Revenge of the Cootie Girls (27 page)

“I got an address … or something. It's hard to read,” I said.

“Let me see.” He took it from my hand, glanced at it quickly, and handed it back.

“So you can return the hat. So why are you telling me this? I don't have much time, Ms. Hudson. Let's order,” Benny Winter said impatiently. “Do you know what you want?”

Quickly, I scanned the menu. Wingate's is a venerable and very pricey old steak house, a serious Male Power place, which is why I had chosen it. It was possible to have meat for almost every course, a meat soup, steak salad, and beef carpaccio as appetizers, and steak for the main course. If they'd had meat cake for dessert, it would have been the perfect carnivorous menu. I ordered a small filet, while Winter ordered the only nonmeat entrée, broiled red snapper.

After the waiter left, Winter said, “Let's hear it. Make your case.”

“The bottom line is, I really want Wallace Mandervan for this series. I'm a great admirer of his work and …”

“What do you know of his work?”

I took a deep breath. “Wallace Mandervan is the man who pioneered commercial anthropology. Oh sure, almost every corporation has its own anthropologist now,” I said. “But that's because, back in the 1960s, Mandervan blazed the trail—he predicted the antiwar movement, the breakup of the Beatles, designer jeans—he predicted disco! He was ahead of the demand for Cabbage Patch Kids … and aromatherapy! And all his predictions have a sound anthropological basis—he's pop culture meets the Royal Academy of Sciences. An original. His last article on how politics and sociology can force physical evolution was brilliant …”

On and on I went in this vein, listing the man's many achievements, demonstrating my scholarship in all things Mandervan, reciting Mandervan quotes and nakedly gushing. This, I'd been told by others who had dealt with him, was what Benny Winter responded to. Don't be real, I was told, don't be funny, don't be warm, and don't be late. Kiss up.

While I delivered a first-class kissing, Benny Winter ate his dinner and betrayed no emotions at all.

“You're quite right about Mandervan,” Winter finally said, nodding, maybe not with approval, but with a lack of the earlier subsumed malice. “Who else are you talking to? Dr. Mandervan has to be careful about the company he keeps.”

“We've got a biochemist who believes by the middle of the next century, men will live to be a hundred and forty. We've got Gill Morton, CEO of Morton Industries … you know him, of course. He's the one who referred me to you. We have Jose Blanca, the fashion designer, an automotive engineer, feminist scholar Alana DeWitt, some preschool kids, and that scientist who grows human hair in a test tube …”

“People pay Dr. Mandervan millions of dollars for his analysis. Why should he give it to you and your network for free?” Winter asked, seeming almost receptive.

My hopes rose and I blazed forward with renewed confidence.

“ANN has prestige and respectability—it means free publicity for whatever Dr. Mandervan is working on now. Rumor has it that he's working on a book about the New Man, so there's a strong thematic link with my report on the Man of the Future. And, more important, we have worldwide coverage. It's a chance for Mandervan to get his message to a much wider audience in the new global economy.”

“Prestige,” Winter said. He leaned over to his valise and pulled out a newspaper clipping, which I immediately recognized as a bad review I got from the
New York News-Journal
.

“Your special report on fatalities caused by childproof containers got slammed by the critics,” Winter said. “And you had to make a public retraction after the mad cow story.…”

“But we've also won awards …”

“You won your last award for a humorous piece, didn't you?”

“Well, yes, for best short feature, but …”

“Let me see here … for ‘The Bible Code Code.'”

The special report he was talking about was a feature in which we subjected Michael Drosnin's book
The Bible Code
to our own rigorous decoding, and revealed the secret messages found within the book about the code found within the Bible. We had a cryptographer go through
The Bible Code
using our own special skip code and then, just for fun, I went through a couple of chapters with my father's Little Orphan Annie secret decoder ring, which I found in the bottom of a box of his stuff sent to me by my aunt Maureen. Among the things we found in
The Bible Code
were cryptic predictions that Frank would step out on Kathie Lee and that the world would be destroyed in 2017 not by a giant apocalyptic comet, as some had predicted, but by a giant blob of space goo. It was a fun filler, but it wasn't a high point in broadcast journalism, that's for sure.

“You can understand that Dr. Mandervan doesn't want to appear in anything that might generate negative publicity indirectly, through no fault of his own, or trivialize his work in any way. So if we did agree to do this—and the chances are slim, I must be honest—we would require approval of the edited product.”

“What I could do,” I said, “is show Dr. Mandervan the final product, and get his feedback.”

“We require approval, in writing, up front.”

“I can't do that,” I said. “It's against news policy.”

He looked at his watch and said, “I'll get back to you after I speak to Dr. Mandervan and he tells me of his decision. But it's safe to say he won't go for it.”

Then, before he left, he said, “You shouldn't have been late.”

Damn. Mandervan would be a coup for me, and not only because he'd become a twitchy recluse and hadn't given an interview in more than two years. Landing Mandervan for my series would provide an exciting perspective on men, and it would shut up the network gossips, who were convinced our CEO Jack Jackson had saved my Special Reports Unit from the ax
not
because of my leadership abilities but because of my rumored ability to suck the dimples off a golf ball. As if Jack Jackson, multibillionaire, media mogul, dater of college-educated supermodels and actresses, would need to sexually harass middle-manager me to get off. Strictly speaking, sexual harassment wasn't his style in any event.

Outside, the bees were waiting for me. Now there were three. A couple more and it would be a Hitchcock movie. I didn't lose them until I got into a cab.

“Where to?” the cabbie asked.

“Tenth Street between B and C.”

But as he pulled away, I changed my mind.

“Mill Street, in the Village. I'll only be a moment there. Then East Tenth Street,” I said.

As part of my mission to talk to as many men as possible, I asked the cabbie what it meant to be a man these days.

“Work, work, work,” he said. “Nothing but work. And no thanks for it.”

“You married?” I asked.

“No. I'm single. I'd like to get married, but girls these days, they got a list. There's no romance to it anymore, it's all business.”

Then he clammed up and cranked up talk radio to drown out any further questions.

CHAPTER TWO

Mill Street is a tiny, picturesque lane that curves off Christopher Street toward Barrow in Greenwich Village, so tiny a street that it doesn't even show up on most maps. Number 7 turned out to be some kind of storefront, but without a sign. While the cab waited, I hopped out and approached a man who was locking a front door festooned with stickers to save the whales, save the bonobos, improve the working conditions of egg-laying chickens, boycott Texaco and Mitsubishi, and ban bioengineered food (a DNA helix in a red circle with a slash through it made that point emphatically). There must have been twenty of them clustered on the glass door. I couldn't help thinking of this bumper sticker my friend Tamayo picked up in Japan when she lived there, which said in English and Japanese: Eat More Whale. Which I'm against, eating whales, but I thought it was a funny idea, if someone put that bumper sticker smack across this door.

“You work here?” I asked the man. He looked to be in his early twenties, with dark hair and a boyish face not quite grown out of its baby fat. If it wasn't for the sneer, he would have been very nice looking. He was sort of a runtier, younger, darker version of Brad Pitt.

Looking over his shoulder at me, he said, “Yes. Can I help you?”

“I dunno. I'm looking for the man who lost this hat and this is the address he gave me …” I handed him the crumpled piece of paper but he took the hat instead and examined it.

“This hat?” he said with scornful surprise, handing it back to me as though it was infected with Ebola. “I don't think any of our people would be wearing a Harben hat. It's some kind of animal felt. Harben trafficks in animal pelts and has polluted the water supply in Guatemala, where it now operates its death mills.”

“I did not know that. Hmmm. Could it belong to someone's dad or grandfather … the guy was older, late fifties, early sixties, nice suit.… Look, I'm just trying to be a Good Samaritan with a man who appeared to be lost … he left his hat …”

“Awright, awright. I'm sorry I snapped at you. I just got back from a bad trip to South America an hour ago, only to learn a friend of mine is in the hospital and that our offices were burgled today. I'm having a bad day.”

To make it up to me, he took the crumpled slip of paper and looked at the address.

“That looks like a one to me,” he said. “There is no ‘one' on this street. It's an empty lot. Someone is about to build on it.”

“Well, take my number and ask around the neighborhood, will you?” I said, handing him my card.

“ANN …” he said with deep suspicion in his voice. He seemed to be trying to remember what ANN's environment or animal crime was. Finally, he said, “Cultural imperialists.

“Yeah, right. Whatever.”

“That's a McQuarrie briefcase, isn't it?” he asked, and snapped firmly back into his self-righteous mode. “Did you skin the animal yourself? Perhaps you are unaware that McQuarrie takes the youngest calves, barely weaned, still mewling for their mothers, and …”

“It's not a McQuarrie,” I said, trying not to breathe in his direction, lest there was still beef on my breath. “It's a cheap vinyl knockoff. I bought it in Chinatown.”

He wouldn't let up. “Was it made in China? And if so, how do you know it wasn't made by imprisoned pro-democracy activists? And your clothes … do you even know where your clothes are made?”

“No, I don't. Jeez. I'm sorry, but all my hemp-cloth clothing is at the laundry,” I said. “Don't you get tired of pretending to be perfect all the time?”

“Don't you get tired of wearing lipstick and high heels and playing into male sexual objectification fantasies?” he persisted.

If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a man who is more of a feminist than I am.

“I never get tired of that,” I said. “Look, I'm just trying to do a good deed.…”

“Sure, you are, sure. I think I've told you too much already. I think you're one of
them
,” he said, and started backing away from me, then took off running.

Right, gotta go now, the microchip in my buttocks is beeping, I thought, as I always did when I encountered a loony. Vile young man. I had sized him up too—those cruelty-free natural-weave clothes don't come cheap and he couldn't make much working for animal rights or whatever the hell he did. Chances were, he was a trust puppy, a kid with a trust fund, probably the rebellious offspring of some meat-eating, hide-bearing conservative in a hat.

I stomped off toward the waiting taxi in my leather shoes, tripping slightly, which made me even madder.

“Tenth Street now?” the cabbie asked as I got back into the cab.

“Yes, thanks,” I said.

What a weird day. Not the weirdest day I'd had by a far sight, but the weirdest in a while. Good thing the Econut didn't know that I was on my way home to, hopefully, have sex with an Irish cameraman with the blood of twenty-seven kamikaze Pakistani dogs on his soul, all strays mowed down at night on the unlit roads of Pakistan's tribal territories over a period of two years during the Afghan War. Hope Mike isn't weird too, I thought. He had been acting odd lately. Which Mike would be waiting there for me? The sweet, sensitive poet, or the dark, brooding dog killer? The former was preferable, but either way, we were sure to have good sex. It had been a while—I'm prone to long droughts, due to my prickly nature and, if not an outright fear of intimacy, sober caution in that regard. Though Mike had been here for about five days, every time we tried to have sex something interfered, either his daughter or this insane trapeze artist who was in his circus documentary and kept calling for him.

I sat back in the seat, toying with the hat until the cab pulled up to my prewar building on East Tenth Street, in the neighborhood locals call Alphabet City and Loisaida and realtors call the East Village. Along with the spicy smells of cooking, love gone wrong permeated the humid air in my neighborhood. From my neighbor Sally's window, I heard the final strains of Bix Beiderbecke's version of “There Ain't No Sweet Man That's Worth the Salt of My Tears,” which she always played when she'd had a breakup.

Up in my hallway, there was a bigger commotion. Mr. O'Brien, who lived down the hall from me, was banging on his door. When he saw me, he said, “The woman put the board in the door again.”

I nodded politely. Mr. O'Brien was a retired lawyer, about seventy, and “the woman” was little and foreign-born, Filipino, I think, late fifties or early sixties. He referred to her as his “housekeeper” when he was in a good mood, and as “the woman” when he was not. She called herself “Mrs. O'Brien” when he wasn't around. Because of her embarrassed fiction and because their apartment was a one-bedroom, there was probably more than housekeeping going on.