Rubout Page 5

  “Don’t thank me,” I said. “You don’t know how wrong I was last time.”

  Dead wrong.

  “Go Away.”

  I could read the words, but I couldn’t believe them. I looked again. They still said “Go Away.”

  The Gazette actually wanted to call its new travel tabloid “Go Away.”

  “So, what do you think of our prototype?” Charlie the managing editor asked me.

  I thought it sucked. But I also thought I’d better not say that. I knew what I was supposed to think. Charlie, the little slimewad, was standing in his conference room beaming like a proud papa. The man almost looked human. He was wearing his best blue suit and most sincere tie. He did everything but hand me a cigar when I went to look at his newborn.

  Six months of meetings and God knows how much money had produced this misbegotten thing on the long mahogany conference table. It was a mishmash of bold, clashing colors, busy layouts, and hard-to read headlines. It violated every principle of newspaper layout and design. The pages bristled with pointless lines, boxes, takeout quotes, and other graphics gewgaws. Stories were jumped two or three times. Photos were small and skewed at odd angles. Text was squeezed into skinny columns, then stretched across the page for no reason.

  There wasn’t a staff-written story in the section, just empty words off the wires. One particularly embarrassing example began: “Hollywood has discovered the magic of Montana. You should, too.” The story named some movie stars with homes in Montana. It forgot to mention how much the natives hated Hollywood types. The illustrations were six postage stamp-size celebrity photos and one picture of the Montana mountains at night. “The other stars come out after dark in the magic of Montana,” the cutline gushed.

  Advertisers would love it. Readers would do what the section advised: Go away. In droves. But they wouldn’t saddle up the family van for magic Montana. They’d cancel their subscriptions. Charlie was planning to turn the Monday paper, our lowest circulation day, into a tabloid with this special travel section as the lure to boost readership. It wouldn’t lure a canary to the bottom of a bird cage. The question was, why would Charlie, who’d tried a number of underhanded tricks to get me fired, want my opinion on his pet project?

  I bought some time by staring thoughtfully at the prototype, but I had to say something soon. Charlie was still smiling expectantly.

  “Is this a MacCreedy design?” I said.

  “You can tell!” Charlie said, looking pleased.

  I sure could. Only MacCreedy produced such empty, fussy work. He was a sour eggplant-shape man, who hated everyone who wasn’t as unhappy as he was. Fortunately for MacCreedy, the people working on his sections were absolutely miserable. He made sure of that. MacCreedy had already midwifed four sections. Two were dead, one was limping sadly, and one was gasping its last. We expected the plug to be pulled on the St. Louie Woman section any day. This was a new women’s section that looked remarkably like an old women’s section. It served up wire service stories on child care, fashion, and household hints. A “Look Inside” column had cute articles about how local celebrities decorated their houses, written by freelancers for thirty-five bucks. No wonder the section was dying. St. Louis women were too sophisticated to swallow rewarmed hash.

  MacCreedy was never blamed for the sections’ failures. He was smart enough to get out after a new section was started. It was turned over to an eager but doomed editor. Then MacCreedy simply sat back and sniped at the poor sap with memos. “I want to call your attention to the following errors in today’s section,” his memos always began. “There should be a two-point rule under the masthead, not a one-point. The column should have a takeout quote, but it should not be boxed. The column on the facing page should be boxed without a takeout quote. In the story. . .”

  Readers didn’t give a rat’s ear about the size of the rules. I doubt if they noticed. But the bosses did. They praised MacCreedy’s nitpicking memos for their attention to detail. The new section editors were so bogged down in pointless—or one-point—graphics details they didn’t have time to worry about the content. They also didn’t have any staff. Most of these ballyhooed new sections simply had an editor, a copy editor, and all the wires service readers could eat. No money was spent on reporters. The budget had already been used for ads to promote the section. But maybe this time the Gazette would do it right.

  “So, how many reporters will this new section have?” I asked.

  “We’ll have a copy editor and an editor,” Charlie said. “The local reporting will be done by freelancers.” For thirty-five bucks. So the Gazette didn’t have to pay the staff overtime.

  “The travel stories will be wire service. We’ll also take freelance from Gazette staffers,” Charlie said, as if he was handing out bonuses.

  “We get thirty-five bucks to write ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation’?” I asked. Oops. That sounded a little sarcastic.

  “No,” Charlie explained. “We’ll pay you twenty-five dollars. But we’ll give you the opportunity to write off a portion of your vacation on your taxes.” The Gazette and the IRS. They made a terrific team.

  “But no new staff,” I said.

  “Francesca,” Charlie replied, “we have one of the largest news staffs for a paper our size in the nation. I couldn’t justify more people.”

  It was true. We had an enormous staff. But we also had one of the highest ratios of editors to reporters. We had more assistant city editors than we had news photographers. Photographers took pictures for the paper. Editors produced nothing but memos—and more confusion. But that was something else I couldn’t say. Charlie already hated me.

  Instead I said, “The section name is unusual.” I thought that sounded remarkably subtle.

  “We wanted to appeal to the young, hip reader,” Charlie said, patting his old, fat gut.

  “I thought most travel was done by older readers who have money and leisure time. Are you concerned the Go Away name will offend them?”

  Charlie shrugged. “We may lose a few old farts,” he said, obviously not including himself in that category. “But our focus groups indicate the name has high appeal in the eighteen-to-thirty age group. We need younger readers.”

  So we offended our older ones. And didn’t get the young hip readers, either. They could get better info off the Internet. But that was something else I couldn’t say. Evidently Charlie thought I’d said enough, anyway.

  “I don’t like your attitude, Francesca,” he said, but he sounded avuncular rather than angry, which should have warned me the sawed-off sleaze was about to pull something sneaky. “You have lots of theories about how a newspaper should be run. You have lots of criticisms. But you have no practical knowledge. That’s why I’m putting you on our Voyage Committee. Our publisher has hired one of the finest consultants in the business to help guide us into the next century. You’re always complaining that we have only white males on these committees. Well, Francesca, you’re our official female newsroom representative. The first meeting is this weekend.”

  “What?” I felt like he’d punched me in the gut. Except a punch in the gut would have been quick. This was going to be slow and painful, like having my arm sawed off with a dull knife.

  “Charlie, I’d be wasted on that committee,” I said, overcome with modesty for once. “Also, I have a four-day-a-week column to write. And you want a special story on the Vander Venter murder.”

  Charlie handed me a thick envelope. “Stretch yourself,” he said, giving his creepy little smile. “Consider this a sign of my confidence in your ability.”

  Consider this a trap so Charlie could get rid of me once and for all. I left his office fuming. At my desk, I pushed aside a pile of old Gazettes, mail and phone messages, and opened the envelope. There, on creamy stationery that must have cost my next raise, was a letter from our publisher.

  “Dear Citizen of Gazetteville,” it began.

  Dear citizen? The publisher didn’t know the name of his best-read female co
lumnist?

  “We are about to sail into the twenty-first century on a Voyage of Discovery that we hope will take us in new directions. You, as a member of our Voyage Committee, will be one of the people at the helm of the Good Ship Gazette. This committee is hand-picked from the paper’s newsroom and business people.”

  Terrific. The two groups that are traditionally at each other’s throats will be locked in a conference room together. The business department felt they could get this newspaper going if they could just make the effete, arrogant snobs in the newsroom understand that there has to be some connection between ad content and news content. The newsroom believed the business department couldn’t sell the fine product we created. All they knew how to do was sell out. The ad reps were always trying to find sneaky ways to persuade writers to do nice stories about major advertisers, including questionable car dealers and siding contractors.

  The letter blathered on. “We will take you all on a Voyage of Discovery to learn about yourself and your newspaper.

  “Our objective is not to improve circulation, but to improve the internal dynamics so that the paper will naturally improve as the committee goes on a voyage of personal discovery. We must improve the product and the profits, while engendering the capabilities for enthusiasm, innovation and community involvement.”

  I groaned. This looked like weeks of what I had a low tolerance for: bullshit meetings. For me, being on this voyage was more dangerous than sailing on the Titanic. I looked around for my life preserver. Thank God, there she was. I spotted my mentor, Georgia T. George, assistant managing editor for features, going into her office on Rotten Row. I called her number. “Georgia, you won’t believe what that little reptile Charlie has done now,” I began when she answered, but she quickly cut me off.

  “Francesca, I know how you really feel about Charlie,” she said soothingly while I stared at the phone. Why was syrup pouring out of it? This didn’t sound like my funny, foul-mouthed mentor. Had she been taken over by the pod people? “Your blood sugar must be low,” she said, much too sweetly. “I want you to have a relaxing cup of tea at Miss Lucy’s Lunchroom. Promise me you’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  She hung up before I could ask what the heck got into her. Tea? At Miss Lucy’s? Tea never sullied Georgia’s lips. She drank scotch, and like most of the newsroom staff, would rather mud-wrestle naked on live TV than go to a tearoom. A light finally dawned. That’s why she wanted me at Miss Lucy’s in ten minutes. So we could talk without running into anyone from the Gazette.

  Miss Lucy’s was just around the corner from the Gazette but light-years away. It was staffed by sweet elderly women in ruffly pink uniforms who called you dear and seemed to mean it. I ordered oolong and cress sandwiches for two, because I’d read about them in English novels. The oolong tasted like ordinary tea and the cress sandwiches tasted like buttered grass.

  “Your ass would have been grass if I hadn’t shut you up,” Georgia bellowed when she steamed through the tearoom’s candy-pink door a few minutes later. The tearoom was empty, but the sweet pink lady pouring the oolong looked so shocked, she slopped tea into my saucer. She apologized and fluttered back to the kitchen to get me another cup.

  Georgia settled into a spindly pink chair, smoothing the wrinkles on one of her expensive, ugly suits. The woman had a genius for picking corporate clothes that looked all wrong on her. Her elfin face and slight figure were lost in boxy suits the color of fungus. Maybe she thought it was the only way to be taken seriously. Maybe she was right. She usually was.

  “I couldn’t talk to you because the fucking phones are bugged,” she said, lowering her voice an octave. “The company is also monitoring the effing e-mail and reading the frigging files on computers. Charlie announced it at the morning meeting today. Said it’s the first step toward getting rid of the deadwood.”

  “Sounds like a worthy goal to me,” I said.

  “That’s exactly what management wants you to think,” she said sharply. “But your definition of dead-wood is different from theirs. With your smart mouth and high salary, you could be Charlie’s next target.”

  “I should know you can’t count on management to make a sensible decision. The Gazette is notorious for promoting goofoffs and driving off talent. Charlie chased off a really fine black reporter by giving her dog assignments. Now she’s a war correspondent at the Washington Post. But Charlie told everyone she was awful and didn’t work hard while she was at the Gazette. Even I believed him. I didn’t realize it was because he gave her such awful stories.”

  “Gazette management specializes in divide and conquer,” Georgia said. “If the staff is at one another’s throats, they won’t notice management is reaming their asses.” The sweet pink lady had returned while Georgia was making that speech. She was so startled she oolonged on my wrist.

  “I’m so sorry,” the tea lady said, and pulled out an embroidered handkerchief to mop up the spots on my sleeve. She turned pinker than her uniform at Georgia’s language. Georgia was a news woman of the old school. When she started at the paper, women were automatically sidetracked into the society section. Georgia talked her way out of covering society stories and into a serious city hall beat. She used a two-pronged approach. First, she convinced management she was a good reporter by getting scoops. Second, she used language so foul her editors were afraid to let her near a so-called society lady.

  When the pink lady went back for another fresh cup for me, Georgia said, “Now, what’s the problem?”

  “Charlie put me on the Voyage Committee,” I said.

  “That’s good,” she said.

  “That’s bad and you know it,” I said.

  “Only if you open your big mouth. I’ve warned you about that.”

  “But I hate long meetings,” I said. Even to me, this sounded whiny. “They’re hot-air machines. I listen to the bullshit and get restless and the next thing you know I say the wrong thing.”

  “Then let this be a test of your willpower, Fran-cesca,” she said sternly. “It’s about time you developed some. This committee can make your career. You’ll be very visible. The publisher will be there—it’s his personal project—and he can see how intelligent and charming you are.”

  I snorted and nearly ruptured my sinuses.

  “I mean this, Francesca. It could be your showcase. The paper is sinking half a million bucks into this Voyage of Discovery.”

  I was outraged. “What! That’s obscene. They could spend that money on staffers and stories and have a really good paper.”

  “That outburst is an example of exactly what I mean,” Georgia said, fixing me with a glare. “Learn control. We both know that Charlie expects you to lose your temper in front of the publisher and damage your career. There’s only one way you can hurt Charlie: Keep your mouth shut. Except when you have something positive to say. Besides, you won’t be alone. I’m on the committee, too. I’ll be with you.”

  “But this committee is useless,” I said. “We just had an expensive survey taken last year. We had a focus group study two years before that. We had an in-depth telephone survey three years before that. The Voyage Committee will make the same recommendations the other surveys have made for the last thirty years. They’ll say the paper needs younger readers. It needs more women readers. It needs reader involvement. It should have lighter, brighter, shorter stories. It needs more local stories.

  “The surveys all have the same conclusions. And management always reacts in the same dumb ways: We’ll have to do a silly series of ‘Tell Us What You Think’ features. Write a bunch of boring celebrity interviews. All stories will have to have a local angle, and we’ll go crazy trying to find one. Last time we went through this, Japan was hit with a major earthquake and the only way we could get that news into the paper was to interview two local families who had relatives living there. Reader response to all these changes will be underwhelming. In a few months, the paper will slip back to its old ways.”

  Georgia clapped when I
finished. “No shit, Sher lock. Tell me something I don’t know,” she said. I could feel her sarcasm etching into me like acid. “Francesca, idealism is embarrassing at your age. The Gazette is a mediocre paper because it’s run by mediocre people. And it will continue to be that way, unless one of them wises up and says ‘Damn I’m dumb, I think I’ll fire myself.’ Mediocre people only hire other mediocrities. I know this Voyage Committee will go nowhere. The answer is already predetermined by the consultants we hired. There are consultants who recommend you beef up your features and local stories and the ones who recommend you improve your hard news. The Gazette hired soft-news consultants, and they will make exactly the recommendations you said. The publisher knows that. He’s not buying an unknown quantity.”

  “You’re not mediocre. Why do you work here?”

  “I’m fifty-five years old. I have a fourteen-room penthouse overlooking Forest Park and a private office at the Gazette. I have a nice salary, good bennies, and an impressive title. I like my life in St. Louis. I couldn’t work out of our Boston headquarters and live this well on my salary. Does that answer it for you? Now, can I go back to work?”

  “One other question. What’s corporate casual? We’re supposed to wear that the first Voyage Committee meeting.”

  “Something preppie. Khaki slacks and a Polo shirt will do fine. No black leather or thigh-high boots.”

  “Oh. You heard about those?”

  “Babe made you sound like you moonlighted as a dominatrix.”

  “At least I’m not boring in his reports to management. I don’t know why they want to bug our phones and monitor our e-mail when they have Babe spying on everyone.”

  “They’re gathering solid evidence of insubordination” she said. “So remember that when you e-mail your pals or talk to anyone on the phone.”

  I had one last question and I had to know the answer. I didn’t care if she laughed at me. “Georgia, is there really no hope for the Gazette? Will the paper ever be a major national newspaper again, the way it was fifty years ago?”