Riffed

Brian Cooper entered the city room as usual one morning in September 2018, only to be summoned to the HR director’s office. The parent company had shed a thousand jobs over the last three years. He wondered if it was his turn to go. After twenty-six years at the paper, the thought paralyzed him.

The economics of the newspaper business were not good. Print journalism was dying and had been for decades. Maybe literacy itself was in jeopardy. In the old days, before people became “part of the workforce function,” editors delivered good or bad news. Now, a corporate flunky handled the job.

“You wanted to see me?” Brian said to her, standing by the door of her walnut-paneled office. It starkly contrasted with the tiny cubicle where he spent his days.

“I’ll come right to the point, Brian,” she said. “We both know circulation is down, and the company is restructuring again to reduce costs. We don’t like it, but we’ll have to cut more positions.”

“Including mine?” he asked in a hoarse voice.

“I’m afraid so.”

She was trying to sound sympathetic, but how could she do that when she had already delivered so many such notices?

“Today’s your day.”

A great weight had settled on Brian’s chest. He knew he had to sign when the HR director presented the company’s severance offer. Now, his life as a newsman, along with his identity, had ended.

“I’ll get my things from my desk.”

“That won’t be necessary. Someone will bring your personal items to you downstairs,” the HR woman said as a uniformed security guard appeared in the doorway. “He’ll walk you out.”

The meeting lasted less than ten minutes.

Down in an immense lobby that had not changed since 1918, another guard handed him the box, and Brian trudged out the rear exit to the parking lot, where he found the temperature in the low eighties under an overcast sky. He slammed the remnants of his career into the trunk and drove his Toyota to a parking meter half a block away. When he entered the saloon where he had been drinking since his cub reporter days, he was sweating like a pig—although pigs do not sweat much.

The reference, of course, was to pig iron, where metal is extracted from ore with heat. Such musings often occupied Brian’s mind of late. He liked to think of it as part of becoming a better writer, but it was probably just wool-gathering. Brian ordered a beer and sat alone at the bar. His gut twitched, but he tried not to show it outwardly. With his unceremonious exit, Brian had not had a chance to steal the paper clips or make a fuss in front of co-workers. No last look at the newsroom where he had been writing stories in the inverted pyramid style on the computer and, before that, on greasy old Royal typewriters, the kind that lacked a number one key, so he’d used the lower-case L.

He got no last wave at the other ink-stained wretches toiling away on the copy desk. Only as he stepped into the elevator with his armed escort did he get a final whiff of printers’ ink and sweet newsprint. Once breathed, never forgotten.

He wondered what he would do now. He was too young to retire and could not afford to anyway. Would he spend the rest of his life painting houses or mowing other people’s lawns? Here he was, still at the peak of his powers and yet being shown the door because of the bottom line. It was a ridiculous waste of talent and experience, he thought with great bitterness. Thomas Jefferson’s words about having a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government and preferring the latter came to mind, especially now when a free press was so desperately needed.

Colleagues filtered in, shook his hand, and commiserated, assuring him he would land on his feet. They knew they might be next, so their good cheer rang hollow.

“You got a shitty deal, man,” said Phil Ross, the younger, still-employed crime-beat reporter, after a couple of quick ones. “At least you took it like a man. Did you hear about the guy in circulation? He was so shit scared that he hid in his cubicle until one of the bosses found him and told him the bad news that he’d been riffed.” Ross shook Brian’s hand and slapped him on the back before going back to work.

Brian ordered another. He realized that soon, he must begin addressing practical matters like mortgage payments that would not stop, as well as his daughter Andrea’s college tuition. He had to figure out what to tell Eleanor. Even with his severance pay, unemployment benefits, and her teacher’s salary, their financial resources would not last long. Even if he found another job, it would be at a lower wage or part-time without benefits. Their lifestyle would have to change.

Brian finished his beer, shook the hands of his co-workers one last time, and went off to face the rest of his life. As he drove home, he saw The Nook and pulled into the bar’s lot. While Jason Delahanty poured more drinks on the house, Brian shared his tale of woe with the young bartender, who had become his pal. Brian considered the difference between them. Here he was with a journalism degree, plus many years and a slight paunch. Jason was struggling through community college with his life still ahead of him. The question that occurred to Brian was who was luckier. It seemed an easy choice to the disconsolate ex-reporter.

*

The first few days were agonizing as Brian discussed his changed circumstances with family and friends. He also phoned every contact he had left in the business. Brian found that word had gotten around. Everyone was sympathetic, but he was over 50 years old. He got no offers. Not from other local media, the small-town dailies out in the state, not even PR firms or corporations who had hired others in his position. When feeling especially low, Brian blamed the loss of his career on his hard-charging, uncompromising style.

When Eleanor got home from school, he gazed at her, taking in the beauty mole above her thin-lipped mouth, the frizzy brown hair framing her long, somewhat irregular face, and told her she looked beautiful.

“Thanks. You’ll find something,” Eleanor said.

Brian thought about free-lancing. Blogging. Of course, he would have preferred to write fiction, his lifelong ambition, but he knew there was no money in that. Eventually, he got a couple of nibbles. One was writing press releases for a nonprofit, but it went belly-up a week before he started. The other was a speech-writing gig for a politician, who canned him after one brutally honest speech.

 Brian expanded his search beyond journalism or technical writing. Still, he got no offers. As the weeks turned into months, the pressure mounted along with his anxiety. “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing,” Hemingway writes in The Sun Also Rises. The line kept ringing in Brian’s ears like a song lyric that gets stuck in your head. Hemingway would know. Now Brian did, too.

Unable to sleep, he walked up to the Nook, where he soon spent too many hours warming a stool and wallowing. He lived in dread that no one would ever need his services again. He knew that statistically speaking, losing one’s job caused more stress than any other life-altering event, more than death in the family, divorce, or serious illness. Everyone told him the number one key was to stay positive and not give up.

Thinking back to his last day at the paper, he could almost smell the printer’s ink and sweet newsprint.

© 2025 Rick Neumayer

“Riffed” will appear in the forthcoming THREE FOGGY MORNINGS: Stories by Rick Neumayer. If you liked this one, I’d love to hear from you.