Deadline Man

“Eleven-eleven, motherfucker! You’ll pay! Eleven-eleven!”

For a moment I stand frozen, remembering Troy Hardesty’s question: What do you know about eleven-eleven? My eyelid feels as if it wants to leap off my face and flee down the street. I turn back and stare at her.

“What did you say?”

She backs up against the rough, aged brick of a building, then turns and runs. I run after her, telling her to come back. She trots maybe twenty feet, then slips down an alley. I run faster but when I reach it she’s gone. The alley is narrow and hemmed in by old buildings, five and six stories high. A security light hangs in the middle, surrounded by a cage. I step in, walking slowly on the wet cobblestones. A half dozen big trash bags sit against the buildings on either side, part of the city’s campaign to eliminate dumpsters. Fifteen steps into the alley and the noise of tires on rainy street is swallowed in silence. I do my best to avoid the puddles as I check the doorways and indentations between the buildings; nothing. She couldn’t have run this fast. I can feel the rough, uneven paving stones through my sodden dress shoes. Eleven-eleven.

I’m ready for rats, at least I think I am, but nothing prepares me for the size of the thing that skitters out from a doorway, black, fat, and formless. Then I realize it’s an empty bag, propelled by the breeze. A jumble of ancient industrial flotsam fills five feet of space between two buildings. Doors proclaim business names and the alarm systems to keep you out. I am directly below the security light. Another few steps and the buildings are empty, the doors replaced with old plywood or iron. Decrepit fire escapes cling to walls and through broken windows and half-covered entrances comes the special darkness of abandoned places. Syringes are scattered every few feet. I walk faster, now not so sure I want to find her after all.

They emerge silently from the blackest part of the alley, all in bulky layers of clothes, all in hoodies. They look like malign Michelin men. I count five, realizing I can turn around or walk on, neither decision particularly safe. I am thirty feet from where the alley opens out again, but I can see only gloom. The street and park beyond are empty, the buildings dark. Not even a single pair of headlights passes by. I walk on, feeling the medicine ball return to my gut. I look ahead and at nothing, my tough street face on, the one I had learned to use back east. Fifteen more paces and they form up, pretty much closing off the alley. A cigarette end flares. Beyond them, I see a Starbucks sign, turned off, the store closed for the night. The whole street is a dead zone. I keep my pace steady, my face set, and I just walk through the group. Nobody says a thing. I thank God I’m tall, broad-shouldered, and can look tougher than I am.

I turn and walk south again, past darkened galleries, using the windows to discreetly see if anyone is following me. No one is. When I reach the next block there’s traffic and pedestrians, noise and neon, as if I have been teleported to a different city. I walk another block to my place. I will have to change clothes.

“Eleven-eleven! Eleven-eleven! Asshole!”

I turn and she is a silhouette, a block away.

She laughs. “You’ll get yours.”

I shake my head and laugh, too, resigned that she is jabbering and I am imagining connections that don’t exist. When I look again, she’s gone.

Once an old girlfriend put a hex on me, or so she said. It involved chicken bones and a cup of water on my desk. I just thought it was the leavings of the overnight sports writers, who sometimes camped out there to file their stories. It was only the next day that a photographer walked by, asked if I was all right, and told me of the ceremony that had been performed on my desk, with the girlfriend, Linda, and her shaman, arranging the bones and chanting over them. The Stranger found out about the episode and wrote a bit called “Voodoo Economics” about an unnamed business columnist being the victim of a newsroom hex. It was the beginning of the best years of my life.

Chapter Four

Friday, October 15th

I leave Melinda Stewart’s house in Capitol Hill a few minutes into the foggy dawn, tossing her newspapers up on the porch and walking across the damp flagstones. She had called me after she had gotten off work at midnight and then she had wanted to go all night long.

Talking, alas.

Our long, on-and-off love affair has cooled, but her friendship is precious. Halfway into a bottle of wine, it became clear that we were reciting all the old lines about the deaths of newspapers: Industry consolidation; impossibly high profit margins promised to Wall Street; groupthink that dumbed down content; monopoly markets that took away competition. How the intellectual capital of the newsroom was only seen as a cost center, and, at paper after paper, the most capable and experienced journalists were pushed out. How the yes-men and yes-women got ahead in management at too many newspapers. How newspapers are the only consumer product that spend almost no money promoting themselves.

Most of all, the problem was a business model that depended on essentially sending out miniskirted sales reps to sell confiscatory ad rates to lecherous old car dealers and appliance-store magnates. With such profit margins, decade after decade, newspaper executives became complacent. Wall Street wouldn’t tolerate an innovation unless it promised huge and immediate returns. Then came innovations from outside like Craigs

list and the old model collapsed. I’d written about it before, about so many industries: monopolies and cartels always commit suicide.

Trendsetters such as Gannett blamed the newsroom, and “journalism” was degraded into reports about school-lunch menus, entertainment trivia, and missing blond teens. The “experts” blamed new technology. But the heart of the problem was dependence on an unsustainable business model. Giving away our content only made things worse—and then there was no going back, because nearly everybody was giving it away. Nobody wondered just who would be around to produce sustained, sophisticated journalism if people weren’t willing to pay for it.

We’d said it all, so many times, over so many bottles of wine. So we got silly after half that bottle was gone. Melinda and I had both started at a little paper in eastern Washington owned by the Free Press chain, and we had both started writing obituaries. So we took our turn pretending to write obits for the newspaper industry. The cause of death: suicide. As we laughed, I worked very hard to keep Troy Hardesty out of our magic circle.

We told old newspaper stories—about the time young Melinda got so mad she threw a typewriter at one of her tyrannical editors (he promoted her); the famed “women’s page” columnist who had the answers to remove any stain or fix any household emergency; the old courts reporter who would fall asleep in his chair for hours after filing his story for the day and the new assistant city editor (Melinda) who feared he had died that way; Jack Emery, the longtime entertainment writer who would attend press galas so he could stuff his pockets with hors d’oeuvres to eat all week at home; the people who had copulated on the historic conference table of the Governor’s Library.

“Not me,” I said.

She laughed, “Yeah, sure.” Melinda years ago taught me the word “louche.” I like it.

We reminisced about all the great scoops the Free Press had over the years, all the major news events we covered, when the newspaper enjoyed its greatest prestige and influence throughout the Northwest. At its best, the paper told the people what they needed to know to be informed citizens, told them the things that those in power didn’t want them to know.

We screamed together in unison: “It is the mission of the newspaper to report the news and raise hell!”

Next came our one-downsmanship contest—the worst assignments we ever had at the Free Press. And notorious corrections. Here the winner was the young features writer years ago, before they started charging for wedding announcements, who wrote up a notice about the nuptials being held in a “pubic ceremony.” It ran through 100,000 copies before a night editor caught it.

“And,” she said, nearly snorting wine through her nose, “what about Bob McClung?”

Indeed. The legendary sports columnist who spent 55 years at the Free Press had asked that his ashes be buried in the building. After his death, the publisher, Maggie Sterling, had arranged for him to be interred in the lobby, under an unassuming plaque. Journalists would bend down and rub the plaque for good luck. No one then could imagine a world without the Free Press. What would happen to Bob now if they closed the building?

We stopped laughing. We long knew the mortal danger facing newspapers and the near impossibility of ever finding a news job again, but somehow we thought the Free Press might survive. It was privately held, had little debt; readership was stable in print and growing fast online. But the advertising market continues to struggle. I cursed James Sterling, but Melinda was more philosophical.