Pete Hamill - Tabloid City

He drove past Jamal’s street, went three more blocks, and turned on 3rd Street toward the Gowanus Canal. Pulled over beside a shuttered clothing factory, just past a loading bay. Turned off lights and engine. He pocketed the key, left by some drunken asshole. He wasn’t worried about the license plate. Nobody would report this heap of shit stolen. Waited, battling sleep, exhaustion eating his flesh. Alert for cruising patrol cars. Or anyone else who might spot him. Then he climbed into the backseat. The floor littered with beer cans mixed with a child’s plastic earthmover toy and a scuffed pair of women’s shoes. He opened a window on the right side, about a quarter inch, to allow air to enter. And stretched out to rest. He did not truly sleep.

Sleep would have to wait until he entered Jamal’s house on 6th Street, three blocks to the south. Jamal, his closest friend in the years after his conversion, Jamal, who traveled with him to Philadelphia, to Buffalo, to Canada, to all the stops in what they both called the Network. He was my brother then, the older brother I never had. His father was a doctor in Philadelphia, maybe still alive, practicing. Making money off sick black folks. Whites too. After September 11, Jamal was convinced that jihad was the only way. He and Malik started collecting the things they needed. A few guns. Powder. Accelerants. Bomb stuff. Getting ready for a rising.

Even after Jamal married an unbeliever, even after his father helped him buy the Brooklyn house, he still believed that day was coming, the moment when Allah’s punishing wind would blow again through America. Malik believed too.

Then Jamal went on the haj . And when Jamal came back, he called Malik and said: Malcolm was right, brother. Malik was sure he knew what Jamal meant. Malcolm came back from making his own first haj believing that Elijah Muhammad and his Black Muslim cult was a bunch of shit. Pure Islam, Jamal said, was all that mattered. Malik agreed. But Jamal said that pure Islam didn’t necessarily include jihad. Their friendship started drying up. Jamal’s marriage helped it happen. They stayed in touch for a while. But it wasn’t the same.

After services at the mosque in Cobble Hill, even the imam, that timid man, asked them to stay away, insisting that suicide was against the Quran, that if you kill yourself in some action it is haraam and you cannot enter Paradise. Later that afternoon, walking in Brooklyn, Malik ranted to Jamal, shouting that the imam was a mushrig, a Muslim who betrays other Muslims. He should be killed. Jamal disagreed, softly, politely, a consoling arm upon Malik’s shoulders, but Malik raised his voice even higher and they went their separate ways. Malik traveled different roads. Longing for Iraq. Longing for Pakistan. Longing for Tora Bora. For training. For sacrifice. And never going. Finding Glorious Burress instead.

Now Jamal is a designer, a graphic artist, who uses his talent to sell the worthless shit that corrupts the world, even the Muslim world. His infidel whore wife won’t allow Malik into their house. They have a child, now about four years old, and the wife is too busy for visitors. Or so Jamal said once when Malik called from Denver. “You’re my brother, Jamal,” Malik said. “I miss you, man.” Jamal chuckled and said, “Yes, but I’m my little girl’s father and my wife’s husband.”

Malik couldn’t tell anyone all that he felt about the old friendship. The endless nights of talk. The dissecting of the Quran. The discovery of the work of Sayyid Qutb. The sense of mission, and purpose, and fierce shared anger at all the corruption in America. He never had another talk as intense as the talks with Jamal. Not with anyone. Certainly not with Glorious Burress, that beautiful heathen puppy. Jamal was the one, the channel into truth. He did try to keep Jamal alive in his life. When he called Jamal, the infidel whore wife almost always answered and Malik always hung up. One Friday evening in the previous July, Malik even went to Jamal’s street, taking the R train, walking to their block. Looking casual as he passed their house. Hoping he would bump into Jamal as he took a morning walk. Watched for a long time from the doors of the abandoned garage up the street. Rehearsing words. After twenty minutes, he saw them placing bundles and suitcases and a folded stroller into the trunk of a BMW. The wife held the little girl by the hand, the two of them whorish in bare legs and flip-flops. Heard the wife calling to Jamal: “Jerry! Jer -ry! We’re late! ” Jamal now called Jerry. Malik turned and walked around the corner, out of sight into Third Avenue, thinking: Maybe they are picking up the imam to drive to the Hamptons.

Fatigue gnaws at him now. Eating the sore muscles in his arms and legs and hands. Reducing him to this boneless body flattened against the backseat. He thinks: I have nobody at all left to talk to. Nobody in the whole wide godless world. Unless Jamal talks. One last time. I will lie here, empty, until the sun comes over the ridge behind me and warms the morning and dries the rain. Then I will rise too, he thinks. To walk the short blocks to 6th Street. To look, to see, to go to Jamal and retrieve what I know is in his house. The stuff of cleansing.

He begins to pray.

Khalid al-Mihdhar.

Khalid al-Mihdhar.

Majed Moqed…

And sleeps.

5:25 a.m. Bobby Fonseca. Avenue B and 12th Street, Manhattan.

They lie together in the dark, spent, breathing deeply, Victoria’s breasts against Fonseca’s back, a down blanket pulled tightly to their necks. Gray street light seeps from the bottom of the window shades. The sound of rain has stopped. Both are awake.

— Thank you, she whispers.

— I promise I’ll get better.

— Not that, dummy. Thanks for taking me with you. For making me feel like a reporter, instead of a goddamned waitress. For three hours, at least.

He turns to face her, breaking into a smile. His black hair is spiky.

— I’m glad I did, he says. You kicked ass. Made me look good. I told them to give you a credit line.

— Now you tell me?

She sits up.

— I gotta tell my father!

— Not now, he says, leaning on his bent elbow, head in hand, as if addressing her right breast. We don’t know if they’ll give you the credit. I can’t order it, y’know.

— He’ll increase today’s circulation by at least ten papers, Fonseca.

Then she laughs and slides back beneath the covers. And is silent.

— I’ll be right back, Fonseca says. Where’s the, uh—?

She switches on a muted bedside lamp. In the yellow darkness, framed photographs cover a wall, with some front pages too. Times. Daily News. Post. HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR. A stove. A sink. One wall of books, CDs, DVDs. She points.

— Right there. The blue door.

Fonseca walks naked to the blue door, shivering in the cold. The wood floor is cold too when he steps past the rug. A small narrow john. Just a toilet, a roll of paper attached to the wall, the seat down. Like an airline toilet, without the sink. He lifts the seat. Staring at a framed browning photograph of a blonde woman. Eyes that miss nothing. From the thirties, maybe? Her grandmother, maybe? Finishes. The woman in the photograph seems to demand he wash his macho hands. No sink.

He steps out, closes the door behind him.

— The sink is beside the stove, she says, her head showing above the blankets. Shoulda warned you.

He washes his hands, uses a towel on a rod above the sink.

Then hurries back to the warmth, the aroma of Victoria Collins. Reaches past her back and holds one of her hands. Silence for a beat. Then:

— A question, he says.

— Yeah?