by Pete Hamill
Telling stories in order to live?
Even if they were not my stories. They weren’t, but I owned them. They could have called the column “Knucklehead News.” No Professor Moriarty among any of them. No Goldfinger. No Dr. Sivana, who called Captain Marvel a “Big Red Cheese.” No Meyer Lansky. No Frank Costello. Absolutely no master criminals. My people were dumbbells all. The smart guys made page 3. But oh, how my guys made me laugh.
She tamps out the cigarette, stands, and shuffles on slippered feet to the bathroom. The shower does not wash away her melancholy. She remembers the feelings that engulfed her after her husband died. Poor Willie. Cancer at fifty-eight. All through the weeks of mourning, she felt like a dot. The kind of period that ends a sentence. And then the newspaper saved her. Again. Sam saved her. Again. The guys on the copy desk saved her. The endless cast of “Vics and Dicks” saved her.
Now…
Drying herself, she is filled with gratitude for what they gave her. They still surround her in the apartment as she dresses in ski pants and wool sweater. Even the ones who got away. The white jerk in Sunnyside with the cape and the wild eyes, raving about killing Obama, and the cops lock him up for disorderly conduct and find eight Glocks and three automatics in his house. I had him for three hours and then they took him up to the front of the paper. She sees another white dumbbell, blond, handsome, in his twenties, a real Amurrican guy, and his real Amurrican blonde wife, with what used to be called an Ipana-toothpaste smile, and how some black guy in a mask carjacked them, and forced them to drive to the Poconos, where the couple had a second home. The masked black dude tied him up, the husband says, then slashed his wife’s throat and breasts while he was forced to watch. She bled to death. The cops listened to the tale for about eight minutes and then locked him up for murder. I lost him too.
Just last week, a knucklehead fresh out of Rikers sticks up an apartment where some woman deals heroin. He’s got the Rikers Island jeans on, the belt taken away on Rikers to prevent suicide. The jeans sliding down toward the crack of his ass, always being yanked up. He runs out with the stash, hears people on the stairs, runs for the roof, the jeans fall to his knees, and he goes right off the roof. Four stories to the yard. Moral of the story: Always buy a belt before sticking up a smack dealer.
She sees them all as minor players in an endless demented version of A Chorus Line… One after the other. The game of Can You Top This? Saying that they didn’t mean to do it. Saying it must have been some other guy. Saying that God told them to do it. A theater would be too small for all of them. They could fill stadiums. All of them proving the theory of original sin. Their tale without end better than anything by Saint Paul or Saint Augustine, John Wesley or Pascal. Like people in traffic court, all of them pleading Guilty, With an Explanation. The title of every human being’s autobiography.
Cynthia Harding and Mary Lou Watson were not part of A Chorus Line.
They were page 1, for sure, and Helen had to write the story. Called in after going home, told she could smoke, with Sam walking around from his office to the news desk to the photo desk and then the news desk again, looking at photographs, or possible wood, or glancing at television sets. She knows that Sam was in love with Cynthia Harding for many years. He told her one night in the Lion’s Head, when he was still drinking. He didn’t have to tell her again tonight. She worked on the story.
Then, twenty minutes ago, he called to give her the news. The paper was being murdered too. His voice down, exhausted, telling her in a few words about the city-room meeting in the afternoon. Five o’clock. Telling her she didn’t have to go. Someone there will be signing up people willing to work for the website. Sam said he would add her to the list if she wanted him to, but she told him she needed to think about it. That was a lie. She knew this was the end of all of it. For Sam. For her. For their whole goddamned regiment. And Sam has another task. Much more important than the paper. He will need time to mourn the woman he loved.
She knows that the gang is sure to go drinking after the meeting in the city room. But where will they go? There is no Mutchie’s anymore, down by the old Journal-American Building on South Street. There is no Lion’s Head on Sheridan Square. There is no Bleeck’s. There is no place left where they can bury their dead. Maybe they should rent a permanent suite at Frank E. Campbell’s funeral parlor. Wherever the drinking spot is tonight, she is certain that Sam Briscoe will not be there.
What did Sam say to her once? Night is for solitaries. The day is for other people. That is why the night has music. Billie Holiday. “In My Solitude.” There are no songs about lunch. Or shopping. Or meetings where everyone whips out laptops.
Today, for Helen Loomis, there can be no Billie Holiday songs. She tells herself, Get out of the house, girl. Maybe she can walk until she is exhausted. That’s the cure. Maybe hike as far as the Metropolitan Museum, where she can look at the new Vermeer, in residence for a while. Maybe find Federico the mambo dancer, in daylight, and just talk. Surely find breakfast. No Second Avenue Deli anymore, not down here, but the stars of the Yiddish theater are still cemented to the sidewalk. Maybe go the other way. Down to the South Street Seaport. To where Sloppy Louie’s was, the waterfront place where they all went after the shift ended at eight in the morning, ordering oysters for breakfast, and beer and whiskey, while the sanitation guys hauled huge garbage cans past their tables, reeking with fish heads and tails and bones. While everyone laughed or bitched or argued and then laughed again. Every one of them smoking.
Gone now.
The laughing boys too.
All of that was so long ago, her mother and father were still alive. Never comfortable with what she did for a living. Wishing she worked for the Times, not some low-life tabloid. Or better, taught literature in the Ivy League. Jane Austen: Myth or Paradox? She never did tell them what the boys in the city room called her column. “Vics and Dicks” they could never get. Mother and Dad. Nice people. And there were so many questions she never asked them, questions she never asked herself until after they were dead.
She gazes out the window at the busy avenue. Many Japanese students from NYU and Cooper Union, heading for the soba place on 9th Street, or the sushi joint, or the St. Mark’s Bookshop on the corner. Delivery men. Lone men in long rough coats walking separately into the old Ottendorfer Branch of the public library. Others hurrying west to the methadone clinic on Cooper Square. A traffic cop writing a ticket for a blue Toyota without a driver. Another old man with a plastic garbage bag slung over his shoulder. A young woman with her gloved hand in the crook of her boyfriend’s elbow. Another woman, alone, middle-aged, walking on the splayed booted feet of an old dancer.
The sky gray.
Desolate.
She thinks: I’m alone now.
At last.
11:50 a.m. Josh Thompson. Fourteenth Street, Manhattan.
He wheels on sidewalks cracked and split, across potholed streets, up tapered corner curbs. He pauses. He watches. An older woman looks at him with pity in her eyes. He pushes past her, thinking, Don’t pity me, woman. I’m here for payback. For me. For Whitey. For Langella. For… Most people move around him, with nothing in their eyes. They don’t know what happened to him, and don’t care. They definitely don’t know what is under his tarp, under his cheap new blanket. Fuck it: they are not his targets. A man comes along with a seeing-eye dog. Wearing a long heavy coat. A fat hat, shades turning his face to a masked blank. Is he a vet? From where? Desert Storm? No. Too old. Nam. Yeah. Gotta be Nam. He’s got a limp too. Maybe a prosthetic. Left a leg in some fucking jungle. Join me, man. For some payback. The dog leads the man away.
He sees a young guy, with a big bubbly maroon coat and a Mets cap. Like mine. A large pin above the visor. SAY NO TO THE NEW VIETNAM. Too young to be a vet. Some college asshole. Doesn’t give a rat’s ass for anyone except himself. Definitely not me. Or Whitey. Langella. Alfredo…
Josh pauses near the curb. A Chinese guy sits in a car, smoking a cigarette. The motor
is running. The fumes rise in the cold air, heading for the gray clouds. He can see vapor, but can’t smell it. Now he sees a tall black woman, dressed like a boss, striding hard on high red heels. A thinner Michelle Obama. He sees her naked, except for the shoes, striding hard toward him, muscles tight in legs and belly, a triangle of black wiry pubic hair. She glances at him, her eyes cautious. He’s thinking: Don’t worry, woman. I got nothing to slide into you. I got nothing you can suck. I fought for my country, see?
He laughs a small bitter laugh.
The fumes are too strong now, making his throat sore. He starts again, moving on an angle to be closer to the wall. He sees a large concrete building, high, but not a skyscraper, full of contempt and power, like an officer. He looks up. Sees the sign. The Salvation Army. Two homeless women on the steps, one in flip-flops, her cold feet dirty as a sidewalk in this fucking city. The other one is toothless, talking to a third woman about four feet away on the sidewalk. This one is waving a bag of potato chips while she talks. Josh can’t hear what they are saying, except for one word. Motherfucker. They use that word everywhere in New York. Kids use it. Girls. Just like Iraq. Pass the motherfuckin’ salt, Private. Up the dozen steps behind the women, he can see a crumpled cardboard box with booted feet jutting out. The entrance to the building is sealed behind a huge gold-painted gate. There’s a cross on the gate with two crossed swords and a huge S and a slogan: DOING THE MOST GOOD.
Doing good? The most good? Hey, in there, do me some good. Get me a new prick. Get me my wife back. Get me my daughter. Tell God to get on it, okay?
On the side, he sees scaffolding. A good place to crash, maybe? No, one side is open. Anyone can see me. And call a cop. Wanting to know what’s under my tarp.
Josh sees words on the wall.
… While there is a drunkard left, while there is a poor lost girl upon the streets, while there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I’ll fight—I’ll fight to the very end!
It’s signed “General William Booth.”
General of what?
Did he work with Petraeus on the surge? Does he want to fight in Namistan? Or is he just a general in the Salvation Army? And if he is, why doesn’t God listen to him?
Josh wheels away, going back to where he came from, down by the river. Down there, after breakfast on two slices of pizza, he asked a man to buy him a blanket in some dump of a store. Told him he would pay. Held out two twenty-dollar bills. The man was maybe fifty, smooth face, overcoat with a velvet collar. A black leather briefcase. Surely a Jew.
–How’d you get into that wheelchair, fella? he said.
–Iraq.
–Wait here, he said and went into the store. He came out with a blanket, thick and dark.
–Want me to do it for you, soldier?
–No, no. How much was it?
–Forget it, he said.
He laid the blanket on Thompson’s lap. And walked away without saying another word.
Don’t go soft now, Josh Thompson thought. You ain’t a charity case. Still…
He struggled to pull the blanket over his upper body without showing what else was there. Nobody seemed to notice. Not the blanket. Not the MAC-10. Just another loser in a wheelchair.
Now he moves through all the others, winners and losers, small kids and nannies, more old ladies, a security guard eating cake, another homeless woman with empty eyes. Then he sees a man in full Muslim gear. The little Muslim hat. The flowing robe with a jacket over it. Thick black beard. Holding a book. The only book. God’s book. Remembered seeing guys like him on CNN at Walter Reed. Muslims in New York! He wants to ram the motherfucker. He wants to be challenged by him. His hands feel for the gun. For the trigger. But the man moves on without looking at him, and Josh does nothing. Telling himself: Wait. Wait until nightfall.
He crosses an avenue, cars and buses and trucks idling at a red light. His feet feel cold now, although he has no feet.
He passes a store for rent. Lots of stores for rent down here. An awning. Sees steps to a basement. Nobody inside or out. He thinks: Maybe I could crash here. Maybe I could get down the stairs to the basement. Six steps. Nah. He moves on, sees a place called Passion, selling adult videos for $1.99. Recession special for jerking off. And next door? Are they kidding? Village Kids Nursery. Next door to the jerk-off store! Josh laughs out loud. Then sees that little girl near Fallujah, the blood erupting from the hole in her chest, like a slow pump, her eyes very still, someone screaming. Maybe it was me shot her. I’ll never know.
He hears a siren. An ambulance or a fire engine. And he stops, leans back, facing the dark sky. Josh Thompson starts to scream. No sound leaves his mouth.
12:05 p.m. Sam Briscoe. His loft.
He’s in a gray sweat suit, white socks, slippers. He is fresher after the shower and has made some of the calls. Matt Logan again. Janet. Helen Loomis. But he doesn’t want to call all of them, one by one. He doesn’t want to call anyone. There is one more call he must make. The one he planned to make first, except that the newspaper, as always, got in the way. He goes to the desk, where the important numbers are written in large printed letters on a three-by-five index card. He lifts the phone and dials his daughter in Paris. A framed color photograph of her is beside the printer. Eighteen. The two of them in Monte Carlo that time. She’s smiling, but her eyes, as always, are wary. A different photograph of that same scene is in his office at the newspaper. The photographer was Cynthia Harding.
Two rings. Three. Five. Then her recorded voice in fluent French, followed by English. Please leave a message. The voice cool and smooth in both languages.
–Nicole? Dad. It’s almost noon in New York. I have some dreadful news… Cynthia Harding… and her secretary… were murdered last night. In the house on Patchin Place… And a separate matter, nowhere as terrible. The World is dead, as a newspaper. On Monday morning, it’ll be a website… Without me. Which was my choice… I didn’t want you to read either story in the Herald-Tribune. Or Le Monde. Call when you can and I’ll explain. I’ll be at the paper later in the day, to say good-bye to the troops… I don’t know how to say good-bye to Cynthia. It’s a bad day. Love you, baby.
He hangs up. Then walks to the window. No sounds penetrate the special double-thick glass. Some gulls circling. Gray sullen clouds. It feels like snow.
He goes to the couch. The morning papers lie on the low table. Delivered to the lobby each morning. The television set is dark. He can’t look at the papers. Not even his own. And doesn’t have to anymore. From today he no longer is required to pay attention. A kind of relief, maybe? No more fucking deadlines.
He dozes but is too tired to sleep. He drifts to that time in Monte Carlo. Cynthia Harding’s idea. Nicole a student at the Sorbonne. Cynthia arrived by airplane from New York and went directly to the hotel. Big place. Marble corridors. Black-tie casino. He and Nicole took the train from Paris. The girl was glum, either dozing or staring out the window all the way south to the Mediterranean. On her vacations in New York, Nicole had met Cynthia at parties, fund-raisers, dinners, horseshit events, one trapped weekend at a friend’s house in Southampton. She seemed to like Cynthia, and Cynthia was sweet and smart and never treated her like a child. Certainly not Sam’s child. But in Monte Carlo, Nicole was bitchy to Cynthia, playing an adult, not a teenager. Cynthia smiled a lot, in an amused, patient way, and her cool made Nicole angrier. Finally, in bed in her room, Cynthia said: Sam, don’t you see? She’s got a guy in Paris. Why would she want to be here with us?
They all left in the morning. Briscoe didn’t own a black-tie costume, and Cynthia was never fond of shooting craps. Nicole was clearly happy, so Cynthia was right. She usually was.
She ends up with her flesh pierced, her blood on the floor, not far from Mary Lou. Gotta find Ali Watson. We both need consolation.
Briscoe sits up abruptly, staring at the rows of books, the paintings. The Mexican girl by Lew Forrest. Her glistening black eyes, her luxurious golden flesh tell him again that the pa
inter must have loved her. A gift from Cynthia. When I turned sixty-five. Cynthia’s flesh was not this flesh. It was ivory. The sun could redden it, but she could never tan. And yet in the dark, with light seeping in from Greene Street or the hills of Tuscany, her flesh was golden too.
Nicole’s guy in Paris was a Spaniard, from Barcelona. A medical student, who spoke Catalan, French, English, and some Italian. Cynthia said, Don’t worry, Sam. She won’t marry this guy, he’s too pretty. She was right about that too.
The evening before he and Cynthia were to leave for New York, he went to a bistro with Nicole. They didn’t sit on the terrace. Too cold. Instead, they found a table deep inside. The waiter brought the coffee. She was silent. And he can still hear what she asked when they were settled.
–Dad, why did Mom kill herself?
He squeezed her hand.
–I don’t really know, Nicole.
She stared at him, while he stared at his own coffee. Seeing the troubled face of Joyce Miller. Mom. His wife. Nicole finally asking the question that she must have wanted to ask for years. Her silence demanding a reply.
–She didn’t say anything to me, Briscoe said. She didn’t leave a note.
–How did she do it?
The ice in her voice. Stabbing him still.
–Pills.
Now remembering Nicole’s puzzled squint.
–That’s all?
–No, there were plenty more things that happened. But that was the finale.
Wanting to be honest at last. Wanting to tell Nicole. To unload. To say the unspoken things. But giving her only a dreadful highlight film. Sitting there in the bistro while tweedy academic tourists looked for Jean-Paul Sartre or the ghost of Albert Camus. He told her about the reefer. Acid. Smack for a while. Freebasing cocaine mixed with ammonia. Then angel dust, which made her insane, even dangerous. With booze lacing it all together. He told her about his calls to Joyce’s father in Ohio, pleading for help. Hearing indifference. Joyce in rehab. Then rehab again. Then rehab once more.