Seattle Examiner
The next day, Indyfront's 37-year-old national director of marketing, Jim Albin, e-mailed Jimenez from company headquarters in New York City that the company would "regretfully terminate" her paper unless she increased circulation and profits within a year by targeting the upper-middle-class, free-spending, brand-loyal, lifestyle-conscious, "super-apolitical" 18- to 34-year-old demographic desired most fervently by computer, cell phone, soda, beer, cigarette, etc., advertisers. Albin, an inveterate dittohead, hoped she would go "down in politically-correct flames," as he told Indyfront's 36-year-old assistant financial manager, Reed Lachney, in the company breakroom that same day. "It's bad enough she has 'Jim' in her name," Albin added, "even if she does pronounce 'Jim' as 'Hccchim.'"
Meanwhile, Jimenez vowed to her staff that she would fight, even if she risked her job, "the corporate bean-counters" who wanted "to turn the Examiner into The Fratboy Times," but she also vowed not to let the paper die and its 125 other employees (some of whom she liked) lose their jobs. "Even a watered-down paper can still serve the community," she contended.
So over the next year, the Examiner, while still covering progressive issues, began replacing its more radical left-wing content with photo layouts of Caucasian swimsuit models, accounts of 1970s-themed circuit parties, futon buying guides, flattering profiles of corporate-label "post-postgrunge" bands, essays from blonde Republican twentysomething women bemoaning "victim feminism," and stories waxing rhapsodic over the "miraculous boom economy" and its "unquestionable and unfailing free-market origins"�stories characterized as "smiley-faced capitalist propaganda for zombies" by Kell Bradford, a 20-year-old sophomore writing major at the University of Washington, upon first meeting Jimenez the evening of April 9, 1999, in downtown Seattle at the Red Bean Coffeehouse's monthly international workers' solidarity poetry slam. "Comrade, baby!" she replied to both their amusement. Two hours later, they left the coffeehouse, went to her apartment, and copulated. Bradford, of Anglo-American/Irish-American descent, had never copulated with a non-Caucasian, and neither had Jimenez.
Pace armchair psychologizing about heterosexual women, Jimenez had no interest, at least then, in copulating with her father, Gabe Jimenez, a 58-year-old time-share mogul in Aspen who liked golfing, reading the National Review, hoping Cari would "wise up" about everything she believed, hoping each new lump he felt on his body was not cancerous, and hoping the Republicans would win the 2000 presidential election so they would quash the ongoing Federal Trade Commission investigation of his real estate dealings.
And pace armchair psychologizing about heterosexual men, Bradford had no interest, at least then, in copulating with his mother, Siobhan O'Donoghue, a 41-year-old cultural studies instructor at Evergreen State College in Olympia who had recently published her first book, What They Really, Really Want: The Spice Girls, Female Pop and the Postmodern Dionysian Urge, Amazon.com sales rank 9,603 and rising, impressive considering the book's availability only in undiscounted $29.95 hardcover and the somewhat dodgy ghostwriting abilities of her graduate assistants. Bradford did have an interest, at least then, in copulating with his mother's partner of five years, Joanna Peebles, a 32-year-old conceptual artist whose latest installation, Decalogue, at the Redberry Center for the Creative Arts in Olympia, consisted of an empty white 10' x 10' x 10' room lit by ten 10-watt ceiling bulbs while a tape recording of Peebles saying "ten" ten times each in ten languages played every ten minutes at ten decibels, an installation 53-year-old Willem Lowenstein, one of the Pacific Northwest's most prestigious conceptual art critics, praised in his column for the website Westworks as "an unassuming tsunami battering the religiosocial planes constricting aesthetic wonderment."
On May 5, 1999, the one-year anniversary of Cari Jimenez's appointment as editor-in-chief, she e-mailed Jim Albin the "optimistic news" that during her tenure, the Examiner's circulation had decreased "only" another one percent, and advertising revenues had decreased "only" another two percent, "the smallest yearly decreases since 1997" and proof she had "started turning the paper's fortunes around" but would "need more time and company support to finish the job." Thirty minutes later, he e-mailed her back:
Oh, so the Titanic's sinking more slowly now? Optimistic news!
You and your rag still want to reeducate the poor, brainwashed proletariat. No one cares about bleeding-heart liberalism anymore. The free market RULES! After I send you this e-mail, I'm suggesting to management they exterminate the Examiner.
Have a nice day, Karla Marx.
That night, as they lay unclothed in her bed, Jimenez told Bradford she had "sold out to In-de-butt for nothing," that she would blame herself if the paper died. Bradford, his head lying between her legs (he had just performed cunnilingus, one of their favorite activities), suggested she "could still save the day by returning the paper to its progressive roots and providing an alternative to the Republican propaganda we get nowadays."
She lay still for a moment, then said "At worst, at least I'd go out in a blaze of glory. Or gory."
� 2002 David V. Matthews
Author's Note: 7/11/05
I'd planned to have Cari try restoring the Seattle Examiner to whatever passed for its peak years, and to have the story culminate at the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, the spark for the antiglobalization movement and the inspiration for a Lipton iced tea TV commercial I saw not long after the riots; in the commercial, as well as I can remember it, the police hose down angry young people protesting something, until one young person calms the crowd by breaking out the Lipton, because you see, the protesters were hot and had wanted the police to break out the hoses.
Observant readers will notice that my current unfinished story, "The Tam-o'-Shanter," shares similarities in tone and subject with this unfinished story. All writers rehash certain themes, dude.
I added the words "Or gory" to the above story's final line because I'd considered the ending a little unmemorable.
But what did Siobhan's dermatologist's financial planner's third niece's swimming pool cleaner enjoy in bed? Huh? What did Siobhan's dermatologist's financial planner's third niece's swimming pool cleaner enjoy in bed?!...Fiction, Home.
� 2005 David V. Matthews