I’d always considered myself fluent in pop culture, but the Chronicle was a crash course in acceptable indie tastes. I kept a mental list of artists I needed to become familiar with, much like the vocab words I used to memorize in middle school to casually drop into conversation. Jim Jarmusch, Fran?ois Truffaut, Albert Maysles. The Velvet Underground, Jeff Buckley, Sonic Youth. The spirit of an alt weekly, after all, was to be an alternative. Our mandate dictated that the most important stories lived outside the mainstream. And also: Top 40 sucked.
Every Thursday afternoon, the staff gathered in a cramped meeting room that looked more like a bomb shelter and lined up stories for the week. Debates were always breaking out, because those people could argue about anything: the most overrated grunge band, the notion of objective journalism, black beans or refried. I sat with my hands in my lap and hoped to God the conversation wouldn’t drift my way. But when the meeting ended, and nobody had called on me, I’d feel weirdly crestfallen. All that anxious buildup for nothing.
I’ve always been mixed up about attention, enjoying its warmth but not its scrutiny. I swear I’ve spent half my life hiding behind a couch and the other half wondering why no one was paying attention to me.
On the weekends, coworkers and I started going to karaoke, which was the perfect end run around my self-doubt. I would sit in the audience, drinking beer after beer, filling myself up with enough “fuck it” to take the microphone. Karaoke was a direct line to the parts of our brains unburdened by aesthetics, the child who once found joy in a Journey song. No singer was bad, no taste was wrong—which was pretty much the inverse philosophy of the paper, but my coworkers still loved it. I guess even people who judge others for a living can secretly long for a world with no judgment.
At our holiday karaoke party, I blew out my vocal cords with an over-the-top version of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” I was in that sparkling state of inebriation where the chain comes off your inhibitions and your voice grows so bold.
The following Monday, our cranky editor-in-chief kicked off the staff meeting. “I have one thing to say about the holiday party.” He turned toward me, and his eyes lit up. “Sarah Fucking Hepola.”
You could’ve seen my glow from space. Before that, I wasn’t even sure he knew my last name.
GROWING UP, I saw journalism as a serious profession. I never anticipated how much damn fun it would be. Music festivals, interviews with celebrities, parties where Quentin Tarantino showed up. Dot-com money was pouring into our flophouse hamlet, and the city’s growth made the paper fat with advertising. We got bonus checks and open-bar celebrations. Coming to the Chronicle a year after college was like leaving a five-year house party only to plunk down on the ripped couches of never-never land.
Swag. That was the name for the promotional items that arrived with alarming abundance. T-shirts, tote bags, novelty toys. For a year, a beach ball with the words “There’s Something About Mary” roamed through the hallway like a tumbleweed.
We got free movies and free CDs and free books. Complimentary bottles of Tito’s Vodka lived in the kitchen. Shiner Bock popped up in the fridge (we paid for that). Each Wednesday night, we put the paper to bed—and those were the words we used, like the paper was our toddler—and I stayed late on the picnic table out back drinking with the proofreaders and the guys from production. We played games of “Who Would You Rather?” sorting the entire staff into people we would like to bang, careful to never mention each other.
I didn’t write much at first. I ran the listings section and contributed third-string theater reviews with unnecessary adjectives. The young, hotshot music critic wrote with such wild metaphors, paragraphs like jazz riffs. I asked him once how he got so good, and he told me, “I did acid.” But he also had what every writer needs: his own voice.
I did not. My writing was a kind of literary karaoke. I aped the formulas and phrasings of older critics whose work I admired. I sometimes borrowed friends’ opinions for theater reviews, because I was certain theirs were more accurate than my own. I’d sit each week in the meeting, listening to the lineup of cover stories, wanting that spotlight so badly. But what did I have to say?
In college, I never read newspapers, which made it a tiny bit awkward to be working for one. What did people want from their news? The Chronicle offered two primary channels, criticism and reporting. But I had neither the deep knowledge nor the training for either. My colleagues slung their authority around the room, while I became afraid to botch any answer. Black or refried: Which are the superior beans?
As for my artistic tastes, I wasn’t sure about them, either. We had entered the Age of Irony. Low culture was high culture, and the difference between loving something and hating it was razor thin. People like me disguised our true feelings in layers of detachment, endless pop-culture references, sarcasm. Because no one can break your heart if they don’t know it.
I pulled down the Blade Runner poster and put up a picture of the Backstreet Boys, and I forced everyone on staff to vote on their favorite member.