Love Monkey (5 page)

“So what do you think of ‘Stalk This Way'?”

“They'll never go for it,” he says. Although we have the honor of being the most-sued daily newspaper in these United States, we do have a staff of libel lawyers reading everything we say. Otherwise we'd really have some fun. A headline that is seen as encouraging crimes against celebrities is likely to get ICM's shysters on the phone toot sweet.

“The best ones never make it,” he says with a dreamy look in his eyes, as if he's remembering being married to Marilyn Monroe or something. “One time there was this guy who was arrested for killing stray cats. He was gassing them to death in his oven.” Irv's empathy for soft whiskery pals is his known weakness, which is why rewrite is constantly lobbing dead-cat jokes at him.

“Horrible person,” he continues. “So for a hed I wrote, ‘Meowschwitz.' They wouldn't run it,” he says. Still smarting.

“You told me that before,” I say. “Wasn't that, like, fifteen years ago?”

“Or the time that violinist for the New York Philharmonic got killed? By that psycho who took her up to the roof of the Met and pushed her off?”

“I know,” I say. “ ‘Fiddler off the Roof.' ”

“Hey, wanna join our shortest-joke-in-the-world game? The copy desk started it. I'm winning.”

“With what?”

“Italian army. Eleven letters.”

“Good one,” I say. “Hmm. Nazi disco. Nine letters.”

Hillary comes by to give the Toad some faxes. Even among six-foot Swedish/Dutch blondes with impossible bodies, she looks good.

“Hey, Hillary, want to play shortest joke in the world?” the Toad says. “I got one. Gay porn. Seven.”

“Perot,” I say. “Five.”

“Zima,” says the Toad. “Four.”

“XFL,” I say. “Three.”

Hillary looks at us as if we're idiots, and promptly beats us both. “L.A.,” she says, and we are forced to concede victory.

From the Desk comes the usual deadline mayhem. Max, the city editor, and the big-boss editor, Cronin, who reacts to him the way orange juice reacts to your mouth after you've brushed your teeth, are inviting each other to perform anatomically unlikely feats. Cronin's the editor in chief. The guy whose job Max wants. The guy known to rewrite as Cronie because he's palled around with Tyrone Rutledge-Swope, our ruthless, hedgehoglike Aussie owner, since both were on their first newspaper. By the windows, weeping pitifully, slouches one of the interns, a twenty-one-year-old Wellesley girl whose Scarsdalian mother, Max is just discovering, has forbidden her from doing any journalism requiring her presence in our northern sister borough, the Bronx. Rewrite says Wellesley's mother is one of Cronin's mistresses, though, which is why we're stuck with her. Someone ducks out of the way of an airborne phone, which lands with a splitty sound on a radiator.

“You've worked at this paper for twenty-five years,” I say to the Toad. “How?”

“Dja ever read
I, Claudius
?” the Toad says.

“No,” I say. I thought about renting the videos once, but I went with a Bill Murray movie instead.

“After all the emperors of Rome scheme and stab and poison each other, who's left to rule the civilized world?” he says.

“Who?” I say.

“The guy who drools on himself,” he says. And he goes lurching off to the bathroom like a cowboy in snowshoes, one shirttail slow-leaking out of his Wranglers.

G
et off the train at Broadway and Fiftieth. Right outside the entrace, at one of the busiest intersections in the city, is stationed the beggar Nazi. He's like an armored personnel carrier, with a long line of big ugly metal newspaper boxes chained together guarding his right flank. His dirty camouflage-patterned pants scream
Vietnam veteran
or, more likely, given that the war ended twenty-six years ago and he appears to be no more than forty,
Army-Navy shopper
. Like every good Nazi, he even has a German shepherd (
ABUSED PUPPY
, reads a calculatedly unverifiable handwritten sign). He has made it impossible to pass without a lengthy detour. So we have to go right into the maw of his mechanized begging, right by the sawnin-half Tide bottle filling with coins, which he shakes like a grubby maraca. In the fifty seconds I wait for the light to change, I see people give him about seventy-five cents. That's ninety cents a minute. Times eight hours. The guy is making four hundred dollars a day,
tax free. Sometimes he decides to cross the street for a cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee. To minimize his time off the clock, he doesn't bother to pretend his legs don't work at these moments; he zips along in a sort of seated run, pushing off with his feet while he hangs on to the leash with both hands. Mush. The dog bolts through the crowd of speed-walking office drones. Only by skipping sideways do I avoid unsightly tire tracks on the back of my shirt. But I don't let him get away with it. I shoot him a really nasty glare after he passes by. People ahead of me scatter as the guy thunders through like a sawn-off Ben-Hur. They turn around angrily and see: a guy in a wheelchair. They're so ashamed of this feeling that they resolve to vote themselves another tax increase the next chance they get.

I arrive at work feeling mean. Meaner than Saddam, meaner than Stalin, meaner than a French waiter. Get in the elevator. A familiar crone with a bald spot and a cloud of Eau de Decay perfume is the only other passenger. Is she a copy editor? A librarian? Someone I dated?

“Hi!” she says.

“How's it going?” I mutter.

“Pretty good!” she says.

And I can feel it coming. The weather conversation.

“Wasn't that a beautiful weekend?” she says.

A conversation is a workout, an exercise in discovering a topic that interests both of you. Weather is pretty much the broadest thing people can possibly have in common, isn't it? It's just one step removed from, “I've noticed we both live on planet Earth. Isn't it a great planet?” As for weekend nostalgia: it should expire by noon on Monday.

“Yeah,” I say, ransacking my backpack for a magazine to occupy me for these final forty seconds.

“It was warm,” she analyzes, “but it wasn't sticky at all!”

What do people in L.A. talk about in elevators? “I wonder if it will be seventy-five and sunny today?” Then again, to the kind of people who gave us the USA Network, this might qualify as snappy banter.

“Sure was!” I say, importantly flinging open a leaflet from the Learning Annex someone (okay, a girl with smiley eyes and a white oxford shirt on which only three of the seven buttons were in active service) shoved into my starstruck hand at Eighty-sixth and Broadway. I smear a look of fascination on my face and pretend to read an article about male breast cancer.

Ding, says the elevator, and I'm free.

Another bright morning at the comic. Today's assignment: write a book review. That new John Adams book by David McCullough. As a critic I must remain scrupulously neutral, fair, unbiased. To keep my mind absolutely free of prejudice, I haven't read a word of it. Instead I'm reading NEXIS clips of all the other reviews. My review will therefore be a sort of metareview. A review of reviews. As we often say at the comic: “It's only a tabloid.” I crack open the book at random:

Yes, sir, it's a spine tingler. But I'm going to give it a good review. Everyone else has. Plus, no one's ever going to accuse you of not having read the book if your review is a valentine. A book like this has only one purpose: to give your dad on Father's Day. He'll smile (“My kid thinks I'm intelligent!”), you will smile (“I'm thoughtful and
patriotic!”), Mom will smile (“It'll make a good coaster!”), and Simon & Schuster will be $35 richer.

The phone. It's my close personal adviser Shooter. There is no salutation. We join this rant already in progress.

“The problem with women,” Shooter begins, “is they don't know what they want. Remember that Mormon guy?”

“Uh-huh,” I say. Rarely do I require any other words in a conversation with Shooter.

“They sent him to prison for bigamy. Prison. For having ten wives. It's not illegal to have ten
girl
friends. It's not illegal to be married to one girl and fuck ten others. It's not illegal to fuck ten girls
in one night
. But if in addition to fucking them you actually agree to give them something in return? Make a solemn public vow to take care of them, feed them, listen to their problems, give them a place to live?
That's
illegal. Isn't women's big thing that we can't commit to even one girl? This guy is the Superman of commitment. So they chuck him in the joint. What kind of fucked society are we living in?”

“Uh-huh,” I say. I remember one night Shooter and I were out having drinks with my friend Nick DePuy. Nick is smooth chested. He smiles while he's talking to you. He reads
Details
. Enough said. The next day Shooter asked me which side of the street Nick drives on. I spoke honestly: Nick is a guy who can't throw a spiral. Nick likes movies about gladiators. If he were any more gay, he'd have to marry Liza Minnelli. “Yeah, I figured,” was what Shooter said at the time. “But you know what? I really respect that. Because I fucking
hate
women.” That made me wonder: is success with women a direct result of not liking them? Because Shooter goes through girlfriends the way Richard Gere goes through gerbils. If you like a girl, what happens? You're nervous with her. Because you're worried she might not like you as much as you like her. She looks at your nervousness and she doesn't think,
Aw. So sweet. He likes me
. She thinks,
This guy has no confidence.
Why would I be confident with a
girl I think is spectacular? I don't think I'm spectacular. Girls go for the cock-wagging oafs, the guys who speak loudly and carry a big prick, and then six months later it's “Why is he so selfish? Doesn't he care about
my
needs?” Girls, in other words, go for guys like Shooter, which is why he's my close personal adviser.

“Here's why this is a decadent society,” Shooter says. “Manhattan today is the first advanced civilization to be completely controlled by women. What are you wearing?”

“Huh? Black pants. Gray shirt. Black shoes.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. Trying to look somewhat cool.”

“Exactly,” Shooter says. “It's eighty-five degrees out, yet you think black is cool. Why is black cool? Because women think it hides their fat. To shave tonnage. So black becomes cool among women. And since cool is whatever women say is cool, you have to wear black—you have to dress like a woman!—to look cool.”

It's been a long time since black became cool. Can you remember when it wasn't? I can't. Every season, black turns out to be the new black.

“Don't they dress to impress us?”

“In the eighties women wore shoulder pads,” Shooter says. “Giant ones. Did you tell them it looked good? I didn't. No
guy
ever did. They don't care about us. They told each other it made their waists look smaller. In fact, their waists looked exactly the same and their shoulders looked like they were trying out as linebacker for the Pittsburgh Steelers.”

“At least we have all the money,” I say.

“That's just it! That's just it!” Shooter says. “Why do we have the money? Why do we work all day?”

“Tell it.”

“So we can spend it on them! Walk by Saks Fifth Avenue in the middle of the day and what do you see?”

“Women. Buying fifteen-hundred-dollar handbags.”

“So whose money are they spending? Can't be their own: if you can afford to drop fifteen bills on a Fendi bag, you'd have to work all day. No, women spend our cash. They have the fun. While they're out shopping and having lunch and seeing shows, we're invisible. In our offices. Selling stocks. Writing books. Designing buildings. Men are
dy
ing, you know. We kill ourselves. Women live
ten years
longer than men, did you know that? And still every newspaper and magazine runs a story every week about how women's health care is being neglected. They're beating us by ten and they're trying to run up the score! As we get crushed by the stress of our incredibly demanding jobs. We only work for one reason: to get laid. So we can fling woo at beautiful women. So we can say, Look, I can take you to any restaurant you want! Look,
I've sold my youth to Wall Street for bucks deluxe
! Look, I built this building
for you
! I went to war
for you
! Beautiful women don't need to have high-powered jobs. They don't need to do anything to get laid. All they need to do is show up and look good. So they have to get their hair done a lot. So what? Which is more fun, chatting with François at the beauty factory or being a corporate troll for the Man? They don't need their own money. If they get a job, they work in
pub
lishing. They teach
kin
dergarten. If you see women actually working hard, being big-firm lawyers or something, they're either, a, too ugly to get a man, b, dykes, or c, just killing time until they marry a senior partner.”

“When was the last time you worked?” I say, knowing the answer: 1991. Shooter's life is a riches-to-riches story. His father owns a big business. You have to take everything he says with a grain elevator of salt.

Shooter doesn't answer. Shooter is riffing.

“So every book that gets written, every movie that gets made, every rock band that rocks, it's all for some woman.”

“What about girl groups?”

“There are about
five
of them. The only other girls in music are the singers. Why? Because the singer is the one everyone looks at. Girls want to look good. They don't want to slave away behind the drum kit. Some
guy
is back there. Trying to impress the girl with the mike. Everything we do, we do it for the women, and it still isn't enough.”

“Uh-huh,” I say.

“Murder!” he says.

“Yeah?”

“When
men
kill, they kill their wife or their girlfriend for leaving them. Or a liquor-store owner so they can get money to spend on some girl. Then they get the death penalty. When women kill, they kill their kids. They get three to five and a shrink.”

“Maybe not in Texas.”

“Now, I'm not saying murder is okay. But which is worse: killing some evil bitch because she fucked your best friend or a helpless little kid because he shit the bed?”

“Speaking of crap,” I say. “Gotta edit some stories now.”

“Oh, okay. What time is it?”

“About eleven.”

“Whoa,” Shooter says. “Been a long night.”

I turn back to the review for a while. I get to the point where I want to quote something no one else has quoted, to prove I read a book I didn't read. So I flip around and discover this little tidbit: when John Adams was declaring revolution and all that in Philly, his wife, Abigail, was writing him from Boston, “in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands.”

Adams wrote back: “You are so saucy.” He really did. He went on:

So, 150 years before women
even had the right to vote
, the panty posse was running the show. Despotism of the petticoat? That's 1776-speak for
whipped
. And this is a president talking. A founding father. What chance do I have?

The phone.

“Tom?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“We just had our baby on Saturday,” says Mike Vega, my fertile friend. The proud papa. How come married guys are
proud
but single guys are
cocky
?

“Hey!” I say. Of course I know this already; his answering machine told me. Sound enthusiastic. Possibly he's mad at me for not calling to congratulate sooner. “Great! Nice! Um, beautiful!” I'm trying to think up superlatives, but really: “MAN, WOMAN BECOME PARENTS OF CHILD”? It's not much of a story, is it?

“What is, uh, it?”

“A girl. We're calling her Alexandra.”

A girl a girl a girl
. And an Alexandra: third baby I know named Alexander or Alexandra. I try to drill this information into my brain. I have noticed that people expect you to keep track of the genders of their offspring, information I have on several occasions been forced to punt around by asking dreamy-eyed couples, “So, how is your little, um, one?”