Phil Lemos
One month out from graduating college and my lot was covering Legion ball for the dying local paper. I lost my notes—not sure if they flew out the window that won’t close all the way or slipped hopelessly underneath the passenger’s seat, but it was hard to write a story from memory. I half-assed it, finishing up my game story, and asked Aidan, the sports editor, if we could talk.
“So, this guy Rex offered me a full-time job at The Portchester Daily Dirt,” I said. This was disappointing. I wanted to stay here with The Bugle, maybe Aidan would let me cover a Red Sox game at some point. but the reality was that I needed full-time work. My parents had presented me with an ultimatum to be out of the house by the end of the summer.
“You wanna work for Rex, huh? I used to work for The Dirt. Covered high school sports. Good luck.”
I nodded. “Thanks.”
“Just one thing, though,” Aidan added.
“Yeah?”
“When you work for Rex, don’t lose your reporter’s notebook.”
***
I was assigned to work in The Dirt’s North Portchester bureau. I cobbled together enough money to plunk down a deposit on a cheap apartment in downtown North Portchester, a classic New England mill town that hadn’t yet recovered, and probably never will.
After a couple of days of training, modules and paperwork, I arrived in the bureau on my third day, where I was greeted by the bureau chief, Nate. I could tell this wasn’t exactly big-time Boston media because Nate also ran a chain of five convenience stories, and he spent most of the time in the bureau not writing stories but philosophizing about how if only the Republicans took back the White House he’d be able to make money. There are three other reporters in the bureau—Gil and Mike cover North Portchester, and James covers some of the fringy surrounding towns. I’m assigned to cover the other fringy towns—Shutesbury, Bow Lake and Southwood.
The first thing I noticed about the paper is its layout, which looked like the board on Jeopardy!, with stories splashed all over the front page like clue boxes.
The next thing I noticed was that nobody was happy.
Nate spent all his time running his convenience stores. The guys in the bureau informed me that Troy, the guy I replaced, left after a month. The guy before him, Tom, did the same. The bureau already had bets on me. They predicted I’d be around for six weeks, and by three weeks I would throw up my hands and say, “I hate this job!”
One night when I went to the Bow Lake Board of Selectmen meeting. The meeting lasted less than 30 minutes. There were no items on the agenda. They were shocked that a reporter showed up. Afterwards, Nate asked me why I don’t have a story.
“Nothing happened,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Nate said. “Something always happens.”
“No,” I said. “Literally nothing happened. They paid some bills.”
Nate started to sweat. “You have to find something,” he said. “You can’t go to a selectmen’s meeting and then not write about it. The taxpayers in town need to know what’s going on. Even if it doesn’t seem like much, it’s a big deal to the residents.”
This went on for several weeks. I ran out to cover car accidents in which nobody was hurt. I got dispatched to go report on what looked like a “raptor” running in the middle of Route 125.
“You don’t really think it’s an actual Velociraptor, do you?” I asked Nick.
“Well, we should double-check,” he said.
In my third week, I was in the middle of writing a story about a rabid skunk in Shutesbury, and when Brad, the city editor, asked me to call the town police and ask if the skunk was male or female, I hung up on him, threw up my hands and said, “I hate this job!”
***
I’d been reporting for a month when Rex called me down to the main newsroom to talk. I drove down to the main newsroom in Portchester. Rex was sitting in his office. He had a grey handlebar mustache, and a lock of hair at the top that saved him from complete baldness. He looked like a walrus.
“How do you feel it’s going?” Rex asked me.
“I think it’s going OK,” I lied. “I like writing.”
“This isn’t a writing job,” Rex said. “It’s a reporting job. I don’t need good writers. I need good reporters.” As he spoke, his face became increasingly redder “I need someone who’s gonna go out and get the story, not someone who’s gonna go to a selectmen’s meeting and then not write a story. There’s a learning curve, but that time is over.” His eyes bugged out and became watery in his anger. He was the only red walrus I’d even seen.
He wasn’t done. “Do I even have a Shutesbury reporter? I don’t know. I’ve been told there’s one on the payroll. But I don’t see any stories from him.”
At The Bugle, all I covered was sports. Rex’s was right. I need to sharpen my reporting skills. I stumble out of his office and head back to North Portchester,
Three days later, I was pitching a story about another board of selectmen meeting. I realized Rex wants me to be a little more aggressive, and I took it to heart. If I have to, if there’s nothing else on the agenda, report every little bill they’re paying. I’ll ask questions. I’ll find a story. And, in my pitch that I send Rex, I tell him that.
“I’ll make sure they get me a story, if I have to throw a blanket over their heads and club them to death,” I wrote.
Around 8 that morning, my phone rang. It was Rex.
“When you’re done filing your stories, why don’t you come down to the Portchester newsroom so we can talk,” he said.
“OK,” I said. The paper went to press at noon. I finished my stories at 10:30 and headed down to Portchester.
Across the hall from Rex’s office is a glass-walled room, big enough for the entire editorial staff to fit in. It’s where the editorial staff decides which stories to run on the front page. It’s nicknamed the Glass House. Rex waves me over to it and shuts the door behind us.
“Do you even care about this job?!” He’s beet red again. “Throw a blanket over their heads and club them to death? You’re not taking this job seriously!”
It dawned on me that maybe my comment was perceived as unprofessional when the entire new room could hear this tirade.
“If you don’t want this job, just say so,” Rex said.
“No, I want it,” I said.
“Then you need to start taking this job seriously.”
I trudged out. Laurel, one of the news editors, was at her desk and looked at me.
“You got Glass-Housed, huh?” Laurel asked.
I paused for a moment, bewildered there was a term for what just happened to me. “I guess, yeah,” I said.
“It’s happened to all of us,” she said. “Rex has Glass-Housed all of us at one point or another. It’s not fun.”
“You think?”
“He just wants to know that you’re taking the job seriously.”
“Yeah, he drilled that point home.”
I took a look back at Rex as he returned to his office. He looked more and more like a walrus every day. But after his outburst in the Glass House, I called him Tyrannosaurus Rex.
***
The week after I got Glass-Housed, James quit. He had no job lined up, he wanted to figure out what to do with the rest of his life from the comfort of his parents’ home. He had the luxury of going home, whereas I didn’t. Besides, as much as I already hated this job, I wasn’t a quitter. If Rex fired me, so be it. But I wasn’t going to leave until he booted me out, or until I found a new reporting job at a bigger, better paper.
There’s a tradition in The Dirt newsroom. Whenever a reporter leaves, there’s a going-away party. The Sports Final is a bar right across the street from the newsroom, and Portchester is a fun party town on the coast with tons of bars conveniently located to support the alcoholic tendencies of journalists.
One such tradition at these going-away parties is Kissing the Monkey. The Monkey is a coconut attached to a string in the newsroom, with a monkey’s face carved into it. Near the end of every going-away party, after the bartender declares last call, the departing reporter kisses the coconut monkey. Nobody knows how this tradition started, but it apparently dates all the way back to the early days of the paper. Legend has it that whoever brings the monkey to the party will be the next to leave. Everyone fights for this responsibility.
At James’s monkey-kissing party, I talk to Dave, who’s the Portchester bureau chief. He’d been with the paper for five years, which made him the most senior reporter by a wide margin.
“Is Rex always this much of an asshole?” I asked.
“Are you kidding me?” Dave said. “He’s mellowed out considerably since I started working here.” I couldn’t even imagine, but Dave continued. “And when I started working here, I asked the same question you just asked, and the long-timers back then told me he’d mellowed out considerably since they’d started.” I imagined Rex putting cub reporters into headlocks and pile-driving them into the ground. That seemed the only thing worse than chewing me out in front of the entire newsroom.
James kissed the monkey and left the next day. I never heard from him again.
After the party, my newly declared goal was to work at The Dirt until someone who was hired after me left the paper before me. This goal took a weird turn six weeks after my start date, when James’s replacement, Anna was hired. Anna quit after four days.
I decided it was time to start sending my resume out.
***
Six months went by and I somehow managed to survive. Nate left for a job at the Union Leader, New Hampshire’s statewide paper. The Union Leader fired him a month later when he reported on a freak explosion at the home of a young couple, and incorrectly reported which one died and which survived. At least he had the convenience stores.
Meanwhile, I started to find my way in the world of news reporting, even though it was still a miserable existence. While Nate couldn’t keep dead bodies straight, I wrote about a fatal car accident in Southwood, which was caused because the unfortunate driver-victim hit a tree after he’d been distracted while watching another serious car accident, one that left two other people in critical condition.
Later that afternoon, I got a call from Rex.
“Great job on that story,” Rex said. “That was a very complicated accident—really two separate accidents—and it reads very clean. You’re doing really solid work.”
“Ummm, thanks,” I said. It was the first time Rex paid me a compliment. He said he was an old crime reporter, so he paid special attention to fatalities.
That didn’t stop me from sending my resume out. I did what I had done six months earlier—sending my (updated) resume to every daily newspaper in New England. I got a few nibbles but nothing worthwhile. The Derry News, a weekly newspaper about half an hour away, was looking for a sports editor. While it would’ve been a sportswriting job, it also would’ve represented a pay cut, and the only sports in Derry were the high school teams from Pinkerton Academy. I passed.
Anna was replaced by Keenan, who was straight out of the mold of James. We all knew Keenan wasn’t going to last because he had his “I hate this job!” moment on his first day in the bureau. What really doomed Keenan was weekend cops duty. Essentially, we all worked a Monday-Friday work week. But we also alternated weekends. There were four of us in the bureau, and so once a month I’d have weekend cops, which meant I had to stick around at home with the scanner, so I could respond if a fire, or murder, or accident happened. I got good at this. There were fatal fires, car accidents, all the time on my weekend. Gil, who took over for Nate as North Portchester bureau chief, nicknamed me, “The Deacon of Death.” With Keenan, it was a crapshoot. Like I had been in my first month or so, Keenan didn’t always see the significance of what for city folks seemed to be minor incidents. And then, on his second weekend cops shift, I got a call in the middle of the night, because there was a fire in Bow Lake and nobody could get in touch with Ken.
I was pissed, but I dragged myself out of bed and covered the fire anyway. Turned out that Keenan went to Boston that weekend for a concert to see this band that he liked called The Shitheads. The real tragedy was, we later found out The Shitheads were also playing in Boston the following weekend, when he wasn’t scheduled for cops duty.
Keenan didn’t last the week. That was the first time since I’d worked at The Dirt that Rex actually fired someone.
By the time I hit the seven-month mark I was actually in the upper half of the newspaper seniority. Keenan had just received his walking papers, others left for bigger papers, or to escape the madness. The Portchester police beat reporter, Aidan, who had been the golden boy at the paper, was leaving to move back home to upstate Maine. One morning, shortly after Aidan gave his notice, I was furiously typing away to finish a story when Rex called me.
“Phil, this is Rex,” he said, in his wicked North Shore Boston. Even though he once paid me a compliment on my accident story, Rex usually didn’t call reporters to dole out praise.
“Hi, Rex,” I said.
“Wanted to see if you had thought about applying for the Portchester police beat,” he said.
“Ummmm, not really.” That was an understatement. Things were going better. But I was still under the impression that my job was on the line every morning. Portchester police was the prize beat at the entire paper. Rex considered it an extension of himself. Surely there were more capable reporters who should receive priority for this beat. Gil was North Portchester bureau chief now and he was doing a great job. Mike was a dick, but also a good reporter. Dave had been in Portchester forever. The list went on.
“Well, you should. You free this afternoon?”
“Umm, yeah?” I usually took a nap in the early afternoon, because we had to be in the bureau by 6am to start writing stories.
“Great. See you at 1:30.”
***
Gil and Mike were very encouraging for me to take the beat. Word on the street was that Gil’s girlfriend, Nicole, who was the Hampton Beach reporter, had applied for the Portchester crime beat. She would’ve been a great candidate. Nicole was a tough, intrepid, ambitious reporter who someday wanted to cover the Middle East for an international paper—definitely more of a passion for the crime beat person than I ever had. Gil said Rex shot her down pretty quickly, saying he had a “preferred candidate” in mind.
The Portchester newsroom was at 333 Central Ave, an oddly shaped labyrinth in downtown Portchester. It’s wedged like a concrete bunker or foxhole at the corner of Central and Henry Law Avenue. I had no idea who Henry Law was, and “avenue” was a misnomer. Henry Law Ave. barely qualified as a paved roadway. It was basically a parking lot for the I employees.
I went in and talked to Rex about the crime beat. It involved a modest (because the reporters’ pay here was dirt to begin with) pay raise. I had just been taken off probation, because unlike many reporters I’d survived the six-month mark at the paper, so I got a second raise in less than a couple of months. The cool thing about the Portchester newsroom was that they had new computers, not the behemoths that looked like 1970s Commodore PETs that we used in the North Portchester bureau. The Portchester computers had color screens. You could even change the color! Every week I’d switch from blue to red to green to white and back to blue. We even had (gasp!) email.
I had to accept the promotion. It felt like I was starting to work toward a career goal. Rex told me a lot of great sportswriters started in hard news. Rex was pretty tight with Paul, the Portchester police chief. The paper and police department had always had a good relationship. This promotion would look good on a resume (because I was going to continue to send my resume out). I could see how the sports department operated—the sports desk was right next to mine.
I talked to Aidan during his monkey-kissing party at The Sports Final, an aptly named bar in downtown Portchester that hosted many of these bashes.
“So,” I asked him, “Why are you leaving?” Aidan really was the golden boy. He could do no wrong. And yet, he was going to take a job at a smaller paper in upstate Maine.
“I’m burned out, man,” Aidan said. “It’s time for me to move on.”
“To a smaller paper?”
He stopped talking and gave the monkey a big smooch on its coconut-textured lips. He might’ve simply been too drunk by then, but he never answered my question.
***
The problem with the Portchester police beat was working in Portchester. In the main newsroom, Rex was always lurking right around the corner. When you worked in the bureaus, Rex would only get up your ass if you fucked up royally and conspicuously. Otherwise, you were out of his crosshairs. In Portchester, if you submitted a story with one typo in it, you’d hear it from him. Every morning he posted the Rex-o-Gram, an email where Rex typed out all the stories in The Portchester Call, our daily competitor. If there was a Portchester-related story in the Call that we didn’t have, Rex would insert a snide comment next to that headline in the Rex-o-Gram (“Do we even have a Portchester crime reporter? I heard there’s one on the payroll.”). He’d walk by my desk, stand with his ear to the police scanner, and play mind games with me. If the dispatchers were talking about someone in a cranberry field, he’d ask me what was going on, and if I didn’t know, he might send me out there, only to figure out the police were simply chatting up a local business.
Things came to a head one day in March when Rex gave an enterprising assignment that detached me from my beat for the day to travel to the state police department headquarters in Concord. The next morning, I returned to the newsroom, and I submitted the 911 feature for the morning meeting, where the editors got together in the Glass House and argued about which stories run where.
Tyrannosaurus Rex emerges from the Glass House.
“That’s not the story you were supposed to pursue,” he said.
“That’s exactly what you told me to pursue,” I fired back.
He cleared out the editors from the Glass House, pointed at me and screamed, “GET IN HERE!”
***
Now I was on probation. Rex said any screw-up on my part for the foreseeable future was grounds for termination. The next day. I screwed up someone’s name in a story and was going to have to write a correction. Every so often we, as a news staff, got a little careless about spelling and other minor details. He had just sent out a Rex-o-gram that morning, in which he scheduled a mandatory seminar for all reporters to discuss “sloppy attention to detail and a general lack of common sense.”
It was inevitable that Rex would find out anyway that I had to write a correction. If I didn’t tell him about it first, he might consider that a screw-up as well. Either way, I was probably gone. It would really twist the knife to tell him about the correction now. If I was gonna get fired, I might as well get terminated my way.
“So, yeah, I gotta write a correction today,” I said.
Rex looked at me.
“See, this is what I’m talking about,” he said. “You’re careless. Now go write the correction and be here for the corrections meeting this afternoon.”
“OK, thanks,” I said. “Also, you still owe me $10 for your NCAA basketball tournament bracket.”
“Oh, right, I’ll get that to you shortly.”
Apparently probation was in name only, because I screwed up and lived to tell about it. I started sending my resume out once again, to every daily newspaper in New England. I also started stealing the issues of Editor & Publisher magazine, the newspaper trade publication, from the newsroom. E&P had a classified section in the back where the magazine posted newsroom openings. I didn’t need to tell those folks that I was on probation. All I had to do was send them a resume and a portfolio of stories.
***
The Dirt sports department consisted of Trent, the sports editor, and three staff writers, Roger, Sarge and Will. They’ve been intact for years. Sports reporters never leave. They knew a cushy gig when they saw it.
Of course, while I was sending my resume out, Will resigned.
Brent left to become the sports editor of a small weekly newspaper near Portland, Maine. My desk was next to the sports department. I talked to those guys all the time.
“Are you gonna apply?” Trent asked me.
Now I had a decision to make. I had gotten relatively decent at news reporting, but I still fancied myself a sports guy at heart. The Dirt wasn’t like The Bugle. They didn’t cover Red Sox games. But they did cover the athletic teams of University of New Hampshire, an NCAA Division I school. The UNH Wildcats men’s hockey teams were perennial national championship contenders. Also, Olympic gold-medal swimmer Bianca Jones hailed from Portchester. Trent actually convinced Rex to send him to the Summer Olympics in Australia to cover her exploits.
I thought about it. It’d be fun covering UNH sports. I’d also have to cover high school sports, which wasn’t as fun. But I could live with that.
Still, I was on Rex’s shit list. Even if I did apply, I wasn’t even sure Rex would bring himself to reward me at that point in my career there.
“Thanks,” I told Tim, “but I’m going to pass.”
To be honest, at that moment I felt like I had to make it in news before I could switch to sports. If I was going to stay at The Dirt, I had something to prove to myself. I wasn’t ready for sports writing here, because I believed I hadn’t earned it yet.
It became a moot point less than a month later. Brent came begging for his job back. The weekly newspaper had suddenly folded and he got his UNH sports beat back. I would’ve been stuck exclusively covering high school sports. It was probably a blessing in disguise.
***
Everyone was bailing on The Dirt except me. Gil and Mike had both left for bigger papers. I had been at I for a couple of years now. I was now the second-longest tenured news reporter at the paper, behind Dave.
My job search continued, and it was frustrating to get nibbles. I went on a series of job interviews. Three of them were sports reporting jobs. Two at small daily papers in Vermont, one at a small daily outside of Syracuse, N.Y., back in my college stomping grounds. I was turned down for all three. One was because I didn’t have any editing experience, another because the publisher’s son had just graduated from college and asked his dad if he could write sports.
Then I landed a bunch of interviews for news reporting jobs at larger papers—first in Quincy, then in Lowell, then Springfield, then Worcester. Each paper I interviewed at was larger than the previous one, offering more money.
Each paper turned me down in favor of someone else.
Dave was right. Rex really was mellowing out. He took me off probation and even gave me a raise, unsolicited. He told me I had improved a great deal, and that he trusted me with the crime beat. I had been at the paper for two-and-a-half years, and while I had just received another raise at The Dirt, my pay was also dirt. My student loans started coming in, and I was having more and more trouble making ends meet.
I got desperate and called Gil. He had left The Dirt for a job at The Hartford Courant. He told me they were looking. He forwarded me the phone number of the Downtown Bureau Chief, Scott, and told me to give him a call.
I called Scott. He told me they had dozens of applicants. I told Scott none of them were as good as me.
Scott told me to come on down to Connecticut for a job interview.
***
I had eared quite a few comp and vacation days, to the point where every time I took a day off, Laurel said, “So…job interview, huh?”
“What?” I asked. “What did you hear?”
“Phil, you’ve been here for almost three years,” Laurel said. “All the editors assume you’re looking.”
I spent the day in Hartford, then I thanked Dave for his time and headed back to New Hampshire.
Three days later, Dave called me.
“We could use you,” he tells me. “When can you start?”
***
Giving Rex my notice was surprisingly difficult. I walked into his office, sat down, and then froze. Just as he looked like he’s about to say, “What the fuck do you want?” I blurt out, “The Hartford Courant offered me a job.”
Rex sits at his desk. He nods.
“I knew we wouldn’t be able to keep you forever,” he said. “Congratulations. You earned it.”
“Thanks,” I said, soaking in the moment.
“So, why are you still in here?” he asks. “You gonna write some stories today or what?”
That’s the Tyrannosaurus Rex I know.
***
For whatever reason, I ended up bringing The Monkey to my own going-away party. I don’t remember a whole lot about my party. Beer and vodka shots at The Sports Final will do that to you. I do remember that I didn’t just kiss the money. I tongued it. I licked it. I fondled it. Things got really weird. But three years is a long time to spend at The Dirt. The only news reporter who was there when I started who was still there when I left was Dave.
Everyone’s last day was on a Friday. Traditionally, your monkey party was the Thursday night before your last day. The first time I ever overslept was on my last day.
I heard my phone ring. It was Stacy, the education reporter.
“Get up, get up,” she said. “Last day, last day.”
I walked into the newsroom. Rex glared at me.
“So, you had a Monkey Party and now you think you can sleep in?” he says. “Maybe you think your job just isn’t important.”
He got one last zinger in.
Except I got one in too. We got our signals crossed on when my last day would be. He thought I was still staying for another week. Not sure why because, by tradition, Rex should’ve known it was my last day by my monkey party celebration. Stacy told me Rex spent all Monday yelling and screaming in the Glass House, cursing me out, because he didn’t know why I didn’t show up for work. And the rest of the newsroom laughed.
***
Years later, I got a Facebook notification.
“Rex’s going-away bash! The mother of all monkey-kissing parties!”
The Dirt had just been bought out. Another local, family-owned newspaper selling its soul to corporate hell. No more Rex. He saw the handwriting on the wall. He was also 73.
I wouldn’t have missed this party for the world.
I walked into The Thirsty Raptor, a new bar in downtown Portchester right across from the old newsroom. I saw Rex. He hadn’t changed a bit—still had that strange lock of hair on his front.
Would he remember me? It’s been years. There were 50 or 60 reporters who came and went during my three years at The Dirt. Hundreds of reporters came and went since I left.
I stumble up to the bar when I hear someone call out my name. I turn around. It’s Rex.
“How’s it going?” I shake his hand.
We catch up. I tell him about how I now manage a convenience store, just like Nate used to.
“What about Hartford?”
“I got bored. You were right, I didn’t really wanna be a reporter.”
“Really?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “And I’ve turned into you. I got all these lazy convenience-store employees who don’t wanna do any work. I come in on Monday morning and the beverage cooler isn’t stocked. And then I’m like, ‘Do we even have a cooler guy? I heard there’s one on the payroll….’”
Rex laughed. I chuckled, too.
But at the end of the night, as Rex smooched the monkey, I realized it wasn’t funny. I’ve become Rex. Rex taught me a lot of discipline. He made me a better reporter. He taught me work ethic. But he was also an asshole. And I became an asshole too, berating and Glass-House-ing my share of employees who, yeah, needed to try harder—but also deserved to be treated better. I became the boss I hated. It’s something that seeing Rex again after all these years made me painfully aware of.
Phil Lemos has too many MFAs. After career stops where he lugged pallets around a warehouse and processed payroll, he now teaches Creative Writing at Clark University. His short fiction and essays have been published in The Valley Review, Now What? The Post-MFA Survival Guide and Assignment Magazine, among other places. A bunch of people have asked when he’s gonna finish that novel…
Stone Quarterly 