5

I parked my car in a lot about a block east of where the office was located and made my way to work. We tried to find parking closer to the building when we originally leased the office space on the second floor, but in the town, parking in general is hard to come by so we took what we could find. The building itself was a two-story brick behemoth with a foundation as thick as the building was tall. Large, sun-catching windows covered the surface on the front and back sides. This was a major selling point for both Rooster and I since we both wanted to keep the workplace well-lit after reading an article about how natural light helped to maintain happy employees.

I stopped in for a coffee at Addie’s Corner Store, a mom and pop convenience market that sat next door to our building. I made an appearance there every morning even though the coffee was burnt and lousy, mostly to show my loyalty to the store’s owner Addie, a skeleton of a woman who while looking like death, somehow managed to always be full of piss and vinegar.

“Good morning, Addie,” I announced as I entered with the chime of the bell that above the door.
Addie leaned over the counter, her fingertips dyed red from cutting strawberries all morning.
“Listen to this,” she dove in. “A young man this morning tells me I shouldn’t be handling money and strawberries at the same time and that I should be wearing plastic gloves. What the hell is the world coming to? I’ve been doing this for fifty years and nobody’s ever complained until today. And then on top of everything, the

“It’s a sick world Addie,” I told her, flipping through one of my competitor’s papers.
“Do you know I sell more lottery tickets than food?”
“Yeah, I’d imagine so. Everyone is looking to take a step up the ladder, and most are looking for the easy way up.”
“Uh-huh, and if it wasn’t for that damn machine, I don’t think I could survive.”
“Yeah, they’re turning this country into one big casino, aren’t they?”
“Sodom and Gomorrah! That’s what it’s become,” she preached.
Addie poured my muddy, thick coffee and missed the cup, spilling a puddle of the black ooze on the counter.
“When things get old they get shaky,” she said nervously.
“Is everything okay Addie?” I asked sincerely.
“Fine. Everything’s fine. I’m just an old broad, you know?”
Addie poured me a second coffee, this time keeping all of the liquid within the confines of the heavy, paper cup.
“Are you sure everything’s alright?” I asked again.
“Absolutely,” she assured me, though it was clear she was shaken. “Now get to work. You’ve got a business to run.”
Addie had never spilled my coffee in the four years I had been coming to her, never complained so vigorously, nor did she ever use religious imagery in her dialogue. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something was clearly not right with the frail woman.
I entered the building still in my jeans and t-shirt. We didn’t reserve causal dress for Fridays alone and instead allowed our employees to be comfortable in hopes of not only inspiring creativity, but productivity as well. Inside the lobby of our office I found two men dressed in suits waiting to speak with one of our editors.
Elroy, the officer manager’s dog, poked his head into the lobby when he heard my keys jangle. He greeted me every morning, not with a bark of joy, but with a snarl so sinister you swore the thing was possessed. He was an ugly mutt of a dog, disproportioned and lacking what most dogs have since birth—a fully formed snout.
“I like your secretary,” one of the suited men stated with a grin.
“You should have seen the last one,” I returned with a wink as I made my way into the heart of our corporate happenings.
The interiors of the office were set up in a simple, non-flashy way with a major hallway artery running down the middle of the space, with offices extending off on each side. An immense circular room sat at the end of the hallway and that partitioned space was shared by both the editorial and sales departments. The two mixed like oil and water, but Rooster had looked closely at the budget, and in the end we decided it was best to combine the two mismatched departments in one room in order to keep from having to move to a new location.
Office manager Bob had the first office on the left, which he inhabited with the tiny growling machine that stirred every time he caught sight of me. We allowed him to bring Elroy to work because we found he always performed better when the dog was in attendance. The pooch was the closest living animate object Bob had in his life and he talked about it like it was a Scandinavian model he bedded. The only drawback to having Elroy at the office was that the staff often complained about his persistent smoker’s bark. The dog, not Bob. See, Bob had been a chain smoker since his teenaged years and the fact that the dog had a serious case of black lung was a living testimonial to the truth that second hand smoke is dangerous. When he got fired up enough, the mutt would let out a half-bark, choke for a moment and then cough himself into submission. I might have felt bad for him if he wasn’t so miserable towards me.
I walked past office after office, greeting Jane, Rooster, and various worker bees in the art department. I reached my home away from home and threw my stuff onto the desk, wasting no time before crashing into my large leather chair, which squeaked beneath me like a supersonic queef. Before I could even let out a sigh of relief over Gato’s brush with imaginary death, Rooster had burst into my office as he did every morning just about this time. He didn’t sit down, in fact, he never sat down. “Sitting down puts the weight on your ass,” he’d say. “When you’re on the phone you have to lean into the phone, step into it and always follow through.”
Rooster was my business partner and one hell of a salesman. If we were going by titles, he was the Director of Sales and I was the Publisher of the newspapers we built. I originally met him in an Irish pub about four years earlier. I was sipping on a Guinness and minding my own business when I overheard him talking to the bartender about a small community newspaper that he knew was for sale. At the time I was an investment banker and had built myself a substantial financial cushion by placing money in mostly high-technology ventures. I had wanted to try something new and publishing had been an outside interest of mine since my college days when I did a small amount of editorial dabbling for the school newspaper. After debating with myself over a few more beers, I made my way over to him and introduced myself, expressing in a somewhat buzzed context that I’d be interested in buying the paper. Before I knew it I had bankrolled the company and we built it up to a successful chain of four community newspapers.
As usual, Rooster had a wide smile exposing most of his long, horse-like teeth. He was as tall as a park statue and he put that height to use, playing pick-up basketball games during lunchtime at a nearby court on cool spring days. He had a huge, pumpkin-sized head and a large nose that seemed to prod you when he leaned in and out in conversation. His complexion was always that of a sunburned man’s, but it wasn’t his frequency in the sun that gave him the reddish hue, but his alcoholic moonlighting. He dressed conservatively and was rarely seen without a gold Rolex and a thick gold bracelet dangling from his wrist like a pair of handcuffs.
“Hey, Babes,” Rooster said as he leaned into my desk, nearly brushing up against me with his nose. “It’s going to be a great day. I feel it in my bones. We’re going to shake that tree today and all of those ripe, red apples are gonna fall to the ground.”
Rooster called everybody “Babes,” including the cleaners, his mechanic, the delivery guy and his wife. He believed that calling people Babes made them each feel special and put them off guard, which is usually when Rooster would go to work on them.
“Last month we spent more than we took in,” I reminded him.
“Give me a valley and I’ll show you a peak. What we need is another one of your big ideas, Babes.”
Since we started the business, Rooster always thought of me as an idea man. In all fairness however, I had zero publishing experience coming into the venture and just approached it with a fresh outlook. Thinking outside of the box was my specialty, and more often than not, my ideas were those that traditional publishers wouldn’t touch. However, innovation was the key to our success.
“Think, Babes,” Rooster continued. “Give us something national this time. No. Something global! I’ll get us an army of warm bodies and we’ll cold call the entire western world if we have to.”
“I think it’s time we Googlize. It’s the wave of the future. We should build a custom search engine that can organize and deliver information on our web site and then we can sell on-line advertisements. Newspapers are going to be obsolete soon if things keep going the way they’re going with the internet, so why not be on the front line?”
“Great idea,” Rooster said with a newfound excitement in his voice. “When can I start selling it?”
“Whoa—easy there. First I need to talk to some programmers because it’s going to take a little bit of time to get it all organized.”
“Sounds perfect, Babes. Give me a rough estimate if you can. How long before it’s up and running?”
Once again, Rooster was an amazing salesman with a knack for smooth talk, but he lacked patience. He was always looking for the next idea to run with, which usually meant we moved onto something new before finishing the previous something old. We always seemed to have our fingers pressed firmly on the pulse of what the public was looking for because of this spastic approach, but at the same time we probably could have benefited from a little more planning, especially with the big concepts.
“At least eight weeks I’m guessing,” I told him, knowing that he’d be disappointed with the answer. “There’s a lot of work that has to be done and this is still uncharted waters for us and most of the publishing world.”
Rooster gave me a half-hearted thumbs up and made his way for the door. “Okay, I can work with that. In the meantime, I’m going to get my sales team motivated. It’s time those boys and girls light up the phones.”
He was just about fully out of my office when he stopped, turned, and poked his head inside, using his oversized nose like a laser pointer.
“Babes, I forgot to mention,” he said with a serious, un-Rooster like expression. “The Moakley billboard company is offering free advertising to all of our big fishes. They are trying to get them to switch over, squawking about visibility and all that jazz. If they pull even a quarter of them over, we’re going to be hammered.”
My stomach sank like I was riding a roller coaster. Without our biggest accounts in our pockets, there was no way we could keep things operating at their current level.
“Those are mafia tactics they’re using,” I said.
“I know, Babes, but unfortunately for us, there is nothing illegal about it. Didn’t want to panic you, but just know it’s happening.”
If Moakley wanted to play rough, they were going to get roughed up in return. I never took lightly to the bully mentality. Getting out of this possibly disastrous predicament required some street justice, and that meant things were going to get ugly. Rooster had family and I didn’t want to get him involved in any activity of questionable origin, so I decided it was best to operate alone. I pulled out a note pad and a pen and began jotting down some important intel.
“How many billboards does Moakley have?” I asked.
“I think they have about fifty,” Rooster responded. “Something like twenty-five community-based and twenty-five city-based.”
“Is he using the same kind of tactics with the City Papers?”
“Yeah. I spoke with the advertising director over there this morning and his accounts are the same as ours. It’s basically the national advertisers Moakley is going after.”
“What’s the owner’s name over there?”
“Bill something,” he said, thinking hard. “Franconi. Bill Franconi.”
“Italian. That’s good. What type of guy is he? Do you know him?”
“Not personally, but rumor has it he’s a mean bastard. All of his employees hate him to the core and I’ve had a couple of people tell me he isn’t the most trustworthy guy. It’s local legend that he stole the paper from his brother-in-law.”
I kept writing notes as Rooster spoke, filling up my tiny piece of white paper with information I could use later down the road. This Franconi guy was going to force me to revise my still-percolating plan slightly, but the details were falling into place.
“Okay, I’m going to need a list of all billboard locations where the City Papers circulate,” I told him. “Can you have someone get that for me?”
“Why? What are you going to do?”
“Just some analysis.”
Rooster eyeballed me up and down. He could sense something was itching at me underneath the surface of my skin. When you work with someone as closely as we have, day in and day out, you tend to get to know when something is on the other’s mind.
“What’s with you, Babes?” he asked me. “What’s chewing on your bone?”
I hesitated for a minute, moving my attention from my note pad to Rooster’s eyes. “You know me pretty good by this point, huh?”
“More than you think, so give it to me straight. What’s bothering you?”
“We’ve talked before about me leaving the paper, right?”
“Sure, but it was always crazy talk, Babes. You’re in this for the long haul.”
“I wish that were the case, Rooster, but it’s not. I’m serious this time. I want out.”
“Babes, you can’t,” he said, yanking on his hair in frustration. “We started this together and without you, I’ll run it into the ground. I can’t keep this place moving forward without my idea man.”
“You’ll do fine if you just keep moving forward,” I reassured him. “I’ll make sure everything is in place before I go, and if things start to get rocky, just do what I said and put your money in the stocks I highlighted and invest in gold assets. That will keep your personal finances healthy.”
“Babes, I got a family to feed,” he pleaded. It was a cool seventy degrees is my office, but Rooster was now sweating pretty heavily. “I didn’t make millions and millions like you did on your investments. The money I could have put into stocks had to go to a mortgage, three hungry kids, and a wife that spends like a drunken sailor.”
“You’ll be fine, and I’ll make sure of that before I make any final decisions about my exit. Now let me get back to this Moakley situation and we’ll talk more about all of this stuff later.”
With glazed-over eyes and sunken, defeated shoulders, Rooster turned to the door, his now-hunched spine staring back at me. “I need you, Babes,” he said as he exited. I understood his concern and sympathized with his fears, but I couldn’t spend my entire life behind a desk, running a newspaper that was sure to become obsolete because the future called for it. Besides, Rooster didn’t give himself enough credit when it came to running the business, because at the end of the day, there was only one of us that was replaceable and that was me. There were plenty of qualified publishers that could run the paper, but it was his relationship with the advertisers that was imperative to continued success.
I watched as Rooster walked away from my office, dejected and fearful for his future. Walking past him and towards me was Harry, editor of the paper and one hell of a moody journalist. I could tell by the sneer he made when brushing up against Rooster in the hallway that he was seconds away from complaining to me about the latest offenses my partner had committed against the editorial department.
“Take a seat, Harry,” I told him before he could even get out a single word.
Prior to hiring Harry, he was a good friend of mine since my early days as a business professional, though in the current state of things I wasn’t exactly sure what our status was. Overweight, bald and sporting an impressively robust mustache, Harry had a hard time holding down a full-time job before becoming editor of the paper. He spent the majority of his career freelancing for various regional newspapers and magazines in his pre-editing days, but at the core he was an intellectual free spirit who would get bored with what he was doing and quit before making his way up the ladder. The reason he stayed on with us so long was out of loyalty, but that too seemed to be on the wane.
Harry circled a chair like a dog trying to get comfortable with its space on the floor and then flopped with a thud, testing the strength of the chair’s legs in the process. He crossed his legs and then leaned forward, clutching his right knee with both hands. I could hear his teeth grinding against each other and I couldn’t help but cringe at the almost fingernail down a chalkboard sound. Harry had such bad teeth that as a company we couldn’t institute a dental plan because Rooster was afraid our premiums would skyrocket when he went to see a battery of dentists.
“Let me guess, Harry,” I said. “You’re upset with Rooster?”
“I just can’t stand him,” he grunted and groaned. “How do you think my editors feel when they hear him shouting, ‘People are a flock of sheep waiting to be sheared’? That type of talk wastes our morale. And then he says, ‘Don’t hang up until they hang up on you. I’ve never seen a fist come through a phone.’ I can’t have that kind of stuff spewed around my people.”
“C’mon, Harry. He’s just motivating the salespeople. You can’t take anything he says to heart. Rooster just does things differently is all.”
Harry’s face turned blood red. I’m sure if I listened closely I could make out the boiling in his veins. As I stared at him from across the desk, I couldn’t help but think of him as an angry drunk upset that someone played a country song on his favorite jukebox in the corner of his favorite bar. I halfway expected him to slur his words when he opened his mouth.
“Can’t take things to heart, huh?” he erupted with no noticeable slur. “When he asked me to do a front page feature on an advertiser, I told him it would destroy the pride of my department. Do you know what he said to me? He told me that we couldn’t afford the luxury of integrity!”
“Okay, I’ll talk to him and have him limit his speeches. Is that all?”
“No, that’s not all,” Harry continued. “There are plenty of obnoxious things he does and there’s one in particular that really goes up my craw. You know those instant soups in the kitchen?” I nodded my head, hoping this conversation would be done sooner rather than later. “He likes to take the dried chicken out and then puts the packets back in the box. That’s incredibly inconsiderate to everyone else that has to work in this building, and I’m not the only one who thinks that.”
“That’s an easy one, Harry,” I assured him while trying hard not to roll my eyes. “I’ll take care of that one right away.”
“I just want you to know—I don’t know how much longer I can last,” Harry threatened. I wasn’t sure if he was looking for an out or a raise, but if our friendship was going to last, it was going to mean his departure, whether it was by choice or by force. “And it’s not just Rooster. It’s everything.”
“Listen, Harry. Maybe you just need some time off. A little change is good, you know?”
My goal was to convince him to quit so I didn’t have to be the bad guy and lower the gavel on a fired verdict. I have used this same trick many times before with women, prodding them into breaking up with me as opposed to doing the dirty deed myself. It helped with post break-up relations and often led to a higher rate of angry break-up sex, which I always found to be the best kind.
“I need a life change,” he said, staring down at his feet. I could have sworn I saw tears welling up in his eyes.
“Well, from one friend to another, I won’t take it personally if you need to step away from your position. I keep my business out of my friendships and vice-versa, so you have my support no matter what you decide.”
I was hoping I could sway him quickly and get this off my plate before jumping head first into the Moakley situation. One bad attitude could bring down an entire office and I didn’t need to be dealing with a revolt while also considering an early leave myself. The fewer headaches on my way out the better because it meant I’d be less likely to have to talk Rooster off of the ledge.
“Yeah. Maybe you’re right,” Harry said and I celebrated a minor victory inside my head. He paused for a few minutes, thinking out his next move. “I’ll get back to you by the end of the week on all of this, but in the meantime, do you think we can turn the air conditioner on? We may be a boiler-shop operation, but does it have to be boiling hot in here?”
“I’ll have Bob take care of it. In fact, send him in and I’ll make it happen right now.”
It was less than thirty seconds before Bob replaced Harry in the seat across from me. As usual, Bob’s pants were too short for his legs and the cuffs hung just below his shinbone. He hadn’t had a girlfriend in the four years I’d known him and his clothing reflected that. Aside from his love for cigarettes, the fifty-four year old was also a closet alcoholic whose hands trembled every morning as he suffered through a daily detox from the binging he experienced the night before. He was an extremely loyal man. Prior to working at the paper he was a telemarketer for a research company, but sitting on the phone all day wasn’t his calling. His frequent hacking due to his excessive smoking didn’t exactly gel with the duties of the job and he would always smile and tell us how he had been hung up more than anybody since Alexander Graham Bell first invented the phone. That summed up Bob in a nutshell and you couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, though you were grateful not to be in his shoes.
We had originally hired Bob to be a salesman, but he failed miserably and I convinced Rooster to keep him on as the office manager. As part of the negotiation, I agreed to Rooster’s demand to have Bob be responsible for opening all incoming postal packages. At the time there was a second Unabomber on the loose and Rooster didn’t want to take any chances, so he made Bob the first line of defense.
“Harry says you want me to turn up the AC.”
“Put it on sixty-eight,” I told him.
“Rooster will have a fit,” Bob said with fear in his voice.
“Don’t worry about it. He was sweating up a storm when he was in here, so he’ll understand.”
“Okay, I’ll lower it, but if Rooster comes barking at me, I’m pointing him in your general direction.”
“Fair enough.”
Thinking our conversation was done, I started to review my notes on the Moakley situation, but Bob didn’t move from his seat and cleared his throat.
“Something on your mind, Bob?”
“Has it been brought to your attention that a neighbor called the Environment Protection Agency on us?” he asked, nervously twitching knowing that the news would drop like an A-bomb.
“No,” I said, choking on my own spit. “I don’t know anything about it.”
“They claimed we put radioactive waste from the photo processor in the garbage.”
“Well, did we?”
“No way. The containers are neatly stacked in the men’s bathroom. Nobody in the office knows what’s in them.”
Suddenly we heard rumblings just outside my office door. It was Avram Rabinowitz, entertainment editor at the paper and a fullblown Hassidic Jew. He had overheard the entire conversation Bob and I were having and the news clearly worried him. He was probably thinking that his wife was going to start having green babies. He had both hands pressed against his black top hat and was moaning out loud. “OH MY GOD!!!!!!!” he repeated over and over again, before scurrying off to spread the news among the other employees.
“Well, I guess it’s not a secret anymore,” I declared. My head was beginning to throb with stress. “Tell me Bob, why would you put something radioactive in the men’s room?”
“There was nowhere else to put it and Rooster didn’t want to pay for the disposal. Should I throw them out?”
“Hell no,” I said firmly. “Call a hazardous waste removal company.”
“It costs thousands. Rooster said…“
“I don’t care what Rooster says. Call them now and get that shit out of the men’s room.”
“Where should I put it in the meantime?”
“Throw it in a closet and lock it. Just get it out of sight. And do me a favor and send Jane in here.”
I rubbed my temples in an attempt to coax my oncoming migraine away. There were certain days when everything seemed to go wrong, and it was one of those days. If I were a turtle, I’d have been in my shell. If I was a bird, I’d have flown away. But no, I was neither of those and instead the publisher of some Mickey Mouse community newspapers.
Jane entered with a sneeze. I blessed her as she sat down, and although I expected a thank you for my gesundheit, I received nothing in return. She was in her late forties and of Armenian descent, which meant she was quite hairy, but did little to keep the growth at bay. She was homely, lacking a libido, and based on my experiences with her in the office, always miserable. She had no friends in the office and if I wasn’t mistaken, hated every single human being alive. Rooster and I both agreed that she was a difficult employee, but we never fired her because was quite good at her job.
Jane was an upstanding member of PETA. There was a particular incident that occurred at the office when the director of a community organization that we were doing a directory for came in for a meeting wearing a full-length mink coat. Jane refused to do the research and only conceded when I promised to make a donation to an animal fund. Rooster was furious about the payment and told me that the inmates were running the asylum.
“Jane, good to see you,” I lied. “I was wondering if you could do me a favor. I need to investigate directory databases and newspapers on the Internet, especially local publishers.”
“Excuse me?” she whined. Her voice was almost more nauseating than the sound of Harry’s grinding teeth. “That’s not what I was hired to do here.”
“Well, Jane, I thought it possible that you might transcend your job description for a moment and take a step into the future with me.”
“I was hired as research director for the directories themselves,” she continued. It took a lot of intestinal fortitude to keep myself from leaping over the desk and snapping the woman’s neck like a twig. “Why am I always being asked to do something else?”
“Because you’re good at what you do,” I said, biting my tongue on what I really wanted to tell her. “I wouldn’t trust this research to anybody else.”
“And what about that assistant you promised me?”
“I’ll see if I can get you one, but as you know, our world here is ruled by cash flow. And just for the record, I never promised you an assistant, I just said I’d look into it. There’s a big difference.”
She pouted briefly, sighing loud enough for me to sense her deep-rooted frustrations. Unknown to Jane however, I could have cared less about what she wanted and her sighs were lost on me.
“So you’re planning a Google-like web site?” she asked.
“Yes, Jane, and I’d like your input and recommendations.”
“Well, in that case I’m going to have to insist that if the directory is on-line, that the information may only be accessed through its own private search engine.”
“I can’t agree to that at this point because I haven’t thought this whole Internet strategy through.”
“With all due respect, I think I know a little bit more about this than you do,” she said snidely. “I have already given a lot of thought to the subject matter and I know a great deal about the best direction to take.”
“Perfect,” I said equally snide. “I’m sure you’ll find the research I’ve just given you very interesting, yet easy at the same time.”
Jane stormed out of my office and I stood from my chair in order to return some blood flow to my legs. I stepped out into the hallway and saw a group from the art department crowded around one of the oversized windows. I pushed through the onlookers as if I were the paparazzi out for the million dollar money shot and glanced down into the street where I saw an ambulance parked in front of Addie’s store. Within seconds the paramedics wheeled out a body that was covered from head to toe in a large white sheet and I felt my stomach sink deep into my pelvis region.
“It’s Addie,” Rooster said as he rushed back into the office, flush from the news and the sprint up the one flight of stairs to share it with the rest of us. “She’s had a heart attack. She’s gone.”