The Night of the Living Safeway: A young writer searches for voice

Many young journalists, seeking their own identity and voice, stumble early-on onto that one story that puts them on a path, helping to forge the older, more-experienced writer they will one day become.

The lucky ones, anyway.

Mine was The Night of the Living Safeway.

In 1986, as a fledgling reporter for the Kansas City Star, I wrote what was to become my motherlode of oddball characters, the piece that showed me that the best stories were to be found well outside the lines.

And that how a good -- even courageous -- editor is the best friend any writer will ever have.

(Thirty-three years ago! Gosh, has it been that long?) 

Published a decade before the online age, the piece quickly vanished into obscurity. Still, I can’t tell you how many times, usually over many beers, I regaled luckless cronies with its backstory, and the people who helped make it happen, but I never kept an actual hard copy of the paper.

Then, just the other day, I reconnected with Don Ipock, the former Star photographer who accompanied me on my journey into a wholly-unique and madcap urban rabbit hole.

As I wrote in my notebook, he focused his camera's viewfinder.

Scribble. Click. Scribble. Scribble. Click.

Miraculously, Don kept a few copies inside a dusty trunk in the back of his Kansas City photography studio and graciously emailed me some images.

Man, just seeing these pictures, rereading these words, certainly stirred up some ghosts. And if you don’t mind, I’d like to relive the story that has so shaped me as a writer, the one whose characters I’ll never forget.

They were like a first love or that early teacher who made a difference.

Except crazier, ballsier, more lunatic.

Just the way I like it.

Back then, the Star was old-school, published in afternoon, and I worked as the paper’s cop reporter, which meant that I showed up each day at 5 a.m. to a warren-like office in the bowels of police department headquarters. 

Already, I had an eye for offbeat narratives, twisted tales of urban violence and mayhem, that I exhumed from police reports or by kibitzing with detectives, to put on the front page.

But I was looking for bigger game than mere 800-word blasts of woe. 

I wanted to develop longer stories that said something about the place they were written from, like all those big-time magazine writers did. 

I needed elbow room.

That spring, I’d moved from the more-fashionable Plaza area to edgier turf, a neighborhood called Broadway-Valentine, from where you could see the gothic downtown skyline in the near distance, where I knew my people lurked.

My new place was right behind a busy grocery store and I liked to go there late at night, when the regular customers deserted the aisles for a far more outlandish cast of nocturnal actors.

That year, as part of his federal-budget buzzsaw, Ronald Reagan had defunded mental institutions nationwide, casting out onto the street countless patients who probably should have been getting better round-the-clock attention.

Some took up residence in cheap one-room flop houses across my transitional neighborhood. And they all became regulars at my local supermarket, their antics quickly giving the place a telling nickname among us snickering urban hipsters.

The Night of the Living Safeway.

This now army of late-night shoppers quickly became legend.

Like the guy with Coke-bottle-thick glasses, whose hair stood straight up like an unmowed lawn. He'd discretely peel off the merchandise price stickers on items and slap on cheaper ones. But the checkout clerks were on to his game and charged him the regular price.

They called him Dave the Label Changer.

And the absent-minded professor, who wheeled his shopping cart around the store, wearing a Scottish kilt, perusing this and that, reading the afternoon newspaper as he went. He never bought anything, and eventually replaced his cart and went on his merry way.

There was the Safari Lady, who dressed entirely in camouflage and bought nothing but meat, mostly prime steaks, hundreds of dollars worth. And the Charcoal Queen, who dressed in black, smeared head to toe in charcoal. Baggers had to hold their breath because of her pungent aroma.

Mrs. Hardy was the grandmotherly type who baked cookies for the staff, but Crazy Helen was the polar opposite. She threw loaves of bread at people she didn't like.

"Shut up!" she'd snap. "You don't own this store!"

One day, when a glowering body-builder began shouting obscenities at the checkout, the security guard reached for his gun, threatening to kick his butt if he didn't leave the store.

The big man complied, but not before breaking into tears, shouting, "I'm going to go home and tell my Mommy!"

I had my favorites. 

Like Frank the bootleg cabbie who, decades before Uber and Lyft, would lurk outside the store in search of off-meter riders. Nearby, Buttons the president’s foreign affairs advisor stood for hours, yacking away into the outside pay phone, offering Reagan such unsolicited advice as “Ya gotta bomb Libya!”

But the Queen of the Night was a small woman named Pam.

The Moon Lady.

She wore a princess’s fairy-tale costume, a flowing white robe with a headdress, with sparkles in her hair. She had a cat and a bunny she pushed around in her cart.

She wanted Don and I to help her make Frederick the Rabbit a famous actor. She told me she was originally from Washington, D.C.

“They have thin houses there,” she said.

Even store employees were spunky a breed apart, like the graveyard-shift manager who philosophized about his lot in life. The Broadway-Valentine Safeway was known as Store 246, he explained, the end of the line for stockers and cashiers who had fallen out of political favor.

It was the place nobody wanted to go.

Yet it also imparted its own sense of freedom, the manager said. If you worked at Store 246, the big bosses couldn’t send you to corporate Siberia.

You were already there.

They were all outcasts, both workers and shoppers alike. 

And yet they bonded to create a society where people could be themselves — even those perched on society’s farthest edge — without fear of mockery or ridicule.

For me, the place was like heaven.

It was how I thought the world should have worked, but didn’t.

I’d found my story and, lucky for me, the Star had its own Sunday magazine.

Luckier still, it was run by a mustachioed, whip-smart editor named Bill Luening.

Bill was both a veteran journalist and raconteur who questioned authority. In Vietnam, as an Army platoon leader, he realized right away that the war was wrong, and he didn’t want any of his men dying for something no grunt could believe in.

“I don’t care if we ever engage the enemy," he told them. "We’re all going home alive.”

Years later, with his wry sense of humor intact, Bill had no doubt seen plenty of brash East Coast kids like me land in the Midwest, with their own sense of sartorial style, and who dreamed big but who didn’t yet have the writing chops to tell the tale.

Looking back, I must have amused him, because he wrote a column that ran along with the story about the day I walked into his office to pitch a piece about my wacky cast of supermarket misfits.

The column began: “My personal policy is never to do business with men who wear pointy-toed shoes the color of buffed liverwurst. So John Glionna already had two strikes on him when he set feet in the office that day to tell me about his grocery store.

“Now John is a hard-sell kind of guy. I think it comes, in part, from being born in the Northeast where a cultivated diffidence isn’t part of the program. Or perhaps it’s from being a police reporter. Whatever it is keeps him at critical mass, his eyes moving like a point man’s. John has a remarkable sense of urgency. And, of course, those shoes.

A story about his grocery store, he told me, would be a hit. A sure hit. A killer hit.”

Quite an introduction, don’t you think?

So, Bill sent me back into the field to absorb all color I could in this wonderfully-weird world. Months later, I reemerged with my first version of the story. I remember that day. It was a Friday afternoon and I was jumping on a plane to Florida to visit my parents. 

Bill gave me a printout of the piece with his thoughts bolded up top. I read it and cringed: The comments were nearly as long as the story itself, and detailed the unfortunate choice of words here, a cliche there, and the lost storytelling opportunities that were all over the place.

But Bill was a teacher, not just an editor. His note brimmed with encouragement.

“First of all,” he began, “I love this story.”

In Florida, I showed it to my father and we had a huge fight.

My father wasn’t a journalist, didn't understand the process. This was no longer my story, he reasoned. Bill had put his mark on it, shaped it. Why didn’t they put his byline on it?

I tried to explain the role of a good editor to coax from young writers like me the words they thought they had at the ready, somewhere deep inside.

He wasn't convinced. But I was.

I hurried back to Kansas City and dove back into the tale of my grocery store.

Eventually, Bill, Don and I had the story we wanted to tell.

The piece ran on the Sunday magazine’s cover, but it almost didn’t get there.

In fact, it almost didn’t run in the newspaper at all.

Bill totally grasped the story I was trying to tell, but there were other decision-makers who weren’t as ready to spotlight this kooky urban subculture.

Safeway, for starters, was a major advertiser — what if they hated the piece?

And what about Broadway-Valentine homeowners? What would such a major spread in the weekend newspaper do to their property values?

One afternoon, just days before publication, both Bill and I sat in the office of newspaper publisher Jim Hale, ready to defend our story.

Now Hale was an SOB in his own right, a veteran newspaperman who had a gritty reputation for going his own way, for throwing drinks in people’s faces at cocktail parties, telling his critics to go to hell.

But even Hale blushed at this oddball lot.

“I don’t know, Luening,” he barked. “What the hell do you think you’re doing here?”

Bill refused to back down. He said the story was filled with humanity and that the people at Safeway would surely see that once they'd read it.

Hale wasn't convinced, insisting the piece was littered with red flags.

And he’d given a copy of the story to the newspaper’s advertising manager, Jeff Hall, just to make sure it wouldn’t wrinkle the sensibilities of those corporations and subscribers who helped put the paychecks in our pockets.

As Hale ranted, Hall walked into the office with printout in hand.

One word of expressed doubt, both Bill and I knew, and the piece was dead.

But let me tell you, what happened next was a thing of pure beauty, something right out of the movie, The Front Page.

"I like it," Hall told the big boss.

Bill and I shifted in our seats.

“What?” Hale frothed. “What do you mean you like it? Well, read it again, goddamn it! We can’t put this story in the Kansas City Star!”

But we did.

The magazine's cover photo featured the Moon Lady herself, with her cat and Frederick the Rabbit in tow.

“During the day, it’s no different than any other grocery store," the come-on read. "But when the sun sinks and the moon rises it becomes …” (the rest in red horror-movie script),

“Night of the Living Safeway.”

The main photo on the inside layout, in what we used to called a double-truck, showed a young hipster with devil-horned hair, a razor blade for an earring, and a safety pin piercing his nose.

He smoked a corncob pipe, and called himself Xavier Riboflaven.

The story opened:

“I like to visit my neighborhood grocery store after midnight. Especially when the moon is full.

That’s when the daylight shopper has fled and a different breed of customer eases through the turn-styles.

The Moon Lady. And Spike Disgusting. And Dave the Label Changer. And Frank the Bootleg Cabbie. And Crazy Helen. And Buttons, the president’s foreign affairs advisor.

They’re all there, shopping, meandering, assembling, acting out. They’re all there in my grocery store at the corner of Broadway and Valentine, a schizophrenic supermarket that changes personalities after dark.

Then it becomes a people watcher’s paradise. Food shopping on the lunatic fringe. The Planet Safeway.

“We do a legitimate business during the day,” says John LePage, a security guard at the store. Then, slowly, he shakes his head. “But when the sun goes down …”

They’re known as the anti-customers, and they only come out at night: the punks, the pushers, the pretty boys and the pimps. After midnight, the aisles become stomping grounds for Mohawks, shaved heads, transvestites, aluminum can pickers, teen-aged boys with pierced nipples and Jack Daniels breath.

Men wearing makeup. Young girls in black leather and chains. Vacant faces appearing outside the store window, silently staring in.

At night, the “F” on the store sign flickers and dies and it beckons “Saeway.” A warning that there’s something not quite right here.

Welcome to the Night of the Living Safeway. A Rocky Horror grocery store.”

Readers loved the piece. Local homeowners hated it.  Safeway didn’t say much.

Reporters looked at me differently after it ran. Suddenly, I was more than just a cop reporter, but a long form tour guide to the dark side.

Bill and I had pulled it off.

I left the paper later that year for my next chapter, a job as a features writer in San Diego, but the story has stayed with me. It became a template for what was to come, for what you will read in this blog, defining my eye for a good subculture story, my appetite for the far side.

I lost touch with Bill, but just yesterday, I tracked him down with the help of former Star managing editor Dave Zeeck and gave him a call at his home in Maine. The Vietnam War had eventually taken its toll on Bill after all. Exposed to Agent Orange, he developed Parkinson's Disease, but is stubbornly hanging on, his voice carrying that same old lilt.

I'm not sure he recognized my name, but he remembered the story.

I thanked him for believing in and protecting a fragile young journalist, like he did his men in Southeast Asia.

"You've made my year," Bill said.

We shared a few stories and before hanging up, Bill paused.

"Those were good times, weren't they?" he said.

Indeed, they were.

The Safeway is long gone. What remains are the images of those characters who found in that grocery store a place to be themselves.

People like Pam, lovely, gentle Pam.

The Moon Lady.

And Bill Luening, that fearless editor who challenged his superiors, and who always knew who he was.

Mr. Question Authority.

I continue to celebrate you both with everything I write.

Each in your own way, you remain among the brightest lights in the nighttime sky of my imagination.