I send the files and go out to meet Peoria at Starbucks.
I order a large iced coffee. The kid behind the counter looks like he’s been shipped in from the Bronx to fill up the minimum-wage jobs on the Upper West Side. He didn’t understand what I wanted. Venti? he says. Yes, a large, I say.
I like Starbucks, but I refuse to speak Italian for them. Nothing against Italians—I’m not going to allow a corporation to rename a serving size.
Peoria arrives a few minutes later. He’s wearing a blue Nike tracksuit.
“Just went to the gym,” he says, after I stand up to shake his hand.
He orders a Grande iced coffee and we sit back down.
“Good to see you, man, you’re looking well,” I say.
“Thanks, bro.”
I wait for him to fill the silence in the conversation. But he doesn’t. It’s odd to see him so healthy-looking; I wonder what kind of medication he’s on, and how long it’s going to last. There’s something in his eyes, a layer of air bubbles in an algae-covered pond. Distracted. His upper lip keeps making a quick motion, like a snarl, the meds going to work on his synapses as they battle his true nature and find expression in a twitch. He’s trying hard to seem calm and relaxed and to not just spaz out, right there at the table.
“We miss you at the magazine,” I try.
He exhales.
“Wow, that’s good to hear, man, because that’s why I’m here. I don’t want to get too specific, and I can’t really tell you, but you should know. Because I’m supposed to come back.”
I know he wants to get very specific—he wants to spill.
“Oh right, when?”
From what I’ve been hearing, it doesn’t look good at The Magazine for Peoria. Some of the editors want administrative leave to mean he was basically fired and just hasn’t been told yet, and they weren’t officially informing him because they didn’t want to seem like they would just abandon an employee that quickly if he was perceived to have made a mistake. Gary, representing the smart money, says that “there’s zero chance he’d work at the magazine again.”
“March. I was supposed to come back in March. A year off. But that was too soon, they said. Though now I have something, I have something real big. I’m working on something real big, you know, that might get me back there sooner, if you know what I mean.”
“Right, sure, of course.”
“It’s a big story. I wanted to get the sense from you, as you always seem to know all the gossip, if you think I’d have a chance of coming back earlier if I had a big story.”
I don’t know if I should tell him the truth or even the truth about what the rumors say.
“Is, like, the coast clear?”
“There’s some discussion about you, yeah.”
“They’re talking about me, so that means they haven’t forgotten me. That’s a good sign, I think.”
“No doubt, like Wilde said, they haven’t forgotten about you.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear. I mean, I can tell you, and this is between you and me, I’ve really been working on self-acceptance this summer, and I’ve accepted, you know, that the magazine doesn’t really mean much to me. Can you believe that? I mean, when I was your age, I would have dreamed for the job I had, and then when I got it, I didn’t know how dependent I became on it for my own self-worth. I, like, started to identify with the brand. I started to say things like I love The Magazine. I started to see it as family and as a place where they really, you know, cared about me as an individual, and man, I loved telling people I worked for them—it made me feel like I had some worth. I guess I took it for granted and I didn’t see that if I lost that, if I lost that, I didn’t think it would be that big of a deal, but it was like my whole identity got shattered. My entire identity. So I worked on self-acceptance, and I think now, you know, it’s not a big deal at all. The Magazine isn’t life. But I also realize, you know, how much it means at the same time, you understand what I’m saying? When I had my class—I’m teaching up at Barnard—you know, something really strange happened and my reporting instincts just BAM!, just pounced, and I said, Wow, this is such a blockbuster I can’t even begin to say. I didn’t get much sleep thinking about it, which really, I think, hurt my workout. I almost puked again, but then I had a protein drink and a slushy and that settled my stomach.”
“You’re teaching? That’s great.”
“Yeah, our semester just started. But that’s how I got this story, or at least what I think might be a story. But I really can’t tell you about it right now, I really can’t.”
“Okay, dude, sure, if you don’t want to tell me about it, that’s cool. But you can, like, trust me, you know?”
“Well fine, I’ll tell you.”
For the next fifteen minutes, Peoria launches into a bizarre story that I really don’t believe. I think he might be having some kind of psychotic episode, or breakdown—a cousin of mine had had that once, and, as is strangely the case with psychotics, when the brain breaks down, it seems to break down in the same way for everyone. This cousin believed that evil alien ghosts were trying to do something with his genitalia and that the signals to these extra-dimensional creatures were coming from a place on the far side of Lake Superior. Peoria’s story had whiffs of that, and the other signs seemed to fit: wearing a Nike tracksuit in the afternoon, talking fast, a stream of consciousness that, really, I could barely follow. Something about Babylon, a Mexican food dish, Thailand, and the GI Bill.
I don’t know what to say, he’s acting so strangely. I just want to get out of there. Yes, it sounds like a story, I tell him, but no, you should not approach Delray M. Milius about it.
Maybe I should tell him to forget it, that there’s no rush, that I think he should think about it more. I think that’s the best chance for him surviving at The Magazine.
And that he didn’t have a chance to survive at The Magazine anyway.
But I don’t say that, I don’t, and maybe I miss a chance to save him, but I don’t know that until later.
I go back to the office. Both Nishant and Sanders have responded, asking me to get a few more details, and maybe talk to a couple of historians to back up their respective cases. I’m keeping an eye on the news—all this Katrina stuff looks pretty bad—but it’s a Monday and only a handful of people are in the office and it definitely doesn’t seem like anyone else thinks it’s a big deal.
Tuesday, Sanders runs the story meeting. He says we are going ahead with the Iraq cover, and that the “website can handle the hurricane.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Delray M. Milius runs by my desk, hissing on the phone, “I know I told you not to go when you called on Monday, but we didn’t realize how big this was. We need you to get down there now!”
On Thursday, Sanders runs the story meeting again. Henry the EIC is on vacation.
“Clearly, we’re doing Katrina on the cover for this week.”
During the international story meeting on Friday, Nishant Patel relents.
“Okay, we’ll hold off on our covers and do this hurricane.”
I get a frantic email from Sanders on Friday night, asking me to do some research for the editor’s note.
“I want more details on how LBJ handled that natural disaster in . . . whenever that was.”
I have to fact-check his editor’s note on Saturday. It reads:
I, for one, have given the President the benefit of the doubt. But it’s clear by his failure to realize how catastrophic the events in New Orleans were, how long he delayed before responding, how—and I’m going to use a word that the kids these days use—how clueless our President has been, I am disgusted. How could they not have seen how big this was? Why did it take them 72 hours, until Wednesday, to get into action? I have written before, that the President, a commander of two wars, is, by his very nature, a hero-prophet. After observing his reaction to this h
urricane, I would be forced to admit that perhaps my estimation has proven premature.
All of this means that I forget about Peoria. I won’t hear from him again until he sends me his journal months later.
INTERLUDE
THE PRE-DENOUEMENT
Okay, so the book is getting a little out of hand. I’m aiming to wrap it up at 80,000 words, and we just hit 80,000 words now. The plot is just beginning to materialize in full force, and there are all sorts of other threads and developments that, if I’m going to get to them, would add an extra hundred fifty pages to the book.
I’ll spare you.
We get the joke quickly. I don’t want to be tedious about the whole thing.
Most of the top media folks are a bunch of clueless assholes, egotistical, vainglorious, pompous, insecure, corrupt—you get the picture, right? Not that they’re bad people—they’re not out there running death camps—but it’s just who they are. If it weren’t them, it’d be someone else, right? And if I’d worked at another magazine, they’d be someone else too.
Like my uncle used to say—he’s a priest—about giving homilies at a Catholic mass: Make it three minutes long and mention basketball.
Keep it simple. Grab the reader by the throat. A fact in every sentence.
I’m breaking these rules, and as Peoria tells his students, many of whom I’ve interviewed, I’m trying my best to do it brilliantly.
We’re coming up on the end here—I’d say less than an hour left in the show.
33.
October 2005
A.E. Peoria sits at a table of his favorite Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side, pondering what he should call the individual sitting across from him.
Justina. Justin. Chipotle. He saw a documentary once about Muhammad Ali, and the writer was having that same problem—should I call him Muhammad Ali or Cassius Clay? Lew Alcindor or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? The Artist Formerly Known as Prince and Sean Combs also pose that problem.
Justina is talking, laying it on heavy, dropping the wisdom. Justina is explaining the conversion.
“A belief in war,” Justina says, “is like a belief in God. Comforting until you look too closely at the facts.”
Peoria doesn’t quite know what to say, but he does know he should write this down.
“Science,” Justina says, “science is a religion that can prove its miracles.”
Peoria keeps taking notes.
Ten details.
Thick bowl of pasta, penne Bolognese.
Four slices of garlic bread.
Justina is wearing a white sweater, preppy, for the fall, jeans that don’t quite fit comfortably on her hips.
Black heels.
Dusky light.
Couple next to them glances over.
Table leg is shorter than the other; waiter kneels to slide a piece of cardboard underneath the dwarf leg.
Thinks: Good Justina isn’t wearing a dress.
Elaborate silver jewelry.
Elaborate earrings: big hoops, bumblebee yellow.
Dark olive complexion contrasts against pale creamy sweater.
Chardonnay, lipstick trace on glass.
A.E. Peoria is surprised by the amount of wisdom she has, and wonders if that’s some kind of stereotype—the wise transvestite or shemale, hard-earned packets of knowledge, dropped out, like crumbs on a trail to self-acceptance.
“I’m a miracle of science, Alex,” Justina says. “I’m a miracle of fate.”
It is their second meeting, not quite the third, not yet the meeting when things go wrong.
A.E. Peoria has promised that he will write about Justina only when Justina gives him permission to do so. Justina explains that she is at Barnard College on the GI Bill. But, as she explains to Peoria, there is a debate in Barnard about whether to accept transgendered students who were once male. It is a raging debate—protests, petitions, clauses in the student handbook. So, Justina hasn’t mentioned her unique circumstances to anyone else. She also is fearful that the funding for the GI Bill could be taken away if it became public that it was supplying funds for the education of a transgendered individual.
Peoria knows this, has nodded and sworn the vow of secrecy, but he is already mentally preparing to back out of that promise. He hasn’t quite admitted to himself that he is going to back out of the promise—he hasn’t quite accepted the fact that he’s ready to give Justina the major burn. He is telling himself that he should just be prepared to write about Justina now, or next week, or three weeks, in case he or she changes his mind, or whenever he has enough to tell her story, whenever he can go to his editors at The Magazine and say, I’ve got something for you, an exclusive. It involves an Ivy League school, a transvestite, and a Purple Heart. Can’t beat that for a story.
Justina trusts him, as he is the man who saved his life, and especially since he agreed to the preconditions of the interview. She explains that the school has the most powerful LGBT organization in the country, so that is why she went there, that leaders of the LGBT know of her case and helped grease the paperwork, helped her in, but they are keeping her hidden, a shemale Trojan horse. She worries it could be a case that would have to be tested in court—if your gender has changed since leaving the armed forces, does your status as veteran change? She knows the conservative elements in the nation might be outraged, might say they do not want their taxpayer dollars paying for a transsexual to go to school, even a veteran transsexual with a Combat Infantry Badge. Already, explains Justina, she has lost her family and she does not also want to lose her benefits.
“So like, uh, how did you pay for the operation?”
She smiles.
“There wasn’t much to pay for . . . I came back, you know, and it was gone. It was gone completely, a scar, a hole with a catheter. I was in my bed at Walter Reed for months, for months, and they would come in and say prayers and I would get balloons and flowers and even the president and celebrities would come by. One celebrity, a Hollywood star who had just tried to kill himself on painkillers and heroin, three weeks later he came by Walter Reed. Like he wanted to see how good his life was compared with people who really can complain. I couldn’t even look at him. I was so angry those first months. They started giving me pills, testosterone supplements, to make up for everything that I had lost. But the pills, they made me so angry! I just got angrier and angrier. And then they would cut my hair, they would still pretend I was in the service, still pretend that I was still part of this army, and I knew that wasn’t true anymore. So when they let me out, I wanted to die. I wanted to curl up and not wake up and just let myself die. It couldn’t be done in the hospital—they were watching you, therapy groups, post-traumatic stress discussions, very well regulated on the pills that one could take lethal dosages of.
“They kept a close eye on me, because they say the wound I have is called, in psychiatry, is called a non-threatening terminal wound. Non-threatening, in that, physically, the damage was minimal! Minimal! Terminal in that it could lead to my death by my own hand later on. This is the wound, I have heard soldiers say, they would rather die than have. Do you know what is the best piece of your body to lose?”
“Uh, your hand?”
“No, they say, BK, below the knee, non-dominant leg—that is the best leg to lose if you have to lose something, I have heard them say. Maybe they didn’t know about me when they said it, that at least they still had their penises, at least they did—because if they didn’t, they would rather have died out there, on the field, in the sand. Bleed out. And where am I? What am I supposed to say to that, me with no penis, no testicles, a scar on skin? I wanted to die. I do not think I am being unreasonable . . .”
Peoria hasn’t touched his pasta, and Justina hasn’t really made headway on her grilled chicken salad. She’s ordering like a girl, Peoria thinks, ordering a salad for a main course at dinner.
; “At Walter Reed, there were reading groups. Discussion groups. A reading group, one of the books we were given was Born on the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic. Have you ever read this book? It is a powerful, disturbing book—it gives lie to everything that we fought for in Vietnam, in Iraq, in most wars. My fellow soldiers, they couldn’t see it like that. They believed the book was interesting because it showed how bad VA care used to be, compared with what it is now. They found the positive message in the book—only in the modern-day American volunteer Army could you have soldiers find a positive message in that book, even the disfigured soldiers, soldiers with nine reconstructive operations on the face, soldiers whose arms have been sheared off at the shoulder, who cannot move anything below the Adam’s apple, only among these soldiers could you have someone say, ‘Born on the Fourth of July is a book about the improvement in health care.’”
“I guess my question is, you didn’t think that the book was about improvements in health care? Sorry, I’ve like, only seen the movie, a long time ago.”
“No, it is not about health care. I found the book to be about transformation. Kovic’s trauma transforms him from the soldier, born on the Fourth of July, the patriot, to an influential antiwar activist. It is about how this spirit of resistance was in him the entire time but it was not until he was shot, twice, until he lost the movement in his legs, that he realized that the surface, the patriot, was not who he really was—or no, I should say that he was always a patriot, it is just that his expression of patriotism did not fully form until the trauma. What was hidden inside him was a true patriot, his true self, a self that was prepared to go out and take criticism for revealing the government’s lies. We are beyond that, we are beyond that, don’t you see? We have to know the government lies, there is no shocking us—every soldier, or most, with a brain, know on some level that the government lies. So the transformation in this war, well, it is very hard to be the same—the veteran who comes back and says ‘I was lied to’ is greeted with a shrug—well, yes, of course you were, didn’t you see Oliver Stone’s film with Tom Cruise in it?”
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