Free The Dilettantes by Michael Hingston Page B

were more slicked than usual. Could a person be so completely out of touch? Not anti-fashionable so much as a-fashionable. Chip would get a free ride through university, Alex figured, where eccentricities like these were encouraged, incubated, even subsidized. But if he wasn’t a millionaire within a couple years of graduation, some street toughs would pummel him to bits, looking for where he stashed his time machine.
    “I say,” he said softly, still looking in the
Metro
’s direction, “I don’t like the looks of it.”
    Alex found this concern reassuring. He still wasn’t sure anyone else on staff had given serious thought to what the
Metro’
s presence on campus would mean. The lost revenue, not to mention the lost readers, who were fickle and easily courted to start with. Alex had been around long enough to remember, not so many years ago, when
The Peak
really was broke, in fact near total collapse—though that time, like every other time, the damage had been largely self-inflicted. Last time it had taken Rick, at the time a savvy business grad student, nearly an entire year to shake them alert.
    Just then two guys came up and slammed their fists on the table. Chip’s pen skittered onto the floor.
    “Why didn’t you print my article?” one asked in a low growl.
    “You’ll have to be more specific,” Alex said. “What section was this for?”
    “Opinions. Last week.”
    “Well, the opinions editor isn’t here right now, so I couldn’t really—”
    “It was about the bus,” he said. “Ten things that piss me off about people on the bus. Number one: take off your fucking backpacks.”
    Alex already knew the story, if not this guy’s version of it. At least once a year someone wrote one of these straight-shooting litanies of complaints. They almost always began, “ OK ,” and petered off somewhere around item seven. Engaging with these kinds of dilettantes was Alex’s biggest source of dread around Clubs Days, where he always felt like an open target. Having a difficult-to-find underground office had its perks.
    “Again, I can’t speak for the editor,” he said, “but from what I heard you had some problems with our edits—specifically, the fact that we would be making some.”
    The guy and his friend banged their fists again in response. It was meant to be done in tandem, but the friend was a half-second too late. They exchanged a quick look. “I wrote what I wrote,” the first guy said, “and that’s it. You put in anything else, one new word or squiggle, it ain’t mine anymore.”
    Those squiggles are what we in the industry call punctuation
, Alex thought. Then he thought,
Don’t say
industry. “Well, we do have rules concerning those squiggles.”
    “That’s his style,” the friend said, backing him up like a jittery hype man. “It’s his voice. Tryin’ to make everyone fit into the same
box
, man.”
    “You don’t believe in commas?”
    “Commas ain’t me,” the guy said. “It’s bourgeois. ‘Pause here,’ or whatever. Don’t tell me where I’m supposed to pause, okay? Do not do it.”
    They high-fived.
    Alex sighed. These guys were so blatantly testing out their newly sprouted Marxist ideas, seeing how all that ideology squared with the world beyond their classroom. Clubs Days was, if nothing else, a particularly fertile petri dish. “I’d also recommend that in the future you not send in the piece as a PDF ,” he added.
    “Number two: people on cell phones can go eat shit.”
    “You’re really going to have to take this up with the editor.”
    “Not good enough,” the guy said, shaking his head like a wet dog. “Promise me.”
    “Promise you what?”
    “That it’ll run next week.”
    “Like I said—”
    “On the cover.”
    Jesus
. “Are you serious?”
    “You owe me. It’s my right.”
    “Wow.”
    “To be heard. Freedom of expression. All that.”
    “Yeah,” said the friend, his eyes bugging out a little. “That’s democracy, bro. Ever