John Domini: Talking Heads: 77

*

He was familiar with the doubt, a worm on his back. A natural corollary to the itching in his hands every time he paged through the first issue. But, what was to doubt? Sillier rags than Sea Level hit the streets all the time. Since the computer money had started to arrive in the mid-’70s, it’d seemed like Boston had a new journal on the stands every other week. The first to prove it could be done were the Cambridge Phoenix and Boston After Dark , now the Boston Phoenix and the Cambridge Real Paper . “Underground” papers in ‘67 and ‘68, they’d become the establishment. There was even a movie about it. A movie about some radical Boston rag making the mid-’70s crossover to mainstream money. Loss of innocence, testing of values — not a bad movie.

Under the Line ? Was that the name?

Kit paused in the corridor outside the Sea Level offices, trying to recall. He only had to go up one flight. Leo was right upstairs.

Washington D.C., after all, had the Washington Monthly . Their first issue, who knows, it could have been smaller than Kit’s. Austin, Texas, for God’s sake, served as a base for the Texas Observer . Why shouldn’t Boston have room for a paper like that? A writer’s paper, non-slick. “Think” stuff, “issues” stuff. Kit saw his journal as a kind of biweekly Op Ed publication — biweekly rather than monthly, to set it apart from the Observer and the others. Each piece would begin with the news. There’d be room for the occasional semi-scoop, like the Monsod story. That was the news, the outbreak above the horizon. But then a non-slick paper would tow the reader back to more elemental questions. Closer to Sea Level .

Plus Kit hadn’t come to it naked. Hadn’t spent his whole life behind those glass walls, a saint in his own reliquary. At the Harvard Crimson he’d made editor. After that, he’d put in five years at the Globe . The last three years, he’d been the paper’s man in agriculture.

He’d lobbied for the job, arguing that he was from farm country himself. A calculated risk. Agriculture hardly got the glamour assignments, and on top of that, the work kept him out of the city as much as three weeks a month. But the job had paid off. For starters, he’d loved it. Every assignment cast Kit as the lone gunslinger, fighting for justice. He’d blasted away at the bad guys who owned timberland in Oregon, tobacco in the Carolinas. And this isolation on the job meant, not glamor, but sole byline credit. His best piece, a series on migrant workers in the Carolinas, had put his name on the front page all week. It had won him a Nieman Fellowship. Kit found himself “going back to Harvard in glory,” as Bette put it. Not yet thirty, he found himself a speaker at the Nieman symposia, the same gatherings he’d sat in as an awestruck undergraduate.

A speaker, hoo boy. So what do you have to say for yourself now, Viddich? What, going to Leo with hat in hand?

To Leo Mirini, Zia Mirini’s father. President and CEO of Mirinex, Incorporated. Just one flight up.

Lately Kit had come to know the drawbacks of playing the gunslinger. In the year after his Nieman, as he’d tried to drum up the financing for Sea Level , Kit had been put through a kind of boot camp in interpersonal relations. Ten months of meeting after meeting, white lie after white lie. This when so much of his previous work had been strictly solo, all a-lone by the telephone. It was like learning all over again how to knot a tie. In Kit’s case, the lack of social skills was compounded by all the time he’d spent away from Boston. He’d spent three years studying Mexican emigration routes or Nebraska corn-storage law, instead of his own home city. He was still suffering the consequences, Harvard and the Nieman notwithstanding. Even this morning, he’d thought of Cousin Cal before he’d thought of Leo. He’d needed to see Zia, in her punk lipstick and mascara, before he thought of going to Leo.

The stairwell had a nasty echo. Cold, too. Kit might as well have been in an MTA station, waiting for a trolley.

If he’d been better at meetings, better at Boston, he’d have found a backer he was more comfortable with. God knows Leo was rich. Mirinex, Inc. owned not only mid-level properties like this one— Sea Level’s offices had been a sweetener on the deal — but also a number of high-yield condominium conversions in the Back Bay. And the old man had begun by working for the state, a crew chief on Massachusetts’s roads and buildings. He had the contacts Kit needed this morning, but not much else in common with a Minnesota Ivy Leaguer.

At least, the old man wasn’t Sea Level’s only backer. Kit had cashed in fifteen hundred dollars of his father’s G.I. life insurance. The bonds had proved pretty low-yield, considering how long it had been, but there’d been something left after college expenses at least. He’d also gotten help from Bette.

When Leo had made his offer, Bette’s family lawyer had looked over the contract. He’d said the question was: Did Kit want to sign?

Third floor. Outside Leo’s office, Kit went back to an older recollection. A deeper warming. He went back to the Globe series on migrant workers. It remained his best work, his best job making sense of an outbreak above the horizon. Better still, his Lone Ranger act had done some good. After his story had finished its run, the North Carolina legislature had changed the regulations. The gunslinger and the saint, for once, had gone hand in hand. At the recollection, Kit’s joints seemed to loosen.

Kit remained a believer. His ambition, as big and well-architected as it was, could never stand erect without the more durable struts of conscience. He could imagine no better life’s work than to go on wringing out — Bette shaded this phrase with such irony — the whole truth.

*

Mirinex offered something very different from downstairs.

Kit’s office looked its age. When he wanted to open a window he had to wrestle against the chipping overlay of a hundred earlier paint jobs. When he’d hung a calendar, the nail had punched through the spackle plastered over an earlier hole. He’d wound up jumping around with his hand in his mouth, tasting blood. Not that Kit was complaining. No. What better home for a paper run on shaky money and true grit than an office that went back to the days of yellow journalism? When the place’s rough edges left him bleeding, it was an object lesson from history itself.

Up at Leo’s, however, they’d left history behind. They’d redone the place in a bewildering ‘70s mix, hard techie gray and dull earthy brown. The receptionist sat at a blinking command console like something out of Star Wars . The walls were decorated with Mirinex product samples, an array of aluminum pipe fittings. Aluminum on suede. You thought of washer-dryers, garden hoses, the ganglia under kitchen sinks.

On the table in the reception area, a copy of Sea Level looked flimsier than ever, in newsprint format among industry slicks. Also out of place was the top-page sketch, a tottering jailhouse. The subhead, In Monsod, Every Cell May Be Death Row .

“Kit, kid.”

Leo Mirini, all satchelmouth and ham. Kit once again rolled his first issue into a stick.

When Zia Mirini was working on a cigarette, downstairs, her face would sometimes reveal its Italian side. Her lips around the Marlboro would look as ripe as the young Brando’s. Leo was the older version, the Godfather. He knew it, too. This morning Leo actually cupped a calloused hand around Kit’s neck. For that matter, what was this big-deal welcome, coming out of his office? Why didn’t he just have Kit sent in? And no way somebody who’d made such a success in this country could still have such a thick accent.