The Last Magazine: A Novel

by Michael Hastings

  Peoria starts walking blindly down the street, crack secured. All he needs now is a way to smoke it. He threw out his crack pipe months before, during his self-acceptance and healthy-living phase. Which put him in a dilemma.

  “Hey, handsome,” a woman in tight black latex pants says. “You holding? Want to make a trade?”

  “You have a crack pipe?”

  “Shhhh, you’re a crazy man, aren’t you. Come with me.”

  “What do I get out of it?”

  “I suck your dick for a hit.”

  She grabs his hand, and she presses a buzzer on an apartment building, where rent is clearly paid late each month and with cash.

  A.E. Peoria stumbles into a room with a white mattress in the corner, three people passed out on the floor. He unzips his pants.

  “Let’s get high first.”

  He hands over the crack, and she takes a few minutes to stick it in a glass pipe. She sparks a Bic lighter, and he stares at her callused fingertips.

  She exhales and passes the pipe to him.

  He inhales and falls back.

  She starts sucking his cock.

  “Let me just finish my way,” he says, looking at her and masturbating. She starts to push her breasts together and moan.

  He stares at her breasts, but he isn’t getting closer to ejaculating. He closes his eyes, and opens them, and closes his eyes again, fixing his mind on Justina, then opening them to get the image of the fat whore, then closing his eyes to fix on Justina, then reaching out and touching the breasts of the fat whore, and finally, thinking of Justina, coming.

  He takes another hit from the crack pipe.

  Fifteen minutes later, he jumps up.

  “What the fuck am I doing here? What the fuck am I doing here?” he screams.

  He sees the street sign—89th and Columbus. He’s near Justina’s place. His mobile phone says it’s 5:45 a.m. He looks across the street and feels an agitating emptiness, an emptiness that stretches back years and years in his life that he can never quite fill, not with crack or with booze or a yearly gym membership or even with his career. No, this emptiness does not just reach across to the piled-up garbage bags and the trickle of yellow cabs crawling by in the empty streets—the only time of day when they travel under the speed limit, when the drivers drive cautiously, which is strange because it would be the safest time to go fast. The newspaper delivery trucks, and the neon sign promising the world’s greatest coffee, and the other neon signs promising the world’s greatest slice of pizza, and the emptiness of a metal grate pulled down over a fast-food juice and hot dog joint, or the emptiness of the Yemeni clerk in the twenty-four-hour bodega, guarding the stocks of booze in the back from drunks, having to say over and over again that he can’t sell again until noon. This emptiness that he sees stretches everywhere and far back into his own past. His own life. That he knows that there is no hope and no god, and nothing at all, and he knows that the story won’t save him either, and he feels the crack leaving his nervous system raw and dry, and he knows the crack has abandoned him to life, and he wants to cry, and he wants to yell out, “Look, here I am world, on the corner of 89th and Columbus, coming down off crack, drunk, a magazine journalist, a New Yorker, a failure, and all I want is to be held.”

  She answers the buzzer on the third obnoxious ring.

  42.

  Thursday–Friday–Saturday

  I don’t have a good feeling about the email from Milius, summoning me to his office.

  “Hi, Delray, what’s up?”

  “It’s three p.m. and we just lost the writer on our cover story,” he says.

  “What happened?”

  “Peoria isn’t doing it. He won’t write it. He’s fired.”

  I nod.

  Milius opens a drawer and pulls out a copy of the New York Herald, placing it on his desk.

  “You’re aware you were mentioned in association with these bloggers this week?”

  “Oh, yeah, that was funny.”

  “You’re aware that the magazine has had a series of leaks this week that have done a lot of damage to our brand?”

  “Yeah, I saw something about that online.”

  Delray stands up, clasping his hands behind his back, and stares out the window.

  He sighs, as if he had practiced the entire sequence of movements in front of a mirror, a corporate executive ballet.

  Delray turns back around and sits.

  “You have all of Peoria’s files. What else?”

  “His journals, his interviews, yeah, I have that.”

  “You’ve also done reporting, yes? He sent you pictures of Justina too?”

  “I’ve talked to all sorts of experts, yes.”

  “Okay, you’re going to do the story.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “You don’t seem very excited, Hastings. This is your first cover.”

  “Oh, I am very excited, but you know, it’s Peoria’s story, and I’m sure if he doesn’t want to do it, it’s probably for good reason, right? Like that he doesn’t want to screw over Justina.”

  “Do you know a blogger named K. Eric Walters?”

  “Hmm.”

  Milius homes his eyes on me, stretches his face back, a flake of facial moisturizing cream falling onto his desk.

  “This isn’t ideal for anyone. But I promised Sanders this story, and so we are going to give Sanders this story. You’re going to do it, you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  I’d like to say that I agonized over the decision, that I thought twice about it—because I know by taking Peoria’s story, I’m putting the last nail in the coffin of his career, and I know that I’m also jeopardizing the privacy and future of Justina. Who knows how the military is going to react to this? Most likely they’ll strip her of the GI Bill benefits. Who knows how the liberals at Barnard are going to react to having been deceived? Maybe they will support her, maybe not.

  But I don’t agonize over it. I don’t want to lose my job, and if Sanders finds out that I’m the leak, then I’m done for too.

  Plus, this is a great opportunity. My first cover story for the magazine.

  I go back to my desk, call up the half rough draft that Peoria had sent me the day before, and start to write, just like I had learned how.

  EPILOGUE

  You should feel like the story is over, like you’re walking out during the credits, waiting for a few deleted scenes or bloopers. Like you want two or three more screens of text to explain what happened to who and how. Maybe then you’ll watch the sequel, if one is made.

  The next week, Henry the EIC decides who his successor is going to be. The decision doesn’t become public until a few weeks later. They don’t want it to have the taint of the nappy-headed hos scandal.

  Henry offers the EIC job to Nishant Patel.

  Nishant turns it down—he’s just gotten his own cable news show.

  Henry then decides that Sanders Berman, after all, is the right man to lead the magazine into the twenty-first century.

  A.E. Peoria gets fired from Barnard.

  Justina doesn’t get expelled. She becomes a cause célèbre on campus.

  There is talk of court-martial—defrauding the government—but the charges never go anywhere. The ensuing controversy outrages the LGBT community. A young woman is temporarily blinded by pepper spray during a protest. A defense fund is raised.

  After the spring semester, A.E. Peoria and Justina get married in a civil union ceremony.

  He sends me an email from their honeymoon in Thailand. He wants my notes and reporting, he says, because he is working on a book proposal. He doesn’t seem very angry at me.

  It’s now 2008. I’m finished writing—finished three weeks ago.

  I’m about to go into work at The Magazine. I should be hearing back
about this book soon. I want to get mine out there before Peoria finishes his draft.

  It’s a story I should be able to sell.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Michael Hastings was a contributing editor to Rolling Stone and a correspondent at large for BuzzFeed. Before that he worked for Newsweek, where he rose to prominence covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He received the 2010 George Polk Award for his Rolling Stone magazine story “The Runaway General.” Hastings was the author of three other books, I Lost My Love in Baghdad, The Operators, and Panic 2012. He died in 2013, and was posthumously honored with the Norman Mailer Award for Emerging Journalist.