Tabloid City

by Pete Hamill

  You were my woman

  Round and sweet—

  Then you took off

  With a lowlife creep

  They step off at 33rd Street. Briscoe wonders when he first heard someone sing those lyrics. Summer of ’55? No, ’56.

  And here I am

  A paper wrappin’ my feet—

  Frankie Lymon? Didn’t he finish badly? Dying of heroin. What year? Sometime in the sixties. Briscoe was working in Europe, so maybe it was 1964. Thinking: Gotta Google him. Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. Or maybe the Platters. The flip side of some big hit. Who was I in love with then?

  Oh why, oh why, do I

  Live in the dark?

  He remembers. Betty Haddad. Small, with lustrous black hair, a handsome hooked nose, oval face. Her parents were Syrian Christians. She loved dancing, which they did for a whole summer. Why did they fall in love? It was simple. She wasn’t like all the Irish and Jews and Italians of Briscoe’s tribes. Or more accurately, not like him. It took him another thirty years to realize that was one of the points of New York. Maybe the most important. It’s the city of people who are not like you.

  Same with Cynthia Harding. She wasn’t like his people and Briscoe wasn’t like hers.

  (day and night, babe)

  Why, oh why, do I…

  He gets off the 6 train at Spring Street, and feels weariness eating his brain cells. At the top of the steps, he has to pause for breath, settling himself, breathing in the cold air. He walks west, slowly. On Broadway, there in the heart of SoHo, there are more people than he saw in midtown. The usual fat tourist ladies in wide threesomes are ambling down to Canal Street, to buy fake Prada and Gucci handbags. Nobody can get past them. Messengers on bicycles weave in and out of traffic. Horns honk in warning or exasperation. Four young tourists pause on the corner, speaking Italian, squinting at a map, and calling up something on a gadget. Presumably a GPS map. Briscoe considers asking them if they knew what had happened to Frankie Lymon. If not, maybe they could Google him, right there on the corner. Yeah.

  He crosses Broadway, heading home. He will call his daughter in Paris and then Helen and then sleep.

  10:45 a.m. Sandra Gordon. Lipstick Building.

  Her door is open and she sits at her desk, glancing at proofs of the Cash for Clunkers ads. A very big client. Tottering now. Buy our cars, get cash back. Wondering: Did they do this for chariots in the last days of the Roman Empire?

  Her right elbow aches. Her right hand trembles. She can’t remember ever fainting before. Not in New York. Not at Columbia. Never in Jamaica. She remembers seeing the front page of the newspaper. Then looking up at the face of Kennedy, the young guy from media analysis, way down the hall, and he’s whispering. “Are you okay, Miss Gordon? You want a doctor?” And she said, “Oh, thanks, Kennedy. I’m okay. I guess I fainted.”

  He helped her up and she saw about twenty people in the lobby, all looking at her. Men and women. She still hears Kennedy asking what happened, as he helps her stand. She remembers pointing at the newsstand. The stack of newspapers. The front page of the World. And saying: I knew that woman. The white woman. She gave me my life.

  Kennedy went with her in the elevator, gently moving her away from the spectators, and into her office. She kept saying: No doctor, please, I’m okay, I fainted is all… Then the bosses were in her office, and one of them suggested she go home, take the day off, what the hell, it’s Friday. And she smiled and said No, I have proofs to look at, and a lunch appointment and… They all looked uneasy, and the doctor was mentioned again, and Sandra Gordon smiled and shooed them away.

  Now she rises from her desk, and looks out the window, south and east, toward where Cynthia Harding lived. The sky is darker than it was when she left home. She hasn’t yet left her office, to walk among the other workers. No longer the mad men of the television series. No martinis at lunch. No smoking at their desks. They’re tweeting, and texting on BlackBerrys, and checking Facebook or MySpace. Not for fun. For ideas. And to gossip.

  She wonders if today, they’re tweeting about her.

  And out there in the city, Cynthia Harding…

  She is thinking: I was gonna call her today. Today. To set up lunch and talk about the endless stupidity of the world, and the men who inhabit it. To make jokes about Myles Compton, wherever he might be. To laugh. To feel alive. And defiant. And let her know that I’m sad too and hurting.

  She can’t look over at the three crowded shelves of the office bookcase. Cynthia’s photograph is there on top, along with two photos of Madda. Looking stern and serious in fierce Jamaican sunlight.

  She can’t look at the newspaper either, folded in the chair against the window. She can’t go online for breaking news. She doesn’t want to know the details. At least not now. Maybe not ever.

  Her secretary eases in without a word. Amanda Burroughs. A crisp British accent. She stands before the bookcase.

  –Yes, Amanda.

  –So far, no news about the burials, or services. Not at the Times. Not online. I called that Mr. Briscoe, as you asked. His secretary said he’d be available about five-thirty.

  –I see.

  –And here are three thank-you cards. Mr. Kennedy is out at a meeting, so you have time to choose one.

  She lays the cards on Sandra Gordon’s desk.

  –Thanks, Amanda.

  –Is there anything else, Ms. Gordon?

  –Just one thing, she says, smiling wanly. Try to find me an Aleve. My elbow hurts like hell.

  Amanda smiles in reply and leaves the office.

  Now Sandra glimpses the photograph of Cynthia Harding. She averts her eyes, sees deep green foliage in Montego Bay, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, rainy streets in Paris, that boat in the Greek isles. All with Cynthia. She turns to face her desk.

  She feels breath rush out of her. Dry with anguish. But she does not faint.

  11:15 a.m. Ali Watson. Brownsville, Brooklyn.

  He is driving past the overgrown lots, where Jews lived for years, and then blacks, and now nobody lives at all. He has called Jamal and left his own cell number on Jamal’s answering machine. He has told his partner to scan all chatter to see if Malik has been in New York. Hoping there’s been a whisper from Oakland. Or Pakistan. Montreal or Yemen. Not here. Please God: not here.

  But he needs to speak to the other one, the man who dragged them both deeper into the seventh century. Ali for a season. Malik forever.

  He needs to speak to Muhammad Ahmad, who two hours earlier whispered the meeting place below the El at Saratoga Avenue. “Around the corner from Moorz Cutz, the barbershop,” the man said. “Noon, okay?” Okay. If anyone knows whether Malik is in New York, and where he is, if he is—it’s Muhammad Ahmad.

  In his day, Ali Watson remembers, he was a great fraud, Muhammad was, but a fraud with charisma and savage humor. The most dangerous kind. Ali remembers his young eyes now, the blaze of certainty in them, the ferocity of his language when they met that time in Brownsville in a mosque that had once been a Baptist church and before that a synagogue. His legend was spreading as despair deepened. The year was 1969. Malcolm was dead. Martin was dead. Bobby was dead. Heroin was alive and Brownsville was burning. And there in the lots rose Muhammad Ahmad, aged eighteen, standing in flowing white robes on the roof of a burnt-out Chevy. Singing the early version of his siren song.

  His slave name, as they said in those days, was Ben Jenkins, and he was born right here in B-ville. The résumé was the usual pile of clichés. His father took off before he was born. His mother kicked him out when he was fourteen. He was a junkie at fifteen and then sent to the reformatory called Warwick, after Ali, a patrolman then at the 7-3 on East New York Avenue, busted him for dealing heroin. In Warwick, he became a Muslim. Like thousands of other young jailhouse Muslims. Then his life started.

  Now Ali pulls over to the curb. He turns off the engine, and sits there, watching, and remembering.

  Ben Jenkins took the name of the man who became the Mahdi in the lat
e nineteenth century, the star of a Muslim tale right out of Hollywood. As Muhammad Ahmad, he began preaching in the lots and then on street corners, the way the communists once did in B-ville, and the guys who recruited soldiers for the Lincoln Brigade, and the passionate socialists who wanted to create Israel. As always, the goal was utopia. The big time was a corner on Pitkin Avenue, up the block from the huge movie house. Ben Jenkins, now called Muhammad Ahmad, became a soapbox boy wonder, telling his audiences how the Mahdi built his army in the south of Egypt, gathering thousands of followers, preaching jihad, until he finally surrounded the British at Khartoum. The Mahdi’s army captured the city and killed the British general, and militant Islam seemed clearly on the march. The Mahdi was now famous all over the world.

  Listening to this passionate kid then, patrolman Ali Watson imagined the El as the walls of Khartoum, and fought off feelings he had when he first heard Malcolm preach. The song was a vision. He laughs, hearing Mary Lou’s voice: Are you nuts? You’re a grown-up, Ali! He gets out of the car now. Locks it. Shakes off Mary Lou’s sharp, intelligent voice. Stands there trembling for a long minute, but not from the cold.

  Still watching.

  On all these street corners, now so empty, Ben Jenkins told the bitter crowds, seething with anger, that he had been chosen as the new Mahdi. He was chosen by the Messenger himself in a visitation on the roof of his building in the Marcus Garvey Houses. Then he moved on to his own divine message, his vision, his addition to the many Brownsville utopias. On that windy rooftop, the Messenger told him Allah wanted him to lead a black revolt, inspired and commanded by Muslims, and then to create an Islamic republic in the American South. Start with Mississippi, then get the white infidels out of Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, northern Florida, and replace them with black believers. They could stay, whites and blacks, only if they accepted Allah, and agreed to sharia law. Otherwise, they must go, or die. Hearing all this, most blacks laughed. The way Mary Lou did. Some did not. Particularly if they were young. They saw a future.

  He, the new Mahdi, would enlist all those Muslims whose faith died when Malcolm was killed. He would draw blacks to the Mahdi Army from all over the United States. The Panthers. The Five Percenters. America had enslaved them, crippled them, placed them out on the edge without power. America gave them the humiliation of welfare and forgot them. Now they would build the proud Black Zion. Gathering first in Mississippi, where blacks were already a majority. Where whites maintained power through the terrorist gang called the Ku Klux Klan. To meet white terror with black terror.

  A kid from City College recorded a few of the Mahdi’s street-corner sermons and, years later, turned the tapes into a very special bootleg. That audiotape, peddled on street corners and then in barbershops and at rallies at schools, attracted many young listeners. One was Malik. Father and son argued bitterly about the message before Malik went away for good. Now Ali has to find him.

  Ali Watson begins to walk on streets where he was young too. He wanders to Legion Street and then Grafton Street, where he can hear the screeching of the El, passing over corners where the street gangs once ruled until heroin cut out their hearts. When he married Mary Lou, she insisted that they move. “This place is doomed,” she said. On moving day, black smoke darkened the sky from a burning tenement two blocks away, and doom seemed certain.

  Ali knew the B-ville story. He had seen it. The burning gashed every block and turned others into lots. Landlords paid twelve-year-old kids to torch the tenements so they could collect insurance money and buy condos in Fort Lauderdale. Some old dude dies in the building? Tough shit. Burnt-out automobiles were everywhere, stolen from other neighborhoods, driven until the gas ran out, then set on fire to become housing for rats. When Ali came over one time on the trail of a murder suspect, Brownsville looked like Stalingrad or Berlin in the old newsreels on the History Channel. When crack came, the neighborhood truly became a war zone. The infantry was made of young zombies with guns. Killing over ownership of a street corner. Killing old ladies. Killing their own mothers. At least the old junkies nodded out once in a while. The crackheads never did. They wanted more, and more, and more. Real Americans.

  Ben Jenkins missed most of that. He was in Leavenworth. In 1980, the Feds nailed him and four others for possession of gelignite, four bag bombs made from boiled and dried horse shit, three AK-47s, fifteen Glocks, two MAC-10s, and plans to blow up the Statue of Liberty. One of the four associates was a rat. Off went the new Mahdi to serve twenty-one years of a thirty-year sentence. He came home in April 2001 to discover that the world he wanted to change as a kid was actually the good old days. Nobody he met remembered him, even those who had heard the audiotape. They were too young, even if, like Malik, they had learned the lyrics of his siren song.

  After September 11, Ali tracked down Ben Jenkins. He was living in his sister’s apartment, sleeping on a couch. Another middle-aged black man on welfare. Everything was out of him, including the gaudy illusion of the New Mahdi Army. His face was pouched and lined. White hairs sprouted from his nose and his stubbly beard. He had no woman, no kids, no job, no hope. His drug of choice was Marlboro Lights. Jenkins told Ali that he knew nothing about al-Qaeda or the men who smashed airplanes into the Trade Center, and Ali believed him. He was still in jail when the planning took place, and he had a solid alibi for the day itself.

  After September 11, Jenkins became part of Ali’s early warning system, which gave him a few extra dollars every month. Calling from pay phones. Meeting in odd parts of the city. He was still a Muslim, drifting from mosque to mosque, warding off loneliness in the company of other womenless men. But he was useful to Ali and the Joint Terrorism Task Force. He could recognize those young men who resembled his own younger self. And from the photographs Ali gave him, he could recognize Malik.

  Now, in the distance, Ali Watson sees him, staring into the window of a hardware store, dressed in a heavy down jacket with a hood. Ali waits a minute, watching for anyone who might be watching Ben Jenkins. Then he hurries across the street. He walks casually past Jenkins, then turns his attention to a display of drill bits. He speaks without turning his head.

  –I’m looking for my son, Ali says.

  –I heard the other day he was out here a few weeks ago.

  Ali feels his stomach moving.

  –Why didn’t you call me?

  –I been sick, man. Some kind of a flu.

  –You should’ve called me, Ben.

  –Yeah. Sorry, man. I didn’t actually see him. Some guy—

  –Where was he? Malik, I mean?

  –At that mosque on Georgia, near Livonia.

  –The storefront?

  –That’s it.

  Ali exhales.

  –I’ll take a look.

  –I’ll keep looking.

  –If you see him, Ben, day or night, call me, hear?

  –Yeah.

  Ali turns to walk past him. Without turning his head.

  –Hey, man, I’m sure sorry about your wife.

  –Thank you.

  11:20 a.m. Freddie Wheeler. His apartment, Williamsburg.

  Freddie Wheeler feels like he’s floating. Two feet above the floor. Ten stories above the street. He moves from bathroom to computer screen to window and back, and his brain is bursting with triumph. More than two hundred e-mails, and it isn’t even lunchtime… The Times three times, looking for a comment… Not David Carr, though… Some reporter… The AP… The Daily News… Howard Kurtz from the Washington Post and CNN, he wants to know how CelineWire.com found out before everybody else that the World was folding as a newspaper and opening as a website… Calling me “Mr. Wheeler”… The London Times sent an e-mail, for fuck sake… Murdoch must be screaming about why the news wasn’t broken in the Wall Street Journal…

  He checks the BlackBerry.

  Some bitter notes… Of course… Blaming the messenger… Hope you’re happy now, you little prick. McLeod… An old fart from the World copy desk: Ucksay my ickday you uckingfay ast
ardbay. Another hack from the copy desk… Pretty hip.

  And, hey: CNN wants to send a crew!

  And, holy shit, Morning Joe wants him Monday!

  He jumps again… then reaches for jeans and starts dressing… He is starving now. Gotta eat… Gotta eat anything… Even eggs… Even just toast. Celebrate! He pulls a T-shirt over his head, and a heavy wool sweater… Céline would love this… A victory in a time when there are almost no victories… Hey, Briscoe: whattaya gonna do now, you half a Hebe? I’ll tell you what you’re gonna do… You’re gonna die, baby… First the paper, then you.

  He imagines his mother turning on Morning Joe… if they even get the show out there… And there he is! Her worthless son! On national television… A Pun-Dit!… Being asked for his opinions! Whattaya think now, Momma?

  Top of the world!

  11:40 a.m. Helen Loomis. Second Avenue and 9th Street, Manhattan.

  She hangs up the phone, turns, and weeps in a surrendering way into the pillow.

  –Oh, Sam, she whispers to herself. What’s to become of you? And me? What’s to become of us all?

  She cries until she can cry no more and reaches for a Kleenex. She blows her nose. Then sits up, and lights a cigarette. At least I got to smoke again in a city room, she thinks, even if it was for the last time. Not the last cigarette. The last city room.

  Oh, God.

  It’s over.

  She sits up on the edge of the bed, flicking ash into a saucer on the bed table, pulling her robe more tightly. What will I do now? she thinks. No more “Vics and Dicks,” the long serial she has written for, what? Forty years now? Five dopes a day? Twenty-five a week. The dumbest knucklehead criminals in the history of the city. Twenty-five a week means how many? Fifty thousand? Fifty-five? She thinks that she must do the math, with a pencil, on paper.

  Thinking: Or was I Scheherazade?