The joy of fear Or: So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, Dubai BY CHRIS WRIGHT

The first time I saw my name in print, on September 1, 1995, was on the Boston Phoenix masthead. I can still remember the thrill of it all, the glee with which I ran around showing the paper to my friends. "Me!" I’d say, jabbing the page with a quivering finger. "Look, me!" Until then, I’d always suspected that my best chance of getting into a newspaper would be to suffer some kind of absurd calamity: LOCAL MAN DIES IN TRAGIC ANVIL ACCIDENT, or THE CASE OF THE MISSING FOOT. Then, one sunny afternoon, I got a call from the Phoenix’s managing editor. The paper was hiring me as an editorial assistant. "Yay!" I thought. And, "Eek!"

While my new job did not represent the pinnacle of journalism — I worked more closely with paper clips than with words — I was determined to take advantage of what I saw as my big break. One of my duties was answering the phone, and I performed this with a gusto that bordered on mania. "Editorial!" I’d bellow, my tone rising expertly on the third syllable. "Editoorial!" Another of my jobs was distributing the faxes that came in. "Looks like there’s a new restaurant opening in Newton," I’d inform the features editor, shoving a press release under her nose. "Top-notch Italian." No missive was too limp to dampen the urgency with which I handed it out. "Ladder Safety Week," I’d advise our political reporter. "Experts available for comment."

Out of the office, I was worse. Within days, I’d developed a flair — unrivaled in the industry, I believe — for steering conversations toward journalism. "I see you’re wearing shoes," I’d say. "We wrote about shoes in last week’s paper." That’s the way I talked about the Phoenix then — it was always we: we hated that movie, we liked that record, we exposed that politician. But of course it wasn’t we at all; it was them. I, for one, cannot recall any Phoenix exclusives about people falling off ladders. Then, a few weeks after I started here, I got my first byline and stopped saying we altogether. At that point, it was all about me.

"In an age of ear-bursting industrial rock and tooth-rattling grunge, some of us now look back on disco with the type of nostalgia usually reserved for long-lost family pets." I don’t know how long it took me to craft my debut sentence — days, maybe — but to me it was a thing of beauty, filled with insight and subtle wit. I found myself wondering if the Phoenix submitted its "Flashbacks" columns for Pulitzer consideration. A week later, I wrote my first movie review, in which I described the actor Albert Finney as having "marshy eyes bubbling above what appear to be two potato sacks." Never mind that this made no sense whatsoever — I had arrived. I was a journalist. Sort of.

If I’d been paid by the modifier back then, I’d be a rich man. If something was apparent, it had to be "glaringly" so. Often, things were "glaringly, blatantly" apparent. Sometimes they were "glaringly palpable" or "blatantly manifest." I was like a terrible game of Boggle. My first full-length profile for the paper, on the poet Robert Pinsky, actually contained the line, "This joining of disparate elements is an exemplary enactment of Pinsky’s idea of poetry-as-nexus." In an early book review, I wrote that the author was "not one to use a moral mallet to make his points." In a story on real ale, I described beer as an "existential anesthetic."

When I wasn’t putting moral mallets into the hands of unsuspecting authors, I went about the business of worming my way into a staff-writer position. The thing was, being able to fling an envelope into the arts editor’s mailbox without looking was beginning to lose its sheen. Soon, I found myself regarding my once-cherished fax machine with real loathing. I wanted more than this. I wanted to squabble with copy editors. I wanted to be profligate with reporter’s notebooks. I wanted to put my feet up on my desk and bark into the phone, "So, what you got for me?" In 1999, after a couple of years at Stuff@night, I got my wish. For the entire night before I started my new job, I lay on the couch and stared at the same spot on the ceiling and thought, "Help me, Jesus!"

Today, things are different. Over the years, I’ve done hundreds of stories for the paper. I’ve written on robotics technology, penis enlargement, problem gambling, politics, terrorism, and sex. I’ve spent three days in jail, stood naked before a theater full of people, jumped out of an airplane, lost control of a speeding Crown Victoria, interviewed the parents of a murdered child, and knocked on Norman Mailer’s door while suffering from a hangover. It’s hard to imagine what could frighten me now. But with ease comes a certain deadening. These days, I’m far more inclined to get excited by seeing my name on a paycheck than by seeing it on the masthead.

The strange thing about all this is, when I applied for a job at the Phoenix I intended it to be stopgap — I’ll work through the summer, I figured, then move on to something else. Now, exactly nine years since I started here, I’m moving on to something else. I’ve been offered a managing-editor position in Dubai, at a magazine that covers advertising and public relations in the Middle East. My knowledge of both the region and those fields is, at best, somewhat threadbare, and that’s a little scary. But I’ve muddled my way through things before.

On my first day at the Phoenix, the editor who hired me, and who believed me when I told her I had computer experience, asked me to get her something "off the server." I remember wondering if she wanted me to go to the kitchen, then realizing that we didn’t have a kitchen. "I’ll need it ASAP," she added from around the corner. So it was that I sat there at the editorial desk, my paper clips neatly sorted, a pile of faxes ready to be handed out, wondering whether I’d be finished before I’d even started. I feel the same way now. I look at terms like "means-end conceptualization of components for advertising strategy," and I am stricken with dumb panic. But maybe this is what I need right now. Very often, fear and joy are part of the same package.

Former staff writer Chris Wright can be reached at chriswrightdubai@hotmail.com