The Last Word On Nothing

My first job, post-paper route, was as a messenger in the advertising department of the Chicago Tribune. As a 15-year-old aspiring journalist (and, yes, underage hire), I thought the experience might be a career path to Woodward and Bernstein heights. By coincidence, the day I started—May 1, 1974—was Watergate Wednesday, the same day that the Tribune was the only newspaper to publish the just-released transcripts of the Nixon White House secret tape recordings in their 246,000-word entirety. I walked into an office where my future-fellow messengers were frantically stuffing copies of the broadsheet supplement into enormous manila envelopes, the kind with string clasps on the back. The office’s mission was to deliver those envelopes, that very afternoon, as part of a vast promotional strategy, to advertising clients ranging from the heart of the Loop to the outermost suburbs. The scene in the office was bedlam. My new boss told me that my job that day was to take a seat on the bench and stay out of the way.

Like me on the bench that afternoon, the journalism dreams went nowhere, at least via my messenger job at the Tribune. The era of the copy boy rising through the ranks to foreign bureau chief was over. But that messenger job did offer life experiences that I couldn’t have imagined.

My Monday-to-Friday workday started at 3. Retirees worked the morning and afternoon shifts, though several of them lasted into the after-school hours when the young crew took over. Sometimes on Saturday mornings, when the office belonged only to the under-20s, we would raid the personnel files of the older messengers. Their birth dates were in the 1880s and 1890s. We marveled then. I marvel more now.

Among these characters—and many of them were characters: Julius, whose mail-order dentures constantly dropped into his lap (and sometimes into the pee-stained lap of the messenger next to him; Julius simply snatched back the dentures and popped them into his mouth); Fred, who in the 1920s had demonstrated his speed-walking skills on a baseball diamond in Denver, an event commemorated in a newspaper clipping that he pulled from his wallet with easy-to-mock frequency (“Pretty good, huh?” he said, every time); Louie, generally a quiet type, who upon hearing that he and another messenger would be trading delivery routes, silenced the office by declaring of his colleague, “Julius, that cocksucker!”—was Harry.

Harry. Harry of the pee-stained lap. Harry with the bowel-control issues, some of which emerged while on the job, and all of which he recounted in detail. Harry who punctuated his discourse with “damn damn”s, as in “Damn damn goin’ to Sears for a pickup damn damn.” Harry whom I once had to rescue from the base of a skyscraper. (“Go to the Standard Oil building and get Harry,” the dispatcher told me on the phone. “He blew over in the wind.”) Harry who once threw a cigar at that same dispatcher; someone had the presence of mind to retrieve the butt and pin it to a bulletin board, where it hung for months.

Harry who, one Saturday morning, when we were acquisitioning the personnel files and found his phone number, received a prank call at home.

It wasn’t much. “Hey, Harry, do you know who this is? It’s me! Sure been a long time!” That kind of stuff. Just enough to rattle the remaining sanity of an already half-gone septuagenarian. (In our defense, we weren’t actually sociopaths; we were teenagers.)

On Monday, as the young generation of messengers began arriving in mid-afternoon, one of us casually asked Harry how his weekend was. He immediately launched into an account of a mysterious relative calling him on Saturday morning. Not knowing what else to do, he caught the el downtown and went to Marshall Field’s; a phone bank there had telephone directories from around the country. He looked up relatives in faraway states, reversed the charges, and asked if they had been trying to get in touch with him. No, came the answer, again and again.

So, wow, Harry, who do you think it might have been?

“Damn damn Kepler on the Moon damn damn,” he answered. “Damn damn Kepler on the Moon.”

Kepler on the Moon?

“Damn damn.”

We looked at one another. One of us said he’d heard of Kepler—an astronomer or something, hundreds of years ago. And because this particular messenger was already in college, the rest of us could safely assume that he knew what he was talking about and that Kepler was an actual historical figure. But on the Moon? Harry must be crazy—as if we needed more evidence.

Turns out Harry was right.

(Tomorrow: Part 2.)