Boomer had hired a new assistant, a substantial woman with wiry hair that threatened to consume her head, voracious hair that had to be set into submission. Garth didn’t like her. It was the assistant’s birthday and all of the secretaries were gathered around her desk in some sort of celebration.
“You can’t be forty-five,” one gushed.
“Nooo!” gasped another.
Garth shifted in his chair, impatient. He had been waiting ten minutes to see Boomer. He tried to ignore the assistant, who had just been given a cake and an oversized card, which she had to push back her hair to read.
“You can afford to eat it,” he heard Carla say. “I wish I had your metabolism.”
Forty-five was nothing, Garth decided. Age was only the enemy, he reasoned, if you let yourself slip. Garth had seen ace reporters lose their bearings with age, analyzing events they’d never been to, adrift on the raft of irrelevance, not even aware. Jock Smith was the best spot man he’d seen next to Mobley. Jock wrote the book on hard news, and when a DC-30 crashed, he stayed on the scene for four days while they pulled out bodies, a human teletype running open. Sledgehammer leads, tear-jerking sidebars so riveting the paper had to order an extra run. Garth’s thoughts drifted off.
“My sister, Janine, is two years younger than I am, thirty-five,” an accounting clerk named Billy announced. “Last month, on her birthday, someone planted fifty pink flamingos on her lawn with a sign HAPPY FIFTIETH, JANINE.”
“Nooo?” A shocked chorus.
“It was probably her husband,” someone snickered.
Garth was tired of waiting amid this bunch of cackling hens. Where the hell was Boomer? Here he was — the paper’s managing editor — and he was wasting his time, time that could have been spent tracking down office thieves or, failing that, planning his model plane formation, a visual feast of colour and aeronautic history. In the old days, someone would have brought him a coffee.
Hey diddle diddle. Garth checked his watch, which confirmed that he’d been waiting for fifteen minutes. Carla said she’d heard bitching over Where Are They Now? but it was probably Smithers in Sports, since he did such a lousy job on the bike messenger story. He was nothing but a pain in the ass, that Smithers. Yesterday, Garth overheard him asking that reporter named Marcia to pick up a puck when she went to Prague.
“It’s my honeymoon,” Marcia had groaned.
“So what? Like you haven’t done it before.”
Garth would find a way to fix Smithers, who could probably, with a little planning, be nailed for sexual harassment. That Books editor, what’s her name, was the new shop steward, and, according to Carla, she hated Smithers’ guts.
“Good day,” snapped Boomer.
“Good day.” Finally, twenty minutes late.
Boomer had barely given Garth time to sit down. Garth was still mentally debating what to do with the olive drab British Sopwith Camel. Maybe, he decided, it would have to stay on the landing pad next to the black British Sopwith.
“There are going to be some changes,” Boomer announced. Garth froze; he should have seen it coming, but with Boomer, the shrunken eyes were deceptive.
“Katherine Redgrave will be taking over your duties . . .”
For the good news, Garth knew, you went to lunch; for the bad you stayed in the office and took it like a man, and when you walked back into that newsroom, stunned and near tears, no longer worth a lousy twelve-buck lunch, wondering how it had happened, why it had to be you, everyone already knew.
“You will be given the title of senior editor. If that’s not acceptable, there is early retirement.” Boomer gave him a mean smirk. “That is your choice.”