Pete Hamill - Tabloid City

She’s been home for thirty minutes now, but after a shower, and four cigarettes, she can’t sleep. The apartment is dark, as always, and she knows it is spotless. Two doors are closed between the bedroom and the windows that open onto Second Avenue but she can still hear the usual sounds of emergency from the street, as she does every night. First, there was the ambulance siren, then heavier screams from a fire engine. They fade away, heading downtown. Then a shout, followed by an answer, then another shout, like a dialogue between angry seals. A new version of Whitman’s barbaric yawp.

Helen Loomis turns on her side, squashing a pillow over her head, then hears a second fire truck, wilder, more guttural, the ladder. She gets up, pulls on a robe, opens the door to the kitchen, then to the long room with its dining table and bookshelves, and on into the living room. She opens the drapes a few inches, peers out into the rain-lashed avenue.

Across the street, under an awning, she sees Federico the mambo dancer. It’s his time, and he is dancing. She knows he is seventy-two, knows that his wife is dead, his two daughters living in Miami, one grandson serving in Afghanistan. He should be too old for this. But Federico surges with life. He wears a woven straw hat, a Mets jacket, polished boots with lifts. Wires feed into his ears from a machine strapped to his chest. The wires give him Tito Puente. They give him Machito. They give him El Gran Combo and Cortijo and Rubén Blades and Eddie Palmieri. They give him the Palladium on Broadway in 1958. She knows, because Federico has told her so, on many warm nights when she meets him while hurrying home from the World. He dances alone on the avenue with the precision and lightness of a twenty-year-old. He never looks for applause. He doesn’t ask for loose change. He doesn’t flirt. He dances for himself. He dances to avoid going home to the apartment where the only resident is himself. He dances to ward off loneliness.

Helen closes the drapes, whispering a “ Buenas noches, Federico.” She moves back through the dark apartment. She thinks about a cigarette, decides no, and returns to bed. A few minutes later, she is asleep.

A few minutes after that, the telephone rings.

2:17 a.m. Josh Thompson. Union Square, Manhattan.

He is staring at George Washington’s iron ass in this deserted park and the rain starts hammering the poncho. The last leaves are falling. A stray dog hurries from tree to tree, with nobody ready to pick up his crap. He’s my brother, that dog, Josh Thompson thinks. All alone in a cold rain. At least Josh is wearing two sweaters. And the poncho is pulled taut over his stumps, with the gun steadied by his hands. The dog has nothing. And it’s colder now. He tells himself to suck in the wet air, suck the rain. Thinking: I did too much time sucking sand.

He closes his eyes and he’s in a Humvee and the sky is white and the sand is white, blinding him, and they’re all talking nonsense, making jokes, trying to see in the white, trying to see wires coming out of the sand beside the road, and his lips are dry and burnt and the snot is like tiny rocks in his nose and his throat is dry, and someone passes a water bottle and Josh takes a swig, and on they go, into the dry killing whiteness. The dryness soaking up all wetness. And sometimes he even gets a hard-on.

Thinking: I gotta have payback.

Thinking now: Allah took my legs. Took my balls. And not just Allah and the people who love his sorry ass. All kinds of Americans too. Never could get payback. Not from the Iraqis. Not from nobody else.

In Walter Reed that time? The shrink said to him, Make a list. A payback list. Get it out of your head, the shrink said. So he put down the names. Put down the Americans too. Bush. Cheney. Rumsfeld. Franks. The lieutenant too. Armstrong. He thinks: That was stupid, putting him on the list. He was dead. Killed the same time I got it. Stupid bastard, riding us straight into a white sandy road with wrecked cars all over, and wrecked houses too, like he was Bruce Willis in a fucking movie. He was in Iraq three weeks and thought he was a little Patton. He charged us right into it. The IED blew his fucking head off. So there’s no payback for him. I’ll never see his squinty-ass little eyes again. His mouth with no lips. Just a line is all. Telling us, Go, go, get in there, and then kuh-fuckin-boom! Killed Whitey too. And Langella. And Alfredo Salinas. And Freddie Goldsmith. Me, I’m the only one that lived. To come to this bench in the fucking New York rain, just behind George Washington. To say, out loud, to an audience of raindrops: The towelheads took my balls.

They took his wife too. Took Wendy and the little girl, Flora. He hardly knew that little girl. She was what? A year old when he went to Iraq? So he could get a reward at the other end, get the G.I. Bill, get educated past what he was and where he came from. To make a good life for Wendy and Flora and whatever other kids they’d have. He sees Wendy holding Flora at the airfield in Texas while the band played and everybody saluted, and Flora was bawling, the tears just pouring down her face, her mouth like Jell-O, pointing a chubby little finger at him, and then Josh Thompson followed the others right on the plane. He waved from the door. Wendy waved back. The girl bawled. Then Pfc. Josh Thompson was off to the war. Wendy wrote him letters. Every day, then three days a week, then every Sunday. She sent him pictures of Flora too, in a bright little new dress, standing up and holding the couch, bigger each time, the brown eyes always sad. Josh cried each night after seeing new pictures. Cried quiet, not making a sound. Cried into the pillow.

Most soldiers knew the computer, but not Josh. His shit-ass school had nothing. But one of the guys, Norris, helped him get online and Wendy sent him some video through that, he didn’t know how, and Josh saw that Wendy was getting fat, in a big oversized yellow dress, pure Target, or Walmart, a dress like a yellow tent, and her face was all round, and her tits bigger, and Josh Thompson wondered: Who took the video? Norris showed him how to write an e-mail and he asked his wife. Wendy said it was a woman friend from church.

But trying to sleep, he wondered: Was it some guy took the video? Some guy from the base who makes the video, waits till little Flora is asleep, and then Josh sees Wendy in the living room, and she’s doing what she did with him one time, but with the guy sitting on the couch, Wendy kneeling on the floor, on the rug.

That night, Josh masturbated in the dark tent, seeing himself on top of Wendy, jamming it home after she blew that guy. Josh playing with his pud, which is what almost everybody did at night because none of them could go anywhere in Iraq to get laid. If you slipped off the base, looking for Iraqi pussy, they buried your body without a head. So every night in Iraq, thousands of guys just beat their meat. The last resort of the lonely. Coming in a Kleenex. Or a washcloth. Or a sock. Some guys scored with the women soldiers, even married them so they could get laid before dying. The way Josh almost died. He closes his eyes. Pay you back. Sees the blinding light, the explosion, shrieking voices of people he can’t see. Others quiet. This one’s alive! Morphine! Stretcher! A chopper then, followed by a blur, and he woke up in Germany. How many days later? Sixteen, they told him. And Wendy was there, out in the hall, that’s what the medic told him. The room bright, with blue trim on the windows. You want to see her now, your wife? Talking very carefully. Yeah, Josh Thompson said. Yeah. The medics unfolded a portable screen to give them privacy and Josh saw that there were eight or nine other guys in the long room, all on beds. Each one totally fucking alone.