By John Ross
Ink drizzles through my punctured veins. Indeed, the toxins that ooze from chemical inks and pulp during a lifetime of reading and writing for newspapers may well have contributed to the tumor that now weighs upon my liver.
Genetics predisposed me to such contamination. My dad was a founding member of the Newspaper Guild when he toiled with Hayward Broun at the old New York World-Telegram (later the World Telegram & Sun.) On December 7, 1941, a day that will live in infamy for more than one reason, George Ross, the WT’s drama critic, restaurant reviewer, Broadway columnist, and general lout-about-town, pushed my stroller into the Telly’s frantic newsroom in lower Manhattan and there, wedged between knobby-kneed reporters, I was introduced to the frenzy of a big-city paper at a maximum moment of world crisis. I was hooked for life.
Newspapers provoke liver cancer. It’s not just the ink and the pulp. Reporters are forever hunched over the bar at the dark dives that abut the rags where they slave, morosely drowning their resentment at editors who just eviscerated their big scoops, in an excess of cirrhosis-generating booze.
Here in San Francisco, working saloons like Hano’s and the M&M, where the newshounds once gathered, have been yuppified into oblivion in this suddenly one-newspaper town. I mourn them as deeply as I mourn my liver.
Although I was on staff at the Examiner (now free and “worth every penny of it”), I never spent much time pounding out my stories on the premises. I had an editor named Jack McCarthy, bless his soul, who insisted that the paper paid me to run away from the pack. The “Monarch of the Dailies” had just been handed over to Willie Hearst, Patty’s cousin, and I found myself a frequent contributor (ten front pages during the stolen 1988 Mexican election) along with Hunter S. Thompson and Zippy the Pinhead as the scion of Citizen Kane commited to going head to head with the Chron. This didn’t last long.
My M.O. at the Zam, much as it had been at the Bay Guardian and Pacific News Service was to ir al lugar de los hechos – to go to the place where it happens – rather than hanging around the phones doing dumb desk stories. I was always on the road. But whether they ran in the dailies (I was big in the Chron-Zam Sunday bulldog edition), Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the Northcoast Environmental Center Econews or the National Horseshoe Pitching Journal, my reportage always appeared in print. Your thumb got inked with the words I wrote.
Now I’m reduced to bloodless ciphers streaming across Internet pages. Counterpunch serves a function but it hardly satisfies my craving for real live chemical inks and pulp.
By a synchronistic twist of fate, newspapering in the U.S. is dying as fast as my liver. Pretty soon they both will be heirlooms, yellowing ancient slabs like the binders of Mexican newspapers at my corner library in the Centro Historico of Mexico City, El Gran Monstruo, to which my neighbors return time and time again to revisit the heartbreaks of the past.