Think Big, Chapters Two and Three

In a rush, he sent his clips from the Michigonian to any outlet he could find. The New York Times, New York magazine, Harpers did not respond. Others barely did. It was the recession, or his lack of a Harvard degree, or experience, or something. Anyway, the fix was in.

            Quinn's cousin worked in TVN's Washington headquarters and scrounged up an $18,000 desk assistant job working the graveyard shift: midnight to 7 AM. The alternative was helping his father in the computer science lab at Michigan where Mr. Connor tinkered and mumbled as a professor of applied physics.

Quinn headed for Washington. He could work on his writing during the daylight hours.

                                                           

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            TVN was like a carnival. Every news story came with ornaments. Stories got shimmering graphics that made the eyes blink. Teams of musicians whipped up meaningful sound tracks in an instant: Violins and cellos were used for brisk and troubling developments, horns for pageantry, drums for the Middle East.

            The studios were not well staffed from midnight to 7 AM shift. America was asleep and didn't want to be bothered by the news. But news broke when it wanted to and so Quinn became a Johnny on the Spot.

In an instant he would be directed to tear wire copy from the dot matrix printers behind his desk and run it to producers or correspondents. Disoriented correspondents relied on him to talk them off the ceiling. "Myanmar?! Who the Fuck is Myanmar!?" they would yell and he would tell them it was not a who but a what and where it was. Once he was asked to pluck a violin string for a plane crash theme song.

The puny salary and title of "secretary" he had to fill out on the narrow box on his time sheet each week didn't matter. The whole chaotic system at times could not move forward if he didn't produce his bit. It never occurred to him that it was rude for producers to scream emergency instructions into his face. It meant they needed something only he had.

            Quinn was not needy. In college, he had many friends and girlfriends (both long-term and provisional) and he had made friends easily in Washington. But there was something about news that fed him in ways he didn't know he was hungry for. So he started giving his bosses more than they needed, sending himself off on little treasure hunts. He became expert in waking people up: translators who could pronounce the new Japanese Prime Minister's name correctly, ex cabinet officials who could talk about Nixon when he died and the old girlfriends of flamboyant serial murderers.

Shoveling for tidbits didn't bring rounds of applause in the control room but the lack of adulation didn't matter. There was a charge in delivering those little gems.

            Soon Quinn got what is known in heart-racing paperbacks as "the big break." He was whisked from the overnight desk to be the Washington associate producer for a new talk show hosted by Forney Smart, who at that time was the very hot fellow behind a new magazine called "Smart Take"--a splashy mix of Vanity Fair, Fortune, Playboy and Rolling Stone. It was one hot little must read.

            It was Quinn's first exposure to a genuine star of journalism. Forney was a regular talking head providing brisk comment in costly foulard ties on everything from the stock market to major league baseball labor disputes. Now he had his own magazine and his own show.

Quinn was to be Forney's vassal in Washington. He would book guests and tend to the host's research needs. Colleagues snickered.  Forney was famously high maintenance. His requests came by the dozen. Who was Kennedy's secretary of agriculture? When did Lee Atwater die? When a bill is tabled in the Senate does every Senator have to vote?

Quinn answered every query with a mix of panic and excitement. He once tried to get the Secretary of State for an interview with only an hour's notice, a ridiculous request but he didn't know any better.

Quinn didn't mind Forney but viewers did. After six months, the show was cancelled. Forney's round oak table at which he had pondered for the cameras was rolled away and the studio became the home of a cooking news show The Daily Baste.

 

                                                            -*-

 

            After Forney's show was cancelled, Quinn was shifted to the morning show which meant he got up when only the fish and flower trucks were on the road. By lunchtime he usually was asleep on whatever bus, couch or table happened to be there to catch his falling noggin. His big break had come and gone and now he lived each day in a perpetual state of fogginess.

"Quinn my boy, I want you to come join me at Think," said Forney by phone a few weeks after his show had been cancelled. Quinn had been asleep when the phone rang and he could feel the ridges left by the sofa cushion on his cheek as he tried to shake himself awake.

 "Um, that sounds great," he said. Quinn was still waking up. Was it morning? Was it noon? Did he still work for Forney? He held his hand over the receiver and sang "Do Re Me Fa So La De Do," to get the frog out of his throat.

            "Since you're a television fellow," said Forney "you're going to be hired as a correspondent apprentice until you can prove yourself in print, which I'm sure will happen in short order. "

Apprentice? It sounded like a job title out of Charles Dickens.

            "So are you on board Quinn?"

            "Sure." He was still a little froggy.

            "Lets have a little more brio than that my boy."

            Quinn stood up. (Was he going to salute?) "Yes, you're right. I'm sorry, I'm a...well, yes, I'm very excited."

            "That's the spirit. See you up here in New York." The line went dead.

            Who? What? When? Where? Why? Those are the five first questions you're supposed to ask as a journalist. Quinn had woken up on his couch, changed jobs and didn't know the answers to most of those questions. He also had apparently agreed to move to New York. Or was he supposed to work in Washington? Was he still wearing his boxer shorts? These were all open questions.

Think magazine? This was enormous news. You go to sleep one afternoon watching Wheel of Fortune and you wake up working for the most famous magazine in America? Now his adrenaline started moving. Quinn had a stack of back issues he had collected as a kid. At ten he had written their New York headquarters, suggesting he become a "junior reporter."  

            After wringing the sleep grog from his head, Quinn called Forney's office to make sure he hadn't missed something.

            "I'm sorry. I just talked to Mr. Smart and I just wanted to know."

            "Who is this?" asked Forney's secretary

            "This is Quinn Connor."

            "You are the new reporter apprentice?"

            "Oh yes, that's what I wanted to check on."

            "Didn't Mr. Smart just phone you?"

            "Yes, I just wanted to make sure."

            "You didn't believe him?"

            "I did. I just wasn't sure if it was a joke." He laughed a little.

            "It wouldn't have been a very funny joke."

            "Yes. No."

           

 

Chapter Three

 

             

As Quinn stood in his new office he read the querey listing the topics he would cover and the questions he was to answer in his file. It went on forever--pages and pages of requests. There were questions about interest rates and price/earnings ratios and what a second high tech boom would do to consumer cyclicals--whatever that meant.

Reading the list was like reading poetry. Quinn had to read each sentence three times and then hurry on to the next sentence hoping that the incomplete understanding of the previous one would stick long enough to make some sense out of the two when they were hooked together.

It might seem absurd that a major newsmagazine would entrust the coverage of a fundamental American institution like the Stock market to someone who knew nothing about it, but that was often the way the system liked it best.  In any given week at Think magazine, 173 reporters in bureaus from Jakarta to Reykjavik are sent queries calling upon them to cover any topic that has popped into the head of an editor at the head office in New York's Times Square. Because only a few correspondents outside of the prodigious and fussy Washington bureau were specialists, most of them covered geographical regions rather than a specific set of topics.

Quinn's region was the entire Empire state and the Northeast. That meant he would be expected to achieve authority on any phenomenon that took place South of the Canadian border, East of the Mississippi and North of Washington, D.C.

            No one worried much if a correspondent didn't have a handle on an issue they'd been assigned to cover. Correspondents were universal handles, and they were supposed to attach to any issue at which they were flung and become the device through which the world would take grab of a phenomenon.

It was a correspondent's job to inform themselves about nuns who farm goat cheese for fun and profit, hunt them down, get inside their habits, interview their friends, experts on the topic, rival priests across the highway who made Port Salut not nearly as well and then report back to headquarters the mysteries and nuances of the nun-cheese-making cyclotron in a narrative that was both breathless and full of with facts.

Panic was a very healthy motivator. The whole system was founded on it.

 

-*-

 

Quinn spent the morning reading the business sections of the newspaper trying to learn terms and come to some brief understanding of what was happening on Wall Street.

By noon he started to worry he hadn't made his first phone call. Was it already too late in the day? The people he would want to interview would be out at lunch. Then they'd have afternoon meetings. Or maybe they would go play golf. That's the kind of thing Wall Street people did right? And that would mean he'd get no calls back until tomorrow. And even then, would they really call him back when they had so much work to catch up on from being out of the office the previous day playing golf?

Just make the call, that had been the primary order at TVN when he was asked to book a guest, so that's what he did.

He sat down to start dialing. Smalton Bigelow, the chief economist at Morgan Stanley was saying seemingly smart things in the morning papers. Quinn picked up the phone. He hung up. There were too many things on his desk. He swept his stapler and tape and the morning papers into the top drawer of his file cabinet. He'd meant to clean out the Ritz crackers and package of pink tissues left in his thin top drawer by the previous occupant, but he could not be bothered with that now. He stretched out his tie from his neck and unbuttoned his top button.

He practiced reciting the premise of his story for secretaries of the analysts he was going to call at Wall Street investment banks.  If he was going to have a prayer of getting through his trial he would have to at least successfully dial a phone.

            He grabbed the receiver's sticky goiter-like addendum, wedged it in his shoulder and started dialing. The phone rang. Wetness was taking hold in the creases of his palm. He clenched his hands and wriggled his fingers.

            "Hello," came a growling voice.

Funny, didn't sound like a secretary.

            "Is Mr. Smalton Bigelow there," Quinn asked in retreat.

            "This is," came the voice.

            What did he say? He is? Does he have a male secretary? No, he said: 'this is,' Is that right? Quinn became conscious of the long pause. To fill up the space he asked again. "Is Mr. Smalton Bigelow there?"

            "Yes," said the voice.

            Quinn stood up in panic. It was all still so unclear. Yes, this is Bigelow? Or yes, he's here, what do you want? Oh God. He was doing a little hop. Hurry up you fool. Make a decision.

 Quinn launched. "My name is Quinn Connor and I am working on a piece about the coming bull market for Think magazine." Then came as much of an authoritative tone as he could kindle, cribbing from Forney's query: "It's our view that we are on the cusp of a second high tech boom that will rival if not surpass the boom of the 1990s. Productivity is up. The benefits of the global market are coming due; people are ready to invest heavily in the market again--particularly those still anxious because they missed the last boom. I wonder what your thoughts are and if you might be able to help us for such a piece." He was out of breath and leaning forward.

            "I don't agree," said the voice. By now Quinn was pretty sure it was Bigelow. "Your premise is incorrect and dangerous. I am a very busy man and cannot talk."

Quinn was terrified that Bigelow was going to hang up on him.

Bigelow hung up on him.

            People just didn't say things like "I'm a very busy man," except in cartoons. Did Bigelow have the 2 ft. cigar and spats like the man on the Monopoly board?

What Quinn should have known is that Think had done an unflattering profile of Bigelow and he'd never forgotten it. He had tried to get back in ways big and small, including writing columns for free for competing magazines. Whenever Think made any pronouncement on the economy or the stock market, Bigelow would rush on the financial cable television shows and remind everyone of his "Don't Think," index.

            "Whenever Think magazine says we're about to go into a boom that's the time to hold on to your hat," he would say in the way people of that older generation used that expression. "Because it means bad times are certain to last for many years more."  He would chuckle. The cable host would chuckle. He would send everyone involved a box of fruit at Christmas time.

Quinn walked to the door. He had botched his first test. Was the story wrongheaded? It couldn't have been. The query was so detailed and it was written by Forney. Had he misunderstood the story? Where had he gone wrong? Quinn had just learned those terms he had used. Maybe he'd gotten one wrong and said sproink when he should have said splonge. Obviously Quinn had blown the pitch, and now he had squandered a key source.

He resolved to spend the rest of the day figuring out what the story was about. He would read some books from the library to learn the terms, scour the newspaper clips and just hope he could cram enough information into his head to keep enough people on the phone Wednesday to file overnight for his Thursday morning deadline.

CHAPTER FOUR