Fire Escapes

There was an episode of “Car 54, Where are you?” (responses of “Huh?” will not be brooked kindly) in which a famous architect was hired to create a modernistic apartment building in the blue collar Bronx neighborhood that was the setting for the series. He excitedly presented his creative concepts, but agreed to the request that the residents have input. The first of numerous observations was that his conceptual drawings showed no fire escapes. He responded that it was designed with fireproof materials and fire suppression systems, so the unsightly structures were unnecessary. They scoffed at his ignorance. Fire escapes aren’t for emergencies. They’re for your plants or sitting out on during hot summer months. And so it went until the last scene. The final drawing was unveiled and it depicted a building exactly like every other archaic existing structure, complete with fire escapes, which drew applause from the audience. He sat there, a crestfallen and beaten man. I’m looking at a web site that has evoked this long dormant recollection. It contains an article I wrote. At least, I think that’s what it is. The origins of this are an email I received from a partner in the web site a couple weeks ago. They’ve been fans of my writing for some time and would be honored if I would consider being a contributing editor for their site. “Contributing editor” is publishing-speak for “no pay,” but the real red flag was that they would be honored. I looked over their stuff, thought I could add another voice and agreed to do it. That was greeted with squeals of delight, email-wise, and a small caveat. Did I mind being edited? I assured them that I have been writing for some time (probably longer than the combined ages of the web site partners) and am used to having my work polished. Fired up by the prospects of a new frontier, I hammered out my first missive. I considered it a good sign that I was provided with a password to post directly instead going through a sieve of editing. I checked back a day later to ensure it remained loaded correctly. It had, but had also acquired a limpet along the way. Appended to the column was a rebuttal penned by one of the partners. This is new. I have written for and even edited many media. In a few instances, I have seen disclaimers by management stating the opinion was that of the author. But, I have never seen it essentially averred that the writer didn’t know what he was talking about. Some facts or conclusions might’ve been questioned during editorial conferences, but not for public viewing. I decided against refuting his position in that forum or even making an issue of it at all. Part of the reason for that was that a new article hook had occurred to me and it lent itself to a lot of creative word play. I was eager to get cracking, wielding puns and metaphors with unbridled largess. It practically wrote itself and was soon in print (or, electrons, as the case may be). Given the prior episode, I checked back almost hourly to see if the feckless youth had had another go at me. None. Maybe even he was stilled by the sheer genius of it. Turns out, he was just ruminating. Part of my morning ritual is powering up the box to attend to the web sites for which I have some managerial responsibilities. I accomplished that today and clicked through to my new article. It had been assaulted in the wee hours of the morning. I should’ve suspected he’d turn out to be one of the night people on the web. The damages were minor and I wrote it off to his just marking his territory. Essentially, he took sentences that were comprised of a series of nouns and converted them to bullet points. I felt this subverted the conversational and humorous tone of the piece, but moved on to another site before I was tempted to shoot him a hot email with an editorial tutorial. I had other things to do this morning anyway. They were enjoyable things so I was in a buoyant mood when I returned to my lair. And, committed the error of returning to the scene of the crime. The title was no longer the clever turn of phrase that set the tone of the article. In its place stood a bland statement of the subject matter. He could get that from an autofill app, what did he need me for? Life’s too short to engage simpletons, nuts and other assorted defectives, so I let it pass. The body remained unscathed, save for the bullets that had been shot through it. Once again I err in referring back to the site, now. Every witticism, metaphor, pun, wry commentary and other scintilla of creativity has been bleached out, leaving a prosaic, declarative manuscript of what I had to say, which is essentially nothing. The pith was in the art, not the content. It was like he had replaced the Mona Lisa with a sample snapshot snatched from a picture frame sold in Wal-Mart. Is it just me or did that sound a tad pompous? Nonetheless, as I sit here looking at the equivalent of a schematic with fire escapes, I shoulder the blame. After all, I said I was open to editing.