Gonzo

It was inevitable, I suppose. You don’t dive into the shark-infested waters of journalism without expecting to come out a little chewed up, and this time, I got the treatment: a pink slip, a half-debouched editor howling in some ancient, forgotten dialect, and an office chair sailing through the air like a demented frisbee.

Fired. No golden parachute or farewell parade—just a swift boot from Rat-Face, the rodent they called an editor. Ol’ Rat-Face, his mustache that drooped like a dead thing by noon, had it in for me from the get-go. It wasn’t just professional friction; this was personal—a vendetta, a seething, verminous hatred.

It started with petty stuff—files disappearing, corrections showing up like unwanted guests in my copy, my assignments handed off to some snot-nosed kid whose writing was as compelling as watching paint dry.

Then it got ugly.

My paycheck? Evaporating faster than sweat in Death Valley. Rat-Face thought $160 a week was too much; he cut it down to $100 like it was nothing.

“You understand, right?” he said, preening that pathetic mustache.

“Yeah, I understand you’re a goddamn lunatic,” I shot back, slamming my hands down on his desk.

Rat-Face just blinked–those soulless little eyes of his. “We all make sacrifices for the paper.”

I went over his head, taking it to the real bosses. “We’ll get back to you tomorrow,” they said, with the sincerity of used-car salesmen selling you a lemon.

Tomorrow never came. Instead, three hours later, Rat-Face storms in, frothing like a rabid weasel.

“You think you can go over my head?” he screeched, his mustache dancing like a mad puppet. “You think you’re better than me?”

“I know I am, Rat-Face,” I said, lighting a cigarette for dramatic effect.

It escalated. I threw something out on social media—a harmless gripe, a whisper into the digital void—but Rat-Face, the vigilant rodent, pounced. He fired me on the spot. “Bad optics,” he said, suddenly playing the PR game like he wasn’t just a barely literate editor.

So there I was, a week and a half later, driving through my old beat, flipping off the billboards, reliving the whole circus in my mind. Some stops were nostalgia, others a reminder of the madness I was leaving behind.

I pulled into a gas station where the attendant looked like he’d been mummified mid-shift, his eyes like marbles in molasses. “You look like a man on a mission,” he mumbled, handing back my change with the enthusiasm of a stoned sloth.

“I just got fired from the worst newspaper in the country.”

“Sounds like freedom to me.”

I thought about that as I gassed up, staring at the sun-cracked asphalt, waiting for it to swallow me up. The air was thick with the buzz of the absurd.

My next stop was the diner–a place stuck in time since Eisenhower was in office. The waitress, who probably served during Prohibition, dropped a cup of coffee in front of me that could double as engine oil.

“Ain’t seen you in a bit,” she said, under her towering beehive.

“Got canned. Rat-Face finally gnawed through my last nerve.”

She smirked. “That little man’s been scared since you walked in. Heard he nearly wet himself when you lit that cigarette.”

“I like to think I left a mark.”

I chugged the coffee and hit the road, the taste of freedom and failure mixing like a Molotov cocktail at the end of the world in my mouth.