April to October 2004, New York

By Nicole K. Sia

I am sunken into a five-seater couch, holding with two hands a cup of tea and saucer. The brew is lava hot, and I haven’t taken milk as I normally would because I’m trying to appear unfussy and grown up. The spoon tinkles against the rim as I try to sip, not slurp, and I quickly steady it between my ring and pinky fingers.

The man who will soon hire me to manage his upstart community newsweekly, and whom this act is intended to impress, has turned the corner of his kitchen into the living room, where I am stranded on an island of cloth hyacinths. A stack of tabloid newspapers are loaded in his right arm, and a roll of silver duct tape bracelets his wrist. He drops the papers down on the floor as he plops himself into a large wooden rocking chair across from me.

He doesn’t make eye contact as he sets to work tearing through to the midsection of one of the papers, biting off a six-inch tear of tape, and haphazardly sticking it diagonally across an article above the fold. He doesn’t make eye contact as he continues to smooth out the creases of the tape, so I smile plainly in his general direction until he finally looks up. His eyes go blank as if he’s forgotten that I’m there, then give a twitch of recognition at this smiling statue gazing expectedly back at him.

“There, you see!” he proudly says, holding up the newspaper with the tape fastened across it. “We will revolutionize ad sales — and graphic design. Banner ads! Cutting right through the center of the page!” He is pointing and explaining that he intends to offer “premium” ad space for a “premium” fee, ads that will bisect a lead feature story, guaranteeing maximum exposure for the client.

“What do you think?” he asks.

I think this is a terrible idea. Not only because it would look ridiculous, but because executing such a design would be ridiculous.

I nod and smile noncommittally. My first professional shit-eating moment. I really need this job.

“And we’re gonna go to the AAN awards —” (I would later learn this stood for the Association of Alternative NewsWeeklies) “—and we’ll blow them away with this! Nothing they’ve seen before.” He is orating me more than engaging me, a fledgling publisher taking to the pulpit.

My lack of verbal affirmation is no matter. In fact, I think this man, now incensed before me, has altogether forgotten I’m sitting here.

But there it was, the April before I was to graduate college, and I hadn’t done that imperative internship in the city over the summer that would land me a job in Manhattan after college. In fact, my biggest, and only, professional accolade so far was acting as editor in chief of a twice-weekly student newspaper for a state school in upstate New York. So I’d pulled a flanged tab off a flier on a bulletin board outside a near-campus pizza shop and sent in my resume Re: Writers, Editors, Designers Wanted for Break-Through New Publication!!!

A callback and a short drive off campus later and there I sat, half swallowed on a strange stranger’s couch, politely stomaching the perils of the Gannett Company and the plight of the locally owned newspaper. A plight so burdensome that employees would be required to distribute the newspaper out of their cars (uncompensated for gas or mileage, and on the employees’ time, we would later learn), use their own cell phones to conduct interviews and ad sales business (also uncompensated) because the building would only ever have one phone line, and forfeit their weekends to handing out the paper at community events in order to maintain the paper’s “local profile.”

“And not only that, we’re going to run this whole operation on Linux! We’ll make headlines across the globe!” He’s broken out in a sweat, shoving his index finger toward the ceiling as he outlines the Principles on which his Newspaper will be run. “Linux is hacker proof. No system crashes and the software is free.”

I’ve never used Linux, nor am I familiar with its desktop publishing programs. He assures me this is no problem; the software is in its beta versions, so no one is.

It should’ve been that moment that tipped me off to the volatile circus for which I’d soon be hired to serve as ringleader. In retrospect, the fact that I’d be required to use unfinished, untested, unreliable software to run an entire newspaper foreshadowed all of my first job’s pitfalls: the motley roundup of down-on-their-luck writers willing to work for $20K a year, who would later turn mutinous after learning a 22-year-old was hired to manage them for $25K; the carrot dangling of medical benefits, which, though promised after three months, were reneged due to a “hemorrhaging of funds”; the asinine insistence that we cover articles up to and including the peewee baseball league; the publisher who, after folding the magazine at five months, took to an online forum to lambaste the people he hired, then fired and refused to give their final paychecks; the publisher who, after telling me to call it a night, showed up on my doorstep at 3 a.m. and pounded incessantly at my door demanding I come back to work to remedy a typo; the publisher who, in front of a staff of 15, including three interns and a local volunteer, called me a “cunt bitch.”

The last straw lay just beyond that inimitable C-word, which came on a Friday afternoon, and by Monday morning I was gone. A few hours later, I was rummaging through the used vinyl at Salvation Army when my cell phone rang.

“Hey, it’s Adam,” said the voice. He had been my coworker up until that morning, when I packed up my coffee mug and personal effects and left the building for the last time. I was gone before he’d shown up for work.

“The boss folded the paper right after lunch. He brought everyone into the conference room, and he just kept saying he was sorry, crying. I felt kind of bad for him.”

I smiled to myself. Because I didn’t.

Nicole K. Sia is the assistant editor at Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. She lives and writes from her home in Brooklyn.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 | Email This Post

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