Big Mike: Hard Guys

I have to admit I’m as much a sensitive flower as I am a he-man. I can give you a thousand examples of my excruciatingly delicate feelings. Then I’ll give you one hell of an example of my manliness. As soon as I think of one.

Maybe that’s why Benny Jay and I have been friends for so long. Neither of us is interested in watching Ultimate Fighting matches on TV or gulping shots of Irish whiskey until our eyeballs roll down the bar. Hard guys, we’re not.

It’s ironic because you have to have the skin of a pachyderm to survive in this mad business. Everybody who lays hands or eyes on one of our manuscripts tells us to change it. Everyone’s a critic – and an editor. There are always words to change, lines of thought to mangle, and brilliant mots to delete.

A pal of mine, also a writer, called the other day in a rage. He was lucky his fingers weren’t in the neighborhood of his editor’s neck otherwise he’d surely be sitting in County Jail right now, making acquaintances with some of Milo’s livelier chums. Let’s call this guy Yablonski.

Yablonski: “Ya know, I’m sick of these people at the Daily Bladder. I’m ready to walk right now.”

Me: “What happened?”

Yablonski: “I just turned in my story about the Mayor and they cut it to shreds. They totally took the heart out of it. Now it’s not even worth running.”

Me: “Well, did they give you a chance to fight for it?”

Yablonski: “Oh sure! They sent it back and said, ‘Are these changes alright?’ I said, ‘What if I say they’re not – will you change them back?’ You know what they said?”

Me: “What?”

Yablosnki: “‘No, we wouldn’t.’ So why in the hell are they asking me if it was alright?”

I spent the next 15 minutes consoling my old pal. We agreed that editors edit because, well, because they can. Every business relationship in this world is a power relationship. Those with power exercise it just to remind you and themselves that they have it.

When I was a young writer, every time an editor changed a comma of my manuscript I mourned as though my child had been kidnapped. Then I fretted that all the changes were mounting up, like demerits for a sixth grader. I felt certain that one day my editors would call and say, “Sorry, Mike. We’ve had to make a total of 500 changes in your stories this year. It’s right here on our bulletin board. We can’t work with you anymore – you’re no longer a writer.”

Man, I cried myself to sleep a time or two agonizing over that. Like I said, I’m a sensitive flower.

From the time we met, Benny Jay and I shared a respect bordering on awe for the crusty old columnist Mike Royko. When we want to give each other the supreme compliment, we say, “What you wrote was just like Royko.”

In his Tribune years, Royko became awfully cranky. Once, he wrote a column complaining about all these crybaby Hispanics demanding bilingual education in the Chicago Public Schools. I wrote him a letter saying it was a shame he felt that way especially after he’d gone to Catholic schools in the old Polish neighborhood where, natch, the nuns taught in both English and Polish. I figured I’d zinged him, although I felt a bit sheepish about zinging the master.

The next week, the good old liberal Royko reemerged with a column about Ronald Reagan’s band of tin soldiers making illegal arms deals with Iran’s Ayatollah in order to finance the Nicaraguan Contras. So, hoping to redeem myself, I wrote him a second letter saying, in essence, that’s the Royko I know and love.

A couple of days later a letter in a Tribune envelope came to my house. Oh my god! Royko’d read my letters and was bowled over by their magnificence! He wanted me to drop everything and come down to the Tower this minute so I could become his personal apprentice! My hands shook as I opened the envelope.

I found my second letter, the conciliatory one, inside. Written in huge block letter in black marker over my typing were the words: “HEY FUCK OFF!”

Gulp! My idol had forsaken me. Now I was really finished. Royko’d surely spread the word around town that this young punk writer ought to be blacklisted.

Then it hit me – jeez, Mike Royko had been dealing with hypercritical readers and editors for years, every day, every column. New editors probably hoped to make their bones by trying to emend his columns. He’d learned to fight like a mother grizzly protecting her cubs to keep his copy intact. By the time he’d hit the Trib, he’d earned a modicum of editorial license. Then some young punk wannabe writer sends him letters telling him how to write.

I realized the sentence, Hey fuck off!, were the most trenchant words I’d ever read. I decided that I would adopt that very philosophy whenever an overly zealous editor or disgruntled reader tore my stories to shreds. I decided to become hard, like Mike Royko.

See? I told you I’d think of an example of my manliness.