Bad Break: A Novel

Chapter One

The headline above the fold of The Chicago Daily Midway could easily have been that from one of those tongue-in-cheek mock news sites, like The Onion. But it was real.

"Black Loses it - Kills Whitey."

My name is Blake Wilson. It's nine a.m. on Monday morning.

I've been at work for all of fifteen minutes, and already I'm annoyed.

But I can't decide what's bothering me the most – that headline or that the coffee I just beat and kicked out of a cafeteria vending machine is wearing a thin layer of fur on top.

I admit it. For just a second, I think maybe Gil Scott Heron was right. The revolution has started, but in print, instead of televised. Someone I know must have gone crazy, perhaps my uncle who has said repeatedly over the years that if society ever collapses, he will take the late comedian Richard Pryor's advice and kill his blonde-haired blue-eyed wife first to prove he means business. I think he's joking. One of these days, in the presence of a lawyer, I'll ask dear old unc if he really means it.

Anyway, I keep reading and learn quickly that Conrad Black, a fifty-three-year-old Cook County Parks Department employee, finally got fed up last evening with constant ribbing from co-worker William Whitey, age forty-six, and struck Whitey over the head with a garden hoe. Whitey, having been thoroughly plowed, did not make it.

Maybe it seems calloused, but my immediate reaction to the conclusion of this short article is a sigh of relief. Anything short of murder would've made this story a dark comedy, if you will, with brooding overtones about the racial ironies of Black popping Whitey – especially in a city so segregated as Chicago, and especially if it turns out Black is black and Whitey actually white.

Should that be the case, my ticket's going to get punched.

In my newsroom, I am the resident safe Black guy - the one whose khakis and oxford shirts are crisp and who grew up thinking Carlton Banks was actually funny. But I also get the billion and one digital platforms on which news is delivered these days.

The Daily Midway is on the verge of a cataclysmic round of layoffs. And the journalist who knows his way around a flash drive and cloud storage and who can Snap and Tweet as well as he types – the writer who can work a camera and the photographer who can stroke out a few paragraphs, is the one who will be standing when the dust settles.

I'm not anti-technology. I'm pretty active on social media, but if the consumption habits of my friends are any indication, those who care about the news still seem to get it mostly from news websites operated by newspapers, or TV.

Regardless of how my work is presented, though, I love my job. I tell stories... true stories to the best of my knowledge. And on days when I'm feeling righteous, I remind myself that I am the fourth estate, the check-and-balance system for all three branches of government, that mine is the voice of the people or something noble like that.

Usually though, right here on planet Earth, I am just that guy. There are other reporters of color. But, seriously, if a revolution had started with Whitey's killing, I'm the guy my editors would ask to stand between them and the angry hoards because management thinks I speak fluent angry hoard, fluent dark-skinned angry hoard.

My editors think my nostalgia...and my blackness are proof that I'm the Wayne Brady of newspapers.

Two editors are huddled in the bay, the semi-enclosed rectangle of desks in the center of our newsroom where all local and state news editors sit. They say it's simply coincidental Feng Shui that the desks on two sides of the bay face each other. On the third side, the desks point toward the executive editor's office, a Mecca of sorts to the mid-level news managers who hope every day that the editor feels the homage and adoring or fearful gazes they send his way via osmosis. But my cynical side says the desks are positioned that way so the section editors can always gaze lovingly on each other and always have their backs turned on the peons in the rest of the basketball court-sized room.