The Last Magazine

by Michael Hastings

  As a young man growing up, photos in magazines were enough to get him off. First, publications like Playboy were good enough, but then he upgraded to Penthouse; the open vaginal and anal shots of Penthouse, still done respectfully, were the next level. Then, he discovered Hustler, and his masturbatorial bar was set even higher—Hustler, now that was explicit, threesomes, full penetration, dripping cum shots, and a new and enticing category called Barely Legal, which forever altered the way he viewed young female teenagers running cash registers at ice cream stands and in grocery stores and Japanese school uniforms and cheerleading outfits.

  When he got his own apartment out of college, in the ’90s, he was able to own his first VHS player and visit his first sex shops in the city, on 33rd Street: a candy store, all the different racks of various interests for sale, and all he had to do was duck in and buy the videotapes to see those still images that had worked for him for so long come to life. The sheer freedom of being able to rewind and fast-forward and pause, with no worries of parents or siblings ruining his privacy. That’s freedom. He never bought another magazine again.

  The Internet proved to be a disruptive force for self-abuse. With the Internet, the sheer range of digital images did the job at first—he was able to stop watching videos on the VHS and start watching, on his computer, acts that he had read about but never seen—women sucking off farm animals, women urinating on the faces of other women, women urinating on the faces of other men, men urinating in clear streams into the open mouths of women, defecating even, strapped and bound with metal and leather contraptions, penetrated with massive objects like baseball bats and giant rubber dildos, a foot in diameter, or shaken soda cans stuffed in rectal canals, and on and on. These images—who was putting them out there? Where was it all coming from? And what an amazing thing it was, all of this that previously one would have had to order via the U.S. Postal Service from a European country, now all available thanks to the spread of dial-up connections and 32-bit modems.

  The Internet, he knows, had been developed by DARPA at the Defense Department, for war, but sex quickly took over as the primary innovator, from the days of the first chat rooms. Now, with DSL and cable connections and streaming video feeds, digital images of the most grotesque and enticing kind no longer worked to get Peoria off. He had to see the movement, he needed the image to be flashing at 32 frames a second, in a little box on his screen, uninterrupted—watching porn on a slow connection didn’t even do it, he needed a high-speed connection or he just wasn’t into it.

  He was not terribly concerned about the moral implications until June 2002, when he’d gotten the fastest speed available and clicked on a link that said “vomit porn,” and at that moment he had a crisis of faith, or the closest thing one who does not believe in anything can have to a crisis of faith.

  A white girl, wearing a blue skiers’ tuque with an embroidered golden star, had been kneeling down in front of a crowd and giving head to a black male of significant perpendicular length. Using the now ancient deep-throating technique, she worked the man’s cock avidly, eyes watering, his large hands clasped around her ears, occasionally pulling out to the left or right to make a popping sound against the suction on her cheek. At minute 2:33 into the clip, the standard degradation went off course; at first, the male performer responded as if it were still part of the performance, but then she ripped his hands away and started to crawl away, a desperate move, as if she were a child with motion sickness in the back of the car trying to unroll the window, or a coed searching for a bathroom stall after expecting to come into the restroom only to touch up her makeup. She started to puke, a yellow and a watery flow, all over the ground, and the camera first zoomed in on her face as she vomited, and then the camera pulled back to get the reaction of the cheering crowd and the still-hard penis of the black performer, and then the video ended, and A.E. Peoria himself felt sick, he felt ill, and wondered if maybe he shouldn’t be watching this stuff, maybe it was destroying his soul, if there was such a thing.

  That didn’t last long.

  He thinks of it now because he’d had the same first reaction to the transsexual performers: that something was somehow unholy or desperately sick in the acts that were being performed, that it was somehow disturbing to his subconscious that the women being fucked in the ass used to be men. But as he watched, he instinctively started to touch himself, and he started to hold the images in his head of Thailand, enhancing a sexual experience that he had avoided masturbating to at all costs—he was straight after all, it was his parents who were gay—but the transsexual porn brought these memories back, and he no longer felt revulsion, and in fact, started to get off on the idea that the man fucking the woman was actually fucking a man, a dirty little secret that wasn’t a secret but added a level of fantasy to the moving video clips, a level of fantasy that his own memories augmented.

  After one week of research, he started to worry: In the same way that he was never able to go back to magazine porn after the Internet had evolved, would he ever be able to have normal sex again, with a normal female? Or had his fantasy wires been so crossed that he would need to keep upping the sexual illusions and delusions and confusion in order to reach a fulfilling orgasm? And then, he asked, in a rare moment of self-awareness, did he want to go back?

  And then there is the issue that he tries to avoid. That he tries to sublimate with Oedipal and Freudian and Jungian rationalizations and all that—he tries to ignore that he really wants to fuck Justina.

  PART VII

  The Last Week

  36.

  Later

  I’m preparing the notes for another Sanders Berman spot on the Imus show. I haven’t heard from Peoria. That’s not too surprising. He’d dumped his notes my way, emails and journals and audio files that I haven’t yet bothered to look at. I had learned at the magazine to work on deadline, and even opening the email was effort I didn’t want to expend until I was sure the story was going to go forward.

  I’m surprised when I get an email from Sarah, the Wretched.com editor. She asks if I’d be able to fill in and guest edit Wretched the next week. Timothy Grove runs what is more or less the media equivalent of a sweatshop—no benefits, ten days of vacation, no extra time for holidays—and Sarah needs to go home for an emergency next week. Timothy Grove had protested and said that if she couldn’t find a replacement, she would lose her job. So she asks me.

  I should ask for permission from Delray or Sanders, to be safe. But I know they’ll most likely reject it. Nishant might be more willing to say yes, because he doesn’t really pay too close attention to the day-to-day, so as long as I ask him, I’m covered. I send an email to Nishant, and I never hear back. I take the non-response as his tacit permission.

  Sarah invites me to a party that night at a bar on the Lower East Side called the Dark Room.

  The Dark Room is on Ludlow Street, above Rivington. This doesn’t mean much to most people—but as Greenwich Village was to the ’50s beatniks and the ’60s hippies, the Lower East Side is to this strange and much less influential crowd of the early ’00s, at least in their minds. They are important, or believe in their own importance, even if only expressed with the required self-mockery. They aren’t artists, and not really a community of writers, either: they are bloggers, and their focus is each other. They are hyper-consumers; they don’t write, they create content, stripping away any pretense of some larger ethos or goal except that it is somehow hip, rebellious—though they’d never use those words and they mock hipsters and rebellion too. A desire to be noticed and to criticize the criticizers of the world, to gain its acceptance by rejecting it, breeding a strange kind of apathy and nihilism and ambition, floating in a kind of morally barren world where they say, Look, here is the asshole’s asshole of the world, the New York media, and we will show you, minute by minute, post by post, what the rectum walls feel and taste like, and you will know even better these sensations because we ourselves a
re part of this intestinal lining, and we are okay with that, we have embraced it as our contemporary calling, at least until we can get real jobs or a book deal.

  On the Lower East Side, where they live, gentrification on these blocks was more or less complete—the last remaining Jews had been pushed out a decade before, the Hispanics were still found but mostly outside the primary five-block radius, hanging around in small groups and whistling outside of the subway entrance to the F train on Second Avenue. Orchard Street is filled with luggage stores and leather stores and glasses shops, run by Pakistanis, storefronts selling junk and trinkets and passport photos, a slow death before developers can come in and create a trendy boutique.

  But none of this is totally clear to me at the time—it seems like a cool crowd to be part of, it seems like the new new media is a place to visit, and here they are, in the Dark Room.

  Sarah meets me outside the front door, where a Cadillac Escalade–size bouncer checks our out-of-state driver’s licenses under the purple glow of a flashlight.

  The bar is split into two rooms, to the left and right of the entrance, eight-foot ceilings, everything black. To the right is a stage, where live bands or DJs play next to a bar; and on the left, there are couches and tables.

  Sarah points to the far corner where a table has been staked out. A group of about seven males and three females, all white, age range twenty-three to thirty-five, stand sipping beers and gin and tonics.

  She starts making introductions, yelling the names and the blogs that they are associated with.

  There is Allan Tool, who holds some kind of deputy managing editor title for Wretched; Franklin Liu, who blogs on Mediabistro; the other Sarah, Sarah Klein, who does Gothamist; some guy named Arnie Cohen, most notorious for his ability to get mentioned on everyone else’s blogs without actually doing anything of note, except hitting on Sarah Klein in the back of a taxicab and then blogging about his rejection; Jennifer Cunningham, who would later have a “crisis of conscience” and leave Wretched to focus more clearly on herself; and on and on, names with a “blogspot” and a “dot com” attached, names that I’ve heard of before by reading one referring to the other. The closest thing to someone from a traditional media outlet, besides myself, is a kid with short dark hair and beady eyes and a skinny tie who works for the New York Herald named Jonathan Lodello—he is here, Sarah whispers, to do a story on the new new media scene, a story that will surely then be linked to on all the blogs of everyone sitting around the table, generating traffic and page views that can help with the advertisers and buzz.

  Franklin runs up to Sarah.

  “Let’s do coke.”

  Sarah looks at me.

  “You want to come?”

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  “Laaaammmmmme,” says Franklin.

  “Yeah,” I concur.

  He takes Sarah by the arm and they find a spot in line at the bathroom. I sit down next to another kid.

  “Kelly,” he says.

  “Mike,” I say. “Kelly, as in Kelly Treemont?”

  “That’s me.”

  “I’ve read your blog. I thought you were a woman. The name.”

  “I get that. You don’t do the powder either?”

  “Nah, I used to do that shit a lot but stopped.”

  “Me too,” he says. “I’m very boring now. I live with cats. I’m in recovery.”

  “Great. I work for a magazine.”

  “Dead tree, oh no.”

  “Yeah, the trees are pretty dead.”

  “You know, to be honest, I take a little Adderall still,” he says. “It helps me in my writing. I’m working on a memoir. About my experiences with drugs and alcohol, and I don’t know if you know, but I’m gay, so it’s about my experiences with drugs and alcohol and being gay and everything.”

  “Sounds great,” I say.

  “You know, I think it’s been out there, a little, but my experience, I think I have a really unique perspective.”

  “How long have you been working on the book?”

  “Three years. This blogging, you know. But I found an agent. She’s excited.”

  “Very cool. Having fun?”

  “I’m waiting for Timothy. He’s supposed to show.”

  “Timothy Grove?”

  “Of course. He doesn’t like these places—he prefers Balthazar, a place where he can pretend he’s Anna Wintour or Graydon Carter—I think coming here reminds him too much that he’s not really one of them, no matter how hard he tries. He’ll always be more Larry Flynt. But you should watch out. He’s a collector of straights.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Aren’t you the one they have guest blogging this week?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There are things you could do, you know, if you want to make it permanent.”

  “Things?”

  “Yes, things.”

  “Good to know. Is that how, uh, I mean, has anyone else ever done those things?”

  “Me, of course, but it was brief, and I thought I loved him, though he is such a fucking scumbag.”

  “Yeah, sounds like it.”

  “Oh, watch this, this should be good.”

  The other Sarah, Sarah Klein, stands up from the table and grabs Jonathan Lodello’s hand.

  “She has such huge tits,” Kelly says. “You know the backstory?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Franklin broke up with her three days ago. She’s totally pissed about it, and she is totally convinced that Franklin is going to go and sleep with Sarah, and so she has to make him jealous by dancing with Lodello. If you want to get laid tonight, you should really talk to her, I’m mean, she is going to be ready to go away with someone cute like you.”

  “Oh, thanks, right.”

  “You have very nice eyes.”

  “Yeah, I appreciate that. They work okay.”

  I get up to get a club soda at the bar. Kelly doesn’t want anything, and while I’m waiting at the bar, Timothy Grove comes in. He looks lanky and recently showered, and there are three men, all in their twenties in a semicircle, the same group I had seen at Eleanor K.’s house. He’s dressed in all black—black jeans and a black T-shirt, probably a two-thousand-dollar shirt, though—with black cowboy boots and silver rings on his left and right hand and two studded diamond earrings on his left ear, new additions, it looks like. He moves—“slithers” would be tipping my hand—he moves over to the table, looking like a Persian prince from some ancient time.

  The other Sarah, Sarah Klein, appears next to me.

  “Do you dance?”

  “Not this early. Can I get you a drink?”

  “Red Bull and vodka,” she says.

  “Very youthful.”

  “I’m going to be thirty-four next week, so I do everything I can do to be very youthful.”

  “Right, right.”

  Timothy Grove has taken over the corner table with his entourage. I walk up with my club soda.

  “Ah, the dead-tree’er, innit? Dead man walking. You talk to old Sanders Berman and Nishant Patel about how they are running to the ground your old brand there? Third round of layoffs coming, innit, and what are they doing? The little princes are scrambling for the top editor job, trying to be the captain of the good ship Titanic. Make brands of themselves over it, and there you are, still the little drooge of them, eh, while they build up their names to trampoline off the dead tree, floating on the dead tree until it goes down? That was your original sin, giving it away for free, giving all that content away for free, what a sin that was! Didn’t get the Internet, they did not at all, and opened the door for the likes of me to come and give ’em a good interrupting kick. Good to see you finally get it, Hastings. Good to see that you’re wanting to work for us now.”

  “I appreciate the opportunity.”

&n
bsp; “You even speak in the dead-tree language. We don’t ‘appreciate opportunity’ here, there’s no need for the brownnosing and suck-upping here, Hastings, no need at all.”

  “Okay, right, well it should be fun.”

  “Here’s a numbers game for you, some research I just had done for my empire. Your magazine circulation ten years ago? Maybe three million, and claiming a readership of twenty-one million. Highly unlikely, but still had impact, it still mattered who you decided to put on the cover. Had that lyric in a Paul Simon song, innit? Thousand words a page, eighty-three pages on average an issue. Now you’re down to 725 words a page, and fifty pages an issue. Full staff of your foreign correspondents was thirty-five a decade ago, now you’ve got ten, but you’re still holding on to them, just to tell your little advertisers that you have an international brand? Isn’t that right, Hastings? You know how much that international brand is worth to your advertisers? Seven million dollars, my sources at your magazine tell me, seven million. No domestic bureaus—no more Detroit or Miami or San Francisco or Dallas, just DC and New York and a woman in Los Angeles. The dead tree, they didn’t get it—and they laughed at me at first with my nonpaper. They said, ‘Oh, there’s no future in that,’ but they weren’t looking too closely, were they? They were blinded, stuck, a bunch of arrogant fools on the good ship Titanic Lollipop. I think you’ve seen the light, Hastings, seen the darkness, more like it, and you’ve become one of us. If, that is, you do a bangers job this week.”

  “Right, right, yeah, I’m looking forward to it.”

  Franklin rushes to the table, Sarah behind him, laughing, eyes darting, nostrils cherry red. He whispers something into Sarah’s ear, and a few minutes later, when I look around to see if she wants to leave, she’s already gone.