Tweaking
by Mark LaFlamme
It was the editors who snuffed the life out of the news business; I was convinced of it then and I'm convinced of it now.
Tired and yellow old crows who hacked and cut and chopped the guts from a story and left behind generic, mutilated blocks of robotic facts and data.
They patted each other on the back while they did it too, and exaggerated personal stories of the old days.
These spiteful creatures sucked the blood from cleverly narrated tales of city lust, greed and murder and left behind monotonous paragraphs of "he said, she said" and "alleged this, alleged that."
Newspapers didn't want writers anymore. They wanted mouthpieces for cops and city leaders. They demanded only translations of facts from officials, authorities and spokesmen. Reporters like myself became nothing more than glorified typists, stripped of their talents and individual styles.
Though they all had their own particular habits of disruption, some editors were far worse than others -- those self-deluded men and women whose revisions were so consistently painful and destructive, it had to be intentional cruelty.
Take Stone for instance, a man who could drive a seasoned pro to tears with his trimming and tweaking and obliterating revisions.
An arrogant son-of-a-bitch who would prattle proudly of his days and decades in the business even as he turned cut a once riveting tale of crime and punishment into a brief pile of paragraphs to be read during the first sip of morning coffee.
"Just the bare bones, my boy," the gray-haired, droopy-eyed bastard would say again and again and again until you wanted to beat him to death with a nearby phone. "The reader only needs to know what happened, when and to whom. Inverted pyramid. See?"
And hack hack hack hack, went your copy. First hand accounts from wet-eyed witnesses; Delicious quotes from a survivor; the comments and appearance of a heart-broken, horrified parent whose child was horribly killed; trembling words from the homeless man who stumbled on the grisly remains of a murder victim. Hack, hack, hack. Just the facts; just the bare bones. Stone was the worst thing that ever happened to the local newspaper, yet he was revered and lauded as a journalist.
By the time I was 35-years-old, I couldn't give him just the bare bones any more. I couldn't trim away all the flesh of a story so that all that remained were names, dates and a word from the nearest "spokesman." I couldn't beg him one more time for a little more space, a little leeway with a particularly juicy bit of information skillfully obtained at the scene of the crime.
I quit the newspaper and I got as far away from the business, as far away from that killer of prose as I could. I became the caretaker for a cemetery and I didn't read or write a word of news. I passed up the chance to become the mouthpiece for a state senator; I turned down an offer of a cushy job in public relations for a city hospital. Screw that: I had been letting people tell me what I could and could not write and say for years. It was time for quiet.
I found myself spending so much time in the caretaker's quarters at the edge of the rolling, immense cemetery that I eventually gave up my apartment in town.
I organized burials and funeral processions and a twelve man crew working under me kept the graveyard immaculate. Pine Grove Cemetery had itself a sentinel to look over its acres of dead with a caring eye and I had a quiet place where the hottest news was the latest occupant on the grounds.
At the very start of spring, when the snow was melting and the rains would soon begin, the newest arrival at Pine Grove was a pillar of the community who should have been in the ground years ago, as far as I was concerned.
R. Benjamin Stone died in his bed surrounded by family, according to his long-winded obituary, and I suspected he was enthralling rows of relatives with talk about his great reporting days when he drew his last breath.
A notably long story about the beloved geezer ran on the front page of the paper I had once worked for, and it dripped with gushing words about he dead man. The same day the story ran, Pine Grove Cemetery officials told me Stone had bought a burial plot decades back and he would be moving in.
Just my luck. The old bastard would be interred just fifty yards from my new home in the caretaker's quarters where I had moved to escape his presence.
"I worked for the man a long time," I told my bosses in my saddest voice. "I'd like to arrange his interment and even do some of the work myself."
"Your a good man," said the chairman of the board. "I'm sure he would have appreciated it."
For starters, I told one of my employees, a talented but lazy man named Lemke, that he could take that Saturday off. Lemke was something of an artist when it came to chiseling an epitaph on a tomb stone, but he hated to work. The newest monument to be erected in Pine Grove would mean a lot of work.
Predictably, Stone's family had rushed out and bought the most expensive and showy tombstone they could find, a big block of granite that would cast shadows on other head stones.
It was six feet high on it's base, five feet long and three feet wide. A 2,000 pound chunk of granite with impressive pillars at the four corners and intricately carved ivy leaves around the edges.
Atop the monument was a two-foot tall cherub to look down sadly and eternally upon the deceased. It would be a wonderful shrine to the pompous bastard, a place for his widow and snobbish, spoiled children to honor his life.
Because it was a special order, it wasn't delivered until the day of the funeral and the family would have to wait an extra day for the massive hunk of granite to be secured at the grave site.
The way I figured it, there would be enough tear-jerking words of adoration uttered at his cemetery plot to make up for the absence of the stone.
The monument arrived the Saturday of the funeral and it was fork-lifted into the maintenance building not far from my home in the caretaker's quarters.
Before I could give it a thorough inspection though, there was the matter of attending Stone's funeral at a cathedral three miles from Pine Grove Cemetery.
It was an exercise that required a deal of self will for me, as I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of others in the church and pretended to be grieved by the old man's death. A dozen people, including former and current journalists who worked with the great man, got up to spew their memories into the packed church.
He was a legend, he was kind. He was brilliant. He was a hero to many and a friend to all. Blah blah and boo hoo.
When it was over, I forced myself to shake hands with former colleagues and exchanged fond words of remembrance for that killer of copy.
As I exited the cathedral, in a long line of dark-suited mourners filing out into the bright, spring sun, a small, veiled woman walked up from behind me and grabbed my elbow.
"I heard you are to prepare his grave stone,” said a red eyed, Ruth Stone, widow of the deceased. "That is so kind and so appropriate."
I only nodded to her and touched her hand, managing to look anguished by the loss of R. Benjamin Stone.
"He would have appreciated it," the widow continued. "He probably never mentioned it, but you were one of his favorites. He always said you had potential and he was shocked when you left the business."
Her words were too much and I had to hurry away from the soft-spoken widow with a few quick words of sympathy. If I had stayed with her another moment, I might have screamed into her saddened face: "Potential? He said I had potential? The bastard! If that arrogant son-of-a-bitch would have had the decency to retire when he stopped being useful, he wouldn't have been around to destroy my work and my potential!"
Instead of saying that to her, I promised the sallow Mrs. Stone that I would take personal pride in finishing his monument. And I rushed from the church and the vast group of mourners and returned to the cemetery for a closer inspection of the giant monument.
It was massive indeed, and my job would be to delicately cut selected words of sorrow in promise into its face.
Lemke had once allowed me to carve out a few words on simpler stones as I was learning about my new career. It really was easy work once you'd laid the template precisely over the stone to guide the chisel your wrist would cramp up every once in a while.
I sat in the maintenance building alone with the massive monument of virginal granite.
In the cemetery outside, friends, family and colleagues of R. Benjamin Stone watched in silent sorrow as his coffin was lowered into the ground and covered with handfuls of dirt.
The words of the burial prayer drifted across the grassy cemetery to the maintenance shack where I hid from the procession. When it was over, the last of the mourners left the graveyard and the only sounds were the snorts and growls of a back hoe filling the hole in which the much loved R. Benjamin Stone now reposed. I turned my attention back to the stone monument that sat in the center of the garage waiting to be complete.
The gleaming surface was smooth and blank, begging to be filled with words of praise for the departed editor.
Lemke had left behind a neatly typed order from the funeral home that contained the exact wording to be etched on the monument. It went like this:
"Our beloved Richard Benjamin Stone has been taken by the angels of heaven and our fallen tears will see him gone. The hearts of his family and friends are heavy, but the kingdom of God is blessed with this great man. The good lord took away our dear friend to protect him and to behold his words of earthly wisdom and love until at last, we are all joined again in heaven. Died March 15, 1998."
Pretentious even in death, I thought as I grimaced at the lengthy epitaph; Pretentious and overbearing.
The iron template prepared by Lemke sat atop two saw horses next to the great monument. But first things first, I thought, sweeping a stack of funeral notices, bills and equipment orders from a desk top to the cement floor of the garage.
I sat at the desk and pulled a pencil from the packet of the black suit I'd worn to the funeral. I grinned down at the epitaph and began to scribble.
"The reader only needs to know what happened, when and to whom. Inverted pyramid. See?" I said with great glee.
I hacked off a word, scratched my chin thoughtfully, and then removed another.
"What happened and to whom," I said as I drew a line through an entire sentence. "The reader only needs to know what happened I shaved of another word, another superfluous adjective. I had hewn it down to where I thought it was just right and then remembered the words of wisdom from the editor Stone. I trimmed a little more, I tweaked that long and wordy copy and cut out the fat.
As I completed the final revisions, a sweaty and dusty man named Miggs stepped into the maintenance building.
"Your friend is six feet under and I'm outta here," Miggs said, tossing me the keys to the back hoe. "See ya Monday?"
"Yeah," I said to Miggs. "if I get this shit done before dark, I'll fork-lift this monstrous thing out there, save you the work on Monday."
Miggs snorted laughter.
"You enjoy your work a little bit too much, if you ask me," he said. "But I love you for it. S’long."
He was gone and I was alone in the cemetery for the rest of the weekend.
I looked over what remained of the epitaph and liked the final draft very much. I turned to the task of setting the template onto the great monument, measuring its placement with great care.
I had been looking at a four hour project of slowly and carefully chiseling those divine words into the granite. With the revisions, it would take far less time.
I grabbed the chisels Lemke had specified. I worked into a rhythm and began progressing at a good pace. Small fragments of granite flew around me, tapping against my protective work glasses occasionally as I bent in close to the work.
I worked for an hour non-stop. When I had chiseled the last word, the last letter of the revised epitaph I removed the glasses from my face, wiped sweat from my brow and lit a smoke. Then I removed the iron template from the monument and examined my work.
I was satisfied. No, I was thrilled with the first and final draft of the epitaph which was now carved into the gray stone. Soon after, I drove the fork lift into the garage and carefully maneuvered the prongs underneath the pallet that held the giant grave stone.
In another thirty minutes, I had carted the monument outside into the cemetery and secured it in it's rightful place on the earth above Stone's burial plot.
The setting sun shined on the gray stone and the surface seemed to glow orange. I stood back a few paces, now stripped down to a T-shirt, and examined this tribute to the great editor. I thought of the pain this man had caused me over the years by reducing my beautiful narratives into simple, monotonous information blocks that any cub reporter could write. He had forced me to abandon my vocation of choice and soured me on the business of news after he had enjoyed a long and rich career in the field.
I recalled all of those gushing words of praise for the man written in that rambling news story inside the crowded cathedral and contained in that eloquent epitaph.
The man had spent years stealing words from me with great abandon and yet in his death, word after word of praise was heaped on him in a display of wretched excess. It wasn't fair. It wasn't right.
I pulled the crumpled piece of paper out of a pocket and examined the type-written epitaph, looking through slashes and scribbles to see the original content.
I liked it my way much better. I had revised it as I had been taught, leaving just enough to inform the reader about what happened and to whom. I had tweaked it with great care, adding nothing, cutting with abandon and leaving plenty of space on the vast face of the monument. So much precious space that the stone now looked freakish and awkward. Using words sparingly from the template had left sentences of one, two or three words from the top of the stone to the bottom and in between were great empty voids.
Standing alone in the sprawling cemetery, six feet above the dirt-covered editor, I read what remained of the epitaph and whispered the words into the silence:
Stone has
gone. The
man took away
words and
at last
died.
It was just right. It told what happened and to whom. After all, I thought, that's all a reader needed to know, even in a cemetery at the plot of a much respected editor.
I had roughly an hour of light left and I needed every minute of it to dig up the coffin containing Richard Benjamin Stone and complete my own personal burial plan.
With the back hoe groaning and snorting into the dusky quiet. I unearthed the coffin in thirty minutes. In another thirty, I had completed the trickier task of pulling the box out of the hole with a small crane parked in the rear of the maintenance building.
In full darkness now, I opened the coffin lid and wrestled out the frail and stiffened body of Stone and I dropped him onto the grass. His pasty white face looked up at a star-speckled sky seeing nothing. Lifeless limbs splayed out in all directions. Those horrible fingers that once pressed keys to destroy my work were gnarled and stiff.
Working in the dark from atop the back hoe, I managed to scoop most of the dirt back into the gaping hole, leaving just a two foot deep grave remaining by the time I was done.
Tiring now, I drove the back hoe and crane back to the maintenance building and quieted both with a turn of their keys. I dragged the coffin to a storage shed and shoved it behind a stack of less expensive pine boxes.
And I returned to the grave site to re-bury my editor, this time without the cumbersome and needless coffin. "Economy of Space," I said to the dead man as I lay him face up in the dirt and used a shovel to cover his body with soil. His face disappeared under the dark earth. One hand poked from the dirt but soon that had disappeared too.
I was mindful not to pack in the dirt to tightly and I threw in stones and twigs now and then to keep the earth loose. I shoveled just enough soil in and then scattered the rest of the dirt in the grass around the fresh grave. I patted it down with the back of the shovel and then slowly replaced squares of grass on top of the dirt, careful not to fit them together too snugly.
When I was finished, I lit a smoke and leaned against the shovel handle, looking at the sky where gray clouds were rolling in and blotting out the stars.
The rains were coming, the thunder-driven, pounding rains of spring that eroded loose soil quickly. I smiled again and looked through the darkness at the massive monument.
Under the heavy downpour, grief stricken loved ones would come soon to see the great gravestone above the recently departed. With any luck at all, they would still be in shock at the sparse, revised epitaph on the great monument by the time the rains unearthed the remains of the much beloved Richard Benjamin Stone. I chuckled at the image. I snorted laughter and then cackled with my face turned to the sky, just as the first drops of rain began to fall.
"Just the bare bones, Mr. Stone," I hollered back as I walked away from the grave. "Just the bare bones! That's all they need to see!"
I kept screaming at the grave of Richard Benjamin Stone even as I broke into a run when the light drizzle gained intensity and the rains of spring began to fall in earnest.