The Last Magazine: A Novel

by Michael Hastings

  “Shit, Justin, Justina, you’re losing me—a bit. I don’t quite get it—I’ll rent the movie again, I have Netflix, so I can put it in my queue and everything.”

  “The transformation, for me, it could not just be political. It had to be more fundamental than that. It had to be a transformation of nature, my human nature, and what is more fundamental to human nature than gender?”

  “Right, good question.”

  Peoria has this strange sense, forcing himself to listen again, that Justina had rehearsed this quite well, and he wonders how an enlisted soldier had that much education. Most didn’t, most would have trouble answering Jay Leno’s on-the-street stumpers: What two countries share the border with the United States? Who is the senator from Puerto Rico? Mexico City is the capital of what country? Who was the third president of the United States? You didn’t get the rare intellectual or philosophizer unless you were talking to an officer.

  “I don’t understand, though, why you enlisted. I mean, you’re obviously pretty smart.”

  “My family is very rich, a rich Hispanic family in El Paso. I had a very good education. I could have been an officer, I would have been accepted quickly, but I felt that if I was to understand what my family and the other immigrants went through, then I would have to join up as an enlisted man. Like Charlie Sheen in Platoon.”

  “Right, like, you would have to be rich to think like that.”

  “Exactamente.”

  Peoria has been listening for close to forty-five minutes straight, and this is about his maximum attention span—this is the point where he nods and hopes that his digital tape recorder keeps capturing the seconds ticking away on the display counter so he can go back and listen to it later.

  He looks down to make sure the little red light is still going, sees that it is, pushes it a little closer to Justina, making sure that it is not being blocked by the edge of a bread plate, and exhales.

  “Anecdotes, do you have any more, you know, like I talk about in class?”

  “Anecdotes?”

  Justina pauses, and Peoria recognizes the subtle shift in the eyes—the shift that indicates the brain is about to disassociate with the words she is about to speak, because whatever it is, whatever sentences are arranging themselves in her head already have warned the brain that protective barriers of enzymes and neurons are necessary, walls must be erected on the sides of her syntax, to keep the language away from the emotional side of her brain, the tear ducts and the heart.

  “Cindy Sheehan. She is the mother who camped out at President Bush’s ranch after her son was killed in Iraq. You remember her?”

  “Yeah, Cindy Sheehan.”

  “She came to Walter Reed. She was not allowed in, and I don’t know if she wanted to come in, but she stood outside the Mologne House, the brick buildings, for three weeks, with a group of antiwar protesters. She stood outside the gates with her signs, and in my ward, we would come and look. Protesting outside Walter Reed. We would peek outside and see her and we would be filled with rage. With absolute rage. What is she doing here, tormenting us? The man in the bed next to mine, Lucas, he had lost his left leg above the knee. A full hip disarticulation, or FHD. He could not stand seeing her out there. He would say, ‘The lying bitch! Her son did not even like her’—and he would tell me how he had heard from someone who knew her son, someone in her son’s unit, that they were estranged, that she was not on good terms, and there she was, an impostor, outside the walls of the pain box, the pain house, marching to make a political point of her tragedy, exploiting her son’s death, the fucking bitch, the fucking slut bitch whore. This became an accepted fact among the men of our ward, of the Army, I think. That she and her son were not close and that she should not be there. She should shut the fuck up and honor her son’s sacrifice, like the rest of us. Lucas wanted to make her shut up. He would wish he had his thirty-thirty hunting rifle that he would use to bag bear and deer and sometimes to help with the local wild boar problem in Georgia. He would say to the CO, a doctor, when he came by, ‘Sir, you’ve got to give me a shot at her. You got to let me get my rifle in here. All it will take is one, one shot. I’m a good shot and no one will be none the wiser.’ He yelled this to the doctor one day, and the response from around the ward was incredible, like some kind of prison movie with the inmates banging tin cups on the bars, this steady beat of clinking and clanging started across the third floor. It was dinnertime and we had forks—men with one arm and one leg hitting against the metal bars of the hospital beds. The rhythm began, swelling up, and we all felt very good, and the shouts started, ‘Sheehan, Sheehan, Sheeeeeeehhannnnnnnnnnn.’”

  “That’s some heavy shit,” Peoria says, thinking it makes the perfect anecdote to begin his piece, one certain to spark controversy and discussion.

  “That night, as it happened, she was going to hold a candlelight midnight vigil to mark the last night of her three weeks. I believe it was even on Veterans Day. Lucas believed it would be his last chance. He plopped into his wheelchair and rolled over to my bed. ‘My prosthetic is working well enough, and I know you can walk, so tonight is our last chance,’ he told me. ‘We have to go outside and we have to take her out. It’s our duty,’ Lucas whispered to me, ‘we must do it.’

  “Did I want to take part in such an adventure? Yes! I did. I did not think twice about it, I did not have a moment of reflection. We would again be in a small unit—it was such a relief to have a mission for us to do, another high-value target for us to take aim at, as Lucas put it. At twenty-three thirty, silent, like we were trained, a whole group of us gathered: me, dickless; Lucas, minus a leg; Payton, a quiet type, no right arm; Jack, two below-the-knees—yes, a half-dozen of us. Like a crippled A-Team. We could be a black humor sitcom. We did not feel at all ridiculous. Fuck them, we had a mission tonight, and if you would have seen us limping along, down the fire exit, one floor, two floors, three floors, down to the ground level, where we would walk out the back and circle around the side of the building, leave at Gate 3, and come up the sidewalk, where we would change into civilian clothes rather than hospital garb, maybe you would have laughed or felt sympathy or started to cry or sneered about how pathetic we looked. But we did not feel ridiculous. We were motivated. Very highly motivated. We were the volunteer army of 2002, and this was not some kind of pussywhipped Vietnam veterans who were just going to sit back and take it. We were making a preemptive, Rambo First Blood strike. We were not going to take this kind of abuse from a lying whore like Cindy Sheehan. Lucas led the pack, around the sidewalk, and as we came closer, we could start to hear the sounds of a song, a song they were singing, and we could see lights for television cameras. They were singing for the cameras. They had been silent all night but now the lights and the sound boom were there, and so they started to sing. They started to sing that very stale song ‘We Shall Overcome,’ as if they were King or Chavez—they shall overcome? They shall overcome what? Who were they, when we were the wounded, missing our manhood and our dignity and keeping our head held high. They were going to tell us, what, that it wasn’t worth it? What the fuck do they know about Iraq? What the fuck do they know about costs, about it not being worth it? They have no idea, and especially that Sheehan, who hated her son and whose son hated her, had no right, no right to be overcoming anything at our expense. Lucas walked with his hand out, already in a grip, imagining Sheehan’s neck in his hands, ready to strangle her to death. He would strangle her—he could taste how satisfying it would be. Army hand-to-hand combat training, army grappling is based on numerical superiority. You get the enemy down, you grapple him, immobilize him, and the others come to your help to finish the beating or detention. We, the other six, would run interference, form a tight circle around him, and therefore there would be no witnesses. There would be no one to see who did it and we would all say nothing. We would all say she had attacked first, and it would be the word of seven veterans against the word of what—a hipp
ie peace activist, a radical tormenting the wounded warriors. Radicals versus veterans. We knew that in any court of law, we would win, the troops would be supported. We turned the corner and there Sheehan was standing, at the head of the crowd . . .”

  Peoria tunes out. The whole thing sounds ridiculous now, and he wants to direct Justina back on track to the more important story, the story about her. All this bullshit about Sheehan is getting tiresome.

  “Okay, yeah, yeah, so it didn’t happen, and when you looked into her eyes or something, you came to realize something about yourself?”

  “Yes, that’s right, I—”

  He cuts her off. “Great. Okay, so you go back to El Paso and your family isn’t like, what, supportive?”

  “Oh, they were supportive. They wanted me to be a hero. They presented me to friends saying I was a hero. My mother would cut in front of lines at Applebee’s or Outback and say, we should sit first, our son is a hero, a veteran, a wounded soldier. They didn’t tell anyone what my true injury was. They didn’t want that information to get out—they just said I was shot in the lower regions and that I was recovering.”

  “Right, right.”

  “I curled up in a little ball in my house. My bedroom that I had had as a teenager, there I was, supposed to be a man in his twenties and living in his parents’ house, in his old bedroom, same posters, same desk for studying, same all of this. I acted like I couldn’t walk, like I was too sore, and my parents, they accepted this. I could have walked, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay in bed. I wanted to just wither away. I stopped cutting my hair. I stopped taking those testosterone pills. I stopped those things, and I drifted, for weeks.

  “My anger, after I stopped taking the pills, my anger started to go away. Like a eunuch. At first, I missed my anger—my anger was all that I had—but I didn’t want to take some pills to be a man. For three days, I shook—I shook with the emptiness of these fucking hormones to make up for what would have been in my testicles! I woke up—”

  “When?”

  “This was five months after my Alive Day, they call it. Alive Day. A sick fucking joke, someone at HBO must have devised it, I don’t know, to make us feel good, rather than call it Blown-to-Shit Day. The shakes had stopped—I had stopped shaking from lack of anger—and no, it was no peace, but I walked by the Dallas Cowboys poster, I walked by the picture of Miguel Fernandez in his Tecate-sponsored open-wheel racing car—we had gone down to, my father and I, to watch him race and got a picture, all of us smiling, the sponsored beer, red and green in the backdrop. I went to the bathroom and I took a shower and I picked up a shampoo—my mother’s shampoo, a coconut-scented flavor from Vidal Sassoon, and I cleaned my long hair, down to my shoulders, and I stepped out and tied a towel around my head like I had seen my sisters do, and I saw how much weight I had lost, how thin I looked, and I looked down at the scar and it looked like a vagina. I smiled, I smiled and I batted my eyelashes, and I inhaled, and I felt at peace, because what I had been resisting, what I had been resisting was that I was no longer a man, yes, and that I was really a woman now, I was a female. I was thin and effeminate-looking always, and perhaps it would always have been so, but if it wasn’t for fate, if it wasn’t for that shrapnel, I would not have seen it, or it would have taken me years to see it, to act on it.”

  A.E. Peoria hits the stop button on the tape recorder and thinks, Man, this chick or dude is fucking nuts. He slips the tape recorder in his pocket and realizes that he has an erection.

  34.

  Later

  I don’t expect to see Peoria back in the office so soon.

  “Mike, dude, good that you’re here,” he says, elbows on the cubicle wall. “I took your advice—I decided to come and talk to Delray M. Milius, to make amends, you know, and to pitch that story I told you about.”

  “Cool, bro, that’s cool.”

  I don’t know what he’s talking about. I gave him the exact opposite advice. But I suppose that’s what he wants to do, and no matter what I had said, he had interpreted it as confirmation of what he had already decided.

  I’m surprised that Milius even agreed to speak to him after the pencil incident—I thought for sure it was just a matter of time before Peoria got canned permanently.

  “He said I could bring you in as a research assistant, you know, to help me get some background to the story. You have time for that?”

  “Ah yeah, just doing a couple things for Sanders and Nishant, no worries.”

  “Okay, great. I gave you the details last time we met, right? About what I was sitting on? Swore you to secrecy, obviously too, as this can’t leak out, you know? It’s all very sensitive.”

  “Sure—”

  The Peoria that I knew is back—divulging, disclosing, vomiting up his exclusive story. It’s kind of mind-boggling to hear. I hadn’t heard anything like it before. Sure, there are gays in the military stories, and there are stories over the past few years about transgendered kids in high school and college, and about how some state universities, like the University of Vermont, were creating unisex, or multisex, or transgendered bathrooms because the risk of attack on transgendered people is extremely high if they go into a men’s room, and they aren’t quite accepted in the ladies’ room either. But never had I heard of a shemale war hero.

  “Not ‘shemale,’ dude, that’s not a politically correct term. Plus, she’s got no junk anyway anymore, so it doesn’t make you a shemale unless you have, like, a dick and breasts—she’s working on the breasts, though. But really, what I need from you is to get me the science behind it, and some of the social context for this—talk to a few experts in the transgendered community. Don’t quite tell them what we’re talking about, you know, but we want to get the legal issues and everything resolved first, you know. We’re really going to be doing Chipotle a favor, I think.”

  “So she’s cool with you running the story?”

  “Oh, you know, man, she doesn’t really want to do a story about it, at least not right now, but sometimes the news value has to outweigh personal considerations. You can’t just sit on a scoop like this because the person you know could get hurt by it.”

  “You don’t want her to get kicked out of school and lose her benefits, though, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s probably going to happen, you know, but there are enough support groups and shit out there that if she does lose that, I’m sure someone will step in, you know?”

  “Okay, right, maybe.”

  “Yeah, maybe, there’s no guarantee in this business on anything, you know. Like that lady said: Anyone who does journalism and doesn’t realize that what we’re doing is totally immoral is a fucking clown, you know?”

  “That’s cool, dude, yeah, of course.”

  “Okay, man, I’ve got to run, because I’m, like, meeting her later tonight for what I hope will be the final interview—I’ve already got like thirteen hours’ worth of audio files—maybe you can start working on transcribing those too? You have the Sony program, right? My other notes, you know, just keep them to yourself and everything.”

  Another assignment. If Delray M. Milius is willing to put his grudge behind him, I realize that this is probably going to be a big story to be part of, and I’m glad he thought of me to work on it. That means, including the Iraq stories, I will have contributed to more than thirty-five feature stories over the past year, which will put me way out ahead of the rest of the newbies.

  Sanders strolls by my desk.

  “Have my notes for the Imus show ready?” he asks me.

  “Oh, coming along, no worries.”

  “I don’t like to look bad on that show—he can throw some tough ones at you,” he says.

  Sanders has become a regular guest on the Don Imus program, one of the highest-rated radio shows in the country. Along with Oprah, Imus can move books like nobody else—and Sanders’s book had moved, thanks t
o his regular appearances and endorsement by Imus. It’s been a regular task for me to do, to get notes together on the possible subjects Imus might bring up on the show, maybe write a few jokes for him, or possible subjects. Not that Imus or his producers ever stick to the topics Sanders tells me they are going to talk about—a continuing source of annoyance for Sanders. I get to work writing up the notes.

  35.

  Sunday, November 20, 2005

  Watching transsexual pornography started as research but it has become a compulsion within days. Men who are now women is the category that A.E. Peoria Googles. Full-blown transsexuals. Hundreds of thousands of links appear, safety filter off, images and video clips and paid sites. The shemales, the he-shes, the cross-dressers, the post-op and pre-op transsexuals, strap-on kings and queens—how much of this community, percentage-wise, he wonders, is involved in pornography or cabarets or strip clubs? And isn’t it odd to base one’s whole life around sex? Or did we all base our lives around sex, and if you could get a job focused on sex, perhaps you were ahead of the game? Perhaps the transsexuals understood something that no one else did? But what’s the point of becoming a ladyboy if you aren’t going to hustle on the street?

  But Justina isn’t a ladyboy or a shemale—she’s a transsexual, and she wants to pursue a career in academia, in writing, in the arts or in advocacy, eventually. Advocacy, there’s another popular profession for transsexuals. You either got a job in the sex industry or got a job advocating for transsexuals’ rights. Advocacy and pornography and show tunes—the three primary industries of the transgendered community.

  Peoria’s morning research starts with his iced coffee and a check of the email and the list of phone numbers of experts he wants to call.

  Up at six a.m., hitting his stride again, feeling for the first time since before the Iraq War that drive, that fulfilling call of work, a sense of purpose—a story to write and to tell and to understand. On his laptop, on his wireless, he streams a local news radio show—usually, the program he starts listening to is Imus in the Morning—but the pull of the boundless Internet, with all of its perversions, drags him back to free porn sites, and he lowers the blinds in his apartment, pulls down his track pants, and watches the explicit sexual acts.