Frayed Edge

04Nov09

Twitching on the sidewalk the frail existence of one of The City’s hundred thousand pigeons eked out all over a morning newspaper. There was no remorse on the behalf of the paperboy that had nailed the small blue-grey bird.

The paper was as apologetic as the paper ever was. Given that this paper was also The Monitor it was a little more apologetic and sheepish then most.

The Monitor was a staple of The City. It’s very first yellow rag. Not to be confused in anyway with a publication of fact or well researched opinion. It was the local equivalent of the National Herald, but with better pictures.

Those pictures, award winning and the actual envy of legitimate publications the world over, were the work of Joseph Grib The Monitor’s golden goose. A boy barely out of the state college, Grib proved to have an eye for art and gore that would have the Medieval masters chopping off their hands and stabbing out their eyes.

His photos spoke of despair, of passions played and lost, of mean and women who have compromised and will compromise, they spoke of humanity in its simplest most vulgar state. His photos sold The Monitor like it was water in the desert.

As the paper’s popularity grew so did Grib’s eccentric habits. It was a classic story of an artist snapping like the legs of a stoolie under his muse. There was so much ugly to document and only one set of borderline psychotic eyes to give it shape.

That is why Joseph Grib, bleeding eye of The City, was in The Monitor’s offices today meeting his new personal assistant an eager youth that went by the name of Monty Vale. Vale was what every mother hoped her child would not grow up to be. An obnoxious precocious boy that longed to know how everything ticked, with an eye and insight into how to dissect the world and stare at its innards and no fucking clue how to put anything back together again.

Vale was hired to haul Grib’s gear. Drive him around town. Watch his back in the tight places and keep him alive long enough for The Monitor to squeeze every last drop of talent and passion form his dried husk.

And Vale was good for all of that at a fraction of what it would cost the paper to lose Grib. How much was he worth alive? A crass question, and a gentleman do not discuss such. But the board of The Monitor was nothing of the sort and that is why the front page of that mornings paper, the very one that a pigeon in Dixon Boulevard was currently leaking out upon, read “Million Dollar Photographer to Unveil Collection”.

It was 1912 and there were only a few things in the world worth that kind of money, and human life was not one of them. Vale sprung to his feet the moment that Grib entered the revolving door into The Monitor’s lobby. Doors installed a week earlier from Grib money. Doors that swooshed the air of the outside of the building and seemed to make it impossible for the filthy air of the Breaker Street bakeries and delis to enter. Doors that separated the world of the working man from the cultural elite.

The cultural deplete, perhaps, thought Grib.

But it was no use. Vale was on him in an instant hauling two ridiculous bags of gear with him to a new Lincoln idling through a side entrance of the building. Kit bags that contained photo paper, developing chemicals, cameras, film, a backdrop for gods sakes.

Nothing original, nothing raw. All sterile and burned. All forms of isolation and scarcity. Nothing of the passion and emotion that made Grib’s photos what they were.

“Is this the beginning then or the end?” Grib said.

“This is the new car,” said Vale.

Grib sighed and as he did he snapped a photo of himself from the hip. A shot that would grace the page a week later. A shot that was in itself an expression. A shot that would sell at auction for half what the man himself was said to be worth.

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Tags: Breaker Street, Dixon Boulevard, Joseph Grib, Monty Vale, The Monitor