Paying the Bill

Bill wore suspenders: wide rainbow stripes or straight shots of his favorite color, red. The suspenders were not fashion accessories, he would explain to us, in time--they were necessary to hold his pants up, now that he was pumping iron and eating salads for lunch. He claimed to have been fighting the battle of the bulge his entire life, and his pants--always khaki, always with a crisp crease--bore the scars of being let out and taken in.

We never saw the fat of which he was so afraid. Bill was a small man, no more than 5'6", but movie star-handsome, with a chiseled chin, light blue-gray-green eyes and close-cropped sandy hair. He was in his early 30s, about 10 years older than I was. Bill looked like a member of the acting family that includes Kirk and Michael Douglas. He was one of those people who always seemed destined for a starring role. I say we never saw any fat on Bill; in fact, we never saw any flaws in him, period. No wonder we hated him so much when he came to teach us how to write.

The newsroom was a collective office for four community newspapers in Southern Illinois. Mike was the boss, the managing editor. Four of us, including me, the youngest and newest member of the group, were the writers and editors of our own papers. Each of us did it all: We wrote news and feature stories, edited our own copy, shot many of our own photos, and designed the pages. We had too much to do, but we were self-contained. I was a fairly recent journalism school grad, and this was my second paper as a writer/editor; this was the way it was supposed to be. Another writer to carry some of the load would have been welcome in our newsroom; a copy editor, to find nitpicking "mistakes" and criticize our writing, was not. Bill was a copy editor. The fact that he was coming to work with us--no, to supervise and correct us--meant we were doing something wrong in the eyes of management.

And the honest-to-God truth is that we were working as hard as we possibly could. I personally covered the St. Clair County Board, the Fairview Heights City Council, the Town of Caseyville Board of Supervisors, a local fire district, the Pontiac School District, the Belleville Senior High School District Board, a couple of police jurisdictions, including the Fairview cops, the county sheriff's department, and any interesting local crimes that fell under the jurisdiction of the State Police, and, as Mike the managing editor described it, "whatever else comes up." I spent my nights at government meetings, my days in writing business features and personality profiles, and my weekends putting together pages for the food section.

And here was this suspender-wearing, dimple-chinned, smiling, pompous, arrogant jerk coming into my territory to criticize me.

From his first days he tried so hard. Bill was a member of Toastmasters, that club whose members meet for dinners and practice giving speeches to one another. Bill wore red ties with his rainbow suspenders and matching argyle socks. He laughed and smiled at us and called us by name. He said "Good morning, John" and "Good night, John." He asked how we were doing; did we have a good weekend? Polite, but cold, we answered in mumbles or short, clipped sentences: Yes. Thanks. Can't talk: Got work to do. The word "work" was always underlined strongly when we said it, as was the word "busy." No, Bill, I can't chat now. Can't you see I'm busy?

Of course, we grudgingly submitted our stories to him for review. Management Mike required it. I was reminded of the summer I spent as a waiter at a Denny's Restaurant. Waiters make their money waiting tables, but many restaurants also require the wait staff to do "side work," which involves refilling ketchup bottles, topping off salt shakers, cleaning the coffee maker, etc.--mindless tasks that add nothing to the waiter's bottom line. That's what side work is, and so it was with handing our stories in to Bill. Each minute we spent telling him that we'd filed a story, each second we spent answering his questions, was a wasted moment when we could have been writing.

Bill was supposed to be proofreading, of course, checking facts, but also improving our writing. Good luck, fella. We were sure the pace would bury him. There were four of us and only one of him. We handed in stories and were quietly gleeful as we watched them pile up. He was expected to fold under the pressure of correcting our comma splices and leave us alone.

Bill had asked for an office; what he got was a hallway. Each of us writer/editors had his own desk in the spacious newsroom; Bill's new "office" was the passage we walked through to get to the photo department. When we had to see the chief photographer, we would wait until Bill went to the bathroom so we wouldn't have to talk with him.

But as we avoided Bill, he sought us out. In the lunchroom, or in the parking lot after work, he was impossible to get away from. Bill talked about himself, which was, in retrospect, the smartest way to reach us, because we were reporters, professionals trained to figure out other people and note telling details about them. Bill was an open book with many lurid chapters.

He had a rainbow bumper sticker on his green minivan, for instance, reading "One day at a time." Turned out Bill was an alcoholic, information he volunteered before we asked him. And he wasn't ashamed, as I thought he probably should be, but was happy to prattle on and on about his wasted years: failing in college, losing jobs, waking up in places he didn't know. Finding Alcoholics Anonymous, getting a steady day job, then being forced by his own sense of self-preservation to get a job to fill his night hours, when the craving for booze was strongest. He called the numbers in the newspaper classifieds that asked for night clerks, only to realize the positions were in liquor stores. Finally, he got a late-night job writing death notices at the local daily newspaper: literally, the graveyard shift.

He loved it. From the dead, Bill gained life. His stories about lives lived, then lost, moved readers. Bill wanted to give up his day job selling shoes and work full-time writing, but the daily newspaper had pigeonholed him.

The daily paper was the main competition for our group of small weeklies. Mike, our managing editor, had lured Bill away from the shoe store and the big newspaper's obituary desk. We were Bill's chance at redemption. And he saw himself as ours.

Bill's impromptu confessions, offered rapid-fire as if he were in a hurry to spill all his darkest secrets before his audience got bored, were something of a revelation to us. The lunchroom conversation generally turned on how many cases of Budweiser had been consumed at the most recent weekend party. Bill unabashedly offered his own cautionary tales of inebriation, sobriety, and regret in such a way that he got his point across--I'm different from you--without seeming to criticize. He earned respect for that.

For my own part, I secretly began watching Bill. I was also a nondrinker, because I had recently been diagnosed as diabetic, but I didn't broadcast either fact. Bill was different, but what did that mean? Could it, I wondered privately, be a good thing? Besides our teetotaler status, Bill and I also shared an interest in our own body weights, except I couldn't keep mine down. And, though I hated to admit it to myself, I admired the way he dressed, scarred pants and all. I had always considered myself something of a sharp dresser, but the poverty of my employment situation, and the weight gain I experienced when I began taking daily insulin injections, steered me toward $9.99 Wal-Mart shirts and Kmart gray polyester pants. Could it be that Bill had something to teach me on a personal level?

While I pondered that question, an odd thing was going on in the newsroom. Despite the inroads he was making with stories of his own private battles, war was in full flower. Bill was not only correcting our occasional run-on sentences, he was also changing our copy without our permission. A long anecdotal lead would become two tight, punchy sentences. Explanations of technical terms would be inserted. A 1,200-word story would be handed back to us with 400 words missing.

"How do you expect us to work like this?" I demanded of Mike, the managing editor, behind his glass door. "He's changing our stories. He's not even asking us about what he changes. He's adding things that I never intended to be there."

"Is it better?" Mike asked.

"It's different," I said huffily. "It's not mine anymore."

"Bill's supposed to be making stories better," Mike said. "From what I've seen, all the stories he's worked on are more readable. If he tries to explain something by adding a sentence and it's not exactly right, then that's your fault because you didn't explain it well enough the first time."

As I opened my mouth to continue my protest, Mike looked at me over his glasses. He was a disconcerting figure in our newsroom, hard to read--warm-hearted for management, a genuinely funny person, but with the coldest fish-eyed stare in the world.

"Look, John, nobody but you really cares if it's your story. What a reader cares about is that it makes sense to him. That's what Bill's supposed to be doing. If you've got a problem, be a big boy and take it up with Bill."

My co-workers were having the same kinds of problems with Bill, and we talked darkly among ourselves about his sins against our stories. At the same time, we were met with Bill's effusive, ecstatic-to-be-here and why-can't-we-all-be-friends banter in the lunchroom and everywhere else we happened to encounter him. What game was he playing, anyway?

To this day, I'm not sure if it was curiosity, animosity, or resignation that finally prompted me to venture into the hallway to ask Bill a question. Probably a mixture of the three. "You changed this in my story," I said, pointing accusingly. "I want to know why."

"Why John, I'm so glad you asked," Bill said. "Why don't you pull up a chair here in my office, and I'll explain it to you?"

I don't remember what the subject was, but I'm sure I had written a feature story with a long anecdotal lead. I tended to write long anyway--I loved to pack in detail after detail after detail--and my co-workers encouraged me to expand my stories since, after all, we had pages to fill. Now Bill was cutting my three-paragraph opening to three sentences. "You have to hook the reader right away, John. You can give him all this information later, but unless you get to the point real soon, he's going to read something else. Writing for a newspaper is not like writing a novel. Newspaper readers have limited attention spans. They want to know what's important right away, or they're gone."

I had studied journalism in college, of course, and this point of "hooking the reader" had been drilled into me again and again. But none of my college professors had ever shown me how to condense my prose, to summarize my story in the opening, or to expand it later in the body of the text. In college, I had been praised as a feature writer, but now, in the workaday world, I realized that much of my college success had to do with finding people with amazing stories to tell and allowing them to tell those stories in detail. I had applied the same tactic in Southern Illinois, but now I was running out of good subjects for stories--and I had to keep writing anyway. Ever faced a health crisis? Ever met a famous person? You're front-page material! Not because you were so interesting, but because I needed material. This exalting of the pedestrian seemed pathetic to me, but it was life at a small newspaper. Now Bill was offering to show me how to keep those stories from becoming dense recitations of symptoms and recycled glory.

Not that I bought into his way immediately. I used his advice sparingly. He didn't really hook me until he started in one day on my news-writing style. I had been taught to write news fast, to get it over with and go on to the next thing. Almost all my news stories began the same way:

The Fairview Heights City Council on Tuesday night approved on second reading an ordinance to . . .

"What does it mean to say they approved an ordinance on second reading, John? Does that mean they approved it faster than normal?"

"No, of course not," I answered, annoyed. "It means they approved it on second reading. Everyone knows what that means."

"I don't," Bill said. "Why don't you explain it to me?"

I sighed. "A proposed ordinance has to be read three times in open meeting and approved each time to become a law. Approval on second reading is a preliminary step to becoming a law."

"Is this a formality then? Does it ever not get approved on third reading?

"Oh, sure," I said. "That's rare, but it does happen. Sometimes a couple of council members will change their minds. Sometimes a council member who doesn't support a proposal will vote 'yes' the first two times just so a proposed law can be moved to the debate stage before final reading, where he'll try to shoot it down."

"John Lenger," Bill said. "You know all this, but you're not telling your readers. You're confusing them with all this bureaucratic bullshit. Why don't you explain everything to them so they can understand it? Nobody knows what this crap means but you and the City Council."

"But that would take too much time!" I protested. "I can't write all that! I don't have the time!"

"You just explained everything to me in about 15 seconds," Bill said. "Surely you can invest an extra 15 seconds in your stories so your readers know what's actually going on in their city. Besides, isn't that why you became a writer in the first place? Because you think you can write better than everyone else?"

Bill was the enemy. That had not changed. But maybe--just maybe--Bill had something to teach me about writing.

I knew he was trying to bait me with comments like "You write because you think you're better than everybody else"; but give him credit, Bill understood at least part of my complicated motivation. I became a writer because I felt compelled to tell stories and I got great joy from having people read them. I became a journalist because journalism is a direct and immediate route to publication. There is a healthy dose of ego in every journalist; my words deserved to be read. And there was no greater satisfaction than when thousands of people read my stories and their lives were affected. That is the greatest feeling in the world.

But my sense of omnipotence gradually had been erased by the grind of the job, the day-and-night struggle to fill an unrelenting tide of blank newspaper pages with something, anything, before the next wave of white space washed over me. Perhaps my protestations about time really had more to do with despair, a sense that the labors before me were Herculean, while my strength and my talent were not. I wrote from ego, yes, but also fear. I filled computer screen after computer screen with words, piling up paragraphs, building a fortress against failure. As long as the words kept coming by the truckload, as long as I met the week's "story-count goal" that Mike had imposed on me, everything would be fine. As always, these private doubts were mine; I shared them with no one, and certainly not with Bill.

I did, however, begin to talk more willingly with Bill, and most surprising to me, often we didn't talk about writing. I never asked for it, but his advice began to stray into other areas of my life. One day he came into the office holding a bag. "Go right now to this store," he said, naming a shop down the street. "They've got all their ties on sale." I did, and we were both amused the next morning to discover that we were wearing the same red-striped tie. As I started to lose weight, Bill noticed; "Hey, John," he'd say, "how many belt notches have you gone down? Those pants are getting awfully baggy."

Work talk and private talk intermingled. One day I told Bill that I was thinking about changing my byline from John Lenger to Jay Lenger. Many people had called me "J" through the years, and "Jay" seemed like a reasonable extension of the one-initial nickname to replace "John," which I had never liked. "I changed my birthday," Bill confided. "I don't celebrate it on the day I was born, because that was an accident of fate. It had nothing to do with me. My new birthday is the anniversary of the day I became sober, which was a decision I made."

When I went into the hospital a few days later for tests to judge how well I was doing with my diabetes, two of my co-workers came to see me, but not Bill. "Bill wanted to come, but he had a lot of editing to do," Dave explained. "He sent a card, though," Marty said. "But why is it addressed to Jay?"

I felt caught in a childish act--to want to change your name is childish--and I also felt elated--I could do anything I wanted. I mumbled something unintelligible to Marty, and out of respect for the fact that I was sitting in a hospital bed, Marty didn't press me about who "Jay" was. I never did explain it to him.

More important, though, than the interest Bill showed in my personal affairs was that when I wanted to experiment with my writing, he encouraged me. "What if I write the introduction like a play?" I asked Bill one day while trying to figure out how to present a story. "Sure, John, whatever you need to tell the story. If it works, it's OK with me." That beginning wasn't quite as elegant as it should have been, so Bill helped me to rewrite it so the lead did work.

Another time, he tried to explain the concept of a "nut" paragraph to me. It's like a thesis sentence, a statement of what a story is about. But I wasn't getting the idea. Nut what? Finally, in mock exasperation, Bill shouted at me, "Call it the give-a-shit paragraph. This is why a reader gives a shit about your story!" I laughed. And I got it.

Slowly, over the course of weeks, I began to regain the sense that as a writer, anything was possible.

Which is ultimately why I quit. Months before Bill had come to our newsroom, I had thought about quitting journalism and earning an MBA. It was the 1980s and greed was good; everyone was going to business school. I didn't expect to get rich; ultimately I saw grad school as a method to escape from the dreariness of my journalism job. Bill's encouragement let some light into my dark days of writing the same city-council story over and over, but his encouragement also reminded me how my life as a writer was supposed to be. In Southern Illinois I couldn't see myself outrunning the fear of being able to fill the paper. Though Bill encouraged me to experiment and praised my best efforts, ultimately I didn't work for him. I worked for Mike and, in a bigger sense, the community, which demanded that I write more and more about things I had ceased to find interesting.

So when I was accepted into an MBA program, I submitted my resignation. Bill was not surprised; he had written one of my letters of recommendation, though we both knew that Mike might fire him for such disloyalty.

At my goodbye party, Bill wished me luck, told me I would make a great multimillionaire, and said I should keep in touch. "And don't give up on your writing, John," he said. "Don't ever give up on your writing."

In the months when I pursued graduate studies, I worked part time for a couple of other newspapers and a marketing research firm. Mike had been shocked by my departure; he tried to lure me back to Southern Illinois with freelance writing assignments. But I said no: I was done working for him. The only time I agreed to set foot back in the newsroom was when Bill was on vacation for a week. I filled his chair as a stand-in copy editor for five days--awkwardly, and knowing I was an imposter--and marveled at how this editing service Bill offered had gone from being unwanted to essential.

Business school didn't go well. I worked hard and got good grades, but everyone in my program wanted one of two things: to move into some specialized area, such as marketing or accounting, or to become the boss of the department they presently worked in. Being the boss had some appeal--I thought I could be a better supervisor than someone like Mike--but was I really suited for a career in management? Or did I want to go into a different field and become, for instance, a marketing executive? I was fascinated by a classmate's description of how his company worked; it made one kind of spaghetti and put it in five different boxes, with five different per-unit prices supported by five different marketing campaigns. But how was that substantively different from what I had been doing in Southern Illinois? If it was always the same story, or the same spaghetti, what was the point? Six months into the MBA program, I had no idea what I wanted. Then one day I picked up the phone and heard Mike's voice. I hadn't talked to him in months, and he sounded different, older perhaps. "Bill's leaving," he said. "That's terrible," I answered automatically.

"Terrible for me, good for Bill," Mike said, starting to sound a bit like his old self. The Southern Illinois newspapers were part of a large chain, and Bill had received a promotion to corporate headquarters. "So why did you call?" I asked. "Is there going to be a party for Bill? I'll be there."

"I want you to come back to take Bill's job."

I didn't know what to say. Finally, I blurted out, "But no one could replace Bill."

There was a pause on the other end of the line.

"I know that," Mike said. "But I have to find someone. Bill recommended you."

I made an appointment with Mike for the next week. I wanted a few days to think. Mostly I thought about the sacrifices that Bill had made in becoming the copy editor in our office. Of course, when he had first arrived, all I saw were the privileges he enjoyed: he made more money than I did, had more authority, and didn't work weekends. Now, however, contemplating taking his job, I thought about what it had cost him.

At the daily newspaper, Bill had found his voice writing death notices. When he had asked to expand beyond the obit desk, to write other things, to have a full-time writing position, he had been told, "Sorry, no writing jobs for someone with your background." Looking into alternatives, he had discovered the need for a copy editor at our weekly newspaper group. Bill had never been an editor before; he had been a writer for just a short time. I finally was struck by the irony. Bill wanted to write. We writers were doing what he wanted to do. But Bill took a job as an editor, to help us write better, though at first we didn't want his help. What had gone through his mind?

I called Bill. "Why did you become an editor?" I asked.

There was silence on Bill's end, perhaps the first silence I had ever heard from him. "Because I love writing, John. I really love good writing. And if it's just me writing my own stories, then I can only reach so many readers. But if I teach a lot of other writers how to write better, then I'm reaching that many more readers. Who knows how far my influence will reach? That's why you should take this job. You can help a lot of people. Isn't that what you want?"

For my job interview with Mike, I bought my first pair of argyle socks. They matched my tie.