NOTE: Necessity being the mother of entrepreneurial invention, I clearly would have missed out on a ton of adventures had I been able to spend my entire career with the one employer I truly loved – United Press International. Who knows what I might have become with UPI, though maybe something less weird and/or interesting than what I became? All the same, I had this dream just the other night… 

I walked across the dusty, suitcase-cluttered hotel lobby to the peeling wooden door, as instructed. The front desk fellow, in his 50s, balding and wearing a suit that had seen better days, had looked at me suspiciously when I’d asked. But then he realized he didn’t care and nodded where I needed to go. The door featured a single sheet of typing paper (okay, printer paper) held two-thirds of the way up by Scotch tape. I turned the knob and stepped through, halting only when I saw another sheet taped to the opposite side.

The paper facing the lobby held one word (I thought of it as a word, anyway), block letters hand-written in black marker. UPI, it announced, with an arrow drawn to invite people in. But the paper facing the long, poorly lit hallway inside featured “UPI” as well, plus an arrow that seemed to point back into the lobby, inviting people out. That’s the way it was with UPI, I couldn’t help thinking, remembering my eight-year writing and editing career there. Forty years ago. I pushed into the hall past two tall cardboard boxes and pulled the lobby door shut behind me.

Middletown was only forty-five minutes off the route to my granddaughter’s seventh birthday party, and I had never traveled this way before. So why not? The state highway had wound through graceful tree-covered mountains with splashes of orange clay, finally opening into a valley with a glistening river. Middletown had a two-lane green steel bridge across the river, connecting two halves of a four-block cluster of red brick buildings. An older-looking railroad bridge crossed the river a few feet from the one for cars. There weren’t many cars.

I found the address on Roosevelt Avenue that had popped up, to my complete shock and surprise, on Google, only to discover that the building was an enterprise called the Roosevelt Hotel. As always when I encountered the surname on something, on anything, I wondered if they meant Teddy or Franklin. They seldom meant both, I’d figured out in my life.

I found a parking spot a block from the entrance and fed actual quarters into an actual meter. No Wifi, satellites or smart phones required. So that’s how I came to be standing in front of this half-open office door, its top half framing frosted glass with the black cutout letters announcing UPI. United Press International. Which used to be united. Which used to be international. Hell, which used to be press.

“Hello,” I said, knocking lightly on the glass. “Hello. UPI?”

I heard nothing from inside, so I tried once more. I didn’t feel comfortable just stepping in, though all evidence suggested no one would have cared. No one was there to care. I looked up and then down the hallway, which seemed to attract large deliveries, presumably for the hotel. I found a box that was solid enough to support my weight and took a seat. The fact that I had no plan came crashing down on me. Without a Plan A, it’s really hard to come up with a Plan B. It was just after one that Saturday afternoon. I had less than an hour before heading onward to the birthday party.

My eyes settled on those three letters stenciled on the glass – UPI. The great and grand news service that competed with the Associated Press for decades had laid me off forty years ago. I would have stayed with UPI forever, I knew then and I also know now, rising into whatever job became my fate along the way. People did that back then, on the job for thirty years, fifty years, gathering tall tales by the dozen to be shared at drunken reunions ‘till death do us part. Not anymore. After several decreasingly competent owners, and at least one bankruptcy, they had let me go with a pregnant wife. Those two concepts always occurred together in my mind. I vowed from the start I wouldn’t look back, picking up the pieces and starting the first of several businesses of my own. Except I never quite stopped looking back.

There was a sudden squeak and scratch along the floor. The door from the lobby swung partly open, revealing a well-dressed, well-pressed man and woman in their late thirties, picking their way in through the boxes until they noticed me sitting atop one. They looked concerned, or more like surprised. I stood up, slapping on my best smile.

“UPI, I presume?”

Both man and woman drew a deep breath at my words, though probably too young to catch my Dr. Livingstone reference, releasing their tension and returning my smile.

“Oh,” the man said. He no doubt noted my white hair. “You must be here to see Al.”

The woman pushed the door open a few inches more to reveal a small, frail, ancient man carrying a folded newspaper and what appeared to be a wrapped half-sandwich. He was wearing rose-colored Bermuda shorts beneath a palm-tree-and-boat-on-sand shirt with the top two buttons unbuttoned. Atop his head rode a straw hat that looked a size or more too small. Someone had bought him the hat, knowing it was now the fashion. Or maybe he’d bought it himself long ago, the last time it was the fashion.

With effort, the old man straightened his posture, stepping around the couple and stretching out his bony, pale, withered hand.

“Al Bouese, UPI Middletown,” he said. He pronounced his family name BOO-ease. I didn’t recall seeing his byline on the wire, though there could be a thousand reasons for that.

I reached across a large box, shook his hand and responded, as I hadn’t in four decades, “Chuck Hampton, UPI New Orleans.”

Looking back, I marvel at how Al came to vigorous life in the seconds after we introduced each other. When I’d spotted him at the door, he’d seemed ready to keel over. But without visible effort, he steered around boxes, pressed open the UPI door and nodded for me to follow him. As veterans of both the character and the setting, the man and woman knew to follow him too.

Al Bouese settled into a tattered chair on wheels, turned on a computer CPU hidden somewhere in the tangle of wires that surrounded his feet – he was wearing sandals, I noticed only now – and switched on his monitor.

“You know how it is, Chuck,” he said to me, nodding to the couple. “Talk to these two a minute, will you?” Al looked up at the clock on the wall. “I’ve got some headlines to file.”

Having filed many a headline package on deadline myself, I turned to the man and woman, putting out my hand. “Chuck Hampton.”

“Mike Bouese,” said the man, who was taller than Al. Then again, so was I. “And this is my wife, Charlotte.”

We shook hands all around. I considered talking very quietly, but then I remembered my old UPI self. A nuclear explosion couldn’t distract me from writing the news. “Mike, you are, I’m guessing, Al’s son?”

“Yes, I am. It’s Saturday. Dad always comes in to do the college sports, and we usually come in to take him to lunch.”

“Nice,” I said. “Lunch, I mean. Not necessarily college sports.”

“You got that right,” offered Charlotte, gazing at her husband as though wondering how much she should tell me. If it was about college sports, I’d long ago stopped caring. Too many Saturday afternoons taking game stories over the phone and banging them into whatever technology was vaguely current. Yet something in Charlotte’s expression tweaked something else in my brain, a question. So I checked quickly on Al at his keyboard, his computer screen filling with letters that became words that became sentences. He was in his element, his zone, as long ago I had been. I turned to Mike.

“Can I ask you something?” He nodded. “I didn’t know UPI still, you know, did this. No, I haven’t kept up, really. I know there’s a upi.com. But to have somebody like Al in a real bureau –“

“He took close to ten years off.”

“Really? Okay. But still.”

“I know this place isn’t very nice.”

I brushed that aside. “In New Orleans, we used to say: it’s shit but it’s home.” Mike and Charlotte laughed. “No, I mean, doing this at all. Covering news. Putting out headline packages –“

“Don’t tell Chuck my whole damn life story,” Al chimed in suddenly. Of course he was hearing everything we were saying, his ears independent of his fingers. I looked at Mike, and he shook his head in a way that no one more than a couple feet away would notice. Charlotte stepped closer and took her husband’s hand.

“It’s kind of a special deal,” explained Mike.

That rang a painful bell with me, except it was all too long ago to be painful. Each time I’d read about UPI changing hands over the decades, vowing a triumphant return to greatness, or simply promising to stumble on, I’d entertained dreams of a “special deal.” I wouldn’t need much money, I’d always tell the new bosses in these dreams. Just the chance to write, to see my stuff published somewhere, to see my byline anywhere. But the special deal never came. Now here, in Noplace Middletown USA, was Al Bouese, pounding away on his headlines.

Mike reconfigured what he had been planning to say. “You remember the one-man bureaus, right?” I did, even though UPI New Orleans had five-to-seven people during my time there. “Well, Middletown was one of those, and Dad got it. We moved here from the capital when I was a kid. Mom was relieved. No more legislature, praise the Lord. Mostly breaking news around here, when it wasn’t sports, hog prices or weather. Dad was happy here, overall.” Mike glanced around. “They rented nicer office space back then, even though it was just him. After all, clients could still stop in.”

“Clients,” I breathed wistfully. “Those were the days.”

“My friend.” This was Charlotte, smiling. “See, I do know that old song. Al used to sing it a lot.”

“I had a damn nice voice too,” offered Al, typing away.

“So,” I said, zeroing in on Mike. “Who is UPI these days? Who are the clients? It all seems such a blast from the past to me. And I’m a little bit jealous, to tell you the truth.”

Mike looked at me, seeming to wish he could avoid answering. But he knew he couldn’t. After all, I’d been a news reporter. “It’s only online, of course, Chuck. And a lot smaller operation than you or my Dad remember. So I suppose it’s sad, mostly. But it’s here. It’s UPI.” He grinned. “Says so, right on the door.”

“Indeed it does.” I’m not sure why, but I was now grinning too.

We heard Al push abruptly away from his desk, thrusting himself backward to the point of almost tipping over. “Sons of bitches!” he shouted angrily. “Goddamn sons of bitches!”

Mike stepped closer. His father was heaving deep, liquid breaths.

“Dad? Are you all right?”

Al Bouese paused, gazing at his hands resting on his keyboard and at the national headlines popping one after another up on his screen. It felt like forever until he answered.

“Sure,” he said. “It’s just those people in Washington. They’re going to kill us all yet. Goddamn sons of bitches.”

Mike relaxed. This was news on the screen but, for Al, not at all new. And I knew, as completely as I know my own name, that he had cursed Democrats, Republicans and Independents, at one time or another, with equal vitriol. So had I. We were news reporters. It’s what we did.

“Look,” I was about to say, but the landline phone rang and Al scooped up the receiver. “UPI Middletown, Al Bouese.”

Al listened, then asked the caller to wait. “Chuck,” he said, rolling his chair toward the desk, pressing the hold button and glancing over his shoulder at me. “I’m sorry, man, us being Unpressers and all. But I need to get this. It’s the game, kind of a state college championship. You know how it is. Clients will be screaming for it.”

I caught Mike’s eye. He simply nodded.

“Sure, Al. No big deal. I have to get to my granddaughter’s birthday party, and it’s two hours away. In Bradford.” Unipressers always knew their state map by heart. “I really just saw this was here and wanted to, you know, see for myself.”

“Dad, I’ll walk him out,” said Mike.

Al nodded and lifted his hand for me to shake. I did. We did. Neither of us had the grip we once had. In our time.

“Now you’ve seen for yourself, Chuck,” Al laughed, pressing the phone button back into service. “There’s still a UPI man on the scene.”

“He loves that old saying,” said Charlotte, moving closer to Al and gazing affectionately at the back of his head. She gently lifted Al’s straw hat off his wisp-thin hair and set it on the desk.

“I sure do,” said Al. Then, into the receiver. “Okay Jimmy, whatcha got for me?”

Mike and Charlotte exchanged looks as Mike led me out the frosted glass UPI door, into the hallway full of boxed deliveries.  We made our way down the hall, then out into the hotel lobby by way of the door with the arrows pointing opposite ways. There was a large guest checkout in progress, three separate lines at the front desk, with a faded bus visible outside the glass revolving front door, kicking out smoke.

“I guess,” said Mike, “you’re wondering –“

“Whatever you want to tell me is fine.” I smiled. “Starting with nothing.”

“No, it’s really okay.” Mike glanced back at the hallway door, then over to the front desk, then to me. “So of course, Dad was laid off by UPI many years ago. 1992, I think. And the company was already a shrunken, pathetic thing.”

“I was laid off in 1988.”

“So I guess Dad was lucky? Who knows? You look like you’ve done okay, Chuck.”

“It’s been an adventure.”

“I bet. So Dad was out of work – he always said retired – for almost ten years. Until UPI called him.”

“They did?”

“Well, sort of. My Mom died and he was a basket case without her, you know? Charlotte and I were worried. He wouldn’t come live with us and the kids, didn’t want to be a burden, wouldn’t leave his own damn house. You know? But then we had this idea.”

“Idea?”

“Yes. I had a friend make the phone call. And since I’m a partner in this building – not the hotel, which is crap, but the real estate – it wasn’t hard to set up an office here. Such as it is.”

“And, well, UPI?”

“It took a while to find anybody, an editor, since they mostly all work from home on laptops. When they work. But in the end, somebody said sure, they’ll use some of Dad’s stuff on the wire. Online, I mean. So he can see it. And it’s still solid work. So for them, I guess, why the hell not?”

“For free? Like all the other journalism these days?”

“Free for them, yes. But since my construction business is doing well enough, we set up a ‘UPI Middletown’ (yes, Mike made the air quotes) account at a bank in the capital and arranged to pay him, without him knowing, from that.”

“I hope your checks don’t bounce.”

Mike laughed loudly. “Yeah, my Dad told me about that. The bad old days. He and Mom really had to struggle.”

“I know,” I said. “Hell, you’re better than the people we worked for.”

“You bet,” nodded Mike, his eyes starting to glisten. “But only for my Dad. Sorry, Chuck. We aren’t hiring.” We both laughed. “Dad’s not doing well, as you probably noticed.” My nod was enough. “But every day he comes here, I mean like seven days a week, and he looks better for hours, even after he goes home.”

I think we both knew the visit was over then. And for me, something was over that had never really been over before. Al was probably writing up the game by now – at UPI, in our day, we were nothing if not quick. I pictured Charlotte glancing at the screen from time to time, not exactly reading. Mike offered me his hand and I took it. I didn’t let go, even as a final question came into my head and moved immediately to my lips.

“Al has been a UPI reporter for how many years?” I asked.

“Forty-five, broken only by those almost-ten.”

“A UPI reporter. You’d think –“ I worked hard to find the right words. “You’d think he’d ask questions about, you know, all this. UPI, the bureau, the amazing non-bouncing paychecks? I mean, all this.”

Mike smiled, giving my hand one last shake. “You’d think so, Chuck, now wouldn’t you?”