by Kyle Smith
“How are you, mate? Name’s Rollo,” he says, proferring a talcumed pink claw.
“Tom,” I say, adding, for old time’s sake, “we’ve known each other for three years.”
He puts both hands on the edge of my cubicle and hangs on, doing what appear to be involuntary deep-knee bends, absorbing this new information, looking for his sea legs. His faraway eyes whir into focus. His wedding ring is like a hula hoop rattling around his skeleton finger.
“And your position here, lad?”
“I’m your editor,” I tell him.
London grown, Sydney reared, Rollo Thrash is the Obi-Wan of hacks, chief revenue stream for Elaine’s and Langan’s, foremost defender of the voodoo tabloid faith in an age when journalism has started to act like a kid born in a whorehouse who grows up to preach chastity and temperance. He could drink you under the table, through the floorboards, and into the basement, where he would call down to prompt you to stop mucking about and fetch him up another case. No one has ever seen him eat.
Best Rollo story—and the best ones don’t even come from Rollo, they have to stew in Langan’s for a while, slow-cooking in entirely implausible detail—is the one about how he’s in Hong Kong, sent up from one of the Sydney rags to cover some Sino-Australian dissident who, after his imprisonment on ludicrous charges caused a diplomatic uproar, is finally being released. This is when it was impossible to get a visa into China. So they let the prisoner out at the China–Hong Kong border. He walks across the border. Up pulls a black stretch, tinted windows, uniformed personnel at the wheel, security guards with hip holsters, Australian flags on the buffed fenders, the works. The dissident waves good-bye to the brownsuits, so long, suckers, gets into the car. Car drives away. Ten minutes later the real Australian ambassador shows up with a confused map-wielding driver and a battered Mercedes, asks the People’s Liberation Army where the dissident went. The soldiers shrug. Not our problem anymore. Meanwhile, in the black stretch, which Rollo has rented and decked out for the day, Rollo is not only getting the exclusive interview, he’s whisking the guy away to hide out in a luxury Kowloon hotel under a false name so none of the other hacks will be able to find him, at least not until after edition.
“Tom,” he says now. “Not much of a word picture. Where’s the sting of poetry, the glow of fire? What word will conjure the man before me: the hang of the face, the lie of its aspirations? We stand confronted by a categorical imperative—the indispensability of a nickname,” he says, in a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger sort of way.
When the drink is on him, he begins to declaim voluptuously. Among the nicknames he’s already given me: Peabo, Sly, T-bag, Piss Boy, Atomic (as in Atomic Bomb: rhymes with Tom), and the most enduring, Frogfucker, in kind remembrance of a well-shod Parisienne I dizzily pursued with Brie and Beaujolais. But not only did I not sleep with her, I never even kissed her in her national manner.
“How about the Duke?” I say.
“Not a chance,” he says, rapping his ring on the metal top of my cube fence.
“Kong?” I say. “Bogie?”
“The boy who never grew up, who was it?” he says. He speaks loudly, possibly to drown out the volume of his tie.
“Michael Jackson?” I say.
He lowers his forehead and, astonishingly, for a face that already bears a line for every pub between here and Sydney, manages to create even more furrows. I swear I hear a faint crinkling, like someone opening a bag of potato chips down the hall. His brain begins to work.
“Peter Pan. Cathy Rigby. Eleanor Rigby. Paul McCartney. That’s it,” he says. “From now on, you’re Ringo.”
“Ringo?” I say.
“That’ll do nicely.”
“Did you write that movie review you owe me?” I say, thinking, I could write movie reviews. When people ask me what I want to be when I grow up (and they still do: that uncooked manboy quality), I always say, “You mean besides write movie reviews?” I mean really, what could be better? The movie critic is the superstar, the one who gets the giant photo next to his byline and the most-expenses-paid trips to Sundance and Cannes and Telluride; the one who sees his name in the newspaper ads an inch high, the one who doesn’t have to come into the office even though, at the office, he has an office, a refuge, a soundproof shelter from the shouty people who stalk the forty-second floor. Rollo has worked for various newspapers associated with this company for forty years. With a suit his only equipment, he has sauntered into the midst of assassinations, invasions, and atrocities on four continents, always bellying up to the abyss, ordering a shot and a lager and telling a dirty story until the abyss snorts seltzer out its nose. On countless occasions he has written the first, or incorrect, draft of history. To me, he’s a superhero. Like 007, he can breaststroke his way through a river of fire, shuck off his wet suit, and emerge in black tie, ready to command a waiter or unzip a little black dress. Today, in his dotage, he has elected to put his camouflage fatigues in storage and decorate our pages as our senior film critic.
Rollo’s reviews. Dire communiqués about the undoing of the American moral fabric, phoned in from a bar stool by a degenerate Aussie hack. I wring the gin out of the clauses, make his woozy sentences sit up straight before a pot of coffee. Then I use the result as a rough draft, which I completely rewrite. To a well-lubed Rollo, every politician is a mountebank, every fib a rodomontade, every crook a desperado. Sometimes I leave in the whoop-de-doo and brimstone, but other times I have to tweeze away words unknown to my readers, or to Webster. I cultivate few standards as an editor—it keeps my life simple—but I try to avoid printing words not actually in the English language. “Sperd”? “Pring”? “Whinge,” it turned out in a bet I once lost, is a word—it means “whine,” but only to those kidney eaters across the pond.
His talent for uttering truth and falsehood with equal, swaggering omniscience turned out to be a useful trait for a critic, and he is today a figure of renewed renown. The fifteen-year-old photo byline has freshened his face, which seems to be aging in reverse to catch up; reality, after all, is always trying to catch up to tabloids. He’s become a starlet himself; I’m just the schlub who holds his coat while he waves to the cameras. Occasionally I’ll spot his name on a movie poster adhering to some bus shelter or video-store window and cringe when I notice that the words between the quotation marks are my own.
“Film review? It’s done, Rimbo.”
“I asked you to rewrite it a bit, though, remember? You just gave me seven hundred and fifty words on Reese Witherspoon’s mouth.”
“Right, Limbo, right,” he says. “Forgot her tits.” And he walks away choosing his steps, like a poodle on a patch of ice. He’s not heading for his office, the one whose floor-to-ceiling windows are papered with randomly spelled lunatic-sent hate mail (so displayed to make us jealous, and also to provide emergency napping cover). He’s going out the way he came in.
“Can I reach you at Langan’s?” I say.
He shows me the back of one balsa-wood hand.
I’m shutting down my computer for the day when the Toad’s crazy white Einstein hair appears over the superwide central cubicle surrounding the Desk. His giant golden wire-rims—never in style, not even in Europe, not even ironically—are the size of hubcaps, giving an outline of craziness to eyes aflame with sarcasm, eyes of Aqua Velva blue. His tie looks like a specimen slide for Fu Ying Chef Special Lunch Platters 1–8. He bobs like a prizefighter, or a peg-legged pirate, due to some ancient botched surgery that requires him to wear orthopedic, stupendously uncool sneakers. He parks his collegiate nylon book bag and comes shambling this way. Lucky me: he always stops by on the way to the bathroom, radiating cheerful cynicism.
“Hi, Tom,” he says. Shuffle, shuffle. “You look like shit.” His voice is like a taxi honking in crosstown traffic. His breath is like a spritz of Mace.
“Yeah?” I say. “What are you? The Sexiest Man Alive?”
“Seriously, though,” he says. “Did you spend the weekend in jail or some
thing?”
I think of my maximum-insecurity facility, the solitary confinement, the bad food, the lack of exercise and fresh air. Throw in a few butt rapes and some pontificating about racism, and I’ve built my own personal Oz.
“Kind of,” I say.
Irving T. Fox, deputy city editor, is a sixty-year-old Jewish man with three cats, two ex-wives, and no TV. He is my best friend at this newspaper. Rewrite started calling him the Toad because of his quick tongue. That’s what we tell him, anyway. It’s really because he has buggy eyes set on either side of his wide warty head.
“So what’re you working on?”
“Need a hed for this thing on celebrity stalkers. I’m thinking, why do it from the perspective of the celeb?”
“So do it from a worm’s-eye view?” he says. “Perfect. Our readers will identify.” He doesn’t have to mention the old joke about why Macy’s won’t advertise in our paper: supposedly the chairman of the store told our publisher, “Your readers are our shoplifters.”
“So what do you think of ‘Stalk This Way’?”
“They’ll never go for it,” he says. Although we have the honor of being the most-sued daily newspaper in these United States, we do have a staff of libel lawyers reading everything we say. Otherwise we’d really have some fun. A headline that is seen as encouraging crimes against celebrities is likely to get ICM’s shysters on the phone toot sweet.
“The best ones never make it,” he says with a dreamy look in his eyes, as if he’s remembering being married to Marilyn Monroe or something. “One time there was this guy who was arrested for killing stray cats. He was gassing them to death in his oven.” Irv’s empathy for soft whiskery pals is his known weakness, which is why rewrite is constantly lobbing dead-cat jokes at him.
“Horrible person,” he continues. “So for a hed I wrote, ‘Meowschwitz.’ They wouldn’t run it,” he says. Still smarting.
“You told me that before,” I say. “Wasn’t that, like, fifteen years ago?”
“Or the time that violinist for the New York Philharmonic got killed? By that psycho who took her up to the roof of the Met and pushed her off?”
“I know,” I say. “ ‘Fiddler off the Roof.’ ”
“Hey, wanna join our shortest-joke-in-the-world game? The copy desk started it. I’m winning.”
“With what?”
“Italian army. Eleven letters.”
“Good one,” I say. “Hmm. Nazi disco. Nine letters.”
Hillary comes by to give the Toad some faxes. Even among six-foot Swedish/Dutch blondes with impossible bodies, she looks good.
“Hey, Hillary, want to play shortest joke in the world?” the Toad says. “I got one. Gay porn. Seven.”
“Perot,” I say. “Five.”
“Zima,” says the Toad. “Four.”
“XFL,” I say. “Three.”
Hillary looks at us as if we’re idiots, and promptly beats us both. “L.A.,” she says, and we are forced to concede victory.
From the Desk comes the usual deadline mayhem. Max, the city editor, and the big-boss editor, Cronin, who reacts to him the way orange juice reacts to your mouth after you’ve brushed your teeth, are inviting each other to perform anatomically unlikely feats. Cronin’s the editor in chief. The guy whose job Max wants. The guy known to rewrite as Cronie because he’s palled around with Tyrone Rutledge-Swope, our ruthless, hedgehoglike Aussie owner, since both were on their first newspaper. By the windows, weeping pitifully, slouches one of the interns, a twenty-one-year-old Wellesley girl whose Scarsdalian mother, Max is just discovering, has forbidden her from doing any journalism requiring her presence in our northern sister borough, the Bronx. Rewrite says Wellesley’s mother is one of Cronin’s mistresses, though, which is why we’re stuck with her. Someone ducks out of the way of an airborne phone, which lands with a splitty sound on a radiator.
“You’ve worked at this paper for twenty-five years,” I say to the Toad. “How?”
“Dja ever read I, Claudius?” the Toad says.
“No,” I say. I thought about renting the videos once, but I went with a Bill Murray movie instead.
“After all the emperors of Rome scheme and stab and poison each other, who’s left to rule the civilized world?” he says.
“Who?” I say.
“The guy who drools on himself,” he says. And he goes lurching off to the bathroom like a cowboy in snowshoes, one shirttail slow-leaking out of his Wranglers.
Tuesday, July 10
Get off the train at Broadway and Fiftieth. Right outside the entrace, at one of the busiest intersections in the city, is stationed the beggar Nazi. He’s like an armored personnel carrier, with a long line of big ugly metal newspaper boxes chained together guarding his right flank. His dirty camouflage-patterned pants scream Vietnam veteran or, more likely, given that the war ended twenty-six years ago and he appears to be no more than forty, Army-Navy shopper. Like every good Nazi, he even has a German shepherd (ABUSED PUPPY, reads a calculatedly unverifiable handwritten sign). He has made it impossible to pass without a lengthy detour. So we have to go right into the maw of his mechanized begging, right by the sawnin-half Tide bottle filling with coins, which he shakes like a grubby maraca. In the fifty seconds I wait for the light to change, I see people give him about seventy-five cents. That’s ninety cents a minute. Times eight hours. The guy is making four hundred dollars a day, tax free. Sometimes he decides to cross the street for a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. To minimize his time off the clock, he doesn’t bother to pretend his legs don’t work at these moments; he zips along in a sort of seated run, pushing off with his feet while he hangs on to the leash with both hands. Mush. The dog bolts through the crowd of speed-walking office drones. Only by skipping sideways do I avoid unsightly tire tracks on the back of my shirt. But I don’t let him get away with it. I shoot him a really nasty glare after he passes by. People ahead of me scatter as the guy thunders through like a sawn-off Ben-Hur. They turn around angrily and see: a guy in a wheelchair. They’re so ashamed of this feeling that they resolve to vote themselves another tax increase the next chance they get.
I arrive at work feeling mean. Meaner than Saddam, meaner than Stalin, meaner than a French waiter. Get in the elevator. A familiar crone with a bald spot and a cloud of Eau de Decay perfume is the only other passenger. Is she a copy editor? A librarian? Someone I dated?
“Hi!” she says.
“How’s it going?” I mutter.
“Pretty good!” she says.
And I can feel it coming. The weather conversation.
“Wasn’t that a beautiful weekend?” she says.
A conversation is a workout, an exercise in discovering a topic that interests both of you. Weather is pretty much the broadest thing people can possibly have in common, isn’t it? It’s just one step removed from, “I’ve noticed we both live on planet Earth. Isn’t it a great planet?” As for weekend nostalgia: it should expire by noon on Monday.
“Yeah,” I say, ransacking my backpack for a magazine to occupy me for these final forty seconds.
“It was warm,” she analyzes, “but it wasn’t sticky at all!”
What do people in L.A. talk about in elevators? “I wonder if it will be seventy-five and sunny today?” Then again, to the kind of people who gave us the USA Network, this might qualify as snappy banter.
“Sure was!” I say, importantly flinging open a leaflet from the Learning Annex someone (okay, a girl with smiley eyes and a white oxford shirt on which only three of the seven buttons were in active service) shoved into my starstruck hand at Eighty-sixth and Broadway. I smear a look of fascination on my face and pretend to read an article about male breast cancer.
Ding, says the elevator, and I’m free.
Another bright morning at the comic. Today’s assignment: write a book review. That new John Adams book by David McCullough. As a critic I must remain scrupulously neutral, fair, unbiased. To keep my mind absolutely free of prejudice, I haven’t read a word o
f it. Instead I’m reading NEXIS clips of all the other reviews. My review will therefore be a sort of metareview. A review of reviews. As we often say at the comic: “It’s only a tabloid.” I crack open the book at random:
There was silence from the floor, until Oliver Ellsworth, considered an authority on the Constitution, rose to his feet. “I find, sir,” he said, “it is evident and clear, sir, that whenever the Senate are to be there, sir, you must be at the head of them. But further, sir, I shall not pretend to say.”
Yes, sir, it’s a spine tingler. But I’m going to give it a good review. Everyone else has. Plus, no one’s ever going to accuse you of not having read the book if your review is a valentine. A book like this has only one purpose: to give your dad on Father’s Day. He’ll smile (“My kid thinks I’m intelligent!”), you will smile (“I’m thoughtful and patriotic!”), Mom will smile (“It’ll make a good coaster!”), and Simon & Schuster will be $35 richer.
The phone. It’s my close personal adviser Shooter. There is no salutation. We join this rant already in progress.
“The problem with women,” Shooter begins, “is they don’t know what they want. Remember that Mormon guy?”
“Uh-huh,” I say. Rarely do I require any other words in a conversation with Shooter.
“They sent him to prison for bigamy. Prison. For having ten wives. It’s not illegal to have ten girl friends. It’s not illegal to be married to one girl and fuck ten others. It’s not illegal to fuck ten girls in one night. But if in addition to fucking them you actually agree to give them something in return? Make a solemn public vow to take care of them, feed them, listen to their problems, give them a place to live? That’s illegal. Isn’t women’s big thing that we can’t commit to even one girl? This guy is the Superman of commitment. So they chuck him in the joint. What kind of fucked society are we living in?”
“Uh-huh,” I say. I remember one night Shooter and I were out having drinks with my friend Nick DePuy. Nick is smooth chested. He smiles while he’s talking to you. He reads Details. Enough said. The next day Shooter asked me which side of the street Nick drives on. I spoke honestly: Nick is a guy who can’t throw a spiral. Nick likes movies about gladiators. If he were any more gay, he’d have to marry Liza Minnelli. “Yeah, I figured,” was what Shooter said at the time. “But you know what? I really respect that. Because I fucking hate women.” That made me wonder: is success with women a direct result of not liking them? Because Shooter goes through girlfriends the way Richard Gere goes through gerbils. If you like a girl, what happens? You’re nervous with her. Because you’re worried she might not like you as much as you like her. She looks at your nervousness and she doesn’t think, Aw. So sweet. He likes me. She thinks, This guy has no confidence. Why would I be confident with a girl I think is spectacular? I don’t think I’m spectacular. Girls go for the cock-wagging oafs, the guys who speak loudly and carry a big prick, and then six months later it’s “Why is he so selfish? Doesn’t he care about my needs?” Girls, in other words, go for guys like Shooter, which is why he’s my close personal adviser.