I nod, and he starts nodding too.
“But I don’t know if I’m hard-core enough. I really started to question that in Chad. Like Townsend.”
A.E. Peoria reaches in his left pocket, then his right pocket, then notices that he placed his mobile phone down in front of him next to a bowl of popcorn, provided free of charge by O’Neil’s Irish Pub and Tavern.
“Oh shit, I should go see my girlfriend. What do you think? I think I might love her. I gave her six orgasms. Big orgasms, huge orgasms. I’d never given anyone so many orgasms before. But I don’t know if she’s top tier, do you know what I mean? I want a top-tier girl, and I think she might be second tier.”
Realizing the conversation is wrapping up, I try to think of any other questions I want to ask.
“I mean, how exactly did you become a foreign correspondent?”
“Look, I’m not going to lie. The job is fucking great. But it’s also shit. I mean, my career is shit. Look, what have I done? Okay, so I wrote a book? So fucking what. Okay, so I’ve covered stories in thirteen different countries? Big fucking deal. Okay, so I’m only thirty-four and I’ve accomplished things that most people won’t do in their entire lives. Okay, so I’m probably, give or take a few thousand, one of the highest-paid journalists my age in the country. None of it means shit.”
“Well, I mean, you did write a book. How many people can say that? And like you said, you’re only thirty-four.”
“Yeah, I did write a fucking book. I guess that is pretty elite. Fuck, I really have to go. What do you say, time for one more shot?”
His phone vibrates.
“Oh shit, she just sent me a picture of herself. Here, take a look at her.”
He slides his mobile phone to me on the bar as the bartender pushes another shot of tequila in front of him.
I snap open the mobile phone, and there’s a surprisingly clear digital picture of A.E. Peoria’s girlfriend. It’s an impressive feat of self-portraiture. From knees to face. Shaved to drooping. Nimble fingers. Lips, a toy.
“She got cleaned up yesterday,” says A.E. Peoria. “Timed for me. She’s great like that, you know? She doesn’t like to fuck on the day she gets waxed because her vagina gets irritated. But look at that—she has a really wet pussy. That ever happened to you? Very adventurous. She calls that one in her mouth the Contender. She’s a little on the heavy side, you know, and she likes it doggy style the best. They have a name for that. I think it’s like Dirty Sanchez or something. Six orgasms I gave her—incredible. She’s a writer. She even does ghostwriting for Penthouse letters, but I don’t think that’s going to last much longer with all the porn on the Internet.”
“You’re a lucky guy,” I say as he takes his phone back and stands up from the bar.
“What’s your number? I’ll send it to you,” he says.
A.E. Peoria punches in my number and tries to send the photo.
“Thanks, man, I appreciate it.”
“Bro, I’m fucking drunk. It’s really amazing that you don’t drink. I have a lot of respect for religions, though I think they’re bullshit. Want to share a taxi? I’m going uptown.”
“I’m heading downtown.”
“I’m expensing all of these drinks tonight, fuck The Magazine. We deserve it.”
I follow A.E. Peoria outside, and he ducks into a cab and shuts the door, and in the four seconds the courtesy light stays on after he closes the door, I can see his blowfish mouth has already opened to give directions and likely more to the taxi driver.
Seventh Avenue at 3:25 a.m. on a Sunday in August is hot and damp, wafting the smell of trash. Most of the cars are yellow taxis. The storefronts are shut, except for a few bars, chalkboard signs not yet dragged back inside, and the unnatural glow from twenty-four-hour corner delis shining through the temporary-looking but permanent plastic walls set up to protect the fruits, vegetables, and flowers. I wonder how those flowers sell. I decide to walk a few blocks before hailing a cab myself.
I wake up at 10:35 a.m. and leave my apartment to get iced coffee. I spend the day watching television.
On Monday morning, I take the F train to work. I stop at the newsstand underneath Second Ave. and Houston to look at The Magazine—“Autistic Twins” is the cover, but over the logo, on what’s called the roofline, it says “Iraq: The Case for War?”
Exciting times, I think.
INTERLUDE
TOWARD A MORE CYNICAL PROTAGONIST
We’re about fifteen thousand words into the story, a good seventy thousand more to go. Adjust your schedule accordingly. If it took you thirty minutes to get this far, that means the running time for the remainder is, oh, four more hours.
Let me offer some preemptive criticism.
I see that I’m setting myself up as the coming-of-age protagonist, a naive and excited twentysomething hero named Michael M. Hastings, unleashed on the world, loose in the big city. Wet behind the earlobes, bright-eyed and puppy-tailed, the universe my own clambake.
But how could I ever have been so naive? How can anyone be naive these days? What’s my excuse?
How could I have expected anything else besides what happened? The eventual disillusionment, the disappointment, the subtle corruption. Shouldn’t I have seen it coming? If I’m a cliché, shouldn’t I have been aware of why I’m a cliché—because my life story, my pattern, has been told and retold over and over again, the future for me was already written? Is it excusable to feel what I eventually feel—betrayed, disappointed, wronged, and upset by how The Magazine treated A.E. Peoria?
Aren’t we in a new age? The end of naiveté?
I grew up reading media satires, reading about the corporate culture, massive layoffs, and polluted rivers, reading about censored stories and the national security state, our imperial sins, FBI investigations into masturbation in the executive office, reading Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn and Tom Wolfe and Pat Buchanan and Hunter S. Thompson—what else could I have expected from The Magazine besides what I saw? I grew up reading Holocaust literature at the beach, Gulag literature on winter holidays, Vietnam memoirs on spring break. Histories of Gentiles and Jews and Germans playing poker and swapping wives at Los Alamos. The rap music I listened to was about dealing crack and dropping Ecstasy and cunnilingus. The television programs and films a constant stream of irony and mocking. How could all of that not have prepared me for the human condition, in the most extreme possible circumstances?
Isn’t it somewhat preposterous, looking at the character that I’m presenting to you, for me to feel let down by the world? Isn’t that narrative arc just a little tired?
Maybe that’s the genius of it, then: because it is tired, it’s easily recognizable. You can relate to me. And even with the knowledge of how the world works, we don’t really know it until we see how the world works ourselves. Secondhand information doesn’t do it.
Until your own hopes and dreams are shattered, or just slightly cracked, shouldn’t you be allowed a bit of innocence?
I don’t know. Maybe that’s the growing-up part. Maybe I was just going through the motions, maybe I knew the fall was coming all along.
Anyway . . .
I’m going to give my past self a more cynical edge, whether or not I actually had it at the time.
I’ve taken a week off from the magazine to finish writing this. It’s still snowing.
8.
Wednesday Evening,
October 23, 2002
The signs are up all over the lobby, in the elevator, in the cafeteria on the twenty-first floor, right outside the elevator doors on the sixteenth. The signs are big blown-up pictures of different scenes from World War II, and every picture—Stalin shaking FDR’s hand, the flag show at Iwo Jima, seven slightly out-of-focus dead bodies floating up to the shore on Omaha Beach—has the big name under it: SANDERS BERMAN.
“You going to this thi
ng?” Gary asks me, leaning up against my cubicle.
“The Berman thing?”
“Yeah.”
“I was thinking about it.”
“I’m going up now, you want to come?”
“Sure.”
I prepared for Sanders Berman’s book party accordingly. I read his book, The Greatest War on Earth. If I am in the mood to be cruel, I’d say his book does really well at nourishing our national myths. It’s a real comfort, reading his book. It gives you a real warm feeling about that whole time between 1939 and 1945. A real black-and-white-photo wholesomeness to it, a breast-fed narrative of good versus evil. A time, thankfully, when there wasn’t much ambiguity. Or at least that’s what he’s selling and that’s what people like to read about, and Sanders does a good job at throwing around words like tragedy and Holocaust and Stalingrad, and does a real good job at making us all feel special about it.
You can say I’m something of a contrarian here, but I guess my reading list on the Second World War is a bit different—more Thin Red Line, memoirs from Auschwitz and Hiroshima, The Battle for Moscow and Life and Fate—stuff that when you read it, you don’t come away feeling particularly enamored with the greatness of human beings and the exceptional nature of the American character. “Fuck my shit,” is how war correspondent Ernie Pyle put it at the time. “That’s what war adds up to.”
So fuck my shit, The Greatest War on Earth reaches number one on the bestseller list, so Berman must be doing something right, and there’s nothing wrong with admiring success. Can’t argue with success, can’t argue with this book party on the twenty-second floor to celebrate the success that he’s having.
“I’m just going to use the restroom,” I tell Gary, using the word restroom because I’m never really comfortable, at work or at home, saying things like “I have to take a piss”—or “a leak” or “drain the lizard” or “shake hands with the wife’s best friend.”
I push open the door to the restroom and hear what sounds like a retching, a hughghghg. The noise stops right when the door is in mid-swing. I can always tell when someone is standing still in his bathroom stall. It’s as if by actively trying not to make a sound, he’s making a silent dog-whistle-like noise that triggers a well-honed lavatory sixth sense—probably a survival instinct from when I was a little kid and public bathrooms were always a potential danger zone, booby-trapped with lurking perverts.
Walking up to the urinal, I glance down at an angle and see the same pair of shoes, pointed to the toilet, not away from it, that I saw a few months back on the night with A.E. Peoria.
I start urinating (or, if you like, I use the urinal, make water, piss, etc.), and it lasts about thirteen seconds. I probably have more left, but I’m a tad nervous with Sanders Berman standing behind the blue panel five feet to my left.
I flush. The man behind the stall flushes. I zip up; I don’t hear a corresponding zip-up. I turn to take the three steps to the six sinks and six mirrors; the door to the stall opens, and there’s Sanders Berman, taking his own two steps to the sink.
“Mr. Berman,” I say, tapping the pink soap container screwed into the white tile just below the mirror. “On the way to your book party now.”
“I’m running late,” says Sanders Berman, and he’s not so much washing his hands as looking in the mirror and wetting a brown paper towel and wiping his face, primarily around the mouth.
I think it might be best to wait it out, to let the water keep running, to take even more time so he finishes his cleanup first and leaves. Or should I finish washing my hands right now and leave first?
Leave first, I think, but in the seven awkward seconds it takes me to make that decision, Berman has turned off his sink, and we’re both tossing crumpled brown paper towels into the steel wastebasket built into the wall next to the door.
Gary doesn’t act surprised when he sees me coming out of the bathroom with Sanders Berman, and he cracks a joke.
“We’re going up with the right company,” Gary says, and all three of us walk through the glass doors on sixteen. I push the up button on the elevator, and we’re in that waiting time when, really, it’s proper etiquette for Sanders Berman to start asking Gary, a senior editor, questions about how life is going for him, etc.
But with the pressure of having a book party, I guess, Sanders Berman doesn’t fulfill that etiquette duty, and as we step into the elevator, bing, I take up the slack.
“Really enjoyed your book,” I tell him. “I’m a big fan of World War Two.”
“Oh, thank you,” says Berman.
“Hastings is the rising star in international,” Gary says, getting in on the act. “He does great work—if you ever need another researcher, you should ask him.”
Sanders Berman looks at me, nods, and says, “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Mercifully, we’ve arrived on the twenty-second floor, and both Gary and I say, in chorus, “After you,” and Sanders Berman goes first, and Gary and I do what’s proper and just hang back for an almost imperceptible split second so Berman can walk into the room on the twenty-second floor without us.
It’s a good thing we do, because when Sanders Berman enters the dining hall, the crowd gathered inside starts to clap.
Gary and I look at each other—dodged a bullet there.
9.
Book Party, Five Minutes Later
The twenty-second floor is called Top of the Mag. A catered dinner is served to the staff there on Friday nights, the late nights at the magazine. It’s classy, with nonindustrial-strength carpeting and rich, glossy brown-paneled walls. The best part is the view. For that brief moment on Friday, I feel like I’m part of the big time, one of those Captain of the Universe types, with a view of Central Park and Columbus Circle, breathtaking and unmolested greenery all the way to Harlem.
It’s also where the magazine hosts events like this one.
Framed posters of Sanders Berman books are up on the wall, with pictures that I have seen before in history books but not pictures that I’ve seen in the context of the promotion of his book—the USS Arizona going down in Pearl Harbor, VJ-Day in Times Square, Churchill on some podium.
Gary and I head to the bar, something to do, and I get a club soda and he gets a Coke.
“You owe me one,” says Gary.
“Thanks. No, that would be great, doing research for him.”
“It’d be a real feather in your cap.”
Gary often talks to me about feathers in my cap. Now, it isn’t about the good of the magazine that Gary tells me to get as many feathers in my cap as possible—because I don’t know anyone who hates the magazine as much as Gary does. He hates it, really detests it. Thinks it’s a total piece of shit. “You don’t think I don’t think about quitting this fucking place every day of my life,” he told me last week. “You don’t have a mortgage, you don’t have kids, you don’t have responsibility, just walking around, the change jingling in your pocket”—he likes to tell me that, that I walk around with change jingling. But we do get along, and he wants to help me out in my career as much as he can, by assigning me that Space Tourism story, for example, or by putting a good word in for me with a guy like Sanders Berman.
Gary and I stand next to each other, sipping our nonalcoholic beverages, watching other people socialize.
There are some noticeable absences. Where’s Henry the EIC? Nishant Patel? Every other bigwig is here, including Tabby Doling, the daughter of The Magazine’s owner, Sandra Doling, who, when she was alive, also owned a big newspaper in Washington and nineteen other media properties around the country, including local television and radio stations.
“That’s Berman’s source of power,” Gary whispers to me, talking about Tabby Doling. “Her mom is the one who discovered him. Way back in the early nineties. I think he was still in school. She put that story of his, the famous one he did . . .”
“
The ‘Vietnam Syndrome’?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. She put that story on the cover.”
At that moment, a semicircle of people starts to form, the employees and famous and semi-famous guests (Kissinger, Stephanopoulos, Brokaw, etc.) step away, leaving Sanders Berman, Tabby Doling, and Delray M. Milius in the center. Milius holds up his glass and taps it, chinking and bringing silence to the room.
Delray M. Milius is doughy-faced and five-foot-seven, and I don’t mention his height pejoratively, as I’m only five-foot-nine, and I’ve never put much stock in how tall somebody is in relation to their character. I know big pricks and little pricks, as I’m sure we all do. He’s Sanders Berman’s right-hand man, his hatchet man, if you will, or if you believe the story—and I believe it because it’s true—he’s “that glory hole ass gape cocksucker.” I don’t choose those words lightly, or to offend homosexuals, some of whom are my closest friends, but because those were the words that Matt Healy, a correspondent in the magazine’s Washington, D.C., bureau, put in an email, accidentally cc’ing the entire editorial staff. This was back in ’99, before my time, and when email mistakes like that were more common. It was also back when Healy was in New York. After that email, he was sent to DC in a kind of exile, while Delray M. Milius leveraged the potential sexual harassment suit to get a big promotion to assistant managing editor, where he’s twisted Sanders Berman’s bow tie ever since.
As you can probably guess, Milius isn’t too popular at the magazine. There’s a strong anti-Milius faction, and within this faction, there’s always a running bet about how long Milius is going to last—this time. He’s left and come back to the magazine five times in twelve years. “Don’t let Milius bother you” is the conventional wisdom in how to deal with him. “It’s just a matter of time before he wakes up one morning and just can’t get out of bed and quits again. Paralyzed. By depression, fear, anxiety, who knows—it’s happened before.”
The Last Magazine: A Novel Page 5