by Kyle Smith
“So!” I say nervously. “Nervous?”
“Not really,” she says.
Why would she be? She faces a long day of fax retrieval. It’s 9:37 A.M., and already I’m ass of the day.
“How was your weekend?” I say brightly as we get in the elevator for the long ride to forty-two.
“It was all right,” she says guardedly, in a way that screams: I made screaming hot monkey love with someone other than you for forty-eight damp hours. “How was yours?”
Oof. Checkmate. How was my weekend? How was Hiroshima? Blood runs for my cheeks. I’m a redhead. There has never been a redheaded spy.
I respond with a sound, but I’m pretty sure it’s not an actual word.
The cartoon thought balloons over our heads:
ME: “I wish you would never leave me.”
HER: “I wish you would leave me alone.”
ME: “I wish this elevator would go to Saturn.”
HER: “I wish I could think of a plausible excuse to get off thirty-five floors early and wait for another elevator.”
We ride up in silence.
On the other hand: we’re together!
We work at a tabloid. It’s a real tabloidy tabloid. Unlike the Daily News, with its hurrah-for-immigrants charts, its isn’t-that-nice stories about entrepreneurs peeling a living off the streets of what well-off people no longer feel comfortable calling the ghetto, we make no apologies. We don’t send serious journalists out to cover the ghetto. We are the ghetto for serious journalists.
Our newspaper was founded on the reasoning that if it took ten billion years for man to crawl out of the muck, then he’s overdue to be dunked back in it. Our home deliveries once increased 20 percent when we hatched a cross-promotion scheme that enabled us to be hidden inside the Times on people’s doormats. The other papers don’t respect us, possibly because of the name of the paper: it’s called Tabloid. (Motto: “America’s loudest newspaper.”) Old folks understand what they’re getting, wide-pantsed hipsters love the cheeky self-referentiality of it. Internally, we call it the comic: we work here so we can laugh at the world. Everyone has to believe in something, so we placed our faith in skepticism. We weren’t the first to discover that the world is a toilet. We just give you something to read while you’re sitting on it.
Three years ago I was the youngest hack on rewrite. The four of us were lashed to consecutive cubicles, a whole squadron of back-of-the-class smart-asses thrown together in the front row facing the Desk, within doughnut-flinging distance of Max, the screaming, insane city editor. Occasionally some aged hack would refer to “the rewrite pit,” and though we were on the same elevation above sea level as everyone else, we loved to think of ourselves as a feared four-headed monster, waving our tentacles at our betters.
By unspoken rule, once settled for the day, rewrite doesn’t leave the office. Rewrite doesn’t do lunch or go to the gym or meet “sources” for drinks. Rewrite never knows how long it’ll be at work; true soldiers of smudge never want to leave. Every day is spent abusing three drugs: caffeine, MSG, and information. Rewrite knows everything that happens before it’s finished happening. You had to: a breathless reporter in the field could call in at any moment with a new bump on any story that ran in the paper in the last month—genocide in the Balkans, a hot-dog-eating contest in Coney Island—and you had to come up with the right questions to caulk up all the holes in time to write it up for edition. Rewrite studies every wire story, absorbs every TV news broadcast (not hard: they steal all their stories from us), gobbles up every newspaper.
Sucking in coffee, spitting out wisecracks, rising to every gruesome moment with hard-boiled nonchalance, we four deadline poets wrote pretty much the whole news hole. We worked strictly for our own amusement, the outside world’s opinion mattering somewhere between diddly and squat. Max pushed our buttons—“Stir up a little outrage,” he would order, his eyebrow cracking like a whip—and out came the headlines, backed up by the usual dubious quote-whore suspects ever ready to spew anger on demand. It isn’t hard to find somebody who is famous, or has followers, or holds office, or used to hold office, or at very least has “association” on his letterhead and a membership of one or more—who is up for a nice game of controversy. Our Rolodexes burst with their names. We had their home numbers. We could find them on any weekend and any night. The numbers were our buckshot, which we would take into the forest and fire at the truth, hitting sometimes, missing most, but when you return for the evening with dinner for your tribe, no one asks you how many bullets you had to fire.
When things were breaking our way, Max, this anonymous figure, a guy whose face never turns up on TV shows or in syndicated columns, whose name doesn’t appear in any paper, even ours, a guy who is no threat to be recognized at a soiree where people swarm around the fops who run Forbes or Vanity Fair (not that he even goes to those six-to-eighters in the first place; he’s always at work till ten) was the most powerful journalist in America. And when he roared, the republic waved a hand in front of its face and wilted before his halitosis. Under his bidding we judged the judges, vetoed the politicians, and bounced the basketball coaches we didn’t like. We were the double espresso to the heartbeat of the city, our gibes providing excellent graphics for TV news. Even the respectable press, too timid or too dull to marshal its own attacks and making everything look more complicated than it was, would wistfully issue reports of our crusades. To us they’re just an empty canyon begging to be shouted into. It’s our America now. When was the last time you saw the front page of the New York Review of Books on World News Tonight?
To rewrite, there is one unforgivable blunder—the one whispered about darkly in drowsy two A.M. heavy-news-day conversations when everyone’s thoughts turn to the nearest drinkery; the one rewrite parents warn their rewritten children never to do: Pull a Hymietown. Hymietown is the word once used to describe our city by a major presidential candidate in the 1980s. The candidate casually dropped this municipal pet name into an interview with a Washington Post reporter who, confronted with the scoop of the year, the one that would reverse the tide of the presidential campaign and vaporize a figure who had a shot at the top, promptly buried it in the thirty-seventh paragraph of the interview. Since no one outside the journalism industry has ever read to the thirty-seventh paragraph of any newspaper story (ours never run more than one-fourth that length), the remark would have had the shelf life of a banana if Tabloid’s zombie-eyed rewrite man, a night prowler skulking in the graveyards of words, hadn’t scoured every sentence of the Washington Post wire at one A.M and plucked out the one noun that mattered in a two-thousand-word story. As though he’d found a wounded bird in a trampled nest, he gave it the care and nurturing it deserved by resettling it in the hot incubator light of our page one. So ended the candidate’s chances of winning the New York state primary. To this day, J schools will teach you that the Post broke the Hymietown story. Yeah, they broke it. We fixed it.
When the outside world was behaving too well, we got bored and gave the rewrite treatment to everything that was happening at the comic. You could fill another newspaper with our staff vendettas and petty crime, with the intraoffice exclusives we broke by reading the editorial lips that flapped behind silent glass walls or by liberating confidential memos from the trash. Since all of our training worked to shorten the time between discovering and telling, none of us ever tried to keep a secret; no news is bad news. We gave long shrift to all of the pressing questions. Who got fired? Who got divorced? Who got pregnant? Rewrite knows, and rewrite tells. When dish is gold, you get extra points for feeding the needy with gossip, so those colleagues who lived their lives in technicolor were objects of awe. The newsroom never disappointed. It’s a Louvre of eccentricity and turpitude. Behavior that might be frowned upon at other major international corporations (or so I’ve heard; I’ve never worked anywhere else), was lustily cheered on rewrite: excessive drinking, getting arrested, or being discovered in compromising circumstances with a pers
on not your spouse—or, ideally, all three—made you a hero for months, inched you closer to the ultimate accolade: the title of legend, which upon being earned would invariably accompany your name whenever one of your colleagues, fellow tribesmen, introduced you in a bar.
It was combat. Behold our names; we even sound like cannon fodder in a World War II movie: Rosen, Burke, Feldman, and Farrell. The women, Rita Rosen and Liz Burke, are still there, returning to work every day the way Nicole kept going back to O.J. Feldman responded to twelve years of Max’s lash by throwing his computer through a window. After that no one would hire him except US magazine. I ducked the shells of three deadlines a day until they started a Sunday edition. Somebody had to become weekend features editor. My hand was the first one up.
There was no increase in salary, but I gladly accepted a 10 percent cut in my pulse. Now I edit the movie reviews on Friday, the starlet interviews and hot-bars blurbs for Saturday, the best-in-town stuff for Sunday. At the time I thought, This is success. I felt it important to succeed for the same reason everyone does: because I secretly hoped to be able to lord it over my classmates at some imagined high school reunion. But it’s been a couple of years since I was last called an up-and-comer, and at some point even wonder boys awaken to discover they’ve become middle management.
I’ve made the stuff so light that the ink nearly floats off the newsprint; mine are the pages that don’t slam or rock or ooze or indict; the stuff, in other words, that we can close four days in advance to make our production schedule. If I come up with something too newsy, it gets taken away from me and put in the daily paper. Which creates a hole in the Sunday paper that I will then have to scramble to fill with something commissioned on the fly. My job therefore is: don’t do your job too well, and mediocrity is my middle name. Ten best places in the city to get your nails done? We did that one last month. Also in November, January, and April.
Tabloid’s frosted gray 1940s-style-private-eye glass doors—even our entrance is hard-boiled—open into the city room. Under the all-night bug-zapping fluorescent burn, tough guys and the women who don’t mind them make dirty jokes, yell insults at each other, cluster in front of TVs. Wastebaskets overflow, the smell of fried food clouds the air, phones ring, empty pizza boxes form unstable skyscrapers. Add a couple of bongs and it could be Delta House at any state U.
At the bank of TVs by the window a guy dressed entirely in mail-order casual clothing is watching New York 1 news. He is my rarely sighted archfoe Eli Knecht. At one time he was my archfriend, a fellow drinkslayer whose stucco complexion, unpressed 60/40 shirts, and inner-tube waistline, I thought, provided a constant subliminal reminder to women that they could wind up with someone even less attractive than me. Eli grew up in a small town in upstate New York hungering for big-city hackdom, skyscrapers glinting in his irises, his broad-beam forehead aching to butt down doors. All he ever wanted was the honor of a cheap suit. Not only couldn’t he wait to grow up, he couldn’t wait to grow old, to own the weary staff of knowledge so he could club people with it. The guy is my age yet his conversations are full of casual references to dead mayors, ancient work stoppages, forgotten scandals. Rewrite has long whispered that he is bald as a friar on purpose, to live up to the look of someone old enough to remember the 1965 mayoral race. Now Eli is our third-string City Hall reporter, devouring every zoning decision and PAC donation so he can prove without a doubt that rich people have more political influence.
When I started, he introduced me to the street. Unlike a lot of reporters, he was generous with his knowledge and taught me a few things when, years ago, I took my first trembling steps onto the long carpets of broken glass that invariably mark a neighborhood where crime is the leading industry. Eli knows more tricks than a forty-dollar hooker: always carry a pencil because pens always explode, run out of ink, or freeze; don’t bother with a tape recorder because then you’ll spend half your day transcribing (a suggestion seconded by our lawyers—who can prove you misquoted someone unless there’s a tape?); and keep your press pass in your pocket, not dangling around your neck, unless you want to spend the afternoon parked behind a sawhorse with the I-got-a-journalism-degree pretend reporters in a designated “media courtesy area” half a block from the cooling corpse getting tucked under the covers while stealthier journos posing as real people who just happen to live in the building glide in unnoticed and get the story.
For years we used to go to South together for pitchers and peanuts, him and me and Hillary from the editorial page, a girl whose hotitude was so off the charts that there would have been as little point in flirting with her as there would have been in showing up at Yankee Stadium with glove and cleats, saying, “Hi, mind if I try out for first base?” I once saw her walk by a construction site on Broadway. The hard hats didn’t whistle. They didn’t shout dirty words. Instead, moving as one man, they stood and bowed their heads. Besides which, there was the matter of the hardware she lugged around on the third finger of her left hand. I got to thinking of her as one of the guys, albeit the only one I often pictured dressed only in Reddi-wip, and so we’d all drift over after work to take turns shooting pool or trying to belch “Hotel California” (she once made it all the way to “warm smell of colitas”). Rewrite would joke about our little ménage à trois, but suddenly there was only one of us and nobody was talking about my ménage à un. You know you’re pathetic when even rewrite orders a cease-fire.
Now Eli’s in the Zone with Hillary. I confronted him about it one night. They had been making cute little call-me-later gestures at each other across the newsroom as I was stuffing my backpack with stolen office supplies, and when I left, he and his gonna-get-some-tonight smirk followed me onto the elevator.
“You in the Zone?” I said.
“I may be. I may be in the Zone.”
“When?” I said.
“Could be a year, could be more.”
“You know this?”
“She’s dropping hints. Let’s just say we’ve started making trips to Bed Bath and Beyond.”
Fucker. “Nice,” I said. He’ll never invite me to the wedding, which sucks because I want to make a big thing out of not going.
“Yep,” he said.
“And the other guy?” I said.
“Oh, him,” he said. “Never existed. She had to wear an engagement ring to keep lo sers from hitting on her. It was made of glass, Tom, didn’t you notice?”
Fuck. Checkmated by my jewelry ignorance.
I couldn’t bear to deal with him after that. It was like he graduated, went to Harvard, and left me behind in kindergarten, eating paste. Today I just give him a nod.
“Hey, Ignatz,” I say. For some reason neither of us can remember, I always call him Ignatz.
“Hey, Pappy,” Eli says, his go-to-hell tie slung completely unknotted around his neck like a flying ace’s scarf. For some reason neither of us can remember, he always calls me Pappy.
I slither off down cubicle way, passing two side streets of gray sound-deadening uprights and the interior fishbowl offices reserved for the muckety-mucks. My house is right where I left it, at the corner of Jaded and Cranky.
Another day in my cave, my cube: ten years in the business and I have never had an office. Sitting on my chair where I specifically ask the copykids not to place them—those unsightly black ass stains—is the usual heap of today’s papers.
Hit the button and the computer starts humming. This is what I do: I spend my life at three keyboards. One I play pretty well. I slouch in front of it with a beverage and words come out of me, often before I have even thought them.
One I’m still studying. It has about eighty-eight keys. You have to learn how to push this and hold that, execute complex tasks with one hand while the other is doing completely different things in an entirely different area. And through it all, you have to stay in rhythm and listen for the climactic moment.
The third one is the piano.
I start to type. Type, type. Today I’m doing headline
s. The heds. Screamers. They’re meant to scare you and make you laugh at the same time. Kind of like Mike Tyson. And like Mike, we enjoy duking it out with the mighty, but sometimes we’re just as happy to gnaw on somebody’s ankle.
There’s a story about the sexploits of Tommy Lee and his former bandmates: “COCK-A-DOODLE CRÜE,” I type.
Here’s one about the future of topless bars: “THE STRIPPING NEWS.” Writes itself.
We’re doing another piece on The Producers hype. It’s the biggest smash on Broadway. You can’t go wrong with Nazis in dresses. We’ve already done six feature articles on it. This one is about the costume designer. “STURM UND DRAG,” I write.
A new offshoot of Judaism that attracts lots of young professionals back to temple. “SECTS AND THE CITY,” of course.
And the one from our Hollywood stringer, who has seen and enjoyed an early cut of Jurassic Park III. Well, not enjoyed, exactly. His words to me on the phone were, “It sucks less cock than you would expect, considering Spielberg didn’t direct it.” I rewrite the story to make it more enthusiastic, for one reason: I’ve always wanted an excuse to use the hed, “IS IT GOOD? YOU BET JURASSIC.”
I’m good at this job. Yes, I am the one who imported “Wacko Jacko” from the British press. And I was the first headline writer ever to describe Hugh Grant as “overblown.” I still remember with pride the time I saw a pretty young thing with that page of the newspaper on West Eighty-second. She was using it to pick up her Airedale’s giant Mississippi mud pies. You can’t say I’m not a man of strong words. Absorbent ones too.
At five-thirty a gentleman wobbles up to my desk looking like the world’s best-dressed derelict, an apparition held together by hair-spray and gin. His chalk-striped double breasted is about a hundred years out of style and it hangs on him like a bedsheet on a hat rack. His skin is parchment. You could open an envelope on his cheekbones, or on the silver prow of his proud pompadour. If he showed up at a wake, people would tell him to get back in the coffin. There are only two jobs this guy could do: vampire, or journalist.