Love Monkey

by Kyle Smith

  “I hope it wasn’t his writing foot,” Irv says.

  “So he’s going to do a column when he gets back,” Max says. “Did you page Eli again?” he asks Hyman Katz.

  “I paged him a hundred and six times,” Hyman Katz says.

  “Page him again,” Max says.

  Hoff from rewrite creeps up and nudges Max, “Hey, boss. Does this mean we get free pizza?”

  Stacks of pizza boxes sometimes appear in the newsroom—hack bribery—only during selected national disasters.

  “Hyman Katz,” Max says. “Call Patsy’s. Get half a dozen pies.”

  A cheer seems inappropriate at the moment but everyone looks relieved.

  Something snaps Max out of it, and he starts lobbing commands in every direction. “Hoff, you’re doing the scene at the trade center, the scene in D.C., and victims’ families’ reax. Rita, international reax, the airports, the FAA, the scene in Pennsylvania. Burkey, the whodunit, the political angle, what Bush’s going to do. Who’s that leave?”

  “I could pitch in,” I say.

  “Tom,” he says. “Your pages are all locked down?”

  I nod.

  “Good. Do a ticktock. Of the whole day.”

  I go to my desk and start checking the wires, pulling exact times everything happened for a minute-by-minute rundown of all the events. Like the newsman I used to be.

  The Toad limps over.

  “We haven’t heard from Eli yet,” he says.

  “I know,” I say.

  “We need somebody to be, uh…”

  “To be?”

  “Prepared,” he says. “Pull clips.”

  “Clips on Eli?” I say.

  “You know,” he says.

  “Should I make some calls, or…”

  “Not,” says the Toad, “just yet.”

  “How, uh, long?”

  “Page lead,” says the Toad.

  “Page lead? Twelve? That’s it?” I say.

  I give him a look but he shakes his head and says, “I know.” Then he does the Quasimodo shuffle back to the Desk.

  Twelve inches. A sidebar. Any other day, a Tabloid reporter killed in the line of duty is page one in our paper, and probably every other paper in town too.

  So I call the library and get the clips. I’ve written a lot of obituaries. I’ve written obits on people who weren’t even dead, just to be sure. (“No obit is ever wasted,” the Toad likes to say.) My Bob Hope obit has been ready to go for five years.

  I’ve never written an obit of someone I know. And usually when you do an obit, you have to get reax. That means one of the hack’s grimmer duties: calling the wife, the mom, the cousin, the next-door neighbor, the coworkers, and telling them, as softly as you can, that you’re preparing a “tribute.” You don’t say obit. You say a “story in his honor. Something to remember him by” and wouldn’t they like to say a few words about what the loved one meant to them? They never refuse. They sniffle, they catch their breath, they talk.

  The library brings me Eli’s bylines, hundreds of them, years of work. But they don’t even fill the shoe box that contains fifteen little four-by-six manila envelopes stuffed with tattered newspaper stories. What to say about the author of such modern prose classics as “STRAPHANGERS RESIST MTA FARE HIKE” and “HIZZONER SEEKS ALBANY ALLIANCE IN BOARD OF ED BATTLE”? All of it, for the present purpose, junk. There isn’t a clip headlined “ELI PROBE REVEALS SECRET LONGINGS, PROFOUNDEST JOYS.” I realize I can’t remember Eli’s sister’s name. Donna? Dina?

  I’m wrestling with the lead when the Toad yells over, pressing a phone receiver to his chest. “Tom,” he says. “I got Eli, he claims he’s not dead. He’s got stuff to dump.”

  “Let’s do it,” I say. My phone goes.

  “Tom,” says a voice. “Christ, it took me half the day to find a phone that works down here. What was your lead?”

  “Huh?” I say.

  “Your lead. Read me your lead.”

  “ ‘Amid the horror of yesterday’s attacks, award-winning Tabloid reporter Eli Knecht sacrificed his life on a hero’s errand when he was caught in the World Trade Center collapse after racing to the scene and filing the earliest reports from the catastrophe.’ ”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. ‘Award-winning’?” he says. “Who says I got awards?”

  “Like someone’s going to call up and sue me for being too nice?”

  “My obit’s going to have lies in it?”

  “Why should it be any different from any other story that ever had your name in it? I also said you had a big schlong.”

  “Plus I didn’t file any reports either,” he says. “Fucking cell phones are out.”

  “None of the other reporters is going to call you a liar if you’re dead,” I say. “We’re talking posthumous Pulitzer here. Thought I’d do something nice for Diane.”

  “Diane? Debbie!”

  And I’m back in the rewrite groove: phone a weird appendage jammed between the shoulder and the ear, debriefing hacks in the field, discovering that I can still type as fast as a fast-talking reporter can talk. Without a word, the Toad takes a seat at the computer next to me and pitches in on rewrite. Instead of pressing the phone between his shoulder and ear, the look that says hard-boiled, he puts on a goofy little phone headset that makes him look like a girl telemarketer from Phoenix. Our chubby fingers slam the keys together, making mad music of the day.

  “Remember the view up there?” he says.

  “Yeah.”

  “You could see the Statue of Liberty,” he says. “And all the bridges. At night they looked like strings of jewels.”

  “It made you remember why you moved to New York in the first place.”

  We’re all hanging around the Desk watching CNN at about seven when Eli shows up. Rollo hobbles in right behind him. Our word warriors, returned intact in all their inky glory. Everyone bursts into applause. Momentarily trapped in our sincerity.

  “Pots of coffee,” Rollo says. “Instantly.”

  We all stand around looking at each other. No one does anything. Someone coughs.

  “Good on them,” Rollo says, the shoulder pads of his charcoal pinstripe looking deflated. “Round one. Caught with our knickers down, that’s one up the arse. All fine. Knock us down. End of overture. Curtain up. Act one, scene one. Our story begins. Civilization and savagery. Ultimate confrontation, good versus evil, apocalypse now. Our shout now. We’ll roast ’em to a turn. And the toll? How many’d they get?”

  “Maybe ten thousand,” Hyman Katz says.

  “Only two things left to do, then,” Rollo says, counting on his thumb and forefinger. “Lock, and load.”

  Eli brushes some dust off his leather jacket. He looks at all of us and shakes his head like a man who has weathered a personal insult. “Can you believe those motherfuckers?” he says.

  Everyone works past eleven, when the Metro edition comes up, and most of rewrite goes when Max finally checks out at one A.M., the last deadline for the Late City Final. The other papers are late coming in, though, and if they have anything important we don’t know about, we can steal it and make last-minute changes by stopping the press run until three A.M. There’s really no need for anyone but the Toad to wait that long since he’s Night Desk, but a few stalwarts buzz around anyway, playing with our shard of history. Someone has turned down the volume on the bank of TVs and the copykid who is supposed to answer the phone has put his head down on his desk.

  I hadn’t realized Eli was still here, but he comes over to take me aside for a word.

  “If anyone was going to write my obit,” he says, “I would have picked you.”

  “Yeah?” I say.

  “Hoff would have spelled my name wrong,” he says.

  “Thanks, Ignatz.”

  “Good night, Pappy.”

  Wednesday, September 12

  And my first thought when I wake up in the morning is, Buildings crashing. Lethal explosions. Fire. Devastation. Horror.

  My second t
hought is, Cool. I’m not thinking about her.

  I’m not due in until three this afternoon. Today’s like an evil snow day. Everyone on the Upper West Side has the day off. Even the bark and snarl of the streets has been tranquilized: most of the bridges and tunnels are closed. Nobody wants to come in anyway. At last, the day has come when you start to understand the point of New Jersey. There are hardly any cabs on the street: cabdrivers are often Muslims. Driving a cab in this town is dangerous on a good day.

  Haven’t heard from Julia. At least she must be safe: she’s in a third-world country where there isn’t much to blow up. That’s okay. There’s no reason for her to call me. There was no reason for me to have been downtown. I call Liesl. No answer. Weird. Couldn’t get hold of her yesterday either. Call Bran. Maybe I’ll tell her about how I’ve been thinking about her. What with everything that’s happened. Have I? Well, sort of. I mean, the mere fact that I’ve been thinking about telling her I’ve been thinking about her must count for something.

  I get her on her cell.

  “Bran,” I say.

  “I can’t talk,” she says. “I’m in Boston.”

  “People talk in Boston,” I say.

  “Haven’t you been keeping up with current events?” she says. “I’m on a story.”

  Boston: where two of the planes took off. Oh. I’m an idiot.

  “About the airport?” I say.

  “Yeah!” she says. “I gotta go, all right?”

  And she does.

  So I call Katie. If circumstances warrant, I could just dump my Bran speech on her.

  “Are you all right?” she says, sounding genuinely worried.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “I’ve been thinking about you.”

  “Me too,” she says.

  “Were you down there?” I say.

  “Please, I was three blocks away!” she says. “You know where my law school is.”

  “So was your building damaged?”

  “It’s inaccessible,” she says. “What am I going to do?”

  “You’ll have some time off,” I say. “Might as well make the most of it.”

  “I want to go back to class,” she says.

  “I thought you hated your classes,” I say.

  “I do. That’s why I want to get them over with.”

  “So what are you doing today?” I say.

  “I’ve got to work on this paper,” she says. “It’s due next week.”

  “You would think at a time like this people wouldn’t be so interested in working obsessively,” I say.

  “I’m not obsessed,” she says. “I’m just looking to catch up.”

  Sigh. Is everyone in New York thinking this way? Major terrorist attack = a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for extra credit?

  I join the slow-moving throngs looking for newspapers on Broadway. A sign of the times: there is no sign of the Times. Everyone wants printed validation of the absurd Jerry Bruckheimerness of what we watched yesterday. Every newsstand has hand-lettered SOLD OUT OF signs, with lists of the names of pretty much every paper. Even the Amsterdam News. People are saying “Please” and “Thank you” and “Have a good day” to the Arab news vendors. Poor things, everyone thinks. Not their fault. Hope they don’t get blamed.

  I check a dozen newsstands but all they have is magazines, their covers now looking as up to date as the Edsel. Heading back home at West End and Eighty-third, I see a blue Times delivery truck heading north. On the southeast corner there is a freshly filled metal Times box. “U.S. ATTACKED,” in Tabloid-sized headlines. Events have raced past hyperbole, lapped it. I feed the box three quarters.

  Mike invites me over for lunch and commiseration. Over our sandwiches we watch CNN. Odd gurgling noises emerge from the bathroom. Not the baby. The mother.

  “Kuh-wee! Kuh-wee!” comes the sound of Karin dunking the baby.

  “Not the same world as it was yesterday, is it?” says Mike. “At some point, you start to get the idea that no one likes us.”

  “Living in New York,” I say, “you really have to learn to love having your heart broken.”

  Karin returns, bearing an overswaddled child. “Bubbie! Aw, blubblub-blub!” The kid is going to develop brilliantly. She’ll be speaking fluent gibberish at fourteen months.

  “Kind of a compliment, though, isn’t it?” Mike says. “They hate us the most. Like when your ex-girlfriend starts calling you in the middle of the night just to hang up on you. It drives you nuts, but then you brag about it to everyone.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “We’re number one.”

  Karin has a different take. “Shooo, shooo, shoooo. Ah-dubbadubba-dubba. Pish, pish. Joopie? Joopie?”

  This woman has an MBA. One baby and she’s Jar Jar Binks.

  “Which reminds me,” he says. “I got an e-mail from Nina.”

  “Really?”

  Nina was Mike’s college girlfriend. All four years, nonstop. The guy majored and minored in nooky. Sometimes the two of them would show up red faced and smirky at lunch. On a week day.

  “She said she was thinking about me when she watched the news,” Mike says.

  “You didn’t tell me that,” says Karin, rejoining the adult world.

  “When was the last time you heard from her?” I say. I haven’t heard from Maggie or Besty or anyone else I ever used to date.

  “Couple of years,” he says. “She has a baby now. Another one on the way.”

  This attack, it’s like a *69 for the whole city. Quick: redial your last conquest.

  “You heard from her two years ago?” says Karin. “We’ve been married for four years.”

  “I always liked Nina,” I say.

  “I know!” says Mike. Winkity-wink.

  “What was so great about her?” Karin sniffs.

  “Of course I like you better,” I say.

  She beams.

  I’m back on the street when my cell phone bleats.

  I figure it’s Julia, desperately worried about me.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Oh my God,” Liesl says. “Do you be lieve this?”

  “I called you at work all day yesterday,” I say.

  “I know, our whole switchboard went down.”

  “Did you go home right afterward?”

  “Well, I had some pleadings to copyedit,” she says.

  “So you worked a full day after the biggest terrorist attack in U.S. history?” I say.

  “Didn’t you?”

  “I’m a journalist!”

  “Well,” she says. “Not really.”

  It’s the unintentional insults that hurt the most.

  “Of course I am. I work at a newspaper.”

  “But. Don’t you do the fluff?” she says.

  “I—,” Well, yes. Ours is a navel-gazing profession and I’m the lint. “I did my part, though,” I say, grouchily.

  Then I remember something from when I covered the story the first time around.

  “Didn’t your firm represent the guys who bombed the trade center in ninety-three?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Our lawyers actually know a lot about all this from the guys who got convicted,” she says. “Apparently they wouldn’t stop bragging about the details. They just talked about all kinds of stuff. Which obviously I can’t discuss.”

  “Attorney-client privilege?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I guess there are just boxes full of transcripts.”

  “You weren’t home last night, were you?” I say. “I called a few times. You okay?”

  “After work I went down to see if I could give blood,” she says. “They didn’t need it. And I ran around trying to find someplace I could volunteer.”

  “You sound shaken up,” I say.

  “Where were you?”

  “I had jury duty,” I say. “So I was downtown. Saw the whole thing.” I have to learn how to say this without sounding like I’m proud of it.

  “Oh my God—are you hurt?”

  “Wasn’t that close. I
was on Chambers Street.”

  “When do you think they’ll start finding survivors?” she says.

  “Liesl,” I say. “There aren’t going to be any survivors.”

  “There have to be,” she says. “I’m going down there tomorrow.”

  “I don’t think they’ll actually let you, y’know, sift through the rub-ble. They have unionized emergency workers to do that. And they’re getting the biggest overtime bonanza of their lives.”

  “How can you say such a thing?” she says. “I’m going down there tomorrow.”

  “Be careful,” I say.

  We hang up.

  At work I boot up my computer and am greeted with one of those magical little fairy-dust whooshy sounds.

  The Internet user EMonahan582 has sent you an instant message. Do you accept?

  EMonahan582: Tom? It’s Betsy

  Manboy33: Hey, Besty! Was just thinking about you

  EMonahan582: Can u believe this???

  Manboy33: I was downtown. Saw the whole thing

  EMonahan582: get out! you all right?

  Manboy33: Yeah. Stunned I guess

  Manboy33: Havent seen you in so long

  EMonahan582: i know just been so busy

  Manboy33: What’s new with you? Get married or anything lately??

  EMonahan582: actually…

  Manboy33: What?

  EMonahan582: Vince and i got married a couple of months ago

  Manboy33: wow

  EMonahan582: felt funny about inviting you

  Manboy33: thats okay

  EMonahan582: it was a really small ceremony

  Manboy33: you could have just told me though

  EMonahan582: i know:-(

  Manboy33: ….

  EMonahan582: mad at me?

  Manboy33: no…

  Manboy33: i gotta go

  EMonahan582: call me sometime?

  Manboy33: ok bye

  Sunday, September 16

  Everyone in the city has been talking about This for five days. That’s what we call it: This. “This is going to change everything.” “I wonder if This will make the economy tank.” “Do you think they’re planning more of This?” I have spent the previous few days doing the following: Going to work. Hanging out at Mike’s. Ordering in food. Listening to the new Dylan CD (which adds another classic Juliacentric line to the Dylanguage: “Gonna look at you till my eyes go blind”). And, occasionally, turning on the news. Which I can only handle in ten-minute disaster bites.