Blast from the Past

I am broken down on Cunnliffe Road on the north end. Daryl, the postmaster is mad as hell and has somewhere to go in his red convertible Mustang. The damn mail is baking in the midday sun.

I took this job to please the in-laws. Some civil worker notion that in 25 years I could take four weeks paid holiday. Boy was I ever wrong about that. Now, this was all way back, before forever stamps and the never ending wars and Homeland Security and didn’t Mickey and Donna just retire from the front of the house. I took the job at the Vashon Post Office thinking I’d flirt with housewives and pet their dogs, now it’s only this silly postal jeep overheating and grumpy catalogue-crazed old ladies waiting for something important.

This was way back when you could smoke and take your dog in the bar. The thing at the post office didn’t work out. God, I’ve never had a more Kafkaesque assignment. The mail never stopped. And it was at least 7/10 junk. It piled up over Sunday and come Monday morning and you had to sort it all out before you headed out to deliver it.

I could never see driving a wagon from the passenger seat. Bought this jeep from a woman on Whidbey; seven hundred bucks. She has quit the mail, but in the meantime her husband had fiddled with it so now it would do 40 mph just fine. Trouble was it wouldn’t do the mail any more. Stopping and starting would positively seize it up.

This was before The Red Bike and the dead gazillionaire owned the Back Bay. This was before even M.B. started speed dating, especially since she met her spare change husband.

The newspaper came out of a late night drinking session with Gino the cook for Fishy’s and Ralph, a red-nosed-thick-necked-sad-faced Rhodes scholar.

I’d hired on as a bartender. Shout out to Carol and Wayne; you were true humanitarians. We were talking about how Vashon needed its’ own paper. Our corporate rag with the old-fashioned name was edited by a crazy mean woman by the name of Alice Somethingoranother, It was stuffed with circulars from off-Island super stores and stories of hay rides and the acrid editorials of Alice.

"Yeah man, we need something that reflects the Island," Gino said. Gino was sleeping in the restaurant’s office. His niece was a stone cold fox, but I was married then.

At any rate, we were talking about the newspaper. The Ticket really delivered. People came out of the wood work to write for us, and we were all blessed that it went as well as it did. I went mad. Burned out. Too much information and it was all getting mixed up. All I wanted was an extended vacation, but one of my co-workers thought she could run the paper by herself, and there was a hostile takeover of sorts, or rather, a passive aggressive one. When I wouldn’t submit to their outrageous demands, they ran away with my ad copy, what was left of my good will, and the writers. Were I a more litigious person I would have sued. As it was the story dragged on and The Loop was born. They kept it alive long enough as to leave it half buried in debt.

Me, I continued to crack up. Took the $10,000 in our account and went to Guatemala for three weeks. This was all a long time and a lot of water under the proverbial Judd Bridge ago.

John Browne came up with the name of the new paper. I always felt a little odd about that, but then, I’m a little odd, he probably had no idea it would become such a colossal bummer.

Steve, the now editor of The Loop asked me to come in with a piece.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"Whatever you want," he said. That was a mistake. There’s not much work in this town and the corporate paper has a very good editor now. I think this town needs a monthly or bi-monthly literary zine, not a second rate paper. Newspapers are so yesterday’s news.

Hamish Todd
hamdogthirty@yahoo.com 

 hamdogthirty@yahoo.com