Almost everyone was, except for stringers working among the primitives in darkest Connecticut and New Jersey. Even scabby little Irving Ramstein, who wrote a joke column called (I don’t understand it, so don’t ask me) Politically Incorrect Chickens, showed up. Katie ran the meeting with aplomb, telling us that the show would go on.
‘It’s what Jeroma would have wanted,’ Pinky said.
‘Who gives a shit what Jeroma would have wanted,’ Georgina Bukowski said. ‘I just want to keep getting a paycheck. Also, if remotely possible, a piece of the action.’
This cry was taken up by several others – Action! Action! Piece-a-da-action! – until our offices sounded like a messhall riot in an old prison movie. Katie let it run its course, then shushed them.
‘How could she choke to death?’ Chin asked. ‘The gumdrop came out.’
‘It wasn’t a gumdrop,’ Roberta said. ‘It was one of those smelly cough drops she was always sucking on. Craptolyptus.’
‘Whatever, dude, it still came flying out when Kates gave her the Hug of Life. We all saw it.’
‘I didn’t,’ Pinky said. ‘I was on the phone. And on fucking hold.’
Katie said that she had interviewed one of the EMTs – no doubt using her large gray eyes to good effect – and had been told that the choking fit might have triggered a heart attack. And, in my effort to follow the dictum of Professor Higgins and keep all the relevant facts straight, I will jump ahead here and report the autopsy on our Dear Leader proved that to be the case. If Jeroma had gotten the Neon Circus headline she deserved, it probably would have been HEAD HONCHO POPS PUMP.
That meeting was long and loud. Already displaying talents that made her a natural to step into Jeroma’s Jimmy Choos, Katie allowed them to fully vent their feelings (expressed mostly in bursts of wild, semihysterical laughter) before telling them to get back to work, because time, tide, and Internet waits for no man. Or woman, either. She said she would be talking with the Circus’s main investors before the week was out, and then invited me to step into Jeroma’s office.
‘Measuring the drapes?’ I asked when the door was shut. ‘Or the blinds, in this case?’
She looked at me with what might have been hurt. Or maybe just surprise. ‘Do you think I want this job? I’m a columnist, Mike, just like you.’
‘You’d be good at it, though. I know it and so do they.’ I jerked my head toward our excuse for a newsroom, where everyone was now either hunting and pecking or working the phones. ‘As for me, I’m just the funny-obit writer. Or was. I’ve decided to become an emeritus.’
‘I think I understand why you feel that way.’ She slipped a piece of paper from the back pocket of her jeans and unfolded it. I knew what it was before she handed it to me. ‘Curiosity comes with the job, so I peeped in your trash before dumping it. And found this.’
I took the sheet, refolded it without looking (I didn’t even want to see the print, let alone reread it), and put it in my own pocket. ‘Is it dumped now?’
‘Yes, and that’s the only hard copy.’ She brushed her hair away from her face and looked at me. It might not have been the face that launched a thousand ships, but it surely could have launched several dozen, including a destroyer or two. ‘I knew you’d ask. Having worked with you for a year and a half, I understand that paranoia is part of your character.’
‘Thanks.’
‘No offense intended. In New York, paranoia is a survival skill. But it’s no reason to quit what could become a far more lucrative job in the immediate future. Even you must know that a freaky coincidence – and I admit this one’s fairly freaky – is just a coincidence. Mike, I need you to stay on board.’
Not we but I. She said she wasn’t measuring the drapes; I thought she was.
‘You don’t understand. I don’t think I could do it anymore even if I wanted to. Not and be funny, at least. It would all come out …’ I reached, and found a word from my childhood. ‘Goosh.’
Katie frowned, thinking. ‘Maybe Penny could do it.’
Penny Langston was one of those stringers from the darker environs, hired by Jeroma at Katie’s suggestion. I had a vague idea that the two women had known each other in college. If so, they could not have been less alike. Penny rarely came in, and when she did, she wore an old baseball cap that never left her head and a macabre smile that rarely left her face. Frank Jessup, the sports guy with the Mohawk, liked to say that Penny always looked about two stress points from going postal.
‘But she’d never be as funny as you are,’ Katie went on. ‘If you don’t want to write obituaries, what would you want to do? Assuming you stay at Circus, which I pray you will.’
‘Reviews, maybe. I could write funny ones, I think.’
‘Hatchet jobs?’ Sounding at least marginally hopeful.
‘Well … yeah. Probably. Some of them.’ I was good at snark, after all, and I thought I could probably outsnark Joe Queenan on points, possibly by a knockout. And at least it would be dumping on live people who could fight back.
She put her hands on my shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and planted a soft kiss on the corner of my mouth. If I close my eyes, I can still feel that kiss today. She looked at me with those wide gray eyes – the sea on an overcast morning. I’m sure Professor Higgins would roll his eyes at that, but C-list guys like me rarely get kissed by A-list girls like her.
‘Think about going on with the obits, would you?’ Hands still on my shoulders. Her light scent in my nostrils. Her breasts less than an inch from my chest, and when she took a deep breath, they touched. I can still feel that today too. ‘This is not just about you or me. The next six weeks are going to be a critical time for the site and the staff. So think, okay? Even another month of obits would be helpful. It would give Penny – or someone else – a chance to work her way into the job, with guidance from you. And hey, maybe nobody interesting will die.’
Except they always do, and we both knew it.
I probably told her I’d think about it. I can’t remember. What I was actually thinking about was lip-locking her right there in Jeroma’s office, and damn anyone in the bullpen who might see us. I didn’t, though. Outside the rom-coms, guys like me rarely do. I said something or other and then I must have left, because pretty soon I found myself out on the street. I felt poleaxed.
One thing I do remember: when I came to a litter basket on the corner of Third and Fiftieth, I tore the joke obit that was no longer a joke into tiny shreds and threw them in.
That night I ate a pleasant enough dinner with my parents, then went into my room – the same one where I’d gone to sulk on days when my Little League team lost, how depressing is that – and sat down at my desk. The easiest way to get past my unease, it seemed to me, was to write another obit of a living person. Don’t they tell you to get back on a horse right away if you’ve been thrown? Or climb right away to the top diving platform after your jackknife turns into a belly flop? All I needed to do was prove what I already knew: we live in a rational world. Sticking pins in voodoo dolls doesn’t kill people. Writing your enemy’s name on a scrap of paper and burning it while you recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards doesn’t kill people. Joke obituaries don’t kill people, either.
Nevertheless, I was careful to make a list of possibles consisting solely of proven bad people, such as Faheem Darzi, who had claimed credit for the bus bombing in Miami, and Kenneth Wanderly, an electrician convicted on four counts of rape-murder in Oklahoma. Wanderly seemed like the best possibility on my short list of seven names, and I was about to whomp something up when I thought of Peter Stefano, a worthless fuck if there ever was one.
Stefano was a record producer who choked his girlfriend to death for refusing to record a song he had written. He was now doing time in a medium-security prison when he should have been at a black site in Saudi Arabia, dining on cockroaches, drinking his own pee, and listening to Anthrax played at top volume during the wee hours of the morning. (Just MHO, of course.) The woman he killed was Andi McCoy, who happened to be one of my all-time favorite female singers. If I had been writing joke obits at the time of her death, I never would have written hers; the idea that her soaring voice, easily the equal of the young Joan Baez’s could have been silenced by that domineering idiot still infuriated me five years later. God gives such golden vocal cords to only the chosen few, and Stefano had destroyed McCoy’s in a fit of drugged-out pique.
I opened my laptop, typed PETER STEFANO OBIT in the proper field, and dropped the cursor onto the blank document. Once again the words poured out with no pause, like water from a broken pipe.
Slave-driving, no-talent record producer Peter Stefano was discovered dead in his jail cell at the Gowanda State Correctional Facility yesterday morning, and we all shout hooray. Although no official cause of death was announced, a prison source said, ‘It appears his anal hate-gland ruptured, thus spreading asshole poison through his body. In layman’s terms, he had an allergic reaction to his own vile shit.’
Although Stefano had his foot on the necks of a great many groups and solo artists, he is especially noted for ruining the careers of the Grenadiers, the Playful Mammals, Joe Dean (who committed suicide after Stefano refused to renegotiate his contract), and of course Andi McCoy. Not content with killing her career, Stefano choked her to death with a lamp cord while high on methamphetamines. He is survived by three grateful ex-wives, five ex-partners, and the two record companies he managed not to bankrupt.
It went on in that vein for another hundred words or so, and was not one of my better efforts (obviously). I didn’t care, because it felt right. Not just because Peter Stefano was a bad man, either. It felt right as a writer, even though it was bad prose and part of me knew it was a bad thing. This might seem like a sidetrack, but I think (actually I know) it’s at the heart of this story. Writing is hard, okay? At least it is for me. And yes, I know that most working stiffs talk about how hard their jobs are, it doesn’t matter if they’re butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, or obituary writers. Only sometimes the work is not hard. Sometimes it’s easy. When that happens you feel like you do at the bowling alley, watching your ball as it rolls over just the right diamond and you know you threw a strike.
Killing Stefano in my computer felt like a strike.
I slept like a baby that night. Maybe some of it was because I felt as if I’d done something to express my own rage and dismay over that poor murdered girl – the stupid waste of her talent. But I felt the same way when I was writing the Jeroma Whitfield obit, and all she did was refuse to give me a raise. Mostly it was the writing itself. I felt the power, and feeling the power was good.
My first compu-stop at breakfast the next day wasn’t Neon Circus but Huffington Post. It almost always was. I never bothered scrolling down to the celebrity dish or the side-boob items (frankly speaking, Circus did both of those things much better), but the Huffpo headline stories are always crisp, concise, and late-breaking. The first item was about a Tea Party governor saying something Huffpo found predictably outrageous. The next one stopped my cup of coffee halfway to my lips. It also stopped my breath. The headline read PETER STEFANO MURDERED IN LIBRARY ALTERCATION.
I put down my untasted coffee – carefully, carefully, not spilling a drop – and read the story. Stefano and the trustee librarian had been arguing because Andi McCoy’s music was playing from the overhead speakers in the library. Stefano told the librarian to quit macking on him and ‘take that shit off.’ The trustee refused, saying he wasn’t macking on anybody, just picked the CD at random. The argument escalated. That was when someone strolled up behind Stefano and put an end to him with some kind of prison shiv.
So far as I could tell, he had been murdered right around the time I finished writing his obit. I looked at my coffee. I raised the cup and sipped. It was cold. I rushed to the sink and vomited. Then I called Katie and told her I wouldn’t be at the meeting, but would like to meet her later on.
‘You said you’d come,’ she said. ‘You’re breaking your promise!’
‘With good reason. Meet me for coffee this afternoon and I’ll tell you why.’
After a pause, she said: ‘It happened again.’ Not a question.
I admitted it. Told her about making a ‘these guys deserve to die’ list, and then thinking of Stefano. ‘So I wrote his obit, just to prove I had nothing to do with Jeroma’s death. I finished around the same time he got stabbed in the library. I’ll bring a printout with a time stamp, if you want to see it.’
‘I don’t need to see a time stamp, I take your word. I’ll meet you, but not for coffee. Come to my place. And bring the obituary.’
‘If you think you’re going to put it online—’
‘God, no, are you crazy? I just want to see it with my own eyes.’
‘All right.’ More than all right. Her place. ‘But Katie?’
‘Yes?’
‘You can’t tell anybody about this.’
‘Of course not. What kind of person do you think I am?’
One with beautiful eyes, long legs, and perfect breasts, I thought as I hung up. I should have known I was in for trouble, but I wasn’t thinking straight. I was thinking about that warm kiss on the corner of my mouth. I wanted another, and not on the corner. Plus whatever came next.
Her apartment was a tidy three-roomer on the West Side. She met me at the door, dressed in shorts and a filmy top, definitely NSFW. She put her arms around me and said, ‘Oh God, Mike, you look awful. I’m so sorry.’
I hugged her. She hugged me. I sought her lips, as the romance novels say, and pressed them to mine. After five seconds or so – endless and not long enough – she pulled back and looked at me with those big gray eyes. ‘We’ve got so much to talk about.’ Then she smiled. ‘But we can talk about it later.’
What followed was what geeks like me rarely get, and when they do get it, there’s usually an ulterior motive. Not that geeks like me think about such things in the moment. In the moment, we’re like any guy on earth: big head takes a walk, little head rules.
Sitting up in bed.
Drinking wine instead of coffee.
‘Here’s something I saw in the paper last year, or the year before,’ she said. ‘This guy in one of the flyover states – Iowa, Nebraska, someplace like that – buys a lottery ticket after work, one of those scratch-off thingies, and wins a hundred thousand dollars. A week later he buys a Powerball ticket and wins a hundred and forty million.’
‘Your point?’ I saw her point, and didn’t care. The sheet had slipped down to reveal her breasts, every bit as firm and perfect as I’d expected they would be.
‘Twice can still be a coincidence. I want you to do it again.’
‘I don’t think that would be wise.’ It sounded weak even to my own ears. There was an armful of pretty girl within reaching distance, but all at once I wasn’t thinking of the pretty girl. I was thinking of a bowling ball rolling over just the right diamond, and how it felt to stand watching it, knowing that in two seconds the pins were going to explode every whichway.
She turned on her side, looking at me earnestly. ‘If this is really happening, Mike, it’s big. Biggest thing ever. The power of life and death!’
‘If you’re thinking about using this for the site—’
She shook her head vehemently. ‘No one would believe it. Even if they did, how would it benefit Circus? Would we run a poll? Ask people to send us names of bad guys who deserved the chop?’
She was wrong. People would be happy to participate in Death Vote 2016. It would be bigger than American Idol.
She linked her arms around my neck. ‘Who was on your hit list before you thought of Stefano?’
I winced. ‘Wish you wouldn’t call it that.’
‘Never mind, just tell me.’
I started listing the names, but when I got to Kenneth Wanderly, she stopped me. Now the gray eyes didn’t just look overcast; they looked stormy. ‘Him! Write his obituary! I’ll look up the background on Google so you can do a bang-up job, and—’
Reluctantly, I freed myself from her arms. ‘Why bother, Katie? He’s on death row already. Let the state take care of him.’
‘But they won’t!’ She jumped out of bed and began to pace back and forth. It was a mesmerizing sight, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you. Those long legs, ai-yi-yi. ‘They won’t! The Okies haven’t done anyone since that botched execution two years ago! Kenneth Wanderly raped and killed four girls – tortured them to death – and he’ll still be there eating government meatloaf when he’s sixty-five! When he’ll die in his sleep!’
She came back to the bed and threw herself on her knees. ‘Do this for me, Mike! Please!’
‘What makes him so important to you?’
The animation ran out of her face. She sat back on her heels and lowered her head so that her hair screened her face. She stayed that way for maybe ten seconds, and when she looked at me again, her beauty was – not gone, but marred. Scarred. It wasn’t just the tears streaming down her cheeks; it was the shamed droop of her mouth.
‘Because I know what it’s like. I was raped while I was in college. One night after a frat party. I’d tell you to write his obituary, but I never saw him.’ She drew a deep, shuddering breath. ‘He came up behind me. I was on my face the whole time. But Wanderly will do as a proxy. He’ll do just fine.’
I tossed back the sheet. ‘Turn on your computer.’
Cowardly bald-headed rapist Kenneth Wanderly, who could only get it up when his prey was tied down, saved the taxpayers a bunch by committing suicide in his Oklahoma State Penitentiary cell on death row in the early hours of this morning. Guards found Wanderly (whose picture is next to ‘useless piece of shit’ in the Urban Dictionary), hanging from a makeshift noose made of his own pants. Warden George Stockett immediately decreed a special celebratory dinner in the gen-pop dining hall tomorrow night, followed by a sock hop. When asked if the Suicide Trousers would be framed and placed with the penitentiary’s other trophies, Warden Stockett refused to answer, but gave the hastily assembled press conference a wink.
Wanderly, a disease masquerading as a live birth, came into the world on October 27, 1972, in Danbury, Connecticut …
Another craptastic piece of work from Michael Anderson! The worst of my Speaking Ill of the Dead obits were funnier and more trenchant (if you don’t believe me, look them up for yourself), but that didn’t matter. Once again the words came gushing out, and with that same sense of perfectly balanced power. At some point, far in the back of my mind, I realized it was more like throwing a spear than rolling a bowling ball. One with a sharply honed point. Katie felt it, too. She was sitting right next to me, crackling like static electricity flying from a hairbrush.
This next part is hard to write, because it makes me think there’s a little Ken Wanderly in all of us, but since there’s no way to tell the truth except to tell it, here it is: It made us horny. I grabbed her in a rough, ungeeky embrace as soon as it was done and carried her back to the bed. Katie locked her ankles at the small of my back and her hands at the nape of my neck. I think that second go-round might have lasted all of fifty seconds, but we both got off. And hard. People stink sometimes.
Ken Wanderly was a monster, okay? That’s not exclusively my judgment; he used the word to describe himself when he ’fessed up to everything in an unsuccessful effort to avoid the death sentence. I could use that to excuse what I did – what we did – except for one thing.
Writing his obituary was even better than the sex that followed it.
It made me want to do it again.
When I woke up the next morning, Katie was sitting on the couch with her laptop. She looked at me solemnly and patted the cushion beside her. I sat and read the Neon Circus headline on the screen: ANOTHER BAD BOY BITES THE DUST, ‘WICKED KEN’ COMMITS SUICIDE IN HIS CELL. Only not by hanging. He had smuggled in a bar of soap – how was a mystery, because inmates are only supposed to have access to the liquid kind – and shoved it down his throat.
‘Dear God,’ I said. ‘What a horrible way to die.’
‘Good!’ She raised her hands, balled them into fists, and shook them beside her temples. ‘Excellent!’
There were things I didn’t want to ask her. Number one on the list was if she had slept with me strictly so she could persuade me to kill a suitable stand-in for her rapist. But ask yourself this (I did): Would asking have done any good? She could give me a totally straight answer and I still might not have believed her. In a situation like that, the relationship may not be outright poisoned, but it’s probably damn sick.
‘I’m not going to do this again,’ I said.
‘All right, I understand.’ (She didn’t.)
‘So don’t ask me.’
‘I won’t.’ (She did.)
‘And you can never tell anybody.’
‘I already said I wouldn’t.’ (She already had.)
I think part of me already knew this conversation was an exercise in futility, but I said okay and let it drop.
‘Mike, I don’t want to hurry you out of here, but I’ve got like a zillion things to do, and …’
‘No worries, mate. I’m taillights.’
In truth, I wanted to get out. I wanted to walk about sixteen aimless miles and think about what came next.
She grabbed me at the door and kissed me hard. ‘Don’t go away mad.’
‘I’m not.’ I didn’t know how I was going away.
‘And don’t you dare think about quitting. I need you. I’ve decided Penny would be all wrong for Speaking Ill of the Dead, but I totally understand you need a break from it. I was thinking maybe … Georgina?’
‘Maybe,’ I said. I thought Georgina was the worst writer on the staff, but I didn’t really care anymore. All I cared about right then was never seeing another obituary, let alone writing one.
‘As for you, do all the nasty reviews you want. No Jeroma left to say no, am I right?’
‘You’re right.’
She shook me. ‘Don’t say it that way, you monkey. Show some enthusiasm. That old Neon Circus get-up-and-git. And say you’ll stick around.’ She lowered her voice. ‘We can have our own conferences. Private ones.’ She saw my eyes drop to the front of her robe and laughed, pleased. Then she gave me a push. ‘Now go. Buzz on out of here.’