ficlet: Novitiate
26 Nov 2017 18:44![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
domarzione1800 words | Karen Page (post-DD2, pre-everything else)
After her first byline, after the fuss dies down, after she almost-maybe stops feeling like she's walking across Ben's grave by sitting at his desk, Karen takes a deep breath and wonders what the hell she's gotten herself into this time.
Which is precisely the moment Ellison sticks his head into 'her' office (it's still Ben's in every way that counts).
"What've you got for me?" he asks and Karen can tell that he already knows the answer.
"Give me until the end of the day?" she offers. The problem with starting off with a bang is that every single idea she has after is terrible by comparison. She is desperate to prove that she can do this job, that she's meant to do this job, and the end result is that she is sitting there blank-minded and blank-paged and there's no way that isn't written all over her face.
"I gave you until the end of last week," Ellison replies, sourly but not unkindly. He wants her to succeed, she knows this, and that makes her inability to follow through all the worse. "Hie thee down to the City desk. That's where you'll be working out of for the next month. Martinez already knows you're coming."
She might have squeaked. "The City desk?"
Ellison sighs. "How long have you been living here, Page? Three years? Five?" he asks. "How many times have you left Hell's Kitchen? How many times have you left Manhattan? Do you even know how to get to Queens without calling an Uber? "
"Head east?" she offers with a wince.
It gets her a put-upon look, but then Ellison gets his Editor-Dad expression on, the one that warns everyone at the Bulletin that they're not going to like what comes next, but it'll be for their own good.
"You want to sit at Ben's desk, inherit Ben's beat? Then you have to learn this city so you can write about it like you know what goes on here. Like he did," he tells her. "Jimmy Breslin, Ben Urich -- the best speakers for the city we've ever had -- they knew this place like their own faces. They didn't have to read a dozen blogs every day to figure out what to say. Their hearts beat to the pulse of this city and all they had to do was listen. You want to live up to that legacy? Get down to the City desk."
She goes.
Martinez knows she's coming and he's not impressed. "I was here five years before I stopped sharing bylines on big stories," he told her. "I was writing about sewers in Huguenot and shootouts in Ocean Hill and sausage festivals on Arthur Avenue and sharing a desk in the bullpen with a guy who left his lunches in the bottom drawer to rot. You, you show up on the front page and get an office on the fourth floor without ever having to sit around in Foley Square waiting for a story to break.
"But now you're here. And, lucky me, I get to break you in."
It's a threat and it's a promise and he doesn't know her very well at all if he thinks the former's going to be a problem.
Her first assignment is up to East Harlem, where an incumbent congressman has been revealed to hold title to four rent-controlled apartments, despite being legally entitled to one and morally to none because he's a millionaire. It sounds like a slam-dunk story and she's pretty sure that refilling her Metrocard is going to be the complicated part... until she gets to 125th Street.
It takes her less than half an hour to realize that she's not the muckraker looking for justice against a corrupt politician. She's the enemy. NY-13 isn't a congressional district, it's a fiefdom. Everyone she talks to loves their congressman and has a story of what he has done for them personally, from getting rid of the red tape for their business to getting their slumlord to fix the pipes to getting their kid's elementary school new books. He ran his last three elections unopposed by the other party, let alone by his own in a primary. If he's got a couple of apartments he's letting his sister and her kids live in, so what? There's much worse going on down below East 96th Street, where all the rich folk live.
That she looks a lot more like those Upper East Siders -- fair hair, fair skin, pencil skirt and heels -- than anyone she's talking to doesn't not matter. It didn't not matter in Hell's Kitchen, where Nelson and Murdock tended to a client base that came in every color and accent. But in Hell's Kitchen she had other ways to make a connection with potential clients until she earned their trust -- she shopped at the same Gristedes, she got woken up by the garbage trucks on the same days, she knew that you went to Eddie's Pizza on 11th by 49th for the arepas and not the pizza. She has none of that up in East Harlem and she doesn't know what to do about it.
What she does do is go a few blocks over and walk into Marcus Garvey Park and find a bench and feel sorry for herself for ten minutes. (She times it.) And then pulls out her notebook to look over what she thought she would be doing and what she accepts she's not going to be able to do now. She crosses out more than she adds, but she adds something and that's a start. She walks through the park to the west exit -- she hopes it's the west exit, she's just following the sun -- and tries to orient herself without pulling out her phone.
An older black gentleman in a flat cap and a light blue suit that might've been trendy in 1973 asks her if she's lost. She is, in more ways than one, but she also suddenly has half an idea.
"Actually, I'm looking for a good place to get lunch," she says and is directed to a caribbean and soul food place on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. She has been instructed to get the oxtails, but goes for the stewed chicken with collards and yams. There's enough food for lunch and dinner and possibly lunch tomorrow, which is enough of an excuse to sit around and people-watch outside the window and do what Ellison, through Martinez, sent her here to do.
Writing a story about the congressman's very loose interpretation of New York State's rent regulation laws isn't complicated. She returns to Harlem -- in more casual clothes -- and gets her bland quote from the district office. And then she walks around, trying not to be someone who is treating the excursion like a safari. It takes her a few days before she can shed her self-consciousness and start focusing on who actually lives in Harlem and learning what their concerns are, since it's not that their elected representative is gaming the system. Also learning that it's not really 'Harlem,' it's Spanish Harlem and Sugar Hill and Manhattanville and Hamilton Heights and Central Harlem and they all have different priorities -- nobody in El Barrio cares about Columbia University buying up half of Manhattanville, nobody in Sugar Hill cares about the Second Avenue Subway. But that doesn't mean they have nothing in common and that's where she finds her 'in' -- and gets Martinez off her back to file the goddamned copy already.
The real story is about what rent control and rent stabilization mean to places where apartments that used to cram in three generations of a family for two-fifty a month are now selling for a million dollars after renovation. Karen has been living through this in Hell's Kitchen since she came to New York and this she understands. There are Foggy Nelsons in Hamilton Heights who know where the best places used to be before they became Starbucks or Duane Reades or banks. There are Elena Cardenases in East Harlem who have stories of neighborhood life twenty years ago, fifty years ago, in good times and bad. And there's a big difference between nostalgia and not being able to afford to live in the community where your parents raised you.
She files two stories, the fifteen-incher Martinez is using as a hazing ritual and then the longer story of how the old tries to make peace with and find their place in the new. Martinez curses her out, but in the non-specific way that means he's really annoyed that he's got to find a different fifteen-incher to run tomorrow so he can run her longform on Sunday.
Monday morning, she's got a clip of her article on her desk with "Not bad," in Ellison's scrawl. And a new assignment from Martinez, who threatens to demote her to digital intern if she tries to write War and Peace instead of a straight-up report on the latest hold-up with the Willets Point development project. "It's chop shops and eminent domain and sludge from the Sound. That's what I want to see."
So she recharges her Metrocard and figures out that you can get to Queens by taking the 7 train, conveniently to the Willets Point station. She takes her look around, then walks off in search of people, since there aren't any in Willets Point. Which is how she ends up in downtown Flushing, which could easily be mistaken for downtown Beijing, and sees only possibilities.
Martinez gets two stories again and Karen does not trade places with Evan-the-digital-intern. Instead, she gets sent to Brooklyn to write the counterpoint half of the debate on whether shutting down two stops on the L train for eighteen months is as apocalyptic as the protesters insist. Martinez thinks she's going to get stuck having to write against those being inconvenienced because her angle has so far been sympathy. Martinez is wrong and he has hoisted himself on his own petard because he's the reason Karen has gotten used to shlepping all the way from her apartment on 52nd off 11th to wait like Godot for the C train.
The game continues for longer than a month, Martinez throwing darts at a map of the city and challenging her to do more with less. It takes her at least that long to realize that Martinez isn't trying to break her anymore. That he hasn't been for a while. He's trying to make her better by making her stretch and learn how to be a journalist as well as a New Yorker. She brings him Senegalese food after filing her copy on the new studio opening in Soundview. He tells her she's still not getting out of covering the Public Advocate candidates debate, but he smiles as he does so.
