I was gainfully employed. Only my final shot, “Alternative, Inc.” featuring Billy Zero’s quote in the industry mag and a discussion of the parent corporation’s other connections, which included lots of unsavory, uncool things like toxic waste dumps and union busting law firms, did the trick.
Eventually The Independent’s parent corporation outsourced the local reporting to India, I kid you not. The “reporters” watched the City Council meetings over the internet live and Googled their sources. They even got rid of the underpaid music reporters by holding a weekly contest on the paper’s blog called “Concert review of the week,” where an unpaid blogger’s take on the big show took the place of an underpaid staffer. Album reviews came off the wire. Mercifully, the parent corporation’s experiment with outsourcing local news and hip commentary died, and they shut down the paper, but give it time. Oh brave new world with such creatures in it…So anyway, that’s how I ended up here at The New Sun tossing copies of century-old Wanted posters on Neville’s desk.
“Let’s find out who Bobby Flash was,” I said without any introduction.
Neville picked up the copies and read them studiously, pushing his little round glasses down his nose a bit and nodding slowly. “Do you want to do a quick piece or a feature? And why not Bunco? He was the leader of the group wasn’t he?”
“Well, the hundred-year anniversary of the free speech fight is coming up so I think it merits a series.” I said, pushing the envelope as always. “And we’ve got a picture to go with Flash’s name. Plus, I’m drawn to bit players. The folks in the background are always more interesting, no?”
“And that’s important to you and a handful of people,” he said without looking up.
“I’ll make it important.”
He smiled and looked up slowly. “Start doing it and talk me into it later. In the meantime, I’ve got a few other things for you, one on something big in Tijuana. The other is local. You can work on Bobby Flash for the long haul.” He handed me a folder.
“Fair enough,” I said looking over a letter in the folder that Neville had just handed me. It had been written on behalf of the women in a Tijuana neighborhood who lived down the hill from an abandoned maquiladora. When the rains hit, the waste from the plant flowed down into the dirt streets by their homes. Bad things were happening, and nobody was paying any attention. Bobby Flash would have to wait until next week.
I said goodnight to Neville and headed down the stairs out onto 5th Avenue. There were a few couples sipping zin in Vineland just out the door. I headed up toward Broadway to the bus stop, pausing at 5th and E for a moment to try to imagine the soapboxers stirring it up a century ago. The fancy bar and grill on the corner made the job tough, but I thought for a moment of Bobby Flash hopping up to say, “Fellow workers and friends,” before being dragged off by the cops. Or maybe he got into a good little rant before they could grab him: “The Working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace as long as hunger and want can be found among millions. How come the bosses got all of the good things? You tell me why.” I smiled as a pack of suits strolled by to hit Ostera, a “Watergrill.” Crossing E, I made my way past the new restaurant of the week, a pawn shop, a check-cashing place, and the last remaining cheap eats joints before I hit Broadway and just caught the bus that would take me up to Golden Hill where I lived in a flat behind a big old house. I dropped in my fare and walked to the back. In the dirty white light I saw the tired, after-work faces of cashiers, janitors, secretaries, security guards, and the homeless men who rode the line like Bartleby the Scrivener, preferring not to leave until they were kicked off at the end of the route.
Neville never told me what to write or even what the lead was, he just handed things over to me like an old-school newsman in a thirties movie. I loved that about him. I sat down and looked over the other item in the folder he’d given me. It was a copy of an email the paper had received from a Marine at Camp Pendleton whose buddy had shot himself the week before. The local TV news had done the “fallen hero” bit but there was some nasty stuff about his experience in Iraq that nobody had mentioned. The Marine wanted to talk to somebody. I looked up at the reflection of my fellow passengers in the window. Indistinct shapes, blurring together. The bus rolled by Church of Steel Tattoo, Chee Chee, El Dorado, and a block that had been leveled for redevelopment. Just then I remembered my son’s letter in my back pocket. I took it out and read:
Dad,
Just have a few minutes to get this out before work. Things are going OK with my classes but none of them are very interesting. Other than the job thing it’s hard to see the point. English is boring, math tedious, and political science lame. I’ll try to stick it out as you advise but other than the “better job” thing there’s not much I’m learning that I couldn’t learn on my own. I know you said not to follow your example, but you never finished school and you have a job, right? Not giving up yet, I’m just saying I think you did all right, no matter what that asshole Kurt says. Maybe it’s just having to stay in that house to save money. Shit, I’m in my twenties! Mom and Kurt are fighting all the time and it gets me down having to listen. Sorry to dump all this on you, but I know you’ll understand. I’ll be OK. Off to serve coffee to the masses.
Love, Hank
P.S. How ’bout a visit sometime? Or me down in SD?
I smiled, shook my head, folded the letter up carefully, and put it back into the envelope and then in my back pocket. Hank always sent his letters to the PO box since I moved a lot. He and a few select friends were are the only people who have that address other than the junk mail people who seem to be able to ferret you out no matter where you try to hide. I insist on letter writing; it’s my nod to a dying art and the notion that fast isn’t always better.
The bus was lurching up the hill toward my stop and I stared out the window into the night at the lights in the front windows of apartments and houses—strangers doused in the dull glow of TVs or sitting down for an evening drink. I got off the bus when it hit 25th, to head to my flat. On the way there I nodded to the doorman smoking outside the Turf Club and glanced through the window at a few solitary faces staring at laptop screens in the Krakatoa Café. I lived behind a Victorian house that the owner had chopped into four claustrophobically small units. My place had a postage-stamp lawn and little porch outside the studio. I had made it—I was in my forties and still doing the work I did when I was in my twenties. And my kid seemed bent on replicating my mistakes. If my mom’s stories about my “hobo” ancestor were correct, maybe it was in the genes.
Long ago I had been relegated to weekend visits, so I was the “cool dad.” It was true, Hank’s stepfather Kurt was an asshole, but unfortunately that seemed to be sending Hank the message that people who could support themselves adequately were all assholes. Partially true perhaps, but a dangerous generalization. Trisha, Hank’s mother, had left me back when he was a baby. I had been working for the LA Scene, an upstart alternative weekly in the days before they were all bought up by media corporations. Anyway, I had been out covering a Jane’s Addiction show at the Howl club down by McArthur Park and came home to an empty apartment and a note: “Sorry Jack, I can’t do this anymore.” By “this” Trisha meant living on my shit wages with a baby. She had been a hairdresser, but quit when she got pregnant, to my surprise, apparently expecting that fatherhood would transform me into a proper provider so she could stay at home. Instead, she got a live-in boyfriend who had to leave her alone at home a lot so he could bring back an inadequate paycheck.
We’d been living in a cheap apartment in the San Fernando Valley with a banner perpetually strung on the side of the building, which read “Move In Now!” Perhaps the owner thought he needed to advertise endlessly because the combination of the 24/7 smell of greasy chili burgers emanating from the Tommy’s next door and the pungent odor of late night hops from the Anheiser Busch Brewery across the street drove everyone who could afford to leave out of the complex. None of our neighbors spoke English, a fact that Trisha frequently commented on, along with the 5:00 AM Norteño music that the neighbors blasted from their pickups as they took off for work. “It’s a hard life,” I’d tell her.
After