It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the
freakin’ weirdest of times. They were fun times and they were stressful
times. It was two decades ago, and we were starting this strange little
newspaper called the Memphis Flyer. I was the first editor and
in my 20s (for a very short time) and weighed about
50 pounds less than I do now. We didn’t have e-mail, the World Wide
Web, spell-check, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, or even cell phones, but,
by damn, we could — and did — smoke at our desks, and
sometimes it was more than mere tobacco. We were out to change the
world or, at least, Memphis. All two-and-a-half of us on the editorial
staff who were putting the paper out each week. And we were nuts. Not
as nuts, though, as many of the people who took to our little paper and
thought that they had finally found the Holy Grail of alternative news
reporting and opinion. But more about that later.
For this special 20th anniversary issue, I just dug out my big bound
book that includes the issues from the Flyer‘s first year and
thumbed through it all. Well, almost all. There’s one cover story
missing: the one that got me sued for $75 million. I guess that one had
to be ripped out of all existing issues. Yes, $75 million! One of the
finer moments in my career, even though I didn’t write the story. I
won’t mention here who or what it was about, just in case I’m still
under some sort of gag order.
Actually, after going through that first year of issues, it looks
like maybe I should have been under a gag order then, based solely on
the video (yeah, movies on VHS) reviews I wrote in the column “One
Night Stands.” While the co-author of the column, Ed Weathers (one of
the smartest people I’ve ever known and the executive editor at the
time), reviewed really engrossing foreign films and movies of social
importance, I managed to review every movie ever made by John Waters,
Andy Warhol, Tennessee Williams, and every other creator of camp who
ever made it to the silver screen — anything involving sex
changes, drugs, suffocating in sinks of spaghetti, babies being thrown
out of windows, legs getting cut off; anything that starred Joan
Crawford, Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, or Elizabeth Taylor or any other
manner of absurdity. I was not going to pass on the chance to
officially write about these films. So why did women keep asking
me out?
But we did some serious stuff, too. The first issue had a photo on
the front cover with the words “THE CIRCLE OF POISON!” It was about a
chemical company in Memphis making dangerous pesticides that it was
peddling to the “Third World.” We were so awesome. The table of
contents in that first issue had a great photo of Rufus Thomas on it
and a review of one of his records inside. We were so cool. We used
words like “verisimilitude.” We were so smart. And we covered art. We
even covered performance art. It was, after all, the 1980s, and we were
so hip. The best performance art we covered was probably our own first
“fashion guide,” in which the models’ hair was bigger than the paper’s
delivery trucks and several women sported high heels with socks rolled
down at the top. I pray that look doesn’t make a comeback.
Before the first issue of the Flyer ever hit the streets, we
had people calling us to tell us what we were doing wrong. I kid you
not. And then the aforementioned crowd of eccentrics who had taken to
the paper began ringing our phones off the hook and showing up at the
office to voice their opinions. Of course, their opinions had little to
do with the actual paper. They were people who had been wronged by
society and thought we should help make it right for them. I came back
from lunch one day and there was a very sweet young man sitting at my
desk talking to the FBI on the telephone, revealing new proof about who
really assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King. If I wasn’t going to write
his story, he was surely going to get it out there somehow. (I think
he’s okay now, and it really wasn’t his father who did it.) The letters
and calls from prison were especially interesting, but not quite as
much as the visits by the inmates once they were released. Kind of
scary, but there was no stopping us. I did have to have my home phone
number (remember land lines?) unlisted, but that was more to fend off
our own columnists, who didn’t like their prose edited and called at
night to curse me. You know who you are. You can’t have my cell-phone
number to this day.
And we did have some interesting columnists. Does anyone remember
the Cinema Sisters, who, in theory, were reviewing movies but instead
wrote a couple of sentences about the flick and devoted the rest of
their space to comment on what people in the theater lobby were
wearing? LOVED them. The best part was how our freelance writers turned
in their columns. As I mentioned, we didn’t have e-mail, so they either
brought them to me (sometimes handwritten) or I had to go to their
houses at night, pick them up, and then type them in myself on what
might have been the world’s first mass-manufactured computer. And then
some people just mailed in unsolicited works of journalism, like the
elderly man who sent me an essay on the “persecution of small penises,”
which he wrote in his sister’s closet.
For those of you who are too young to remember the early days of the
Flyer and spend all of your time FB’ing your BFF’s all day, I
hope you appreciate those of us who had to walk miles in the snow to
get to work to get this paper out. We were gnarly dudes and chicks with
passion and journalistic pizzazz. For the most part, we haven’t changed
all that much.
