With that, Channel 10 Action News broke for commercial, and we all returned to drinking and swapping stories about other newspaper screwups. I was on my fourth Killian’s. Ulcer be damned; tonight I needed beer.
Logan had called the newspaper for comment, tipping us off to what was coming, so we’d fled the grim visage of the city editor and found a place more suitable for our gallows humor.
We’d been at it for nearly an hour already, Gloria kicking off the game of can-you-top-this by swearing that the small North Carolina paper where she got her start once reported a cat show with the headline NORFOLK PUSSY BEST IN SOUTH.
Abbruzzi had the floor now, spinning a tale about her days with the AP in Richmond, when a reporter trying to get literary with a weather story wrote, “Jack Frost stuck his icy finger into Virginia Tuesday.”
Sean Sullivan, a night-side copy editor for forty years, chipped in with a story about the drunk who covered Pawtucket City Hall for us back in the seventies. Not about to let the city fathers cut into his drinking time, he’d skip the council meetings and drop by the newsroom of the rival
“Took years, but we eventually lived that one down,” Sullivan said, “so maybe we’ll eventually live Sassy down too.”
Unless you’re a member of the tribe, you have no idea how hard journalists take mistakes. Sure, the business occasionally attracts a fraud like Jayson Blair, the reporter who got fired for making stuff up at
“If you write ‘Blackstone Street,’ which is in the poor part of town, when you mean ‘Blackstone Boulevard,’ which is in the rich part of town, no one will believe anything in your story,” my first city editor, the legendary Albert R. Johnson, once told me. That mistake cost me three nights’ sleep.
As we waited for Logan to come back and shock us, it was Veronica’s turn to tell a story.
“My first job after college, I had the police beat at a little paper in western Massachusetts. The editor, an old fart named Bud Collins, wouldn’t print the word
We all howled, but the commercial was over now, and the foxlike face of Logan Bedford was smirking again above the bar.
“I’m here with Martin Lippitt in the Silver Lake section of Providence,” he said, the camera angle widening to show a thirty-something standing beside Logan. “Martin, please tell us what you know about the amazing dog named Sassy.”
“Well, it’s like I told you. Her name isn’t Sassy. It’s Sugar. And there’s nothing amazing about her at all.”
“Sassy is really Sugar?”
“That’s right, Logan. See, I left her with some friends for a couple of weeks to go snowboarding in Vermont, but she managed to get away from them. Didn’t wander far though, just a few doors down.”
“To the home of Ralph and Gladys Fleming, right?”
“The new people, I guess that’s their names. Wouldn’t of known where she was, I hadn’t glanced at the papers piled up on the porch and seen her picture. That was some surprise, I’ll tell you.”
Veronica nudged me and started to giggle.
“So, where is Sassy, I mean Sugar, now?” Logan said.
“New people still got her. Won’t give her back.”
Now Gloria and Abbruzzi were giggling, too.
“They really think it’s their dog, don’t they?” Logan said.
“Sure do. Miss their own dog so much they convinced themselves it could have walked all the way across the country to find them. Of course, you gotta be a little nuts to believe that.”
“And a little nuts to print it,” Logan said, gleefully holding up a copy of last week’s paper with the big picture of Sassy/Sugar on the front. “So, what are you going to do now, Martin?”
“Cops promised they’d come by tomorrow, get my dog for me.”
“And Action News will be there! This is Logan Bedford, reporting live from Silver Lake. Back to you, Beverly.”
We were all roaring now, Gloria laughing so hard that tears rolled down her cheeks. This was bad for the paper. It damaged our credibility. It made us look ridiculous. But we were so giddy with drink and wacky newspaper stories that tonight a hockey game would have struck us as hilarious.
We were still giggling five minutes later when Hardcastle slid down from the bar stool where he’d been drinking alone and stomped over to our table. By his expression, it was apparent that at least someone was able to appreciate the gravity of the situation.
“Did you set me up, Mulligan?” he said. Thanks to the evening’s diet of boilermakers, his lazy drawl was even lazier. “Did you?”
That made all of us at the table laugh louder. We laughed so hard that a half dozen firemen sitting three tables away joined in, even though they had no idea what they were laughing at.
I could have saved Hardcastle from himself, but I didn’t because he was such a jerk. I was going to have to live with that for a long time. That’s what I thought. What I said was, “Hardcastle, maybe you should have waited for the doggy DNA.”
“Fuck you,” he said, provoking more peals of laughter.
“Well,” Gloria said as Hardcastle stalked off, “no call for any more newspaper horror stories. We have a winner.”
“Not so fast,” I said. “My turn.”
“No way you can top Sassy,” Veronica said.
“It’s Sugar,” Abbruzzi said, and Gloria laughed so hard that she tipped over her Bud.
“Back in the eighties,” I said as a waitress mopped up the spill with a bar rag, “the paper used to crown a Rhode Island Mother of the Year. Winner got a nice write-up in the ‘Living’ section and a free six-month subscription to the paper. Hundreds of readers would write in to tell us why their mothers were worthy of the honor. The reporter who dreamed up the idea would read each heartfelt letter, choose the best one, interview the letter writer and his mom, and write it up for the Mother’s Day paper. In 1989, I think it was, the city editor got a call the day we announced the winner: ‘Did you know that four of her sons are in prison?’ ”
The table erupted again. This time, it was Abbruzzi’s Amstel Light that went airborne.
“Nice try,” Veronica said, when it quieted down. “But the dog story can’t be beat.”
“You haven’t heard the rest of it,” I said. “Guess who wrote the Mother’s Day story?”
“Hardcastle?”
“That’s right.”
“Oh, no, he didn’t!”
“Oh, yes, he did.”
With that, I got up, gave Veronica a good-bye kiss, and headed for Secretariat.
21
I prowled the Mount Hope neighborhood again that night, looking for Mr. Rapture but harboring no hope of actually finding him. Around midnight, with a Cuban between my lips and Tommy Castro’s
