The Last Manly Man

by Sparkle Hayter

  “Yes.”

  “I need to talk to you. Do you know my friend Dewey? I think you might be in danger.”

  He took the glasses off. It was the crazy vegetarian.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “My name is Jason, and I need to talk to you.”

  “You’re the Jason who has been calling? How did you get my address?” I asked. “It’s unlisted.”

  “It wasn’t easy, but I have ways. Hear me out, all right?”

  “You’re not gonna run away this time?”

  “No. I’ve checked you out. You’re sort of a respectable journalist, and your CEO Jack Jackson is a big supporter of environmental causes.”

  “Thanks. What’s with the hat?”

  “I’m incognito,” he said, putting the sunglasses back on.

  “Oh, I get it. The hamburger logo is to make you look like you’re not a vegetarian. That’s clever.”

  “I think you might know my friend Dewey,” he said.

  “And Dewey is?”

  “My friend who is in the hospital, in a coma.”

  “I don’t know anyone by that name. This Dewey, is he young? Old?”

  “He’s in his twenties.”

  Dewey wasn’t the man in the hat or the John Doe then. “Heavy? Thin? Blond? Brunette?”

  “Tall, blond, thin. I don’t have a photo. He was beaten up yesterday, our offices were burgled, and I think it has to do with that hat-wearing man you met, because I found your name in Dewey’s notes.”

  “My name?”

  “Yes. Can we go to your apartment and talk? I don’t feel safe out here on the street.”

  Let a stranger into my apartment. Let me think.

  “No,” I said. But the next second, Mrs. Ramirez rounded the corner of Avenue C, and I changed my mind. “Aw hell, come on up. But don’t try anything funny.”

  “What would I try with you?” he asked.

  I waved him ahead of me into the building and followed him onto the elevator.

  “You’re old enough to be my aunt or something.”

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Twenty-one.”

  “I’m old enough to be your mother. Christ. Well, all the same, let me warn you. I beat the last person who messed with me with her own comatose granny. That’s just for starters.”

  Not only did I have pepper spray, I had six bottles of beer that could do some damage.

  “I’m not going to mess with you. Shit.”

  No, he was loony, but he was not evil, just young and idealistic, a Sonny Boy in the parlance of my girlfriends and me.

  “So my name is in your friend’s notes. What do these notes say?”

  “‘Asking questions. Hudson.’”

  “And you think that’s me? We have a Hudson River, a Hudson Street, lots of companies with that name, at least two other reporters named Hudson in this town.”

  “Yeah, but you’re the one who showed up with our address in your hand.”

  “Hmmm. Good point. This is my apartment. Excuse the mess. The maid’s in detox.… Why was your friend Dewey beaten up?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out. Look, I’m trusting you because I don’t know where else to turn.”

  “How about the police?”

  “The police are lackeys of the corporations,” Jason said. “They are part of the conspiracy.”

  I thought, Oh Christ, another fucking paranoid conspiracy theorist. In Special Reports, we hear from a lot of them, obsessives who’ve been sitting in their mothers’ basements for the last thirty-some years thinking about what really happened on the grassy knoll in Dallas, to hunched-over men with wild eyes who want to warn the world about the existence of the “inner earth people” (who were feeling a tad cramped in the bowels of the planet, and would soon be coming aboveground to conquer us surface dwellers). Add to that the small businessmen who think big business is engaged in a conscious conspiracy to drive them under and shut-ins who think the guy next door is a serial killer, and you have an idea why all my calls are screened by my staff to weed out the nutcases, small-timers, and hoaxers.

  “Can I see these notes?”

  “Before I say anything else, this has to be off-the-record.”

  “Yeah, okay, sure.”

  He pulled a folded yellow sheet of paper out of his pocket and handed it to me. It was from a legal pad.

  “This was all I found. Whoever broke into our offices took the computers and every scrap of paper they could carry. I found this down the back of the desk.”

  At the top it said, over and over in a childish scrawl, “bonobos.” Down a few inches, he had scribbled, “Asking questions. Hudson.” And below that, “Why?”

  “What are bonobos?” I asked.

  “Chimps.”

  “Now who are you exactly?”

  “I’m with PACA, People Against Cruelty to Animals. So is Dewey.”

  “And you think Dewey’s beating had something to do with his work for PACA?”

  “I don’t know. I was in South America, like I said. Just got back …”

  “And the others who presumably work there. They don’t know anything?”

  “Dewey is secretive,” Jason said.

  “What kind of work does Dewey do?”

  “Animal liberations mainly.”

  “Let me get this straight. You think that man in a hat didn’t stumble into me by accident. You think your friend Dewey, under an assumed name in a hospital, knows me and his beating is connected to the man in the hat and some chimps.”

  “Right.”

  “Where is he, Dewey?” I asked.

  “In a hospital, under an assumed name. We’re moving him soon to a private clinic.”

  “Of course, an assumed name. Could I see your friend Dewey?”

  “Why?” Jason asked, and now he sounded suspicious. “He’s in a coma, he can’t tell you anything.”

  I was a tad suspicious myself. Though Jason appeared to be a Sonny Boy, I was beginning to smell a rat, maybe because I’d once been scammed on an animal rights story. If Dewey had my name, maybe it was from that story. Maybe he was the rotten little shit who set me up. Maybe the lost man in the hat wasn’t lost at all, but one of their co-conspirators.

  “I only have your word that this Dewey exists,” I said.

  “You don’t believe me!”

  “I don’t have much to go on.”

  “Why do … uh, there’s a cat at your window.”

  Louise Bryant, somehow sensing I was home, had come back from her day at Sally’s to cadge a meal. After carefully moving the poison ivy I grew in planters as a form of delayed justice for anyone who broke into my apartment, I opened the window, and Louise darted in and began weaving around my legs and rubbing up against me affectionately, her way of kissing my ass.

  “Did Dewey by any chance have Doublemint gum on him when he was found?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t in his personal effects. Why?”

  “I just wondered.”

  Louise Bryant will be ignored for only so long and then she adopts more emphatic tactics, like taking a clawed swipe at my leg.

  “Excuse me, I have to feed my cat. Want a beer?”

  “Sure.”

  Louise Bryant beat me to the kitchen, meowing for her special dinner, Aloof & Fussy cat food sautéed with bok choy, which I had prepared in bulk so I could just micro it. One whiff of steaming animal flesh and Jason the vegetarian was up in arms.

  “Do you have to cook meat while I’m here?” he said.

  “Unless you want to fight it out with my half-mad cat, and she’s meaner than me,” I called out to him from the kitchen. “It’s for her. But I’m planning to have a big raw steak later.”

  I let the hot cat meal cool for a moment while I poured Jason a small glass of beer, not wanting him to stay for a full bottle.

  “So you’re one of those people who only likes cute, domestic animals,” he said. “And doesn’t give a damn ab
out the …”

  “Ugly, disease-carrying ones?” I said.

  I went into the living room and handed him the glass before sitting down in the armchair across from him.

  “Not just them,” he said. “Do you eat chicken?”

  “Yeah, sometimes. Why?”

  “Don’t you like chickens? Aren’t they cute enough for you?”

  “Depends on the chicken,” I said.

  Funny that he picked the chicken, and not, say, the indefensible cockroach. The night Jack Jackson and I had gone out, Jack had asked me about the last time I unexpectedly cried about a story. That’s one of the things you find as a newswriter and a reporter—when you follow a story long enough, you can lose your detachment. There were plenty of stories that had sent me from my typewriter to the ladies’ room to weep in a stall. Most of these were understandable, deaths of children, Princess Diana, etc.

  But the last story that surprised me by moving me to tears … it’s odd, I guess, but it was the death of Mr. Chicken. Mr. Chicken was this chicken whose legs froze off, and so a doctor made him little prosthetic legs, with square wood platforms for feet. Mr. Chicken adapted, and managed quite well on his little legs, until one night when he died defending his henhouse from some marauding carnivore like a dog or a raccoon. There wasn’t much left of Mr. Chicken, except the little legs.

  Before his death, the Mr. Chicken story was a “squirrel on water skis,” a cute animal with talent and chutzpah doing something unusual—on videotape. It’s an “evergreen” piece that can run anytime. But his tragic death defending his hens against a bigger, stronger rival elevated that story. Boy, did Mr. Chicken valiantly refute the stereotype of the chicken. I know I wasn’t the only hardened, cynical, ego-driven journalist who had a good nose-blower over that one. RIP Mr. Chicken.

  But I didn’t tell Jason this. Something about him brought out my contrary side.

  “Who has time to care about all the people who live and die in the world except in a global, abstract way, let alone every last lab rat or chicken? Unless it is a special lab rat or chicken,” I said.

  “That’s so Nazi …”

  “You know, Hitler was a vegetarian who tamed baby deer at his Berchtesgaden retreat. Makes you think, don’t it? Hypothetically speaking, I’d give every baby deer in Berchtesgaden and plenty more if it meant Anne Frank, for example, or any other person, didn’t have to die. I’d give every Ted Bundy type and maybe a few Al Bundys—and maybe you too on a bad day—to save one baby deer. This is known as the Baby Deer/Bundy formula. In the future, before you jump on me, do the math.”

  He started to say something to challenge this argument, which is admittedly simplistic, but I shushed him in my best schoolmarm fashion, which I’ve found is often effective with young men.

  “Well, Jason, thanks for the information. I have work to do. If there’s nothing else …”

  “Let me give you my emergency number. It reaches our beeper central. You can leave a message with them. Don’t call on a cell phone. Use a pay phone whenever possible if you’re leaving a message.”

  “Why?”

  “Other phones aren’t safe.”

  “Oh. Okay. Or, you could just call me if you have some new information, real information.”

  “You don’t care,” he sneered. “For some reason, I thought you were a human being beneath that corporate uniform.”

  “Enough. I am a really busy person right now, okay? I have a story, Man of the Future, FYI, and my job and the jobs of my staff depend on its success.”

  He swallowed the last of his penurious allotment of beer and left. From my window, I watched to make sure he actually left my building.

  He seemed self-righteous enough to be a real animal rights person, but that didn’t let him off the hook. I’ve played my share of pranks, and I’ve fallen for my share, and one big one involved some rotten animal rights nuts.

  So, maybe I was being set up, the way I was set up on a mad cow beef hoax story earlier that year, a story that ran on a day that would later be known downtown as “Meat Is Murder, Dairy Is Rape, Day.” On that day, animal rights activists launched an all-night campaign of mischief and vandalism during which those words, Meat Is Murder, etc., were painted on a number of grocery stores, BBQ joints, kosher dairies, and ice cream parlors.

  The mad cow nonstory led to my humiliating on-air retraction: “I was completely mistaken when I reported that mad cows from Britain had been brought to this country and insinuated into herds bound for the New American Meatpackers slaughterhouses. I was completely mistaken when I reported that frozen meat from mad cows had been shipped from New American Meatpackers to supermarkets all over the Midwest. The president of New American, Bill Carlan, is not ‘an irresponsible megalomaniac insensitive to consumer concerns in pursuit of a bloody butcher’s dollar,’ as one of our sources called him. ANN and I personally extend our apologies to Mr. Carlan and his many satisfied customers.”

  We were damned lucky we didn’t get sued. It was only because of Jack Jackson’s personal intervention that we didn’t end up in court, Jack’s intervention, plus free advertising time on Jack’s all-sports network and my on-air retraction that ran hourly for two days. Somehow, Jack convinced Bill Carlan that a lawsuit would bring New American Meatpackers more bad than good publicity.

  But you’d fall for a hoax like that too, I bet, if you had witnesses (who later vanished), shipping documents (faked), vet reports (forged), and a video of black-clad people smuggling the alleged “mad cows” into an existing herd.

  And you might rush it to air too, in order to keep Solange and Reb from stealing the story out from under you.

  Would those mad cow hoaxers have the nerve to try to scam me a second time? I wondered. It seemed unlikely, but maybe that unlikeliness made a second hoax all the more brilliant. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

  There was only one way to make sure I didn’t get scammed a second time: drop the whole thing. Jason had managed to push a couple of my buttons and make me curious. But the truth is, even if Jason’s tale was a real story, if Dewey and the man in the hat had taken a drubbing in an effort to liberate some chimps, it wasn’t a story for Special Reports. Animal liberation stories, if they ran on ANN at all, were done as quick voice-overs or on-cam readers.

  If the John Doe had been connected to it, it would have been a different story. As it stood, my time would be better spent reading up on the next day’s interviews and getting ready for my date the following night with Gus, or as my friends referred to him, the Liar. On our seven dates in the past eight months, Gus and I communicated almost exclusively with lies, if we talked at all.

  Gus and I had met the previous autumn at a party and art show opening down in SoHo, a group show featuring seven artists, all unusual. I was there with my friend Tamayo, who had just started dating Herve, a guy who painted with his own blood, which limited his output considerably. Unfortunately, the previous night, after he finished the piece for this show, he put it down on the floor to dry and his Doberman ate it. His dog ate his painting. He was still distraught the night of the art show, and while Tamayo consoled him, I wandered off to mingle and see the other paintings and artwork. At the complimentary Skyy martini bar, Gus and I had amazing eye contact over the heads of three other people. (At the time, I thought it was a magic look of recognition between strangers, but later I saw him on TV and realized I recognized him from commercials.)

  I made my way to him, but he spoke first, asking me what I thought of the show. After I told him about the dog who ate the painting, Gus told me about his family’s salmon cannery and how when he was a kid he had this pet salmon named Harry. Harry was so named because the fish had a freakish tuft of hairlike bristles at the back of its head, like a balding man. According to Gus, this anomaly made Harry stand out, a fish among fish, and saved him from the tin can. Sometimes, Gus said, he’d put Harry in a bucket and take him outside for a walk.

  Playing along, I told him my name w
as Lola and I worked at a Think Tank where the taxpayers paid me obscene amounts of money to think about whatever the hell I wanted. Our motto was “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. Leave the thinking to us!” Gus and I got drunker and just went with the lying game until we ran out of lies. Then we made out for a while in the art gallery office. We had sex on our second date, after I’d checked the various databases to make sure he wasn’t a serial killer on the lam and after I saw him act in a commercial on TV.

  Obviously, we didn’t lie about details—times and places we’d meet, etc. We only lied about important things, like who we were and what our lives were like. Granted, it sounds nuts, but it had its own weird logic. We could say whatever the hell we wanted and not have it mean anything, so the usual mood-killers, the power and control issues, or worse, overfamiliarity, were absent. That’s why this thing, this role play, worked for us—keeping the reality and the talking to a minimum.

  Gus, an actor, was so much better at this than I was, and I always felt like I needed to have a prepared lie in advance of seeing him. Afterward, I’d need to prepare another lie in case Mike called the following day and asked me what I’d done the night before. Mike tended to get jealous if he heard anything about me and any other man, which was silly, given that Mad Mike was traveling with a circus full of sultry East European women in sequin bodysuits and surely not thinking of me at the moment.

  Tonight I was drawing a blank and couldn’t come up with even one good lie. Every time I tried to think of a lie, the face of the dead John Doe appeared. Every time I tried to fantasize about Gus, he had the face of the dead John Doe. I couldn’t shake it away.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Curiosity is the number one killer of cats and bumbling quasi-investigative reporters, a lesson I can’t seem to learn.

  Against my better instincts, I got up early the next morning and took a trip to Erin’s Coffee House to talk to the woman who had, according to the News-Journal, identified the John Doe.

  Most of the crowd was male and older, in their fifties and sixties, white, black, Hispanic, and evidently all blue-collar, a hard way to make a living for so many years. More than a few hats in here. The only other woman in the place was the waitress. An old-timey Irish coffee shop, painted green with paper shamrocks on the walls advertising the specials, it was now owned by Greeks, who had proudly put snapshots of their children and grandchildren up on the wall between the square glass-and-steel dessert case and a shelf bearing two loaves of square bread and a King Edward cigar box overflowing with receipts. In a more jarring juxtaposition, the take-out coffee came in white, minimalist paper cups advertising www.sidewalk.com. The cups were the only thing that ruined the illusion of being frozen in time.