A/N: Please, please tell me Skittery was the name of the one who complained about the papes. You know, in the restaurant when Race goes, "you been in a bad mood all day"? He was that one, right? Please let me be right. I'm not that good with all these extra characters and their names. Anyway, that is certainly the character I am talking about in this piece. Wow, that was long and fairly pointless. Okay, please, read away. :)
"So you get your picture in the pape, so what?"
Of course, Skittery knew what getting in the papes meant.
It meant fame, and glory. It meant attention, focused on you for at least a day. It might mean support for your cause, it at least meant people heard about you. Getting your picture in a pape was not just helpful, it was most kids' dream. Fame, fortune and glory.
Skittery used to want his picture in the paper.
Back when he was younger, and he watched his mom struggle to get her writing published, he'd heard her go on and on about what a great thing publicity was. About how it could elevate you from a nobody to the next big thing. He'd dreamed about getting in the paper. Front page, special edition. Big news.
Then, he became a newsie.
He hawked the headline every day in the streets of New York City. In the rain, in the sun, in the snow, sleet, and hail. He shouted himself hoarse for a penny a pape. Every morning, he watched Weasel plop a stack of papers down in front of him with a heavy thud. Every morning he picked up the dead weight and hefted it onto his shoulder where it settled into the groove between his neck and his shoulder and rested until he was sore as anything.
By midday his shoulder would be aching and his hands would be stained with newsprint. He'd have the headline more than memorized, he would know every little detail of every single page of the stupid paper.
And by the time he got back to the lodging house at night he was so sick and tired of newspapers he would have given anything to never have to look at one again.
The next morning, it would start all over.
He knew some newsies who welcomed the familiarity of the papers. Some who loved knowing the feel of a paper, who loved hawking a headline. He knew newsies (Jack for one, and Race was another) who practiced their craft like an art, perfecting it. Who could practically tell whether the headline was good just be picking up a pape. And they loved that. But Skittery didn't.
Skittery was tired of papes.
He wasn't tired of being a newsie. He had real friends, a livelihood (if not a "career"). He had card games and cigars and coffee. He had a bunk, and a roof over his head. He wasn't tired of being a newsie. He was just tired of the papes.
If only selling newspapers didn't involve, well, newspapers.
He was tired of the large letters on the top that read "The World." He was tired of the date that was printed in the corner. He was tired of the smell of newspapers. The feel of them, hot off the press, greasy with ink. He was tired of their size, and their weight. Tired of the sound of his own, hoarse voice, hawking the headline, day after day.
Skittery was tired of papes.
He hated papes.
Papes reminded him of his ma, who had never gotten the publicity she wanted in those stupid papes. They reminded him of getting soaked by the Delanceys over a crummy headline. They reminded him of the disgusting taste of ink and page when he'd been selling in a windstorm and had one of his own papers blown into his mouth. They reminded him of little humiliations long past, and of present hardships. Papes were everything Skittery wanted to escape.
So seeing himself on the front page, immortalized forever in black and white for the whole city to see, he was disgusted. He glared at that paper, and resentment boiled up inside him, and he said it.
"So you get your picture in the pape, so what?"
He was shouted down immediately, as he'd known he would be, but he didn't care. He had been going to say something. And how stupid would it sound, he wondered, to say, "I hate papes"? They all relied on those papes for a living.
Yet another thing he despised about them.
They were the key to his survival -- the key to food and warmth and a roof over his head. The headline determined his profits, no matter what Cowboy said. And the papes were fickle -- great one day and terrible the next, as if passing arbitrary judgment for past transgressions, long forgotten by Skittery himself.
When he was a grown man, he grudgingly bought papes, because he remembered what it was like to be standing there in the cold, yelling out the headline until you couldn't yell anymore and glaring at everyone who went by and decided they didn't need a paper. But Skittery never read the pape. He gave it to the next person he saw, eager to dispose of the inky feeling and the familiar weight in his hands. Once he escaped from the merciless paper and ink creations, he never wanted to see them again.
A/N: I just thought to myself: if I were a newsie, I'd be tired of newspapers. I don't know that I'd want to see myself in one. And...this happened. A bit short perhaps, but I discovered I could only write so much about hating papers, as I feel no particular animosity towards them myself. :P Please, tell me what you thought!