Joan gets through to the editorial desk and informs a man about the killing spree. She sees a tan police car enter the square. Her use of the words killing spree is questioned by the man working the Sunday slot, who asks her to identify herself and slow down. Joan is the intern for the Life section of the Charleston Daily Mail. She had been very excited early in the spring that she might get the chance to write about fashion, a desire she expressed to her parents during their Sunday evening phone call. Her father got on the phone to her uncle. Her uncle, a successful lawyer who had many influential friends, got on the horn to the sales director of the Charleston Daily Mail, who made calls of his own. Then disaster struck. Around April Joan discovered that her three best friends were going to travel in Europe for the summer. Joan fumed; she wished they had told her earlier, they were supposed to be best friends. But she had already given her word committing to the internship and her parents told her that to back out would make her look irresponsible. In addition, they had paid for her trip to Europe the summer before and did not want to spoil her. A compromise in the form of a new car to facilitate her commute between home and office restored the family to its customary state of goodwill.
Joan tries to slow down on the phone. The slot man tells her to just slow down and tell him what happened exactly. For a second, the men standing over the journalist part and she can see his bloody chest and slack mouth. The sales director of the Charleston Daily Mail took her out to lunch the first day of her internship and described the history and traditions of the paper, pantomiming certain key moments with his hairy fingers. Joans duties include opening mail, calling for art, and taking messages. There are occasional perks. One time the film editor said, anyone want a pass to a movie, and Joan took her best friend from childhood. In the movie they sat next to a beautiful news anchorman who had been on television for years and years. She made the best of things. Joan told her friends from high school, amid the silences that made apparent the divergent tacking of their lives, that she was going to write for the Daily Mail, but in fact she had little success convincing her boss of her specialness. The editor of the Life section does not seem fashionable or hip. He had been trapped by benefits and union security some years before. He is grizzled and has seen interns come and go, but Joan is an expert nagger. She is pert and brunette. In an impulse of inspired cruelty, he assigned her to write two hundred words on the stamp ceremony, to teach her about the dues all journalists must pay, no matter who their friends are. Joan was delighted and rose early Sunday morning and drove the fifty miles from Charleston to Talcott in her new car, which was equipped with a CD player. The Sunday slot man reiterates his instructions to Joan. Just tell him slowly what happened. She perceives a stiffening in the postures of the men tending to one of the wounded and takes this as an indication of his worsening condition. She begins to cry. She cannot get the words to the slot man. She thinks, where, what, who, these are the essential questions a journalist must ask herself. And then Joan feels a warmth in her chest and she says in someone elses voice, Talcott, West Virginia A postal worker opened fire Sunday afternoon on a crowd of people gathered for the unveiling of a new postage stamp; critically wounding three people before being shot and killed.
Dave Browns byline is a roach whose gradual infestation of the worlds print media can only be sketchily documented. First sightings of the scourge can be traced to the late 1960s; numerous samples of the creatures spoor have been collected from the concert reviews section of Crawdaddy. The counterculture, it is hypothesized, proved an abundant food source for the emergent insect, which seemed to thrive on the scraps of the new pop culture, insinuating itself behind the baseboards of Rolling Stone and beneath the refrigerators of alternative weeklies. The organism traveled to new publishing empires by stowing away in the cargo holds of spectacle, a survival instinct that served it well in the following decade when a threefold increase in the number of print venues provided ample nesting opportunities. This moist, expanding media proved an exceptionally favorable environment for the byline and its appearances grew at an exponential rate. It has been observed crawling above a prison interview with Sirhan Sirhan in Playboy and lazily breeding in the New York Times during the heyday of singer-songwriters. Stubborn and tenacious, the byline was able to sustain itself through climatic changes in editorial style, its reproductive cycle seemingly unaffected by the insufferable aridity of the Reagan years. Today, no newsstand remains uninfested by Dave Browns byline and its readily identifiable, unadorned, service-oriented prose.