Here's the scene. It's Friday night, and in a Richmond Va. attic there's me, a 12-pack of Rolling Rocks and box after box of tattered, yellow newspaper clippings. The task - throwing away enough paper to get 20-some years of my life into a single box.

It keeps me busy until 4:30 Saturday morning and the end result is a pile of empty beer bottles, one neat plastic box chocked with memories, and two huge garbage bags full of clips, including a small mountain of old UPI wire copy. Every clip tells a story, and the process has been more emotional than I had ever imagined. For most of my life, people looked at me as a writer, not a dot commie, and it's like saying goodbye to yourself.

Then the cosmic karma starts kicking in.

First, I found out that the First Dumpling woke up jarred -- 102 miles away, I might add -- at the same time I was going to bed.

Next I learned that my mother called Dumpling early that morning to lament how I don't write anymore, and how good I was at it.

Finally, after a fitful and disoriented few hours of attempted sleep, I'm driving back to Virginia Beach. The radio catches a classic rock 'n roll station where the DJ is doing a segment on famous people in rock who have died this week, and as soon as he's finished with Jim Capaldi of Traffic, he launches into the obit of Lucien Carr.

Lou Carr wasn't exactly Top 40.

But he was a rock star to me.

***

Lou Carr was a legendary editor at United Press International, the heart and soul of the A-wire, the top stories of the day.

Unabashedly old-school -- "When I see that lead I want to either cry or get horny" -- it was his job to make people better, and he was brilliant at it. It meant a lot when you got a "good job" from Lou Carr. More often than any compliment, he was the guy asking the question you should have asked. He was the guy who'd know the perfect verb that escaped you. He'd be the guy who'd put your stuff in active voice, cut the length of your story by a third, and make it better.

He had an unbelievable sense of what people would want to know. I carry that sense of anticipation into my Web work to this very day.

But too much thumb-sucking about me; Carr would have ridiculed the nine grafs I've used to set this up, and he'd tell me I was burying the lead (the most important part). Even if I was trying to explain why I'm doing all this.

I'm trying to introduce Lucien Carr to the trailing generations.

Working for UPI won't get you on a classic rock station.

***

Before rebellious young people tatted and piereced themselves, before grunge and flannel shirts, before the long-haired freaky people who need not apply, there were the beatniks, the hip cats, the people who in the 40s and 50s who took on the culture of suburbia and grey flannel suit corporate conformity.

And Lucien Carr was its prime mover. The beat generation, as it came to be known, came about because Lou Carr introduced a bunch of his brilliant buddies to each other, and then kept them all on a short and to the point pursuit of the truth. Jack Kerouac on the road. Alan Ginsburg howling.

Carr wasn't the type to put himself first; while The Beat rolled on, he got a real job. At United Press, no less, and stayed with it until '93. For youngsters, think of the earliest days of Microsoft, and why Bill Gates got the big share and Paul Allen the third. Allen had a day job.

In recent years, Carr's biggest media ride came when Kerouac's original manuscript for "On The Road" was put up for auction. Carr had given him the old wire-style spool of paper so he could keep writing without having to stop and change paper in his typewriter.

I know a bit about writing on wire paper.

The day Lou Carr died, I was up to my elbows in the cheap brown rolls.

***

In the news business, in the area of news wholesalers such as UPI and the Associated Press and Reuters, the term for getting your story in the paper instead of the other guys is "getting the play."

Lou Carr got a lot of play with his obit, most all of which mentioned that he killed a homosexual stalker, and even though it was self-defense he spent two years in prison for stabbing his ex-Scoutmaster with his Boy Scout knife. Left hanging between the lines was the suggestion that his prison past is what kept Carr in the background.

I believe it's a lot more simple than pop psychology.

It's a legitimate calling and a satisfying pursuit to make things better. Lou Carr wasn't a friend of mine, he was a presence, a voice on a phone, a name at the end of a rocketgram message from the big desk. Better is what he made me -- and everybody else who had the fortune/misfortune of having a big story in their laps.

There's a name for that, you know.

Editor.

-30-

Mr. Marshall, who uses italics when speaking in the third person, would be remiss if he did not mention another legendary UPI editor, the gravel-voiced, quite scary and quite good Jack Warner, the best friend a story ever had.