(Chapter 2) (Chapter 3)
CHAPTER 1 from the novel POOKOO
Personal Ground Zero
The world is a severely misspelled place; it’s full of errors, it isn’t aligned in justified columns and the figures don’t always add up. There is no SOP to inspect by. My line gauge, loupe, font books and dictionary are of no use in it. I have not received an answer yet on my query to The Great Author.
Oh, how the world is rife with errors, but do you know why?
The world doesn’t care.
The world also doesn’t care about picas and points or kerning or the Chicago Manual of Style. You cannot proofread human beings but I did back then. I was laid-off from a lucrative graphics arts position in the River North section of downtown Chicago as the Senior Proofreader at a now-defunct pre-press service bureau company.
Mehedrich & Associates.
El Dorado.
First shift Monday through Friday, rare weekends, full benefits, profit sharing, three weeks paid vacation plus a week off for Christmas shutdown.
I graduated from college at 22 in 1984 with a Bachelor’s and entered the world; I was ready to work. I told myself I could always go back and get my Master’s. I took a salary job just past the far northwest suburbs of Chicago at a small rural newspaper called The Courier, which should have been named The Daily Struggle.
It was a “glamour job”, as many newspaper, TV and radio jobs are. They provide plenty for the ego, little pay and lots of work. For two years at an average of 60 hours-a-week I wrote articles, did paste-up and lay-out, proofread, set type, shot on the horizontal camera and even sold ad space all for $20,280 per year. My wife, Anna-Krista, would fight with me about money (and the lack of it) and how I wasn’t spending any time with her. I had no time at all to work on any of my personal writing. I contemplated getting a t-shirt that read
CANCEL MY SUBSCRIPTION TO THE DAILY STRUGGLE.
Then one day I committed the cardinal sin of figuring out my hourly net wage. Don’t ever do that.
My calculator revealed the sad truth. I bought a pin-stripe suit, got a haircut, and looked for a new job.
During my interview at Mehedrich & Associates I remember following the lily-white receptionist up two flights of a spiral staircase and looking at all that brass and oak and glass. The only thing missing, I thought, were wisps of clouds. I was led to a domed-shaped conference room with a skylight and a 30-foot oval table. The tan white-haired man at the table wore a hound’s-tooth sport coat. He looked like God’s older brother.
“You’re wearing a tie,” Mr. Mehedrich said, lighting an unfiltered Pall Mall. “It’s good to see the entire world hasn’t gone to hell yet. I get all these artist types in here with ripped jeans and earrings. I used to draw a little. But this is a business. Well, do you draw?”
“I write a little,” I admitted.
Five years later (in 1991) as the Senior Proofreader I was making over $50K a year. I was ready to put in 50 years. I was the Cerberus of Typos – I proofread our proofreaders, and I didn’t keep my disease at the office: yes, I confess, I used to proofread (and mark-up) Anna-Krista’s grocery list. The way I really moved up the ladder was on my reputation for writing concise memos. Also, although overloaded, I was given the task of rewriting all of the SOP books. I only wore suits to the office, except on Casual Fridays when I wore my indispensable camel hair sport coat and khakis. My second story office had a huge window 15 feet away from the EL train tracks there at the southwest corner of Erie and Franklin. I had my own business cards and letterhead and my name was painted on the glass door.
The early 90s saw the Apple computer revolution take place in the pre-press printing industry, with PageMaker and Quark Xpress leading the charge. Because of that, we lost our biggest accounts. Companies used to turn to us for typesetting annual reports and medical packaging. The big Chicago ad agencies would send lines of type (sometimes just two words, or a magazine cover title for kerning). As middlemen, who charged $20K to set type for an annual report, we were too expensive. Mr. Mehedrich, my mentor, had a heart attack right on that grand spiral staircase – and died.
The company’s V.P.’s took over the shop.
Two weeks before Christmas 1990 I survived what we called The Wednesday Night Massacre – a catastrophic layoff of 60% of the workforce. Glenn Lang, my proofreading mentor, used to tell me: “Proofreading is the last refuge of the alcoholic.” When they fired Glenn during The Wednesday Night Massacre I became the Senior Proofreader. I did not look for other work, despite the corporate bloodletting, because the pay, perks and power were good. Then one day in the middle of March of 1991, I went to work and the front doors were shut with a lockout kit.
I fell from the sky.
In a panic, I bought some lottery tickets, cigarettes and a 12-pack of Budweiser. Then I updated my resume. I thought it was pretty good (I was a writer and an English major, after all) and I mailed off a bunch of resumes from ads I saw in the Sunday Tribune and Sun-Times. Zip, nada, zilch. I quit smoking for a whopping six hours until Anna-Krista and I had a fight, and I stormed down to Sonny’s, the corner store on the first floor of my building, and bought a pack of Marlboro Lights. For the next two weeks I looked for work. Nothing.
The rejection letters claimed I was overqualified. I was 29-years-old and washed-up.
I learned that while on Unemployment I could work part-time to supplement my income. In April, I looked for part-time work in my far-north Chicago neighborhood of Rogers Park. One day I walked past the Elysium movie theater. It was a scuzzy place: Anna-Krista said she’d never be caught dead in it. I noticed a misspelled word on the marquee.
There was a HELP WANTED sign in the window.
I had a plan. Look for work by day, watch second-run movies for free at night. I could also get back to Untitled, the ‘meaning of life’ novel from my college days that I had never finished. I figured on doing all of that for a month or two. I was due for a sabbatical, after all. I filled out an application for an usher position.
Who was the Assistant Manager and full-time theater usher?
Katlin James Hillmacher (pronounced ‘Hillmocker’) was born on January 1, 1962. His resume was too long for any sports trading card. His college GPA was 3.8 but it wasn’t padded with basket weaving classes: he read Nietzsche, Socrates and Camus “for fun.” I knew him because we were in the same Advanced Religion class, but we weren’t good friends back then. He married Cassandra Kippling, his college sweetheart, on June 23, 1983, right after graduation and they honeymooned for two months at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs while he attended the U.S. Olympic Training Center. I took that job at The Courier and went my way. As a collegiate athlete, Katlin was the NCAA javelin champion and won a gold medal at the Goodwill Games. He capped his career by earning the silver medal at the 1988 Olympic Games
(he missed the gold by a mere nine inches). The last I heard Katlin was a track coach at Atlas State College, wherever that was. When I applied for the usher’s job, I was stunned to see him, a world-class athlete, married to a millionaire’s daughter, working at the Elysium.
I got the job.
May passed and still no dream job. I didn’t write much, either. My little sabbatical from the button-down shirt world was getting old. Anna-Krista thought so, too and it was our one daily topic of conversation. I was proud of my work history and felt good that I had made a decent living. I needed a job. But I couldn’t take any full-time job that came along because if I
started in a new field, I’d be back to square one with entry level pay. I also had to be careful that I didn’t look like a job-hopper. I didn’t want to pay the steep penalties for getting into my 401k and I’d been dipping into my savings. The bills piled up and Anna and me fought almost every day.
Then it was late June. I wasn’t ever supposed to be making a career out of the Elysium, but I was.
A former resident of Rogers Park (in the great city of Chicago), Doug Shiloh has been a sports editor, a proofreader, an educator, and even a restaurant mascot. A graduate of Enfield, Connecticut’s Enrico Fermi High School, and Rock Valley College, Shiloh was a Manuscript Contributor at The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Shiloh’s fiction and poetry has appeared in Cherrybleeds.com, Fictionaut, WordPlaySound.com, The Electric Acorn, Zouch Magazine and Stockyard Magazine.com. In the mid-1990s, he produced celebrity and expert “Centerstage” events on America Online, which garnered notice in USA TODAY. He hosts The Literary Road Show, a traveling live event reading forum. He lives in Belvidere, Illinois with his wife Brenda. His official web site is www.dougshiloh.tumblr.com.
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dougshiloh
