Thursdays meant several things. It was payday. Which meant you’d kill a half hour at lunch waiting in line to cash your cheque. Bank machines and attendant service fees had yet to replace tellers who conveniently took lunch hours when everyone else did.
But surviving the line-up rewarded you with the cash needed to kickstart the day and end the night somewhere between moderate and over-the-line inebriated.
Thursdays also meant that you had not slept well the night before, your mind flipping through your notebook, debating with yourself how the story would start and where it would go. And if it would go. And what if it didn’t? How were the photos?
Would the guys you respected most, the guys you shared the latest from totems like John Simon, Pauline Kael, Vincent Canby and the most righteous of the righteous, Tom Wolfe, think you had the right stuff? A Chuck Yeager of the keyboard?
Because Thursday night was deadline for long Saturday feature stories, the one day you could let it rip. In those days, in the 70s and early 80s, 100 years ago, Saturday papers were thick as phone books. Stories could go 2,000-4,000 words.
So Thursday meant that, though your shift started at 11, you’d be there by 9:30. You needed to caffeinate and you needed to grab a computer or tube as they were called. There were not enough to go around and the dedicated system crashed almost daily to a symphony of “Shit!” “Fuck!” “Goddamn it” from a frothing, jacked-up newsroom. But you’d be getting saddle sores from spending the next 12 hours parked in front of it, smoking cigarettes – you couldn’t have the right stuff without inviting lung cancer – so you needed to claim a tube before the rest of the staff arrived.
This was, obviously, during the years when newsrooms were not morgues, but tiny towns populated by hordes of reporters and editors and copy boys and managing editors. Male, of course. These shirt-and-tie-guys in offices around the perimeter of the circus that was the newsroom, performed tasks, which, at least in those days, seemed to involve mostly drinking, denying travel, perforating egos and carrying out excessively long, closed-door job interviews with good-looking women. The more attractive, the longer the interview.
But, even though you had a tube, two fresh packs of killer smokes like Camel non-filter, Gauloises or Gitanes, symbols not only of the death-defying, hard-core feature writer, but also the narcissistic disregard of colleagues’ lungs or olfactory senses, no work could begin.
The tube was powered, its green screen humming. The committed feature writer, targeting page one or a break page in News in Review, Arts, Business or Life, made a grand show of flipping through notes and clippings accumulated through one, two or, if proper fealty had been paid to whichever editor one had to spar with, three weeks or more of research.
But the flipping of pages and unfolding of yellowed clippings and chain smoking were all for show. Because not a word could be written, not a lede could be mined until noon and the arrival of Dave. Usually there were four or five of us waiting, toes tapping, for Dave – and Dave never disappointed.
Dave would dependably and unerringly pull up as the clock struck 12 and call from the lobby. Tubes were abandoned and the parade to the washroom began.
By the time Dave had made his rabidly awaited call, the regular bang, clatter and chimes of the newsroom would be in full glorious bedlam, reporters had one eye on the clock and the other on the phone. Four or five men winding their way to the washroom went as unnoticed as a few geese in a flock honking their way south.
And once the door was closed and the toilet stalls checked for spies, the cash was pooled.
Each man threw in his twenty or thirty – hard to recall – and everyone returned to their tubes except for the lucky man dispatched to meet Dave, whose blue Econoline was parked illegally in front of the main entrance with flashers on. The bread and pastry that Dave delivered for a bakery shop interested us not at all, though there is a vague memory of carting a dozen or so cinnamon buns back to the newsroom as a cover story. More to the point, Dave delivered first-class grass. No kick-ass feature could be begun without a head smoked by the finest weed.
The transaction was brief but not without politesse and curiosity.
“How’s your wife, Dave? You doing okay?”
“Yeah, all cool. What story you working on?”
Polite intercourse dispensed with, Dave pulled away and one journalist/pothead, pants and shirt pockets stuffed with bulging baggies, would make his way to the abandoned third floor, where once typographers and typography ruled that Dickensian hell of hot type and hard men who put pages together letter by letter.
But those glowing tubes we had abandoned back in the newsroom had replaced man and machine, and now the third floor of the ancient, beautiful old newspaper building, symbolic of everything newspapers used to be, was bereft of man or purpose, except for the Thursday ritual.
Though, to be fair, the tomb-like room was converted to a smoking den just about daily.
Dope was distributed, twigs and seeds were dumped, joints were rolled and the serious business of getting one’s head around the most important task in the world began.
Neither wife, child, fever, death in the family or an unexpected pregnancy, incoming missiles or a hyper-extended bladder, could brake the process of the next 10 hours. The Story, the mano à mano duel over a prominent spot on one of those coveted break pages, or on Page One, was what life was about; trembling hands, pounding heart be damned.
And every few hours, after flipping through notes until the thin pink lines had been worn from the pages of the notebook, the scribbles and arrows and circles blurred, the keyboard hammered, the four or five men would rise and again disappear. More joints were rolled, more joints were smoked, each man lost in the battle of transforming the now barely legible scribbles into a story that would sing loud enough to grab a largetype headline in the Crown Jewel that was Saturday’s paper. There was no time to talk. Thursdays, there were no friends once the battle began to get those words to sing, to claim a coveted space.
“How’s it going?”
“Not bad.”
You exchanged fumes and gooey, soggy jays, but there was no time to waste on conversation with a man who only hours before – and hours later – had, and would again, be your friend. Now, you were playing duelling keyboards with him.
Sometimes, eyes fried and brain clogged, you took a break at the fancy restaurant bar next door, joining hardcore deskers inhaling gin and tonics, sports writers getting a buzz on before going to the ballpark or The Forum, the rest hydrating their throats, parched by tobacco and dope and life, with beer. Sometimes a Coke would do. It was akin to going to your corner between rounds in the fight with the glowing screen and the ever-present doubts.
What if the story would not sing? What if you failed?
Once back at the tube, brain now too fogged to see anything but The Story, the addled journalist had to confront the obsessive-compulsive question: What read better? “The man.” Or “A man.” Great pondering ensued, as did vast amounts of wasted time, by exquisitely twisted brains. Which would make the story soar?
The newsroom would wind down. Five stoners wrestled with the weighty question of A or The. And how to wrap it all up? There were still editors on the late-news desk, some of whom might decide the fate of what had been life’s sole purpose during the last 12 hours, along with weeks of research and phone calls that preceded it. And there were Thursdays when the last piece to the puzzle – the perfect quote – was phoned in by some expert you have been harassing for days if not weeks, a come-to-Jesus moment, made you punch the air, slam the phone down and, what else, descend to the third floor for well-deserved celebratory brain-cell destruction.
Wives and lovers would be phoned later, told best not to wait up. This being Thursday, the call was no surprise. For some beleaguered spouses the call was expected seven days a week.
And, usually around 11 p.m., the notebook had been tamed, the fear had been vanquished, the story had been slain. There were drinks to be shared at the bar next door. The marijuana haze had to be coupled with a thicker alcohol-induced fog. You were now certain that the break page, maybe even the bottom or top of one, had been secured. The story sang the sweetest of songs.
Of course, every Thursday survived was followed by a Friday, and you were singing a different tune. It was a minor chord, transformed into a major high-pitched keening from the axe in your head, the reminder of the night before, after which you had cabbed home and lain on the kitchen floor. Movement of any kind, you were certain, would bring up your insides and everything in it. Your wife was standing over you, your infant son in her arms, smiling down on you.
“Look at your drunken father,” she’d say. Your six-month-old kid, soon to be 40, giggled. Daddy didn’t lie on the floor, except to play, except for Thursday nights, of course.
Friday was lunch day. Those anointed with the fear and favour of writing long-winded features for Saturday were not on the general assignment list and hence, after a few fixes, asked for by the Saturday editor, had the day off. Or so it was thought.
On this particular Friday, lunch at Magnan’s, a tavern favoured by scribes and cops and city politicians, as long as they were male, was the usual stomach-turning nearly-raw slab of beef in pepper sauce and horse radish and beer, levity and the requisite dessert smoked in the parking lot.
Full of beef and beans, axe in head dulled by dope, 222s and, if lucky, a Valium tablet for the shakes, lunch went on and on. We had the right stuff, we were young, newspapers were our oyster and scallop and we were free to write and enjoy life and look forward to weekend calls of “Good piece,” “liked your story,” “great read.” How could life be better, other than being pain and nausea free? Hangovers were a badge of courage.
On this particular Friday, lo those many decades under the bridge, after having consumed my half slice of bloody roast beef, three or four glasses of mineral water and the disapproval of my colleagues – “is this kid for real – mineral water?” – it was time to return to the shop, though not before the requisite separation of twigs and seeds from leaf and bud and inhalation of latter.
It was 4 p.m. and certainty prevailed that there would be no work that late afternoon or evening, which was a good thing since the newsroom sparkled as if the fluorescents were really Christmas tinsel and the jangle of the phones and the crash of the typewriters sounded like the newsroom had turned into an iron foundry.
Eyes were at half-mast. My colleagues, definitely with more of the right stuff than I, had consumed not only hair of the dog, but an entire German Shepherd. My mineral water had done little to dull the corrosive blade in my head.
But worse, waving to me persistently, was the ACE – assistant city editor – or assignment editor.
This was obviously a mistake. Friday was for goofing off. I had paid my dues Thursday night. I had the right stuff. Break-page piece tomorrow. And my brain was badly compromised.
Perhaps he just wanted to say, “good read, the story sings.”
The editor, let’s call him Marshall, was persistent. But it was not praise he wished to bestow, it was torture. He wanted me to actually go out and work, interview people and come back and write a story for tomorrow by seven, a scant three hours away.
“This is a joke, right?” The room might have been spinning then and I could’ve been holding on to a desk or perhaps Marshall’s tie to keep trembling knees from buckling.
“No joke, mate,” he said, one of those insufferable Brits that invaded the newsroom and, by dint of their nationality, assumed they knew more about the newspaper business than us colonists. And he was smiling. Marshall was, by all accounts, a sober fellow, and not a bad ACE. He did not begrudge a man his appetite for self-destruction. He was smiling. He enjoyed punishing me for my four-hour lunch.
“Marshall, really, I can’t and it’s late,” I begged. I might’ve shed a tear or two. “What’s the story?” “Tits for Tots, boyo,” he said, sadistic grin on his face. “That’s what they’re calling it. Strippers are shedding their knickers and everything else to raise money for the Children’s Hospital. It’s a good little piece. You’ll have fun. If you can find the fucking place in the shape you’re in. Be back by six. Cheers.”
He gave me the contact’s name and the address of the strip club. It was hard to argue with Marshall, who was blurred at the edges. Interviewing young women without their clothes and getting paid for it, well, I was all of 29. It didn’t seem like arduous labour, though focusing might be a challenge.
And my steadfast comrade-in-arms, one of the paper’s best, Robert, a man five years my senior who could consume a half bottle of rum with a couple of litres of Coke, a few grams of coke in powder form, countless blunts, as they are called today, untold chemicals, interview cabinet ministers after sucking up a blotter of acid and still write a story that sang like Puccini, said, “I’ll go with you,” and happily plugged a Camel into his broad grin.
I think I had to hold his hand to get downstairs and into a cab.
In short order we were backstage in the strip club’s dressing room, surrounded by what you’d expect to find backstage in the strip club’s dressing room – acres and acres of young, naked, female flesh, all eager to talk to us. They were peeling to aid healing and happy to spread the word.
The organizer was Lindalee Tracey, astute and articulate. All I remember is her smile and energy and good humour. She went on to a distinguished career as a filmmaker and was killed by cancer in 2006. The ravages to come with age were not even on our radar then. We were invincible.
So Robert and I asked any questions our abused brains could think of, anything at all to stay in this fantasyland of breasts and butts and pretty smiles and unwavering attention.
And then it dawned on me. Marshall, the British assignment editor, had not sent me here to write a glorious piece about benevolence and charity.
This was punishment. All the ladies were in a haze of my making, their charms, though revealed, were unappreciated by my pulverized synapses. Yes, we were there, but our heads were somewhere in another galaxy, far, far away.
Even Robert, married with children and a reputation for not being enamoured with monogamy, seemed at a loss for anything other than the five Ws and when can I get out of here and get to a bar? The obvious question, “What’s your phone number?” never occurred to him. Sobriety has its advantages.
I can only assume I found my way back to the shop, Robert back to the bar. I wrote my story because that’s what I did.
Did it sing? I have no idea. But life did. Brain cleared after a race with deadline, sitting at the bar with a Coca-Cola and a smile, nerves humming with visions of lovely young women dancing in front of me, I thought to myself: What could be better? Life on a newspaper was indeed the sweetest of songs.
DAVID SHERMAN started working newspapers as a copy boy, later reporter and feature writer, copy editor and branched out to magazine editor, singer/songwriter and various pursuits that had one thing in common: they didn’t pay. His first novel, The Alcoholic’s Daughter, was published by Guernica Editions as is his next, The Situation Womb.