texting breathless accounts of Spartacus’s suffering to PETA while the greedy driver whipped the poor horse on.  As it happened,  Spartacus immediately trotted back to the stable pulling his carriage and waited for the police vet  and the media to arrive. The vet said he didn’t have a mark on him.

– The Oklahoma tourist referred in her message to the uncaring men working on the horse, but she did not seem to notice that at least one of them was a woman, Christina Hansen, a driver who was present during the incident. Since she was close enough to overhear the greedy rantings of the drivers, she might have been close enough to notice the difference between a male and female driver. But then, she saw a magical bus that no one else saw.

– There’s the authenticity thing, critical to making up believable stuff:

So think about this:  the drivers – in front of hundreds, if not thousands of tourists and passersby, police and park officials, almost every one of them with a camera of one kind or another, and in the midst of an intense controversy about the future of their jobs, cruelly abuse a horse in front of all those people and their lphone and video cameras? And then make the horse get up while he is limping,  and force him to take people through Central Park? If Tony Salerno said this in his broken English, in front of all those people, in the midst of this insane controversy,  then he is not only the meanest horse owner in New York, he is mad.

– Personally, I thought the timing of this smelly-a-week-old fish story was a bit off, too obvious to launch this story just as the campaign against the horses is tottering, polls, editorials, businesses all going against it. As Twain suggested, made-up stories need to be done in a calm and cool way, desperation makes them sound phoney and strained. In other words, they suck.

– Then, of course, there is the matter of the mysterious tourist herself.  PETA refused to identify her, or let anyone talk to her, they seemed angry at  questions about her. No one at the scene remembers her or knows who she was, no one saw her after the incident. Why didn’t she join the demonstration at the Plaza, underway before Spartacus had his second helping of hay? Or take her tale to the TV producers, they would have been eager to share, and PETA would have loved to hold more press conferences and make more of those signs at the demos.

No one has heard from the Oklahoma tourist since her now famous text message, nor has she elaborated on the worst case of animal abuse she had ever seen. She cared enough about it  to contact PETA, but not enough to talk to the many reporters eager to hear more. Perhaps she is returning to Oklahoma to work on her narrative and observational skills, and her syntax and detail. I hope she doesn’t try to tell a story like this out there.  Maybe she will consider taking my short story class at Hubbard Hall in the Fall. We could talk about the structure of short stories.

And one more thing. Why does she sound like one of those PETA and NYCLASS demonstrators who scream in the park every Sunday at the carriage drivers? Those quotes of hers not only highlight really bad writing, they show a weak imagination. Just read them aloud.

This is not good enough in New York City, the Big Apple, the Tough Town, Walter Winchell’s town. There are dialogue and story writers hanging off of rooftops, couldn’t somebody from PETA have found a good one. So many are hungry for work these days, I have this feeling they didn’t go much further than the next cubicle.

For those truth-seekers reading this, here is what happened, by almost all accounts, including the carriage drivers, the police, videos and photos, and many eyewitnesses, including several who read my blog and were present: A horse who was not tied to a pole pulled out of line as the carriage pulled by Spartacus pulled out behind him, the rear wheels of both carriages became entangled, Spartacus’s carriage toppled over and Spartacus, still in harness, stumbled and fell. Tony Salerno the driver and several other drivers who rushed to help calmed the horse until he was clear of the harness, then – when he was not panicked or frightened – got him up. The incident took between two and three minutes, no one was hurt, the horse was fine, the carriage suffered minor damage.

The mayor, in his statement praising the incident for reaffirming the need for the horses to be banned, forgot to praise or thank Tony Salerno and the other drivers for reacting calmly and professionally  – it’s a very crowded street. The mayor also neglected to express gratitude that Salerno and Spartacus were not hurt, nor were any tourists or passersby.  So it adds up to this: a horse fell down, and then the horse got up. Spartacus and Salerno are both back at work.

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You don’t really have to be Woodward and Bernstein to see that there is not a single thing in this story (okay, the horse did fall down) that is true, or that makes the least bit of sense at all. The dialogue was awful, the narrative was almost insulting ridiculous and unimaginative, the story lacked a single meaningful detail and is almost impossible to believe, even if you were inclined to. Unless, of course, you are  the mayor of New York or a TV star with a rescue cat.

In the Emerald City, we deserve better than this. This is the ancestral home of the best yarns spun anywhere, Henny Youngman,  Jack Paar and Johnny Carson, Sid Ceasar, Walter Cronkite, Fiorella La Guardia, Casey Stengel, the Friar’s Club, Broadway. They are blushing in shame today.

I should confess that I am in regular e-mail and occasional phone contact with a PETA worker in New York City, someone I have known a long time, an person with some very strong ideas about animals and their rights. We have parted company on a number of things, but we share a common history, we have not abandoned one another even though she (I’ll call her a “she” for now, it is easier) is unhappy with me at the moment. I am working on her to talk about this Oklahoma tourist story in greater detail.  I think she is wavering, she is a former journalist torn a bit between ideology and truth. People do not need to agree with me to be my friend, although I’m not sure I can be friends with people who lie.

She did say I am quite correct not only to smell a rat, but perhaps a rhino. Or maybe some of those rotting fish.  No one in the PETA office seems to know who the Oklahoma tourist is either, she says,  and the word has gone out to not discuss it with reporters or with one another. It seems there was a great need for a horrifying tale involving a horse and a traffic.

Apologies to Mr. Twain, if you are watching from your  Woodlawn Cemetery resting place, I want to say as a writer and a three-time former resident of New York City, I am abashed that anyone would dare to float an ice cream sundae like this in front of what were once the toughest reporters in the world..

Of which Mark Twain was not.