Friday AG Newsletter Substack Email

Monday, October 2nd, 2000

Hi,

It’s Friday so that means another newsletter.

This one is an excerpt from my novel The Internet Newspaper which came out February 14th in a collaboration between Three One G and Bread & Roses Press.

The book is about working at the online version of a daily newspaper in 2000 when the internet was a wasteland of garbage no one wanted (while at the same time everyone was dumping way too much money into websites).

These are the first few pages of the book.

The scene itself is set in the Mission Valley area of San Diego.

You can get a copy of the book here.

-AG

Monday, October 2^nd, 2000

You can see the palm trees from the third-floor windows of the internet newspaper. It’s a bright, hot, gray morning in October—windy, the breeze lashing at the palms, bending their tall, thin trunks.

From where I sit in my dark blue folding chair in the conference room you don’t hear the wind or the shaggy heads of the palms rustling or their trunks creaking. You don’t feel the wind either. You feel the air-conditioning and you hear Brendan who’s in charge of today’s sales meeting standing in front of the white board talking to us about cats.

Brendan tells us how Jay wrote his column Friday and mentioned his cat and put a photo of it at the top of the piece above the headline and how the column had 51,563 hits over the weekend compared to last week’s average of 32 hits a day.

“Nobody knows why but people want cats on the internet,” says Brendan. “We want you to put cats in your stories. If you can. Whenever you can.”

One of the news guys sitting in the row in front of me sticks his hand up like he’s in a classroom.

“Chris,” says Brendan, nodding patiently like a teacher, arms folded across his chest in a way that seems protective.

The news guy, Chris, gets to his feet and says, “Brendan, seriously, man. We’re not a pet magazine.”

“Chris. I know. But look—”

“We’re a newspaper. We handle news. Not—not animal stories.” Chris is one of the older news guys. He wears a suit every day. This one’s light blue, long out of fashion like something you’d find in a thrift store and laugh about with your friends before putting it back. The jacket and pants are a couple sizes too big on his small frame and because of that he looks like a kid in a wedding suit. Chris says, “I didn’t sign up for this,” and Chris says, “Ugh, Jesus Christ, man,” and Chris says, “You hear what you’re saying, right?”

As Chris talks, Brendan does a very slow shrug that’s so exaggerated it’s like a vaudeville act which works because Brendan looks like a ventriloquist’s dummy—the empty blue eyes painted on the wood, the brittle-looking short curly brown hair, the oversized mouth that clops open and clops shut, and now Brendan’s talking again and his squeaky voice hurts my stomach. “Look. Chris. Goal here’s traffic. Traffic is money.” He spells the word out for emphasis, and does it slow and lusty like, “Em oh en ee why.” A disgusting smile spreads across Brendan’s pink face. Brendan has small, rounded, spaced-apart peg teeth like a cartoon dinosaur and whenever you see them you feel like you’re seeing something you’re not meant to. He says, “More traffic means more ads which means us charging more for ads.”

“Yeah. Sure. I get that but Brendan—”

“Chris, hear me out. The paper making more money means more money for us and I know you guys want raises, right? Am I right?” Brendan looks around the room, arms spread like Jesus welcoming the children. He waves his hands upward in a “Come on now” motion, soliciting confirmation and agreement from us in editorial who sit stone-faced, impassive. “I mean, right? Guys. Raises.” He stamps his foot in a way that’s supposed to be inspirational. “We all wanna get that cash money. Goal’s to double ad numbers by New Year’s Day 2001. We’ve got two months. New Year’s. January 1^st. Wham. The big goal.”

As he sits back down Chris the news guy throws his hands in the air like everything is futile, like life is shit.

The room is quiet now except for the sound of the A-C blowing through the vents.

Outside, the breeze bends the palm trees silently.

Someone in the back coughs, but it doesn’t sound like a real one. It sounds like a cough to clear the tension, to fill up the space.

Brendan shuts his lifeless ventriloquist dummy eyes and brings his hands together under his chin then his eyes snap open. “Oh! You guys! The bell!” he shouts. “I almost forgot! We finally got the bell!” Brendan’s arms shoot above his head, and he makes Olympic gold medal victory fists as the front two rows of salespeople clap and cheer.

A stocky, brown-haired one whose name I can never remember stands up and pumps his fist in the air in a circular motion and barks, “Woof! Woof! Woof!”

I call the woofing guy “Donut” because he always shouts, “Who brought donuts?!” in the morning when he walks in from reception. No one ever brings donuts. No one brings anything for anyone. That doesn’t matter. Donut is forever hopeful about donuts and unabashedly loud with his hope and I hate him for it.

The only thing Donut loves as much as donuts is doing things in slow motion to make people laugh.

I imagine how good it would feel to stand up and scream.

No words. Just a scream.

Scream until everything goes white.

Like he’s done at meetings more times than I can count, Donut slow motion jogs up to Brendan as if he’s been running for hours and he’s exhausted, at the same time reaching out for a slow motion high-five, saying, “Hiiiiigh-fiiiive” in a slow, deep voice.

Everyone in sales loves it.

They laugh.

A few people clap.

Someone sitting up front I’ve never met says the words “slow motion” in slow motion and that gets more laughs.

Brendan bends down behind the plastic folding table in front of the white board looking for something in a row of cardboard boxes while Donut turns and gives fast, violent high-fives to the front row of salespeople—fast to punctuate how slow he was moving before. The slow then fast thing is part of the game. With each fast smack of the hand he shouts, “Yeee-ah!” Six of them. Six “Yeee-ah!”s and the sixth “Yeee-ah!” also gets a “Bro!” at the end like a thunderclap, like a warhammer hitting a shield in some rainy, blood-splattered, mythological tale.

After that Donut does a few bodybuilder poses for some reason with a grim, intense look on his face like he’s straining hard to shit while everyone in sales cheers him on.

“Pumped!” says Donut clapping his hands once and hard.

Brendan stands back up and sets a large cardboard box that looks heavy on the table. “Oh you guys. I am so happy to present—drum roll everybody—the bell! The bell! The bell!” he shrieks proudly.

One of the salesgirls, an awful, sour-faced blonde called “Sind” gets up and helps Brendan. They reach into the box, and each taking a side, lift a brass bell the size of a soup pot out and set it on the table.

“Thanks, Sind!” shouts Brendan. “Wham! The bell’s here!” Brendan’s voice gets shrill when he’s excited, and he’s excited most of the time. His voice is harsh, thin, and high. The weird part is I’ve heard Brendan serious before and there’s something scary about his serious voice. It’s deeper—his diction slow and measured as he makes sure to carefully choose each word. He doesn’t say “Wham” when he’s serious and he doesn’t say “Oh you guys!” It’s unsettling that Brendan’s excited voice is an affectation. When you hear him serious you want to leave the room. It’s like seeing a snake on the trail ahead of you—all your instincts scream “TURN. BACK. NOW.”

I can feel the tension build—the arts and entertainment staff, our boss Ed, the news guys, the associate editors we rarely see, their (our) tension hangs around us like a poisonous cloud.

“Swear to fuckin’ god I’m gonna squat down and take a piss in that bell,” I hear Emily Benowitz whisper behind me.

I turn to look and Emily smiles at me and mouths, “Fuck the bell” with a swaggering, happy-to-be-angry snarl. When Emily’s angry her red hair looks like fire and her green eyes shine like something beautiful, vile, and deadly. I drag a finger across my throat and make a dead face like “Oh just kill me now” and we both laugh without making any noise. “Dude. Fuck the bell,” she says louder this time, and I turn back just as Brendan hits the side of the bell with a piece of metal that looks like a brass crowbar.

I startle so badly I drop my empty coffee mug on the floor.

Before I can reach down for it my mind tells me to give up.

Give up.

It tells me to give up about the mug just like it told me to give up about getting out of bed this morning and give up about being alive, which it’s told me more times than I can count lately.

Give up.

Give.

Up.

When I’m going through a bad spot like I am now, it’s as if my mind and I are too different people. It hates me and I hate it. We’re at war. At best we’re like baby siblings arguing over who owns the red shoe or whose turn it is to use the special chair. Mostly the war rages on with spectacular violence. The war is like a volcano that will turn the world to ash. The world in question is me. The war and the volcano are me as well. The product of this equation is a dumb, self-defeating shitstorm.

“Okay! The bell plan!” Brendan says. “Sales knows this already, of course, but for editorial’s sake the way it works’s we get a new ad then we—bang! Ring the bell. For a normal sale we ring it with the rope thing like, y’know, ding-a ling-a ling.” He laughs with a terrible rolling peel of hee hee hee hee noise that feels like rats scrabbling around in the pit of my stomach trying to chew their way out. “For a big sale we use the crowbar. Bang! That’s how we know we’re excelling and that the health of the site is—” he’s at a loss for words. He looks down at his knobby pink hands then looks up at us and I know he doesn’t want to say “healthy” because he’s already said “health” but that’s all he’s got and he laughs a little and smiles his wide grin with his little round teeth and says, “—we’ll know the site’s healthy.”

I like to imagine smashing Brendan’s head.

Sometimes it’s a melon and I have a sledgehammer and the seeds and pulp spray everywhere like how I expect the Big Bang looked.

Sometimes I push a giant stone off a cliff in the way they killed Piggy in Lord of the Flies.

Today I imagine crushing his head in my hands like a ball of tinfoil—crushing it down to the smallest possible size then dropping it in a toilet and flushing him into the sewers of San Diego.