With the last word, Brady moved on. Steven turned to Jamie and half-joked, “I’ll be pounding a beat by tomorrow.” But the only newspaper passion of Brady’s that outranked his ideology was his undying devotion to the bottom line. He set about operating the Trib on a shoestring, not even bothering to bring aboard financial or editorial people from his parent company. He merely installed his son Maxwell, bestowing on him the title of executive editor. Maxwell Brady took to proofreading the paper every night from the bar stool of the trendiest East Side haunts.
Lee Brady had apparently surmised that Steven’s column had too much readership to kill outright. The column continued, though Brady and occasionally his son grew into the habit of spiking one for every three printed.
Weeks before the strike, Steven had managed to deliver one dear to Brady’s own political sensibilities. He blistered the teachers union for threatening a job action if the city continued to explore its plan of reducing classroom crowding by operating a year-round school calendar.
Teachers want it both ways. They complain about overcrowded classrooms. Then they threaten to walk out when the Mayor sits down with the Chancellor and comes up with a viable working plan to ease classroom crowding by extending the school year. They say an extended summer vacation is essential to the well-being of students but it sounds like a self-righteous attempt to preserve the great American essay, “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.”
The column got the wood—the front page. The next morning, Brady stepped out of his office with the paper rolled under his arm. The newsroom came to a standstill.
“Pardon, pardon. The work today of Mr. Kramer was the finest example of what we set out to do here and must not pass without an appropriate show of appreciation. I have therefore instructed our accounting department to award our esteemed columnist a $250 bonus for his extraordinary essay.”
At which point, before the startled newsroom had fully ingested Brady’s spontaneous and uncharacteristic largess, Steven climbed right up on his desk and shouted, “Attention…attention, please.”
Brady, walking back toward his office, turned around and did a double take.
“I would like to thank Mr. Brady for his generosity. But columnists do not accept cash awards for their convictions. We only wish for every opportunity to express them, without editorial interference.”
Brady shook his head and walked away. Just as he stepped inside his office and closed the door, he unleashed a mighty, convulsive sneeze.
Steven bent his, slender frame into a perfect bow and bellowed, “Bless you, Lord.”
The city room broke out in laughter. Steven’s line was etched in Trib lore, contemptuous employees all over the building mouthing those words the moment Brady’s back was turned.
Brady continued to have the last word. The same day Steven rejected his gesture, he returned to work on a Sunday column about former welfare mothers being harassed by city workers. It was a controversy bound to land in the lap of the new mayor, Zimmerman.
Willis gave him the thumbs-down sign when he trudged back from his daily showdown with the publisher.
“Didn’t it occur to you that Brady might fire you on the spot for showing him up?” Jamie asked Steven the next morning.
He shrugged. “Fuck him. When the contracts run out and the shit hits the fan, this place will be a war zone—and then we’ll see how tough Lord Brady is.”
Jamie knew his cousin had been waiting for the strike, almost to the point of invitation. “The paper is already lost to this lunatic,” he said at Kelly’s one night, going over each slanted story, getting angrier by the beer.
“Steve, I don’t think there are too many people who actually want to go out,” Jamie said. “Things aren’t good out there in this business or in the economy. And the holidays are coming.”
Steven chugged more beer and kept talking.
“The only way we can get it back is to kick his ass in a fair labor fight,” he said. “He won’t keep it if he can’t have it his way. He’ll sell the damn place lock, stock and barrel twenty minutes after we shut him down. We’ll get our paper back. I’ll get my column back.”
Jamie listened to his cousin rant. He wondered if only a drunken fool—or a well-paid columnist with no dependents—could be so anxious to walk out.
Chapter Nine
Jamie stepped away from the marching strikers as they neared the Trib building and the wooden blue barricades that were set up by police. Keeping his distance from the picket line, he hid across the street behind a parked van.
His cousin, along with Carla Delgado, had taken over organization of the line. Steven, he conceded, was a natural leader. He always had been. When they were kids, in school or at summer camp in the Catskills, there was even a modicum of status in it for Jamie when others discovered that Steven was his cousin.
While Steven hung a picket sign from a low branch of a small tree, Carla stepped into the street and yelled, “Listen up.”
The assembled staff once again gave her its full attention.
“Unless you sign up at headquarters, you will not be eligible for union strike benefits. You can get a hundred bucks a week, two-hundred if you are the only working member of your family and have at least two kids.”
His ex-wife would be thrilled with this jackpot news, Jamie thought. The notion of midnight patrol on the deserted waterfront already fatigued him. The afternoon sun had faded behind the clouds and taken with it the last vestige of autumnal comfort. Jamie almost started to walk toward the picket line but held back. Steven didn’t seem to be looking for him. He had more than enough people to organize for the war that he insisted would bring Brady down.
Jamie decided to leave, shielding himself from view behind parked cars. He headed for the subway, thinking Steven won’t even notice I’m gone. Just the same, the train back to Brooklyn Heights couldn’t come fast enough.
With no destination in mind, he walked the narrow streets lined with handsome brownstones and brick-faced apartment buildings. He had fallen hard for them and the entire neighborhood from the night he nearly emptied his gas tank in search of a parking spot and was forty-five minutes late for his first date with Karyn.
They met in the spring of 1990 at a mixer for Hunter College graduates. Karyn failed to mention that she had transferred to Hunter from Princeton after two years. Having fared so poorly in the Columbia pickup scene, Jamie might have wished her well and gone on his way had she told him. Instead, he and Karyn topic-hopped from his business—newspapers—to hers—book publishing—until finding more mutual territory: a love of Jackson Browne, every Seinfeld episode from the show’s inception in 1989 and the NBA playoffs.
Jamie was for Magic Johnson and the Lakers because they were, beyond Showtime, the essence of unselfish team play. She was for the Pistons and Isiah Thomas because he had “the cutest ass and an irresistible smile.”
Given that standard, Jamie decided not to elaborate on how much of a basketball junkie he really was—and how much of his adolescence he had devoted to the game.
He looked more like a wrestler than a basketball player. A shade over 5' 8" without the verticality of his hair, Jamie was on the stocky side, a body replica of his father. The curvature of his back made his shoulders look stooped. Nor was he the most graceful or fluid of athletes. But he had spent hours as a kid launching weathered balls at backboards and rims in schoolyards and in cramped neighborhood backyards. From the time he played his first games of three-on-three, he loved basketball’s freewheeling nature and simplicity, the ease with which it was organized, controlled, without parental supervision or intrusion.
By late middle school he was the proud owner of a magnetic dribble with a surprising quickness for the proverbial stout white boy. For Jamie, the beauty of playing