Cold Type

by Harvey Araton

  “I write about jobs for New Yorkers, Mr. Brady—the ones who are your readers,” Steven responded.

  “If our readers need a job, they may consult the want ads,” Brady said.

  “The ads we run are for minimum wage jobs,” Steven said.

  Brady laughed, much too smugly, in Jamie’s opinion, who was standing nearby.

  “Travel the world as I have, young man, and you may discover that most people live terrifically contented lives on no great abundance of money,” Brady lectured. “What they most want is to have the faith that they can live and worship peacefully, without fear of being shot by a mugger or blown up by fanatics. Their newspaper has a moral obligation to help them with that, unless you believe—like many members of your Congress—that we ought to be in the business of guaranteeing them employment.”

  With the last word, Brady moved on. Steven turned to Jamie and half-joked, “I’ll be pounding a beat by tomorrow.” But the only newspaper passion of Brady’s that outranked his ideology was his undying devotion to the bottom line. He set about operating the Trib on a shoestring, not even bothering to bring aboard financial or editorial people from his parent company. He merely installed his son Maxwell, bestowing on him the title of executive editor. Maxwell Brady took to proofreading the paper every night from the bar stool of the trendiest East Side haunts.

  Lee Brady had apparently surmised that Steven’s column had too much readership to kill outright. The column continued, though Brady and occasionally his son grew into the habit of spiking one for every three printed.

  Weeks before the strike, Steven had managed to deliver one dear to Brady’s own political sensibilities. He blistered the teachers union for threatening a job action if the city continued to explore its plan of reducing classroom crowding by operating a year-round school calendar.

  Teachers want it both ways. They complain about overcrowded classrooms. Then they threaten to walk out when the Mayor sits down with the Chancellor and comes up with a viable working plan to ease classroom crowding by extending the school year. They say an extended summer vacation is essential to the well-being of students but it sounds like a self-righteous attempt to preserve the great American essay, “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.”

  The column got the wood—the front page. The next morning, Brady stepped out of his office with the paper rolled under his arm. The newsroom came to a standstill.

  “Pardon, pardon. The work today of Mr. Kramer was the finest example of what we set out to do here and must not pass without an appropriate show of appreciation. I have therefore instructed our accounting department to award our esteemed columnist a $250 bonus for his extraordinary essay.”

  At which point, before the startled newsroom had fully ingested Brady’s spontaneous and uncharacteristic largess, Steven climbed right up on his desk and shouted, “Attention…attention, please.”

  Brady, walking back toward his office, turned around and did a double take.

  “I would like to thank Mr. Brady for his generosity. But columnists do not accept cash awards for their convictions. We only wish for every opportunity to express them, without editorial interference.”

  Brady shook his head and walked away. Just as he stepped inside his office and closed the door, he unleashed a mighty, convulsive sneeze.

  Steven bent his, slender frame into a perfect bow and bellowed, “Bless you, Lord.”

  The city room broke out in laughter. Steven’s line was etched in Trib lore, contemptuous employees all over the building mouthing those words the moment Brady’s back was turned.

  Brady continued to have the last word. The same day Steven rejected his gesture, he returned to work on a Sunday column about former welfare mothers being harassed by city workers. It was a controversy bound to land in the lap of the new mayor, Zimmerman.

  Willis gave him the thumbs-down sign when he trudged back from his daily showdown with the publisher.

  “Didn’t it occur to you that Brady might fire you on the spot for showing him up?” Jamie asked Steven the next morning.

  He shrugged. “Fuck him. When the contracts run out and the shit hits the fan, this place will be a war zone—and then we’ll see how tough Lord Brady is.”

  Jamie knew his cousin had been waiting for the strike, almost to the point of invitation. “The paper is already lost to this lunatic,” he said at Kelly’s one night, going over each slanted story, getting angrier by the beer.

  “Steve, I don’t think there are too many people who actually want to go out,” Jamie said. “Things aren’t good out there in this business or in the economy. And the holidays are coming.”

  Steven chugged more beer and kept talking.

  “The only way we can get it back is to kick his ass in a fair labor fight,” he said. “He won’t keep it if he can’t have it his way. He’ll sell the damn place lock, stock and barrel twenty minutes after we shut him down. We’ll get our paper back. I’ll get my column back.”

  Jamie listened to his cousin rant. He wondered if only a drunken fool—or a well-paid columnist with no dependents—could be so anxious to walk out.

  Chapter Nine

  Jamie stepped away from the marching strikers as they neared the Trib building and the wooden blue barricades that were set up by police. Keeping his distance from the picket line, he hid across the street behind a parked van.

  His cousin, along with Carla Delgado, had taken over organization of the line. Steven, he conceded, was a natural leader. He always had been. When they were kids, in school or at summer camp in the Catskills, there was even a modicum of status in it for Jamie when others discovered that Steven was his cousin.

  While Steven hung a picket sign from a low branch of a small tree, Carla stepped into the street and yelled, “Listen up.”

  The assembled staff once again gave her its full attention.

  “Unless you sign up at headquarters, you will not be eligible for union strike benefits. You can get a hundred bucks a week, two-hundred if you are the only working member of your family and have at least two kids.”

  His ex-wife would be thrilled with this jackpot news, Jamie thought. The notion of midnight patrol on the deserted waterfront already fatigued him. The afternoon sun had faded behind the clouds and taken with it the last vestige of autumnal comfort. Jamie almost started to walk toward the picket line but held back. Steven didn’t seem to be looking for him. He had more than enough people to organize for the war that he insisted would bring Brady down.

  Jamie decided to leave, shielding himself from view behind parked cars. He headed for the subway, thinking Steven won’t even notice I’m gone. Just the same, the train back to Brooklyn Heights couldn’t come fast enough.

  With no destination in mind, he walked the narrow streets lined with handsome brownstones and brick-faced apartment buildings. He had fallen hard for them and the entire neighborhood from the night he nearly emptied his gas tank in search of a parking spot and was forty-five minutes late for his first date with Karyn.

  They met in the spring of 1990 at a mixer for Hunter College graduates. Karyn failed to mention that she had transferred to Hunter from Princeton after two years. Having fared so poorly in the Columbia pickup scene, Jamie might have wished her well and gone on his way had she told him. Instead, he and Karyn topic-hopped from his business—newspapers—to hers—book publishing—until finding more mutual territory: a love of Jackson Browne, every Seinfeld episode from the show’s inception in 1989 and the NBA playoffs.

  Jamie was for Magic Johnson and the Lakers because they were, beyond Showtime, the essence of unselfish team play. She was for the Pistons and Isiah Thomas because he had “the cutest ass and an irresistible smile.”

  Given that standard, Jamie decided not to elaborate on how much of a basketball junkie he really was—and how much of his adolescence he had devoted to the game.

  He looked more like a wrestler than a basketball player. A shade over 5' 8" without the verticality of his hair, Jamie was on the stock
y side, a body replica of his father. The curvature of his back made his shoulders look stooped. Nor was he the most graceful or fluid of athletes. But he had spent hours as a kid launching weathered balls at backboards and rims in schoolyards and in cramped neighborhood backyards. From the time he played his first games of three-on-three, he loved basketball’s freewheeling nature and simplicity, the ease with which it was organized, controlled, without parental supervision or intrusion.

  By late middle school he was the proud owner of a magnetic dribble with a surprising quickness for the proverbial stout white boy. For Jamie, the beauty of playing his position, of being the point guard, was that he was in control of making things happen for others. The process of creating off the dribble and finding the open man was instinctive. You had to make an immediate decision and live with it. There was no time for second guessing—a Jamie specialty—because the next play was coming up fast.

  He made his high school freshman team and became friends with several black kids who lived in the housing projects a few blocks away. In the 70s, Farragut Houses was no isolated fortress of poverty and despair like other developments around the city. Blacks and whites, European immigrants and those from the Caribbean co-existed. But there was never a proprietary question around the basketball courts that were smack dab in the middle of the cluster of buildings. The black kids reigned. And Jamie had an open invitation to get chosen in.

  They called him J—so what if he bore no resemblance to the gravity defying Julius Erving, Dr. J? At least his curly hair, worn stylishly long, could from a distance pass for a reasonable imitation of Erving’s trademark fro.

  The courts were quiet on Sunday afternoons when Erving’s Philadelphia 76ers played on national television. Jamie often watched from the crowded apartment of the boy he liked best. Ronald Allen was a gangly six feet tall—gap-toothed and so skinny that the other boys called him Bones. His favorite Knick was Earl Monroe, though his attempts to mimic Monroe’s classic spin moves were comical. His bank shot, however, was money.

  “Man, we should go to your house and watch the game,” he said to Jamie one Sunday when Dr. J and the 76ers were playing the Knicks—his favorite team but only a shell of the early 70s championship teams. “Bet your family’s got a nice color TV, better than this old piece of shit.”

  That was true, but Jamie made up an excuse that his family was having relatives over. For one thing, he was suspicious of how welcoming his father would be. He hated it when Morris and Uncle Lou used that word—schvartzer. Their attitudes convinced Jamie to make sure that what happened in the projects stayed in the projects.

  Beyond basketball, there were other adolescent adventures going on there. He smoked his first joint in a chilly, dark stairwell. He copped his first feel.

  Sarah Tompkins’ breasts were fleshy and Milky Way brown. In the half-dozen times they slipped away from the crowd, she confidently guided him under her sweater, never bothering to complicate matters with a bra.

  Morris had no clue that his son’s incursions into the projects were producing such interracial indulgences. He still hated that Jamie spent time in a place that his generation believed symbolized failure. They had worked so hard to escape from it.

  “I just go there to play ball,” Jamie told him. But Morris learned otherwise one hazy summer afternoon between Jamie’s freshman and sophomore years. Jamie’s team had lost a game and stepped off the court for the boys who called next. Jamie wandered outside the fence where the girls watched and flirted. Sarah Tompkins and a friend were among them.

  The friend sidled up to Jamie and said, “You’re not bad for a white boy.” Sarah promptly elbowed her aside.

  “Don’t be getting ideas,” she said. “Jamie and I got a little thing going. We have our secret meeting place.”

  Jamie blushed, uncomfortable with the public display. Just the same he was aroused by Sarah’s seductive playfulness. She was wearing a spaghetti-strap top with tight shorts that highlighted the tautness of her thighs.

  She winked at Jamie and said, “Maybe we’ll meet up soon if you promise to take me on a date.”

  “Like where?” Jamie said.

  “You know, like a movie.”

  The thought of being with Sarah outside the projects terrified Jamie. He played along though, asking her what she wanted to see.

  “Something sexy,” she said, rubbing a shoulder against his. This led to a game of pretend fighting and a round of kissy face. Jamie was feeling his fifteen-year-old oats until he felt a hard tap on the shoulder.

  He turned to face his father.

  “What are you doing here?” he stammered.

  “I need you to come home now,” Morris said, red-faced and in no mood to argue.

  “Why?” Jamie said. He sensed the others were watching.

  “Because your grandmother had a heart attack and is in critical condition. We’re all going to the hospital.”

  Morris turned and walked off. Jamie looked at Sarah, who had overheard them. She shrugged her shoulders. Jamie left without saying a word. One of the mouthier boys yelled out, “Don’t worry, Big Daddy. J’s cool. We weren’t taking his money—only his motherfucking Cons.”

  It was a reference Morris wouldn’t get—Jamie had bought a new pair of black Converse sneakers that were the envy of the playground.

  He got why his father had to come looking for him and why he had to follow him home, lame as it looked to the others. But only the gravity of his mother’s health had eclipsed the shock of what Morris had stumbled upon—his son in the arms of a black girl. He didn’t say a word about it to Jamie, but Jamie read the disapproval in his eyes.

  Jamie told his mother, “Every time I pick up my basketball and walk toward the door, he looks at me like I’m going out to join the NAACP.”

  “Talk to him about it,” Molly said.

  “Yeah, right,” Jamie said.

  He knew it was pointless to explain—and why the hell should he? Morris would never understand what his social acceptance in those outdoor courts meant. Even Jamie was incapable of fully getting it until years later when he explained it to his brother-in-law Mickey, who liked basketball. “Going into the projects helped me play all four years in high school. I sat the bench on varsity as a senior because I didn’t have the speed the other kids did. That didn’t matter. I was on the team. I was accepted as a player. Not that it mattered to anyone at home.”

  “Your dad didn’t go the games?” Mickey asked.

  “Not one.”

  “Why not?”

  “They were played weekdays, late in the afternoon,” Jamie said. “He’d already left for work. But he had some days off. He just didn’t like, you know, the element. His greatest fear was that I was going to date black girls.”

  Jamie, in fact, could still picture the relief on Morris’ face when, years later, he brought Karyn home to meet his parents—the first time he’d brought any woman home. A few bites into dinner, he announced they had decided to get married. Molly cried. Morris hugged Karyn tight. She had him at the mention of her last name—Kleinman.

  Jamie had called her a few days after they met. He took her on a dinner date in Brooklyn Heights.

  “I thought you would be here at 7, 7:15,” she said when she answered the door. Her one-bedroom, second-floor apartment was in a corner building two blocks from the famous Brooklyn Heights Promenade.

  “Your neighborhood has lots of personality but no parking,” he said.

  Her building was run down, its hallways musty and dark. But Karyn’s apartment was well-furnished and spotless, painted in light, cheerful colors. Framed posters decorated the walls. The pillows on the couch were set perfectly in the corners. Magazines were carefully laid out on the coffee table as if it were a dentist’s office.

  Karyn wore a short black skirt, turtleneck sweater and earrings that fell even with her neck-length light brown hair. She appeared taller than five-foot-four, thanks to a slender frame and the heels on her black Frye boots. She wore grann
y glasses that slid down her nose just enough to cover a slight bump. On both wrists were bangle bracelets, different colors all—her trademark wardrobe accoutrements. She had on a lemon-scented perfume that Jamie found too pungent but would never have the audacity to complain about.

  They ate sushi, which he labored to feign a taste for, on Montague Street. They bought ice cream cones at a Baskin-Robbins next door to the newsstand. Eight months later they were married in the neighborhood in a brownstone synagogue and celebrated modestly with a small delegation of family and friends in a private room at Junior’s restaurant on Flatbush. Jamie moved into her one-bedroom apartment. He quickly grew to love the irregularly shaped neighborhood on the promontory of Long Island—about eight blocks wide and fourteen long at its principal range—that took form as New York’s so-called first suburb after the establishment of a steam ferry between Manhattan and Brooklyn in 1814.

  It all seemed so long ago now. So much had since gone wrong. So much had changed. Baskin-Robbins had turned into a florist. Jamie and Karyn had left what had been her neighborhood together and Jamie had come back to it, alone.

  He walked along Montague, picked up a Times from the newsstand and settled in at a Greek restaurant where they had occasionally eaten. Jamie set the paper on the table and scanned the front page. The lead story on the mid-term elections headlined: Clinton Strategists See Gloom for Next Two Years. The middle of the page featured an investigative look into security advancements that had apparently been proposed at the World Trade Center following the car bombing of an underground garage in February 1993.

  Jamie had played a small role in the Trib’s reporting of that story, manning the phones and recording information from reporters in the field. He was grateful for the mention he received in the box identifying the many who had contributed to the coverage.

  Below the fold, near the page index, was a small headline over a single tease paragraph: Shutdown at Trib, Metro, Page 3. He pulled the Metro section from inside, folded over the front. He found himself staring at a familiar sight—burning stacks of Tribs alongside the hobbled delivery truck.