The Last Magazine

by Michael Hastings

  By the end of the month, it’s clear Dean’s candidacy is making an impact—he starts speaking out against the war in Iraq, and a lot of people, it turns out, are willing to listen. The New Republic puts him on the cover, and they quote my story from the magazine’s website. Then, the political correspondents at the magazine realize they’d better get on this story, so they decide to put Howard Dean on the cover. Brand X, our main competitor, puts him on the cover the same week we do.

  In December, months after Nishant runs his “How to Win the Peace” story, Sanders Berman calls me into his office, on the other side of the building.

  “The Vietnam syndrome, Hastings,” he says.

  “Yes, Sanders?”

  “Don’t repeat what I’m going to tell you, but that story we ran—‘How to Win the Peace’—that’s classic Vietnam syndrome thinking. It’s bet-hedging, Hastings—Patel is hedging his bets, already. That was the problem with Vietnam—everyone in the news business started hedging their bets at the first sign of trouble,” he says.

  “We have to give Rumsfeld the benefit of the doubt, we have to give the president the benefit of the doubt, we have to give our military the benefit of the doubt—a few months into this thing and already we’re throwing them to the wolves.”

  “Yes, it seems like there is a souring,” I say.

  “So we haven’t captured Saddam? Doesn’t matter. These things take time. Capturing Saddam wouldn’t make a real difference anyway, tactically, strategically, or psychologically speaking. Not a lick of difference. I spoke to Henry about this, and we agreed to do a story—‘Don’t Let Vietnam Happen to Us Again.’

  “My story was supposed to be on the cover this week. But do you know who is going to be there instead? Howard Dean! Howard Dean, a governor from Vermont—Howard Dean, the so-called antiwar candidate. The second time we’ll have put him on the cover. He’s calling Iraq ‘Vietnam,’ and we’re putting him on the cover and doing a profile of him! And how does the profile begin? It begins with him crying because he lost his brother in Vietnam. He doesn’t have the distance to understand what Vietnam was about. To understand what war is about. He’s just playing to people who don’t get why we need to make the sacrifices. And my story, ‘Don’t Let Vietnam Happen to Us Again’? One page, I’m getting one page, while Dean is getting fifteen, with pictures. It’s bad, it’s bad news for me and our country, don’t you think?

  “Our problem with Vietnam was our high expectations. We can’t expect our leaders, in a time of war, to meet these expectations. We need to respect them more than that. That’s why Patel’s story really is aggravating—just weeks after the invasion—”

  “Months, I think,” I say.

  “And he’s holding the bar so high? We beat Saddam, we beat a horrible, disgusting, despicable regime, and there are a few riots and we’re supposed to start saying it might not have been the wisest move. No way,” he says. “Let me tell you this: it’s a quote from Winston Churchill. Churchill.”

  Sanders Berman stands up in his office, walks back and forth, and looks out the window over Central Park, a classic pose.

  “He carried on his shoulders a horrible burden, a horrible burden—he’s like Bush in that way, a war leader. I’ve always been fascinated by war leaders. What great decisions they have to make. The burden they carry, the price they pay. Don’t go wobbly! Nineteen forty-one, mid-Atlantic, the two boats meet in the dark. Roosevelt’s ship blew a horn thrice. The response from Churchill’s vessel: a magnificent ray of light from a single lamp, held for fifteen seconds. Destroyers, medium-class, circled the two ships, keeping an eye out for German U-boats—perhaps the Nazis had cracked their code? Perhaps they knew that these two great leaders would be meeting at dusk, mist curling up from the ten-foot swells. Roosevelt, huddled over in his wheelchair, covered in a shawl knitted by Eleanor. Churchill, five drinks into the evening. Their aides stand off to the side, trying not to get seasick—neither Winston nor Franklin got seasick. Franklin, a sailor from his younger days, Winston, permanently drunk. Didn’t really make a difference if the floor dipped to the right and left—a hard drinker is always prepared for the sea. . . .”

  A knock on Sanders Berman’s door.

  I turn to see who it is, but even before I get halfway around, I can feel a presence, feline, predatory. Delray M. Milius’s voice follows.

  “Umm, Sanders, can I interrupt you for a moment?”

  “Sure, Milius, what’s the daisies?”

  “Breaking news, Sanders,” he says, smiling. “We captured Saddam.”

  Sanders leans back in his chair. A look of intensity, betraying his casual southernness, flashes to his eyes.

  “Does Henry know?”

  “Not yet, I don’t think.”

  Sanders picks up the phone and dials Henry’s extension.

  “Henry, it’s Sanders. We got Saddam.”

  Delray M. Milius moves up from the door, and with the contempt of a Prada clerk, seems to look down at me in my chair. I’m moving in on his turf.

  “We have to bump Dean. This changes everything about the war. Tactically, strategically, philosophically. I can write it. We were about to fall into the Vietnam syndrome, you know? But now we’ve really won the war.”

  Howard Dean gets bumped. Sanders Berman gets to write his story—“How Saddam’s Capture Changes Everything.” Without a leader, the dead-enders will soon reach the dead end.

  19.

  A.E. Peoria Goes on Holiday

  After the flight attendants tell you where the exits are and how the oxygen masks drop down, most airlines don’t play videos about why it’s bad to sleep with twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, thinks magazine journalist A.E. Peoria. But Thai Airways is a little different, due to its clientele, and sure enough, before takeoff from Dubai to Bangkok, there is a seven-minute public service video that reminds him of his destination.

  A red curtain in a back alley opens, a naked leg on a bed, hookah smoke hovering, a seductive haze. The camera sneaks in, creeps into the bedroom, and there is this beautiful young girl lying on the bed, wide eyes, and instantly Peoria thinks, that girl is fucking hot. The director ruins the erotic moment by flashing 14 ans, right there, a chyron at the bottom of the screen to trigger what Peoria guesses is supposed to be a response of shame or revulsion, or self-flagellation. The video does the same trick, again and again, showing these pre-teens made up to look like postteens in very seductive settings, high production values in the brothels creating a romantic sleaziness. 12 ans, 15 ans, 17 ans, and in small writing at the bottom, there is a message, in French, about who paid for the video, the Thai and French tourism boards, with a grant from Interpol’s anti-human-trafficking division.

  It was stupid of them to let a Frenchman produce that kind of video—this is no moment for edginess. But if I was on my way to Thailand to sleep with fourteen-year-old girls, Peoria thinks, would this public service announcement stop me? Or was it just an FYI to the regular old sex tourists—for your information, be careful that you could accidentally sleep with a fourteen-year-old, even if you’re aiming for eighteen? Or, if you wanted to pretend it was an accident, now you have no excuse, because you were warned that a lot of the girls on the street—over two hundred thousand of them in Thailand alone, according to a statistic at the end of the video—are selling themselves.

  Seven hours later, after landing and checking into a hotel, Peoria remembers the video, rather uncomfortably. He is staring at what looks like a children’s playroom, a romper room. He is looking through a Plexiglas window of the kind used at a supersize McDonald’s or a Burger King to separate the toddlers’ play area from the restaurant. There is a carpeted floor with no sharp edges. All it’s missing are a trampoline and a container full of colored balls. The room has levels of large carpeted steps, with spaceship-like oval chairs and a half-dozen oversize fuzzy building blocks to sit on.

  Sitting, sprawlin
g, in positions from prim to proper to sultry, legs crossed or uncrossed, vectors of narrow panty lines, thirty-five young Thai women, peasant dark to Victorian pale, stare out at the darker room where Peoria sits, deciding.

  Can they see me? Are they looking? Does it matter?

  He had told himself, upon arrival, that he was going to resist. See the temples, walk the famous streets of Patpong, get a tuk-tuk ride and a cheap silk suit, maybe a massage. Research. At the most, he’d get a blow job. Then technically, he could say that, like great American leaders before him (never wanting to rule out future career options, such as one in the legislature), he had never had sex with a prostitute, per se, and technically, he wouldn’t be lying. He didn’t think the press corps would push him on this point—there wouldn’t be specificity in the question, words like “blow job” or “hand job” or “happy ending” would not be used. “Sex act,” perhaps. Have you ever had a sex act with a prostitute? A question to laugh off, not worth answering. In a scenario that was admittedly more realistic, he doubted that any girl he would date would ever dig that deeply on the subject. It was a perfectly natural question, he believes, for a girl to ask if he’d ever slept with a hooker. His denial then would be honest and pure and he wouldn’t be lying—blow jobs didn’t count.

  If only it would have stopped at the blow job.

  From a hash-and-booze daze, his eyes focus on a white pin with a red number that says 72 hanging off the chest of one of the Thai women.

  He’s made it this far in life, thirty-four years of putting up the boundaries, of never breaking his own rule. Now he finds himself (because he’s never gone to these places, he’s only found himself there) telling a man that he’s chosen 72.

  Over the intercom, piped into the playroom, the manager says 72.

  “Handsome man, so handsome,” 72 says.

  She takes his hand and they get into an elevator, up two floors. They are greeted by a smaller Thai woman, a maid with darker skin and two towels.

  “So handsome,” the maid says, handing 72 a key.

  The key is for door number 11, three down the hallway on the left. Peoria feels like he is in some kind of ’80s health club, catching a smell similar to that of a newly opened container of blue racquetballs.

  There is a Jacuzzi bathtub and a shower and a roll futon with clean sheets, raised two or three feet off the floor.

  72 takes her clothes off and turns on the water in the bathtub.

  Peoria takes his clothes off.

  72 fiddles with the temperatures. She asks a few questions in English.

  “You here for fun?” 72 asks.

  “No, business,” Peoria says.

  “What job you do?”

  “I’m a journalist, a reporter, a writer,” he says, and he pretends to write in the air.

  “A writer?”

  “Yes, for a magazine,” he says, pretending to open a magazine.

  “Oh, magazine,” she repeats.

  “Time magazine,” he says.

  She points to the bath. He doesn’t know what she’s asking.

  “Go in.”

  He steps in, and she unhooks the showerhead and starts to spray him down, scrubbing him with soap—she scrubs parts of his body that have never been scrubbed so clean since childhood; she starts scrubbing his testicles, she scrubs his ass. She puts her hand right up there with soap and his rectum tingles as she scrubs away at it. She starts to scrub herself, too, and whenever she touches her shaved vagina, she smiles and giggles and says, “Don’t look, don’t look.”

  She hands him a towel to dry off. He lies down on the futon. She straddles him and starts to rub his shoulders.

  She reaches, with great dexterity, into a small plastic water-resistant cabinet, like the kind you get at the Container Store, or whatever the Bangkok equivalent would be. She pulls out a Durex Ultra Thin condom in a yellow wrapper. She starts to jerk his penis, and he becomes hard. She puts the condom in her mouth, and, with the same kind of dexterity, 72 slips her mouth onto his penis, unrolling the condom skillfully as she goes.

  Peoria has thoughts of safe sex—if her saliva is on the condom, on the inside of the condom, would that contaminate it? Could he get HIV/AIDs from that?

  He closes his eyes and remembers what his doctor friend told him the last time he got a blow job from a prostitute in Mexico. He called the doctor upon returning home and asked: Should I get tested?

  “She use a condom to blow you?”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “Did it look like she had any sores or anything on her mouth?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You’re probably good on herpes. You didn’t go down on her, did you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “The rate of HIV in Mexico,” his friend said, looking up the information online at the CIA World Factbook, “is about one in three hundred fifty thousand. The at-risk populations are gay men and intravenous drug users. I’d consider prostitutes at risk too. No track marks?”

  “No track marks.”

  “Okay. And you didn’t have any cuts or anything on your dick, did you?”

  “Fuck, I don’t think so.”

  “Chafing?”

  “A little chafing, but I think that came from later, after showering too much and watching porn in the hotel.”

  “Okay. Now, if you were having sex with her, and she was having a full-blown HIV outbreak—just vaginal sex—if you were having vaginal sex with her, the chance of you, a heterosexual male, getting HIV would only be at like five percent. That’s if she was all-out HIVing it. And since you weren’t the one giving the blow job, it’s not like you’re ingesting any semen or anything. Were you? You can be honest.”

  “No, dude. Fuck you.”

  “So you’re probably good to go.”

  Now, as number 72 lowers herself down on his penis, he opens his eyes and grabs her waist to stop her. He runs the calculations in his head. Thailand, he’d read, had done a surprisingly good job protecting its citizens from HIV—you want to protect your natural resources—and the rate of infection of females was one in one hundred thousand.

  “Wait, wait,” he says.

  72 stops, half submerged.

  “Do you do drugs, needles,” he says, tapping his inner arms along the veins.

  “No way, man,” she says. He can tell he’s almost ruined the mood.

  “And you’re clean,” he asks her.

  “Very clean! We just took bath. You have very nice . . .”

  She looks at his face, searching for a feature to compliment—whether the size of his dick or his nose or his smile.

  “Hair on your eyes,” she says, running her finger along his eyebrows.

  “Eyebrows?”

  “Very handsome eyebrows.”

  And she lowers herself the rest of the way and starts to bounce up and down, move around, and it feels pretty good, Peoria admits. He thinks of his girlfriend back home, and knowing that it has been three weeks since the last time he spoke to her and that he wondered if they were actually going out anymore, and that as the days go on, he keeps getting email messages that vary wildly in length, from two paragraphs to three thousand words, explaining all the reasons why he should break up with her: that she waited for him patiently even after he almost got killed, what a stress that was for her, and rather than go straight back to New York for his break, he decided to go to Thailand for a month. To Thailand—and so he should now consider himself to be broken up with her, unless he has decided otherwise. And Peoria knows how to respond—he knows what he needs to write back to save the relationship with the girl he gave six orgasms to, but he doesn’t want to say it, he doesn’t want to say it.

  And as he starts to fuck 72, or 72 starts to fuck him, he realizes it doesn’t matter if he just blows his load now, or ten minutes from now,
or forty-five minutes from now; there is no pressure to perform sexually, and if 72 judges him, she will judge silently, or at least in a language he doesn’t understand, and at least pretend to be satisfied—her satisfaction comes from the baht, his from the orgasm. What liberty! So he doesn’t wait to come. In fact, with health and safety reasons lingering in the back of his head, he wants to get it over with quickly.

  “Ah ah aha . . .”

  She pops up. His cum drips back down the condom, a gooey ring around his pubic hair.

  She hands him a piece of tissue paper. He plucks the condom off his cock, handling it like a dirty diaper covered in seaweed, and jumps up, his penis withdrawn in its foreskin. He drops the dead condom in a wastebasket by the door.

  72 grabs a pack of Marlboro Lights and hands him one.

  They smoke in tandem.

  “Where are you from?” she asks.

  “New York, but I haven’t been home in a while.”

  Should he tell her? Yes, he has to. As he starts to talk, he knows he can’t blame it on the unmedicated CDD. Mentally ill or not, he would have talked. He sees why men open up to whores, why they feel the need to share the dark and deep secrets, to water the ego, to repeat, I am a man and paying for sex will not change that. The desire to open up, to talk, to puff himself up, as well as his accomplishments, is irresistible. Peoria’s view on prostitutes until now has been only a matter of literature and the tabloids—he has always been surprised how call girls manage to get so much out of men, enough for $100,000 paydays. But he realizes now that they didn’t even need to try to learn the secrets; the men would start divulging state secrets and professional gossip as naturally as they would orgasm and roll over—because the talk was part of the process, part of the sex act, as certain as a lake level rises after a storm.

  “Baghdad, I’ve spent the last few months in Baghdad,” he says.

  She doesn’t understand.

  “Iraq, you know, the war.”

  She looks at him, smiling.

  “No, no, the war, you know? Boom, boom, pop-pop, pop, shooting, fighting, you know, the war?”