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The Duration: Quitting Time
My first month in the Washington, D.C., bureau, one of the old hands took me out to lunch to give me advice and take my measure. When we sat down at the restaurant, he told me to run my hand underneath the table. What did I feel?
Nothing.
Exactly! No fossilized gum. It’s a new place, you see. The places where the power guys lunched, the places that had been serving steaks to senators since Lyndon was wet behind the ears, they had gum under the table. You knew you were invited into the inner circle when you found yourself at a place with lots of gum under the table.
“Ah!” he said when the waiter arrived. “I’ll have my appetizer.” The waiter went away and came back with a double scotch. He had something to eat, but also requested his “main course,” which was another double scotch. After we had cleared our plates, he gave a bright smile and said, “It’s time for dessert.” The waiter brought another ration of Dewar’s.
In the old days the old hand might sleep it off, wake at two, hit the Bunn-O-Matic for some acrid jake, then bang out the story on a manual Royal. But a new wind was whistling through the office, and post-lunch siestas were discouraged. (The only fellow who could sleep at his desk was an elderly columnist from the Times Picayune, a gentle and courtly man named Edgar Allen Poe.) In fact, most of the staff belonged to a new generation, and they did not liquor up at lunch.
Quitting time was another matter.
The bureau was located in an office complex built around a block of row houses. It had a long atrium with shops and restaurants. Several newspaper bureaus had offices in the building, as well as independent journalists. (My first day on the job, Art Buchwald came into the office to get the bathroom key. He really had to go.) Our watering hole was Wollensky’s, a woody bar in the classic style. When the whistle blew and we all slid down the dinosaur’s tail, we landed here for a bump before we went home — some by taxi, some by car, some by subway, some on foot. We argued and complained, congratulated and gossiped, plotted and confessed. I can still see them and name their poisons: rum for El Jefe, Jameson for Irish Mary, Beam Black for me. The workday was over when the waiter set the glasses on the napkins and everyone lit up. El Jefe clinked the Zippo and lit us all, clanked it shut, and raised a glass in a toast: To Tuesday.
Newspapering in the nineties. The days when the morning Washington Post was so thick you had to forklift it off the stoop.
Spin the clock forward 30 years. At the office today I heard … voices. A rare sound. Our breaking-news guy is in a few days a week, but he’s on the other side of the floor. Once a week our classic sports columnist comes in, and I can hear him growling and laughing. Two days ago, some graphics folks came in for a photo shoot and did some collaboration in the break room, both masked. Most days I have the place to myself.
Turns out one of the top editors had dropped in. I hadn’t seen her in a while, and we chatted about this and that in the hub — that’s the ring of desks around a central media station, where the newspaper used to be assembled. Online editors, print editors, photo editors, everyone working around a central monolith that had flat-screens turned to every channel. Another wall of monitors showed traffic to the site, news feeds, updates. You could walk through the hub and feel like you were in the middle of an electrical generator. Now the monitors are dark and the batteries on the remotes are dead.
“When is everyone coming back?” I asked. She said it was looking like January, but even so, you know. Cases are still high. The new paradigm was flexibility.
I understood; I used to make the same argument. Doesn’t matter where I am as long as I’m doing the work, and hey, the best newsroom is one that’s empty at 2 p.m., because everyone’s out getting stuff.
But this feels different. You think: It’s never coming back.
It’s one thing to age out and see the world change, continue on in a morphed form with some remnant wraiths that seem familiar. It’s another to watch it fall away completely, almost all at once. There was March of 2020, and then there was two weeks, and it’s still two weeks.
You know it can’t be quitting time, because the clocks are striking 13.
Published in General
By the time I left in 1982, the dancers had been exiled to the Beaumont club annex. Which, if I recall correctly, was only open after duty hours on Th and Fr. Oddly enough, we collectively abandoned liquid lunch in the basement when we became XOs, because we no longer had any “free time”. Deadline reports and Q services had a way of focusing one’s attention.
What happened to the Ramble anyway? I’m getting ready to record those two episodes before they disappear from Apple. If you haven’t heard them, well, you need to. Lapidary.
Has anyone come out with an “Omega Man Syndrome?” I can’t even be in the first hundred to think of this comparison. The contrast must be especially stark in a place like a newsroom, a place that never slept, like a police station or a hospital.
OmegaPaladin has.
I’ve used the comparison a lot – in conversation, to limited effect, and I think here in the Duration pieces. Certainly in the Bleat.
It will return when I want to do it again. I keep thinking that if I do podcasts, it should be the Diner, since they stretch back so far. But thank you!