A Drinking Life (36 page)
Those long grinding hours entitled me to a reward. Of course. On weekends, or on nights when I was not making mechanicals for a doll catalog or designing an ad for a machine operator, I went drinking. Sometimes I was with my Dominican
flaquita.
Sometimes with Tim, Jake, and Billy. Sometimes alone. I had money in my pocket, cash I’d earned with hard hours. In the downtown bars, in joints like Birdland, I could afford any drink in the house.
We were in the roaring midst of a New Year’s Eve party on Ninth Street when someone arrived with great news.
It’s over! Castro wins! Batista left Havana.
You’re shitting me, Jake said.
No, man, it’s on the radio.
We turned on the radio and the news was true. The bearded young revolutionary had triumphed over the cruel dictator. His army was moving down from the Sierra Maestra in triumph. All night long, we played
charangas
by Orquesta Aragón and listened to bulletins and drank beer and talked bad Spanish and cheered for Fidel. Nobody knew that he was a communist. He was young, from
our
time. He hadn’t just talked about change, he’d
done
something. Faced with grinding oppression and a lack of freedom, Fidel had picked up a rifle and gone to the mountains. We cheered because we thought the good guys had won. After a while, I took my Dominican girl next door to a friend’s small apartment and fucked her wildly, the two of us yelling together in the revolutionary solidarity of Spanish. Then we went back to the party and danced some more, full of exultation, beer, and joy. Later, when the party was over, Jake went off with one woman and Tim with another. I was alone with La Dominicana again. We made love then in my own bed. The morning arrived, as gray as hangover. I wished we could wake up in Havana.
More than ever, as Jack Kennedy made his great run for the presidency, I was reading the political columns in the newspapers, particularly in the
Post.
Since it had published several of my letters, I thought of the
Post
as
my
newspaper. In the late spring of 1960, Jimmy Wechsler, the paper’s editor, published a book called
Reflections of an Angry Middle Aged Editor.
The book was a kind of situation report on American society after the fall of McCarthy; it was sometimes despairing, about race and class, but otherwise full of hope. I read it through in one night and then typed a long letter to Wechsler, agreeing with most of what he’d written, arguing with some of his remarks, singling out a chapter on journalism for my hardest criticism, implying that newspapers had no room for people like me. Working-class people. People who didn’t go to Ivy League schools, young men rejected by places like Columbia. Such people, I said, might not have great formal educations but they knew about New York, the world, life. I worked hard on the letter, making three drafts. I didn’t think of it as a job application. That’s what it turned out to be.
A week later, a brief note arrived from Wechsler. He said he’d enjoyed my letter and agreed with about 90 percent of what I’d said. Why didn’t I give him a call sometime and come down to the paper for a chat?
His secretary set up an appointment for a few days later at the
Post.
I told Tim and Jake and tried to be casual about it, but for the next few nights I had trouble sleeping. My mind was full of images from newspaper movies, all those tough fast-talking men in tumultuous city rooms, causing trouble, being brave: Bogart pressing the button to start the presses at the end of
Deadline U.S.A.,
Robert Mitchum moving through fog in a trench coat, Gregory Peck in a glorious apartment in Rome, riding with Eddie Albert to an assignment. Hemingway was there too, of course. He’d started as reporter in Kansas City, without ever going to college. He’d put a reporter named Jake Barnes into
The Sun Also Rises,
his best novel. I couldn’t imagine him writing a novel about a graphic designer.
Finally, on a late afternoon in the last week of May, I took the IRT down to the old
Post
building at 75 West Street, went in through the Washington Street entrance, and rode the elevator to the second floor. I followed a gloomy marbelized corridor around to the back and then, for the first time, stepped into the city room.
Looking for someone? a tall, bespectacled man said.
Yes. Jimmy Wechsler.
All the way in the back.
The room was more exciting to me than any movie: an organized chaos of editors shouting from desks, copyboys dashing through doors into the composing room, men and women typing at big manual typewriters, telephones ringing, the wire service tickers clattering, everyone smoking and putting butts out on the floor. I remembered the day I saw Dan Parker walking out of the
Daily Mirror
building and the newspapermen hurrying to the bars of Third Avenue. They’d all come from a place like this. But this wasn’t a rag like the
Mirror;
this was the
Post,
the smartest, bravest tabloid in New York,
my
paper. All these men and women were doing work that was honorable, I thought, work that added to the ideals and intelligence of the world. I wanted desperately to be one of them.
Wechsler was a small man with a large head and thoughtful eyes. He was wearing a bowtie and suspenders. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows. He took me into his inner office and I sat beside a desk littered with newspaper clippings, magazines, letters from readers, copies of his book. While we talked, he smoked cigarettes and sipped coffee. Near the end of our chat, he leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head.
Have you ever thought about becoming a newspaperman? he said.
I mumbled something in reply, but I don’t remember what. It must have been something like, Only all my life.
Well, Wechsler said, call me in a couple of days. Maybe I can get you a tryout around here.
At 1
A.M.,
on June 1, 1960, I was back in the city room, clumsily disguised as a reporter, and my life changed forever.
A DRINKING LIFE
Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling
And I would still be on my feet
I would still be on my feet.
— Joni Mitchell, “A Case of You”
I read the news today oh boy . . .
— John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “A Day in the Life”
I
N HUMILITY
and arrogance, I started to learn the newspaper trade. I was humbled by what I did not know, in the company of so many skilled craftsmen; I was arrogant enough to believe I could learn to do what they did. My teacher wasn’t Jimmy Wechsler; for the first eighteen months I worked nights while he worked days and we seldom saw each other. He allowed me in the door, but a man named Paul Sann kept me there.
I saw him for the first time at six o’clock in the morning of my first shift at the
Post.
I had walked in that night full of fear and trembling, not knowing what to expect, carrying a copy of
Under the Volcano
to read on the subway home if they threw me out. The assistant night city editor was Ed Kosner, younger than I was by a few years. He parked me at a typewriter and asked me how much experience I had. When I told him absolutely none, he laughed and without pause explained the fundamentals. I would write on “books,” four sheets of coarse copy paper separated by carbons. The carbon copies were called “dupes.” In the upper left-hand corner I should type my name in lower case and then create a “slug,” a short word that identified the story for editors and typesetters. The slug should reflect the subject; a political story could be slugged
POLS
. But if it was a story about a murder I should not slug it
KILL
because the men setting type would kill the story. With that simple lesson, he gave me a press release and told me to rewrite it in two paragraphs, and my career had begun.
All through the night in the sparsely manned city room, I wrote small stories based on press releases or items clipped from the early editions of the morning papers. I noticed that Kosner had Scotch-taped a single word to his own typewriter:
Focus.
I appropriated the word as my motto. My nervousness ebbed as I worked, asking myself: What does this story say? What is new? How would I tell it to someone in a saloon?
Focus,
I said to myself.
Focus. . . .
Near dawn, there was a lull as the editors discussed what they would do with all the material they now had in type. Beyond the high open windows, the sky was turning red. I walked over and gazed out and saw that we were across the street from the piers of United Fruit, whose bananas my grandfather had shipped from faraway Honduras a half-century before. I wondered if he had ever docked at this pier, ever looked up at the building that housed the
New York Post.
When I turned around, Paul Sann was walking into the city room.
He had a great walk, quick, rhythmic, taut with authority, as he moved without hellos across the city room to the fenced-off pen at the far end, where he served as executive editor. He was dressed entirely in black, with black cowboy boots, carrying the morning papers under his arm. From where I sat, I watched him go to his desk, light a Camel, take a cardboard cup of coffee from a copyboy. His face was gray, urban, Bogartian, his mouth pulled tight in a tough guy’s mask, his gray hair cut short, and he wore horn-rimmed glasses which he shoved to the top of his head while reading. He immediately began poring over galleys, a thick black ebony pencil in his hand, marking some, discarding others, making a list on a yellow pad. Around seven, the other editors gathered at his desk to discuss the flow of the paper. Sann always wrote the “wood,” the page-one headline (so named because for decades it had been set in wood type). Then he moved into the composing room, where the trays of metal type for each page were laid out on stone-topped tables. He was still there when my shift ended at eight and Kosner gave me a goodnight. Sann didn’t talk to me that night. He didn’t talk to me for weeks.
But in the weeks that followed, as I started going out on fires and murders, knocking on doors in Harlem and the Bronx at three in the morning, I came to understand that Paul Sann was the great piston of the
New York Post.
Wechsler gave the paper its liberal political soul; but Sann made it a tough ballsy tabloid. Wechsler pressed for coverage of civil rights, Cold War sanity, the reform politicians of the Democratic party; Sann was skeptical of all living beings, and leavened the political coverage with murders, fires, disasters, and gangsters. They didn’t much like each other, and their conflict was discussed almost every morning after the shift ended, at the bar in the Page One, a block away from the
Post.
One guy wants a newspaper, said Carl Pelleck, the best police reporter in the city. The other guy wants a pamphlet.
Yeah, someone else said, but without Wechsler, it has no identity, no function, no
soul.
It’ll die.
Listen, it’s gonna die anyway. It won’t last past New Year’s.
The uncertainty about the paper’s future didn’t bother me; I was still working at the studio, and if the newspaper did go down I wouldn’t starve. But in the meantime, I’d have had the best time of my life. I just hoped it would last long enough for me to learn the trade. During my three-month tryout, I watched Sann from a distance and got to know other newspapermen up close, in the morning seminars at the Page One. I loved their talk, its cynicism and fatalism, its brilliant wordplay, as we stood at the bar and watched the stockbrokers coming up from the subways to trudge to Walk Street while we waited for the first editions to arrive. When the papers landed on the bar, the seminar would begin. This was an often brutal analysis of stories, headlines, and writing style, presided over by an immense, burly, mustached copy editor named Fred McMorrow, attended by two old pros named Gene Grove and Normand Poirier. They were funny and merciless. About my stories. About others, their works, themselves, and most of the human race.
Then one stormy morning, an hour before deadline, after I’d written a story about the eviction of a family in Brooklyn, Sann called me over. He held the galley in his hands. I was nervous, still on a tryout, still provisional.
Not bad, he said.
Thanks.
I like the part about the rain rolling down his face.
Thanks.
By the way, did this guy speak English?
No.
So how the fuck did you get all these quotes?
I speak a little Spanish, I said.
You do? How come an uneducated Brooklyn Mick like you speaks Spanish?
I went to school in Mexico for a year. On the GI Bill.
No shit?
No shit.
He lit a Camel. Then he pointed at a paragraph near the end.
You see this, he said, where you say this is a tragedy?
Yeah.
I’m taking it out. And don’t you ever use the fucking word “tragedy” again. You tell what happened, and let the
reader
say it’s a tragedy. If you’re crying, the reader won’t.
I see what you mean.
You better, he said, taking a drag on the cigarette, then sipping the black coffee. He glanced at the story again.
Maybe in another eight or nine years, you could be pretty good at this miserable trade.
Thanks, I said, and started to leave.
Oh, by the way, Paul Sann said. You’re hired.
N
ATURALLY
, I got drunk in celebration. The next day, I told my partner I was leaving the studio. He was furious, shouting
You’ve left me high and dry.
He was right, of course. But there was no going back. I’d found a life I wanted. Every day or night would be different. I would have a ringside seat at the big events of the day. I’d learn about death and life and everything in between. It was honorable work, not putting goods in pretty packages. Somehow the desire for freedom and the need for security had merged. If I worked hard, listened well, studied the masters of the craft, I’d have a trade I could practice anywhere. Even if the
Post
folded. I might never be Franz Kline in his heroic studio. But I wouldn’t be a buttoned-down organization man either. I’d be a newspaperman.