Occasionally, because of its name, The National Herald is mistaken for a church publication. Such is not the case. At those moments, only its reputation as a 120-year-old newspaper of great repute rescues it from calumny. You don’t expect The New York Times to be a compendium of train and bus schedules. The Chicago Tribune covers more than the courts. The Los Angeles Times, flat broke, still lists other items in addition to sunrises and sunsets.

            Several years into the new millenium, to celebrate Valentine’s Day, The National Herald’s magazine Hark! ran a short story contest based on a photograph. A voluptuous strawberry blonde—anonymously presented from the back—lies half-naked on a bed, clutching the receiver of a telephone.

            Your job, Bob, shall be to make up a romantic story based on this photo. Should you or any of your team be captured or killed, my secretary will disallow that individual’s expense account!

            My creative writing teacher at Moosegrave College once lectured us, “Boys and girls, young adults, please don’t ever begin a story with the sentence ‘Frank sat on the grass in front of the frat house.’ Nothing could be more mundane, pernicious and absolutely reeking of inconsequentiality. A story that begins like that loses the reader’s interest before you have even begun.”

            What a challenge!

            Here is that story.

                                         Tell Laurel I Love Her

            Bob sat on the grass in front of the frat house.

            “Hello?”

            “Laurel, it’s Bob!”

            “Good grief, Bob, what time is it?”

             “Never mind what time it is, Laurel! I LOVE YOU!”

               “Bob!” she yawned cavernously. “It’s sweet of you to call on Valentine’s Day, honey, but a little early—“     

               “It’s 10 a.m. I’m sitting on the grass in front of the Alpha Sigma Pi fraternity house here on campus in sunny Hollywood, Florida, thinking of you, Laurel, thinking how I love you! Let me count the ways. There’s—“

               “Bob, honey, it’s way early!” she said, all but dropping the phone. She couldn’t really be angry with him. Bob forgave her every little misstep. That was his strength, he was non-judgmental. Even when she took up pole-dancing to supplement her salary as a waitress, Bob hadn’t complained. Jim, Paul and Richard all felt pole-dancing was out of line. People completely missed the benefits of pole-dancing! It was wonderful exercise. Many of the movements were similar to cheerleading. No one criticized cheerleaders. Ergo, why criticize pole-dancers? True, she pole-danced in a titty bar, but that wasn’t her fault. Given a choice, she gladly would have pole-danced in Town Hall.

           Even when she slept with her boss, Arturo, sweet and considerate Bob had understood. He used the opportunity to score some coke from Artie.

        “Laurel, the sky is filled with purple haze—!”

        “Bob?” she asked, beginning to tire of this conversation. “What are you talking about, Bob? Have you begun ingesting methamphetamine again, Bob?”

        “I’m clean, I swear!” he gasped into his cell phone. “There’s a bright, silver light filling the sky, Laurel!”

        “Because, Bob, long-term abuse of crystal meth can cause—“

        “My God!” he screamed. “It’s a f—ing spaceship!”

        “Bob?”

        On the lawn of the frat house, yellow with morning sunshine, alive with the buzzing of bees and twitter of birds, the eight-ton alien spacecraft roared to a stop amidst a pool of flame. Slowly, slowly, the metal door slid open and hundreds of little green men the size of crickets infested the lawn. Firing tiny rayguns, they felled students on every side. Pinging and banging, their guns mowed down the young people like the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

        Clamping his iPod Nano more firmly to his hip with his right hand and holding his cell phone with his left, Bob sprinted toward the safety of the corner.

        Over the phone, Laurel could hear the wop-wop-wop of military helicopters. I guess this is what it’s like to serve in Iraq, she thought, on the edge of sleep. The soothing wop, wop, wop had the rhythm of a pole-dance. As she drifted off…

        “Hello! Ma’am?”

        She was awakened by an authoritative voice. She must have dozed off holding the phone. “What? Yes, who is this?” she asked sleepily. Turning to look at the wall clock across the room, she saw it was 11:15 a.m. “Jesus!” she mumbled crankily. “What does a girl have to do to get some sleep?” Poor Bob, she had used up 75 of his anytime minutes.

        “This is Ralph Rolfe of the 33^rd Medical Detachment, ma’am,” said the voice. He sounded surprisingly virile.

        Laurel began to wake up! “Yes?” she asked.

        “You must be Laurel, ma’am,” said the deep, consoling voice of Ralph Rolfe.

        “Well, yes, I am,” she said, sitting up in bed and running her hand through her hair. “Do I know you?”

        “Not really, ma’am. I’m a medic with the 33^rd,” Rolfe told her apologetically.

        “Because I’m not that far north of Hollywood. I mean, Florida isn’t such a big state, geographically.”

        “That’s true,” agreed Ralph Rolfe. “I know your name because the last thing this young man, whose pale lifeless head is cradled in my lap, said before he died was, ‘Tell Laurel I love her!’ Just how far north of Hollywood are you, ma’am? May I call you Laurel?”

        Oh, well, she thought philosophically. It is Valentine’s Day and dear, sweet Bob wouldn’t have wanted me to be alone on Valentine’s Day! The very fact that he called—

*

            Unlike the university age editors of the Moosegrave College weekly, the grown-up professionals at The National Herald had no complaint about the narrative style nor the length of my piece, which stayed within the prescribed limits. Although they agreed that, technically, it was a short story focusing on the various aspects of love, by their reckoning, what was missing was the sting of Cupid’s arrows. They felt my contribution failed to fulfill the spirit of Valentine’s Day.

            Rather ungraciously, they told me to take a hike.

*

            Alas, I live with the rancid remnant of early success. Once upon a time, having just graduated from college, I won the golden horseshoe at this self-same National Herald. They took a reasoned, lengthy reply I made to an article about the Dutch Vondelpark outside Amsterdam and published it as a bonafide news story.

            I was a newspaper writer!

            They sent me a check for $25!       

             Beginner’s luck fresh out of the gate, I have spent a lifetime trying to duplicate this one case of correct info and perfect timing. 

             Like many a denizen of Greater Washington, over the years, I too have sought employment at The National Herald. I have applied to work editorially on the Night Desk, electronically on the national blog or even organizationally within the Data Archive Division. A simple B. A. in Communications—journalism, radio, TV and film—I get fully dumped upon by people with Master’s Degrees who already have 30 years’ broadcast and writing experience for major news outlets near you!

            “Why are you applying for a nuts and bolts position at The National Herald if you’re already a senior editor somewhere else?” I actually asked a fellow applicant at the publisher’s Open House job fair.

            “Transferring laterally allows me to move up the career ladder without waiting for someone above me, where I work now, to retire or die.

            “Although I’m not at all sure that I want to commit to a new company at this time.”

            Fee, fye, fo, fum, I’m trying to land a job, and my competitors want to embellish their résumés!

            In this new millenium, I have rec’d. only an occasional nibble from The National Herald.

            At The National Herald, it’s not the quality of your writing that counts. Everyone writes stupendously! Nor is encyclopedic knowledge particularly rewarded. There are researchers to ferret that stuff, every reporter has a string of knowledgeable contacts, and Google works as well on their WiFi network as anyone else’s. No, the sad fact is, in an ever-shrinking environment, it’s your reputation that separates the gainfully employed from the dudes on line at Social Services. If you already have your set of keys to the building, mazel tov! If not, seek thy fortune elsewhere.

              I have since attempted to remain an impartial observer of the newspaper scene, noting the unmantling and demise of one news sheet after another. “Getting screwed?” I gloat triumphantly, in spite of my best efforts to the contrary. “It couldn’t happen to a more elitist, arrogant, puffed-up, self-aggrandizing collection of self-congratulatory egomaniacs!”

               I mean, happily, I’m not bitter or anything, right?

*