In celebration of my new collection of the so-called ‘best’ of 30 years of journalism, Clippings, each Monday in March I’m spotlighting one of the more than 100 pieces by me gathered up in this hefty tome. I hope you’ll consider grabbing a copy, now available on Amazon as a paperback for a mere US$14.99, or as an e-book download for just US$2.99!
I randomly divided this collection up by themes – Profiles, Places, Criticism and the like, and then there was a random selection of more goofy pieces I figured I’d just file under “humour.” This recollection of my very first job in journalism written while I was working at Lake Tahoe is, as best as I can recall, almost entirely true.
Scenes from the route
North Shore Truckee ACTION, September 2, 1998
I have edited newspapers and I have written for newspapers, but my first “real” job in this world was to deliver them.
I was a squirrelly, zit-faced and longhaired 13 going on 14, and I did it for about a year, delivering the Grass Valley Union from door to door in a square mile area several blocks from my home.
The Union is an afternoon paper, and so each day after school I would return home to find a bundle of Unions in our driveway, tightly bound. After an afternoon snack I would kneel busily on our dark garage’s concrete floor, taking my fifty or so papers and wrapping them with rubber bands. If it rained, you had to put them in orange plastic bags first.
The rubber bands sometimes snap if you rush things, and they twang off about the room spastically. Once one smacked me right in the cheek, raising a really embarrassing welt.
Your fingertips become black with ink as the headlines leave a bit of themselves on your skin. The day’s happenings are compressed into a small, dense cylinder of pulp that you lift and hurl repeatedly, trying to achieve a passable imitation of grace with each throw.
It was then, likely, that I began to stumble down the career path I follow tenaciously to this day. I was immersed in the smell of the hot paper, sometimes still steaming with the heat of the press, fascinated with the way the ink can cling to you.
I would ride down my route on my battered yellow bike, the newspaper bag carefully balanced on the handlebars, getting lighter with each block.
It was my first real job, and no one forgets the way that is – the strange freedom I felt riding my bike in the late afternoon on days that always seem cloudy in hindsight, the wind rustling the newspapers in my bag. I delivered news of President Reagan and “Peanuts” cartoons and what was on sale at Lucky’s, and I felt a part of some great system that pulsed beneath my 13- year-old world, a system I was just then beginning to perceive dimly.
I delivered newspapers and took inventory of my customers, the yards with plastic toys and broken bicycles in them, the houses with immaculate hedges and shrubbery whose porches I always aimed for with care.
The most difficult part of being a Union paperboy was collection time. At the end of each month I would go door to door on my route, getting $5.50 per customer per month to ensure they kept receiving their daily dose of news.
It was here you begin to encounter the world beyond lifting and hurling newspapers, and these days I’d dread somewhat. Demanding money from strangers was intimidating – looking briefly inside the anonymous homes I threw papers at, the couches where they read their Union each day.
I rapidly began to learn the language of excuses and rationale used so well in the grownup world.
“I paid you last month, boy, what are you tryin’ to pull?” one beefy guy who always wore too-small t-shirts would say to me every time I came by. And every time I would explain to him that he had to pay every month, he would mutter about what a rip-off it was, and he would finally pull five greasy dollars and fifty cents out of his pocket.
I learned how people wheel and deal, and I learned how people live without luck.
There was a cat woman. Every town has the cat woman, the twisted old lady who lives in a shack with a hundred stray cats. This woman’s house was crumbling and rotten, about to slide down an embankment onto the freeway overpass below. She had no teeth and no hair, and always wore a filthy Oakland A’s baseball cap. She would never have her $5.50 at the end of the month, and would gummily offer me excuses as ten of her bedraggled cats meowed and hissed around her legs. The cat lady had only one eye.
The cat woman would occasionally leave a folded dollar bill for me in her mailbox, toward paying off her slowly rising newspaper debt. I did not know what she did with her Union each day, if she read it or merely used it to line her floors inside what was surely one giant litter box.
And then there was “the towel lady,” as she would be enshrined forever in my pubescent memory. Each and every month when I would come by to get my $5.50, this highly attractive young lady, in her mid-twenties or so I’d imagine, would answer the door wearing a pink towel.
Just a pink towel.
You can imagine the fireworks this would set off in your typical 13- year-old paperboy.
Each month this woman would come to the door wearing just her towel, and she would give me my five-fifty and smile and I would melt into a giddy puddle of goo right on her doorstep.
I never could figure it out. If the towel lady wore just a towel once, I’d understand – she just got out of the shower or something, right? But each month, November or May or August, the towel lady would answer the door in her towel, and I would mature just a little bit faster.
The towel lady probably kept me doing the paper route a few months longer than I would have done – I was entering high school soon, and paper routes seemed too grade-school for my elitist brain then.
But I labored on with the route a few months into my freshman year of high school, always looking hopefully forward to my monthly visit to the towel lady.
The odds of gravity and physics were with me, I knew. That towel had to fall off eventually.
It never did, of course, except in my dreams.
This ink-stained confession and much more can be found in my new book Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024
Nik Dirga 