A fond farewell to the guy who coerced me to write this stuff
by Jack Neely
When I started at Whittle in the fall of '87, I fell in with a group of low-ranking sub-editors for various slick magazines, all from different parts of the country, all in our 20s. We went to lunch together every day, mainly to make fun of everything we saw. I was the least-experienced magazine editor in the group, and the only Knoxvillian. I didn't have much to offer my colleagues except to amuse them with defensive stories about my hometown.
Coury Turczyn was the skinny kid from Detroit who, depending on his arrangement of facial hair, sometimes bore a striking resemblance to Frank Zappa and any number of Hungarian assassins. I couldn't spell his name, but I felt an affinity for him because he was the only guy at Whittle who didn't brag about his big-time magazine credits, maybe because, like me, he didn't have any.
Coury seemed like a dreamy lad, at odds with Whittle's pragmatic manifesto. He quoted fellow midwesterner F. Scott Fitzgerald. He wore hip sunglasses with nickel-sized lenses and learned to ride a motorcycle. He talked about going to Hollywood to sell his screenplays, like Fitzgerald did.
A lot of people talk that big, of course. Coury surprised us all when he actually left.
Meanwhile, I got used to my status as a cog in a very comfortable machine. We made glossy, doggedly useful magazines. I talked on the phone with famous writers and went on business trips to New York and Washington. It all convinced me I was a big shot, putting together magazines our marketing people told us were being read by 20 million people nationwide. I watched my colleagues come and go. At Whittle, you made friends strangely fast, then they left, and you never saw them again. Eventually you forgot their names. Whittle was like trench warfare, except with air conditioning, a great medical plan, and little actual blood.
Some stayed much longer than others. But after they left, they never came back. That is, until that day in the fall of '91—I think it was shortly after we moved into the swanky new building—when suddenly the elevator disgorged a vaguely familiar face from the distant past, the late '80s, three or four Whittle eras ago. It was Coury Turczyn himself, saying hello, and in his unassertive, ironic, self-effacing way, asking for a job. He'd given up on Hollywood and decided to come back. Instead of coming back to Detroit, though, he came back to Knoxville. But for the first time ever, Whittle wasn't hiring. Coury lowered his sites and came back asking for freelance work, and I think he got a little.
He kept coming around, roaming the carpeted floors like the guy who sells flowers in nightclubs. I began to feel sorry for him.
After a couple of months, though, he was coming around not looking for work, but recruiting writers for another publication. He carried a story list from carrel to carrel, quickly, as if he was afraid of being collared for soliciting.
I'd heard of "Metro Pulse." I pronounced it with quotation marks because I didn't want anyone to think I took it seriously. It was one of a half-dozen free tabloids that blew around on Gay Street, most of them full of shameless music promotions and the wisdom of sophomores.
Coury somehow recruited some of my Whittle colleagues: Lee Gardner, David Haynes, Allison Glock. They kept their day jobs, but began moonlighting for this "Metro Pulse," writing profiles and music stories. When he came by my carrel he had several ideas about stories I could write for "Metro Pulse"; the one he pushed was an idea that I should write a history column based on some of the beery Knoxville stories I used to tell at parties. For weeks, I tried to think of polite ways to put him off.
Just to humor Coury, I accepted his invitation to meet him in the seedy "Metro Pulse" office upstairs at the unrenovated Bijou. I wanted to shake him and say, Have some pride, man! You're a former Whittle editor! I feared for his reputation, and for mine. One Whittle editor's association with this "Metro Pulse" could spoil all of our resumes.
Coury, however, seemed to be suffering some sad delusion, speaking as if "Metro Pulse" were a respectable enterprise. I'd known Coury as a habitual cynic—he dismissed most popular culture with a wry, nasal comment—but he seemed unsettlingly earnest about this cheap paper. Moreover, he seemed earnest about Knoxville, which he began to call "our city," a phrase I don't think I'd ever heard before. He spoke of Knoxville as if it were a real place that deserved attention. It seemed a provocative new theory.
Coury kept bugging me about the local-history idea, and proposed calling the prospective column Knoxville Babylon. I think it was in arguing against that title that I implicitly agreed to write it. Over the next several months, I spent a good deal of time in the library humoring Coury.
They paid me $15 a column. I thought I was robbing them. I was writing it as a favor for my friend Coury, for whom I was concerned.
This bi-weekly couldn't have had a real circulation of over 450 in 1992, but suddenly I was getting more cards and letters and phone calls about these "Metro Pulse" stories than I ever got working for Special Report, where we were lucky to have enough mail to fill the letters page.
By the summer of '92, I began to get a weird suspicion that, regardless of Whittle's big names and big money and scientific focus groups and a national-circulation machine, more people were actually reading this little free downtown bi-weekly. I kept my day job, for the money, but started paying more attention to Metro Pulse, without the quotation marks, and even begging Coury to let me publish more. Just to humor him, of course.
August 24, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 34
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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