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Jack & Clem: family reunion
Who: Jack P & Clem M
What: Family reunions and hard-bitten news. Or something.
When: Before Bennie-disappearance
Where: The newspaper office over Alexandria Books.
Warnings: Surly bad humor and snide catty commentary.
The newspaper offices were small. The entryway was to the right of the wide-plated windows of the bookstore and the stairs curled around the building possessively until they ejected you at the lip of a step up past a plate-glass door into the murky set of rooms that was the office. Small possibly excused the cramped nature of the place: a long trestle table ran down the middle of the room, laden with computers, printers, telephones, notepads, crumpled takeout cartons and coffee cups languishing in corners. There was a large, industrial printer shoved along the length of the wall to the immediate left on entering. It was partly responsible for the heat, and for the noise.
There was a notch of a kitchen carved out of the main rooms, and a bathroom door with a lopsided sign to the right. And at the very end of the room, blocked off by virtue of partition walls and a glass door with blinds slung so low they had clearly been torn to remain permanently down, the editorial office itself.
Jack's office was a nest of petty misery if not outright bebauchery. It looked like it hadn't been cleaned by anyone who knew the definition of the word in significant amounts of time, if not decades. There was a couch against the back-wall, which was leather and looked as if it had been on its last legs some distance ago and a heavy broad desk, much spread with more detritus. Buried behind and underneath and below all the shit, photographs could be dug out - there was one of a smiling, laughing redhead with her face tipped upward toward the camera. There was one of a sprawling yawn of a vista, all sand and dirt and fiercely blue sky. And one of a street-market in Ho Chi Minh city. There were no framed prints of newspaper column inches. No awards, save one that had missed the sweep and was propping up a corner of the desk.
Jack himself? Spread on his back on the couch, with a handful of papers and his eyebrows knit together in what might have been agony over prose or simply the hangover. The room smelled like cigarettes and coffee and spilled whiskey sodden into carpets. He had at least showered. But he was red-eyed and sleepless and furious with the state of the newspaper, not helped by the fact he refused to use more than three words at any one point in editing, lest it provoke what he now thought of as a curse.
What: Family reunions and hard-bitten news. Or something.
When: Before Bennie-disappearance
Where: The newspaper office over Alexandria Books.
Warnings: Surly bad humor and snide catty commentary.
The newspaper offices were small. The entryway was to the right of the wide-plated windows of the bookstore and the stairs curled around the building possessively until they ejected you at the lip of a step up past a plate-glass door into the murky set of rooms that was the office. Small possibly excused the cramped nature of the place: a long trestle table ran down the middle of the room, laden with computers, printers, telephones, notepads, crumpled takeout cartons and coffee cups languishing in corners. There was a large, industrial printer shoved along the length of the wall to the immediate left on entering. It was partly responsible for the heat, and for the noise.
There was a notch of a kitchen carved out of the main rooms, and a bathroom door with a lopsided sign to the right. And at the very end of the room, blocked off by virtue of partition walls and a glass door with blinds slung so low they had clearly been torn to remain permanently down, the editorial office itself.
Jack's office was a nest of petty misery if not outright bebauchery. It looked like it hadn't been cleaned by anyone who knew the definition of the word in significant amounts of time, if not decades. There was a couch against the back-wall, which was leather and looked as if it had been on its last legs some distance ago and a heavy broad desk, much spread with more detritus. Buried behind and underneath and below all the shit, photographs could be dug out - there was one of a smiling, laughing redhead with her face tipped upward toward the camera. There was one of a sprawling yawn of a vista, all sand and dirt and fiercely blue sky. And one of a street-market in Ho Chi Minh city. There were no framed prints of newspaper column inches. No awards, save one that had missed the sweep and was propping up a corner of the desk.
Jack himself? Spread on his back on the couch, with a handful of papers and his eyebrows knit together in what might have been agony over prose or simply the hangover. The room smelled like cigarettes and coffee and spilled whiskey sodden into carpets. He had at least showered. But he was red-eyed and sleepless and furious with the state of the newspaper, not helped by the fact he refused to use more than three words at any one point in editing, lest it provoke what he now thought of as a curse.
