Telling stories for a living

$$$Start

Jan. 24, 2002

Dear Ken,

I had quit my job at a good newspaper in Southern California and moved north, needing a breather from the hot rush to go nowhere. I rented a room in a house and drove the roads of Marin County beneath Mount Tamalpais, listening over and over to Jackson Browne's new album, "World in Motion," hoping for guidance.

"We watch the days, we make our plans/We change in ways a life demands ... Anything can happen," he advised. I trusted it would.

I was barely hanging on by the edge of my maxed out credit cards when the job appeared. The editor, I later learned, had just walked out cussing a few days earlier.

An odd collection of misfits and saints -- often in the same skin -- are attracted to the job of telling stories for a living. Inside and out, the building looked more like a warehouse than a newspaper. I had happened onto the blunt edge of journalism.

The advertising director and I were the only ones who had any newspaper experience. The publisher yelled at his wife about his incompetent employees and made most of his profit from a free airport magazine for amateur pilots. In his free time, the editor of that publication set up photo shoots of busty models in lingerie for lonely guys with $35 and a camera.

Frisco, a Filipino typesetter, was the only one of us who understood the antiquated computer system. He loved chess, fantasizing about unattainable women and baseball. When things got bad, Frisco and I went to Candlestick Park.

Kira, another typesetter, channeled someone who claimed to exist in another dimension. Augustine, a native Italian and the publisher's younger brother, took a photograph once in awhile and tried to sell ads. He really just wanted to become a biscotti baker.

Marc was a neophyte reporter who got sick every week just as our deadline approached. One week after pointing out to him that the deadline and his illnesses seemed to be related, I returned from lunch to discover that the publisher had just taken Marc to the emergency room. Some reporters will do anything to prove an editor wrong.

Paige was a talented young reporter whose mom used to travel with the Grateful Dead. Marc, having a good day, described her as a Botticelli with the heart of a lion. She loved Latin men and had been sneaking into Cuba for years.

My favorite part of the newspaper was a column written by a rawboned fellow we called the Midnight Cabby. He worked the graveyard shift for a cab company and had a room in the local flophouse, but his column made his life sound romantic.

He claimed to be a former Navy fighter pilot and University of Missouri School of Journalism graduate. It could have been true. Just like in the Harry Chapin song, he's exchanged his dreams for a reality he could handle.

His wary eyes failed to disguise some deep hurt. I urged the Cabby to write from his gut about the hookers and minimum-wage warriors and drunks who needed rides so deep in the night, but he was as protective of them as he was of himself. They were his people.

He feared exposing too much. I said the more he told, the easier it is to face and accept the parts that don't fit the image you have of yourself. Finally he turned in a stream-of-consciousness masterpiece about the bizarreness of his life. He quit the day it appeared in the newspaper.

One Monday morning, the publisher called all of us into his office. There would be no next edition. He was going to concentrate on informing pilots.

Everybody lands somewhere. For me it was here. I hope the Midnight Cabby found a parking place, too.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.