Blunt Darts

kids that the school committee doesn’t educate, they graduate from high school anyway. Half of ’em never wrote a book report. Shit, of those probably never read a book. They intern here—’intern,’ that’s the word they use nowadays for office boy, although both boys and girls can be office boys and you sure as shit better call them men and women or interns for neutral—they intern here because they saw the movie All the President’s Men a couple of years ago and they wanna be ‘journalists.’! You hear that, ‘journalists.’ I haven’t met one yet, not one, that’s read the book All the President’s Men, and only two could spell Bernstein’s and Woodward’s last names right the first time.”
    “Youth can be sloppy, Mo.”
    “Aw, it’s not just sloppy, it’s the way they’ve been brought up. On TV and now videogames. Videogames, can you imagine? I got a niece, she can’t speak a word of Hebrew. When I was growing up in Chelsea in the late thirties, it was maybe seventy-five percent Jewish, twenty-five percent Italian. All the Jewish kids could speak enough Italian to be polite to the old store owners and whatever, and understand the dirty jokes. The same for the Italian kids with Yiddish and Hebrew. Now, Jesus, we don’t even give them names you can recognize anymore. That niece of mine is Jennifer. Jennifer, can you fucking imagine! When we grew up it was Morris, and Mario, and Patrick. Now it’s fucking Jennifer, and Scott, and..
    “... and Stephen,” I said.
    “What?”
    “And Stephen. With a ‘ph’ instead of a ‘v.’ ”
    “Oh, yeah and Stephen, right. Oh, I’m telling you, John, I’m tired, dog-tired, down-and-fucking-out tired.” .1
    I glanced down at my watch. Mo usually runs his course in fifteen minutes, and the repetition of his opening stanza is usually the giveaway. “Mo, I was wondering...”
    “You know, that’s why they got me in here.”
    Usually, but not always.
    “They gave me my own office. Me, a reporter. No Pulitzer putzin’ Prize or anything. Just me. In my day I don’t think the city editor had his own office. But I got one. You know why?”
    I cleared my throat. “Ah, no, Mo, I don’t.”
    “It’s because of them.” He swung his hand in an all-inclusive circle. “It’s because of youth. The brass is afraid I’ll infect them. So they stay out there with their video terminals and I stay in here with my Remington,” which he paused to slap firmly but affectionately. “I type my stories on this, then they gotta go to somebody on one of those terminals to be entered. ‘Entered.’ That’s another one of those words like intern.”
    “Bad words, Mo. One and all.”
    “Tell me about it. I haven’t had three stories in a year get printed without ‘constituency’ becoming ‘constitutional’ or ‘receive’ becoming ‘recieve’ or... oh, I dunno. I’m just so tired. So fuckin’ tired.”
    He paused again to try to resuscitate the cigar. I leaped in.
    “Mo, I was wondering if you could help me.“
    “Sure thing, John.” Two puffs. “What’s up?”
    “I’m trying to locate a guy who was a reporter for a suburban paper and who now is supposed to be in Boston. His name is Thomas Doucette—”
    Mo held up his hand to stop me. “He’s an assistant editor at the Gay News in the South End. I forget the street.”
    “Thanks, Mo,” I said, getting up.
    ‘Hell, if that’s all you wanted,” he said between Puffs, “why didn’t you just say so?”
     
     
     

     
     
    I had a filling meal at Dante’s, a restaurant on Beacon Hill with a spicy Italian menu and an incongruously Asian staff. It’s a candlelit place, spread over several rooms, with low ceilings and fireplaces. I was the only one eating alone. Romantic couples occasionally glanced sympathetically at me as I chomped my linguini and read my Evening Globe.
    The next morning I started out running four miles but cut it back to two because of the heat. I cleaned up and grabbed a few doughnuts on my way to the rent-a-car, happily still parked where I had left it.
    The Gay News was located on a South End street that was “in transition.” In some cities, that expression is an unfortunate euphemism for a racial evolution. In Boston, however, the expression is used to reflect a building-by-building renovation. The South End (not to be confused with the heavily Irish South Boston, where I grew up) is predominantly narrow streets, some with imitation gas lamps. The