Think Big - Chapter Five

The computer was the first problem. It looked like one of the ones the DMV uses for the driving quiz. The keyboard was large enough to hold a dinner, salad, and your choice of medium drink or dessert.

The other problem is that he felt it was necessary to re-listen to every interview he had conducted. Far down the hall, his new colleagues could hear him rewinding his taped interviews. "I think we're going to see more of a fourth quarter," came a jolt of a voice. Quinn hit the rewind button.  BBRRREEEEP, it squeeled out a high pitched whine. "Productivity that's the key. Oh markets go up and markets go down." BBBRRREEEP.

            By midnight, Quinn's desk was littered with small packets of Cheetos, from the vending machine--his dinner. Six or seven Cokes all half full were pushed up against the wall like a backsplash.  In a coffee cup bobbed the discarded butts of a pack of cigarettes, their filters orange from where he'd held them in his Cheeto dusted fingers.

            Quinn had stopped smoking three years ago. In a strange twist of human behavior on which the tobacco companies had so long relied, it was a woman who stopped him. After all those years of smoking to look cool for women, or at least look at peace and comfortable in your skin when you weren't with a woman, he had to quit in order to go out with one. The relationship lasted through college and even during his year in Washington but foundered when Stanford rather than some perfectly fine East Coast law school plucked her from her non-smoking boyfriend.

That evening wasn't the best time to pick up the habit again. The reintroduction of nicotine into Quinn's system had caused a whole range of problems. With the first drag he was back in middle school behind the gym, falling free and fast face first through the floor. Deep breaths only increased the problem-- especially when his face was still engaged with the cigarette.  After a few more, he got some traction and so did the caffeine in the Cokes. He settled into a steady rhythm of smoking, drinking and writing. He could feel his lungs going suede.

Later, in the middle of trying to explain why some thought dividend yields weren't as important to the future of the market--and what exactly that meant--he could have sworn that he heard crickets. Low silent chirping like you hear up in the trees in August at night. But he was in the middle of a 73-story building without even windows to echo in the sounds from downtown where there weren't really a lot of crickets to begin with anyway.

             He walked the hallways to take a break. It was 4 A.M. Thursday morning. Everyone was gone. He wandered towards the sections that he'd been too scared to invade earlier in the day.

            He passed a wall with framed copies of iconic magazine covers. Uncle Sam bound and gagged during the Iranian hostage crisis, the cover that called on Nixon to resign, and the "supermodel," cover that Quinn's elementary school teacher had not allowed him to bring to class.

            Scraps of the previous week's cover story were still lying around the Globe section. There had been a string of suicide bombings and a coup attempt in Pakistan at about sunup on Friday New York time. By dinner, stacks of files had come in from the team in Karachi, correspondents in the other Middle Eastern countries, European capitals, and the White House correspondents traveling with the president.

            There were probably 50,000 words streaming over the wires. The entire madness had been fed into the head of a single writer, Sandra Night, a wordsmith of such speed and clarity that her colleagues joked she'd been bred in a pod for the purpose. It was her specialty to explain events that changed the planet in less than a turn of its orbit. She sifted the files for the best parts of the drama. Into that she dropped teaspoons of punchy historical references. As new information came in she tore out the guts of what she had been writing to stuff in the newer better bits. Over 18 pages she roamed through charts and exclusive pictures of the Pakistani president hunkered down behind his overturned desk. At sun up, she shipped the tapestry upstairs. She had been typing so much she had to soak her hands in icewater to get the sting out of her knuckles.

            The ice had just started melting when a correspondent in Lahore phoned in with an exclusive late interview. Splash, her fingers were out of their ice bucket and flipping little droplets on the screen as the correspondent in Lahore screamed her scribblings from her note pad into the phone. "The embattled president railed at his captors, his military boots crunching over the broken glass of his office windows...."

This week there were no global emergencies though. Night's office was quiet. Tomorrow night at this hour, the halls would be alive as writers churned through their stories to slip them under deadline. Now, two days away from that deadline, it felt like being in the school halls after closing, looking at displays of class trips to the site of the Johnstown flood and homeroom projects, all of it illuminated by the low wattage of the few lights left on for the cleaning crews.

Quinn heaped meaning into every little back-stage artifact he saw, knowing the chaos that had blown through that end of the building four days earlier. The whole mess looked so impressive, like the speckled pots and hasty garlic skins left on the stove after a great meal. The appealing disarray was all ordered by some important purpose that someone talented had orchestrated.

            A mad genius, that's what he wanted to be, Quinn thought. He lifted his arms as if to control all before him. It was 4:30 in the morning. It could be that he was just mad.

 

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             By 6:30 A.M. Thursday morning Quinn had sent the story's writer 10,000 words (five times the number that would appear in the actual article). It was his first effort. The first work that would form the basis of the evaluation that would determine whether he would get a permanent job. He did not hit the send button easily, but his colleagues were starting to arrive and he had to get out of the previous day's wilted clothes and take a shower.

Going against the commute, Quinn had the subway platform to himself. He watched the tatty bread loaf sized rats mingle with the rails. After so many hours struggling to draw conclusions about the stock market, Quinn couldn't turn himself off. He was drawing conclusions about rat behavior and newspaper stands and drink cup sizes. The subway always looked the same, no matter what the time of day, he thought. Only the clean-shaven faces gave the hour away. His theory-mongering was like the fever of last minute Christmas shopping. For an instant, every object looks like a potential present. Sure, dad would love breast pump.

Now, everything he saw became a topic sentence, waiting to be put somewhere in the story.

Quinn slipped into his apartment before his roommate Joel or his girlfriend-of-the-moment was even awake. That meant an added degree of difficulty getting to the only shower which was at the other end of Joel's room.

There was always a woman tangling the sheets of Joel's bed. PHD literature candidates are not usually known for high volume conquests, and Joel wasn't particularly attractive. But he was the creator of Chicklit.com. A simple algorithm, the web site promised publishing fame to legions of women in chenille turtleneck sweaters who hoped to write a novel in their first years after graduating with an English degree. After answering a kind of high brow Mad Lib questionnaire and submitting a digital photo they would receive a personalized 300-page novel. It was, of course, a gimmick meant purely to pick up women, but then three of them got book deals. They were very grateful. And after that there seemed to be a different tidy pair of cat glasses on Joel's morning bedside table each week.

Quinn averted his scratchy eyes and slipped open the flimsy particleboard door. He could hear the authors shifting positions just before he stubbed his toe on Fielding's Tom Jones, one of Joel's schoolbooks. Knocking over a stale beer, he completed the course on the dry foot. It wasn't Joel who had requested he do the half-blind dash and Quinn wasn't a prude, but at that hour, he just could not handle seeing tufts and patches of pale morning skin.

            For five days, the Super hadn't dealt with the clog in the shower, which meant each morning began with a bracing wade into cold gray water. Quinn hoped the effort would not be a net reduction in cleanliness. Fortunately, the whole shampooing, soaping, rinsing had to be quick or the basin would overflow, so the shower and suffering was short.

            His mirror still in boxes, Quinn looped and stuffed his tie in the reflection of the dusty window. He was conscious that in Washington he had been in a fashion cocoon. Either it didn't matter what you wore, or people had such extraordinarily bad fashion sense that the merely stain-free could make heads turn.

Think owned two fashion magazines, which meant walking through the cafeteria seemed like a trip down the catwalk.  You could hear the soft announcer's whisper: "Passing the curtain of steam from the made-to-order pasta bar is Calvin Klein's latest precocious creation. See how Penelope in Jill Sander's latest suit offsets the exhausted salami?"

He had to improve his look. Not only did Quinn have only white shirts. He only had two. He threw the other one into the pasta pot with some water and dishwashing lotion. He'd have to rinse and iron that one for tomorrow. He would buy a third shirt that weekend, maybe a blue one. A fashion baby step.

            His hair still wet, Quinn headed back towards his office. At least his socks were still clean from the last load he'd done before driving to New York. He hoped they would beat back or contain whatever graveyard parasites he'd picked up on his feet during his shower.

 

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In Washington, correspondent Charles Frazier found the Wall Street query Forney had written under a pile of newspapers and cab receipts where he had stowed it two days ago after it first came over the wire. After reading the four pages for the first time he smoothed the crumpled paper with his palm.

He called the researcher in the Business section in New York.  

            "Betty?" said Frazer.

            "Yes Charles the story is still running," she said, anticipating his question.

            "How long?"

            "Three pages"

            "Thank you Betty, we don't want to spend any time on stories that aren't going to fall under the eyes of our readers my dear. Goodbye."

            Frazer did a quick and familiar calculation. A three-page story meant sending a three-page file to the writer in New York. Three hundred words for each page meant a 900-word file. The word processor had finally fired up by the time Frazer's fingers were tapping out his third sentence. In half an hour, seven hundred words were up on his screen with a dozen or so TK's littered throughout his confection like walnuts.

            The TK is the magazine journalist's salvation, a magical potion that can solve the thorniest conundrums and even-out the largest bumps. Properly used, the symbol-- which means, "to come"--can stand for anything. It can stand for a word: "The commissioner opened the TK and showed the crowd the pumpkin." TK can stand for a figure: "TK PERCENT of cats lash out at their owners when on plane flights over TK hours in length." Or, it can stand for a phrase, as in: "The president pulled up his trousers and said INCRIMINATING THING TK, when the First Lady came home early from their daughter's piano recital/ballet OR WHAT ADOLESCENT THING SHE WAS DOING TK." , If properly applied, TK could solve what's wrong with kids today, help your wife sleep through the night and remove spots from your finest crystal.

            The TK allowed the fingers to keep dancing, allowing the brain to make magic without being weighed down by pesky facts. What was important was getting to the truth at the end of the sentence. The "fact" to be filled into the TK would come along usually by providence or it could be tickled to fit in later, for the greater good of the sentence. There was nothing that couldn't be TKed into working. 

Most of Frazier's TK's were at the end of the paragraphs he had written that morning in Washington. His file mostly written, it was time to start interviewing.

"Joe, this is Frazier," he said after hitting the first speed dial button. "Where are we this week on mutual funds? They snapping them up or wait and see?"

            "Well Charles people are not sure what they want to do," said Joe. "They're taking a wait and see attitude."

            "Yes. Fascinating. Well done. Thanks Joe. Best to wife and kids goodbye." Frazier put in the word "not" a few times in his second paragraph which had at first been bullish about mutual funds and plugged in Joe's quote where the first TK had been.

            Second speed dial. "Bill, is the Fed going to raise rates?"

            "No, they're likely to tighten them."

            "Very good. Yes that makes sense. Tighten them."

            "It's not really a matter of the Fed though these days," said Bill, the head of the economics department at Georgia State. "Fiscal policy is where..."

            "Thanks Bill, some other time. We'll do a story on fiscal policy. On deadline now though." He hung up. "Jabbermouth."

            Frazier deleted the last sentence of the third paragraph and wrote: "Fed watchers are sanguine about any rate increases. In fact, says William Hester of Georgia State: "Rates are likely to tighten."

A few more phone calls were placed and few more TKs were hustled out. By 9:30 Frazier hit the send button just 40 minutes after he had struck his first key of the day and just as Quinn, shaven and showered, was re-entering Think headquarters in New York.

CHAPTER SIX