Pete Hamill - Tabloid City

After September 11, Ali tracked down Ben Jenkins. He was living in his sister’s apartment, sleeping on a couch. Another middle-aged black man on welfare. Everything was out of him, including the gaudy illusion of the New Mahdi Army. His face was pouched and lined. White hairs sprouted from his nose and his stubbly beard. He had no woman, no kids, no job, no hope. His drug of choice was Marlboro Lights. Jenkins told Ali that he knew nothing about al-Qaeda or the men who smashed airplanes into the Trade Center, and Ali believed him. He was still in jail when the planning took place, and he had a solid alibi for the day itself.

After September 11, Jenkins became part of Ali’s early warning system, which gave him a few extra dollars every month. Calling from pay phones. Meeting in odd parts of the city. He was still a Muslim, drifting from mosque to mosque, warding off loneliness in the company of other womenless men. But he was useful to Ali and the Joint Terrorism Task Force. He could recognize those young men who resembled his own younger self. And from the photographs Ali gave him, he could recognize Malik.

Now, in the distance, Ali Watson sees him, staring into the window of a hardware store, dressed in a heavy down jacket with a hood. Ali waits a minute, watching for anyone who might be watching Ben Jenkins. Then he hurries across the street. He walks casually past Jenkins, then turns his attention to a display of drill bits. He speaks without turning his head.

— I’m looking for my son, Ali says.

— I heard the other day he was out here a few weeks ago.

Ali feels his stomach moving.

— Why didn’t you call me?

— I been sick, man. Some kind of a flu.

— You should’ve called me, Ben.

— Yeah. Sorry, man. I didn’t actually see him. Some guy—

— Where was he? Malik, I mean?

— At that mosque on Georgia, near Livonia.

— The storefront?

— That’s it.

Ali exhales.

— I’ll take a look.

— I’ll keep looking.

— If you see him, Ben, day or night, call me, hear?

— Yeah.

Ali turns to walk past him. Without turning his head.

— Hey, man, I’m sure sorry about your wife.

— Thank you.

11:20 a.m. Freddie Wheeler. His apartment, Williamsburg.

Freddie Wheeler feels like he’s floating. Two feet above the floor. Ten stories above the street. He moves from bathroom to computer screen to window and back, and his brain is bursting with triumph. More than two hundred e-mails, and it isn’t even lunchtime… The Times three times, looking for a comment… Not David Carr, though… Some reporter… The AP… The Daily News … Howard Kurtz from the Washington Post and CNN, he wants to know how CelineWire.com found out before everybody else that the World was folding as a newspaper and opening as a website… Calling me “Mr. Wheeler”… The London Times sent an e-mail, for fuck sake… Murdoch must be screaming about why the news wasn’t broken in the Wall Street Journal …

He checks the BlackBerry.

Some bitter notes… Of course… Blaming the messenger… Hope you’re happy now, you little prick. McLeod … An old fart from the World copy desk: Ucksay my ickday you uckingfay astardbay. Another hack from the copy desk… Pretty hip.

And, hey: CNN wants to send a crew!

And, holy shit, Morning Joe wants him Monday!

He jumps again… then reaches for jeans and starts dressing… He is starving now. Gotta eat… Gotta eat anything… Even eggs… Even just toast . Celebrate! He pulls a T-shirt over his head, and a heavy wool sweater… Céline would love this… A victory in a time when there are almost no victories… Hey, Briscoe: whattaya gonna do now, you half a Hebe? I’ll tell you what you’re gonna do… You’re gonna die, baby… First the paper, then you.

He imagines his mother turning on Morning Joe … if they even get the show out there… And there he is! Her worthless son! On national television… A Pun-Dit!.. Being asked for his opinions! Whattaya think now, Momma?

Top of the world!

11:40 a.m. Helen Loomis. Second Avenue and 9th Street, Manhattan.

She hangs up the phone, turns, and weeps in a surrendering way into the pillow.

— Oh, Sam, she whispers to herself. What’s to become of you? And me? What’s to become of us all?

She cries until she can cry no more and reaches for a Kleenex. She blows her nose. Then sits up, and lights a cigarette. At least I got to smoke again in a city room, she thinks, even if it was for the last time. Not the last cigarette. The last city room.

Oh, God.

It’s over.

She sits up on the edge of the bed, flicking ash into a saucer on the bed table, pulling her robe more tightly. What will I do now? she thinks. No more “Vics and Dicks,” the long serial she has written for, what? Forty years now? Five dopes a day? Twenty-five a week. The dumbest knucklehead criminals in the history of the city. Twenty-five a week means how many? Fifty thousand? Fifty-five? She thinks that she must do the math, with a pencil, on paper.

Thinking: Or was I Scheherazade?

Telling stories in order to live?

Even if they were not my stories. They weren’t, but I owned them. They could have called the column “Knucklehead News.” No Professor Moriarty among any of them. No Goldfinger. No Dr. Sivana, who called Captain Marvel a “Big Red Cheese.” No Meyer Lansky. No Frank Costello. Absolutely no master criminals. My people were dumbbells all. The smart guys made page 3. But oh, how my guys made me laugh.

She tamps out the cigarette, stands, and shuffles on slippered feet to the bathroom. The shower does not wash away her melancholy. She remembers the feelings that engulfed her after her husband died. Poor Willie. Cancer at fifty-eight. All through the weeks of mourning, she felt like a dot. The kind of period that ends a sentence. And then the newspaper saved her. Again. Sam saved her. Again. The guys on the copy desk saved her. The endless cast of “Vics and Dicks” saved her.

Now…

Drying herself, she is filled with gratitude for what they gave her. They still surround her in the apartment as she dresses in ski pants and wool sweater. Even the ones who got away. The white jerk in Sunnyside with the cape and the wild eyes, raving about killing Obama, and the cops lock him up for disorderly conduct and find eight Glocks and three automatics in his house. I had him for three hours and then they took him up to the front of the paper. She sees another white dumbbell, blond, handsome, in his twenties, a real Amurrican guy, and his real Amurrican blonde wife, with what used to be called an Ipana-toothpaste smile, and how some black guy in a mask carjacked them, and forced them to drive to the Poconos, where the couple had a second home. The masked black dude tied him up, the husband says, then slashed his wife’s throat and breasts while he was forced to watch. She bled to death. The cops listened to the tale for about eight minutes and then locked him up for murder. I lost him too.

Just last week, a knucklehead fresh out of Rikers sticks up an apartment where some woman deals heroin. He’s got the Rikers Island jeans on, the belt taken away on Rikers to prevent suicide. The jeans sliding down toward the crack of his ass, always being yanked up. He runs out with the stash, hears people on the stairs, runs for the roof, the jeans fall to his knees, and he goes right off the roof. Four stories to the yard. Moral of the story: Always buy a belt before sticking up a smack dealer.

She sees them all as minor players in an endless demented version of A Chorus Line… One after the other. The game of Can You Top This? Saying that they didn’t mean to do it. Saying it must have been some other guy. Saying that God told them to do it. A theater would be too small for all of them. They could fill stadiums. All of them proving the theory of original sin. Their tale without end better than anything by Saint Paul or Saint Augustine, John Wesley or Pascal. Like people in traffic court, all of them pleading Guilty, With an Explanation. The title of every human being’s autobiography.