First Day. 1994. TV News Station. Marketing Intern.
I looked good. Never sharper.
New suit. New tie. Fresh haircut, still stiff with product. I was wide-eyed, excited, maybe a little scared — first real day in the real world, walking into the local TV news station downtown. Not New York. Not Chicago. But in the Mountain West, where people still turned their heads if they saw the evening anchor at the grocery store.
They walked me around, showing me the place like I’d earned something. Security doors beeped. Phones rang. A lot of people looked stressed in a professional way. I nodded and smiled like I understood how anything worked.
Then, somewhere in a hallway near the breakroom, we passed an older guy. Windbreaker. Styrofoam cup. Staring at nothing. He looked like someone who’d once been important, but had slowly been filed down by decades of memos.
Someone said to him, “This is the new intern. Starting today.”
He glanced at me just long enough to confirm my youth.
“Oh. Sorry, kid,” he said.
“It was fun to work in the ’70s.”
Then he paused. Looked past me, like at some ghost only he could see.
“There used to be a brothel down the street…”
And then — nothing. He cut himself off. Didn’t explain.
Just turned down the hall and kept walking. I never saw him again.
But before he disappeared, he said one last thing, like tossing a cigarette butt over his shoulder:
“Well… there’s always free food in TV.”
And that was my welcome.