THE husky voice on my overnight voice mail got my attention first thing in the morning. "You commie!" it croaked. "YOU COMMIE!!!" Uninvited visitors
to newspaper officesI wondered what I had done to deserve that, but didn't waste much time on it. I attributed it to the heat. Things always get weird around here when it's hot.
Our building's air conditioning hadn't worked for over a week. Temperatures were in the 80s in parts of the building, which tends to make tempers flare and computers fry. Every day, building managers put out a tantalizing message that the part to fix the cooler has arrived from the mainland, but there always turned out to be one more part that was needed.
The last time the air conditioning broke, I arrived at work to find a lady who didn't belong to us sleeping on the couch in our reception area. Everybody decided by voice vote that it was my problem to get rid of her.
"Let her be," I argued. "Who knows how long it's been since the poor woman had a decent sleep?"
The trouble was she had the smell on her of about three months worth of street. And the lack of air conditioning left the newsroom suffocating from the musk. So I gently shook her awake and politely asked her to leave, greasing her way out the door with a $20 bill.
"It's too bleeping hot in here to sleep anyway," she groused as she left.
A few weeks later, the newsroom committee was waiting at my door with the news that the very same homeless woman was in our bathroom taking a shower. They wanted me to throw her out.
"Good grief," I said, "Can't that poor woman do anything to please you? First you complain that she smells bad and now you complain that she's trying to clean herself up."
She should be doing both somewhere else, they insisted.
This time I held my ground. There was no way I was marching into the ladies' restroom to give a naked woman the heave ho. By time the harassment police got through with me, she'd be the one sitting at my desk listening to the staff complain about the air conditioning. I asked the security guards to keep an eye out for her and let it go at that.
I never saw her again, but the guards didn't stop the crazed gentleman who dropped by one hot day to ask if he could sit a few minutes because he had a bladder problem and needed to be near a bathroom. I reluctantly consented, which drew the ire of my co-workers when it turned out that he didn't sit close enough to the bathroom. A puddle formed at his feet as he railed about our poor air conditioning.
I finessed him out the door, but he started sneaking back in every day to leave me notes outlining his conspiracy theories. He got his hands on a tape recorder once and left me a cassette tape. With the volume turned all the way up to 10, he intoned, "YOU'VE KNOWN ME BY PEN, NOW YOU SHALL KNOW ME BY VOICE." Hmm, was he the one who left me the "commie" message?
I never figured out how this guy got in the building. Our vigilant guards kept the likes of Dan Inouye and Linda Lingle waiting while they called to see if it was OK to let them upstairs. But my lunatic could get in anytime he wanted. The last time I saw him he was hustling his bony figure down the stairs wearing nothing but threadbare boxer shorts. The lousy air conditioning, you know.
The guards apparently thought nothing of it. They must have taken him for an Advertiser editor.
David Shapiro is managing editor of the Star-Bulletin.
He can be reached by e-mail at editor@starbulletin.com.
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