It was the early ’90s, and the Philadelphia-based weekly that had given me my start, the Welcomat, had fortuitously fallen under the control of the best possible people. Better still, they offered me a staff job. So I quit my security guard gig at the Guggenheim, and began commuting from Brooklyn to Philly for two days each week to play out my role as “Editor-at-Large,” which I took to mean they never knew where the hell I was.
Before long, the five of us on the editorial staff (headed by Derek Davis, who’d been my first editor) transformed the Welcomat into exactly what we thought it should be. We were old friends, we were of the same mindset, we shared the same sense of humor.
We brought in writers and cartoonists we liked, we ran stories we liked. The office walls became covered with insane posterage, the ceiling a home to a hundred or more species of dangling plastic animal. The air in that room filled with music few people could tolerate.
Every week, we found a way to smuggle the phrases “swinging hepcats” and “beverage vehicle” into the paper somewhere, for no reason whatsoever.
We’d go out to lunch and get drunk, then that night I would crash at someone’s house and get drunker.
Didn’t make much money (my salary just about covered my commuting expenses), but we had a hell of a good time and put out a hell of a good paper.
Then the people who owned, but thank God never read, the paper decided they needed to bring in... a publisher.
It sounds like a mighty fancy and important job, and always sits up there near the top of the masthead, but when you get right down to it, a publisher is nothing more than a glorified ad salesman. The job entails nothing more than running the business department. That’s all and that’s fine.
We learned the guy they were bringing in had been the publisher of New York Press in the late ’80s. Now he was coming to Philly. That seemed a little iffy, so Derek and I talked to some people who had worked with him. The reaction was universal—“Don’t believe a thing he says,” they all warned us. “He’s a backstabber.”
We chose, for some reason, to ignore this advice and hope for the best instead.
And when the new publisher was finally brought in, he seemed nice enough. He told us straight off he would leave us be. Hell, Derek and I even went drinking with him one night, and left convinced that he was an all-right fellow.
•
Things continued as they were—which is as they should have been—for two months before the subtle pressures started making themselves obvious.
This publisher, who looked like a young Gerald Ford and seemed about as bright, just didn’t get the paper. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t his job to get it—he didn’t, is all, and that upset him. Suddenly he couldn’t sell ads, because the paper was too whacky. Suddenly some of the artwork was a real turn-off. For the record, the paper wasn’t getting any smaller, yet he insisted that we were killing it with our high-spirited shenanigans.
Suddenly, he was back there in the editorial office, making suggestions and sitting in on editorial meetings. It became more and more evident that what we were doing wasn’t “commercial” enough for him, and that he was scheming to take steps to remedy that.
And sure enough, after a nose-to-nose screaming match in the middle of the office over whether or not we could reproduce a Joe Coleman painting on the cover (it would’ve been a real turn-off, don’t you know), I was fired. And Derek quit. And a week after we left, everyone else in that room was fired, too. A whole new editorial staff was brought in, and the name of the paper was changed, and it became “commercial.” It also became just another one of those bland, predictable weekly “alternative” papers that you’ll find in every major American city, with the same stories, the same attitudes, the same comic strips.
I’m not a bitter man. I put it all behind me, and began writing for the Press. I never gave that publisher (or “Baldy Fuckwad,” as we came to know him) another thought.
Until, that is, October, 2000 rolled around, and word came by way of a company-wide memo that we were getting a new publisher here at the Press.
Don’t bother me none, I shrugged to myself. Seen it happen plenty of times bef—
I looked at the name. Then again.A moment later, I was in John Strausbaugh’s office, holding the sheet of paper aloft.
“What the fuck is this?”
“Whaddya mean?” He looked up, puzzled.
I thrust the memo at him.
“Yeah? So?” He caught himself and said, “Ohhh.... that’s right.”Then he laughed long and hard.
I glared at my laughing editor until he realized that I wasn’t laughing with him. Immediately I came up with some ground rules. I didn’t have to worry about him messing with editorial—I knew the editors would never let that happen. Still, though.
“He does not come into my office for any reason,” I announced, counting the points off on my fingers. “He does not talk to me. If he sees me in the hall, he gets the fuck out of my way. And if he interferes, in any way, with my work here, I will kill him.”
I don’t say things like that very often. This time, I knew I meant it.
•
That same day, I began getting letters of condolence from people who’d worked with him, each with a story of lies and backstabbing, coercion and threats. Nobody liked this man. No, it was worse than that—everybody I knew who had ever met the man hated him with a passion normally reserved for child molesters, ventriloquists and Hitler. So why was he here—especially after he’d already been canned from the same job?
I’ll never know. It’s an old question; Why do the assholes end up in positions of power?
Weeks later, Baldy Fuckwad was given a welcoming tour of the premises. I heard the introductions working their way down the hall toward me. When he reached my office, I stayed put, kept working, didn’t look up, said nothing. And when a voice said, “I believe you two know each other, right?” I merely growled. It was more than he deserved. He’s lucky I didn’t throw a stapler at his puny, newly-shaved head.
Over the following months, things were okay. Oh, he strode through the halls real imperious-like, and real fast (because, you see, he was a real important man, with real important places to go), always looking down his upturned piggy nose at people with his little piggy eyes. He’d glare at me, pick up the pace when he saw me coming, but he never spoke to me, and never came into my office.
I believe I kept my end of the bargain as well. I never left threatening messages or pissed on his desk, and never tried to beat that balder-than-ever little skull of his into jelly with a baseball bat.
(Although I admit I did my share of glaring, too.)
For a few weeks in early summer, he took to trying to slam me against the wall whenever we passed in a hall, which I thought was a pretty classy move. (He never succeeded.) A couple times he tried to whack me with the bathroom door, but never did a very good job of that, either. After several such failures, I took to carrying a heavy porcelain coffee mug with me wherever I went, just in case, and he took to changing course whenever he saw me coming.
I admit this was childish, schoolyard behavior—but just seeing that smug son of a bitch striding down the hall churned my guts and filled my mind with hot black hatred.
•
Then, almost a year after I first heard that Baldy Fuckwad was coming, I heard that he was going. Apparently he hadn’t done a very good job, again. It was a glorious day. A dancing-nekkid-in-the-streets kind of day. A “smell of napalm” kind of day.
As they so often are in the newspaper business, the details of his departure were sketchy, but what mattered was that he was on his way out.
Two days after the news came, a funny thing happened—though I swear it was an accident.
I was in the habit back then of stalking through the halls here with my head down and my hands balled up into fury-stiffened fists. That in itself had nothing to do with him—it’s just the way I walked, generally, and it was easier than screaming all the time.
So it was early on a Thursday morning, and I was on my way to get a drink of water.
Again, swear to God, it was an accident.
So, I’m on my way to get a drink of water, head down, fists clenched, and Baldy (who I thought was gone already) comes striding down the hall toward me, nose doubtless in the air, smug stench around him, same as always.
Then, as he passed me in the too-narrow hallway—BOOM—my fist swung forward and socked him right in the balls.
It was unintentional, sure, but when I realized what just happened, I couldn’t help but smile, just a little bit. For a year I’d been wanting to do much worse but stuck to the high road. This would do me just fine. A little going-away present. He said nothing, and neither did I. No apologies, no “excuse me, I’m sorry I just socked you in the balls.” Instead, I went ahead and got my glass of water, then went back to work. Baldy Fuckwad, I assume, cleaned out his desk.
I think Morgan put it best.
“Revenge,” she said after she heard the story, “is a dish best served slapstick.”
•
When I first tried to publish this story in the pages of New York Press back in 2001, an ad rep (lovely individual) leaked word of it to ol’ Baldy. And whatever the reason, the story was yanked at the last minute, though copies did get circulated around the office.
Now, normally I pay no attention whatsoever to media gossip—the comings and goings of various editors, what this or that columnist wrote, etc.—mostly because I don’t give a damn. I just do my job, keep my head down and that’s that. But I pulled the old Baldy Fuckwad story out again now because I’ve just learned that Baldy is being brought up from Miami to become the new publisher of the Village Voice.
The animosity between the Voice and the Press is tired old news, not worth dredging up again. The Voice may not be my favorite publication in the world, but I have nothing against the people who work there, personally. And so, on a very human-to-human level, I would like to sincerely send my condolences their way. I wish them only the best of luck in these coming dark days. Their lives are about to become miserable—but on the bright side, it probably won’t last long.
