— W.B. Yeats
In The Paper’s Midtown Manhattan office, the long fluorescent light fixtures contained the silhouetted carcasses of cockroaches that had died making the journey from one end to the other. The carpet was a Rorschach test of spilled cola, coffee, and cigarette ashes. This was where I worked for the better part of a year.
I call it The Paper because that’s how I thought of it back then, just as “the paper,” as if it were a major daily. At The Paper it was our job, once every three weeks, to tell the stories that the big papers ignored. I spent a summer following an independent mayoral candidate who had no hope of winning. My co-worker Zoe spent several months covering a strike when she should have been working on her résumé. To be fair, The New York Times did briefly cover the strike, but Zoe’s coverage was a lot more in-depth, and I was in love with her.
