Welcome to the Boom Town

Cowboy suits and muddy streets beat writing medical pamphlets

By Richard von Busack

I have worked for Metro for 10 years because I can't work comfortably in the kind of ambiance where they use the term "wordsmith." The office where I was last employed as a wordsmith, 10 years ago, was in Daly City, where the sun has not been seen since 1912. This was bad enough, but there was also a poster of Cathy from the funny pages on the wall of my cubicle.

Under her beady-eyed gaze, I'd call up podiatrists and ask them about the best way to take care of a hammertoe. Some liked surgery, some liked surgery and bone screws. One surgeon felt the question wasn't really how do you deal with a hammertoe, but how do you deal with sulfites in the salad bar? People were eating these carcinogens on their lettuce, and nobody did a thing about it.

No matter what they suggested, which I duly compressed and sent off to copywriters, we as editors always knew one thing: We might experience some discomfort during this procedure. This was the house editorial style where I smithed, along with "Use words understandable at a sixth-grade reading level" and "Avoid the word 'pain' and use 'discomfort.' " Even a superlatively painful medical process, the kind that causes whooping and gibbering, was described as a procedure during which we might experience some discomfort.

Being an adult is a procedure during which you're expected to experience some discomfort. Though the office politics were bad and the work was worse, this was my job and, I presumed, my life. I'd had it up to here trying to sell freelance articles, and it was time that I sold myself instead, tried to make a go at a real, legitimate, discomfiting, wanna-kill-myself-every-Sunday-night type adult job. It was useless; they smelled my attitude. My probation lasted three months and was extended. During the last two weeks of the fourth month, a woman arrived whom I needed to train to become my co-editor. What an easily anticipated surprise when I got my severance. As a completion bonus, I helped myself to the office fifth of Jim Beam.

Soon after this, I was sitting around waiting for the girlfriend to come home from her similarly awful job, and to witness her evening ritual of collapsing on the bed and bursting into tears. The phone rang. It was Dan Pulcrano, who with David Cohen, late of the LA Weekly, was starting a paper in San Jose. He was looking for a hard news reporter; I lied and said I was willing to write hard news. Did I have a car? Yes, I said, meaning, my girlfriend had one, and I could probably borrow hers.

Not long after, I was touring the office of Metro, which was a kiln in the summer, a sieve in the spring rains and a freezer in the winter. Its next-door neighbor was the Pussycat Theater; amplified stage-moans and real bad electric bass solos penetrated the walls. The streets were muddy ditches from the endless streetcar track construction, and people bounced over boards from the street to the doorstep, like in a western movie. Struggling over some prose in the evenings, I'd sit on a chenille-covered folding sofa in the front window in Metro lit by a lurid hydrocarbon sunset, breathing the garlic stench from the harvest in Gilroy, and watching that big woman who used to bounce the lechers out of the Bachelor Club, a go-go bar across the street (now the Cactus Club). She used to wear a cowboy outfit, smoke cigarettes and hunker against the wall like Marshall Dillon--the only woman never propositioned by the cruisers. The possibility of me being in that office long enough to see the president of the United States jogging down the streets of downtown San Jose seemed as likely as the probability of, say, Led Zeppelin coming to sing next to the SP train station.

I'd never been in a boom town before, but I didn't know how to react. I never was the entrepreneur type; I never could master the fear of seeing the books bleeding red, stanched only by faith in a better next quarter. And I never thought Metro would last this long, let alone that it would spawn a thriving newspaper chain that ranges from the edges of Monterey County to the edges of Mendocino County.

Seeing the paper live and grow has been gratifying enough, but there's a special perquisite for working here that has never staled. Yes, every sentence that got cut or rewritten still howls out for vengeance years later, despite much consolation by Sharan Street and Michael Gant, my longtime editors, that it was all for the best. Such little disturbances of man are nothing compared to this one special perk I mentioned. Alternative journalists, unlike daily paper wordsmiths, are allowed to venture their opinion to the readers. We can write: "Discomfort is not the word for it: This procedure will cause momentous physical pain." Or, "This procedure will hurt like a bastard." Or, "Here's hoping agony builds character!" And if you live, don't eat the lettuce in the hospital cafeteria salad bar--it's got sulfites on it.

What working for Metro has taught me is the same thing I'd tell anyone else who wanted to write instead of being a wordsmith: Stick it out. Persist in your folly, and you'll live to see it become a tradition--and nobody likes to mess with a tradition. Just ask God.

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