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Chapter Eight

Jamie actually swelled with rebellious pride as he chanted an improvised battle cry, “Don’t buy the Trib.” Any tabloid editor who submitted so unimaginative a headline for the first edition would have had it rewritten for the second. But Jamie’s newly discovered ardor faded soon after a smiling brunette in an unbuttoned black coat, dark business suit and very high heels made brief eye contact and passed by.

The strikers cut a circuitous swath on the way back to the Trib building, picket signs swaying as they marched through the Fulton Street business area, past the fish market and along the East River. Some in the lunch crowd seemed amused. A few passers-by volunteered a thumbs-up. But Jamie recognized this common response he had seen while reporting at crime scenes and accidents, too many places where the curious couldn’t help but gape at a spectacle while hurrying back to their comparatively sane lives.

In fact, Jamie considered himself an accredited representative of those who wanted to have a general idea of what was happening and not much more. He didn’t fancy himself a journalistic insider as much as just someone who crossed into the disaster zone on an abbreviated fact-finding mission.

Truth be told, he was never very much at home around the sudden and occasionally shocking messes that commanded a few paragraphs in the next day’s paper. Get through it, he would tell himself. Get what you need and get back to the solitude of your partitioned workspace, to the anesthetizing clatter of computer keys. There he could enjoy the challenge of organizing the chaos of the street, of life itself, into an orderly and publishable six hundred words.

By the time the Alliance contingent was within a few blocks of the Trib building, Jamie’s throat was dry. He was chanted out, starved for lunch. His limp fist, when he bothered to raise it, would not have knocked out a horse fly. He only feigned a surge of energy when Steven, working his way back from the front of the pack, found him languishing in the middle.

“So, what do you think?” Steven said, walking alongside.

“I think we’re on strike,” Jamie said, impassively.

“It’s going to be a fucking war, you know?”

“I guess.”

“Listen, when we get to the building, we’ll need to start organizing picket duty right away. And then set up a meeting to create a longer-term strategy because you know that moron Robbins hasn’t thought of anything beyond getting us out of the building.”

Jamie nodded obediently. He watched as Steven, his body typically caffeinated, rejoined the front of the pack. Steven had inherited his father’s wiry frame—he was almost six feet tall, with dark brown eyes and a prominent nose that fit his angular face. His straight black hair, worn stylishly long, flapped in the breeze blowing off the river. Six months past his thirty-second birthday, Steven could still pass for a scruffy Columbia undergrad with jeans ripped at the knee and his hand on the tight ass of some poetry-reciting coed.

When they both were in college, Steven would occasionally invite Jamie to a party at his off-campus apartment on the Upper West Side with the promise of an introduction to a cute freshman he might get into bed with minimal effort and charm. But Jamie hated the inevitability of having to reveal himself as an interloper from Hunter College, a city commuter school. College life had been a mostly graceless, sexless tedium that concluded with him graduating after five years as a communications major. He minored in film studies, which more or less had credentialed him to consult the movie reviews before choosing which one to see.

Right out of school, he took a summer job teaching basketball three afternoons a week to semi-coordinated pre-adolescents at a Jewish Community Center day camp. In the fall, he was hired to work afternoons in the center’s after-school programs. One afternoon it was cooking class—tapioca pudding and grilled cheese sandwiches left uneaten by the kids for Jamie to pick at and dispose of. Another afternoon it was dodgeball in the gym. Finally, he agreed to replace the Cub Scout den mother whose pregnancy required sudden bed rest.

Most of the letters Jamie sent out seeking full-time employment went unanswered. He found a full-time job selling shoes in a department store. He sold magazine subscriptions making cold calls. Two years after graduating from Hunter, he went home one day and, with all the rehearsed humility he could muster, asked his father to help him secure a job at the Trib.

Morris looked at Jamie as if he’d requested a ride on the space shuttle. Molly shot Morris a hard stare.

“Why couldn’t you?” she said. “People do these things for their children. At least ask.”

Jamie was hired within the month as a copy boy, with the promise of promotion to editorial clerk if he handled his initial chores well. Six months after Jamie pioneered a second generation of Kramers at the Trib, Steven graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism. He was snapped up right outside those august gates of academia as a general assignment reporter.

“Don’t worry, I won’t make you get coffee for me,” Steven told him during a family dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Only Becky, with whom Jamie made eye contact, seemed to acknowledge what a shitty thing it was for Steven to say.

Jamie, as usual, hid his envy and did his best to tolerate Steven, who always looked like he was ready to make a smart-ass remark—and often was. When they were boys, Jamie would complain to his mother that his cousin was a braggart and that he made Jamie feel like he was good at nothing. Molly would say, “He needs to make himself feel better because he hasn’t had it so easy.” Jamie could at least understand Steven in that context.

They were in grade school when Steven’s mother, Aunt Marge, began substituting scotch for her husband’s companionship while Lou worked night shifts in the composing room. By the time Lou caught on, she was deep into an alcohol-fueled affair with Freddie the mailman from down the block. They ran off when Steven, an only child, was in sixth grade. Uncle Lou raised him alone. Steven spent many a night doing his homework on the floor in Jamie’s room, sleeping on a cot a couple of feet from Jamie’s bed.

“My mother’s a drunk,” he said one night with the lights out. “I’m glad she’s gone.”

Jamie didn’t answer. He liked Aunt Marge for how she playfully teased his father for “only smiling on the day he gets a tax refund from the government.”

On nights before non-school days, Uncle Lou would take Steven to the office, where he would sneak away from the composing room to spy on editors and reporters hunched over keyboards—index fingers pecking away, covering for other fingers untrained. Steven was drawn to that life early on.

“He wants to be one of the big shots,” Lou would say, affectionately grabbing his teenage son around the neck. He said this once in the company of Morris and Jamie. Jamie wished his father had a comeback regarding Jamie’s future plans. But Morris had not a clue what Jamie was contemplating and neither for the most part did Jamie. They would stand by quietly, awkward and resentful.

When he was hired as a reporter, Steven scoured the streets for little people under siege by landlords, city agencies, anyone in power. His writing was filled with bold, effusive commentary—leaving Cal Willis rolling his eyes and a finger on the delete key.

Occasionally Willis even wondered about the veracity of Steven’s quotes. They were so well-timed and pithy that any editor worth his salt and cynicism would question if they originated from the notes of a meticulous journalist or the imagination of a Hollywood screenwriter.

“You sure he said this?” Willis would say.

“Here, it’s right in my notes,” Steven would respond.

There was no arguing with the fact that his cousin produced front of the paper copy. Within three years, he was off the general assignment schedule and given the freedom of an enterprise reporter. The column came soon after, before Steven turned thirty. It was more specialized than Pat Blaine’s—a demagogic, union-touting, Wall Street-bashing voice for the worker. Steven volunteered the title—“In Labor”—and even rendered a crude drawing of an old waterfront boss choosing his crew from a ragged crowd of workers. It became his logo.

The column was relished by the city’s unions, admired by some editors uptown at the Times. One of them called Steven to say, “We might consider you after you’ve matured as a writer and toned it down.”

He immediately went to Maxine Hancock and informed her of The Gray Lady’s quote-unquote interest. She offered him a raise and a contract.

“How would it look if I signed a contract and quit the union?” he said. Of course he gratefully accepted the raise. Mission accomplished, salary upgraded, he ridiculed the notion of going to the Times and writing stories he compared in style to text book math.

He proclaimed the Trib “my paper” and its readers “my people.”

But Steven’s column seemed to become an endangered species in the early reign of Leland Brady. He was too much the bleeding-heart to suit a publisher who had made his fortune in his native Dublin and later London and the Canadian provinces by generating readership less with personal conviction than sheer ambition. While longtime Brady associates described him as an avowed conservative, the editorial position of his newspapers was typically opportunistic. In New York, where the Times spoke to the liberal majority, Brady’s mission was to steer the Trib to the far right, to become so much the enemy of the Times and of Godless New York that even the Man Upstairs might sign on for home delivery.

Leland Francis Brady was well known in Ireland and the U.K. for his cozy relationships with the well-heeled and connected. Leveraged with a string of publishing houses, he rewarded his new friends with lucrative book deals. He fashioned himself as a more eccentric, flamboyant Murdoch and became known for his posh gatherings aboard luxury yachts. He reveled in being referred to by the broadsheets and trade magazines across the Atlantic as the hottest press lord. He conferred on himself the eminently bogus title of Lord Leland Brady—and ordered his companies worldwide to do the same.

He arrived triumphantly aboard the Vanessa Queen—named for his wife—in New York harbor to stuff enough cash into Maxine Hancock’s account to allow her to live luxuriously for her remaining days. The newsroom mourned her departure and welcomed Brady with a front page that read: LORD, HELP US. The staff’s true feelings were expressed in the late edition when the comma between LORD and HELP was mysteriously dropped.

Two days after the sale was complete, Brady rented the ballroom at the Waldorf and threw a bash for the city’s power brokers. Mimicking his social rituals abroad, he began throwing the occasional and extravagantly catered Friday night dinner party aboard his yacht. He drew up the guest list on Monday mornings for the city room manager he inherited, Carla Delgado. Rare was the invitee who declined, who wanted to risk not being a friend of the man who had come to New York to expand his influence in the New World.

In the blink of an eye, the Trib went from Hancock’s rugged and unaffiliated coverage of City Hall to unquestioning support of a conservative agenda. With an election coming up, Brady threw his editorial might behind Republican challenger Harold Zimmerman, summoning his city editor Willis into his office every day for a review of the next day’s political news. Armed with a bright red marker, Brady would check off stories or draw a large X right through the ones he didn’t approve of. The incumbent Democrat’s coverage was cut in half. When Willis groused, Brady offered him early retirement, with four weeks’ pay.

Willis was the first black city editor in the history of mainstream New York City journalism, still the highest-ranking African-American at any of the papers. He loved the Trib. He spent so much time in the newsroom—routinely working twelve-hour days—that reporters joked he had no apartment and slept on a Greenwich Village bar stool.

The upshot was that Willis was not about to surrender his job to Brady that easily.

Steven, conversely, was emboldened by the union protection he had for as long as the union could protect itself.

“Mr. Kramer, the champion of organized labor, if I am not mistaken,” Brady said when he made his introductory newsroom rounds. He was a massive man, six-foot-four and more than three hundred pounds, with thick dark hair that belied his sixty-four years. He had a taste for exquisite silk scarves.

“I write about jobs for New Yorkers, Mr. Brady—the ones who are your readers,” Steven responded.

“If our readers need a job, they may consult the want ads,” Brady said.

“The ads we run are for minimum wage jobs,” Steven said.

Brady laughed, much too smugly, in Jamie’s opinion, who was standing nearby.

“Travel the world as I have, young man, and you may discover that most people live terrifically contented lives on no great abundance of money,” Brady lectured. “What they most want is to have the faith that they can live and worship peacefully, without fear of being shot by a mugger or blown up by fanatics. Their newspaper has a moral obligation to help them with that, unless you believe—like many members of your Congress—that we ought to be in the business of guaranteeing them employment.”

With the last word, Brady moved on. Steven turned to Jamie and half-joked, “I’ll be pounding a beat by tomorrow.” But the only newspaper passion of Brady’s that outranked his ideology was his undying devotion to the bottom line. He set about operating the Trib on a shoestring, not even bothering to bring aboard financial or editorial people from his parent company. He merely installed his son Maxwell, bestowing on him the title of executive editor. Maxwell Brady took to proofreading the paper every night from the bar stool of the trendiest East Side haunts.

Lee Brady had apparently surmised that Steven’s column had too much readership to kill outright. The column continued, though Brady and occasionally his son grew into the habit of spiking one for every three printed.

Weeks before the strike, Steven had managed to deliver one dear to Brady’s own political sensibilities. He blistered the teachers union for threatening a job action if the city continued to explore its plan of reducing classroom crowding by operating a year-round school calendar.

Teachers want it both ways. They complain about overcrowded classrooms. Then they threaten to walk out when the Mayor sits down with the Chancellor and comes up with a viable working plan to ease classroom crowding by extending the school year. They say an extended summer vacation is essential to the well-being of students but it sounds like a self-righteous attempt to preserve the great American essay, “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.”

The column got the wood—the front page. The next morning, Brady stepped out of his office with the paper rolled under his arm. The newsroom came to a standstill.

“Pardon, pardon. The work today of Mr. Kramer was the finest example of what we set out to do here and must not pass without an appropriate show of appreciation. I have therefore instructed our accounting department to award our esteemed columnist a $250 bonus for his extraordinary essay.”

At which point, before the startled newsroom had fully ingested Brady’s spontaneous and uncharacteristic largess, Steven climbed right up on his desk and shouted, “Attention…attention, please.”

Brady, walking back toward his office, turned around and did a double take.

“I would like to thank Mr. Brady for his generosity. But columnists do not accept cash awards for their convictions. We only wish for every opportunity to express them, without editorial interference.”

Brady shook his head and walked away. Just as he stepped inside his office and closed the door, he unleashed a mighty, convulsive sneeze.

Steven bent his, slender frame into a perfect bow and bellowed, “Bless you, Lord.”

The city room broke out in laughter. Steven’s line was etched in Trib lore, contemptuous employees all over the building mouthing those words the moment Brady’s back was turned.

Brady continued to have the last word. The same day Steven rejected his gesture, he returned to work on a Sunday column about former welfare mothers being harassed by city workers. It was a controversy bound to land in the lap of the new mayor, Zimmerman.

Willis gave him the thumbs-down sign when he trudged back from his daily showdown with the publisher.

“Didn’t it occur to you that Brady might fire you on the spot for showing him up?” Jamie asked Steven the next morning.

He shrugged. “Fuck him. When the contracts run out and the shit hits the fan, this place will be a war zone—and then we’ll see how tough Lord Brady is.”

Jamie knew his cousin had been waiting for the strike, almost to the point of invitation. “The paper is already lost to this lunatic,” he said at Kelly’s one night, going over each slanted story, getting angrier by the beer.

“Steve, I don’t think there are too many people who actually want to go out,” Jamie said. “Things aren’t good out there in this business or in the economy. And the holidays are coming.”

Steven chugged more beer and kept talking.

“The only way we can get it back is to kick his ass in a fair labor fight,” he said. “He won’t keep it if he can’t have it his way. He’ll sell the damn place lock, stock and barrel twenty minutes after we shut him down. We’ll get our paper back. I’ll get my column back.”

Jamie listened to his cousin rant. He wondered if only a drunken fool—or a well-paid columnist with no dependents—could be so anxious to walk out.