The Last Magazine: A Novel (20 page)

One night the buzzer to his apartment rang. He had ordered no food deliveries, so he didn’t know who it could be. He hit the intercom button.

“Yes?”

“Alex, it’s your mother.”

He pushed the buzzer to let her in.

He poked his head out the door and saw his mother, with her partner, Amy.

“You two shouldn’t come in here,” he said. “It’s a mess.”

“We’ll be okay.”

Amy and his mother walked into the apartment, grimacing, almost coughing: dishes piled in the sink, cardboard containers on the kitchen counters, smears and stains on the glass living room tables, wadded tissues and toilet paper.

His mother opened the drapes and then the window. She and Amy moved aside a blanket and tossed a few empty boxes of television-series DVDs onto the floor.

“We’re worried about you,” his mother said.

“Well, I didn’t want to tell you, but I got fired.”

“We know,” his mother said. “Amy read about it online.”

“Ahahahfgahrh,” he cried out.

“But that’s why we’re here. Amy, as you know, works with the dean of faculty, and they’re looking for a part-time professor to teach journalism. We think you could do that, while you’re waiting to go back to work.”

“Teach?”

“Yes, teach journalism,” Amy said.

“A professor,” A.E. Peoria thought, and he had the first positive emotion he’d had in a while, the first stirring to his soul, because—as if it were the first tingling of exoskeleton, of another system of vertebrae spawning—being a professor was a career too, and that was something he could hold on to, that was something with backbone. It was as if the dendrites in some paralyzed part of his inner being that had dried up and contracted were firing again, new nerve
endings flourishing, a network of new nerves that could take the place of A.E. Peoria, Magazine Journalist: A.E. Peoria, Professor of Journalism.

“Don’t I need a master’s?”

“No, you have a book published—that’s a terminal degree, and you have years’ worth of reporting behind you, so I think that should be enough.”

And with his mother and Amy there, he felt the sparks of the old A.E. Peoria, the compulsive disclosure disorder persona. He started to describe to them the darkness, the darkness that he could breathe in, the loss of Six Orgasms, the humiliation on television, and three hours later, he had finished dumping, unloading, and his mother and Amy left, like angels of mercy—if he had believed in angels or mercy—but angels carrying something that could give him real meaning again, another career path. He wrote all of this down in his journal.

He turned on the TV, which he hadn’t used to watch anything besides DVDs, and switched to a news channel.

On it were pictures from a prison called Abu Ghraib, naked Iraqis in a pyramid, a girl holding a man on a leash, even a picture of a soldier drop-kicking a Koran.

His story had been right after all.

I
email Sarah to say hey. She emails back: Want to come to a book party? But I’m not calling it a first date.

Her job at Wretched.com is all-consuming. Up at six a.m., reading at least four newspapers and ten other blogs by seven a.m., twelve posts a day, a thirty-minute lunch, and then at night she goes to different events across the city to stay on top of things.

The book party is for a daughter of a famous writer who wrote a women’s liberation classic back in the ’70s. The daughter’s memoir is one of those tell-alls about what it was like growing up around all these other famous writers. About all the fucked-up shit she saw at a young age, about the different men who passed through her mother’s life, and how that led, inevitably, to promiscuity, drug addiction, expulsion from high-priced schools, and, finally, a career in writing, the shadow of her mother looming over her.

The shadow has its advantages, like the fact that her mom is a famous writer with a really nice corner apartment on 81st and Park, a perfect place to host a book party.

I meet Sarah in Midtown. I’m coming from work, and she takes the train up from the Lower East Side. We grab a coffee at Starbucks.
She’s in sandals and a light blue dress that’s pushing the boundaries of summer.

“Thanks for inviting me to this,” I say.

“It sucks, I really don’t want to go,” she says. “This job is taking up way too much of my life. And I think my boss is going to be there.”

Timothy Grove. A media mogul in training. Reputation is that he’s something of a “new media” genius. He’s the first person to make a business out of blogging. He found a way to monetize it. He’s not considered really respectable though—maybe a step above a pornographer.

The theory behind his success at Wretched: We live in a society of assholes. The media is a reflection of these assholes. We’ll show you what the inside of the asshole’s asshole looks like.

It’s been an effective tactic so far—nine million unique visitors a month.

Taking the elevator up, I walk into the room with Sarah. My first New York media party. I’m part of the scene. I recognize the people eating hors d’oeuvres and holding drinks, not because I know them but because I’ve read about them. My inspirations.

I stand halfway off to the side. Sarah works the room. The room pays its respects to Wretched.com.

Sarah introduces me to the daughter whose book is being released, Eleanor K.

“Eleanor, this is Mike Hastings,” she says, and tells her the name of the magazine I work for.

“Oh,” says Eleanor, “I think your magazine is running a review of my book next week.”

“I work mostly for the international editions,” I say.

“I don’t know who’s writing it, but it would be great to get a copy before it came out,” she says. “To know what to expect.”

Eleanor K. and Sarah look at me.

“So, do you think you could send me a copy? I mean, if it’s not too big of a hassle, if it’s not too big of a deal.”

“Um, yeah, I guess I could look into that, sure,” I say, knowing that I wasn’t going to look into that at all. I do have access to the system of all the stories that are scheduled to run, but I’m not going to risk sending a copy of a story to someone I don’t know.

“Mom, come over here, meet Mike Walters,” she says.

“Mike Hastings,” Sarah corrects.

Eleanor K.’s mother comes up, and I say hello to Mrs. K.

“Obviously, I know I’m a guy, but I was, uh, am, a big fan of your book, Mrs. K.” I say. I’ve never read the book, but I’ve seen the paperback enough times to get the gist of what it’s about.

“Thanks so much,” she says, as insincere as my compliment.

Mrs. K. looks like she’s from the ’70s: ashram-chic clothes, long hair that used to flow and fit in a ponytail now dry and long and puffy. She has all sorts of bracelets and necklaces hanging off her wrists and necks.

“Mike’s going to send me an early review,” Eleanor K. says to her mom.

“How kind of you,” Mrs. K. says. She seems spaced-out, as if she had traded in the pot and acid of the ’60s for the lighter mood-stabilizing drugs of the late ’90s, like Wellbutrin and Prozac. A pharmaceutical sellout.

“Eleanor, are you going to read soon?” her mother asks.

The room is filling up, getting to that point where the number of people will only go down throughout the rest of the evening.

Mrs. K. clinks her glass and Eleanor K. picks up a copy of the book that had been displayed on a small round table near the door.

Mrs. K. says something about how this is a very personal book to her daughter—and a personal book to her as a mother too.

I have a flash of envy for a second, watching the two. Wouldn’t it
all be easier if one of my parents were some famous writer? Who knew all the book editors and agents and could stock a room full of gossip columnists and book reviewers and magazine editors? I’d have that good material right off the bat—how Philip Roth taught me to masturbate on a grapefruit, how Bill Styron once called looking for his wallet, which he thought he’d left in the couch, how I read about one of my parents in a first-person account by Norman Mailer of an orgy where he’d sat on his/her face.

Eleanor K. introduces the passage she’s going to read.

“Because you’re all here, and many of you know, my mother has had this apartment since 1985,” she says. “’Eighty-five was the year they turned her classic book into a movie, so she could afford a place like this”—everyone laughs, somewhat uncomfortably—“but it’s also when everything came . . . I don’t know. Crashing down.”

She has a page marked, about fifteen pages in.

“‘Early night. I don’t want to go to bed. Park Avenue isn’t a place for children after nine o’clock, my mother tells me. I want it to be a place for children. I am not a child anymore, but I want my home to be for me. I still take childish pride in answering her phones. Is your mother home? the voice asks. I’m proud that the voice asks for my mother. When I ask the voice his name, I can see his name in front of me on the bookshelf. Does your mother get calls from bookshelves? No? Mine does. It’s like the boy in my second-grade class who bragged his father had climbed Mount Everest. That boy was lying, but I wasn’t lying when I said that I had met the man who’d written a book about climbing Mount Everest. He was a friend of my mother’s; everyone with a name was a friend of my mother’s.

“‘I climb up the stairs, running my hands along the cold metal from the spiral case to the second floor. The spiral staircase is my favorite part of the new home. It’s neat.

“‘I climb up the stairs and I look down. I am fourteen years old
and already I know I’m a woman, my mother’s daughter. I catch the eye of a Famous Writer. The Famous Writer with dark eyebrows. He catches my eye. He asks me if I want to hear a bedtime story. I’m too old for bedtime stories. He tells me this is a bedtime story that I’d never heard before.’”

Eleanor K. flips to another chapter.

“‘How could you have done this to me, how could you? I scream at my mother, eighteen now, drunk on booze stolen from the cabinet. She didn’t bother marking the levels of the bottles anymore. I didn’t try to hide it. I knew the combination to the padlock. He had shown it to me while she was at a benefit, at a concert, at a panel discussion, a book tour, a play, a guest lecture, a talk show, a radio show, at a reading, at a book party.’”

Silence in the room, ironic laughter—this is a book party.

I start to sidestep toward the balcony to get out of the room. I haven’t been out there yet.

I recognize the silhouette of the tallest man on the balcony. Timothy Grove. In all the profiles I’d read about him, the writers mention his unusually tiny head on a skinny six-one frame. Massively tiny, almost like a headshrinker, like the guy sitting next to Beetlejuice in the waiting room to purgatory. You had to think that a smart guy like Grove has a pretty big brain, and that his brain must be really pressing against his skull, trying to squirt out his ears. There are three other guys standing around him, leaning up against the balcony, listening to him.

I stand back from the circle, waiting for a break in Grove’s monologue to introduce myself. I can hear his heavy British accent.

“See what they’ve done, the
New York Post
? Taking four items from Wretched—four items, ripped right off our pages. No credit, not a single credit given to Wretched. A travesty, innit?”

Grove looks at me.

I feel a bit strange at the party, wearing what I’m wearing. I don’t really dress like the normal media type. My hair is a bit mussed—an ex-girlfriend, in one of her parting shots, told me I should keep my hair messy because otherwise I look like a dork—but I don’t wear tight jeans or American Apparel T-shirts to work, or button-down shirts with open collars. A blue blazer and tie and gray flannels—I’ve always gotten a lot of shit from colleagues about it. They ask me whether I’m going to a job interview, or going on television, or if I’m thinking about becoming a banker. But Nishant and Sanders Berman wear blazers and ties, and most of the senior editors do too, so if I want to climb up, it makes sense for me to wear them as well.

But seeing Grove and his posse, gelled, hair product, hair fibers, hair molding, sculpturing crème, with Diesel jeans and pointy-toed cowboy boots or shoes, tight T-shirts, also designer, that probably cost fifty dollars a pop, I feel a bit underdressed, even though I’m wearing a tie. I probably look more like I belong in DC than in New York, but that’s not a compliment in this city.

“Oh, this lad right here looks like he might work for the
Post
,” he says, and his coven of straight males laughs.

“Hah. Nah, I’m just coming from work. Mike Hastings, nice to meet you, Mr. Grove.”

I tell him I work for
The Magazine
.

“Ah? Another dead-tree’er come to say hullo,” he says, and the young men laugh again.

“What’s the readership of your dead tree?” Grove asks.

“I think they say it’s like twenty million readership, three million circulation,” I say.

“Twenty million, my arse. Three million copies for the doctor’s office and dentist rooms, a whole forest chopped up for stale news, innit?”

“We definitely use a lot of paper,” I say.

“See, boys, the blogs, the blogs are good at tearing things down. Ants and the like. Tearing it down. Throw it up, tear it down, break it apart, piece by piece. You get the scale, you get the ad dollars. Low overhead, scale, ad dollars, tear it down,” he says. “What do you think of that, Hastings?”

“Wretched certainly seems to be where the industry is heading,” I say.

“So, you here looking for a job?” he says, and his circle chuckles.

“Not really,” I say.

“Well he should be, innit!”

Grove’s small head shakes when he laughs, like a steamed pea rolling atop a telephone pole.

I laugh along too, wanting to seem like I’m cool with being from the old media.

“Lookie who’s arrived,” he says.

As a Wretched.com reader, I recognize the face of Rohan Mais, another up-and-coming media guru (also on the list of “Top 20 Media Players Under Age 38”). Grove’s been directing his bloggers to post at least a half-dozen items on Rohan’s own start-up print publication—he sees him as his “homo-competitor” for the crown of new media guru.

“You boys see what he’s doing here,” Grove says. “Might have some questions, privy like, for Mr. Hastings here.”

Three of the twentysomethings fan out, leaving Grove and me alone on the balcony.

“A tad of a shake-up at your pub,” he says.

“The pub?”

“Publication, the dead tree.”

“Yeah, there’s some readjusting going on.”

“So whosit going to be?”

“Pardon?”

“Who’s gonna take ol’ Henry’s place?”

“Either Sanders Berman or Nishant Patel,” I say.

“Right, right, that’s obvious, innit—I’m asking Patel or Berman,” he says.

I’m tempted to tell him something—a little nugget of inside dope. I should have inside dope, shouldn’t I? And part of me wants to tell him—to impress him. Am I after a job? I’m not averse to the possibility. There’s something enticing about the world of Park Avenue book parties and instant New York media celebrity—a touch of power—and I can see that’s why the twentysomethings hover around Grove, to get a sense of that power that comes with having a platform where what you say can shape reputations, kill reputations, make reputations. It’s part of the fun, I suppose.

“Oh, I think, that at least right now, Nishant has the lead . . . I mean, he’s a minority, there’s never been an Asian editor, he’s still riding that wave from 9/11, he’s got a TV show, so his brand recognition is way up . . .”

“I hear Henry likes Berman better,” he says.

“Maybe, but the last time I saw them”—and here I’m lying—“they were talking and, and you know, Henry ignored Sanders, at his own book party, and talked to Nishant, so I think that was a sign.”

Spastically, his head nods up and down.

“So you think it’s a lock for Patel, innit?”

“Not a lock, but if I had to say who was ahead in the sweepstakes . . .”

“Right, right, natch, right. You see the magazine stories before they hit, right? You could send us along a little peek every once in a while, do ya think?”

“I could give your name to the publicist,” I say.

“Don’t want no publicists, mate. I want to get the scoops before the scoops, you follow?”

I follow.

I leave the party an hour later with Sarah. We take a taxi back down to the Lower East Side. We don’t make out. I probably should have made a move, but I’ll leave it at that, because I hate those books or stories about guys who agonize for one hundred pages about not making a move. It’s not usually my style—usually I make the move—but I don’t want to complicate things, at least not yet, especially if I’m maybe going to try to get a job there. Instead we talk about her boss.

“I talked to Grove,” I say.

“Oh? I’m sure he loved you.”

“What do you mean?”

“He does that, he likes to surround himself with twentysomething straight guys. It’s a thing he has.”