Read Online The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jess Walter
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Catholic training, I cross myself. “I swear.”
And maybe this kid was raised Catholic because this seems to convince him. He cocks his head and says, “How much you want?”
“Well,” and I take the $9,400 check from my pocket, “how about this much?”
The Last Days of the Newspaper Business
I DREAMED I WAS ON my bike, delivering the last paper
to the final porch and I tossed that rag at least a mile—
last dream of a democratic press—and the end of papers
fell like a snowflake onto the faded wood planks
of my old man’s porch, and he came out in slippers,
picked it up, slipped off the rubber band—and the thing
exploded with fresh despairs: new Vietnams and
Watergates, Mansons and Patty Hearsts, not to mention
Andy Capp and Hi and Lois, horoscopes, a Crossword puzzle,
box scores—even the obit of my poor mother. And
my old man told me not to cry, that even good things die,
son, and he folded that paper back up and tucked
the only good thing I ever did under his arm, easing back
into the warm house of my dead childhood to take
his morning shit.
The Last Days of the Newspaper Business, Part II
M Y DREAMS TEND TO be either so obscure as to seem random, or so obviously connected to my subconscious that it’s embarrassing—as if even my hidden depths lack depth. When I was negotiating my severance from the newspaper, I really did dream one night that I’d delivered a paper to my own father, and that it contained my mother’s obituary. Of course, any good Freudian would accuse such a dreamer of ginning up his dream to please his therapist (this kind of behavior has a name like Stockholm Syndrome or Des Moines Disorder or something). But I swear: I really am that shallow.
Sometimes, in the same way one might try to piece together a fading dream in the morning, I’ll try to re-create the stupid chain of events that caused me to quit a solid newspaper job two years ago. The industry decline had already begun, of course, but I didn’t think for a moment that it would be fatal. I’d always assumed that, no matter what, I could just go back to the paper…that I could go home. It never occurred to me that a newspaper could die, any more than children think their parents will one day die. In fact, it was right around the time my mother passed away that I first began to feel the urge to leave my job. It felt like I was dying, like I was missing some opportunity to do something grand, something meaningful. Destiny. It felt like my creative soul was being suffocated by the cycle of writing for a newspaper, the slumping, slacking, always-behind feeling of being a news reporter. And then the stories themselves even seemed to shrink—pieces about this insurance company laying eighty people off…or that hospital joining a health consortium—as if there was a deflation of journalism’s ambition alongside its news hole.
But I never disliked my job. Worse (and it’s with great shame that I admit this), I took my job for granted. Worse yet, I never believed that my job was worthy of me. I thought of myself as more than a simple newspaper reporter, somehow better than the mean of my colleagues. I offer no excuses for this arrogance, and no rationale, either; I simply felt bigger than what I did for a living, like I was slumming, like I deserved more money, more respect and more esteem than any grubby newspaper could offer. I suppose it’s one of the reasons I became a business reporter in the first place. I preferred wearing suits (most reporters tend to dress like substitute teachers) and I liked swimming amid the sorts of fearless executives who made multi-million-dollar decisions the way the rest of us decided on a restaurant for lunch. When it became clear that Lisa and I had higher material aspirations than we could satisfy on the sixty-or-so-grand I could make as a journalist, I considered public relations for a time, but I’d always seen that as a pasture for old glue horses. So I
And maybe this kid was raised Catholic because this seems to convince him. He cocks his head and says, “How much you want?”
“Well,” and I take the $9,400 check from my pocket, “how about this much?”
The Last Days of the Newspaper Business
I DREAMED I WAS ON my bike, delivering the last paper
to the final porch and I tossed that rag at least a mile—
last dream of a democratic press—and the end of papers
fell like a snowflake onto the faded wood planks
of my old man’s porch, and he came out in slippers,
picked it up, slipped off the rubber band—and the thing
exploded with fresh despairs: new Vietnams and
Watergates, Mansons and Patty Hearsts, not to mention
Andy Capp and Hi and Lois, horoscopes, a Crossword puzzle,
box scores—even the obit of my poor mother. And
my old man told me not to cry, that even good things die,
son, and he folded that paper back up and tucked
the only good thing I ever did under his arm, easing back
into the warm house of my dead childhood to take
his morning shit.
The Last Days of the Newspaper Business, Part II
M Y DREAMS TEND TO be either so obscure as to seem random, or so obviously connected to my subconscious that it’s embarrassing—as if even my hidden depths lack depth. When I was negotiating my severance from the newspaper, I really did dream one night that I’d delivered a paper to my own father, and that it contained my mother’s obituary. Of course, any good Freudian would accuse such a dreamer of ginning up his dream to please his therapist (this kind of behavior has a name like Stockholm Syndrome or Des Moines Disorder or something). But I swear: I really am that shallow.
Sometimes, in the same way one might try to piece together a fading dream in the morning, I’ll try to re-create the stupid chain of events that caused me to quit a solid newspaper job two years ago. The industry decline had already begun, of course, but I didn’t think for a moment that it would be fatal. I’d always assumed that, no matter what, I could just go back to the paper…that I could go home. It never occurred to me that a newspaper could die, any more than children think their parents will one day die. In fact, it was right around the time my mother passed away that I first began to feel the urge to leave my job. It felt like I was dying, like I was missing some opportunity to do something grand, something meaningful. Destiny. It felt like my creative soul was being suffocated by the cycle of writing for a newspaper, the slumping, slacking, always-behind feeling of being a news reporter. And then the stories themselves even seemed to shrink—pieces about this insurance company laying eighty people off…or that hospital joining a health consortium—as if there was a deflation of journalism’s ambition alongside its news hole.
But I never disliked my job. Worse (and it’s with great shame that I admit this), I took my job for granted. Worse yet, I never believed that my job was worthy of me. I thought of myself as more than a simple newspaper reporter, somehow better than the mean of my colleagues. I offer no excuses for this arrogance, and no rationale, either; I simply felt bigger than what I did for a living, like I was slumming, like I deserved more money, more respect and more esteem than any grubby newspaper could offer. I suppose it’s one of the reasons I became a business reporter in the first place. I preferred wearing suits (most reporters tend to dress like substitute teachers) and I liked swimming amid the sorts of fearless executives who made multi-million-dollar decisions the way the rest of us decided on a restaurant for lunch. When it became clear that Lisa and I had higher material aspirations than we could satisfy on the sixty-or-so-grand I could make as a journalist, I considered public relations for a time, but I’d always seen that as a pasture for old glue horses. So I
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