The Last Magazine: A Novel

by Michael Hastings

  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.

  I walk outside the Dark Room. I feel a brush of long leather jacket charging inside.

  “Whoa,” I say, moving to the wall.

  “It’s you,” Sarah Klein says.

  We’re standing in the dark alcove in front of the exit. The bouncer holds open the door, and in the light from the streetlamp, I can see her face.

  “In or out,” the bouncer says.

  “Out?” I ask.

  Sarah follows me out onto the street.

  “I was about to leave too,” she says.

  “Sorry to hear about you and Franklin, that sucks.”

  “Fuck him, he didn’t mean a thing to me. I was only out here looking for him because I forgot to tell him something about this post I’m writing.”

  “You were out here looking for him?”

  “No, like I said, I just wanted to tell him something. I can’t believe it. He’s such a fucking asshole. Where’s the other Sarah?”

  “I think she left too.”

  “With him?”

  “So it would seem.”

  There is the inevitable awkward pause.

  “You’re upset.”

  “Yes.”

  “If you want to talk about it, my apartment is just around the corner.”

  We start walking down the street, and I notice that Jonathan Lodello of the Herald has left the Dark Room at about the same time and sees us before we turn the corner.

  37.

  Later Still

  A.E. Peoria tries to get comfortable in his bed, but he is lying on a hard object, buried beneath the sheets. He moves around restless, still can’t figure out what it is, until in frustration he grabs the sheet and throws it up in the air.

  “What’s wrong?” Justina asks him.

  “Oh fuck, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “Does being with me make you nervous?”

  “Ah, here it is, fuck,” A.E. Peoria says, holding up the object. “The jar of Vaseline.”

  Justina laughs and rolls over, putting her head on his chest. Peoria places the Vaseline onto the nightstand, next to a cruddy box of condoms that he had purchased three years before, when he had moved into his apartment, but hadn’t really used very much; the box just kept getting buried under papers and other junk that found its way into the nightstand drawer. His girlfriends were usually on the pill, so he hadn’t had a need for them.

  Did being with Justina make him nervous? Yes it did. Did he want to tell her that? No, but would he be able to stop himself?

  What he really wanted to do was to call his doctor friend, and ask what his percentage chance of catching an STD is from sleeping with a transsexual. Have there been any studies done on that? What are the percentages? How many partners had Justina had before him? Does anyone really get infected with HIV from just one sex act? He supposes it’s possible, but how unlucky would he have to be for that to happen? And really, he hasn’t heard much about HIV in recent years, and he’d never had sex with African prostitutes, or gay men, or heroin users, so he had felt quite well protected and secure until now. Even the fear he’d felt in Thailand had been put to rest by a Reuters story saying that the Thai sex industry had really nipped the HIV problem in the bud, thanks to a public information campaign, symbolized by a cartoon figure named Pac Con-Dom-Dom, a lively semitransparent condom with a red sash and googly eyes, who would, like a Japanese spirit, swoop into brothels and teenage bedrooms moments before penetration, to say, at least in translation, Please remember to be safe. The cartoon worked, and practically eliminated that disease from the Southeast Asian nation, protecting its sex industry for at least another generation or two, until some new fucked-up supervirus came out that could kill every fornicator around.

  But Peoria starts worrying about this midway through the second time they are having sex, after remembering that you aren’t supposed to put Vaseline on condoms or something because the Vaseline eats through the rubber. Shit, there’s even a Pac Con-Dom-Dom public service announcement about it on YouTube! But maybe that’s inaccurate, referring to some outdated Vaseline in the developing world. Maybe Vaseline has gotten rid of that glitch; maybe it’s now closer to the K-Y line of products, but it was the only lubricant that Peoria had available in his apartment—he had picked it up after broaching anal sex with his now ex-girlfriend, but when they finally did have anal sex, it was at her apartment, and she had K-Y.

  Then there is the fact that he signed a contract with the school that said he wouldn’t sleep with his students, at least while he was teaching them. He didn’t ask about it at the job interview—he didn’t think it would be a wise question—but he had read the paperwork carefully enough to see that professors were given a loophole that meant that as long as the student wasn’t getting credit that semester and complied with other state and local laws, there was some room to maneuver. Finally, he started to feel a strong attachment bond, as his mother’s partner would say.

  “Yes, I think I am nervous. I mean, you are a student and I’ve never slept with a man before.”

  “I’m not a man.”

  “And what if the Vaseline ate through the condom?”

  “What?”

  Peoria pauses. He gets out of bed. He goes into the bathroom, closes the bathroom door, and turns on the hot water and starts to scrub himself.

  What was it with this strong attachment bond anyway? She understood, Justina understood. She understood what it was like to be out there in the desert, and he had never really dealt with that. The I-am-going-to-die-amid-loneliness feeling, the absolute trauma of helplessness—no one had understood that, no one had gotten that, and maybe he had pretended that it didn’t really matter to him that he had shrugged it off like the wannabe war correspondent is supposed to do. But it did affect him, and it was an experience that—despite his ramblings, despite throwing hundreds of thousands of words at it in conversation—that defied all conversation and writing and one that just required you to be there: you had to be there, and the only person close to the trauma of that night was Justina, and this is what is so powerful.

  The door to the bathroom swings open slowly.

  Peoria peeks around the shower curtain.

  Justina stands there, flat belly, just thicker than a rail, tiny flat breasts with artificially puffy nipples, hairless vagina, if that was the right word, that even with reconstructive surgery resembled crushed Silly Putty wedged into an inverted ant hill.

  She pushes the curtain aside and steps in, kneeling down. She starts sucking his cock.

  A mouth is a mouth, a hole is a hole, Peoria remembers . . . Peoria gets hard.

  He closes his eyes and rests his hand on the soap dish, knocking over a bottle of Gillette 2-in-1 shampoo-conditioner.

  He usually has a hard time coming in hot water—he never masturbates in the shower, for instance—but he lets his imagination go, and his imagination goes back to the memory, the first time he had touched Justina, while he was still Justin, his hand warmed by blood, bodies pressed together, the absolute fear and excitement of death enveloping him, a memory so powerful he had pretended it didn’t exist, and with the warm water falling off his short, five-foot-seven frame, splashing to the top of the long black hair at his knees, he lets the memory wash over him, maybe even washing it away however briefly, and he comes.

  Swallowing, Justina looks up.

  “I know what you were thinking about,” she says. “I was thinking it too.”

  They both start to cry.

  38.

  Monday

  Whoosh. I’m pulled into the blogosphere.

  I’m at my cubicle at The Magazine at 6:45 a.m., a copy of the Ne
w York Post and the Daily News on my desk, scanning the papers for items that I can’t find online. I’m hooked into Wretched’s email system, where all the tips from readers come in, naming names, hinting at layoffs, leaking details to fuck somebody over. Wretched’s slogan is “Envy is a beautiful thing,” and it’s apparent from the kind of correspondence that envy is the grease of the Wretched Empire.

  I don’t want to use my real name as a guest editor, so I come up with a pseudonym. I settle on K. Eric Walters, the name of a little-known and short-lived Irish revolutionary who had accidentally punched out a Brit in a drunken brawl, sparking a rebellion that Michael Collins would later take credit for. There is also a K. Eric Walters who spends his time as an amateur bass fisherman—the perfect name, one that gets plenty of Google hits, seemingly legit, and would cause a bit of confusion for anyone trying to figure out my identity—food critic? Bass fisherman? Molecular scientist at UCLA? Film critic for some site called Rotten Tomatoes? Yes, there were plenty of K. Eric Walterses to choose from.

  Grove emails me.

  Specting 10 posts a day? Use IDs.

  I forward it to Sarah, with a “?”

  Oh, he’s obsessed with IDers. I don’t know why. The guy is a freak. Something from his FT days I think.

  Ten posts a day. Where to find them?

  I check the story-tips email box. There is a forward from a publicist at a publishing house, a press release announcing that Stephen King’s son has just published his first collection of short stories. “Think he deserves this on merit?” the emailer asks.

  Okay, that works. Nasty potential there. I copy a chunk of the press release then write a few lines about how Stephen King’s son got a book deal because he was Stephen King’s son. Scathing.

  And then I’m off, and I get a full sense of the power of the blog, like I’m walking a tightrope, a live piece of performance art. Hundreds of thousands of readers out there are responding within seconds and minutes to what I am writing, and I sense this sensation and the only thing I can think of is that it’s like crack. This is a powerful drug, having the ability to communicate so freely and widely and instantaneously, and to get a response—yes they are reading my snark, hurrah.

  The next few items are simple. A reporter for The New York Times has written a book about the three weeks he spent in Iraq at the paper’s Baghdad bureau and has made up names for some of the Arabs they spoke to—probably true, and that is the problem with it, and Wretched is able to tee off, getting three posts out of it, until finally, one of his allies from the Times stands up for him in an email and says, Hey, if you want to really start talking about inaccuracies for the Times, try writing about our television critic—she has more corrections per story than any other New York Times person currently on staff. And with a bit of LexisNexis fun, I do a post on the television critic and how many mistakes she makes per column; by this time, I’m done, it’s noon, the rush hour is over—the highest traffic is usually in the morning—and I go grab a sandwich at the corner store.

  —

  The subject heading of the email says: “Imus Racist comment.”

  “Hey, did you listen to the show today? Imus called the Rutgers women’s basketball team a ‘bunch of nappy-headed hos.’ That’s racist!”

  The emailer is Sarah Klein, the other Sarah, who left my apartment earlier this morning. I know that she could use a link from Wretched. It would really drive the traffic her way. She has posted a partial transcript on her website.

  I don’t think much of posting it. It’s one of many. It takes off.

  39.

  Tuesday

  Like wildfire—cliché. Like flesh-eating bacteria? Closer.

  The new new media, the new media, and the old media, go into action.

  Again, at my desk, at 7:30 a.m. I’m not alone.

  Sanders Berman, looking ill, leaves the men’s room and walks by.

  “What are you doing here so early, Hastings?”

  “Oh, just working on some extracurricular stuff,” I say. “Yourself?”

  “Some silly thing with the blogosphere. Apparently Don Imus said something racist on air yesterday. I was on his show, and now the Times is doing a story on it, so I’m going to talk to their reporter in a few minutes. Have you heard anything about it?”

  “Um, yeah. I saw something on Wretched.com.”

  “Wretched? Who reads that trash?”

  “A lot of people, I think.”

  Berman leaves me at the cubicle.

  Throughout the night, the Imus comments, the “nappy-headed hos” controversy, has swept away all other news. Bloggers on the East Coast and West Coast and in the American Midwest have listened to the show, in full, and started to dissect the entire transcript; the cable news networks are playing the audio recording, and “Is Imus a Racist?” columns are already being prepared for tomorrow’s papers.

  Fifteen minutes later, Sanders Berman comes back down the hall, his face greenish. He goes into the bathroom again and then comes back out.

  “They said I laughed, Hastings.”

  “Laughed at what?”

  “The reporter, the Times reporter. They said that Imus called the Rutgers team a bunch of nappy-headed hos, and I was on the line, doing my weekly interview, and they said I laughed at the joke.”

  “Wow.”

  “I cleared my throat, I recall, and unfortunately it happened to time with his comments. Have you seen Milius? Where is he?”

  Berman disappears down the hall again.

  Within minutes, the Times has posted a story on its website, including the Sanders Berman comment: “‘I don’t think we want to rush to judgment,’ magazine editor Sanders Berman said. ‘We should wait to see how it plays out.’ Mr. Berman, a regular guest on Imus in the Morning, can also be heard apparently laughing after Mr. Imus’s remarks. Mr. Berman said he was ‘clearing his throat.’”

  By noon, human rights groups, media watchdog groups, civil rights organizations, and the majority of mainstream media outlets are calling for an apology from Imus. Former guests on Imus’s show, many of whose books had become bestsellers after their appearance there, are also demanding an apology. Imus refuses at first and strikes back at his critics, saying they are acting like “rats on a sinking ship. Not that this ship is sinking.”

  Nishant Patel, back from a meeting with European advertisers, strolls in around one p.m.

  “Mr. Hastings, hope you are well, sir.”

  “Yes, Nishant, doing great, thanks.”

  “What have I missed?”

  “The Imus controversy. He called the Rutgers basketball team a bunch of nappy-headed hos. They’re black, so everyone is saying it was racist.”

  “Ah, I would visit Princeton when Yale played them, in American football.”

  “Sanders was on the show when he said it.”

  Nishant nods, then goes to his corner office.

  “Dorothy, call Henry, tell him we should talk very soon.”

  “Yes, Nishant. You know, of course, that Henry is away, and Sanders is acting . . .”

  Nishant nods and turns away.

  Dorothy stands up and scans the room.

  “Patricia?”

  Patricia pops up from her cubicle, startled.

  “Yes, Dorothy?”

  “Call Henry the EIC and tell him Dr. Patel wants to speak with him.”

  “What is the EIC?”

  “Not what, who—Henry, the EIC.”

  “Henry from the copy desk?”

  “No, not the copy desk, the editor in chief.”

  “You want him to call you?”

  “You won’t get him, you’ll get his assistant, and tell her to tell him to call.”

  I turn back to my cubicle. I’ve already posted three items on what is being called a “growing controversy.” I’m getting a little nervous. Glad
I have a pseudonym. I’m thinking that it might be smart to resign my position at Wretched for the week. That’s when Grove pings me.

  “Great job so far, keep this up and there might be a position for you here. Leave the dead trees once and for all.”

  I hear the hiss of Delray M. Milius, walking two steps behind Berman. They stop on the other side of the cubicle wall.

  “Send another statement to the Times,” Berman says. “Tell them The Magazine is no longer going on the show. Tell them I found his comments reprehensible—I scoffed at them on air! And let’s get one of those staff meetings together. And make sure to invite all the . . . we need to get their input . . .”

  Delray M. Milius sends out a company-wide email, calling for an emergency staff meeting to discuss the new policy in relation to the Imus show.

  An hour later, the conference room on the fifteenth floor is filled up with staff. I’m about to sit down when Delray tells me that these four seats are reserved. I say okay and stand in the back of the room, by the door.

  Charlotte, the youngest African American woman on staff, comes into the conference room.

  “Sit right there,” Delray tells her, pointing to the empty seat that I was going to sit in.

  The three seats next to her are filled by the remaining three African American members on the magazine’s staff.

  Sanders Berman comes in, second to last, beaten in being fashionably late only by Nishant.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sure you’ve all heard of the growing controversy surrounding Don Imus’s appalling comments,” Berman begins. “First, I’d like you to know that I had no idea that Imus would say such things.”

  Berman looks around the room, his eyes stopping on Janet, the woman who runs the magazine’s public relations department and who regularly books the magazine employees for media appearances.

  “Janet, I’m really disappointed that you never told me Imus ran this kind of a show. I’m really disappointed that no one warned me that he would say such horrible things.”