Ode to a desk rat: an excerpt from my newspaper novel COME AGAIN NO MORE
A tip of the newsboy cap to one of the fictional fallen
COME AGAIN NO MORE (JackLeg Press) is available for preorder now in advance of Nov. 10 publication. Preorder from the usual sites — or from Burke’s Book Store in Memphis for a signed copy (paperback, $18). It’s my most personal book, my newspaper novel. It opens with a barroom wake for victims of the latest layoffs at a fictional Memphis daily. Here’s an excerpt:
I remember Tommy Miles, sitting alone at the bar. He was a copy editor, a desk rat, a somber little fellow at work, hunched over his keys and staring at the screen through round, wire glasses as if bewildered by the nonsense before him. He’d shake his head and set about to fix it. He could make sense of the worst rot. He was a savior of bad writers, could teach sentences to walk straight with proper bearing and go out into the world and say what they had to say, in plainspoken language. It was a gift, though the ink barons who owned us didn’t value it so much, and less all the time. I don’t even think the worst of the writers noticed — they didn’t read a word of their rot, after they filed it. If they happened to notice, the next morning, that somehow it made sense, that it could speak plainly, if not quite sing, well, then … the newspaper sprites see to those things, don’t they? Tommy Miles was a newspaper sprite. He was one in the flesh, bent-backed from his labor, with a smoker’s teeth and a smoker’s cough, looking ten years older than his age, but looking dapper, still and all, in that little tweed newsboy cap he always wore.
You’d see the slightest little smile start to form when he’d finish one story and move onto the next. He’d pull back from the screen, never taking his eyes off it, and then lean back in and start again.
Some fall into their life’s work and some are dragged, and most of both get by well and harmlessly enough. And some have no more business doing what they do than a rat does captaining a great ship (I’ve seen it happen, countless times, though, with editors in chief). But a blessed few, by luck or grace or whatever name you give it, end up just where they should be, doing just what they should do. Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior had nothing on Thomas Patrick Miles, for that. He was a born copy editor, but now he was an ex-one.
He was hunched over a small glass of bourbon. I sat beside him.
“You poor bastard,” I said to him.
“I never met one who wasn’t,” he said to me.
He leaned back then, as if from one of those stories. He turned and showed me that start of a smile, but then it died on his face—didn’t stop or fade and start to turn to something else, but died. Then he stood and patted me on the shoulder, seeing the look of death upon me, too. He straightened that newsboy cap. Tipped it, just slightly. He turned and walked toward the door, in his head-down way, in those mincing steps of his. He walked like a very old sprite, though he wasn’t yet fifty. He walked and kept walking and I never saw the poor bastard again.
Photo of newsboys and newsgirl was taken July 1910 in New York City by Lewis Hine. (Credit: National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.)
