The Last Manly Man (5 page)

“Yes,” I said.

Fairchild threw back the sheet, revealing the waxy, blue-white face of a bald man I had never seen before.

“Well?” Fairchild said.

“I don't know him.”

“Remember, he was in the water for a while. He's slightly bloated.”

“The guy I saw had brown hair, a lot of it, and a completely different face and build,” I said. “He was wearing a different suit too.”

“Well, good. I'm relieved you don't know him. Thanks for coming down, all the same.”

“No problem,” I said. “It's just such a weird coincidence, the Doublemint gum, I mean.”

“A lot of people chew gum. When I learn more from Brooklyn Homicide, I'll call
you
,” she said, which was her polite way of saying, “Don't call me.”

Though Bigger and Fairchild saw me as some kind of murder fetishist, I was more than happy that the dead guy was a stranger. Not happy for him, poor slob. Whoever he was, he had lived and loved and died too soon. While I was heading to work, it was hard not to wonder about him, who he was and how he ended up dead. And it was hard not to be depressed after a trip to the morgue, with its bright lights, sterility—emotionally and otherwise—the chem lab smell and … what was that other thing? Oh yeah. Staring into the face of a dead man and confronting the chilly darkness of oblivion.

That face was hard to shake, but I managed to put it out of my mind as I went into the pink and granite Jackson Broadcasting Building in midtown Manhattan. As Wallace Mandervan wrote in his book,
The Natural Leader
, successful men leave their personal troubles and existential angst outside the workplace. No time now to contemplate the certainty of death and the uncertainty of an afterlife; I had to summon up enough of an air of authority to get me through another day as the Boss.

Just getting to my office these days involved a series of obstacles. To get into the All News Network part of the building, you have to go through a security desk ID check, a metal detector, a series of
Star Trek
–style airlock doors, and past Investigative Reports. There was always a risk of running into either Dr. Solange Stevenson—former TV psychologist and now Barbara Walters clone in the Investigative Reports Unit, whom my ex-husband once referred to as six feet of walking saltpeter, because of her great personal charm—or Reb “Rambo” Ryan, whose sartorial role model was Ernest Hemingway.

Fortunately, neither one was around that morning, so I felt safe stopping to see what was new on Democracy Wall, the ten-foot-long employee bulletin board in the hallway outside the newsroom. The state of Georgia had commissioned a study to select a second method of killing death row inmates, in addition to the primitive electric chair. Some dark-humored ANN wag had posted a contest soliciting suggestions. Topping the list were Batmanesque ideas involving conveyor belts, circular saws, and large, mutant Venus flytraps, along with the simpler, more whimsical methods such as “death by tickling.” Near the bottom, one gentle soul had added, “Old age.”

Someone else had posted a contest to determine the programming for Jack's new nameless worldwide network, formerly Millennial Broadcasting. This was fairly fresh; the only suggestions so far were the 24-Hour Home Video Network and the 24-Hour Test Pattern Network.

Normally, I'd cut through the newsroom on my way to my offices, but at the moment, I was trying to avoid the newsroom gossips and their peasant-king, producer Louis Levin, lest they try to pry information out of me about Jack Jackson, my “benefactor,” as Louis Levin called him in the loaded way he has. So I took the long way, skirting around the newsroom through the warren of feature news offices, science, fashion, medicine, legal, the
Kerwin Shutz
show, to Special Reports, a room of partitioned offices off one of ANN's back hallways.

My miserable employees were waiting for me with questions, complaints, problems, complaints, paperwork, and complaints, which I listened to as I made my own morning coffee (light, four sugars, in a cup that said “Bitch-Boss”).

Karim the tape editor had called in sick—again. The company accountants were getting anxious for the quarterly budget figures. During the night, the cleaning people had rearranged the conference area furniture and Liz the associate producer, who was legally blind and litigious, had almost hurt herself.

“Are you going to look after the cleaning situation?” Liz demanded. She was very aggressive for a blind woman, which would have seemed admirable if I hadn't been on the receiving end of it so much of the time.

“Robin, the cleaning crew must move the furniture back exactly where it was before they started cleaning. Otherwise …”

“I'll write a memo to maintenance. Anything else?” I asked.

Liz always had a long list of complaints. The air-conditioning was on too high. Her Opticon, the text-reading device she used, was not working properly. How come I hadn't done anything yet about the slippery tile outside the ladies' room?

It was hard work wearing two hats, boss and reporter, in the Special Reports Unit, or as the newsroom called it lately, Village of the Damned, because it had become a repository for every outcast employee the network couldn't fire for one reason or another. There was Liz, Karim, the hypochondriacal tape editor, and Shauna, the production assistant who either had really low self-esteem or no personality at all, I couldn't decide. Plus, I had all the interns rejected by the other units.

This cast of characters arrived after Investigative Reports had pillaged my unit for talent. This is the deal. Jack Jackson went to war with media baron Lord Otterrill for control of Millennial Broadcasting after Millennial's head, Reverend Paul Mangecet, went bankrupt. The company mandarins decided that the network had to be sleeker in order to do battle, and there was a lot of talk about Special Reports being shut down in favor of the higher-profile Investigative Reports Unit. Presumably, Human Resources thought they could replace my staff with the misfits and then fire them all indiscriminately in one fell swoop when my unit closed down, thereby protecting the company from lawsuits.

To the chagrin of the “serious” journalists and Human Resources, Jack Jackson saved Special Reports. Though we had been “saved,” it was with the understanding that this reprieve was temporary, until budget time rolled around again in another month and our status was reviewed. By this time, the serious journalists hoped, Jack would have come to his senses. By this time, I hoped, the Man of the Future series would have aired and been a tremendous success.

This series and all my work on it was all that stood between my staff and the unemployment line. But did they appreciate it? No. It was no good telling my staff how lucky they were to have me as a boss, that it could have been so much worse: They could have worked for Jerry Spurdle. Spurdle, my former boss in Special Reports, had once made me pose as his wife for an undercover report on shoddy sperm banks. I avoided further embarrassment on that story by saying unflattering things on camera about Jerry to a nurse, forcing Jerry to cut me out of the edited piece. Then there was the time he had me pose as a “hopeful customer” of a computerized dating service. In this case, I made myself as unattractive as possible, claiming I was thrice widowed with four kids and my hobbies were tournament whist, Court TV, and making my own muumuus. I was looking for “lucky husband number four” and my personal quote was: “You got any money?” Oddly, I got no takers.

The point is, I was a good boss, relatively speaking, and my staff didn't appreciate me. Jerry would have made fun of all their tics and deformities and threatened them with his big drawer full of “résumés of all the people who want to replace you.”

I'd tried being the “friend-boss,” but that didn't work, because I was so much older than my employees—in their eyes anyway. They were embarrassed to be in the unit, and they took it out on me most of the time. There was not a one of them I trusted, and I suspected someone in the office was responsible for certain rumors about me and Jack Jackson that showed up anonymously in the companywide, computerized rumor file, known as Radio Free Babylon and run by my old friend, producer Louis Levin.

“I'd like you to think again about letting me bring my Seeing Eye dog into work,” Liz said.

“Karim's allergic, but I'll talk to Human Resources about it.” Whenever possible, pass the buck. “Any calls?”

“Yeah, you got a call yesterday, just after you left, from some guy. He wanted to know where your dinner meeting was. You met up with him okay, right? Because I forgot to tell you about the call.”

“Yes. Benny Winter. We met up. Has he called this morning?”

“No, but Jack Jackson called,” said Liz, her voice laden with innuendo.

“Any other calls?”

“A guy named Jason called a couple of times already this morning.”

“Jason? Doesn't ring a bell.”

“Wouldn't leave a number.” She lowered her voice to parody Jason's conspiratorial tone. “‘Phones might not be safe.' Is he a loony?”

“Probably.”

“And a Dr. Karen Keyes called. She's presenting at the women's conference …”

“Not interested. We have two feminists for our series. If you count that file clip of Gloria Steinem, that's plenty. I'm more interested in what men have to say about their future. Anything else?”

“Here's your fan mail, all of it from that village in India.”

“Balandapur.” I didn't get much fan mail anymore, and what I did get came mostly from this little village in south India, where villagers had been watching ANN by satellite in their teahouses. Most of my fan mail talked about my carrot-red hair, which was evidently a great topic of conversation in Balandapur. My fan base used to be comprised mainly of masochists who wanted me to hurt them, but the masochists had all deserted me for meaner and/or more powerful goddesses like Xena, Courtney Love, and, inexplicably, Kathie Lee Gifford.

First thing I did was call back Jack Jackson, Our Fearless Leader, aka Daddy Warbucks due to a more than passing resemblance. Jack was working on a speech he was to give at the end of the women's conference and he was looking for “some feedback from some of my women.”

“What was the thing you told me the night we went barhopping about urinating standing up?” Jack asked.

“Oh, a trick I learned from an old Girl Scout named Julie,” I said. “That's a thing feminists say a lot, the only thing a man can do that a woman can't do is pee standing up. But a little technology—a simple funnel—and you've solved that problem.”

“A little technology,” Jack repeated. “And didn't we discuss how many names men have for masturbation, while women have none?”

Christ, I must have been really drunk that night. I didn't remember discussing masturbation with the Great Man.

“Possibly,” I said.

“What were some of the names men had for it? I've got spanking the monkey, polishing the pipe, stretching the leather, and there was something about Bubba.”

“Shucking Bubba,” I provided.

“Shucking Bubba. Haw haw.”

“What does this have to do with feminism?”

“You'll see, when I give my speech,” he said.

He hung up without saying good-bye, as usual, and I turned my attention back to the administrative crap I had to look after before I went to my first interview of the day. While doing an isometric butt-tightening exercise, I speed-wrote memos to maintenance and accounting; then I gulped down my coffee and ran to meet the crew for the first of our Man of the Future interviews.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Who are we shooting?” Sven the sound tech asked when I climbed into the back of the crew car.

“Alana DeWitt, the mother of modern feminism,” I said. “Followed by Dr. Budd Nukker, and Gill Morton, CEO of Morton Industries.”

“Gill Morton?” Jim the cameraman repeated after me, visibly thrilled. “No shit. My dad was a Morton Man for years. Did they have Morton Men in Sweden, Sven?”

“Yeah, my uncle was one.”

When you hear the words Morton Company, you too probably think of the Morton Man, a guy with a sample case flogging cleaning products door-to-door. Of course, Morton was no longer just a door-to-door outfit peddling patent medicines and Morton Mopwash to the lonely and the housebound. After World War Two, it branched out into automotive products, plastics, and household appliances. According to the press packet, since Gill had taken over in the 1970s, the company had expanded into food products, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, building materials, and tableware. If you look in your cupboards and medicine chest, you probably have something made by Morton or one of its subsidiaries. One sub had a defense contract to make electrical switches for guided-missile systems, another to set up private prisons in Texas. It was a long way from the original Morton Man, Hock Morton, who in 1887 started the company by selling soap and scrub brushes door-to-door in Brooklyn, dispensing his folksy wisdom for free.

“My dad was one for a summer,” I said.

“Did he have the jacket? The suspenders?” Jim asked.

“I don't know. He didn't do it for very long.”

“Jeez, my dad had all the crap, whaddya call it. Memorabilia. Some of it is worth money now,” Jim said.

“But before we interview Morton, we interview Alana DeWitt. By the way, if she asks, you're both gay men.”

“What?” Jim said. “I'm not gay. I have a wife and two kids.…”

“She hates men,” I explained. “But she hates gay men less than straight men. I couldn't find an all-female crew and this was the only way she'd agree to do the interview.”

As the antimatter Will Rogers—never met a man she liked—CUNY professor DeWitt was so paranoid and hated men so much that she insisted only women reporters interview her. That was a noble kind of gesture back in the days of Eleanor Roosevelt, when women journalists were denied access to important briefings, but these days it just seemed petty and mean, though totally in character for DeWitt. Among her other interview eccentricities, she didn't like discussing specific men, only men in general. This way, you couldn't confuse her or trip her up with examples of men who went against the “norms” that she railed against.