Arnold Sawislak - Dwarf Rapes Nun; Flees in UFO - A Novel of Journalism

The discussion, as I recall, was exploring one of your loftier points of editorial integrity when we got our first glimpse of the new management.

“The Garden Club election,” Fargo said, “goes above the fold.”

“You’re joking, for Christ’s sake,” I yelled. “It’s a society brief for Mary.” When you get pulled off a nice, quiet state-house beat to sit in “temporarily” as city editor, you figure you can yell a bit at the boss—at least a boss like Fargo.

Bill Grace, whose recurrence of shingles (or herpes if the girls in classified were to be believed) was responsible for my involuntary servitude in the office, claims he saw Fargo get mad once in eight years.

His wife sent him to work with a bean sprout and cream cheese sandwich, which Fargo bit into, gagged on, examined at length, rewrapped, and dropped into the Kapplan Brothers shopping bag he used as a briefcase. “Tastes like worms and toothpaste,” he told Grace. “Looks like worms and toothpaste. Dumb woman.”

I was not about to give up. “The goddamn officers were reelected, for Christ’s sake,” I yelled some more. “Three of them didn’t even have opposition. It wasn’t exactly Truman beating Dewey!”

“Front page,” Fargo said, twining his fingers like a three-year-old learning to pray.

“Mrs. Morgan. That’s why, isn’t it? Fargo, you’d kiss the ass of a she-gorilla if she was a publisher’s wife.”

“Its their paper,” Fargo said. “Give it a couple of inches and jump it to society. But it starts on the front… and above the fold.”

If this had been a hypothetical situation in a journalism school exam, the right answer would have been: “A. Sir, I resign.” In the editors office in the only paper in town, if you have support and a car loan to pay and you’ve raised about as much hell as you figure you can get away with, the right answer is: “B. Shut up already and get back to work.”

Which I started to do, when I almost collided at Fargo’s office door with the gentleman whose wife had just made the front page of this afternoon’s Capital Register & Press (“Fearless, But Friendly; Untouchable, But Understanding”) with her remarkable and intensely newsworthy accomplishment of achieving a sixth term as treasurer of the town’s petunia establishment.

J. Donald Morgan, sixty-two and not looking a day older than seventy-eight, nodded to me—I doubt he knew my name after only six years on the paper—and waved the Mutt and Jeff team behind him into Fargo’s cubicle office.

It was late in the morning, which on a small town afternoon paper like the CR&P meant about 10:30. That day’s paper was just about put to bed (somebody ought to do a Ph.D. thesis on the sexual overtones of newspaper jargon: “insert a graf,” “hed to come,” “hold for release,” “boldface box”), and I was in charge of a nearly empty city room.

The paper’s “crack news staff’ (there we go again) consisted of sixteen full-time editors and reporters plus a couple dozen eager high-school kids who phoned in prep sports and hypersensitive little old ladies (“What do you mean, there’s no space for the list of people who came to the church supper? I told everybody they would get their names in the paper”) who mailed in badly typed or scribbled social notes from such teeming urban centers as Fenstermacher’s Corners and Indian Crotch.

The Mutt character Morgan had in tow was a lean and tweedy type with a face pocked by the memory of zits long healed and framed top and bottom with enough hair to do justice to a tea bag box. Everything about him seemed elongated; pipestem legs, a beaked nose sharp enough to slice cheese, fingers so long that they looked like they must have come equipped with a fourth joint.

Jeff was, to borrow the defiant self-description of a retired jockey I once interviewed, “well over four feet tall,” a chunky Asian with a display of teeth worthy of a Steinway keyboard, and the biggest damn briefcase I’ve seen since my wife’s lawyer came to court with affidavits from some of the ladies to whom I had somehow neglected to mention my marital status.

Morgan left Fargo’s door ajar, and one of the handy-tricks-of-reporting-you-never-learn-in-journalism-school—don’t eavesdrop unless you have a good hiding place—presented itself.

Fargo’s office had a window looking into the nearly square low-ceilinged city room, which housed the entire editorial operation of the paper.

The creaky elevator from the first floor was in one corner and separated from the working area by a waist-high wooden railing. Next to the barrier were the two desks that dealt mostly with the public, sports, and society. State news had a desk off to one side near a row of filing cabinets and a reading table that were the paper’s morgue. The local, national, and international news departments—the last two consisting of one editor and one teletype machine—had two desks and a table shoved together in the center of the room. I had one of the desks and my copyreaders (three, when things really got busy) had places at the table.

Opposite the state desk, the reporting staff had three desks off in a corner. Along the back of the room w?s a door leading to the photo darkroom and the window through which Fargo could keep his eye on this beehive of activity, but the door to his lair was on a side corridor. I suspected that was to quell any impulse by his staff to drop in to discuss such ugly subjects as pay increases.

This layout made it possible for me to move out of the line of sight of both Fargo and the staff and begin a careful examination of the water fountain in the corridor leading to the rear elevator. The water, as usual, was tepid. The audio was acceptable.

Morgan, in a voice as thin as a sheet of Zig Zag, said, “Ah, Mr. Barton…”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Morgan,” Fargo replied in eager agreement. This established that Fargo knew and could respond to his own name, about which a lively debate could have been sustained in the city room, and that he recognized the publisher after only twenty-eight years on his payroll. A true triumph of corporate manuevering for Fargo.

“Mr. Barton, this is Mr. Shiu,” Morgan said. “And this is Mr. Swift.”

“Shigetsu Shiu,” said the accented baritone voice I took to be the Oriental’s. “Please to call me Shiggy.”

“A pleasure, Mr. Barton,” said the second voice, as high-pitched as any I have ever heard come from a man since Sam Darlington caught himself in his zipper.

Actually, it sounded like, “Play-shuh, stah-barn,” but within weeks I was able to translate more or less simultaneously from what I am told is highborn English English into midwestern American.

Morgan again. “Mr. Barton, this is, ah, somewhat sudden, but, well, ah, there was no way to give you advance notice. There has been, ah, a change of ownership here at the paper. Mr. Shiu is your new, that is to say, he will be your publisher…”

“Shiu? New?”

“Shiggy, Mr. Barton. Publisher, Mr. Barton,” Shiu said, “And Mr. Swift, Mr. Granville Swift, is our new managing editor.”