The Nightgown by Brad Parks

 
    When ranking life’s more pointless exercises – and I’m including things like ironing your underwear, flossing your dog and watching daytime television – the newspaper writing test deserves special consideration.
    It is a time-honored and ritualized form of journalistic hazing wherein a job applicant, after a day of meeting with editors in glass offices, is made to write a fake story on fake deadline. They sit you down with a pile of notes (which you did not actually take), quotes (which you did not actually hear) and color (which you did not actually see) and expect you to produce an article about some imaginary homicide/city council meeting/girl scout jamboree – and craft every sentence as if your future depended on its brilliance.
    The idea, of course, is to simulate what the candidate would do with an actual story on an actual deadline. The only problem is it doesn’t really simulate anything – besides, perhaps, how well you take writing tests.
    Any journalist worth his ink understands great writing begins with great reporting: the keen eye for detail, the ability to ask the right question at the right moment, the mental horsepower to quickly absorb new information, the narrative instincts to understand what’s pertinent and what isn’t. Writing a story with someone else’s notes is a bit like baking a cake with someone else’s batter.
    Nevertheless, there I was, with several sheets of gooey slop in front of me, making like Betty Crocker.
    I was interviewing for a staff writer position at the Newark Eagle-Examiner , New Jersey’s largest and most respected news-disseminating organization. This was eight years ago, back when newspapers were still hiring and I was a young cub of 24. Up to that point in my life, the largest newspaper to carry the byline “Carter Ross” was a 40,000-circulation daily out in the hinterlands of Pennsylvania.
    Merely walking into the doors of the Eagle-Examiner – whose circulation was roughly ten times as large – was a huge deal for me, especially since I’m a New Jersey native who grew up reading it. Plus, as an ambitious sort of fellow, it was either a perfect steppingstone to something bigger or, even if it never took me anywhere, a pretty good place to end up.
    I had managed to get its editors’ attention with some of my recent work, most notably a series of stories that came about when I uncovered a small-town pastor who was inventing imaginary winners to his church’s 50-50 raffle so he could keep all the proceeds for himself.
    He got indicted. I got a job interview.
    That’s the way it works in journalism, where stars are often made on the stupidity of others. (Even my hero, Bob Woodward, would today be a talented-though-little-remembered reporter for The Washington Post if the Committee to Re-elect the President was any good at breaking and entering).
    So, thanks largely to one greedy minister, I found myself in the Eagle-Examiner newsroom, slogging through a writing test. I was trying to take it seriously, inasmuch as it could help change my career trajectory. But I also kept hearing a running dialogue between Assistant Managing Editor Sal Szanto – the guy who would most likely be deciding whether I got hired – and a woman on the night desk. She seemed to be some kind of lesser assignment editor but what I noticed most is that she was a knockout: an attractive, long-limbed, curly haired brunette. She was almost certainly on the other side of 30, a few years older than me, but that didn’t strike me as a big deal – legs like that tend to discourage any thoughts of age discrimination.
    From what bits of conversation I heard, I could sense she was growing agitated about something. I just couldn’t tell what. There was news breaking, that much was clear. Someone important had done something of interest and Szanto wanted a reporter dispatched to chase it down.
    And, apparently, at 6:30 at night, they didn’t have an extra warm body. As I began