1. Flagship

“The planks look warped! and see those sails,

How thin they are, and sere!”

 – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

 

The Los Angeles Chronicle building was a fossil. In 1915, it loomed over the stubby brick office buildings and whispering beanfields of downtown like an emperor’s summer palace. Now, in the year of our Lord, 1980, it was little more than a bit of history, freakish amid glassy high-rises and maniac buses.

Architecturally, it looked liked something based on California missions, and the Casbah. An Egyptian variation of an Elks’ Lodge. A Mesopotamian bingo parlor. It had been designed by a twenty-year-old Russian genius who was murdered at 21 in a homosexual love triangle. There were little turrets, like a fairy castle, and colorful ice cream scoop domes, like the Kremlin, and beige oval archways, like a Spanish adobe. Inquisitions might have been held in such a building (if you asked the reporters who worked there, they were), or incantations. It looked like something tourists would visit, then slap bumper stickers on their station wagons to let the world know they’d been there. Like the Trees of Mystery and the World’s Largest Ball of Twine.

Once upon a time, back in the era of ten editions a day, the Chronicle had been the flagship of a mighty fleet of newspapers, most of which had long since been torpedoed by television. The lobby was a monument to its past glory: a cavernous, downright palatial room big enough to carry an echo when you spoke, foreboding enough for sacrificing virgins.

There were icy, towering marble columns, ivory-inlaid mahogany braces, grim baroque ironwork, flying buttresses, and leering gargoyles said to house the souls of damned reporters. But the sheen was long tarnished, the grandeur cracked, like paint on a Rembrandt. Rodent traps lay out in the open, at regular intervals.

The heart of the place, if the term applies, could be found on the second floor, at the top of a swayback wooden staircase no steeper than the side of a pyramid. This was the city room. To enter it after a stroll through that grand lobby was like knocking on your date’s door and finding her at home, with no make-up, 30 years late.

Here was once a shiny, percolating den of snap-brims, spats, wisecracks, paste-pots, pica poles, booze bottles, cigars, rat-a-tat typewriters, shouts of “boy!” – and editors who learned the business from the basement up. In a way, things hadn’t changed much – things like desks, chairs, Venetian blinds, vinyl flooring, wall clocks, rat-a-tat typewriters – which had been in use since roughly 1940. The place still percolated, but it wasn’t shiny. Ten rows of grimy, gray metal desks ran up and down the length of the room, four desks in each row, occupied by a horde of squirming, smoking, wailing, cursing, moaning, coughing, laughing reporters. The snap-brims and spats were long gone, replaced by sneakers and flannel, short skirts and heels. Oh, a couple rows of computers had been thrown into the middle of it all, but they didn’t fool anybody. They fit in about as well as children in a convalescent hospital.

The nerve center of the city room – the city desk – was just a conglomeration of four of the old metal desks shoved together, from which the city editor and his assistants could sit and glower over their charges, like disapproving schoolmasters. Cockroaches favored the city room, as did spiders. Once in a while, a rat scurried out of one of the many tottering stacks of old newspapers lining the walls, and made a bee-line for another stack, where it disappeared. Families of possums had been seen scuttling down the hallways, late at night. Air conditioning was a memory, supplanted by a lingering melange of old newsprint, rotting wood, coffee, and Lysol. Buses regularly pumped clouds of black diesel smoke through the opened second-floor windows, lending a barbecued flavor to the fog of pipe, cigar, and cigarette smoke that settled into the place each morning.

More than once, I watched a prospective employee climb those steep stairs for an interview, take a quick look around, and leave without a word.