The first time I saw a stranger’s corpse was one summer night in 1992, in a small, trash-filled courtyard in front of an abandoned building. I was 20, a cub reporter—an intern, really—for the San Diego Reader, but I wasn’t on the job. Just wandering. One of my beats was supposed to be homelessness, because there was enough to go around even for an intern. But this wasn’t a story, just a body. A pair of cops stood watch, waiting for the others who’d actually lay hands on the matter. White male, middle-aged, belly-down and facing away. Probably an OD, a disinterested cop told me, or maybe just a heart attack. “Six of one, you know?” he said. I didn’t, but I nodded. I was learning.
The Reader was a fat, tabloid-sized weekly paper, one of the biggest in the country at a time when not just the Village Voice but Washington, D.C.’s City Paper, Denver’s Westword, Chicago’s Reader (inspiration for San Diego’s), Philadelphia’s Weekly, Boston’s Phoenix and many more gave voice to and helped shape a way of thinking about cities: messy, thrilling, sad, funny, queer, glorious, pompous, comically crooked and endlessly fascinating. I arrived at the Reader the summer after my sophomore year of college because my creative nonfiction professor—we called it literary journalism then—had asked them to find a desk for me after they’d asked him to fly across the country to write a cover story. Take as much as space as you want, they told him (14,000 words!), take as long as you want. We’ll handle all the expenses. The money will be good.
My teacher, Michael Lesy, was best known for a book called Wisconsin Death Trip; the paper’s idea was that he might like to move into the aging Hotel San Diego, said to be haunted, even as it was shined up—sanded down and made over in the colors of Hotel Anytown—for orthodontists and HR managers drawn by the new convention center. Michael didn’t believe in ghosts, but he believed in ghost stories. He stayed at the hotel, spoke with its residents and its staff, listened to tales of the gay pornographer who’d once owned it as well as the Pussycat Theaters—long gone now—and who they believed still made his spectral presence known. These were, he knew, also stories about how a place changes, stories about “development,” about real estate, about different ideas of what it might mean to be “downtown.” “The Convention Center,” wrote Michael, “the bottom line. Cash flow problems. Overcapacity.” Those who still clung to their jobs at the hotel—which would soon enough follow the Pussycat into dust—spoke of its decline in terms of the supernatural. “Stories were distorted in transmission,” Michael wrote…
…but there was more: the ghost stories weren’t just the result of poor communication. The hotel had been stripped of its special identity. It had become a barren place. Interchangeable with a thousand others. Question: if human beings are confined to barren places, cells or stalls or cubicles, what do they do? Answer: they scribble on the walls. That’s what those ghost stories were: they were graffiti. They were the natural reaction of human imaginations to the pastel walls of an empty place. The ghost stories were decorations. They were efforts to transform the emptiness.
Maybe that’s what the alt-weeklies were, too. “Alt” was short for “alternative,” as in alternative to the daily newspapers published by men and women too often indistinguishable from the establishment they covered. Call it the franchise class: a political arrangement of lobbyists and electeds and suburban voters who dreamed of downtowns “cleared” of all that might make a tourist uneasy, filled instead with chains, outposts, corporate colonization from the generic everywhere. The alt-weeklies were instead made by people who loved their cities as cities.
The first issue of the Reader featured on its cover a double bill under a single headline, “South of Bdwy”: one story of what San Diego would become and one of what it really was and had been. The first story, by a writer improbably bylined John Milton, followed the money fueling a re-development scheme; the second, by Nancy Banks, wandered among that which would be lost, the pool halls and the tattoo parlors and the strip clubs, the seedy ecology of a downtown defined by decrepit residence hotels. The twinned tales are the origin story of the alt-weeklies in their heyday: one part muckraking, aka the gap between what is and what should be, and one part simply what is, for better and worse. Above the neon that remained, Banks wrote,
in two-dollar rooms with a sink in one corner and a long walk down the hall to the john, lonely men are spending another night staring at red and blue reflections on the ceiling. Golden West Hotel: the name itself is a mockery, a lurid joke…
But it wasn’t all noir. Allow me to quote at length from the cover story of the fourth issue, November 2, 1972, by a writer named Melanie Stutz. It’s about a roller rink. The piece as a whole is uneven, but these three paragraphs?
There are skaters and skaters with big angular thrumming bodies and skates that you can feel rolling across the small bones of your feet. They are all skating forward. It is a hawklike kind of skating, very slit-eyed and predatory. All around the edges are young bruised-eyed girls with clinging purple and red and green jersey shirts and hip-hugger pants, lighting up cigarettes and thinning their mouths. The boys are lank-haired and craggy faced and they pose, and thrust their legs in snazzy stopping turns. In the middle of the ceiling there is a grinning jack o’ lantern with black and orange streamers strung around him.
There are some weavers in this clanging throng; people who are skating skillfully and using themselves like serpents, coiling in and around, insinuating themselves through the aimless boundings of most of the crowd. One very tall black man with legs like filaments bends and twists through the skaters, his arms hang behind him, thumbs gripping his pockets. And a serene old man in a sweater vest and flannel shirt, with richly polished black roller skates, ambling around the rink with his blue eyes half-shut and his face folded in calmly.
His name is Mr. McElroy, and he’s due to retire in December. He’s skated this rink since it opened, and he’s been skating since he was five. Back in Providence, Rhode Island, where he comes from, he used to play Roller Polo, in 1917 or thereabouts. Five men, with shinny sticks, which are scoop-ended sticks like hockey sticks, and a fat rubber ball. And he played hockey in high school. There was always, in the winter, ice eight inches thick and you could skate forever. “Skating’s great, it is. These skates I have, they’re real fine. They don’t make ’em any more. Chicago Velvet Treads. I have to be very careful with them. New, they’re about a hundred and ten. I got them barely used, for just seventy-five dollars, from a boy who’d been to Viet Nam and lost both legs.”
Maybe it is all noir, after all.
Unlike most of the alt-weeklies, the Reader was never bought up and hollowed out in the late ‘90s & early 2000s by corporate media chains, but like all of the alt-weeklies, it was gutted by the internet, by Craigslist, by the loss of the personals and ads for escorts and 1-900 numbers that paid actual money for writers to write 14,000-word cover stories and hang around in roller rinks. It held on in print until last year, though—no other way to put it—much diminished in past decades by thinning ad pages, changing politics, the long victory of the re-developers. Its archives are online. I’ve spent part of this summer reading through them and those of other alt-weeklies—I set my window at 1972-2001—contemplating an anthology of this kind of increasingly rare journalism, literary journalism, the longform of lingering in a place just to see how it is.
And I’ve been keeping a partial list of how it was. Some of the topics covered: There are the local variations of mass phenomena and common callings: taxi drivers, coroners, preachers, real estate schemers, gangbangers, psychoanalysis, pornographers, convents, massage parlors, plastic surgeons, trashmen, fish mongers, bail bondsmen, the boxing scene, the drag scene, drag racing, 911 operators, crooked cops, white supremacists, snake oil, bomb shelters, beekeepers, bookies, taggers, people who live under bridges, detectives, murder and suicide and sudden death (mortality tales), professional shoplifters, evidence rooms, the circus, bank robber confessionals. And then there are the stories either specific to San Diego (or Tijuana), or particular to the Reader: urchin divers, gem miners, the mountain lion menace, mermaid strippers, lucha libre, Bible smugglers, Naval deserters, door-to-door funeral salesmen, whale burials, the tuna/porpoise debate, the black market military weapons trade, the black market baby trade, the down-low gay marine sex trade, a General Patton devotion society, bingo wars, cross-border match makers, yacht rock con men, hot tub rebirthing rituals, bullfight surgeons, Little Cambodia, the Vietnamese gang scene, the Laotian gossip rag scene, brawling marines, courts-martial, shark hunters, politics in the nudist scene, the steady documentos chuecos trade.
***
Inspiration for this Enthusiasm comes not from San Diego but from Seven Days, one of the last alt-weeklies standing. Along with VTDigger, they’re holding up the alts’ muckraking tradition. But for the most part the years of narrative reporting—what is rather than the gap between what is and what should be—are past. A solid exception was last week’s cover story, “Tent City,” by Derek Brouwer.
It’s another story about the unhoused of Burlington, but instead of fretting about needles or defending the right to shelter—instead of another take—Brouwer follows Neil Preston, the urban park ranger tasked with supervision of the city’s tent population. Purveyors of takes will find plenty to feud over. Brouwer’s sympathy, like Preston’s, with the people simply trying to stay out of the weather, which will anger the “quality-of-life” constituency; but Preston is nonetheless a kind of cop, charged with removing tents in response to anonymous complaints filed to an app ominously called SeeClickFix.
Spoiler: the complaints come for Preston, too, from residents unsatisfied with the vigor of his enforcement. I mention this fact because even though I’m on the side of mutual aid groups like Food Not Cops, I found myself admiring Preston, who, when compelled to deliver a “notice to leave” to one tent dweller, points him to another clearing that will technically satisfy the law. I don’t want Preston to lose his job.
That’s how it is now: To read is to vote up or down. To summarize Brouwer’s story is to render the kind of basic observation he practices—once a weekly staple in alts across the country—nearly impossible. I can almost hear you, like me, staking out a position. The compression of social media has reduced narrative to instant opinion, sublimated curiosity to the needs of advocacy, and turned me into a curmudgeon shouting at the journalism of today to tell more goddamn stories. Why when I was a boy…
Here's one more bit from the Reader, a man named Charles schooling a young writer spending Christmas Eve in a shelter, 1992:
“This boy a reporter. A YOUNG REPORTER. He wants to know about the shelter. How is it going? Where it is? WHAT IS IT DOING TO THE MINDS OF STREET FOLKS?
“Now, what to do with homeless folks? You got to be one.” His voice became grave. “We all grow up, homeboy. We all go through some terror, some horror, some nightmare, some thrill that just—” Charles ground his teeth together, making a low growling sound that stopped just short of a scream.
He held up his hands. The ends of his fingers tapered into gnawed stumps without fingernails. “I don’t bite these nails ‘cause I’m just worried. I bite these nails because it comes to worry itself…”
If you want to dive into some great writing of old…
1. "The Boy Next Door," by Sue Garson, San Diego Reader, 1983. "True crime" that turns out to be a story by and about a single mother contemplating complicity and survival.
2. "Soldier's Paradise," by Mary Lang, San Diego Reader, 1989. To even say what this story is "about" misses the point: There's a sailor, an older woman, a bad marriage... it's the journalism of ordinary people getting by.
3. "Resurrection," by Robin Bingham, Washington D.C. City Paper, 2000. Another story of an alt-weekly intern finding a body. Only she knows how to write the story.
Jeff Sharlet is a professor of creative nonfiction at Dartmouth College and the bestselling author and editor of eight books including The Undertow, The Family, and This Brilliant Darkness, which begins in the clock tower of the Hotel Coolidge in White River Junction and ends in Norwich, where he lives with his family and creatures.