A wasteland of strangers Read Online Free PDF Page B

the AP rewrite desk. None in Pasadena that I could recall; my first job on a real newspaper, brash and eager and confident and still harboring a few of what I laughably considered ideals. Santa Monica? Yep, I'd gathered quite a few in good old Santa Monica after the promise of a freehand daily think piece became instead a restricted twice-weekly Pap smear and then, after four months, evolved into a reason to quit when the bastard city editor arbitrarily determined that I wasn't columnist material after all and kicked me back onto the City Hall beat.
    They came fast and often after that, all the sticks on the twenty-year ride to the bottom. One more large-city daily (never a big-city daily where Kent could strut his stuff) and on to a couple of small-city dailies, a succession of small-town dailies, and small-town twice weeklies, and finally all the way down, plunk, to the tiny-town, once-a-week sheets. How many papers and towns altogether in twenty years? A score? Two dozen? They were all pasted together in my memory, a gray blur like the booze-soaked remnants of a cheap montage. The only things from each stop along the route that I remembered clearly were the sticks: missed deadlines, broken promises, bitter firings, random rants and clashes. But those weren't the only mementos of the past two decades; there were plenty of other sticks, too, courtesy of one ex-wife (I wonder who's laying her now?), a gaggle of ex-girlfriends, more than one episode involving the nonperformance of a once dependable pecker, a clutch of drunk-driving charges, two or three sodden fistfights. Kent used them all, one by one (often, with certain favorites like the Storm stick), in the grand sport of Kent-bashing. And still the bag wasn't full nor the psyche fully flayed, nor would they ever be even if my liver and lungs held out for another ten years or more. Which was about as likely as a black lesbian with AIDS being elected to the White House.
    Spend the rest of my short unhappy life in Pomo? Nope. Definitely not. The tiniest town yet, true, but there were tinier ones; tinier weeklies, too, than the Pomo Advocate, whose owners could be persuaded to tolerate the fine, ink-stained hand of Douglas Kent, crusading editor. The truth was, Pomowas wearing thin on me after three years. I wasn't used to holding a job that long, staying in one place that long. I should have been fired long ago. Instead, I was still enjoying undeserved freedom, the largesse of a large-assed absentee owner whose only interest in the Advocate was a modest annual profit gleaned from its advertisers. He cared not a whit for the contents of the paper. Neither, for that matter, did its subscribers; their primary interest lay in a weekly search for the correct wording and spacing of their ads, the mention and correct spelling of their names and those of friends and relatives, ad nauseam.
    Perfect case in point: the long Kent-generated article last spring on alcoholism and its root causes in Pomo County. Isolation, alienation, high poverty level on and off the Indian rancherias, high jobless rate, high density of the homeless and elderly retirees and welfare recipients, lack of adequate social services—all the usual crap, re-shat and recycled. A temperance tract, in content and tone, on the insidious, long-range effects of John Barleycorn and his various spirited cousins.
    I wrote it drunk, of course.
    Blind drunk.
    Kent was amazed when he read the piece in print. About a quarter of it was borderline brilliant, some of the best writing I'd done in years, drunk or sober. The other three quarters was mostly incoherent. Sentences that made no sense, paragraphs that had little or no continuity, logic that was illogical, misquotes, even a couple of dangling participles. A shameful mess, in sum, from the first word to the final period.
    And the magnificent irony was, nobody noticed.
    We received not a single phone call or letter of protest. One of the city councilmen, by God, stopped