Tabloid City

by Pete Hamill

  Helen closes the drapes, whispering a “Buenas noches, Federico.” She moves back through the dark apartment. She thinks about a cigarette, decides no, and returns to bed. A few minutes later, she is asleep.

  A few minutes after that, the telephone rings.

  2:17 a.m. Josh Thompson. Union Square, Manhattan.

  He is staring at George Washington’s iron ass in this deserted park and the rain starts hammering the poncho. The last leaves are falling. A stray dog hurries from tree to tree, with nobody ready to pick up his crap. He’s my brother, that dog, Josh Thompson thinks. All alone in a cold rain. At least Josh is wearing two sweaters. And the poncho is pulled taut over his stumps, with the gun steadied by his hands. The dog has nothing. And it’s colder now. He tells himself to suck in the wet air, suck the rain. Thinking: I did too much time sucking sand.

  He closes his eyes and he’s in a Humvee and the sky is white and the sand is white, blinding him, and they’re all talking nonsense, making jokes, trying to see in the white, trying to see wires coming out of the sand beside the road, and his lips are dry and burnt and the snot is like tiny rocks in his nose and his throat is dry, and someone passes a water bottle and Josh takes a swig, and on they go, into the dry killing whiteness. The dryness soaking up all wetness. And sometimes he even gets a hard-on.

  Thinking: I gotta have payback.

  Thinking now: Allah took my legs. Took my balls. And not just Allah and the people who love his sorry ass. All kinds of Americans too. Never could get payback. Not from the Iraqis. Not from nobody else.

  In Walter Reed that time? The shrink said to him, Make a list. A payback list. Get it out of your head, the shrink said. So he put down the names. Put down the Americans too. Bush. Cheney. Rumsfeld. Franks. The lieutenant too. Armstrong. He thinks: That was stupid, putting him on the list. He was dead. Killed the same time I got it. Stupid bastard, riding us straight into a white sandy road with wrecked cars all over, and wrecked houses too, like he was Bruce Willis in a fucking movie. He was in Iraq three weeks and thought he was a little Patton. He charged us right into it. The IED blew his fucking head off. So there’s no payback for him. I’ll never see his squinty-ass little eyes again. His mouth with no lips. Just a line is all. Telling us, Go, go, get in there, and then kuh-fuckin-boom! Killed Whitey too. And Langella. And Alfredo Salinas. And Freddie Goldsmith. Me, I’m the only one that lived. To come to this bench in the fucking New York rain, just behind George Washington. To say, out loud, to an audience of raindrops: The towelheads took my balls.

  They took his wife too. Took Wendy and the little girl, Flora. He hardly knew that little girl. She was what? A year old when he went to Iraq? So he could get a reward at the other end, get the G.I. Bill, get educated past what he was and where he came from. To make a good life for Wendy and Flora and whatever other kids they’d have. He sees Wendy holding Flora at the airfield in Texas while the band played and everybody saluted, and Flora was bawling, the tears just pouring down her face, her mouth like Jell-O, pointing a chubby little finger at him, and then Josh Thompson followed the others right on the plane. He waved from the door. Wendy waved back. The girl bawled. Then Pfc. Josh Thompson was off to the war. Wendy wrote him letters. Every day, then three days a week, then every Sunday. She sent him pictures of Flora too, in a bright little new dress, standing up and holding the couch, bigger each time, the brown eyes always sad. Josh cried each night after seeing new pictures. Cried quiet, not making a sound. Cried into the pillow.

  Most soldiers knew the computer, but not Josh. His shit-ass school had nothing. But one of the guys, Norris, helped him get online and Wendy sent him some video through that, he didn’t know how, and Josh saw that Wendy was getting fat, in a big oversized yellow dress, pure Target, or Walmart, a dress like a yellow tent, and her face was all round, and her tits bigger, and Josh Thompson wondered: Who took the video? Norris showed him how to write an e-mail and he asked his wife. Wendy said it was a woman friend from church.

  But trying to sleep, he wondered: Was it some guy took the video? Some guy from the base who makes the video, waits till little Flora is asleep, and then Josh sees Wendy in the living room, and she’s doing what she did with him one time, but with the guy sitting on the couch, Wendy kneeling on the floor, on the rug.

  That night, Josh masturbated in the dark tent, seeing himself on top of Wendy, jamming it home after she blew that guy. Josh playing with his pud, which is what almost everybody did at night because none of them could go anywhere in Iraq to get laid. If you slipped off the base, looking for Iraqi pussy, they buried your body without a head. So every night in Iraq, thousands of guys just beat their meat. The last resort of the lonely. Coming in a Kleenex. Or a washcloth. Or a sock. Some guys scored with the women soldiers, even married them so they could get laid before dying. The way Josh almost died. He closes his eyes. Pay you back. Sees the blinding light, the explosion, shrieking voices of people he can’t see. Others quiet. This one’s alive! Morphine! Stretcher! A chopper then, followed by a blur, and he woke up in Germany. How many days later? Sixteen, they told him. And Wendy was there, out in the hall, that’s what the medic told him. The room bright, with blue trim on the windows. You want to see her now, your wife? Talking very carefully. Yeah, Josh Thompson said. Yeah. The medics unfolded a portable screen to give them privacy and Josh saw that there were eight or nine other guys in the long room, all on beds. Each one totally fucking alone.

  Wendy came in, wearing the yellow dress from the video and her hair all curly and too much lipstick, all curves and flesh. She was breathing hard, her eyes full of tears, and she leaned over and kissed Josh on the mouth. He couldn’t smell her. He couldn’t smell anything, and still can’t. There was a buzz in his head too, like a dentist drill.

  –Hello, baby, she whispered.

  –Hello, Wendy, baby.

  –I’m so sorry, Josh.

  –Me too.

  She started telling him that the church raised money to send her there to Germany, that everything was okay with Flora, she was staying at Wendy’s mother’s house in Norman, that she was praying for him too. Everybody was praying for him. The whole state of Oklahoma was praying for him. She had cookies from the church for him and the other guys. She had flowers. And a book about the Hornets, who played two seasons in Oklahoma City after Katrina. And, oh, it was in the papers, she said, what happened to you.

  –Can I go home now? he said.

  –Not yet, the doctor says.

  Josh pushed a hand under the sheet and blanket. There was a thick pad of gauze where his penis used to be. To the side, left and right, more bulging bandages. He wiggled his toes, or thought he did. But there were no toes, because there were no feet and no legs. Jesus Christ.

  –Let me see it, Wendy said.

  –No.

  –I need to see it, she said, her voice colder. I’m your wife.

  –Wait till it heals.

  She came around to the side and lifted the sheet and blanket. Her eyes grew wide with horror, her eyebrows arched, she made a choked sound in her throat. Then she squeezed his hand, covered him again, seemed to melt a bit, and walked heavily to the door. He never saw her again. She went home to Norman and closed the house and picked up Flora and went away. She divorced him by mail a year later when he was in Walter Reed. On that day in Germany, the cookies were great but he couldn’t smell the flowers.

  And now he’s freezing in this park in New York fucking City. The rain harder. The MAC-10 icy to the touch of his bare hand. The second clip is cold and hard against his gut. Thinking: Payback.

  And wondering where that little girl is now, his daughter, little Flora, and whether her eyes are still sad.

  George Washington is all green and shiny with rain. Beyond him, a red light blinks on but there is no traffic for it to stop.

  He unlocks the wheels and rolls to the edge of the park. Something called Filene’s Basement is one way, a Staples store the other. The rain lashes his face.

  A black gu
y in a hoodie comes hurrying across the drowning street. He is hatless, without an umbrella. The hood keeps falling back in the wind and he keeps brushing it forward. He’s about the same age as Josh Thompson. He sees the wheelchair and his eyes go wide.

  –Hey, man, Josh says.

  –I’m busy, muthafucka.

  –I’m just wonderin’, is there a place I can stay around here?

  The black man points down a wide two-way street.

  –Try down there. Might be a hotel. A church. At the end, they’s an overpass called the High Line. The fuck knows?

  Then he looks behind him, and hurries away, heading uptown. And disappears down some stairs.

  Josh rolls into what a sign calls 14th Street. He lowers his head and moves into the wind and rain. It ain’t sand, he says out loud. It ain’t sand. It’s wet. It’s rain. What I wanted so bad back there in Iraq. He crosses other avenues and passes many shuttered stores. No sign of a hotel. But across the street, there’s a church. Our Lady of… something. Goo-add-a-luppy? All the lights are out. The Mexicans back home got a church with the same name. Or like Salinas in Iraq, with a Virgin Mary medal around his neck. It didn’t save him.

  Then in the distance, on the right-hand side of the street, he sees minarets. He stops, his heart pounding. One big minaret, and a dome, and others around it, high thin towers where they can chant their fucking prayers. Just like in Sadr City. His hips are hurting now but he moves faster.

  A neon sign says: ALADDIN.

  Then: LAMP.

  Aladdin’s Lamp.

  He hears another word.

  Payback.

  2:19 a.m. Beverly Starr. Eighth Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn.

  She eases back from the drawing table, then pushes hard against the black Girsberger chair, the one she thinks of as her second spine. She exhales, takes another breath, holds it, lets the air out more slowly. Then stands. She stares down at the large painting on the table. On thick illustration board. Made of grays and blacks. Bold slashing blacks. A young black woman, infant in arms, small boy holding her skirt. An old junkie with a shirt hanging loose on his bones. A middle-class white man with a lumpy suit, his face sagging in defeat. An old soldier with a steel helmet and combat fatigues. The eyes of each of them full of fear, abandonment, injury, shame.

  Beverly Starr steps to the side, a brush in hand, thick with a load of gray casein. She first goes left, then to the right. The eyes follow her. As she wanted them to. Eyes she hoped were full of questions. How did this happen? How did I end up like this? How did I get to be a wanderer in empty streets? Can’t you see we need help? A roof over our heads, a warm bed, a stove, food? Beverly has lived with them for weeks, has sketched them from window seats in coffee shops, has seen them waiting for food-stamp cards outside welfare offices, has frozen them in memory with her own blinking eyes, using the blinks as if they were shutters in a camera. A trick learned long ago from a sidewalk artist in the Village.

  Here they are.

  The homeless.

  On a street as empty and menacing as any in Batman’s Gotham.

  She moves in on the painting, and with her brush she blurs the details of the soldier’s hands. Too literal. Too comic-book-y. Does the same for the middle-class man, then lifts a smaller brush and makes a subtle crack in one lens of his glasses. Thinking: Don’t fuck it up now. Don’t overfinish it. She pauses again, and abruptly thinks: It’s done.

  She slips the two brushes into a large jar of water, shaking the paint loose. Then she lifts a black lithographic pencil from her tabouret and signs her name in the lower right corner. Boldly. Proudly. The first time in too long a time that she has done such work. Doing it for a benefit instead of an editor. To help raise money for the homeless. Tonight.

  Another goddamned deadline kept. With hours to spare. Thank God for water-based casein. Quick-drying acrylics. Someone is coming at nine, to carry the painting away for a quick scanning and a framing job, and delivery to the committee in charge of the benefit. The painting will be auctioned off. The scanners will turn it into a poster and all benefactors will receive personally framed copies a few weeks later. She thinks: This is the moment in the old days when I would have had a cigarette.

  She stretches, moves her shoulders like rippling gears. Then glances at the Mac. Her true workshop. The homeless painting is the first work she’s done away from the Mac in two years. But she can’t sleep now. She has more work to do. She rolls the chair and sits down facing the screen. There’s a page on the screen, half the panels in black and white, half in color, alternating real world, virtual world. Page 5 of Like Mama. For Vanity Fair. Splash page, and four strip pages. All about a mild-mannered English teacher named Lois Trueheart, early forties, a spinster, like her creator. She’s been driven half mad by the way all the girl students use “like” in almost every uttered sentence. Sometimes twice. Or three times! And how they add question marks after statements of fact. As if all fact were conditional.

  On Beverly’s splash page there’s an aerial shot of New York City, showing the skyscrapers, Central Park, the East River, parts of Brooklyn and Queens. Voice balloons are rising over the city, some large, others tiny, hundreds of them, many millions of others just suggested, all saying likelikelikelikelikelikelikelikelikelike… In class, in the corridors, in stores and churches and bars, on the streets, in the subway, maybe even in their sleep… He calls, and I’m, like, scared?… I finish and I’m, like, happy?… He’s handsome, but he’s, like, thirty?… I look at it, and it’s, like, awesome? One four-letter word blurring the city’s soundtrack, part of the pasty verbal mush, and on the splash page it’s crowding the sky among the many towers.

  Is that girl scared, or is she like scared?

  Is this one happy, or is she like happy? The guy is thirty, or like thirty, and his schlong is, like, awesome?

  Where the twin towers once stood, an immense new steel and granite edifice, ominous, primordial, carries the name of the story: The Charge of the Like Brigade.

  In a small panel at the bottom, Lois Trueheart holds her head in her hands, wracked with despair, alone at her desk in an empty classroom. On a blackboard behind her are the words “Precise, Clear, Exact.” Those words that mean, like, nothing to millions of young women. She clicks to the following page. A gigantic gray finger enters through the window, a finger with the crosshatched texture of stone, and touches her clenched hands. Then Lois is swept up and out the window, into the sky, whizzed to the far reaches of the galaxy, all the way to the Fortress of Exactitude, where she is placed before the ancient deity Gramaticus. He gives her the sacred task. To cleanse the English-speaking world of “like.” By any means necessary. She will become… Like Mama.

  Beverly Starr laughs. A gust of rain sprays the room’s two windows. Hard and tiny pieces of the sky, drowning and silencing the earth, one pellet for each “like.” Millions. Billions. Cluster bombs from God or Gramaticus.

  She lays down the stylus she uses for details, moves the chair back with her flat butt, hits “Save,” and rises. She is barefoot, in jeans and black T-shirt, inhaling the damp warm stale air of the room. She caresses the frame of the tablet/monitor, turns, runs the tips of her fingers over the top of the scanner. She glances at the painting of the homeless. They are, like, hurting. She places it on an easel, revealing a sheet of two-ply Bristol taped to the immaculate white surface of the table. Panels are drawn in blue pencil, lines laid for lettering. In the drawer to the right are the old tools of her trade: two Winsor & Newton sable brushes, two steel-nib pens, a crow quill, various pencils and erasers, markers and technical pens, an X-Acto knife, a single-edge razor blade, an old bottle of Higgins ink, with a jar of white beside it for corrections. The Luxo swing-arm lamp is off now, but it contains a fluorescent bulb and an incandescent one, balancing each other so that color stays true. There’s a T square too and a steel ruler, eighteen inches long, and a clear plastic triangle. She thinks: The tools Caniff used, and Will Eisner, and Noel Sickles. Tools I don’t use an
ymore.

  She crooks her right arm as far as possible across the top of her head, grips the elbow in her left hand, and bends to the side. Twenty times. Facing a ten-foot-high mirror, she reverses hand and elbow and bends the other way. Her body is still lean and hard, buttless and almost titless, but she wears the same size 8 she wore at nineteen.

  In Like Mama, Beverly uses herself as the model for Lois, an exclamation point in a Catwoman suit, improved by art into a 34C cup. The character has a secret lab in Red Hook, where she invents her own tools for the crusade: a stylus-sized secret weapon, with a button she can press when it’s slyly aimed at one of the Like Brigade. The girl says “like” and her thorax freezes, her eyes widen, she can’t finish a sentence? Like Mama presses the button again, and the young woman can speak, which she does nervously, until she says “like” again, and click! Frozen silence! Panic? She resembles a dog who has encountered an electric fence. Maybe the girl even gets what happened, connects “like” to paralysis. But Like Mama doesn’t stick around for Pavlovian results, as puny as this one might be. She is returning to the beginning of this, far from Brooklyn, in distant California. Google has taught her that Valley Girls were the Muslim Brotherhood of this linguistic perversion. Now they are Beverly’s age (or the same age as Lois Trueheart) and still talking that way, making it seem normal in certain households and classrooms, and Beverly realizes that she will need to invent a Weapon of Mass Obstruction. And then…