Throwing Papers

My roommate Mario delivers newspapers in Pacific Grove, California.  I have wanted to go on the route with him since he moved in in December.  Today I finally did.

4:00—Wake up with NPR's Morning Edition already playing.  The adage "the news never sleeps" comes to mind.  A piece of dock drifted ashore near Newport off the Oregon coast. It was ripped from a fishing port in northern Japan by the tsunami of 2011.
4:15—Head out.  I sit in the back seat as Mario has removed the passenger seat from his car to more efficiently wrap up and throw his papers.  Mario asks if I want to listen to jazz or tango.  He only listens to vintage Big Band recordings and early 20th century tangos.  I choose tangos.  The recently full moon has halved itself in the past week and the last of the stars begin to disappear.
4:20—We stop at the 7-11 at the bottom of the hill to get coffee.  There are four cars in the parking lot, which strikes me as insanely busy for 4 in the morning.  Mario says Good Morning to two women in a van. "She's a carrier," he explains to me.  "She's an early riser.   She's already been to the plant."  That is where we are headed—the plant—a facility in Ryan Ranch by the airport where all of the papers await the carriers.  We have to go there, get the papers, wrap them up, come back to P.G., and deliver all 300 or so before 6, or, more importantly, before people start complaining.  Mario explains to me he knows who needs their papers early and he delivers them first.  There is only one coffee brewed and I unload the last drops into my cup as the attendent hits the start button above it to start the next batch, of which I get the first drips percolated through the empty caraff.
4:3—"La Cumparsita," what most would identify as the classic tango composition, comes on as we pass the lake and get on the freeway inland toward the airport.  I had just seen Scent of a Woman for the first time the night before.  I was not too impressed by the supposedly infamous tango scene in which Al Pacino's blind character pushes and pulls the very young woman from Burn Notice around on the dance floor.  It strikes me as an unconvincing justification of misogyny.  Perhaps having seen Elaine Benes mock "Hoo-Ah!  Hooh-ah!" a dozen times before seeing the film ruined it for me.  Mario explains the song is about a masked mysterious women.  The title means "the little parade."  The first lines in the original, "la cumparsa / de miserias sin fin desfila," translate: "the parade of endless miseries lines up."

4:45—We need gas before we really get started.  We stop at the 7-11 between the airport and Ryan Ranch.

4:55—Arriving at the plant we park by our section of newspapers.  I get out to help pile them in the car, upside-down with the spine toward Mario.  Another couple arrives to pick up their section of newspapers as we head out, with the 200 hundred or so Monterey County Heralds in place of his passenger seat, half a dozen New York Times on his dashboard, and a handful of others Californians, Chronicles, Mercury News, Wall Street Journals, Financial Times and one paper in Korean on the seat next to me.  Ray Bradbury is memorialized on the front of most.

5:15—We emerge from the tunnel onto one of the best views of Monterey Bay, with Fisherman's Wharf and the boats of the harbor in the foreground before the rippling expanse between us and Seaside and the mountains and Salinas Valley beyond, slowly illuminated by a developing orange glow casting purple up through the sky.  "One of the perks," Mario says.  "10 minutes from now it'll be different.  Another ten minutes it'll be different."

5:20—At the threshold of the first route we stop to wrap and prepare for the first throws.  The odd out-of-town papers are the ones that need the most attention.  And, because it is Thursday, the day of the weekend culture insert, the Herald is in two piles, the paper and the GO! section. Mario has a fluid movement of grabbing one of each with one hand folding and wrapping them, and placing them in the bags hanging from his dashboard.  In one block that does not require any throwing I count him do this 5 times in about as many seconds leaving the prepared papers in a pile at the foot of the ever-diminishing two stacks.

5:25—I ask Mario many questions (he was not good at the first-generation Nintendo classic Paper Boy) and he responds thoughtfully and completely about the drop-off of newspapers in 2008-9 while hurling papers out the passenger window, gracefully veering into the oncoming lane to throw a paper into the courtyard of First Awakenings, or suddenly stopping the car, placing the handbrake, running full speed into an apartment complex and tossing a paper a story up, perfectly landing on a balcony.

5:35—I get many explanations about certain throws he needs to make, due to complaints—that if it doesn't clear the front fence it will be stolen from the driveway—and explains certain difficult shots.  "This one's a 60% shot," he explains on a more difficult throw, "it was 10 when I started."  He doesn't even mention others that completely amaze me.  Before I realize why he has suddenly slowed down the car the paper has already cleared the window and arced through a 4-foot wide trellis and bounced a foot to the right of the door to land perfectly onto the doorstep.

5:50—Mario runs all the way up the stairs to place a paper on the porch's bench.  The disabled woman who lives there fell once, when Mario had just started, trying to pick up the paper from the top step where he had thrown it.  Now he runs it up every day.

5:55—The sun rises fully above the mountains and through the streets, where the woman from Pavel's gets the bakery ready for the day, I see orange ripples glimmering on the bay.  The view from Pine and Eardley is breathtaking, the ripples diminishing half a dozen miles across the bay.
6:00—Tearing up 2nd from Lighthouse we inadvertantly disperse a mom and two baby deer out looking for the town's choicest roses.

6:09—Mario explains that he is giving a house a courtesy paper because 4 years ago he broke a window in the front door and the man did not charge him for it.  Three months ago he broke it again.  This reminds him that he needs to pay another customer for the porch light he broke last month.

6:15—I learn that "porch" is a verb, and an important one, in the paper-throwing game.  To throw a paper and have it land on the porch. Ex. "I porch the paper at this house 80% of the time."

6:20—Mario hears a sound that unsettles him.  He turns off his car at the intersection of Maple and Cedar.  It does not restart.  This has never happened to him and I feel responsible (naturally?).  He puts the car in neutral and we push it backward into a space, delivering it, as it were, to the side of the road.  He calls his manager to come and help him finish the route.  We grab a dozen or so Heralds, one NY Times, and walk around the block.  I am told where I can toss the few that I am carrying.  I hit one walkway, one lawn, and one driveway.  I am an amateur.
6:35—The manager shows up in his truck, gives Mario a plastic tub to put his remaining already-wrapped papers in and I wait in the car until there's more room in the cab to ride along.  I read the Santa Cruz Sentinel that was left over at the plant.  I read a Ray Bradbury obituary.  A carnival magician urged a young Ray to "Live forever!"  The AP story quotes Bradbury in regards to his decision to do so by being a writer, "I decided that was the greatest idea I ever heard." From that moment he "started writing every day," he said.  "I never stopped."

6:55—They come back and I sit in the middle of the truck's cab with Mario next to me with one last San Jose Mercury News.  He forgot to throw it at the beginning of the route and we hadn't yet cycled back to it before the car died.  We get there he passes it over me to the manager and tells him "the yellow house" and the manager throws it at the front porch.

7:15—We are dropped back at the house by the manager.  I try to go back to sleep.

8:00—The two hour newscycle starts again on my radio. The piece of dock washes ashore in Oregon once again, like a really big piece of news arriving at your doorstop over a year late.  I finally fall back asleep.