The best thing that happened to me when I worked at a newspaper was shortly after I started.
The newsroom moved from one side of the building to the other.
My seatmates changed. Across from me sat a mentally disturbed man.
He was from Brighton, Mass., of Russian heritage, had grown up in an Irish neighborhood during the Cold War getting the shit kicked out of him. He was brilliant and the paper's crime reporter with a dim view of people.
He had an unfathomably deep sense of humor, cliched kindness for clueless newbie reporters, and a lyrical and exotic word style that quickly got to the thrilling point of local crime news.
He was fat.
I'd look up and his baby face would be staring at me. If I stared back at him he'd blow kisses at me.
Behind me, face to face, sat the newspapers two premier columnists.
They competed to see who got the most, meanest phone calls, letters and anger from readers over their columns.
MURDER
In college, I was a cab driver. One fall, there were two murders in a Cambridge college neighborhood. Stabbings.
I took a woman, girl really, from Boston to this neighborhood, nice apartments, lots of students. She was used to the fare and had me let her off at the end of her street rather than go around the block to drop her in front of her building.
"Are you sure?" I said.
"Oh yeah," she said. "I do it all the time."
I mentioned the murders.
She hadn't heard. That was it. She was moving back to Manchester, New Hampshire. Didn't know how people live in a city where you always have to watch out for something. She paid and walked down the block.
People are careful when there are stabbings in Manchester, too. I told her that but it didn't matter.
AESOP
Writing is like sitting across from a crazy man blowing kisses at you.
It's laughing at negative reaction from haters**. (And you WILL have haters.)
It's when a nut starts terrorizing your neighborhood.
It's having a thick skin.
**Haters is a post-2012 word. I had complainers.
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