Pete Hamill - Tabloid City

Wendy came in, wearing the yellow dress from the video and her hair all curly and too much lipstick, all curves and flesh. She was breathing hard, her eyes full of tears, and she leaned over and kissed Josh on the mouth. He couldn’t smell her. He couldn’t smell anything, and still can’t. There was a buzz in his head too, like a dentist drill.

— Hello, baby, she whispered.

— Hello, Wendy, baby.

— I’m so sorry, Josh.

— Me too.

She started telling him that the church raised money to send her there to Germany, that everything was okay with Flora, she was staying at Wendy’s mother’s house in Norman, that she was praying for him too. Everybody was praying for him. The whole state of Oklahoma was praying for him. She had cookies from the church for him and the other guys. She had flowers. And a book about the Hornets, who played two seasons in Oklahoma City after Katrina. And, oh, it was in the papers, she said, what happened to you.

— Can I go home now? he said.

— Not yet, the doctor says.

Josh pushed a hand under the sheet and blanket. There was a thick pad of gauze where his penis used to be. To the side, left and right, more bulging bandages. He wiggled his toes, or thought he did. But there were no toes, because there were no feet and no legs. Jesus Christ.

— Let me see it, Wendy said.

— No.

— I need to see it, she said, her voice colder. I’m your wife.

— Wait till it heals.

She came around to the side and lifted the sheet and blanket. Her eyes grew wide with horror, her eyebrows arched, she made a choked sound in her throat. Then she squeezed his hand, covered him again, seemed to melt a bit, and walked heavily to the door. He never saw her again. She went home to Norman and closed the house and picked up Flora and went away. She divorced him by mail a year later when he was in Walter Reed. On that day in Germany, the cookies were great but he couldn’t smell the flowers.

And now he’s freezing in this park in New York fucking City. The rain harder. The MAC-10 icy to the touch of his bare hand. The second clip is cold and hard against his gut. Thinking: Payback.

And wondering where that little girl is now, his daughter, little Flora, and whether her eyes are still sad.

George Washington is all green and shiny with rain. Beyond him, a red light blinks on but there is no traffic for it to stop.

He unlocks the wheels and rolls to the edge of the park. Something called Filene’s Basement is one way, a Staples store the other. The rain lashes his face.

A black guy in a hoodie comes hurrying across the drowning street. He is hatless, without an umbrella. The hood keeps falling back in the wind and he keeps brushing it forward. He’s about the same age as Josh Thompson. He sees the wheelchair and his eyes go wide.

— Hey, man, Josh says.

— I’m busy, muthafucka.

— I’m just wonderin’, is there a place I can stay around here?

The black man points down a wide two-way street.

— Try down there. Might be a hotel. A church. At the end, they’s an overpass called the High Line. The fuck knows?

Then he looks behind him, and hurries away, heading uptown. And disappears down some stairs.

Josh rolls into what a sign calls 14th Street. He lowers his head and moves into the wind and rain. It ain’t sand, he says out loud. It ain’t sand. It’s wet. It’s rain. What I wanted so bad back there in Iraq. He crosses other avenues and passes many shuttered stores. No sign of a hotel. But across the street, there’s a church. Our Lady of… something. Goo-add-a-luppy? All the lights are out. The Mexicans back home got a church with the same name. Or like Salinas in Iraq, with a Virgin Mary medal around his neck. It didn’t save him.

Then in the distance, on the right-hand side of the street, he sees minarets. He stops, his heart pounding. One big minaret, and a dome, and others around it, high thin towers where they can chant their fucking prayers. Just like in Sadr City. His hips are hurting now but he moves faster.

A neon sign says: ALADDIN.

Then: LAMP.

Aladdin’s Lamp.

He hears another word.

Payback.

2:19 a.m. Beverly Starr. Eighth Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn.

She eases back from the drawing table, then pushes hard against the black Girsberger chair, the one she thinks of as her second spine. She exhales, takes another breath, holds it, lets the air out more slowly. Then stands. She stares down at the large painting on the table. On thick illustration board. Made of grays and blacks. Bold slashing blacks. A young black woman, infant in arms, small boy holding her skirt. An old junkie with a shirt hanging loose on his bones. A middle-class white man with a lumpy suit, his face sagging in defeat. An old soldier with a steel helmet and combat fatigues. The eyes of each of them full of fear, abandonment, injury, shame.

Beverly Starr steps to the side, a brush in hand, thick with a load of gray casein. She first goes left, then to the right. The eyes follow her. As she wanted them to. Eyes she hoped were full of questions. How did this happen? How did I end up like this? How did I get to be a wanderer in empty streets? Can’t you see we need help? A roof over our heads, a warm bed, a stove, food? Beverly has lived with them for weeks, has sketched them from window seats in coffee shops, has seen them waiting for food-stamp cards outside welfare offices, has frozen them in memory with her own blinking eyes, using the blinks as if they were shutters in a camera. A trick learned long ago from a sidewalk artist in the Village.

Here they are.

The homeless.

On a street as empty and menacing as any in Batman’s Gotham.

She moves in on the painting, and with her brush she blurs the details of the soldier’s hands. Too literal. Too comic-book-y. Does the same for the middle-class man, then lifts a smaller brush and makes a subtle crack in one lens of his glasses. Thinking: Don’t fuck it up now. Don’t overfinish it. She pauses again, and abruptly thinks: It’s done.

She slips the two brushes into a large jar of water, shaking the paint loose. Then she lifts a black lithographic pencil from her tabouret and signs her name in the lower right corner. Boldly. Proudly. The first time in too long a time that she has done such work. Doing it for a benefit instead of an editor. To help raise money for the homeless. Tonight.

Another goddamned deadline kept. With hours to spare. Thank God for water-based casein. Quick-drying acrylics. Someone is coming at nine, to carry the painting away for a quick scanning and a framing job, and delivery to the committee in charge of the benefit. The painting will be auctioned off. The scanners will turn it into a poster and all benefactors will receive personally framed copies a few weeks later. She thinks: This is the moment in the old days when I would have had a cigarette.

She stretches, moves her shoulders like rippling gears. Then glances at the Mac. Her true workshop. The homeless painting is the first work she’s done away from the Mac in two years. But she can’t sleep now. She has more work to do. She rolls the chair and sits down facing the screen. There’s a page on the screen, half the panels in black and white, half in color, alternating real world, virtual world. Page 5 of Like Mama. For Vanity Fair. Splash page, and four strip pages. All about a mild-mannered English teacher named Lois Trueheart, early forties, a spinster, like her creator. She’s been driven half mad by the way all the girl students use “like” in almost every uttered sentence. Sometimes twice. Or three times! And how they add question marks after statements of fact. As if all fact were conditional.

On Beverly’s splash page there’s an aerial shot of New York City, showing the skyscrapers, Central Park, the East River, parts of Brooklyn and Queens. Voice balloons are rising over the city, some large, others tiny, hundreds of them, many millions of others just suggested, all saying likelikelikelikelikelikelikelikelikelike… In class, in the corridors, in stores and churches and bars, on the streets, in the subway, maybe even in their sleep… He calls, and I’m, like, scared?… I finish and I’m, like, happy?… He’s handsome, but he’s, like, thirty?… I look at it, and it’s, like, awesome? One four-letter word blurring the city’s soundtrack, part of the pasty verbal mush, and on the splash page it’s crowding the sky among the many towers.