Pete Hamill - Tabloid City

Wheeler laughed all the way to the elevators, thinking: It wasn’t Walter Winchell I learned from, you assholes.

My master was Céline.

Céline… King of all the three-dotters… There, his photo right in front of me now on the wall, here in Williamsburg, plus those lines from Rigadoon I typed years ago on that yellowing index card… “Gossip is right at home! Nothing fazes it! Peremptory! On the nakedest summits, Everest or Nevada…. Gossip is at home all over, wherever you go, it creeps in somehow”—Louis-Ferdinand Céline… He knew everybody was shit… presidents, generals, archbishops… Show me a hero and I’ll show you a shit… My slogan too… They’re all shit… And fifty years later, Americans finally know it… I confirm it for them every fucking day… Famous in September, forgotten by New Year’s… Joining the mountain of enrubbled American shit…

Yeah… Welcome to the shitocracy, America! Meet all the fashionistas… the priests and the pols… the boys in the band… Editors go, I’m shocked, I’m shocked… and leave their offices for the Days Inn to fuck little summer interns with big tits… Everybody at every magazine, every book publisher, all editors, all fact-checkers, all citizens of the Republic of Shit… My beat!

Comfort me, Louis-Ferdinand… I know, I know, you were a collaborator with the Nazis… I know you hated everybody who was not like you, starting with my fellow Jews… But you didn’t lie… Comfort me… I continue your work.

Wheeler starts typing. We’ve learned that the end is near for the Daily Loser, ancient Sam Briscoe, editor… Not days… Hours.

He smiles, glances at the clock, thinks: I had to blow a guy in the Elwood website room to get this… tonight I get laid as a plain old reward. Tonight, of all nights. Tonight, when Briscoe falls, and I win.

And resumes typing.

1:15 a.m. Sandra Gordon. 120 East 70th Street, Manhattan.

All lights are out. The bedroom door is closed, the heavy drapes drawn, sealing out the sounds of the city. Except for her breathing. The white gown is folded on a trunk at the foot of the bed. She thinks: I’ll drop it at Goodwill on the weekend. No, I have to get it cleaned first. She is curled on her side in pajamas under the heavy blanket, legs drawn up, hugging the thick pillow. She does not sleep.

Just like that, she thinks. He’s on the lam.

And laughs at herself.

Gone. And she knows he’s not coming back. Not in a few days. Not ever.

The worst of it is, she thinks, I always knew this could happen.

What do they say back home? He’s an ’at steppa. Myles tells her Miami, it must be Siberia. Always wrapped in secrets. Turning his back to her when he took a call on the cell. Texting close to his chest on his BlackBerry like she was interested in the messages he was sending, which she wasn’t. Now the fall is under way, for him, for thousands like him. Maybe more. It’s all they talk about at the agency. Or the client meetings. The Great Fall.

My man Myles is falling too.

Who knows where.

The funny thing was, she didn’t really know him. Didn’t know his mother’s name or if she was even alive. Or the name of his father. Or if he was ever married. Or had kids. Once, early on, she Googled him, and found the name of his firm but no bio, no list of degrees, no experience in other places. She knew his hair was his own but was never sure about his teeth. He said he was her age, which would have made him forty-one. But who knows? Not Sandra Gordon.

She did know some things, which is why she didn’t care about biography and other details. He was clean. Start with that. He took a shower when he got up and before he left his office and before he said good night to her. She knew his body was flat-bellied and hairless and free of marks. No scars. No tattoos. He ran his fingers over her butt one night and asked where the fine scars came from and she told some lie about a fall in a playground when she was a little girl, and then he caressed the scars, and kissed them and then oiled them.

Oh, my.

She knows he did everything she wanted him to do in bed and didn’t do what she did not want him to do. She knew he loved her neck, the lobes of her ears, the curve of her back, and the delicate biting she would do when he was in her mouth.

She knew he liked her black skin, blacker than a cave at midnight. He might even have loved it. He would stand behind her facing the bedroom mirror and place his hands on her belly or fondle her breasts and kiss her neck. Her blackness made his own skin whiter. And she could feel his rush of arousal, the exhaling, the quickening of breath. Even in the second year with him, one trip to bed was never enough.

He did ask for the résumé-style details of her life, Jamaica and then Columbia and then Harvard Business School. He always said he was impressed. But he never matched that information with information about himself. They had places, uptown and down, where they met for lunch or dinner, but they were never places where photographers might show up. Early on, she asked him if this was because she was black and he said no, no, it’s because I don’t want my face around anywhere. Celebrity is a killer. He talked about a shipping guy named Ludwig, one of the richest guys of his day, and how nobody had ever seen his face in the Wall Street Journal, or Forbes, or the Economist, or the Time business section, and that allowed him to live and work more freely. Ludwig could never live in the world now, he said, with all these scurrying rodents holding camcorders, trying to get on YouTube. Or be crowned as “iReporters” on CNN or Fox. Staying out of certain places is better for both of us, Myles said. That makes sense, Sandra said. She even wanted to believe it.

One night he did ask her how she started writing copy for an agency and she told him that she wanted first to write stories. About what? he said, his brow furrowing. About Jamaica, she said, and my coming to New York, and, well, all sorts of things. His face looked puzzled, as if she had told him that she wanted once to start a colony on Mars. And what happened? he said. I had to eat, she said. And he smiled in a relieved way.

Sandra Gordon never mentioned this again, never told him that she wanted to write about the things that truly mattered, to make sense of them, to make sense of herself. Above all, to freeze on paper the way chance is almost everything in life. Or at least in Sandra’s life. If my father had not abused me when I was eight, my madda would not have hit him in the head with a club and gathered me with her to set off to a kind of freedom. She might not have found work in the kitchen of those two gay guys in Montego Bay, in a house full of books that neither she nor Sandra could read. One of the guys, a very kind man, found the girl a tutor, and she started reading, and then there was a big party and they bought her a pink dress and new shoes and showed her how to carry a tray of appetizers and how to curtsy.

Sandra Gordon, aged nine, was a nervous wreck. But at the party, chance expanded its role. One of the guests was Cynthia Harding, who was there with the Briscoe guy, from the World. Her beloved Sam. In the library of the house in Montego Bay, Cynthia talked to Sandra about how books were the true food of the big wide world, and when she went home to New York, she sent Sandra copies of two Babar books and The Little Engine That Could. Stories too young for me, maybe, but I was only reading for about five months, and they were stories. Made of pictures and those little squiggles called words. Years later Cynthia explained that she was touched by my joy in reading. That I reminded her of why reading mattered. After those first books, she returned to Montego Bay once a year to visit, sometimes with Sam, sometimes without, and she kept bringing books. And sending them from New York. Right up the scale. From Little Women to Dumas. To Stevenson and My Friend Flicka. And when Sandra turned seventeen, Stendhal.