Tonight we collated.

The issue came earlier than we thought, at about 2:00 pm.

Tim came to collating for the first time, perhaps because Charlie wasn’t there and Tim’s office is in the process of moving to Alameda. When I went to pick him up, there were boxes all over the place, and he took he loaded his Mac and disks into the car. It was weird having him at collating. He helped me seal envelopes and stuff boxes, then I sat down to show him how to bundle issues, not an easy thing to do because Tim as impatient and didn’t like the chore. Eventually, he settled down to the task. We’ll know tomorrow if he knew what he was doing.

Russ was there, of course, and Carolyn, and Lisa.

Shelly prepared beef and chicken tacos.

The party broke up at about 10:00 pm. I gave Russ a ride home. All the states were finished.

A bare-bones entry, probably because I was tired. “Collating” was a monthly chore in which bound copies of the finished magazine arrived at Charlie’s house to be labelled and bundled by zip code so they could be carried to the bulk mailing center in West Oakland the following day. To complete this, Charlie would throw a party, inviting various “Locus people” (friends, writers, contributors and ex-employees if they’d remained in good standing). He’d prepare a meal, usually barbecue, and everyone would gather in his living rooom among stacks of magazines, most of us sitting on the floor. Various states in the forms of labels would be passed out, assigned to people based on their level of expertise. The largest, most demanding zip code was Portland.

Lisa Goldstein author of The Red Magician, was a collating regular, and Russ, a local fan who was slender, gay, sandy-haired, opinionated and entertaining. It became a regular thing for me to give Russ a ride home to the Castro afterwards.