It’s Your Short Story

I have certain skills as a writer, but fiction isn’t among them. Long ago, in college, I made a half-hearted attempt at typing 1500-word stories, but, as my professor said, they were a bust, and I agreed. I’m also a clod at ice-skating, a zero on any kind of skis, never had much luck at fishing and chemistry baffles me. You yam what you yam.

The accompanying picture, at Baltimore’s City Paper first-floor offices, has the makings of a wonderful short story. As it happens, I just finished the well-known Lauren Groff’s collection of nine stories, Brawler, and though her celebrity in the publishing world (small as it is today) is overblown, her “What’s The Time, Mr. Wolf” is the most perfect short story I’ve read in at least six months. Groff is a punctilious writer in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop vein, meaning, at least in my reading, that the fiction is precise, alternately poignant and witty, but lacks a satisfying conclusion. Not so with “Mr. Wolf,” the long narrative of a blueblood named Chip (of course) from his chubby, unaccomplished teen years—to the consternation and also amusement of his smarter and cruel family members—to an alcoholic, bed-hopping college student and flameout at the family bank, and then an awakening, maybe an epiphany, that he possesses other attributes that would baffle, for example, his brilliant sister Julia. I rooted for the no-longer aimless Chip during his exile, and was pleasantly surprised when Groff wrapped up the story with nothing in doubt.

The New York Times’ Alexandra Jacobs, in reviewing Brawler, was very complimentary, although too flowery to my eye. For example, she writes: “Lauren Groff produces rough beasts that slouch off in unexpected directions and spawn. There’s often a little story within the story, a joey in a marsupial pouch.” High-brow Kamala Harris. She says Groff, unlike many peers, isn’t “polished” and “compact.” I’d say every story in Brawler is “polished,” but that’s neither here nor there; we both liked the collection. (One tic, or device, of Groff’s is a fascination with smells: apples, flowers, urine, maple trees, dogshit and ponds and oceans, to give just a smattering.)

I look at this photo from my youth and wonder what a writer like Groff might do with it. There’s my City Paper co-owner Alan Hirsch (publisher) slouching at my desk, at the end of an exhausting 15 hours, glad to wait until the next day to fend off creditors, referee turf battles between rival sales representatives and enduring (but sometimes enjoying) the wisecracks from the small cadre of free-lance writers and art department staff. He’s wearing a short-sleeve dress shirt—hard to find today, unfortunately—and polyester slacks, probably because they were cheap, as well as a disinterest in fashion.

My Olivetti portable typewriter’s in view, as is a recording device that I used to interview Very Important People, meaning Baltimore’s then-mayor (the city’s never had a better mayor than William Donald Schaefer, a crank I didn’t get along with, but he was largely responsible for the city’s “Renaissance,” and wasn’t caught taking a nickel from the public coffers, unusual for a Baltimore pol), the City Council President and gubernatorial  and Congressional candidates. Funny how one’s view of “importance” shifts in subsequent years and decades.

There’s the beer can and bottle collection at the right, and why I displayed them escapes me. Just above Alan’s head is the cover from a short-lived but excellent Minneapolis weekly, Metropolis (an example of a well-financed newspaper that prioritized editorial over business, a fatal mistake) with Wendell Anderson—the state’s governor, he arrogantly appointed himself Senator when Walter Mondale became Vice President—on the cover. A picture of Bob Dylan, circa 1965; an empty cigarette pack; a couple of CP front pages and house ads; a cover from the invigorating, if too liberal, biweekly magazine New Times, founded and shuttered in the 1970s; a poster, “Eat the Rich” that my friend Bill McGraw and I, working together in Denver a few years earlier, printed on a Chief-15 and plastered on vacant storefronts on Colfax Ave. and side streets; a flyer from JHU’s best rock band Ocean Rose from 1974; and so many newspaper clippings that struck my fancy, but can’t decipher from this picture.

Take a look at the clues to figure out the year: James Callaghan is Prime Minister of UK; the Yorkshire Ripper is on a rampage; the musical Evita opens in London; the British embassy in Tehran is ransacked; Gaylor Perry wins the National League’s Cy Young; Eddie Matthews inducted into Hall of Fame; the Seattle Mariners finish at 56-104; Larry Flynt’s shot and paralyzed; Sweet’s “Love Is Like Oxygen” is big hit; Dallas debuts on CBS; James Badge Dale is born and Charles Boyer dies; Bob Hope hosts the Oscars for the final time; and Harold Nemerov wins the Poetry Pulitzer Prize.

—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023