Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

The same faces night after night. Crackheads and drug dealers and here’s that guy for three Coronas.

J. Sutter on deadline queues up with crackheads in the sinister A.M. His fingers hurt from late employment at the tiny buttons of J.’s microcassette recorder, where they teased shrill idiocy from metallic spools. On the tape the actor and pinup expounded on Tantric sex and the Dalai Lama, from a white table poolside at a hotel in Los Angeles. That day, a year ago, J. sipped a margarita and squinted at his notes in the bleaching sunlight. He felt himself getting soft and overripe in the sunlight just like everything else in the state, his brain splitting and spilling juices. Brody Mills had just finished a stint at a court-appointed substance abuse rehabilitation facility. “Four weeks of seriously getting my head together,” as he described it that day, and a year later in J.’s apartment through diminutive technology. He tapped ash on the coarse tile of the hotel Sun Deck Lounge, eschewing for reasons of his own the elegant ashtray proximate his hand. “I’m clean for the first time in years and it feels so great,” he said, while eyeing and coveting J.’s frothy blue margarita like a Bedlam fiend.

Brody Mills dispensed rehearsed penance as the viscount of the studio publicity mechanism nodded and smiled and tapped Brody’s tanned forearm when he wandered too close to the demilitarized zone between their agreed-upon orchestrations and the facts themselves. His implosion had announced itself for months, first as nameless ectoplasm in blind items of gossip pages, then as bold-faced and named instigator in a brawl at a Manhattan after-hours club, finally no longer omen but event itself, as Brody Mills was cast against type in a hooded sweatshirt and detectives led him into the precinct at the top of the nightly news. On every channel. He was Wednesday’s scandal, he took a wrong turn after an afternoon spent with his surgeon-sculpted proboscis deep in cocaine anthill, slapped his longtime model girlfriend around, and bit the arresting officer on the ass when he came to investigate the noise complaint delivered to 911 by fellow residents of the upscale downtown co-op. The judge gave the actor and heartthrob probation and ordered a mandatory stay in rehab. J. was one of ten journalists scheduled for poolside chats that day, one of pop’s own parole review board. Brody certainly looked better than in his now infamous mugshot: the goatee shreds in a Beverly Hills sink; the black halos around his eyes trod away by step after step (numbering twelve in total) of self-awakening. J. was there to force the man to his mark, the X of tape where the public wanted him to stand, centered beneath the cleansing spotlight of contrition. Brody moved obediently. “Fame came so quickly,” he conceded, “I never had a chance to grow up.”

When J. got to that part of the tape, a few days later, when he was back in the civilized regions of Brooklyn, that quotation insisted on itself as an obvious and natural segue for a recap of Brody’s early career. He grew up before the public’s eyes but the child remained inside him. It was obvious, blunt, and ready for copy.

The magazine called him up, asked J. if he wanted to fly to L.A. to interview the actor and idol on his release from rehabilitation. J. flew out, interviewed this nipple-pierced Lazarus and filed the piece on time. But Fellini died. The great director Federico Fellini was dead in Italy and the managing editor wanted to run a package on the man’s demise: capsule reviews of his key movies rated by one to four stars for video store convenience; brief statements by leading American directors (no one too art housey) who were influenced by his work; and an essay on his impact on the world of film, the peculiar economy of postwar Italian life and how it produced idiosyncratic and beautiful art, this essay prepared months before when the man first checked into the hospital, just in case. There’s a protocol for such things. J.’s piece on the Confessions of Brody Mills, Actor and Superstar, was pushed back a week to make room for the package, and then another week, and then no one cared and a kill fee (full) arrived in the mail. That was a year ago.

Then this morning J. got a call rousing him from a dream, one of the agitated type that he gets only when the noon light gushes full and accusatory on his face through the bedroom window. Brody was in trouble again, falling naturally to mischief just as he did in the show that made him famous, the Fox television program Quaker’s Dozen, a situation comedy concerning twelve orphans of different ethnic backgrounds and the hip preacher who is their guardian. (When one of the child actors wanted to leave the show, or was eliminated by the producers’ caprices, they were “adopted” at the end of the season, a truly successful adaptation in the Darwinian jungle hell of modern entertainment, rarely a dry eye in the house when this stunt was performed, and seismic, Neilsen-wise.) Brody arrested yet again, and on the eve of the premiere of his new action film, yet. Will neighbors ever refrain from calling the police over loud noises that disturb the early morning metropolitan calm? When the constables arrived at the Paramount Hotel this morning and knocked down the door, Brody Mills was as naked as a babe (or the famous bare-ass scene in Ten Miles, the first film he made after he was adopted from the hip priest’s orphanage) and arguing with invisible critics and studio executives (for the unseen goblins he harangued must have surely been critics and studio executives) while the paraphernalia of narcotics abuse lay in plain sight and the hotel reservoir of pay-per-view pornography inundated the well-appointed suite at high volume. “It took half a dozen of New York’s Finest to restrain him,” the magazine editor related to J. from the AP wire, and would J. mind fixing up his piece from last year, two thousand words if possible, buck a word and by tomorrow noon?

J. put down the phone and went back to sleep. Paid twice for basically the same thing: he slept unperturbed by hectoring afternoon light, tranquilized by the thought of taking money off the troubled celeb. He woke and mulled over, guzzling coffee, the talk show disaster on his TV screen. At five he strolled to Fort Greene Park for what he reckoned might be a pleasant hour of meditation but he bored quickly with the pavement and pitbulls and wilted condoms and beat it home after five minutes. His thoughts did not touch on the assignment for more than a few moments through the evening. Pop a few details into the original fifteen-hundred-word piece, no sweat, snatching lollipops from a baby, the tikes have no grip yet, he could get up early and do that easy. He ordered Chinese food and watched television until eleven o’clock, when the faint angel of professionalism perched on his shoulder, implored in a whisper, and he went to check the file. Place the X rays up to the light and see exactly where the fractures were, what needed mending tomorrow so to speak. When he called up the file he found gibberish, a glyphic conspiracy of pixelated symbols he didn’t even know how to muster from his keys, it was a language from a cranky sect deep within the motherboard. He couldn’t explain it. He had fifteen hundred words of shit when he called up the file B. Mills Repentance Spiel.

But he still had the interview tape in his income tax receipt drawer, and he had coffee beans. J. knocked back a pot of coffee and transcribed once again the actor and teen scream’s confessional peregrinations. J. fastfor-warded past his own voice; he loathed the sound of his voice through the tiny speaker, it was amplified and remastered by the machine so that it contained a quality of earnestness and sincerity that he did not truly possess. Since Brody Mills never answered any of his questions, preferring instead a dada discourse, it did not matter that J. did not hear his questions. But two and a half hours into his reconstructions, J.’s fingers were rebellious from rewinding and fastforwarding, and his stomach and heart convulsed with the coffee bean’s harassment. He was so jazzed up that he needed to calm down if he was going to get, what, two hours sleep maybe and be fresh for the morning’s foray to the happy hunting grounds of hackery. And that meant an expedition to the only establishment open at this time of night. He must make his descent.