Somebody Keeps Stealing My Lunches

Harold Heimlich was a crime reporter at the Nevada SUN newspaper. He was also a criminal.

            Believe me. I know. I was there.

            Like the newspaper business in general, the Nevada SUN was struggling to stay afloat. TV news took a big bite out of the newspaper business. The Internet took another bite.

            Ad revenue dried up at the Nevada SUN. Dried up like the desert. Reporters at the SUN didn’t make much back then. Reporting is a notoriously low-paying profession. Most of the reporters at the Sun were making between $15,000 to $25,000 a year.

            Young reporters without a family could get by if they roomed with somebody. They did the work for the love of the business and to gain the experience they needed to move to a bigger, better paying market. Maybe go someplace where it wasn’t so freaking hot.

            Harold’s career was on the downward slope. It wasn’t Harold’s fault. He was last year’s flavor. That happens to people in the news business. You’re hot stuff until you’re not.

            Harold still had sources out the ass. He still wrote well. Had kind of a tabloid flair about him. But the paper had a new generation of reporters on the rise hungry to make a name for themselves.

            Harold on the other hand was a newsman with an insatiable appetite. That’s why he stole other peoples’ lunches out of the refrigerator in the break room on a regular basis.

            Like all of us in the newsroom, Harold was usually hard-up for cash.

When Is Lunch

Bob Hunter was a portly editor on the copy desk. As a copy editor, Bob, designed the pages and edited the copy (the stories) that went into the newspaper. There were a bunch of copy editors at the SUN.

            Bob liked everybody who worked in the newsroom and in return everybody liked Bob. He always had something encouraging or positive to say. And like most of us, he didn’t make much money.

            He brought his lunch to work every day along with a big thermos of coffee. It was back in the day when grocery stores gave you your groceries in big brown paper bags.

            Like I said Bob was man of considerable girth. He would bring a grocery bag full of food every day. He kept the bag next to his thermos of coffee on the copy desk. But the stuff that needed to be kept cold, went in the refrigerator in the breakroom.

            The SUN newroom was kind of a dingy place. The dark green carpet was worn and dirty. The lighting was poor. There was a lot of cigarette smoke in the air. Kind of a depressing place.

            You had to really love the newspaper business to work at the SUN. The newsroom was filled with hopeless romantics. They were the kind of guys who kept a bottle of bourbon in the drawer of their metal desk.

            Guys who every now and then would take a swig from that bottle, especially if they had come up with a good story or wrote a great headline. They’d put their tender gout foot up on the desk when it ached. I mean you just can’t get more romantic than that.

On Monday, Harold had beef stroganoff for lunch. Only problem was, it wasn’t his. On Tuesday, he had chicken cordon bleu. Wednesday was chicken and broccoli. Harold was on quite the roll. On Thursday he treated himself to a hot pastrami sandwich on seeded rye with spicy brown mustard. He warmed the meat in the microwave before inhaling the sandwich.

            Harold’s M-O was to go out in the parking lot. Smoke a joint. Then come back inside and eat somebody’s lunch.

            Normally Harold wouldn’t steal somebody’s lunch every day. Just now and then. But for some reason this particular week, he was feeling emboldened. Maybe it was the weed giving him the munchies. I don’t know.

            When Bob went home that night to his wife, Carol, he was fuming. His wife had fixed him a lovely dinner of beef stew with rolls baked from scratch. Carol knew that food was the way to Bob’s heart.

            “How was the stew Bob,” Carol asked. “Did you enjoy it honey. Does it make up for Harold stealing your lunch today.”

            “Oh it was wonderful dear,” Bob said. “It made my tastebuds sing. It was heaven to the palate. Now Harold, no one ever seems to catch him in the act. But we all know what he’s doing.”

Bob and Carol put away the leftovers. After they finished washing the dishes, the pots and the pans, they had a glass of wine together. Watched a little TV and went to sleep.

            The next day Bob puttered around the house. He had mornings off. He went into work around 2 p.m. The SUN was a morning paper. Around noon, Bob started getting ready for work.  He went into the kitchen and packed a heaping portion of the beef stew left over from the night before.

            Even for Bob this was a huge portion. He mixed in a special ingredient that wasn’t in Carol’s original receipe. Carol was in the living room watching TV. “The Price Is Right” was on, Carol’s favorite show.

Beef Stew With 14 Doses of MIraLAX

She never saw Bob dump the Value Size container of MiraLAX into the beef stew. Bob stirred it up real good. The stew had a thick gravy. It would have made a good mortar for a brick wall. When you looked at it, you couldn’t tell it was mixed with MiraLAX.

            Bob took a teaspoon and tasted it.

            “Not bad,” he said to himself.

            Bob grabbed his lunch. He told his wife he was good to go. He gave her a kiss as she watched TV. Carol couldn’t bear to tear herself away from “The Price Is Right.”

            Bob kissed Carol on the cheek.

            “Have a good day honey. I hope your day goes better than yesterday,” Carol said.

            “Oh it will honey,” Bob said. “See you tonight.”

            By the time Bob made it into the SUN newsroom, he was loaded for bear and so was his beef stew.

            Bob nonchalantly placed the stew in the middle shelf of the refrigerator like he always did. The rest of his food he kept in a bag on the copy desk.

            Bob went about his business looking over the news wire for the international stories he was going to include in tomorrow’s edition of the SUN.

            I looked at Bob from my desk in the newsroom and smiled. Bob looked at me and gave a knowing nod. Bob had told me what he had done to the beef stew when he got to work.

            I had a big shit-eating grin when Harold passed by.

            “What are you so happy about,” Harold said as he walked by.

            “Oh I don’t know, Just in a good mood for a change.’

Harold headed into the breakroom. Bob and I waited in anticipation. About a half hour later, Harold returned to his desk. He burped a couple of times. He started making phone calls to various sources to see what was going on around town.

            About 20 minutes later, beads of sweat started to form on Harold’s head. My desk faced Harold’s, so I had a good view of him. He peered at me over the top of his bifocals. He squirmed in his seat. He was suddenly looking uncomfortable.

            “I don’t feel so good,” Harold said. “My stomach…”

            He never finished the sentence. He ran out of the newsroom. None of us had ever seen Harold move so fast. He was halfway down the hall when I stood up to follow.

            A brown stain was splattered on the floor. UPS suddenly didn’t have the market cornered on the color brown. Harold was in a full sprint now to the back door of the building.

            “Where’s he going,” shouted Mike Collins, one of the other editors on the copy desk . “He still owes me a story.”

            Everyone was looking through the glass windows that separated the newsroom from the hall. Harold was pushing people out of his way as he ran.

            “Do we have a broken sewer line. It stinks in the hall,” someone said as Harold shot by.

            Harold made it to the parking lot. He jumped in his brown Chevy Malibu. The seat of his tan slacks were soaking wet. The skin on his butt was stinging. It burned like hot sauce. The inside of the car bore a putrid odor.

            When Harold got home, he took off all his clothes. He got into the shower and washed himself. Now his bathroom smelled as bad as the front seat of his Malibu. He changed into a fresh set of clothes.

            He took all his soiled clothes and tossed them in the driveway. He  drenched them with the garden hose. Then he took the pile of sopping clothes back inside and threw them in the washing machine.

            Harold had attacks of diarrhea the rest of the day. He ended up in the emergency room of Desert Sky Hospital. The doctor gave him an injection to settle his stomach. They also gave him something to control the diarrhea.

A nurse then gave him an IV. He was badly dehydrated.

            Harold didn’t come to work until the following Monday. Jim Latham, the city editor asked Harold what had happened.

            “We never did get your Sunday piece. The one about the double murder at The Cheesecake Factory. The one where everyone went back to eating their desserts after the cab driver shot the couple for stiffing him on the cab fare.” Latham said. “It was supposed to be the lead story in Metro Section.

            “Oh Jim. I was really sick. First time in my life I missed a deadline. Give me a break.”

            “What was it,” Latham asked him.

            “Food poisoning.”

            I looked up from my desk at Bob. He just stared at his computer screen, as if he hadn’t heard a thing.

            Not a single lunch ever turned up missing from the SUN breakroom. Harold started bringing his own lunches to work. Usually, it was fast food from McDonalds or some such place. Eventually all the cholesterol and all the heartburn got to Harold.

            He was listening to the police scanner, his bifocals slipping off his nose one day when he collapsed in the newsroom. He fell to the floor clutching his chest, gasping for air. He died on the job. A heart attack.

The newspaper died for me that day with Harold. His was the final obituary of a bygone era.

          I will always remember it as the day Harold Heimlich went to that Front Page Sky. The reporter with the last name that always reminded me of that well-known maneuver used to dislodge food from the windpipe of a choking victim. One thing about Harold, he never choked on his food. He savored every bite.