The Book of Joe

some distance.”
    “I’ve had seventeen years of distance,” I say, impulsively flipping my phone shut, suddenly sick to death of talking about it. If I’m going to make a genuine effort to roll up my sleeves and get dirty here, it won’t do to have our constant clinical analysis lifting me out of the fray. I pull over, wait for a break in the traffic, and then execute a quick U-turn, pointing the Mercedes in the direction of the editorial offices of The Minuteman. It’s high time I got a little reckless, I think.
    Every once in a while you experience what alcoholics and addicts refer to as a moment of clarity, where the opaque veil of chaos falls away and the unarticulated cosmic rhythm of the universe seems suddenly within your grasp. I don’t doubt that it will all turn out to be a load of crap as usual, but I nevertheless feel an overwhelming surge of optimism so powerful that it remains undiminished even as Mouse pulls me over, his siren wailing obnoxiously, to write me a summons for the illegal U-turn and, get this, driving with a broken taillight.

Twenty-Eight
    The offices of The Minuteman are located in a strip mall that’s been converted into a small corporate park on Oxnard Avenue, just north of the center of town. I step through the glass doors and into a large open office area filled with the controlled din of enterprise - the plastic clatter of key-boards, the atonal electronic chimes of telephones, and, faintly in the background, some Lite FM refugee station for displaced artists like Phil Collins, Billy Joel, and Hall and Oates. In the center of the room, bathed in the fluorescent glow from light tubes in the drop ceiling, four reporters sit in oddly configured cubicles, typing urgently on battered gray computers. Two college-aged kids sit at aluminum desks on the periphery, looking cool and bored as they answer the phones and sort through mountains of papers and photos.
    In the far corner, two geeky-looking guys sit in front of oversized Macs, configuring digital layouts for the paper. The back wall contains three doors, all open, and through the one on the left, I catch a glimpse of Carly. As I make my way through the cubicles, a hush falls over the staff as they become aware of my presence, tracking my progress toward Carly’s office with obvious interest.
    “It’s not going to work,” Carly says when I enter the room.
    She’s sitting Indian-style on the center of a worn oak desk, poring over a layout proof, her hair hanging over her face like a curtain.
    “You haven’t even heard my pitch yet,” I say, and her head jerks up, her eyes wide with surprise behind the gold-framed spectacles that I had no idea she wore.
    “Joe,” she says, letting the proof slip out of her hands and onto the desk. “What are you doing here?”
    “What’s not going to work?” says a disembodied voice from behind Carly.
    “The layout on page six.” Carly addresses the speakerphone, still staring at me. “I don’t want to cut up the article for two lousy sentences.”
    “Then get editorial to trim fifteen words,” comes the reply.
    “Did you speak to them?”
    “They told me to piss off.”
    Carly looks at me and grins apologetically. “I’ll call you back in a minute,” she says.
    “Who’s Joe?” the voice wants to know.
    “Good-bye, Calvin,” Carly says, hitting a button on the phone. “I’m sorry,” she says to me, self-consciously removing her glasses. “What are you doing here?”
    She’s wearing a rust-colored stretch blouse tucked into dark pleated slacks, and she looks cute and compact on the massive desk. Her face, devoid of any makeup, looks more chiseled than I remember, bordering on gaunt, and I’m still getting used to the surprise of her long chestnut hair: straight, thick, and defiantly unstyled. “I thought I’d buy you lunch,” I say, affecting a casual tone.
    “It’s ten A.M.”
    “We’ll beat the rush.”
    She considers me thoughtfully for a minute. “What will we talk about?”
    Carly’s disarming directness, powered by the undercurrent of her incisive wit, was one of the qualities I always admired about her back when we were teenagers. But getting into the conversational flow with her now is like playing in a jazz combo, and I’m out of practice and my timing is off. “I don’t know,” I say. “We really haven’t had the opportunity to catch up.”
    “It’s sort of pointless, isn’t it?” she says, rolling gracefully off her desk and