Love Monkey (3 page)

“Single white female, facial deformity, seeks man 29–40. 5'11" and above, in good shape.”

This woman has a facial deformity, and I don't meet her height requirement. Us, afraid of commitment? Women can't commit to one drink with the greatest guy on earth if he's one inch shorter than they are. I read somewhere that Manhattan does not have the highest proportion of single people in America. We came in second. First place went to a county in Hawaii. Party town, USA? The place where moist young college grads come to celebrate panting youth? No: a former leper colony. Does Facial Deformity Woman place an ad, in, say,
Canker Sore Illustrated
? No. She picks the most upscale, Gucci-and-Harvard paper in the country for her personal ad, then she sits back thinking:
George Clooney will be calling any minute.

Liesl buzzes me around five. I don't jump her, although she is sexy in a beige tank top with matching bra straps peeking out on the sides. And light makeup. This matters: it's a Sunday, and she's a feminist. Not a default feminist as in, “Well, I'm a woman so I guess I have to be one, don't I?” but a real one who writes angry letters to the
Times
to call attention to their insidious sexist language. This is the
New York Times
we're talking about, the paper that made “white male” a surprisingly effective insult.

I love the way she looks, all blue eyes, fair skin, medium-blond hair. She looks like the führer's wet dream, and why not? She's German. Half German, anyway. She was born here; her mother fled East Berlin in the fifties. I picture my friends—the Cohens and Rabinowitzes, the Meyers, the Shapiros, the Fleisch-, Good-, and Kuntzmans—freaking when they meet her.

“I like your place,” she says, looking around as though she's
thinking of renting it. “Oh, my. Those,
flow
ers,” she says. “Time to change them.”

I look at the windowsill: oh yeah. The flowers. From The Dinner. They look like I feel.

I'm in the middle of watching a Brian Wilson special on TV. I start to tell her about it. Maybe she's a fan.

“And who is Brian Wilson?” she says.

Who is Brian Wilson?
He only wrote “Good Vibrations,” “Wouldn't It Be Nice,” and “Don't Worry, Baby.” I can see not knowing who Brian Wilson is if you also don't know who Mozart was. But this girl definitely knows who Mozart was. And she grew up in the time of Brian, not in eighteenth-century Austria.

It gets better: she hasn't even heard of “Caroline, No.”

“ ‘Caroline Knows'?” she says. “I thought it was ‘God Only Knows.' ”

At times like this, I look to a higher power for guidance. Luckily I have His image on the wall: Bogart. The poster shows him sitting at a typewriter. Next to him stand two guys pointing guns at him. He ignores them and keeps typing. That picture says it all. The film was called
In a Lonely Place.
He plays a jaded writer, a guy so hard-boiled that he cracks jokes when he finds out a girl he knew slightly has been murdered. My favorite line is when his detective buddy tells him he has recently gotten married. Bogey just says, “Why?”

Not only was Bogart great for the part, but the girl who makes him fall in love and confront his emotions for the first time is played by this withering blonde, Gloria Grahame. She was clever and hard, a girl who could say it all with a cocked eyebrow or a flared nostril. Bergman in
Casablanca
? Please. A clinging bore who fawns over that twinkle-toes do-gooder Laszlo. Where's the mystery in her? Give me Gloria any day. In every movie you get the feeling that she could be capable of anything. And in real life she was: she married the guy who directed
In a Lonely Place
, that weirdo Nicholas Ray. Then dumped him. Then she
married his son
from an earlier marriage. Now that's a
woman who knows how to hurt a guy. And make him beg for more. Because he knows it'll take him a lifetime to figure her out. You don't hang on to the crossword puzzle after you've finished it, do you?

What would Bogart do with Liesl? He'd take her out to a cool dive. A mildly pretentious Frenchy cafe, the kind that makes girls want to drink because it's such a European thing to do. Luckily there's one right in my neighborhood. It's one of the main reasons I picked this apartment: I've closed many a deal at Cafe Frog.

We get a table in the sunshine. I give her the old, “Do you want to get a bottle of wine?”

“No,” she says.

I get a half bottle for me. She orders one beer, makes it last. That scotches my evening right there. Never hit on a woman who could pass a Breathalyzer.

Mmmm. Scotch.

She agrees to come back to the apartment afterward. My arsenal is prepared.

Weapon number one: my baby pictures. This a) humanizes me; b) makes me look sensitive; c) makes her think we would make beautiful babies (I was one, after all); and d) shows me at my best, since frankly I looked stellar at five, but rarely since. Who doesn't look good in baby pictures? Clear skin, matched outfits, induced jollity. Plus your unbroken heart is in mint condition. Your hairline hasn't begun its retreat and your gut has not yet made the acquaintance of Messrs. Anheuser and Busch. Baby pictures are the Doomsday Machine of getting play. Press the button, it's all over.

There are pictures of my parents at Niagara Falls for their honeymoon, pictures of me abusing the seams of various Little League outfits (Why were they always too small, year after year? Couldn't they have just given me the next year's uniform ahead of time?), pictures of me in a Bugs Bunny costume, pictures of me arm in arm
with my best friend, Bucky, both of us in white T-shirts and navy camp shorts. It is always summer in these pictures, or a holiday. I spot a pattern. There were the Gosh-Darned Adorable Years (0–6) and the Really Quite Acceptably Kid-Looking Kid Years (6–11). Then there were the Wonder Years (11–32), as in, I wonder how two such foxy parents managed to produce such a chimp?

As I hand each picture to Liesl for adoration, I realize she is meticulously putting them in chronological order. She is not even issuing the requisite “Awww's.” Come on: me in a Donald Duck hat, age six? Who could resist?

“Wait, wait,” she says as I give her a picture of my dad and me at Disney World circa 1979. I've got on huge plastic glasses and an Electric Light Orchestra T-shirt.

Liesl looks at this one, flips it over, peers at the date, finds the exact right place for it in the stack. I'm tempted to shuffle the deck on her to see if it will make her cry.

I take the Beach Boys'
Greatest Hits
off the CD player (I played it with manboy sarcasm; it contains both “Caroline, No” and “God Only Knows,” but Liesl didn't seem to notice my point) and unsheath weapon number two: Cowboy Junkies,
The Trinity Session
. In times like these I always choose
The Trinity Session
. This is guaranteed stuff. Over the years it's fifteen for fifteen in delivering at least a gropefest. Don't think I don't keep charts for these things.

“What's this?” Liesl asks.

“Cowboy Junkies,” I say.

“Is that a joke?” she says.

“No,” I say. “It's actually their name.”

“Is there anything on TV?” she asks.

After we watch a sitcom about (hint, hint) horny girls in New York (“I didn't think it was very funny,” she informs me), I fetch her a glass of water (isn't that supposed to come
after
the sex?).

But we talk and chat and then we chat and talk and ponder and talk serious stuff about the future when all I want to do is taste the inside of her mouth. I can't, because she's still holding the glass of water. She takes a sip, and then
keeps it in her hand
. Who does this? The coffee table is right there! She takes another sip, continues to clutch the glass. She does this until she drains the entire glass. Then, finally, anxiously (the half bottle of wine has worn off so I'm all antsy again), I lean in and give her—well, not much, because I pull back at the last second and give her what turns out to be a peck. A mom kiss. Short and not particularly sweet.

“Umm,” she says.

Here it comes. The let's-be-friends speech. Or worse: the I-don't-feel-that-way-about-you speech.

“Yeah?” I say, trying to hit the mute button on my ringing desperation. God, I need to prove I can get over on someone.

“Nothing,” she says. Girls are always saying, “Nothing,” but it's always something.

“Come on,” I coax. Why do they always make you beg for bad news?

“It's just…”

“Yeah?”

“Could you…”

Rub your back? Kiss your ear? Remove your bra?

“Yeah?”

“Could you walk me to the subway?”

It's ten o'clock. It's ten fucking o'clock.

Off to the subway. A couple more pecks, but then she gives me a nice, long, warm hug. What does that mean? Maybe she wants to get busy. Maybe she wants me to be her brother.

Five minutes later I'm watching Bugs again, but after a while I decide I've had enough of this nonproductive behavior for one weekend. I stand up straight. I turn out the lights and program the CD carousel to play
Murmur, Up
, “From the Edge of the Deep
Green Sea,” “A Letter to Elise,” and “Yellow.” I sit back down. It takes me five glasses of Scotch to get through them all and then I stumble into the kitchen to drink five glasses of water to cheat the hangover gods and then the couch seems so warm and friendly and inviting and…

A
nd when I walk in the lobby this morning, whose is the first face I see? Hers. Not dream her; for-real her. We still work together, after all. Did I not mention that? I rarely bump into her, though, since her desk is on the far wing of the building.

Today it's her first day in a new job. She's been promoted from sub-blue-collar-wage-tryout-level deputy assistant flunky to, like, Officially Sanctioned Big-Time Media Factotum.

I kid around with her. Badly.

“So!” I say nervously. “Nervous?”

“Not really,” she says.

Why would she be? She faces a long day of fax retrieval. It's 9:37
A.M.,
and already I'm ass of the day.

“How was your weekend?” I say brightly as we get in the elevator for the long ride to forty-two.

“It was all right,” she says guardedly, in a way that screams:
I
made screaming hot monkey love with someone other than you for forty-eight damp hours
. “How was yours?”

Oof. Checkmate. How was my weekend? How was Hiroshima? Blood runs for my cheeks. I'm a redhead. There has never been a redheaded spy.

I respond with a sound, but I'm pretty sure it's not an actual word.

The cartoon thought balloons over our heads:

We ride up in silence.

On the other hand: we're together!

We work at a tabloid. It's a real tabloidy tabloid. Unlike the
Daily News
, with its hurrah-for-immigrants charts, its isn't-that-nice stories about entrepreneurs peeling a living off the streets of what well-off people no longer feel comfortable calling the ghetto, we make no apologies. We don't send serious journalists out to cover the ghetto. We are the ghetto for serious journalists.

Our newspaper was founded on the reasoning that if it took ten billion years for man to crawl out of the muck, then he's overdue to be dunked back in it. Our home deliveries once increased 20 percent when we hatched a cross-promotion scheme that enabled us to be hidden inside the
Times
on people's doormats. The other papers don't respect us, possibly because of the name of the paper: it's called
Tabloid
. (Motto: “America's loudest newspaper.”) Old folks understand what they're getting, wide-pantsed hipsters love the cheeky self-referentiality of it. Internally, we call it the comic: we
work here so we can laugh at the world. Everyone has to believe in something, so we placed our faith in skepticism. We weren't the first to discover that the world is a toilet. We just give you something to read while you're sitting on it.

Three years ago I was the youngest hack on rewrite. The four of us were lashed to consecutive cubicles, a whole squadron of back-of-the-class smart-asses thrown together in the front row facing the Desk, within doughnut-flinging distance of Max, the screaming, insane city editor. Occasionally some aged hack would refer to “the rewrite pit,” and though we were on the same elevation above sea level as everyone else, we loved to think of ourselves as a feared four-headed monster, waving our tentacles at our betters.

By unspoken rule, once settled for the day, rewrite doesn't leave the office. Rewrite doesn't do lunch or go to the gym or meet “sources” for drinks. Rewrite never knows how long it'll be at work; true soldiers of smudge never want to leave. Every day is spent abusing three drugs: caffeine, MSG, and information. Rewrite knows everything that happens before it's finished happening. You had to: a breathless reporter in the field could call in at any moment with a new bump on any story that ran in the paper in the last month—genocide in the Balkans, a hot-dog-eating contest in Coney Island—and you had to come up with the right questions to caulk up all the holes in time to write it up for edition. Rewrite studies every wire story, absorbs every TV news broadcast (not hard: they steal all their stories from us), gobbles up every newspaper.

Sucking in coffee, spitting out wisecracks, rising to every gruesome moment with hard-boiled nonchalance, we four deadline poets wrote pretty much the whole news hole. We worked strictly for our own amusement, the outside world's opinion mattering somewhere between diddly and squat. Max pushed our buttons—“Stir up a little outrage,” he would order, his eyebrow cracking like a whip—and out came the headlines, backed up by the usual dubious quote-whore
suspects ever ready to spew anger on demand. It isn't hard to find somebody who is famous, or has followers, or holds office, or used to hold office, or at very least has “association” on his letterhead and a membership of one or more—who is up for a nice game of controversy. Our Rolodexes burst with their names. We had their home numbers. We could find them on any weekend and any night. The numbers were our buckshot, which we would take into the forest and fire at the truth, hitting sometimes, missing most, but when you return for the evening with dinner for your tribe, no one asks you how many bullets you had to fire.

When things were breaking our way, Max, this anonymous figure, a guy whose face never turns up on TV shows or in syndicated columns, whose name doesn't appear in any paper, even ours, a guy who is no threat to be recognized at a soiree where people swarm around the fops who run
Forbes
or
Vanity Fair
(not that he even goes to those six-to-eighters in the first place; he's always at work till ten) was the most powerful journalist in America. And when he roared, the republic waved a hand in front of its face and wilted before his halitosis. Under his bidding we judged the judges, vetoed the politicians, and bounced the basketball coaches we didn't like. We were the double espresso to the heartbeat of the city, our gibes providing excellent graphics for TV news. Even the respectable press, too timid or too dull to marshal its own attacks and making everything look more complicated than it was, would wistfully issue reports of our crusades. To us they're just an empty canyon begging to be shouted into. It's our America now. When was the last time you saw the front page of the
New York Review of Books
on
World News Tonight
?

To rewrite, there is one unforgivable blunder—the one whispered about darkly in drowsy two
A.M.
heavy-news-day conversations when everyone's thoughts turn to the nearest drinkery; the one rewrite parents warn their rewritten children never to do:
Pull
a Hymietown
. Hymietown is the word once used to describe our city by a major presidential candidate in the 1980s. The candidate casually dropped this municipal pet name into an interview with a
Washington Post
reporter who, confronted with the scoop of the year, the one that would reverse the tide of the presidential campaign and vaporize a figure who had a shot at the top, promptly buried it in the thirty-seventh paragraph of the interview. Since no one outside the journalism industry has ever read to the thirty-seventh paragraph of any newspaper story (ours never run more than one-fourth that length), the remark would have had the shelf life of a banana if
Tabloid
's zombie-eyed rewrite man, a night prowler skulking in the graveyards of words, hadn't scoured every sentence of the
Washington Post
wire at one
A.M
and plucked out the one noun that mattered in a two-thousand-word story. As though he'd found a wounded bird in a trampled nest, he gave it the care and nurturing it deserved by resettling it in the hot incubator light of our page one. So ended the candidate's chances of winning the New York state primary. To this day, J schools will teach you that the
Post
broke the Hymietown story. Yeah, they broke it. We fixed it.

When the outside world was behaving too well, we got bored and gave the rewrite treatment to everything that was happening at the comic. You could fill another newspaper with our staff vendettas and petty crime, with the intraoffice exclusives we broke by reading the editorial lips that flapped behind silent glass walls or by liberating confidential memos from the trash. Since all of our training worked to shorten the time between discovering and telling, none of us ever tried to keep a secret; no news is bad news. We gave long shrift to all of the pressing questions. Who got fired? Who got divorced? Who got pregnant? Rewrite knows, and rewrite tells. When dish is gold, you get extra points for feeding the needy with gossip, so those colleagues who lived their lives in technicolor were objects of awe. The newsroom never disappointed. It's a Louvre of
eccentricity and turpitude. Behavior that might be frowned upon at other major international corporations (or so I've heard; I've never worked anywhere else), was lustily cheered on rewrite: excessive drinking, getting arrested, or being discovered in compromising circumstances with a person not your spouse—or, ideally, all three—made you a hero for months, inched you closer to the ultimate accolade: the title of
legend,
which upon being earned would invariably accompany your name whenever one of your colleagues, fellow tribesmen, introduced you in a bar.

It was combat. Behold our names; we even sound like cannon fodder in a World War II movie: Rosen, Burke, Feldman, and Farrell. The women, Rita Rosen and Liz Burke, are still there, returning to work every day the way Nicole kept going back to O.J. Feldman responded to twelve years of Max's lash by throwing his computer through a window. After that no one would hire him except
US
magazine. I ducked the shells of three deadlines a day until they started a Sunday edition. Somebody had to become weekend features editor. My hand was the first one up.

There was no increase in salary, but I gladly accepted a 10 percent cut in my pulse. Now I edit the movie reviews on Friday, the starlet interviews and hot-bars blurbs for Saturday, the best-in-town stuff for Sunday. At the time I thought, This is success. I felt it important to succeed for the same reason everyone does: because I secretly hoped to be able to lord it over my classmates at some imagined high school reunion. But it's been a couple of years since I was last called an up-and-comer, and at some point even wonder boys awaken to discover they've become middle management.

I've made the stuff so light that the ink nearly floats off the newsprint; mine are the pages that don't slam or rock or ooze or indict; the stuff, in other words, that we can close four days in advance to make our production schedule. If I come up with something too newsy, it gets taken away from me and put in the daily
paper. Which creates a hole in the Sunday paper that I will then have to scramble to fill with something commissioned on the fly. My job therefore is: don't do your job too well, and mediocrity is my middle name. Ten best places in the city to get your nails done? We did that one last month. Also in November, January, and April.

Tabloid
's frosted gray 1940s-style-private-eye glass doors—even our entrance is hard-boiled—open into the city room. Under the all-night bug-zapping fluorescent burn, tough guys and the women who don't mind them make dirty jokes, yell insults at each other, cluster in front of TVs. Wastebaskets overflow, the smell of fried food clouds the air, phones ring, empty pizza boxes form unstable skyscrapers. Add a couple of bongs and it could be Delta House at any state U.

At the bank of TVs by the window a guy dressed entirely in mail-order casual clothing is watching New York 1 news. He is my rarely sighted archfoe Eli Knecht. At one time he was my archfriend, a fellow drinkslayer whose stucco complexion, unpressed 60/40 shirts, and inner-tube waistline, I thought, provided a constant subliminal reminder to women that they could wind up with someone even less attractive than me. Eli grew up in a small town in upstate New York hungering for big-city hackdom, skyscrapers glinting in his irises, his broad-beam forehead aching to butt down doors. All he ever wanted was the honor of a cheap suit. Not only couldn't he wait to grow up, he couldn't wait to grow
old
, to own the weary staff of knowledge so he could club people with it. The guy is my age yet his conversations are full of casual references to dead mayors, ancient work stoppages, forgotten scandals. Rewrite has long whispered that he is bald as a friar on purpose, to live up to the look of someone old enough to remember the 1965 mayoral race. Now Eli is our third-string City Hall reporter, devouring every zoning decision and PAC donation so he can prove without a doubt that rich people have more political influence.

When I started, he introduced me to the street. Unlike a lot of
reporters, he was generous with his knowledge and taught me a few things when, years ago, I took my first trembling steps onto the long carpets of broken glass that invariably mark a neighborhood where crime is the leading industry. Eli knows more tricks than a forty-dollar hooker: always carry a pencil because pens always explode, run out of ink, or freeze; don't bother with a tape recorder because then you'll spend half your day transcribing (a suggestion seconded by our lawyers—who can prove you misquoted someone unless there's a tape?); and keep your press pass in your pocket, not dangling around your neck, unless you want to spend the afternoon parked behind a sawhorse with the I-got-a-journalism-degree pretend reporters in a designated “media courtesy area” half a block from the cooling corpse getting tucked under the covers while stealthier journos posing as real people who just happen to live in the building glide in unnoticed and get the story.

For years we used to go to South together for pitchers and peanuts, him and me and Hillary from the editorial page, a girl whose hotitude was so off the charts that there would have been as little point in flirting with her as there would have been in showing up at Yankee Stadium with glove and cleats, saying, “Hi, mind if I try out for first base?” I once saw her walk by a construction site on Broadway. The hard hats didn't whistle. They didn't shout dirty words. Instead, moving as one man, they stood and bowed their heads. Besides which, there was the matter of the hardware she lugged around on the third finger of her left hand. I got to thinking of her as one of the guys, albeit the only one I often pictured dressed only in Reddi-wip, and so we'd all drift over after work to take turns shooting pool or trying to belch “Hotel California” (she once made it all the way to “warm smell of colitas”). Rewrite would joke about our little ménage à trois, but suddenly there was only one of us and nobody was talking about my ménage à un. You know you're pathetic when even rewrite orders a cease-fire.