by R. G. Belsky
And then, just as easily as everything went right for me, it all fell apart extraordinarily quickly.
It wasn’t supposed to have happened that way. In fact, the story that led to my downfall was supposed to be my biggest triumph. My shining moment as a reporter. The story that would define me as a journalist. And, in the end, I guess that’s exactly what it did. Just not in the way I had anticipated.
It was a massive investigative series that ran in the News about prostitution in New York City. I wanted to do an in-depth look at the problem of prostitution and its impact on everyone involved, as well as the people around them. I talked to madams, prostitutes, johns, and law enforcement officials. I took a look at the trade from the streetwalkers near Times Square to the high-end hookers who worked out of expensive escort agencies. The governor of New York had been forced to resign after being linked with a high-priced hooker. I thought it was a great peg for a series on prostitution and all of its aspects on the New York scene. My editors thought so too.
The highlight of the series was a young woman who called herself Houston. Houston got her name from the street in downtown Manhattan where she’d first plied her trade. By the time I did my series, she was working on call for high rollers at hotels and expensive apartments around Manhattan. She had become quite a legend in the world of call girls. Men clamored for her services, and she truly seemed to enjoy her work. One of her specialties was the Houston Hello. She named it after the famous Brentwood Hello that the women in the O. J. Simpson case used to call a blow job. She also offered the Houston Hero Sandwich—her and another girl—and the Houston Honeymoon Special, which provided a bridal night fantasy beyond any man’s wildest expectations. But there was a dark side to Houston too. She’d been attacked by clients, once almost fatally; beaten up by pimps; extorted for money and sex by cops; and battled drug and alcohol. Houston put a face on prostitution for the first time—she made us understand the people who were involved in this industry and the complexity of the issue of women who sell their bodies for a living. I didn’t say that last part. The Daily News editorial board did when they submitted my series for a Pulitzer Prize.
Everyone wanted a piece of Houston. She became a tabloid sensation. Other newspapers searched for her. TV stations too. Network shows like Dateline and 60 Minutes—and even Oprah—were desperate for an interview. Book publishers threw big-money offers at me to write about her story. There was even talk of a movie deal. That was when I first met Nikki Reynolds. She pursued me relentlessly after the series came out. Took me to lunch at “21,” for drinks at Elaine’s, and then eventually back to her penthouse apartment on Central Park West where we made love through the night. I remember lying in her bed early the next morning, watching the sun come up over Central Park outside her window, and thinking about how perfect everything in my life had turned out to be. This series had put me on the fast track of journalism. It had made me a star. It had given me everything I’d ever wanted—or at least everything I thought I wanted back then.
But in the end, the series was too good. Houston was too good. She became a monster I could no longer control. That’s when the whole story began to fall apart. And my life along with it.
Because there was no Houston.
Or, if there was, I hadn’t been able find her either, just like all the other news organizations now looking for her.
Everyone I’d talked to while I was working on my series had stories about Houston. She was a legend in the world of call girls and hookers and escort agencies that I was writing about. The more stories I heard about her, the more I knew she had to be the linchpin of my series. But I never could actually track her down. I talked to a lot of people who had met her, or at least claimed they had. And, I guess, after a while she became real to me too. I collected so many anecdotes and experiences from other prostitutes that were similar to the stories I’d heard about Houston. Some of them related stuff they’d heard about Houston to me. But I never found the ultimate prize. My white whale.
And so I took the anecdotes and incidents and quotes I had about Houston—along with stuff from the other women—and put them all into Houston’s mouth. I didn’t just write about Houston. I wrote about talking to her. I turned Houston into a real person. I created a fictional character, or at least one I wasn’t sure really existed.
Maybe things had just moved too quickly and too easily for me. Maybe I thought things would always be that easy. Maybe I was so cocky and arrogant I thought I could do anything I wanted, that I was impervious to failure and was somehow above the rules other journalists needed to follow.
At first, when the questions about my story and about Houston started, I was able to deflect them all by claiming she was a confidential source and I had promised not to reveal her real identity or location to anyone, in return for allowing me to tell her story. Wrapping myself in journalistic principles like this to cover up my own lack of journalistic principles was something I was not proud of. But at that point I was just desperately hoping that the Houston controversy would go away.
It took a while for the truth to come out. But things began to unravel when the rival New York Post did a Page Six item speculating that the story could be a hoax because no one except me had found any evidence that Houston existed. A few of the local TV stations picked up on that. Then the New York Times did a long piece raising serious and sobering questions about my investigation, my answers to questions about it, and the facts—or lack of facts—about Houston. After the Times article was published, the Pulitzer committee announced it was dropping my series from consideration because of “troubling issues and inconsistencies” that had arisen following its submission.
For a while, my editors at the Daily News believed my denials that anything was wrong. Or at least they claimed to. They publicly stood by my story despite the growing skepticism from other media. But when they eventually demanded that I produce Houston for them as proof of the credibility of my investigation, the story quickly fell apart. I finally told them the truth. The paper tried to make the best of it in an announcement saying what I had practiced was a kind of “new journalism” in which I created a fictional character to tell a story that had been supported by other facts. But no matter how much you tried to sugarcoat it, there was no getting around what I had done. I had fiddled with the facts. I had made up an interview that never happened. I had crossed over that crucial line of integrity that no journalist can ever cross and survive. I had betrayed the public trust. I had screwed up, big time.
The next day the headline in the New York Post gleefully proclaimed: HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM!
The Daily News could have fired me, should have fired me. But they didn’t. I’ve never known exactly why, but I assume it had something to do with the paper’s own internal damage control efforts. Firing me would have been admitting wrongdoing—or at least editorial malfeasance—on their part. Or maybe they just felt compassion for me, feared I’d jump off of the Brooklyn Bridge or something if I lost my job. For whatever reason, I still worked at the News.
Not as a columnist anymore, though. No, far from it.
I was the low man on the totem pole in the newsroom now. Right down there where I started as an intern. Busted back to being a reporter, I had a desk in a far corner away from the city desk and hubbub of the newsroom. I rarely got much to do. When I did get an assignment, it was to interview a Daily News contest winner, or write a public service item about the importance of regular cancer checkups or the benefits of flossing daily. Once in a while, if I was lucky, I’d get to write some soft feature or fluff interview piece for the Sunday paper.
I hated it, but I didn’t know what else to do. No other newspaper or media outlet would hire me now. And so I showed up for work every day, did my job, and hoped that someday I could accomplish something worthwhile enough to make people forget about what had happened and let me be a real reporter again. Except I knew, deep down in my heart, that
it never could happen. No matter what I did for the rest of my career, I would always be defined by that one moment of weakness when I crossed over the line and surrendered my integrity as a journalist.
And there was absolutely nothing I could do to change that perception of me.
It was like the story of Sisyphus, a character in mythology sentenced by the gods to forever push a heavy rock up a hill, only to see it roll back down to the bottom each time. The gods felt that being forced to do this work without ever being able to accomplish anything was the worst punishment possible. Sisyphus’s only satisfaction could come from the simple act of pushing the rock up the hill each time. The journey up the hill became his only reward, even if he was destined never to change his fate.
Was that what I was doing now?
Working every day in a futile effort to change my life back to the way it had once been.
The rock was at the bottom of the hill for me, and all I knew how to do was keep pushing it back to the top.
I walked over to the reporters’ assignment board behind the city desk. Marilyn Staley, the city editor, looked up at me.
“Hey, Malloy, what are you doing here?” she asked.
“I work here, remember.”
“You’re supposed to be at a doctor’s appointment now.”
“I’m headed there soon,” I said.
I looked up at the assignment board behind her. It listed all the stories for the next day’s paper and the reporters who were assigned to them. My name wasn’t on the list.
“I could cover one of those stories,” I blurted out.
“They’re already covered.”
“Maybe I could help—”
“Go to your doctor’s appointment.”
“The appointment’s only an hour,” I said hopefully. “I could start when I get back . . .”
Staley shook her head. “Go to the doctor, Malloy.”
“What do you want me to be—a reporter or a patient?” I asked.
“I just want you to get your goddamned life together.”
“It’s going to take me a lot longer than an hour to do that,” I said.
Chapter 3
SO HOW ARE you doing, Mr. Malloy?” Dr. Barbara Landis asked.
“I’m doing fine.”
“Excellent.”
“Damn straight it is.”
“Have you had any more episodes?” she asked.
“Such as?”
“Blackouts?”
“No.”
“Dizziness?”
“No.”
“Loss of memory or lack of ability to concentrate?”
“Uh . . . I don’t remember.”
Dr. Landis smiled, but not like she thought it was funny.
“You seem to enjoy using humor to deflect issues you don’t want to deal with, Mr. Malloy. Jokes are a defense for you. By being funny, you don’t have to deal with the realities of your life. Realities like a panic attack.”
A few months earlier, I’d suffered a panic attack in the middle of the Daily News city room. A full-fledged, really scary event that freaked out everyone at the paper, including me. All I remember is feeling light-headed as I stood up from the chair at my desk, then gasping for breath and suddenly seeing the room start to spin around me. They told me later I’d passed out a few seconds afterward, falling to the floor and opening up a gash on my head as I hit the edge of my desk on the way down. I woke up in a hospital with no memory of any of it. The doctors did a lot of tests on me but could find nothing physically wrong. Eventually, they diagnosed it as a panic attack, probably brought on by all the psychological stress I’d been under because of the Houston thing. They recommended professional counseling to deal with my problems, which is how I wound up with Dr. Barbara Landis. The paper didn’t ask me to go to Dr. Landis, they told me.
I’d been seeing her for several weeks now. I’d missed a couple of appointments, claiming that I was too busy with stories to show up. She interpreted this, probably accurately, as a hostile act on my part. Maybe because I spent most of the time in the sessions I did attend complaining the paper never gave me good stories to do anymore and how bored I was there. So, as excuses go, mine was a pretty lame one. Damn, I couldn’t even lie well anymore.
Landis was a distinguished-looking woman with gray hair, probably in her fifties. She always wore a business suit of some bland color—like gray or beige—and sat perfectly still and erect in her chair as she talked to me. She had an old-fashioned three-ring notebook and a fountain pen that she used to take notes continuously during the sessions. The notebook annoyed me. So did the fountain pen. Hell, the business suits did too. Everything about her was just so precise and so perfect that it pissed the hell out of me. Maybe if I’d met her in a different setting—at a party, in a bar, working on a story—we would have hit it off better. But sitting in her office and feeling the walls close in around me . . . well, let’s just say she wasn’t my idea of the perfect shrink. But then I probably wasn’t her idea of the perfect patient.
“How are things at the paper?” she asked me now.
“Peachy.”
“Peachy,” she repeated.
“Sure. They don’t expect anything from me anymore, I sure as hell don’t expect to give them anything—and I’m still getting paid. So everyone’s happy. Like I said, it’s just peachy.”
She wrote that in her notebook.
“How is your personal life going?” she asked.
“It isn’t.”
“Meaning?”
“I have no personal life.”
“Don’t you have some friends?”
“Most of them keep their distance from me these days. Not too many people want to admit to being my friend after . . . well, after everything that happened.”
“Do you have any hobbies?”
“Well, I watch a lot of TV.”
“Romantic interests?”
“Huh?”
“Are you seeing anyone?”
“I haven’t gotten laid in a long time, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“Horny.”
She wrote that down too. Damn this woman and her damn notebook.
“Have you talked to your wife?”
“My ex-wife.”
“Okay, your ex-wife. Have you been in contact with her?”
“I talked to Susan awhile back, about two months ago.”
“How did that conversation go?”
“I asked her if she wanted to get back together. I said I still loved her. She said she’d just gotten engaged to someone else. Someone she loved now. Someone who didn’t come with as much emotional baggage. I kinda got the feeling she wasn’t as broken up about our divorce as I was. I told her that. I also told her a few other things that, in retrospect, were probably unfortunate choices on my part. I believe, at one point, I called her a bitch. She told me to go to hell. So, in answer to your question, no, the conversation with my ex-wife Susan did not go very well.”
Landis paged through her notes. “And you say this happened approximately two months ago?”
“I guess.”
“That’s about the same time you collapsed in the newsroom.”
“Okay.”
“You realize, of course, that the two events could be connected.”
“Are you saying that I was so upset about Susan getting remarried that it could have brought on my panic attack that day in the newsroom?”
“I think it is very possible.”
“You may be right,” I said.
“I believe we are making some real progress here today, don’t you?” Dr. Landis said.
“Absolutely,” I said.
Except I was lying to her.
The first panic attack had not come aft
er I had the conversation with my ex-wife.
I’d been having them for weeks before—smaller ones, but just as scary—only no one else had ever seen them. I didn’t even want to admit to myself that they had happened. But sitting in my apartment late at night and switching with the remote between cable news channels and old reruns on TV Land because I couldn’t sleep, I’d started gasping for breath, gotten dizzy, and felt I was going to faint or pass out or something worse. Eventually, the feeling would pass and I’d pretend that nothing ever happened. Until that day in the newsroom.
And I remember exactly what I was thinking about when it happened.
It wasn’t Susan.
It was Carrie Bratten.
Carrie Bratten was the new hotshot reporter at the Daily News. She was twenty five years old, pretty, very bright, very talented, and even more ambitious. I hated her. Looking at her running around the newsroom, reveling in her front-page stories and exclusives—well, it was just too much for me to handle. She was everything I wanted to be, everything I once was—but couldn’t be anymore. And every time I saw her and all of her success, it reminded me of that all over again.
That morning, I’d found out about a Ground Zero follow-up story. One of the survivors, someone I’d written a number of stories about in the past, had been suffering from kidney failure and urgently needed a transplant to stay alive. The normal waiting time for a new kidney was at least three months, and doctors said there was no way he could last that long without a transplant. But then a cop, one of the cops who had been there at the doomed World Trade Center in 2001, donated his own kidney to save the man. “I couldn’t save many lives on 9/11,” the cop said in explaining his reasoning for the decision. “That’s haunted me for years. This time I can at least save one life of one of those people who were down there. That’s why I want to do this.” It was a great story. The kind of story that sent the adrenaline flowing through me in a way I hadn’t experienced in a long, long time.
The editors at the Daily News liked the story too.