Runyon story. Sleazy newsrooms after midnight. Half baked philosopher
janitors. Hard-drinking reporters who sleep at their desks.
But it was Runyon as revised by an absurdist writer in collaboration
with a bleak existentialist.
“I feel better just having talked to you,” Holly lied. “Thanks, Tommy.”
“Anytime, Miss Thorne.”
As Tommy set to work with his push broom again and moved on down the
aisle, Holly tossed some more candy into her mouth and wondered if she
would be able to pass the physical required of potential sanitation
truck drivers. On the positive side, the work would be different from
journalism as she knew it collecting garbage instead of dispensing it-or
she would have the satisfaction of knowing that at least one person
Portland would desperately envy her.
She looked at the wall clock. One-thirty in the morning. She wasn’t
sleepy. She didn’t want to go home and lie awake, staring at the
ceiling with nothing to do but indulge in more self examination and self
pity Well, actually, that was what she wanted, because she was in a
wallow in it mood, but she knew it wasn’t a healthy thing to do.
Unfortunately, she was without alternatives: weekday, wee-hour nightlife
in Portland was twenty-four-hour doughnut shop.
She was less than a day away from the start of her vacation, and She
desperately needed it. She had made no plans. She was just going to
hang out, never once look at a newspaper. Maybe see some movies.
maybe read a few books. Maybe go to the Betty Ford Center to take the
self pity detox program.
She had reached that dangerous state in which she began to brood about
her name. Holly Thorne. Cute. Real cute. What in God’s name had
possessed her parents to hang that one on her? Was it possible to
imagine the Pulitzer committee giving that grand prize to a woman with a
name more suitable to a cartoon character? Sometimes-always in the
still heart of the night, of course-she was tempted to call her folks
and demand to know whether this name thing had been just bad taste, a
misfired joke, or conscious cruelty.
But her parents were salt-of the-earth working-class people who had
denied themselves many pleasures in order to give her a first-rate
education , and they wanted nothing but the best for her. They would be
devastated to hear that she loathed her name, when they no doubt thought
it was clever and even sophisticated. She loved them fiercely, and she
had to be in the deepest trenches of depression before she had the gall
to blame them for her shortcomings.
Half afraid that she would pick up the phone and call them, she quickly
turned to her computer again and accessed the current-edition file. The
Press’s data-retrieval system made it possible for any reporter on staff
to follow any story through editing, typesetting, and production.
Now the tomorrow’s edition had been formatted, locked down, and sent to
the printer she could actually call up an image of each page on her
screen.
Only the headlines were big enough to read, but any portion of the image
could be enlarged to fill the screen. Sometimes she could cheer herself
a little by reading a big story before the newspaper hit the street; it
sparked in her at cast a dim glimmer of the feeling of being an insider,
which was one aspect of the job that attracted every dream-besotted
young person to a vocation in journalism.
But as she scanned the headlines on the first few pages, looking for an
interesting story to enlarge, her gloom deepened. A big fire in St.
Louis, nine people dead. Presentiments of war in the Mid-East. An oil
spill off Japan. A huge storm and flood in India, tens of thousands
homeless. The federal government was raising taxes again. She had
always known that the news industry flourished on gloom, disaster,
scandal, mindless violence, and strife. But suddenly it seemed to be a
singularly ghoulish business, and Holly realized that she no longer
wanted to be an insider, among the first to know this dreadful stuff
Then, just as she was about to close the file and switch off the