Love Monkey (4 page)

Now Eli's in the Zone with Hillary. I confronted him about it one night. They had been making cute little call-me-later gestures at each other across the newsroom as I was stuffing my backpack with stolen office supplies, and when I left, he and his gonna-get-some-tonight smirk followed me onto the elevator.

“You in the Zone?” I said.

“I may be. I may be in the Zone.”

“When?” I said.

“Could be a year, could be more.”

“You know this?”

“She's dropping hints. Let's just say we've started making trips to Bed Bath and Beyond.”

Fucker. “Nice,” I said. He'll never invite me to the wedding, which sucks because I want to make a big thing out of not going.

“Yep,” he said.

“And the other guy?” I said.

“Oh,
him
,” he said. “Never existed. She had to wear an engagement ring to keep
lo
sers from hitting on her. It was made of
glass,
Tom, didn't you notice?”

Fuck. Checkmated by my jewelry ignorance.

I couldn't bear to deal with him after that. It was like he graduated, went to Harvard, and left me behind in kindergarten, eating paste. Today I just give him a nod.

“Hey, Ignatz,” I say. For some reason neither of us can remember, I always call him Ignatz.

“Hey, Pappy,” Eli says, his go-to-hell tie slung completely unknotted around his neck like a flying ace's scarf. For some reason neither of us can remember, he always calls me Pappy.

I slither off down cubicle way, passing two side streets of gray sound-deadening uprights and the interior fishbowl offices reserved for the muckety-mucks. My house is right where I left it, at the corner of Jaded and Cranky.

Another day in my cave, my cube: ten years in the business and I have never had an office. Sitting on my chair where I specifically ask the copykids not to place them—those unsightly black ass stains—is the usual heap of today's papers.

Hit the button and the computer starts humming. This is what I do: I spend my life at three keyboards. One I play pretty well. I slouch in front of it with a beverage and words come out of me, often before I have even thought them.

One I'm still studying. It has about eighty-eight keys. You have to learn how to push this and hold that, execute complex tasks with one hand while the other is doing completely different things in an entirely different area. And through it all, you have to stay in rhythm and listen for the climactic moment.

The third one is the piano.

I start to type. Type, type. Today I'm doing headlines. The heds. Screamers. They're meant to scare you and make you laugh at the same time. Kind of like Mike Tyson. And like Mike, we enjoy duking it out with the mighty, but sometimes we're just as happy to gnaw on somebody's ankle.

There's a story about the sexploits of Tommy Lee and his former bandmates: “COCK-A-DOODLE CRÜE,” I type.

Here's one about the future of topless bars: “THE STRIPPING NEWS.” Writes itself.

We're doing another piece on
The Producers
hype. It's the biggest smash on Broadway. You can't go wrong with Nazis in dresses. We've already done six feature articles on it. This one is about the costume designer. “STURM UND DRAG,” I write.

A new offshoot of Judaism that attracts lots of young professionals back to temple. “SECTS AND THE CITY,” of course.

And the one from our Hollywood stringer, who has seen and enjoyed an early cut of
Jurassic Park III
. Well, not enjoyed, exactly. His words to me on the phone were, “It sucks less cock than you
would expect, considering Spielberg didn't direct it.” I rewrite the story to make it more enthusiastic, for one reason: I've always wanted an excuse to use the hed, “IS IT GOOD? YOU BET JURASSIC.”

I'm good at this job. Yes, I am the one who imported “Wacko Jacko” from the British press. And I was the first headline writer ever to describe Hugh Grant as “overblown.” I still remember with pride the time I saw a pretty young thing with that page of the newspaper on West Eighty-second. She was using it to pick up her Airedale's giant Mississippi mud pies. You can't say I'm not a man of strong words. Absorbent ones too.

At five-thirty a gentleman wobbles up to my desk looking like the world's best-dressed derelict, an apparition held together by hair-spray and gin. His chalk-striped double breasted is about a hundred years out of style and it hangs on him like a bedsheet on a hat rack. His skin is parchment. You could open an envelope on his cheekbones, or on the silver prow of his proud pompadour. If he showed up at a wake, people would tell him to get back in the coffin. There are only two jobs this guy could do: vampire, or journalist.

“How are you, mate? Name's Rollo,” he says, proferring a talcumed pink claw.

“Tom,” I say, adding, for old time's sake, “we've known each other for three years.”

He puts both hands on the edge of my cubicle and hangs on, doing what appear to be involuntary deep-knee bends, absorbing this new information, looking for his sea legs. His faraway eyes whir into focus. His wedding ring is like a hula hoop rattling around his skeleton finger.

“And your position here, lad?”

“I'm your editor,” I tell him.

London grown, Sydney reared, Rollo Thrash is the Obi-Wan of hacks, chief revenue stream for Elaine's and Langan's, foremost defender of the voodoo tabloid faith in an age when journalism has
started to act like a kid born in a whorehouse who grows up to preach chastity and temperance. He could drink you under the table, through the floorboards, and into the basement, where he would call down to prompt you to stop mucking about and fetch him up another case. No one has ever seen him eat.

Best Rollo story—and the best ones don't even come from Rollo, they have to stew in Langan's for a while, slow-cooking in entirely implausible detail—is the one about how he's in Hong Kong, sent up from one of the Sydney rags to cover some Sino-Australian dissident who, after his imprisonment on ludicrous charges caused a diplomatic uproar, is finally being released. This is when it was impossible to get a visa into China. So they let the prisoner out at the China–Hong Kong border. He walks across the border. Up pulls a black stretch, tinted windows, uniformed personnel at the wheel, security guards with hip holsters, Australian flags on the buffed fenders, the works. The dissident waves good-bye to the brownsuits, so long, suckers, gets into the car. Car drives away. Ten minutes later the real Australian ambassador shows up with a confused map-wielding driver and a battered Mercedes, asks the People's Liberation Army where the dissident went. The soldiers shrug. Not our problem anymore. Meanwhile, in the black stretch, which Rollo has rented and decked out for the day, Rollo is not only getting the exclusive interview, he's whisking the guy away to hide out in a luxury Kowloon hotel under a false name so none of the other hacks will be able to find him, at least not until after edition.

“Tom,” he says now. “Not much of a word picture. Where's the sting of poetry, the glow of fire? What word will conjure the man before me: the hang of the face, the lie of its aspirations? We stand confronted by a categorical imperative—the indispensability of a nickname,” he says, in a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger sort of way.

When the drink is on him, he begins to declaim voluptuously. Among the nicknames he's already given me: Peabo, Sly, T-bag, Piss
Boy, Atomic (as in Atomic Bomb: rhymes with Tom), and the most enduring, Frogfucker, in kind remembrance of a well-shod Parisienne I dizzily pursued with Brie and Beaujolais. But not only did I not sleep with her, I never even kissed her in her national manner.

“How about the Duke?” I say.

“Not a chance,” he says, rapping his ring on the metal top of my cube fence.

“Kong?” I say. “Bogie?”

“The boy who never grew up, who was it?” he says. He speaks loudly, possibly to drown out the volume of his tie.

“Michael Jackson?” I say.

He lowers his forehead and, astonishingly, for a face that already bears a line for every pub between here and Sydney, manages to create even more furrows. I swear I hear a faint crinkling, like someone opening a bag of potato chips down the hall. His brain begins to work.

“Peter Pan. Cathy Rigby. Eleanor Rigby. Paul McCartney. That's it,” he says. “From now on, you're Ringo.”

“Ringo?” I say.

“That'll do nicely.”

“Did you write that movie review you owe me?” I say, thinking, I could write movie reviews. When people ask me what I want to be when I grow up (and they still do: that uncooked manboy quality), I always say, “You mean besides write movie reviews?” I mean really, what could be better? The movie critic is the superstar, the one who gets the giant photo next to his byline and the most-expenses-paid trips to Sundance and Cannes and Telluride; the one who sees his name in the newspaper ads an inch high, the one who doesn't have to come into the office even though, at the office, he
has an office
, a refuge, a soundproof shelter from the shouty people who stalk the forty-second floor. Rollo has worked for various newspapers associated with this company for forty years. With a suit his only equipment, he has sauntered into the midst of assassinations, invasions, and
atrocities on four continents, always bellying up to the abyss, ordering a shot and a lager and telling a dirty story until the abyss snorts seltzer out its nose. On countless occasions he has written the first, or incorrect, draft of history. To me, he's a superhero. Like 007, he can breaststroke his way through a river of fire, shuck off his wet suit, and emerge in black tie, ready to command a waiter or unzip a little black dress. Today, in his dotage, he has elected to put his camouflage fatigues in storage and decorate our pages as our senior film critic.

Rollo's reviews. Dire communiqués about the undoing of the American moral fabric, phoned in from a bar stool by a degenerate Aussie hack. I wring the gin out of the clauses, make his woozy sentences sit up straight before a pot of coffee. Then I use the result as a rough draft, which I completely rewrite. To a well-lubed Rollo, every politician is a mountebank, every fib a rodomontade, every crook a desperado. Sometimes I leave in the whoop-de-doo and brimstone, but other times I have to tweeze away words unknown to my readers, or to Webster. I cultivate few standards as an editor—it keeps my life simple—but I try to avoid printing words not actually in the English language. “Sperd”? “Pring”? “Whinge,” it turned out in a bet I once lost, is a word—it means “whine,” but only to those kidney eaters across the pond.

His talent for uttering truth and falsehood with equal, swaggering omniscience turned out to be a useful trait for a critic, and he is today a figure of renewed renown. The fifteen-year-old photo byline has freshened his face, which seems to be aging in reverse to catch up; reality, after all, is always trying to catch up to tabloids. He's become a starlet himself; I'm just the schlub who holds his coat while he waves to the cameras. Occasionally I'll spot his name on a movie poster adhering to some bus shelter or video-store window and cringe when I notice that the words between the quotation marks are my own.

“Film review? It's done, Rimbo.”

“I asked you to rewrite it a bit, though, remember? You just gave me seven hundred and fifty words on Reese Witherspoon's mouth.”

“Right, Limbo, right,” he says. “Forgot her tits.” And he walks away choosing his steps, like a poodle on a patch of ice. He's not heading for his office, the one whose floor-to-ceiling windows are papered with randomly spelled lunatic-sent hate mail (so displayed to make us jealous, and also to provide emergency napping cover). He's going out the way he came in.

“Can I reach you at Langan's?” I say.

He shows me the back of one balsa-wood hand.

I'm shutting down my computer for the day when the Toad's crazy white Einstein hair appears over the superwide central cubicle surrounding the Desk. His giant golden wire-rims—never in style, not even in Europe, not even ironically—are the size of hubcaps, giving an outline of craziness to eyes aflame with sarcasm, eyes of Aqua Velva blue. His tie looks like a specimen slide for Fu Ying Chef Special Lunch Platters 1–8. He bobs like a prizefighter, or a peg-legged pirate, due to some ancient botched surgery that requires him to wear orthopedic, stupendously uncool sneakers. He parks his collegiate nylon book bag and comes shambling this way. Lucky me: he always stops by on the way to the bathroom, radiating cheerful cynicism.

“Hi, Tom,” he says. Shuffle, shuffle. “You look like shit.” His voice is like a taxi honking in crosstown traffic. His breath is like a spritz of Mace.

“Yeah?” I say. “What are you? The Sexiest Man Alive?”

“Seriously, though,” he says. “Did you spend the weekend in jail or something?”

I think of my maximum-insecurity facility, the solitary confinement, the bad food, the lack of exercise and fresh air. Throw in a few butt rapes and some pontificating about racism, and I've built my own personal
Oz
.

“Kind of,” I say.

Irving T. Fox, deputy city editor, is a sixty-year-old Jewish man with three cats, two ex-wives, and no TV. He is my best friend at this newspaper. Rewrite started calling him the Toad because of his quick tongue. That's what we tell him, anyway. It's really because he has buggy eyes set on either side of his wide warty head.

“So what're you working on?”

“Need a hed for this thing on celebrity stalkers. I'm thinking, why do it from the perspective of the celeb?”

“So do it from a worm's-eye view?” he says. “Perfect. Our readers will identify.” He doesn't have to mention the old joke about why Macy's won't advertise in our paper: supposedly the chairman of the store told our publisher, “Your readers are our shoplifters.”