How Happy to Be Read Free Page A

people’s doorsteps and
The Daily
complains about inflated circulation numbers. The ugliest moment is when a disgruntled employee at one rag e-mails the front page to the other, an hour before going to press, which happens rarely. In this war, bodies don’t come home in coffins and
The Other Daily
appears to be taking the battle. Up here insuburbia, ads are down, sales are down, all numbers small and smaller. The anti-communist, anti-health-care readership just isn’t what it used to be in Canada these days.
    Most of the staff at
The Other Daily
are over sixty and write with quill pens, but compared to
The Daily
, it’s a socialist newsletter over there. I wonder, as I complete my mocking of the up-talker, if such behaviour might earn a reprimand at a paper with affirmative action policies and an editorial page that doesn’t refer to single moms as “greedy” and retroactively defend Pinochet on the grounds of sound tax policy. It’s hard to get fired in a libertarian climate. Every screw-you rebellious gesture is interpreted as just another triumphant expression of the individual. This makes
The Daily
oddly similar to a commune – and I speak from experience here – where a child is praised for stabbing another child in the shin with a hoe because said stabber is merely acting on an honest urge of the unchained spirit. One person’s pain is another person’s liberation; that’s how it was as a Marxist agrarian teen, that’s how it is in a neo-conservative newsroom.
    Under my desk, I sleep for what seems like a long time. Sleep is oceanic when you’re watch-free. My body wakes my brain only because I need to be watered. Of course, the Editor sniffed out this possibility and is waiting for me by the water cooler, which here at
The Daily
isn’t so much a metaphoric meeting place as a leghold trap for hungover writers like myself.
    Procrastinating, rehydrating, ogling the sexy mullet-head who replaces the tank – whatever the reason, you will find me at the water cooler more than in the cubicle. I elbowaside a few red-eyed intern-types sucking at the tap and the Editor cries, “Theey-ah she is!” lips curled under her blue British teeth that come to a series of points like a package of leaking ballpoint pens. She has a hard-on for the third person, so I always think she’s referring to someone else. I pat my body to see if her certainty regarding my presence is justified.
    “There she is,” I say.
    “You are going to the film festival press conference Monday morning, you got that e-mail didn’t you? I know you did because my computer tells me which epistles have been received.”
    I interpret this as a warning, a vague threat, which is the usual communication mode in an office full of embittered Brits less than happily removed from the really bloody newspaper wars and exiled to the peaceful colonies.
    My Editor addresses her third-person edict to the space directly over her right shoulder, as if she has an assistant at her elbow jotting down her every thought. “So she’ll cover the press conference for Tuesday, and we’ll launch the festival with the Ethan Hawke interview for Friday, one day early to beat them.” She almost spits with glee at the prospect of scooping
The Other Daily
. The Brits are much more fired up over the war than their privates. Our blank faces and mild suggestions at story meetings always seem to leave the Editor incensed, a high-school cheerleader standing in front of quarter-filled bleachers.
    “Ahh-ight,” I say in a kind of ghetto-speak that started out camp and has become habit.
    The water isn’t going down as smoothly as the crantinis of the night before, and suddenly I’m pushing past the Editor and the buzzing interns and it’s not so pleasant in the bathroom cubicle, my hands holding up my hair, careful not to touch anything parasitic. Not so pleasant to be pushing up wave after wave of air, but with my eyes closed, I can almost imagine this as something