The Last Magazine: A Novel (24 page)

I
’m preparing the notes for another Sanders Berman spot on the Imus show. I haven’t heard from Peoria. That’s not too surprising. He’d dumped his notes my way, emails and journals and audio files that I haven’t yet bothered to look at. I had learned at the magazine to work on deadline, and even opening the email was effort I didn’t want to expend until I was sure the story was going to go forward.

I’m surprised when I get an email from Sarah, the Wretched.com editor. She asks if I’d be able to fill in and guest edit Wretched the next week. Timothy Grove runs what is more or less the media equivalent of a sweatshop—no benefits, ten days of vacation, no extra time for holidays—and Sarah needs to go home for an emergency next week. Timothy Grove had protested and said that if she couldn’t find a replacement, she would lose her job. So she asks me.

I should ask for permission from Delray or Sanders, to be safe. But I know they’ll most likely reject it. Nishant might be more willing to say yes, because he doesn’t really pay too close attention to the day-to-day, so as long as I ask him, I’m covered. I send an email to Nishant, and I never hear back. I take the non-response as his tacit permission.

Sarah invites me to a party that night at a bar on the Lower East Side called the Dark Room.

The Dark Room is on Ludlow Street, above Rivington. This doesn’t mean much to most people—but as Greenwich Village was to the ’50s beatniks and the ’60s hippies, the Lower East Side is to this strange and much less influential crowd of the early ’00s, at least in their minds. They are important, or believe in their own importance, even if only expressed with the required self-mockery. They aren’t artists, and not really a community of writers, either: they are bloggers, and their focus is each other. They are hyper-consumers; they don’t write, they create content, stripping away any pretense of some larger ethos or goal except that it is somehow hip, rebellious—though they’d never use those words and they mock hipsters and rebellion too. A desire to be noticed and to criticize the criticizers of the world, to gain its acceptance by rejecting it, breeding a strange kind of apathy and nihilism and ambition, floating in a kind of morally barren world where they say, Look, here is the asshole’s asshole of the world, the New York media, and we will show you, minute by minute, post by post, what the rectum walls feel and taste like, and you will know even better these sensations because we ourselves are part of this intestinal lining, and we are okay with that, we have embraced it as our contemporary calling, at least until we can get real jobs or a book deal.

On the Lower East Side, where they live, gentrification on these blocks was more or less complete—the last remaining Jews had been pushed out a decade before, the Hispanics were still found but mostly outside the primary five-block radius, hanging around in small groups and whistling outside of the subway entrance to the F train on Second Avenue. Orchard Street is filled with luggage stores and leather stores and glasses shops, run by Pakistanis, storefronts selling
junk and trinkets and passport photos, a slow death before developers can come in and create a trendy boutique.

But none of this is totally clear to me at the time—it seems like a cool crowd to be part of, it seems like the new new media is a place to visit, and here they are, in the Dark Room.

Sarah meets me outside the front door, where a Cadillac Escalade–size bouncer checks our out-of-state driver’s licenses under the purple glow of a flashlight.

The bar is split into two rooms, to the left and right of the entrance, eight-foot ceilings, everything black. To the right is a stage, where live bands or DJs play next to a bar; and on the left, there are couches and tables.

Sarah points to the far corner where a table has been staked out. A group of about seven males and three females, all white, age range twenty-three to thirty-five, stand sipping beers and gin and tonics.

She starts making introductions, yelling the names and the blogs that they are associated with.

There is Allan Tool, who holds some kind of deputy managing editor title for Wretched; Franklin Liu, who blogs on Mediabistro; the other Sarah, Sarah Klein, who does Gothamist; some guy named Arnie Cohen, most notorious for his ability to get mentioned on everyone else’s blogs without actually doing anything of note, except hitting on Sarah Klein in the back of a taxicab and then blogging about his rejection; Jennifer Cunningham, who would later have a “crisis of conscience” and leave Wretched to focus more clearly on herself; and on and on, names with a “blogspot” and a “dot com” attached, names that I’ve heard of before by reading one referring to the other. The closest thing to someone from a traditional media outlet, besides myself, is a kid with short dark hair and beady eyes and a skinny tie who works for the
New York Herald
named Jonathan
Lodello—he is here, Sarah whispers, to do a story on the new new media scene, a story that will surely then be linked to on all the blogs of everyone sitting around the table, generating traffic and page views that can help with the advertisers and buzz.

Franklin runs up to Sarah.

“Let’s do coke.”

Sarah looks at me.

“You want to come?”

“I’m good, thanks.”

“Laaaammmmmme,” says Franklin.

“Yeah,” I concur.

He takes Sarah by the arm and they find a spot in line at the bathroom. I sit down next to another kid.

“Kelly,” he says.

“Mike,” I say. “Kelly, as in Kelly Treemont?”

“That’s me.”

“I’ve read your blog. I thought you were a woman. The name.”

“I get that. You don’t do the powder either?”

“Nah, I used to do that shit a lot but stopped.”

“Me too,” he says. “I’m very boring now. I live with cats. I’m in recovery.”

“Great. I work for a magazine.”

“Dead tree, oh no.”

“Yeah, the trees are pretty dead.”

“You know, to be honest, I take a little Adderall still,” he says. “It helps me in my writing. I’m working on a memoir. About my experiences with drugs and alcohol, and I don’t know if you know, but I’m gay, so it’s about my experiences with drugs and alcohol and being gay and everything.”

“Sounds great,” I say.

“You know, I think it’s been out there, a little, but my experience, I think I have a really unique perspective.”

“How long have you been working on the book?”

“Three years. This blogging, you know. But I found an agent. She’s excited.”

“Very cool. Having fun?”

“I’m waiting for Timothy. He’s supposed to show.”

“Timothy Grove?”

“Of course. He doesn’t like these places—he prefers Balthazar, a place where he can pretend he’s Anna Wintour or Graydon Carter—I think coming here reminds him too much that he’s not really one of them, no matter how hard he tries. He’ll always be more Larry Flynt. But you should watch out. He’s a collector of straights.”

“Is that right?”

“Aren’t you the one they have guest blogging this week?”

“Yeah.”

“There are things you could do, you know, if you want to make it permanent.”

“Things?”

“Yes, things.”

“Good to know. Is that how, uh, I mean, has anyone else ever done those things?”

“Me, of course, but it was brief, and I thought I loved him, though he is such a fucking scumbag.”

“Yeah, sounds like it.”

“Oh, watch this, this should be good.”

The other Sarah, Sarah Klein, stands up from the table and grabs Jonathan Lodello’s hand.

“She has such huge tits,” Kelly says. “You know the backstory?”

“Uh, no.”

“Franklin broke up with her three days ago. She’s totally pissed about it, and she is totally convinced that Franklin is going to go and sleep with Sarah, and so she has to make him jealous by dancing with Lodello. If you want to get laid tonight, you should really talk to her, I’m mean, she is going to be ready to go away with someone cute like you.”

“Oh, thanks, right.”

“You have very nice eyes.”

“Yeah, I appreciate that. They work okay.”

I get up to get a club soda at the bar. Kelly doesn’t want anything, and while I’m waiting at the bar, Timothy Grove comes in. He looks lanky and recently showered, and there are three men, all in their twenties in a semicircle, the same group I had seen at Eleanor K.’s house. He’s dressed in all black—black jeans and a black T-shirt, probably a two-thousand-dollar shirt, though—with black cowboy boots and silver rings on his left and right hand and two studded diamond earrings on his left ear, new additions, it looks like. He moves—“slithers” would be tipping my hand—he moves over to the table, looking like a Persian prince from some ancient time.

The other Sarah, Sarah Klein, appears next to me.

“Do you dance?”

“Not this early. Can I get you a drink?”

“Red Bull and vodka,” she says.

“Very youthful.”

“I’m going to be thirty-four next week, so I do everything I can do to be very youthful.”

“Right, right.”

Timothy Grove has taken over the corner table with his entourage. I walk up with my club soda.

“Ah, the dead-tree’er, innit? Dead man walking. You talk to old Sanders Berman and Nishant Patel about how they are running to
the ground your old brand there? Third round of layoffs coming, innit, and what are they doing? The little princes are scrambling for the top editor job, trying to be the captain of the good ship
Titanic
. Make brands of themselves over it, and there you are, still the little drooge of them, eh, while they build up their names to trampoline off the dead tree, floating on the dead tree until it goes down? That was your original sin, giving it away for free, giving all that content away for free, what a sin that was! Didn’t get the Internet, they did not at all, and opened the door for the likes of me to come and give ’em a good interrupting kick. Good to see you finally get it, Hastings. Good to see that you’re wanting to work for us now.”

“I appreciate the opportunity.”

“You even speak in the dead-tree language. We don’t ‘appreciate opportunity’ here, there’s no need for the brownnosing and suck-upping here, Hastings, no need at all.”

“Okay, right, well it should be fun.”

“Here’s a numbers game for you, some research I just had done for my empire. Your magazine circulation ten years ago? Maybe three million, and claiming a readership of twenty-one million. Highly unlikely, but still had impact, it still mattered who you decided to put on the cover. Had that lyric in a Paul Simon song, innit? Thousand words a page, eighty-three pages on average an issue. Now you’re down to 725 words a page, and fifty pages an issue. Full staff of your foreign correspondents was thirty-five a decade ago, now you’ve got ten, but you’re still holding on to them, just to tell your little advertisers that you have an international brand? Isn’t that right, Hastings? You know how much that international brand is worth to your advertisers? Seven million dollars, my sources at your magazine tell me, seven million. No domestic bureaus—no more Detroit or Miami or San Francisco or Dallas, just DC and New York and a woman in Los Angeles. The dead tree, they didn’t get it—and they laughed at me at
first with my nonpaper. They said, ‘Oh, there’s no future in that,’ but they weren’t looking too closely, were they? They were blinded, stuck, a bunch of arrogant fools on the good ship
Titanic
Lollipop
. I think you’ve seen the light, Hastings, seen the darkness, more like it, and you’ve become one of us. If, that is, you do a bangers job this week.”

“Right, right, yeah, I’m looking forward to it.”

Franklin rushes to the table, Sarah behind him, laughing, eyes darting, nostrils cherry red. He whispers something into Sarah’s ear, and a few minutes later, when I look around to see if she wants to leave, she’s already gone.

I walk outside the Dark Room. I feel a brush of long leather jacket charging inside.

“Whoa,” I say, moving to the wall.

“It’s you,” Sarah Klein says.

We’re standing in the dark alcove in front of the exit. The bouncer holds open the door, and in the light from the streetlamp, I can see her face.

“In or out,” the bouncer says.

“Out?” I ask.

Sarah follows me out onto the street.

“I was about to leave too,” she says.

“Sorry to hear about you and Franklin, that sucks.”

“Fuck him, he didn’t mean a thing to me. I was only out here looking for him because I forgot to tell him something about this post I’m writing.”

“You were out here looking for him?”

“No, like I said, I just wanted to tell him something. I can’t believe it. He’s such a fucking asshole. Where’s the other Sarah?”

“I think she left too.”

“With him?”

“So it would seem.”

There is the inevitable awkward pause.

“You’re upset.”

“Yes.”

“If you want to talk about it, my apartment is just around the corner.”

We start walking down the street, and I notice that Jonathan Lodello of the
Herald
has left the Dark Room at about the same time and sees us before we turn the corner.

A
.E. Peoria tries to get comfortable in his bed, but he is lying on a hard object, buried beneath the sheets. He moves around restless, still can’t figure out what it is, until in frustration he grabs the sheet and throws it up in the air.

“What’s wrong?” Justina asks him.

“Oh fuck, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Does being with me make you nervous?”

“Ah, here it is, fuck,” A.E. Peoria says, holding up the object. “The jar of Vaseline.”

Justina laughs and rolls over, putting her head on his chest. Peoria places the Vaseline onto the nightstand, next to a cruddy box of condoms that he had purchased three years before, when he had moved into his apartment, but hadn’t really used very much; the box just kept getting buried under papers and other junk that found its way into the nightstand drawer. His girlfriends were usually on the pill, so he hadn’t had a need for them.

Did being with Justina make him nervous? Yes it did. Did he want to tell her that? No, but would he be able to stop himself?

What he really wanted to do was to call his doctor friend, and ask
what his percentage chance of catching an STD is from sleeping with a transsexual. Have there been any studies done on that? What are the percentages? How many partners had Justina had before him? Does anyone really get infected with HIV from just one sex act? He supposes it’s possible, but how unlucky would he have to be for that to happen? And really, he hasn’t heard much about HIV in recent years, and he’d never had sex with African prostitutes, or gay men, or heroin users, so he had felt quite well protected and secure until now. Even the fear he’d felt in Thailand had been put to rest by a Reuters story saying that the Thai sex industry had really nipped the HIV problem in the bud, thanks to a public information campaign, symbolized by a cartoon figure named Pac Con-Dom-Dom, a lively semitransparent condom with a red sash and googly eyes, who would, like a Japanese spirit, swoop into brothels and teenage bedrooms moments before penetration, to say, at least in translation, Please remember to be safe. The cartoon worked, and practically eliminated that disease from the Southeast Asian nation, protecting its sex industry for at least another generation or two, until some new fucked-up supervirus came out that could kill every fornicator around.

But Peoria starts worrying about this midway through the second time they are having sex, after remembering that you aren’t supposed to put Vaseline on condoms or something because the Vaseline eats through the rubber. Shit, there’s even a Pac Con-Dom-Dom public service announcement about it on YouTube! But maybe that’s inaccurate, referring to some outdated Vaseline in the developing world. Maybe Vaseline has gotten rid of that glitch; maybe it’s now closer to the K-Y line of products, but it was the only lubricant that Peoria had available in his apartment—he had picked it up after broaching anal sex with his now ex-girlfriend, but when they finally did have anal sex, it was at her apartment, and she had K-Y.

Then there is the fact that he signed a contract with the school
that said he wouldn’t sleep with his students, at least while he was teaching them. He didn’t ask about it at the job interview—he didn’t think it would be a wise question—but he had read the paperwork carefully enough to see that professors were given a loophole that meant that as long as the student wasn’t getting credit that semester and complied with other state and local laws, there was some room to maneuver. Finally, he started to feel a strong attachment bond, as his mother’s partner would say.

“Yes, I think I am nervous. I mean, you are a student and I’ve never slept with a man before.”

“I’m not a man.”

“And what if the Vaseline ate through the condom?”

“What?”

Peoria pauses. He gets out of bed. He goes into the bathroom, closes the bathroom door, and turns on the hot water and starts to scrub himself.

What was it with this strong attachment bond anyway? She understood, Justina understood. She understood what it was like to be out there in the desert, and he had never really dealt with that. The I-am-going-to-die-amid-loneliness feeling, the absolute trauma of helplessness—no one had understood that, no one had gotten that, and maybe he had pretended that it didn’t really matter to him that he had shrugged it off like the wannabe war correspondent is supposed to do. But it did affect him, and it was an experience that—despite his ramblings, despite throwing hundreds of thousands of words at it in conversation—that defied all conversation and writing and one that just required you to be there: you had to be there, and the only person close to the trauma of that night was Justina, and this is what is so powerful.

The door to the bathroom swings open slowly.

Peoria peeks around the shower curtain.

Justina stands there, flat belly, just thicker than a rail, tiny flat breasts with artificially puffy nipples, hairless vagina, if that was the right word, that even with reconstructive surgery resembled crushed Silly Putty wedged into an inverted ant hill.

She pushes the curtain aside and steps in, kneeling down. She starts sucking his cock.

A mouth is a mouth, a hole is a hole, Peoria remembers . . . Peoria gets hard.

He closes his eyes and rests his hand on the soap dish, knocking over a bottle of Gillette 2-in-1 shampoo-conditioner.

He usually has a hard time coming in hot water—he never masturbates in the shower, for instance—but he lets his imagination go, and his imagination goes back to the memory, the first time he had touched Justina, while he was still Justin, his hand warmed by blood, bodies pressed together, the absolute fear and excitement of death enveloping him, a memory so powerful he had pretended it didn’t exist, and with the warm water falling off his short, five-foot-seven frame, splashing to the top of the long black hair at his knees, he lets the memory wash over him, maybe even washing it away however briefly, and he comes.

Swallowing, Justina looks up.

“I know what you were thinking about,” she says. “I was thinking it too.”

They both start to cry.