Years ago, I worked with the shit string out of Canada, Thompson Newspapers. I’ve rarely seen a cheaper, more skinflinted operation. I started out as a minimum wage dockboy but wound up in circulation—much to the quick chagrin of my cocaphile boss. He came to think that I was too negative (imagine that!), and caused too much trouble. “I think your negativity is infecting the department,” Cocaine Jim told once me in a heart-to-heart.

I thanked him for his imaginative assessment of my powers of influence.

The negativism was actually flowing from the mud upstream, which Cocaine Jim couldn’t name. Picture the clown-nosed hatchetman sent from HQ to shore up falling numbers. Bolby was a company stooge north to south. He even wore suspenders, which the asskissers in our department immediately adopted. Parenthetically you might note that suspenders had been brought back from extinction by Michael J Fox in Back to the Future. Fox was second choice: he got his gig after Spielberg fired Eric Stoltz, finding the redhead “too intense.” (Too negative?)

Bolby disliked me on spec, perhaps understandably. My shirts were too wrinkly. My hair was too long. I often came in towards noon. I would noticeably groan when the deathshead Bolby would refer to the newspaper as “product.” I went so far as to correct him. “It’s a newspaper, not a new fast-acting bleach.”

The falling numbers were such an issue, why? Expected in a Bush recession (the first one). Expected in a general cycle.

But Thompson Newspapers was ahoist on their most recent petard. They had rather capriciously thrown up a multi-mil building with high speed web presses, intending to consolidate all their eeny-peeny Central Ohio dailies into one distribution hub. Turns out the money wasn’t there.

So they did what all misunderestimating fatcat companies do—moved the blame to the heads more towards the asshole end of the totem pole. There was a true slaughter of the innocents in the newsroom, as neophytes and stalwart deadwood both got maul and axe. There were new savage performance standards for the overburdened mailroom—which hardly permitted time now for all those who-fuck-who dramedies. And Bolby was sent down to circulation to imply somebody was for the chop.

Bolby scowled the whole day, shedding his suit jacket and rolling up his sleeves. Always a white shirt. I don’t know if he was trying to look like a workingman or just a busy executioner. He had the exact personality of a personal injury claims attorney in heat. He held interminable meetings in which he never offered encouragement or solutions, only a strip tease of termination threats.

Finally even Cocaine Jim started to give way. He would first try to mirror Bolby, but as Bolby prattled on and on over the weeks, Jim would start to roll his eyes and sarcasm began to creep in like an unclean spirit. You could hear his breath of relief when Bolby came up for air and he could go out-of-doors and grab that long suffered-for cigarette.

Finally, my peer Tim broke the ice. He looked Bolby dead in the accountant eye and said, “You know, when you threaten my job every day, it doesn’t make me work harder. It makes me look for another job.”

Bolby had nothing to say, only his eyebrows to raise.

There was really only one solution. And Thompson had the playbook out. Man overboard: the publisher of many years, John Starn, was encouraged to throw himself on his sword. And so he did.

I don’t believe Thompson spun many golden parachutes. But I didn’t feel too badly for Starn. He had that sharklike smile and aggressive thrusting handshake that spelled Organization Man from the gray flannel days. He must have known since the New Building was announced that he was out—scapegoated.

All these years later, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Bolby has likewise been euthanatized. The odor of the pasture would suit him. Organizations have a way of “rewarding” true believers, those trusty trustees, those capable kapos.

Cocaine Jim liked to give us X’er Slackers his “JFK speech.” He liked to describe us as the “After Kennedy Generation,” those with the unrealistic expectations of compensation for effort, or general social justice. Looking back, it was nice to have been lectured to, to still be a young kid with a fresh-faced future, to be the New Generation. Cocaine Jim was a balding thirty-seven to our young twenties, and he seemed like a failed regency indeed. But Kennedy, Cocaine Jim would always remind you, got shot.

Cocaine Jim got “retired” for irreconcilable differences later on, proving even a shifty-eyed sonfabitch with his finger on the trigger gets it too. Years later—now years ago—I stumbled across him as a night clerk at a quick-stop store. He was pretty defensive. Even though we had not parted our former association friends (we didn’t start out so either), I wasn’t bitter about him. I didn’t feel an urge to gloat. Maybe that’s a Kennedy Kid thing too.

All those management books Cocaine Jim was always pushing—The One Minute Manager bullshit—didn’t secure his own future. I’ve come to think that it is pretty well impossible to secure your future in any company unless you are the very top. You don’t get the girl, the gold watch, or anything. You leave with what you brought in—yourself, and the growing sense that this will all be over before you ever quite figure it out.