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j It’s Freezing Here in Milwaukee J. S. Marcus S ometimes I am in excruciating pain, so excruciating that I can barely walk across the room. I prop my feet up on pillows to keep the pain away. It’s very simple, really: The arches—the metatarsal arches of both my feet—are falling, and when I try to walk in any direction, or stand up, the bones of my toes throb, and my eyes begin to water. It’s unbearable. My surgeon , the man who is supposed to operate on my falling arches, is in Italy, and I am waiting at my parents’ house for him to get back. Every day I read the weather report in the newspaper: “Rome—84 degrees F.” or “Rome—91 degrees F.” My surgeon is in Rome, and my parents live in Milwaukee. I don’t have to stay in bed all the time. I could go down to the family room and sit on the La-Z-Boy, or into the basement and sprawl out on our old sofa. Sometimes, in the afternoons, I go into my parents’ bedroom and lie down on their king-size bed. The bedspread , which is frayed and colorless, smells like the kitchen. It’s like lying down on a tablecloth. The surgeon is supposed to be the best in the country for this kind of surgery, so I gave up my apartment, took a leave of absence from my job, and came home to see him at his suburban clinic. After my second visit, the nurse gave me some cork-and-leather inserts so I could get out of the house and do things. The cork-and-leather inserts, which are too big and slip underneath the soles of my feet, remind me of portable oxygen tanks. When I was in high school, I had a summer job at a factory on the south side of Milwaukee. The factory made portable oxygen tanks for people with severe respiratory illnesses so they could leave their houses without passing out. The company liked using employees instead of models for their brochures, and I remember one of the vicepresidents coming around every July to choose people. He would take them to the parking lot, fit them each with an oxygen tank, then get the photographer to take pictures of them getting in and out of a company car. Somewhere, in some part of the house, there is a brochure with a picture of me and a caption reading, “It really helps!” I have spent the last three years of my life working on the metropolitan staff of a newspaper in New York City. Outside, everything seemed to be falling apart, but inside, in the newsroom, 164 . .  165 It’s Freezing Here in Milwaukee everything was getting better and better; new carpeting, new display terminals, record-setting circulation. I was a copy aide for two years, which meant that I clipped other people’s articles and answered the telephones. In September of last year, the deputy editor called me in and said, “Danny, we’re going to make you election coverage coordinator ,” which meant that in early October I was supposed to call the telephone company and order the extra telephones. This last winter, I was promoted to editorial aide and sent to the Westchester bureau. My job there was pretty similar: answering phones and clipping articles. But about twice a month they would let me write a brief for the “Westchester in Brief” column. Right before my arches collapsed, they sent me on my first story: a python had escaped from a veterinarian’s office in Tarrytown and gotten itself caught in the engine of a nearby station wagon. A few weeks after I was sent to Westchester, Sally-Ann arrived. She had been a reporter for a Dallas paper and had just been hired by the metro editor. Sally-Ann lied about everything: her age, her salary , where she went to college. And she used me as a personal slave. “Daniel!” she would scream. “I need that clip ASAP!” The bureau chief, who is twenty-five (a year younger than I am), had been working on an investigative story for ten months: something about cocaine smugglers and a Larchmont pizza parlor. When he discovered a link with a pizza parlor in Amarillo, Sally-Ann said, “Let me work on this story. Get the paper to send me to Texas. I know Amarillo. I covered the Panhandle...

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