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weeks on WMBC.”
    “Radio’s for housewives. People believe what they see in print.” He tapped the newspaper. “This picture will be remembered long after Buckley’s dead and his words are gone in the ether. Father Coughlin doesn’t have that kind of power. Neither does Herbert Hoover.”
    Six months later, I remembered what he said about Buckley, and wondered if he’d had some kind of line.
    “It’s a good-looking paper,” I said. “The writing could be better.”
    “It could be a lot better. That’s why I’m here.”
    I sucked the foam off my beer. I knew what was coming next.
    “How’s Hearst to work for?” he asked.
    “He signs the checks every other Friday.”
    “I mean from a journalist’s standpoint. Are you happy at the Times?”
    “Are you offering me a job, Mr. Wolfman?”
    “Howard. I’ve got the newest equipment and the best photographers in the Midwest. I need good copy. I’ve read your stuff. What’s Hearst paying you?”
    “Seventy-five a week.”
    He smiled, blinking behind the spectacles. “Nearer sixty. I’ll give you a hundred and fifty, plus a twenty-dollar bonus every time you scoop the rest of the city.”
    My hand was starting to shake. I clamped it around the handle of my mug. “I cover police and city government. And I get a byline.”
    “I already have a police reporter and a city government reporter. I’m offering you a column.”
    I let go of the mug and took his hand. “When do I start?”
    “How soon can you clean out your desk?”
    That’s how I came to work for the tabloids. They’re tamer now, and so much a part of the landscape that it’s difficult to imagine the impact they made when they were new. Splattered with lurid photos (many of them dramatically doctored) and black headlines, they broke out in cities from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico as suddenly as gang wars and swooped down on domestic murders, state executions, sex scandals, and anything else sufficiently scarlet to clear a newsstand in minutes. Little bullets of voyeuristic pleasure, they were portable enough to be read easily in cabs and streetcars and cheap enough, at two or three cents a pop, to be left behind. They obeyed few laws beyond supply and demand and sold in the millions. When a New York tabloid smuggled a photographer into Ruth Snyder’s electrocution chamber and ran a picture of her snapped just as the switch was thrown—RUTH FRIES, the headline explained—the legitimate press lowered its flags in mourning, while scrambling behind the scenes to start tabloids of its own. The Fourth Estate would never be the same, and no one who moved around in the public eye would ever again be totally secure in his private life. The tabloids would force subtlety upon the corrupt and threaten heroes with extinction.
    My new employer inhabited the fifth floor of the Parker Block, a Victorian wedge triangulated by Woodward, Michigan, and Gratiot avenues, with a cast-iron front housing Siegel’s Department Store on the ground floor, dripping with cornices and scrollwork—a dotty old aunt of a building, and a strange home for a brat like the Banner. The office I shared with the cartoon editor was eleven feet square with an arched window looking out on Gratiot and the J. L. Hudson building across the street. The cartoon editor, whose name was Jensen, a woodsy-looking number with craggy features and a pipe he couldn’t keep burning to pay the rent, never cracked a smile when I was around to see it and gave no indication when I told a joke that he understood English, but the cartoons he bought were the funniest I’ve ever seen. You figure it out.
    I’ve forgotten the subject of the first column I wrote once I’d gotten past the novelty of a Remington typewriter with an entire working alphabet and no keys that stuck. I’m not alone, because it garnered no letters to the editor and Howard didn’t stop by the office to congratulate me, something he made a point of doing later