A lot of people have worked at Metro Pulse over the past 10 years. Here's what some of them have to say about it.
Coury Turczyn (editor, engine):
Although I've applied almost 12 minutes of near-total concentration to the task, I'm sadly unable to come up with one anecdote that neatly encapsulates the decade I spent at Metro Pulse having the most productive years of my life being sucked out for wages that would offend a McDonald's fry cook, leaving me an empty husk of a man with little or no future. But I will try.
Mostly, I remember mishaps, screaming, and violence—for some reason, these are the moments that have staunchly resisted the daily deletion that my brain undertakes as it erases as much as possible from the databanks to ease the pain. Most of it's from the early years: The Day Ashley Screamed At Rand When He Was Freaking Out Over the Screwed-Up Jazz and Blues Fest Guide, The Day Pat the Sales Manager Thrust His Fist Through the Wall, The Day the Fire Broke Out and Turned the Sprinklers On Over Our Only Design Computer, etc. Legends in local alternative newsweekly history, all. Then there were the various underhanded attempts made by the News-Sentinel to kill us off, the countless readers who called to scream threats or accuse us of grand conspiracies, the several advertiser boycotts that arose because we printed the word "gay" too many times (and not in reference to the street). To tell you the truth, it was a lot of misery to go through just to give Knoxville a free weekly paper with news, analysis, and culture—especially when it seemed like Knoxville really just preferred its usual diet of safe, empty fluff. Does this happen in other cities? I ask myself this a lot, even a year after retiring from the fray.
But then I start recalling the faces. I can't always place the names of former staffers, but they float past my mind's eye like a '40s movie montage: writers and editors (Chris! Lee! Shelly!), designers (Jared, Nicole, Valerie, so many others), copy editors (burly punk Jon, are you still in Russia?), freelancers and photographers (so much talent for so little money), harried production managers, hundreds of earnest interns, thousands of hopeful sales people, stressed business managers, the string of odd office assistants... Many, many lives crossed the Metro Pulse threshold during my stay, and I remember that most of us were thankful to be here, together, doing good work and making a living that offered not a little fulfillment. We were free to do the best job we could—and not many places of employment truly offer that privilege (a tip of the hat to publisher Joe Sullivan).
It was a pleasure to work with these staffers (both former and current), and I doubt if I'll ever be around that many smart, talented, passionate individuals in one place again. While I hope our few dozen loyal readers also benefited from our efforts (and maybe Knoxville itself, who knows), I'll always selfishly think of Metro Pulse in terms of our own little band of scrappy newspaperists, now scattered to the world.
Jack Neely (secret historian, troublemaker):
It was a sunny weekday morning and I was alone in a rental car on I-75 just north of Cincinnati when I passed an Ohio State Trooper parked in the median. I eased into the right lane to give him some room, and was surprised when I saw his blue lights in my rearview. I slowed down, thinking he was just going to pass. I wasn't doing anything wrong. I had my seatbelts on, I wasn't speeding. But he stayed behind me, lights flashing, and I pulled over.
The Ohio State Trooper came to my window and muttered something about my having changed lanes without signaling. I apologized, told him I was from Tennessee, and didn't know any better. Besides, I said, there was no traffic. Nobody could have seen my signal, except for him, and at the time he was parked on the side of the road.
It didn't matter much to him. I'd still broken the law. "If you're from Tennessee," he said, "what are you doing in Ohio?"
For some reason, it seemed like a reasonable question. I once answered a question like it at the Yugoslavian border. "I'm a reporter," I said. "I'm working on a story."
"Where did your trip to Ohio originate, sir?" he asked.
"Knoxville, Tennessee," I said.
"Where is your destination?"
"Illinois," I said.
"Where in Illinois?"
"Knoxville."
"You're from Knoxville."
"I'm going to Knoxville, Illinois," I said.
He looked at me like I was the biggest smartass he'd ever seen.
"Do you know people in Knoxville, Illinois, sir?"
"No, sir."
"Where are you going next?" he said.
"Iowa," I said.
"Where in Iowa?" he said.
I took a deep breath. "Knoxville, Iowa," I said.
I started to explain that I was doing a feature story about the second and third largest Knoxvilles in the world for the folks back in Knoxville, Tennessee, but I didn't make much headway. He'd clearly had enough of me for one decade.
"So you're a reporter," he interrupted. "Who do you work for?"
"Metro Pulse."
"Never heard of it. You're a reporter? Let me see your press pass."
Come on, I thought. Press pass? This is Metro Pulse. I said, "I'm sorry, I don't have one."
It was clear he doubted every bit of this white boy's story, especially the part about me being who I said I was.
"Do you have any proof that you work for this Metro ——?" He seemed to have as much uncertainty pronouncing the name as a Cedar Bluff Republican. "Pay stubs? Business cards?"
I rifled through my wallet like a mugger, pretty sure I could find something like that, but my wallet was, for once, eerily neat. No pay stubs. And I'd given my last business card to an old lady who wanted to tell me about how nice everybody was in the old days.
The state trooper called in backup. He asked for my home phone number and, standing by the side of the road with his cell phone, called my wife long distance. He asked her to describe me.
I couldn't hear everything he said, but the conversation seemed to be taking altogether too long. I didn't realize that she thought this cop was some jerky salesman or pervert and wasn't about to tell him anything.
Suddenly I realized the gravity of my situation. I was a solo white man in his 30s with a goatee, driving a rental car from Tennessee toward the population centers of the north. I fit the profile. I was the definition of the profile. Plus, I had a weird story about my trip and a questionable identity. I was as good as guilty. As I sat there, I was pretty well convinced myself that I was running a trunkload of hash.
"Sir, do you mind if we search your car?"
He blurted it out quickly as if it was something of no consequence. From college, I remembered studying cases about car searches, but I couldn't remember what the Supreme Court had decided about it. I thought I could refuse, but also thought this guy might drag me back to Cincinnati for questioning, and I was in a hurry. And heck, it was just a rental car. All I had was a paper bag with some underwear and an extra shirt. Might be fun to watch.
"Well, sure," I said. "Go right ahead," but he'd started before I even finished talking.
"Is that alcohol, sir?" he said, gesturing toward the bottles in my front seat. They were six bottles in a black-and-white carton, cheap-looking clear bottles that look as if their red caps were hammered on in someone's garage. I have a habit, on long trips, of carrying a six-pack of this stuff with me. It's the only thing strong enough to keep me awake in the Midwest. One bottle was empty, another half-empty.
"No, sir," I said. "It's Blenheim's Ginger Ale. It's really spicy. They make it in South Carolina."
He was pondering that answer when the backup unit arrived and parked in front of my car in case I made a break for it. The second cop grilled me with many of the same questions the first one had, then escorted me into his squad car. He put me in the back, behind the cage wall, and locked the doors.
As I watched from behind, the two men picked through my car. They first picked up my Blenheim's, passed it back and forth, smelling it, inspecting it as if it were an AK-47. They combed through the trunk, took out the spare tire. They popped the hood and poked around in there for a while. I couldn't see them from my back-seat cell, but I guessed they were looking for cocaine in the distributor cap. They went through my paper sack, and I realized it probably seemed suspicious for a young urban professional to travel for several days without any actual luggage.
Then they pulled out something I didn't recognize. The older cop came back to the car and talked to me through the cage.
"Who's Lois Stringfield?" he said.
"I don't know."
"Who's Curtis Potash?" he said.
"Don't know him, either."
"Why are you carrying a check for $256?" I didn't know. It must have been in the car when I rented it. He said he found it in the door pouch.
I tallied all the suspicious evidence in my mind: the Tennessee plates, the weird personal check, the questionable identification, the bizarre itinerary, the paper sack, the goatee, the Blenheim's. In Ohio, I figured that was probable cause. I could almost hear the clang of the cell doors in some Cincinnati jail.
But after about an hour, the two men stood in front of the car and talked. I couldn't hear what they said, but they both seemed frustrated, and a little angry. They closed up my car and let me out of theirs. They even gave me back the check from Lois to Curtis.
"I'm not going to write you a ticket," the first cop said. "But I recommend you don't stop until you get out of Ohio." He handed me a citation for changing lanes without signaling. I've still got it somewhere.
I took the patrolman's advice. I crossed New Knoxville, Ohio, off my itinerary and didn't stop again in the buckeye state. I drove on to Knoxville, Iowa, by way of Knoxville, Illinois.
Betty Bean (provacateur, sass dispenser):
The Knoxville Journal folded at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve 1991, making Knoxville a one-newspaper town. I didn't figure there was much reason for me to stay around, so I accepted a cool out-of-state job and threw myself a going-away party down at Hoo-Rays. Among the guests was Rand Pearson, the 20-something publisher of a feisty little 'zine called Metro Pulse.
Everybody had a real good time, especially me. Afterward, I sat there while the band was breaking down, trying to remember why I was leaving this low-rise burg that's the only place I've ever called home. The Pearson kid, a persistent little cuss, hung around, too.
Within the week, I had unpacked my bags and was doing freelance pieces for Metro Pulse, including a gossip column called "Urban Trolling," essentially the "Whispers" column that I had inherited from Cynthia Moxley at the Journal. I found myself—a 40-something learning about computers from Ian and pop culture from Coury and music from Lee. These Gen-Xers were the smartest, most talented, wettest-behind-the-ears bunch I'd ever known (other than the two at home who called me mom), but they cared little for local politics, which was pretty much my life. It was an interesting time.
After awhile, a grownup came around. Joe Sullivan—a native Knoxvillian who'd sought his fortune in places like Chicago and New York and returned home with this crazy idea of starting a newspaper—invited me to lunch. Joe had looked at getting in on an effort to revive the Journal, and when that failed, the pesky Pearson had sold him on Metro Pulse. I figured him for a pretty conservative guy.
Joe's financial backing and rigorous editing made life even more interesting. Staff meetings were marked by lively discussions (read: shouting matches). Sacred cows were variously defended, slaughtered and eaten for lunch. We duked it out on some issues, like downtown development; worked shoulder-to-shoulder on others, like the Mayfield for Council campaign. We were visited by the Klan.
Personally, I've never had a better time.
Professionally, I can't think of anyone who has put his money, and his heart, where his mouth is more than Joe Sullivan, to whom I am forever grateful, even when I yell at him.
Barry Henderson (editor, sage):
Way back in '93 when I was new to the Metro Pulse family, only a couple of months into the editor's job, we learned one bright Thursday morning that the then-distributor had a deliveryman quit on the spot before putting the issue out. It was in a testy time, before the company and its contractors were operating like the well-oiled machine we have today. It was a crisis among crises, so to speak.
A substantial part of Knoxville was without its dose of bi-weekly reality. Joe Sullivan was fretting and stewing. There was nothing, the distributor told Joe, that could be done that day. Staff members were standing around with blank looks on their faces.
It dawned on me that my truck was outside, so I blurted out: "Hell, all the work that goes into this comes to nothing unless it gets to the racks and newsstands," or something like that.
I got directions from Joe, pulled the red Dodge up to the loading dock off Broadway where the bundles were stacked, and piled the bed with Metro Pulses bound for the Cumberland Strip and points west.
Four-and-a-half hours and around 40,000 beads of sweat later (I don't ordinarily engage in physical labor; that's why I do what I do), the racks were filled, and the discriminating denizens of West Knoxville were secure in the truth of the moment.
It was a good experience all around. I got a look at where we were putting how many copies of the paper in a wide area of the city and county, and the staff regarded me differently, and, I think, more favorably, from then on. I still laugh when I think of how much more work it was than I had imagined when I offered up my gesture of dedication to the cause.
Lee Gardner (writer, music man):
There was the time a local wrestling promoter got me in a headlock to demonstrate (very forcefully, I might add) that wrestling isn't fake.
There was the time some bulky, middle-aged guys stopped by the office early one morning when I was one of the few staffers around. They claimed to be representatives of the Ku Klux Klan and wanted to speak with someone about the Klan's new "positive" image.
There was the time I caught Joe Sullivan lighting a cigarette off a candle at a party on Chris Barrett and Mollie Moran's front porch. "Joe, that's bad luck," I told him. "Every time you do that a sailor dies." He leaned up from the flame with one of those endearingly wobegone expressions on his face and said, "And a little part of me does too."
There were the times Pat Hinds and Jared Coffin seemed ready to obliterate each other, like matter and anti-matter. There were all the times Jack Neely called me "Leebo," which made me sound like the knockaround Southern kid I never was, and I liked that. There were the too-numerous-to-count times that some discursive conversation or goof got us laughing enough to jeopardize us getting any work done at all.
But for some reason, I keep thinking about the smelly old Army-surplus sleeping bag I kept under my desk for most of the years I worked at Metro Pulse. I used it often, crawling into it in around 2 a.m. to take a break from working on a story and crawling out when the alarm on my Mac went off at six, so I could keep writing. I believe Ian borrowed it a time or two as well for just such a purpose. I have never done that on any job since.
We all worked really hard, in large part because we simply loved doing what we were doing. I imagine that's still the case.
Shelly Ridenour (editor, torture kitty):
So I'll probably always be known as the editor who loved Superdrag (which is certainly not a bad way to be remembered), but few people realize my relationship with the band didn't have the warmest or fuzziest of beginnings. Remember the pre-Superdrag band The Used, aka "ugly music for ugly people"? Well, the first time I saw these Hanoi Rocks wannabes—opening for Barbed Wire Sheila at Tomato Head (possibly when it was still called the Flying Tomato, circa 1992)—they sucked. Hard. I don't remember exactly, but I likely wrote something dismissive of them in the calendar section. I avoided them for months, but it's sort of inevitable in Knoxville that a band you don't like will eventually end up opening for a band you do, and paths will cross. But something had happened in the six months since I had last seen The Used. They'd gotten better. In fact, they were suddenly great. In a fit of genuine excitement, I previewed their next show by calling them "the most improved band in town." I meant it as a compliment. But, as I would come to learn over five-plus years of writing blurby witticisms about local bands, people can take offense in the font you use. I went to that next show, at Flamingo's, with my pal Mike Smithers. There I am, watching The Used, loving the fierce, raw, devil-may-care attitude, when suddenly I hear over the P.A., "If there's anyone here from that rag Metro Pulse, screw you. We don't need you or your asshole publicity." This went on as the between-song banter for the rest of the set. I was stunned. And furious.
As soon as the band (none of whom I'd ever met) walked off the stage, I marched up to the guitarist, Brandon Fisher, and said, "Hi, I'm Shelly from Metro Pulse. Nice to meet you, jackass." Poor Brandon. Only later would I understand how unlikely—how absolutely comical—it would've been for this amazingly nice man to ever say anything like that. Red-faced, he stammered and stuttered and apologized profusely for his drummer's comments before taking me to the Longbranch.
We were making nice at an outside table, when suddenly this loudmouth kid—at 17, much too young to even join us on the bar's porch—came up and started cursing and spitting and spewing crap about everything and nothing in particular. "This is John Davis," Brandon said. "He's the one you can thank for saying shit about you." We circled each other like angry cats, traded a few fierce put-downs, and... a few weeks later we were inseparable friends, and I would become an absolute champion of the band he would soon front, Superdrag.
The funny thing is, it wasn't the only time I was cussed out from a stage in the name of Metro Pulse. Later, I heard the Misfits' new singer threatened my skinny ass from onstage at the Electric Ballroom because I wrote, "Without Glenn Danzig, it's basically just a Misfits' cover band."
Meow.
Jay Nations (sales guru, warlock):
I had the first ad in the first issue of Metro Pulse. After I closed Raven Records, the ad manager called me to try my hand at selling ads. After two months off, I came on. Had to retire my loud short-sleeve shirts and get used to wearing a tie again.
Talking to small business owners about small business owner needs came naturally to me. Developed some lasting relationships with club owners, record shops and a whole bunch of restaurants.
Things I remember fondly about MP: engaging with very creative folks (touring the office walls is still a treat), seemingly endless birthday and celebratory parties with great food, jiving with production about music (and keeping them supplied with fresh CDs), working in a grand old historic building downtown (with an empty floor at the time—just right for discreet napping...), and contributing to the occasional rack-buckling BIG issue.
I'm proud of MP and wish them continued success. Nothing else gets me out of the house every week on Thursdays at 6 a.m.
Dig.
Zak Weisfeld (malcontent, smart-ass):
In the past, when my brilliantly ironic opinion on film, and poignantly ironic take on life, were shared only with my immediate family, close friends and the occasional unsuspecting woman at a party, it seemed that nearly everyone agreed with me. Oh, there were probably a few objections, but I'm sure they were minor. And I certainly don't remember any of them. The only really clear memory I have from the time I call PP (pre-published) is that of rapt, upturned faces glowing with appreciation and nodding in hearty assent.
Then, I met a guy in a bar. He was a gloomy fellow, possessed of a brooding intelligence and a grim wit in the Eastern European style. Though I never learned to properly pronounce either of his overly-consonanted names, he made me a proposition—share my precocious opinions on art and life with the masses. In exchange, he would give 25 dollars. One week (and Johnny Mnemonic) later I was in print.
A month after that I got my first piece of mail.
It was a shock. Somewhere, out there in the world, was a person who not only disagreed with me but had both the gall and the free time to actually tell me about it. Even worse, the so-called "editor" of the newspaper fully intended to publish this open dissent. I was reeling. It seemed madness. If people got the idea they weren't required to agree with my enlightened opinion I felt we were just a step or two away from anarchy.
Luckily, and with the inestimable help of beer, I came to learn that civilized people could learn to accept that other, less civilized people could disagree with them. And while they were invariably wrong, the less civilized nonetheless had the right to see their doltish mutterings appear in very tiny print in the front of a paper that no one reads.
But that was just the beginning of my growth. Soon, letters to the editor or, as we in the trade call them, "hate mail" transformed from a necessary evil of the job to its highest reward. I forgot I even did it for money. All that mattered was the hate mail. I was called names, threatened with lawsuits over descriptions of bowling alleys, mocked for my facial hair, even challenged by some poor soul on my knowledge of Manhattan geography. Of course all of these people were wrong. From their letters some of them were obviously deeply disturbed and probably writing from behind bars or padded walls somewhere. But it ceased to matter. I loved them. Loved them all. Because at least they were reading me.
Jesse Fox Mayshark (editor, know-it-all):
It was our Best of Knoxville party in April 1998, in the too spacious and oddly gloomy banquet room of The Foundry. The festivities, which would include a heartfelt thanks from Ted Hall for his award as Knoxville's favorite media personality, had not yet gotten under way.
Metro Pulse publisher Joe Sullivan had called the early attendees, mostly MP staff and family, into a half-circle around a large-screen television at the rear of the room. He had a videotape he wanted us to watch. Joe had recently returned from Chicago, where we all knew he had attended a reunion of the men who had founded the Chicago Board Options Exchange 25 years ago. The tape was a memento of the reunion, in which various participants recounted a sort of oral history of the institution's first years. And right there, among all the other white men with gray hair and gray jackets, was Joe.
The men on the tape all seemed genuinely nostalgic, even excited, as they recalled the intrepid financial exploits of their younger days. It was hard to hear the audio, and some of it wouldn't have made sense to us anyway, but we sat and watched it respectfully. At the end of the 20-minute film, we all clapped. Joe beamed, equal parts proud and a little abashed.
I looked around the room and was struck, not for the first or last time, by the incongruity of the scene. Most of us gathered there were half Joe's age, and none of us was likely to ever work for the Options Exchange or an investment firm or the Wall Street Journal, where Joe had cut his journalistic teeth. I wondered what those men on the tape, men who probably spend their time these days mostly in the company of other men with gray hair and gray jackets, would think of the odd assemblage of misfit writers, mid-30s bohemians, hippie-kid sales reps, and punk-rock designers that Joe presided over every day.
Later that year, at our Christmas potluck lunch, someone too embarrassed to show up empty-handed brought a bag of marshmallows. Nobody ate them, what with all the cookies and casseroles and fresh-killed goose. But after the meal, someone happened to pick up a few and toss them casually at someone else. Retaliation ensued, and within a few minutes the entire office was engulfed in full-scale marshmallow warfare.
At some point in the carnage, Joe emerged from his office, where he was apparently actually having a business meeting. As he reached for a newspaper or some other reference material, a marshmallow whapped into the wall next to his head. He turned around. The office got very quiet for a second. Then Joe bent down, picked up the marshmallow, and hurled it back across the room. He went back to his meeting, and the war continued. It is now an annual tradition.
I don't know exactly why Joe does what he does. But I think he enjoys it more than those other guys from Chicago could ever understand. And I will always thank him for it.
Katie Allison Granju (writer, parent)
In 1998 I was assigned to cover the right-wing Christian men's group Promise Keepers' regional assembly, which was to take place at Neyland Stadium. As it turns out, this particular Promise Keepers rally arguably marked the zenith of this huge national organization's power and influence. For several weeks I attended Promise Keepers planning sessions with prominent locals—primarily hard-working volunteer women who wouldn't even be allowed INTO Neyland Stadium during the actual event—as they raised the money and organized the myriad details that would allow a meeting of tens of thousands of fundamentalist guys to get together in Knoxville without a hitch.
I sat in on prayer sessions in which Promise Keeper organizers weepingly asked God to "touch the hearts" of sad, uninformed local individuals such as Jewish and Muslim men. I interviewed a local journalist/volunteer who told me that she was really only assisting in the planning sessions in a desperate effort to find a man with a good job who wouldn't cheat on her. I listened to one well-known Knoxville power player who had worked hard to bring the Promise Keepers to town inform me that although she routinely put together multi-million dollar business deals, she still believed that her husband should have the final say in her day to day life. She further informed me that she had instructed her Duke-educated, soon to be married daughter to pursue the same policy with her own husband.
And I tried every way I could think of to get UT officials to give me a clear answer on how it could possibly be legal for them to allow Neyland Stadium, which is almost never opened to any use other than UT football, to be rented for an event which explicitly barred women from attendance. They never did get back to me on that one.
So then I wrote the cover article for Metro Pulse . And never, ever in my life as a writer has something I have had published had such a swift and remarkable impact on my personal life. Knoxville friends who belonged to Promise Keeper-affiliated churches stopped returning my social calls. My children were suddenly no longer invited to several homes where they had previously been welcome. My husband noticed an immediate and unmistakable chill from one of his supervising colleagues at work. It was truly something.
(The only time I had seen anything like it was back when my mother, as the 30-something editor of a small Tennessee daily newspaper, had suggested in print that the local schools should hold spelling bees rather than beauty pageants as fundraisers. Our family received physical threats by phone and more than one local wag suggested that my feminist mother's opposition to beauty pageants was in reality a reaction to her own daughters' unfortunate looks.)
Prior to Metro Pulse's exploration of the Promise Keepers, area coverage of the nationally controversial organization had been fluffy and glowing. Although the nasty letters and occasional grocery-store diatribes I got concerning the piece I wrote went on for several months, I was and am still proud to write for Knoxville's only publication that is willing to dig deeper, even when it ruffles feathers...or even turns off potential advertisers.
Matthew T. Everett (writer, daydream believer):
I'd like to say I wouldn't be where I am now without Metro Pulse, but I'm sure I could have found the unemployment office on my own. I don't entirely hold the paper responsible for my dismissal; I was, after all, spending an afternoon trying to calculate just how many home runs Barry Bonds might hit this year when the news reached me that I was being laid off. But it's tough to keep from holding a grudge when a paper you really like no longer has a place for you.
I never intended to have a career in journalism. I knew I wanted to write; I just didn't quite know how to make a career out of it. Then, during my last year at UT, I happened into an editorial internship here, and I realized this is how you do it. I'd been alternately impressed and infuriated by Metro Pulse since 1993 or so, and actually being in the same room as Shelly, Jack, Coury, Jesse and Mike was damned exhilarating during those first few weeks. It was hard to believe that real people were behind all those stories—sometimes compelling, sometimes exasperating—I'd read the last five years. It was even harder to believe that they eventually thought I was capable of doing the same thing.
I suspect that my feelings for the paper will always be tinged with some bitterness. At the same time, I'll still read it every week. Maybe one day I'll win a Pulitzer and make them all sorry. Or maybe I'll flounder around, depressed and unfulfilled, and prove them right. Either way, I liked working at Metro Pulse, and that makes not working there that much harder.
Adrienne Martini (editor, drama queen):
My office is the coolest office on the third floor of the Arnstein Building, which is a cool place in its own right. From here, I can see the FANB sign, which no longer flashes "FANB" along with the time (5:12) and temperature (83), the tops of the trees in Krutch Park, a black and white promo picture of Hanson stuck to the outside of one of the windows, a red brick corner of the revamped Miller's Building, and a tiny balcony rimmed with a substantial, yet simple, wrought iron railing.
(A note: one Lee Gardner once wedged himself out onto said balcony during a remarkably boisterous (I'm told) MP party. Having met Lee, who, for the record, is not small, and having lived with myself, who, for the record, is not small either, and having once tried the same feat one strange night, I can honestly say that Lee must have been well lubricated and very pliable.)
When I first interviewed, by phone from Austin, Coury asked if I wanted a cubicle or an office. He made it sound like there was a real choice to be made, that my first instinct may not be the best one, and that the entire job was riding upon it. (Later I would find out how desperate they were and what happened to the first guy who was supposed to take this position...but those are both stories for other days.)
"The, uh, office, I guess." Apparently, that was the right choice, since I found myself moving to Tennessee a couple of weeks later, to work on a publication where (most of the time) all of the editorial staff was male, all older and smarter than me, and who had been doing this for much longer. But my office has a door and, when needed, I could close it and hide or cry or stifle screams or write furious screeds, which were never sent. Now, the door stays mostly open.
When I first started, this smallish room—wide as I am tall and about nine feet long—contained nothing but a steel filing cabinet, a desk, a bookshelf made from lumber and bricks, and a computer. On the desk was a plant, a welcome to the family sort of gift that slowly became infested with a virulent colony of whitish gnat-like critters. For awhile, it lived (sort of) out on the balcony. One day, it disappeared, the work of either some very strong pigeons or a very determined wind.
Now, three-plus years out, stacks of CDs and/or books and/or press releases litter every level area. Plants—healthy ones—line the window sill, sharing the space with a statue of Shiva and some dead roses. On a good day, you can see the carpet. "Charmingly cluttered" would be the best description, with a rolling chair that dumps you onto the teetering piles if you scootch back too quickly. And it's always freezing, which makes me wonder if I should offer to store cuts of beef in my drawers.
Which brings me around to the toilet paper. One Wednesday morning, I bopped 'round the receptionist's desk and noticed something, well, odder than usual. During the night, two elves (their names shall be withheld until someone asks and buys me a beer) had emptied an industrial-sized box of wrapped rolls onto, over, and in every surface that could balance them—a tiny TP Everest that kept me laughing until noon.
I told you my office was the coolest.
Joe Tarr (writer, enigma):
When my friend Jesse left upstate New York in 1993 with his wife who was accepted to grad school at the University of Tennessee, I felt pretty sorry for the guy. Who the hell would want to live in Knoxville? I thought.
My intentions were good, but I never did stay in touch. Years later I'd heard the alternative paper he wound up working for had an opening. Thoroughly burned out on daily journalism, a gig at an alternative weekly was my dream at the time.
I applied and somehow got the job. The work appealed to me, but I didn't know a thing about this town and not much more about this paper. And it seemed everyone I ran across here had a different idea of what Metro Pulse was all about.
Opening a checking account, the guy at the bank asked what I did. "Oh, you work at the Pulse," he said, his voice growing in enthusiasm. Then he went on to explain to me that the paper gets inserted into the Knoxville News-Sentinel every Thursday, but they also leave it on the racks around town throughout the week.
I met some who revered the paper, speaking of those who worked here as if they were a band of brilliant hip renegades. Mostly, my new co-workers just seemed kind of grumpy to me. And quiet. And really smart. All of which made me kind of nervous around them. They were nice enough to take me to some cool parties.
This aura that some bestowed on the paper also made me nervous because I knew I had nothing to do with creating it (Coury, Jack, Shelly, Mike and others did all of that) and I wasn't too confident my work would live up to theirs (still ain't).
I ran across other people who resented or disliked the paper. And you could never tell at first blush who hated it and who liked it—a Wiccan or punk rocker nursing an old slight real or imagined was just as likely to spew venom as an elevator filled with gray-haired ladies from Fountain City or an elderly Presbyterian preacher would be to fawn. Others hadn't heard of it. "Where do you get it?" was a common thing people asked when I interviewed them.
After I had been here about a year and was starting to feel comfortable with this city and this job, I went to the bank to deposit my paycheck one afternoon. The stub read "Metro Publications, Inc." and the teller said, "Is that the newspaper?"
"Yes," I responded, not sure if this was another fan or detractor. She was white, probably in her 30s. Probably lived in some suburb with her husband, maybe a small child and a dog.
"Who do you all write for?" she asked, genuinely befuddled about this Metro Pulse. "I mean, who are your readers?"
Almost three years later, I still don't have a good answer for her. Whoever wants to read it, I guess. I just hope some people read it. Thanks if you're one of them.
August 2, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 31
© 2001 Metro Pulse
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