Cold Type
Page 1
El Paso, Texas
Cold Type. Copyright © 2014 by Harvey Araton. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written consent from the publisher, except for brief quotations for reviews. For further information, write Cinco Puntos Press, 701 Texas Avenue, El Paso, TX 79901; or call 1-915-838-1625.
FIRST EDITION
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Araton, Harvey.
Cold type / Harvey Araton.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-935955-88-7 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-935955-71-9 (pbk.);
ISBN 978-1-935955-72-6 (e-book).
1. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 2. Journalists—Fiction. 3. Journalism—Politital aspects—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3601.R356C65 2014
813'.6--dc23
2013040574
Cover and book design by Anne M. Giangiulio
Proud mother of Little Lulu and John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.
Dah dah dah dah dah dah dah!
Another handcrafted e-pub from Pajarito Studios
To my friend Paul Needell,
who crossed with me, in and back out.
Cold Type
Day One: Monday, November 7, 1994
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Day Two: Tuesday, November 8, 1994
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Day Three: Wednesday, November 9, 1994
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Day Four: Thursday, November 10, 1994
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Day Five: Friday, November 11, 1994
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Day Six: Saturday, November 12, 1994
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Acknowlegements
About the Author
Praise for Cold Type
Day One: Monday, November 7, 1994
Chapter One
The clock in the middle of the newsroom reported five past midnight. Jamie’s Sunday—his planned day off—had ended with a frantic deadline rush.
It had begun so serenely over a three-egg omelet at his favorite café, with newspapers scattered on his table by the window overlooking the neighborhood’s busiest commercial street. He’d had an overcast, unseasonably warm morning to himself and was looking forward to seeing his nearly two-year-old son later in the day. But, no question, he’d made the classic reporter’s miscalculation—going home after his meal and answering the telephone without letting the machine pick up.
Cal Willis barked at him, “I want to run your piece tomorrow, Kramer. You said it was ready, didn’t you?”
Jamie hesitated, unsure about arguing with his boss’ inventive memory.
“Well,” he said. “I guess…”
“Good,” Willis said. “Get the piece in as soon as you can.”
Jamie hung up the phone and swore under his breath. The truth was that he hadn’t yet organized the scribble that was scattered in three different notepads. On the other hand, he knew he had enough material to squeeze out nine hundred words on the squalid conditions and care in a Brooklyn nursing home.
The tip had come from a friend who’d found his Alzheimer-stricken grandfather in urine-soaked pants. Jamie followed up with a surreptitious inspection of the facility, interviews with two other concerned families in the parking lot and with an official from an advocacy group for the elderly. The story was no prize winner. It probably wouldn’t even rate a front-page tease. But it had been weeks since he had generated anything remotely enterprising, a point he had been reminded of earlier that week—though not by Willis.
“Got anything good?” Steven Kramer had asked when they’d stepped out for lunch.
It was just like Steven—his older cousin by six months and the Kramer whose face Trib readers were well-acquainted with from his twice-weekly column—to make Jamie feel defensive about his output. It was also a subtle reminder that he owed his very existence in the newspaper business to family connections. Steven, conversely, had a degree from the Columbia School of Journalism.
Jamie wanted his story published but wished he’d had the courage to tell Willis he needed another day. After he hung up, he called his ex-wife to tell her that he had no choice—he had to work and would not be coming up to deliver his son’s birthday gifts. His excuse was airtight, entirely legitimate. He still was upset but not so much at Willis as he was with himself—and Karyn.
“Why can’t I just bring Aaron’s presents to his party?” he asked her.
She sighed.
“It would, you know, just be uncomfortable for me and by extension for Aaron,” she said.
He returned fire with a sigh of his own.
“You can see him on your birthday next month,” she said.
“I’ll be 32, a little old for a party,” he said. Sarcasm got him nowhere.
“Let me know when you want to bring the gifts—before Friday,” she said.
He hung up, collected the notepads from his desk, stuffed them into his shoulder bag and left for the office.
Four cups of coffee, two apple cinnamon granola bars and a small container of lo mein later, he made the 11 o’clock first-edition deadline, with about forty-five minutes to spare. He helped himself to a call on the Trib’s dime to a high school friend who had migrated to the California Bay Area. He flipped through sections of the voluminous Sunday Times, waiting for the fresh stack of Monday’s first edition Tribs to be dropped on a nearby desk.
Jamie made a beeline for a copy, glancing at the front page headline (DOOM FOR DEMS?) that hopefully raised the possibility of a mid-term rebuke of the Clinton White House agenda in the election that was two days away. He folded the tabloid and stuffed the lower half into the back pocket of his jeans. He scraped away a few stray noodles on his desk and rolled the greasy refuse into one disposable mass. He treaded carefully by Willis, who didn’t look up.
“Not bad. Need the copy earlier, as usual,” Willis said. He always needed copy earlier no matter what time it was submitted.
Willis’ dark, bald dome glistened under yellow-tinted fluorescent light. A platoon of cigarette butts overflowed an ashtray on the left side of his desk.
“And we had to trim,” he said.
“How much?”
“Fourteen lines.”
Willis, as usual, disclosed the damage with no apparent remorse.
Damn, Jamie thought. I spent so much time making the transitions work. Now it’ll read like shit.
Other reporters—Steven certainly—would have complained. Why shouldn’t he? Say something, Jamie thought. He didn’t. He reasoned that he owed Willis every line he’d published, not to mention the paycheck that supported him, his son and his ex-wife. Besides, his copy was late.
“See you tomorrow,” he said. Willis grunted a response that didn’t
much sound like goodnight.
The decrepit elevator leading to the rear of the old waterfront building reeked of antiquity and groaned all the way down before shuddering to a halt. Jamie pulled the paper from his back pocket, opened it to his story at the top of page five and held it up to his face to read. He lowered his left shoulder into the metal door.
He’d been unwilling to walk the five blocks to the subway when he knew he’d be working late. That meant surrendering a cherished Brooklyn Heights parking spot to make the short drive over the bridge and lock up under the highway across the street. There he could count on the security of the post-midnight bustle, the fraternal, profane chatter of the drivers at the end of the production line as they waited to leave on their runs.
But something was different outside the building, unfamiliarity permeating the cold night air. There were unmistakable sounds of anger, the scent of disorder. One of the deaf guys who worked the presses was sitting in a chair in the dimly lit lobby, reading the paper.
“Something going on out there?” Jamie said, hoping the guy could read his lips. He just shrugged.
Jamie leaned a shoulder into the door. One step onto the sidewalk was not enough time for him to prepare for the force of nature hurtling toward him, about to tear through his flimsy newspaper shield.
In that immeasurable blink of time between detection and reaction, impact and consequence, Jamie could only create a vague mental recording of the brawny forearms that snapped the glasses off his face, knocked him to the ground—and out cold.
Chapter Two
“There’s some blood,” Carla Delgado said. She cradled Jamie’s head on her thigh. Someone from the small circle of onlookers produced an ice pack.
When Carla applied the compress, the cold jolted Jamie back to consciousness.
“Small cut,” she said, pulling back to inspect the damage. “Just a little blood.”
Eyes still closed, Jamie recognized the husky, accented mix of San Juan and New York. It was the sultry yet robust voice of the Trib’s office manager.
“He got lucky,” Carla said. “Looks like when he fell, his head landed on his bag and not the sidewalk. I don’t think it’s going to need stitches, just some ice and a Band-Aid. But the eye, it’s starting to swell up a bit.”
Caressing his cheek, she shouted: “Jamie, can you hear me?”
He opened his eyes. He wasn’t quite sure where he was but he liked the feeling of her hand on his face, the light but scratchy touch of her long fingernails. What felt even better was his head resting on the stocking covering her thigh. Her breath smelled of spearmint gum.
“One of the drivers ran you over.”
“I got hit by a car?”
“No,” Carla said, shaking her head, giggling a bit. She couldn’t help but be amused by his incoherence.
“Not by a car. One of the drivers, our truck drivers, happened to be running by just as you walked outside and knocked you over. This guy here saw what happened.”
The haze lifting, Jamie was able to place himself outside the building. He remembered more now—the forearms extended, the clenched fists, even the breathy aroma of potato chips.
“This guy…came at me…don’t know why…”
He lifted his head off her thigh. Carla continued to apply the ice pack and pushed him back down.
“It was an accident, he didn’t mean to take you out,” said a man in a navy blue hooded sweatshirt and a Mets cap pulled so low that his eyes were hidden.
“Jamie, listen,” Carla said. “The drivers just walked off the job a little while ago. Management is trying to move the trucks with scab drivers they must have had hidden nearby. All hell just broke loose. Someone was running by here just as you stepped outside. You understand?”
In the distance, there was more obscene shouting. When Jamie turned to look into the street, blurry as his naked night vision was, he could make out a Trib delivery truck, immobilized in the intersection. Its windshield was smashed. The dumped contents were burning, dozens of bundles of Monday editions—hundreds of copies of Jamie’s story suffering the worst of all possible trims.
Carla and the handful of bystanders anxiously watched a cavalry of ranting Trib drivers moving in the direction of the trucks that were lined up behind the one that was attacked. A phalanx of city cops was trying to push them out of the street. Police cars were haphazardly parked with their driver-side doors flung open.
“I must have just followed you down in the elevator,” Carla said. “When I opened the door, you were laying here.”
“For how long?” he asked.
Men rushed past them, wielding baseball bats. One yelled, “Scab bastards.”
“Jamie, are you listening to me? Should I send someone up to get your father?”
The acrid air from the drifting smoke seemed to act as a stimulant—unless it was Carla’s request to call his old man.
“Why would you do that?”
“So he can drive you home,” she said. “You don’t look so good.”
He sat up and took the ice pack from Carla.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I can drive.”
He noticed his broken glasses on the ground next to him. He unzipped his shoulder bag to find the extra pair of tortoise shell glasses he always carried there. Back on his feet, his head throbbed, as if someone had cranked up the bass too high.
He straightened up, replacing the bag on his shoulder.
“Take the ice pack with you,” Carla said.
“What exactly did you say is going on?” Jamie said.
Her first-aid mission complete, Carla was already moving off in the direction of the mob.
“Go home,” she called back, glancing sympathetically over her shoulder, pressing a palm to her eye. “Keep using that ice.”
Jamie decided to take her advice. He’d had enough excitement for one night—and enough damage done. His jeans were torn at the left knee and his right ankle felt like he’d twisted it during his fall. It took him several seconds to remember where his Corolla was parked. He walked away with a slight limp and made the short drive over the bridge into downtown Brooklyn for what he hoped would be a decent night’s sleep.
With any luck, the drivers would be delivering newspapers again by the time he woke up—not burning them.
Chapter Three
Jamie squinted to meet the sun streaming through the half-drawn blinds. It wasn’t the most prudent idea—the swelling beneath his left eye made any optic movement a chore.
He picked up a ringing telephone from the night table next to his bed.
“What’s up?” he said, closing his eyes and letting out a noisy yawn.
“Are you?”
“Yeah, sort of.”
“Heard you took one for the team last night,” Steven Kramer said.
“Some team,” Jamie said, his head back on the pillow. “An asshole walks off his job and thinks I’m a human turnstile.”
“Unless that asshole gets back to work today, my guess is that we’re going to be out with him. That’s what I’m calling about, actually. The Alliance is meeting this afternoon at headquarters. Big vote. You should come.”
Jamie closed his eyes and frowned.
“You there?” Steven said.
“Still here.”
“It’s at twelve-thirty.”
“I’ll try,” Jamie said.
“Don’t try, be there. We’re in this.”
“In what?”
Too late, Steven was gone. He was questioning a dial tone.
It was a few minutes after ten. As usual, Jamie hadn't been able to relax and fall into a deep sleep. He had battled insomnia since preadolescence. He typically slept well in the morning but invariably woke up feeling he needed more. Today was no different.
He inspected the discoloration on his face in a wall mirror beside his bed. There was a spot of dried blood that could be washed off but it didn’t look as bad as it felt. Sunglasses would hide the worst of it.
He
brewed coffee, waited in the cramped kitchen, feet bare on the linoleum floor. He returned to the edge of his bed, clicked on the television to catch a report about what had happened at the Trib.
Drops of coffee, tasteless as tofu, slid off his lips, down his chin and onto his bare chest.
“Trucks attempting to leave the plant were halted by Trib employees, who smashed windows, hurled rocks and set bundles of papers on fire,” the anchorwoman said. “Three of the non-union drivers attempting to man the trucks were injured. Police estimate about two dozen arrests. By one a.m., Trib executives were admitting that the paper would not be on today’s newsstands. For more, we go to Deborah Givens, who is with the drivers’ union president, Gerard Colangelo, outside the Trib plant in downtown Manhattan.”
Jamie had run copy at the Trib with Debbie Givens, a diminutive blonde with a pristine complexion and immovable shoulder-length hair. She was from a small town in Iowa. She also had a master’s degree in broadcasting from the University of Missouri—enough to land her a general assignment reporter’s gig at the city’s cable news station.
When Jamie was still married and living out of the city in a suburb that some wintry nights seemed north of Yonkers and south of Maine, they had gone out for a drink, commiserating the meaninglessness of their work and pondering the prospects of elevation, or escape. For Jamie there weren’t many.
Gerard Colangelo was almost a foot taller than Givens. His combed-back black hair left a three-inch scar uncovered high on his forehead—a remnant of his days as a boxer who cut too easily. With his lined, angular face, Colangelo bore a fair resemblance to Pat Riley. But he was not exactly giving the kind of corporate motivational primer for which the famous Knicks coach demanded a working man’s annual haul.
“We tried…we begged the Trib to negotiate with us like human beings,” Colangelo said. His scratchy voice suffered the effects of a long, argumentative night. “Lee Brady doesn’t want to work with the unions. He doesn’t want contracts. He doesn’t seem to believe in them. And our workers, all the unions, have taken enough from this bully who thinks he can come to New York and do what he did to the unions in Dublin and London. New York is not Dublin or London. Now we show this guy what New York is all about.”