“Back here, Louie.”
The voice came from behind, in the printers’ section of the bar. Lou looked up at Kelly. She shrugged, raised her eyebrows. Morris was pacing, holding his soda glass from the top by the fingertips.
“Where did Colangelo go?” Lou said.
“Picked up and left,” Morris said.
“Did he say anything about what’s going on?”
Morris didn’t answer. He dropped into a chair by the table, motioning for Lou to join him. They faced each other silently. Lou Kramer waited for his brother to enlighten him, as he had his whole life.
“Mo, tell me, what happened?” he said.
Morris removed his hands from the glass and massaged his forehead. It struck Lou that his brother looked pale, exhausted and possibly defeated.
“Louie, put it this way—nothing,” Morris said. “He said nothing. If he has a plan, I get the feeling that we’re only going to find out about it by watching the news.”
Lou decided this wasn’t a good time to mention the segment Morris and Jamie had just apparently co-starred in back at the Trib. His brother would hear about it soon enough.
Chapter Twenty
Jamie wasn’t three feet out of the elevator when he spotted Pat Blaine balancing a cup of coffee in one hand with a Manhattan white pages telephone book in the other.
“New policy!” Blaine announced. It was the kind of theatrical greeting Jamie would expect from him on any normal Wednesday. “No more dialing information when you need a telephone number. From now on our fingers do the walking.”
Jamie felt better about his own ruffled appearance when he saw how unkempt Blaine looked. Unshaven, suit rumpled, the knot of his tie coming apart. Jamie was mostly grateful that the first face he’d encountered was familiar and friendly. Blaine was a sore sight for his own sad, teary eyes.
“Who says?”
“Our blessed Lord, that’s who,” said Blaine. “Any information charges showing up on your phone extension will automatically be deducted from your paycheck and they won’t be going into your pension plan.” Blaine took a swig of the coffee and grimaced. “Do we still have a pension plan?” he asked.
“I’m just here to find out if I have a job, to tell you the truth,” Jamie said. He wondered for a moment if Blaine was drunk.
“So you are, Kramer.” Blaine’s tone at least was gracious, almost avuncular.
“Did you see or hear about what just happened downstairs?” Jamie said.
“I’ve just spent the last half-hour in the can reading today’s paper, which, I am obligated to report—because I am and will always be a reporter even if they call me a columnist—is about the only appropriate place to be reading the piece of crap that was delivered to the newsstand this morning.”
“Never mind, then,” Jamie said. They walked together through the double glass doors that led into the newsroom. They were, as usual during day hours, wide open despite Steven’s and Robbins’ insistence at the union meeting that the locks had been changed and the place was under heavy security.
“That’s funny,” Jamie said. “I thought…”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“That’s the second time you’ve said that. You lose credibility when you repeat yourself,” Blaine said.
“No, I just thought this place would be crawling with security—and especially with Brady’s people,” he said.
“Security costs money and he’s going for the record lowest union-busting budget in the history of the printed word. He’s got his lawyer to bust everyone’s balls and his son in charge of the product.”
“Maxwell Brady is editing the paper?”
“Absolutely, hands-on, at least until it’s time to go hit the bar and Willis salvages whatever he can. Young Master Brady is promising to win us the Pulitzer for the best scab paper of all time.”
They were inside the newsroom, Jamie trying to at least appear relaxed. His sweaty hands remained in his jacket pockets. The city room was quiet, eerily so. Cal Willis was at his usual station, four other editors clustered around him. There seemed to be no one else around.
It was still early in the newspaper day. Some of the editorial staff and especially the culture people were notoriously late getting started. The sportswriters seldom appeared unless it was the time of the month expense accounts were due. Still, even with the bulk of the union staff out on strike, there should have been more activity.
Blaine finished off the coffee with one long gulp, crumpled the cup and tossed it toward a wastepaper basket. He missed by a foot. He rested his free hand on Jamie’s shoulder.
“Kramer, whatever the hell it is that you are doing in here, whatever made you walk through those doors downstairs, it’s too late to second-guess yourself. You’re here, pal. Deal with it.”
“Pat, I’ve got my reasons,” Jamie said. “You know, I have a kid…”
“You’re here. I’m here. Somehow, we both got here.”
Jamie bit his lower lip, looked down at the floor.
“Just do yourself a favor and don’t read the damn paper,” Blaine said.
“I haven’t seen it since we went out. Have you written?”
Blaine shook his head, scratched his nose and stifled a yawn.
“Offered to write a column when you guys went out, but Cal said he didn’t have room. Funny man. He told me to work on something really good. Not to rush it. He said, ‘I don’t have any room for your lousy effin column.’ Cal is a great man—you know what I’m saying?”
“So who is writing?” Jamie said.
Blaine smiled and made a sweeping motion with his right arm, presenting the eerily serene newsroom.
“Behold,” he said.
They parted near Willis’ desk in the center of the room. Once there had been plaster and glass separating departments, but Willis had tired of having to stand, stretch his neck over partitions and shout to get a person’s attention. He long ago had refused his own office along the back wall near Maxine Hancock’s spacious digs and the paper’s conference rooms.
“What’s the use of going to work in an office and then when you get there you go into another one?” he’d said.
Jamie warily approached his desk. As if his eyes could peer through his forehead, Willis said: “You got anything good?” It took Jamie a moment to realize that Willis was talking to him.
“Does that mean I can work?” Jamie said.
“You got another effin reason for being here?”
Jamie shrugged. “I just thought, you know, maybe there’s a process…”
“You report, we edit. That’s the process.”
Jamie was about to walk away to his desk for lack of anything else to say.
“And whom do we have here?”
Maxwell Brady stopped suddenly by Willis’ desk. He was the body opposite of his father: wiry thin, prematurely gray, demonstrative and party-boy buoyant.
“Kramer,” Willis said, nodding to Jamie.
“Mr. Brady,” Jamie said, offering his right hand.
They had already been introduced but only in passing. On that occasion, Brady was on the way uptown to make a sloppy spectacle of himself for the benefit of the gossip columnists staking out the popular haunts—especially those from the Sun, which dubbed him Brady Boy.
“Kramer,” Maxwell Brady said, nodding. “The great labor columnist crosses the picket line?”
“You’re confusing me with my cousin,” Jamie said. “He’s still out.”
“And you are…”
“Jamie. I’m a reporter. I just came back today, right now.”
Maxwell Brady, his Groucho eyebrows suddenly at attention, pointed a finger.
“You’re not the bloke who was just downstairs…”
“I was…I mean, I had to cross the line to get in.”
Jamie stole a glance at Willis, who frowned and returned to his keyboard.
“My father and I, well, we had a thing.”
“I heard a
row from Lord Brady’s office, so I took a peak out the window—saw the whole fracas. You were assaulted trying to report to work. “Appalling! The bastards tried those tactics in Dublin and London, and we had them all arrested.”
The notion of his father being led away in handcuffs was momentarily amusing, but Jamie reminded himself of why he’d crossed the line: he just wanted to be back at his desk, his computer screen, perhaps have another crack at his still-unpublished nursing home piece. He wanted his life back.
“Actually,” he said, softly, “it was nothing. My dad, he’s the head of the printers’ union, and this is like life and death to him. I guess he just lost it.”
Jamie looked away from his aspiring defender. Willis was punching computer keys and whistling a tune from his most beloved musical, Les Miserables. He liked to brag that as many actors that had played Jean Valjean, that’s how many times he had seen the Broadway production.
“No big deal,” Jamie said.
“You mean, you crossed the picket line right past your daddy and he took a poke at you?”
Jamie nodded, sheepishly.
“That is incredible. Willis, did you hear that?”
Willis didn’t look up. Maxwell Brady pounded his palm on the desk and went cackling down the aisle, bounding in the direction of his father’s office.
“Cal, where are all the new reporters they hired?” Jamie said.
“Hired?”
“People were saying that Brady brought in new people. He’s been on television insisting that they’re going to be permanent. Isn’t that why the sports guys crossed?”
“The sports guys crossed because the basketball and hockey seasons just started and they didn’t want to miss the damn buffet at the Garden. Otherwise, Brady hasn’t hired anyone.”
“But I was hearing from Steve and he said…”
“You just heard Maxwell Brady say a few things—would you believe anything that jackass said?”
“So who’s writing the stories?”
Willis shook his head and threw up his hands.
“Who would you like to have writing them?” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“In case you forgot, Kramer, yesterday was Election Day. All we had to do to put out a paper was to put the results in it, use the wires. That’s all we pretty much have to do every day. But if it’s local news and quote-unquote staff reporters you’re looking for, we’re all over that too.”
He lifted a Trib off his desk, turned the front page and skimmed a few more. “Okay, what’s our big local story? We had a drug bust yesterday at Kennedy High School up in the Bronx by one of our new reporters, Sylvia Stallone.”
Willis wheeled around to face a group of vacant desks.
“Ms. Stallone, say hello to Mr. Kramer, one of our regular general assignment people. Mr. Kramer started here as a copy boy and worked his way up.” He turned back to Jamie. “Ms. Stallone joined us yesterday, a name Max Brady apparently found in the Brooklyn telephone book. A good fightin’ name, he said, perfect for the crime beat.”
Jamie took the newspaper from Willis and began thumbing through the front pages, scanning bylines. “Martin L. King…Robert Zimmerman…W.J. Clinton,” he read out loud. “You mean to tell me that you guys just made up these ridiculous bylines and put them on stories in the paper?”
“Not we—him, Brady the younger. And keep it down, Kramer, you don’t want to offend our new staff, do you? These people are very sensitive about their prose, especially Mr. Zimmerman over there. He writes protest songs in his spare time so we’re letting him cover City Hall.”
“This is crazy.”
“Jamie, who would you like to be? You can actually be several people on the same day, write as many stories as you want. We just take them off the wire and rearrange a few paragraphs and sentences. You have a favorite athlete? Musician? Journalist? If you go with a journalist, make it a dead one. We don’t need a lawsuit.”
“I don’t get it,” Jamie said. “Why are the union people saying that real reporters are being hired to replace us? What’s the point of making us all think we’re about to be permanently replaced?”
“Because they assumed striking reporters would know it’s a load of effin bull. But in the eyes of the rest of the city, it makes Brady look like he’s trying to break the unions,” Willis said. “The Alliance and other Trib unions need support from the teachers, hospital workers, sanitation—everywhere they can get it.”
Willis held his palms up, in effect asking Jamie how the hell this hadn’t been obvious to him. Jamie suddenly wished he were as invisible as Willis’ new reporting staff. Willis and Blaine had been contractually obligated to do Brady’s bidding but understood the mockery he—and by extension they—were making of the newspaper. They had little choice but to go along until the dispute was resolved. Jamie, on the other hand, was in the building because he had made a rash decision that, in lieu of what he’d just learned, was devoid of all common sense.
The words from Blaine—Whatever it is you’re doing here, you’ve got to deal with it—had been fair warning.
Jamie was numbed by the realization that the sense of normalcy he was seeking did not exist, not in this building, not right now and perhaps never again. Walking toward the Trib from the subway station, he had imagined himself calling Karyn to say, “Cancel those plans, and let me speak to my boy.” What a joke he had played on himself. Who was to be the fictionalized author of his next piece? Ronald McDonald? Or would Jamie proceed to make himself a bigger clown by putting his name in a newspaper that was now nothing more than a daily lampoon of itself?
He walked away from Willis’ desk in the direction of his own. He sank into his chair, suddenly overwhelmed by the emptiness all around him. He closed his eyes, trying to stave off another cresting wave of emotion.
“You should have called me before you came in,” Willis said, standing over him. He leaned over slightly, placed a hand on his shoulder. “You’re a reporter, Jamie—did you forget that? All you had to do was pick up the telephone and find out what was going on. I would’ve told you not to bother. But you’re here now, and I gather from what Max Brady was yapping about that you made it worse by coming in the front door.”
Jamie looked up at Willis. He begged himself not to tear up, but he couldn’t help it.
“People downstairs saw a lot more than me crossing the line,” Jamie said. “They saw the Big Apple Circus. The question is: What the hell do I do now?”
Willis frowned, shook his head.
“Unless you are determined to be part of this, I’d say go home, have a drink. Don’t talk to anyone. Get a good night’s sleep and see what comes out of this in the next day or two. I can’t tell you what it’ll be, but we didn’t create this, and we can’t end it. Inside or out, we’re just bystanders in a game of chicken.”
Obediently, Jamie nodded. He rose from his seat and began a stiff walk up the aisle toward the double-glass doors.
“Kramer, one more thing.”
Jamie turned back. Willis had the exasperated look of a disbelieving parent. He pointed an index finger toward the exit on the far side of the office. It was the one Jamie had used when he became an unwilling prop on the night the strike broke out.
“Will you use the effin side door?”
Day Four: Thursday, November 10, 1994
Chapter Twenty-one
Another long fitful night came to a merciful end. Dawn arrived with Jamie still able to muster just a couple of hours of uninterrupted sleep.
His back was sore. His neck felt encased in cement. He lay motionless on his back, staring at the ceiling, asking himself, What now?
His crossing of the picket line had been executed with the simultaneously comic and tragic touch of slipping on a banana peel and falling in front of a speeding bus. He had alienated everyone important in his life, with the possible exceptions of Cal Willis and Patrick Blaine.
Steven wouldn’t be making any more recruitment calls. Morris was
possibly sitting shivah, mourning the loss of a striker more than a son. Even Molly might be furious with him at this point.
If the Lonely Planet travel guide Karyn had left for his viewing displeasure was the precursor to accepting the job at the invisible bookstore, what would Jamie have left with Aaron in effect out of his life?
My life sucks, kept running through his mind like a self-pitying mantra.
He had nowhere to go, nothing to do. What else to do besides isolate himself in his apartment, eat junk food and watch television until his vision faded to black?
One day down. And counting.
On the previous afternoon, Jamie had gratefully taken Willis’ advice and slipped inconspicuously through the side door of the building. Back in Brooklyn, he moved his car from the spot he’d left it in the previous night and found another one three spaces from his front door. It was a Monday no-parking zone, good for the next three days. Covered on that front, Jamie proceeded to shop as if the city was on Category Five hurricane alert. He purchased a pound and a half of sliced turkey and Swiss cheese, three large bags of chips, three six-packs of diet Coke. He stopped by the meat counter and bought a few hamburger patties, a dozen chicken wings and a large container of potato salad. He dropped two boxes of his favorite breakfast cereal, Special K, into the cart.
Two doors down, he propped his grocery bags against the front counter of the video store. He prowled the aisles and stacked videos against his body like a clerk taking inventory. Needy for companionship, he rounded up bad-ass hombres for a guys’ night in. James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause; Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon; Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver; and Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy. He passed on Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo in a voluntary show of good taste.
Severed from the world outside his apartment, he settled in at home with the mad, misguided and misanthropic—the only real friends he believed he had left.
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