Pete Hamill - Tabloid City

Thinking: Gotta be a gun here somewheres. Into the small bedroom. Feeling around. Lifted the mattress. There it was. A.38, like his so-called father used to have. Loaded.

And now he’s in the Lexus on the FDR, East River Drive, heading to East Harlem, to a parking lot he used back in the day. The.38 under his ass. He sees people in other cars smoking cigarettes, using cell phones, texting on BlackBerrys. They’re all going somewhere. To see wives and friends or friendly neighborhood pushers. Malik is heading for the night. For the finale. Thinking: It’s just me now. Me and Allah. My woman Glorious is dead. My son is dead without ever breathing the air of the world. My infidel bitch of a mother is dead. Her rich blonde motherfucking slave owner is dead. Now Aref is dead, and I’m driving his Lexus. He was dead before I killed him. An imam with a Lexus: that’s why he’s dead.

Thinking: More people will be dead before the midnight hour. Including me. Around the world tomorrow, millions will celebrate when they hear the news. They will pray for me. They will call to me in Paradise.

Now I have my tools. All I need. Now I go on, alone.

1:35 p.m. Helen Loomis. South Street Seaport.

She is out at the end of the pier, in wool hat, long down coat, boots. Smoking a cigarette, her back to the wind. She is alone. Nobody else smokes anymore. Below her, the East River swirls and eddies, the water opaque. A lone gull flies a tour of inspection, searching for scraps to be shared by the sheltering flock. A tug moves north to pass under the bridges, heading for the Bronx. Off to her right, she can see the four masts of the Peking. She knows it was built in 1911 because she wrote about it for the World when two dopes dressed as pirates tried to rob it. There are no people on the wooden deck. Directly behind her is the three-story mall, full of shops, a kind of nautical theme park for people from out of town. Inside, she could have been in Des Moines. Some shops were closed for good. Others catered to the few customers. They were offering maps, New York souvenirs, cheap little versions of the Statue of Liberty or the World Trade Center or the skyline. Junk destined for garage sales in distant cities.

But back there, behind her, a short walk under the FDR Drive, into the square that is now perfectly cobblestoned and perfectly empty, was the place where every Friday was a good Friday: Sloppy Louie’s. She sees them now, all of them, loud and laughing and cocking a hoot at the world. They ordered the freshest fish in New York, cod and fluke and halibut, still icy from the fish market up past the square. They made fun of everybody, including themselves. Newspapermen.

The whole thing is shuttered now. The fish market is gone to the Bronx. The aroma of fish replaced by the exhaust of stalled cars on the Drive.

She tamps out the cigarette on the rail, flicks the butt into the current. What the hell: Al Gore is nowhere in sight. She sees a helicopter rising out of the tumbling grayness over Brooklyn, sees it before she hears it, watches it cross high over the empty harbor, then descend into New Jersey. The ongoing search for terrorists. She turns with her back to the river and gazes at the tops of the buildings on Wall Street. They must be happy up there, she thinks. Then she sees a man slip out a door from the mall. White hair pokes out the sides of his hat, one of those Irish jobs that Sam always brought home from Dublin. The guy is wearing a long tweed coat, a dark scarf, polished shoes. He looks up at the Brooklyn Bridge, the cables like part of an immense harp. Then he peels off his gloves, takes out a pack of cigarettes, and lights up.

Helen looks south at the harbor and the distant Verrazano. She remembers a chilly night with her husband on the deck of the Staten Island Ferry, the two of them holding each other for warmth, and she spoke some of the words of Edna St. Vincent Millay. “We were very tired, we were very merry—/ We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry…” That night they tried again to make a baby, and once again it didn’t happen. She wanted just that, just a tiny boy in a crib playing with his toes. They kept trying until a week before her husband died, and she never tried again. Not with anyone. Across more than thirty years. The little boy still plays with his toes in her dreams.

She turns away and the white-haired man is walking toward her. She hopes he veers away. He doesn’t look like he wants a spare cigarette, or some change. For sure. But he doesn’t veer away.

— Helen, he says. Helen Loomis?

Suddenly she knows him.

— Eddie Gaffney? she says. Is that you?

— I’ll be goddamned, Gaffney says.

— What are you doing here?

He exhales, making a fluttering sound with his lips.

— My wife, she’s in St. Vincent’s, the downtown one, you know: a couple of blocks from here.

— Oh, Eddie. I’m so sorry.

— Yeah, well…

He shakes his head, takes a drag on the filtered Camel.

— And you, Helen? I heard the news about the paper on the TV at the hospital. You all right?

— Not really.

— Want some coffee?

— Sure.

He flips his butt into the river and they turn toward the mall. How long had it been since Eddie Gaffney walked away from newspapers? To become a flack, and then a lobbyist up in Albany? Thirty years, at least. How long since she’d seen him? Twelve years? Some funeral… He opens the door and she steps into the mall. Somewhere, Beatles music is playing. “Hey, Jude.” Maybe the floor below.

— There’s a place over in the corner, Gaffney says.

— Right.

She knows he will start talking about the days when the fish market was still here and they all filled the big table at Sloppy Louie’s in the mornings. He won’t tell Helen about his wife unless she pries. She won’t. Over coffee, they can talk about the years when they each had the best of everything. Without much money. She thinks: The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else’s nostalgia.

1:45 p.m. Josh Thompson. Fourteenth Street, Manhattan.

More steps and he can’t climb them. These lead into still another church. Dark faces, men and women, probably Mexicans. The sign says something in Spanish, ending with that word he can’t say. Goo-add-a-luppy? Same as back home. All these Mexicans, it must be Catholic. Figures. But if you look at their faces long enough, they look like Arabs.

He moves the wheelchair closer to the iron spears of the fence, and locks the wheels. People move along the street in both directions, but none of them look at him. Across the street, past the buses and the taxis and the SUVs, he sees the King Food Chinese restaurant. Every kind of people here. Chinese too. This side of the street, they even got an Istanbul Café. Not just Jews and Catholics and blacks and Mexicans. Muslims too.

Then he sees an older woman looking at him. A Mexican. Or Arab. Short and dumpy, hair a little gray, the tan skin a little red from the cold. She has kind eyes. She comes over.

— Señor? Necesita ayuda? You need help?

— No, no, I’m all right.

— You wan’ to go to chutch?

He smiles, shrugs. Then taps the arms of the wheelchair.

— No, no, lady. I can’t. Not with this.

He waves at the high steps.

The woman leans forward.

— Wait a minute.

She turns and hurries to a side entrance, and moves down the steps into a place Josh Thompson can’t see. He thinks he should leave. Go away. Disappear. But he thinks of her eyes. There was no anger in her eyes. In Baghdad, all eyes were angry, even when people smiled.

Now she comes back, with two Mexican men, rough, dark, smiling.