TABLOID MAN

My name is Peter Wiener.Yes, I know.I don’t like it much either.But I always kept it because it is uniquely mine, and I could never think of a better alternative.And…I remember the first time I ever saw it in print as a byline: by P. Wiener.That was the most exciting thing I had ever felt in my life.Up until then, I didn’t have much going for me.

As you probably guessed, I work as a journalist.I can hear you laughing, but I take it very seriously.I work for the National Bludgeon – the Chicago branch.I got the job because the editor had somehow come across my 250 page, “History of Flannel,” that I penned for another company.I also used to work for Hallmark Cards writing doggerel verse commemorating your Mother-in-Law’s birthday.I sat directly opposite a little man whose name I forget but who also wrote sing-song rhymes for people who had a lot of loss in their lives.He was particularly good at Death.“In Sympathy for Your Loss…” kind of stuff.I think he weighed 97 pounds and was 117 years old.I’m not sure.I never asked.He always wore his pants up to his armpits which may have accounted for his long stays in the Men’s Room.We both had these high rickety wooden chairs to sit on, and watching him climb up the side of one was like watching a lame cat try to scale a piano bench.Once he made it up there he could barely see over the edge of the desk – as our desks were back to back, so in theory we could always face each other.Actually all I ever saw was the top of his head and it was several years before I ever got a look at his face.It wasn’t much to look at.

We worked in an old building on the seventh or eighth floor.I could never remember which, and always hit the wrong button and had to walk up or down a flight of stairs.They only had a freight elevator in the building and it was slow.I think they deliberately slowed it down to accommodate this guy, I’m not sure.He held his position for years, but they finally threw him out because he was annoying.He had come from Reader’s Digest, and had been a good editor.He was credited with having condensed all of Marcel Proust into 53 pages.

“Mostly it was just getting rid of all those long sentences!” he used to tell me.“When are writers going to learn?It’s Subject – Verb – Object!That’s It!‘The Cat Sips Milk!’What else do you need to know?”He wanted to work independently on compressing all of Shakespeare into 126 pages.It was his private goal in life.He showed me passages of his great tome.I remember he turned Hamlet’s famous: “To be or not to be…” into simply, “This sucks!”Okay, not as poetic maybe, but to the point.

We worked in an old warehouse – former warehouse – on the edge of the factory district.There was a tannery and a meat-packing plant directly across from us which we could see, and smell, through our shared, dirty window which opened itself from the top and leaned into the room to take up desk space.Our building shared a parking lot with both of those places across the way, and every morning the empty space filled up with stray cats and dogs that roamed between our parked cars.

Besides the stray cats and dogs, the parking lot by noon collected stray people.They didn’t look much different from the cats and dogs, and all used the lot as their personal bathroom.There was no air conditioning in the old building so we had to keep the window open during those hot summer days.It was difficult writing verses about your widowed grandmother’s lone anniversary with a big shit smell wafting in across the desktop.

But enough of my early career.

An industrialist got a hold of me – I forget how – and appointed me to write his company’s history.He was in textiles.That was followed by my history of flannel, already mentioned.I was rather proud of it, even if nobody but the boss read it.After all, would you read it?But he was friends with somebody at the National Bludgeon, and when somebody died, it came up in conversation that I was a writer.So it spring-boarded me into a reporter’s job.Actually, I was a custodial assistant; and when somebody else died, I got the reporter job.And here I am.

Anyway, this story is not about my past history (okay, it is, but I’ll get to that) or about dealing with my name or companies I’ve worked for, or anything like that.This story is about how I met Doctor Flabbergast. (Now, it should be noted I’m writing in the present – my present – and these are all events that happened in the past.My past.Although I’m not writing about my past.Only certain experiences I’ve had in the past as I lived my life as a National Bludgeon reporter.In other words, it’s not so much a diary or a book of memoirs, so much as it’s about me encountering what I encountered researching certain stories.I think.)It was probably dumb to mention all that.Oh well.Fuck it.

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