A few days later, no doubt facing unimaginable pressure from Ray, Dave called me into his office to try to patch things up. He told me that Ray was his best friend and if need be, he would “take a bullet” for him and I was not being fair. But I was beyond the point of reason and was not trying to hear any of it. I wasn’t going to help him. “No review,” I said. “Not even for me?” he appealed, obviously trying to tap into my positive memories of better days at The Source, feelings that he knew meant the world to me. “No Dave, not even for you.” And I don’t recall saying much to him ever again.

Dave moved himself and part of business side to an office one flight up on the sixth floor. And outside of just going up there to check it out, no one from the editorial side spent much time up there. And when Dave would come down to the fifth floor, we’d all be like, what’s this chump doing down here? It was serious, we literally hated each other, and yet we still had to work together to put out the magazine, which was becoming more ambitious by the month. Some of our best work appeared during those final days. We knew it could all end at anytime and were rushing to get our stuff out there.

James Bernard had reached his breaking point and was beginning to make noises about quitting. If James quit then so would I, because then there would really be no one up there looking out for me. Jon Shecter would always be the heart and soul of The Source, but James was my mentor and without him around, the content of the magazine would quickly revert to a rather pedestrian examination of Hip Hop trivia (Jon Shecter openly opposed many of the things that he saw in the magazine; he wanted things to go in a more accessible, non-confrontational direction). I started to seriously consider what I would do if I had to make a sudden exit from The Source.

But then, suddenly, things seemed to ease off. There was no more Ray. There was no more office drama. Dave stopped coming down stairs. I got a substantial raise in salary. James stopped talking about quitting. Jon stopped complaining about the content of the magazine. It looked as if we’d managed to move beyond this troubled period.

But we were wrong. We didn’t know that Dave had already been secretly interviewing people to take James’ place should he ever make good on his threats to leave. We didn’t know that Dave had sent writer Bonz Malone up to Boston to interview RSO for a feature that he planned to secretly insert into the magazine without the knowledge of his partners in editorial. We didn’t know a lot of things. Continued on page 13 »