I cringe at the "marred by heavy substance abuse" line, but I can't come up with anything that isn't equally cliched.
I insert the phrase "highly publicized" in front of "romances." ...
Tinkering is a way of stalling, and I'm stalling in the hope that Janet Thrush might still phone with a quote or two about her brother. Except for a few paragraphs of background from old clippings, the obituary is pretty much all Cleo Rio. Single-sourcing always makes me uneasy, and I'm stuck with Cleo's word on lots of material facts, including the cause of Jimmy Stoma's death.
I keep thinking of the shimmery-haired guy with the deli bags who got out of the elevator. Hell, there could be a dozen innocent explanations. Maybe he was Cleo's big brother, or some diving buddy of Jimmy's. That bull-semen cologne, though, was definitely too heavy for the occasion.
My eyes fall skeptically on the phrase "still dazed by the tragedy," which I've used to describe Jimmy's widow. I should probably take it out, but I won't. It paints a gentler scene than if I'd written she was "knocking back screwdrivers and staring blankly out a window," which was the sad truth.
One more detail jumps out of the obituary to give me a twinge of acid reflux: the bit about how Jimmy and Cleo Rio first met at a VH1 party. That's what Cleo told me.
Yet she also told me her husband had broken completely from his past, and wanted nothing more to do with the music world until he'd met her. So why was he attending a Van Halen bash?
One of many things I'll probably never know.
I check the clock. I punch the Send key, then e-mail Emma to tell her Jimmy Stoma's on the way. I head downstairs to grab a soda. Upon my return I see Emma has responded with an electronic message of her own: "We need to talk as soon as I'm out of the news meeting!"
She probably hasn't even read the obitall she did was scope out the length, then freak. Minutes later I see her crossing the newsroom and I pounce like a wolverine.
"Metro took it," she says, acting as if she couldn't care less.
"Yeah? For out front?"
Emma says nothing. She knows where the Jimmy Stoma obit is being played, but she won't give me the satisfaction.
"Talk to Metro," she says, now pretending to edit a story by young Evan Richards, our college intern. Upon my approach Evan warily has drifted away from Emma's desk; he has witnessed too many of our dustups.
"What about you?" I say to Emma. "You got enough to fill the page?"
"I'll find something on the wires."
She won't look directly at me; her slender hands appear bolted to the keypad of her computer, her nose poised six inches from the screen. The worst part is, the screen is blank. I can see its bright blue reflection in Emma's reading glasses.
Unaccountably, I am overtaken by pity.
"Rabbi Levine won't be on the wire services, Emma. You want me to make a few calls?"
Her eyes flicker. I notice the ivory tip of a tooth, pinching a corner of her lip. "No, Jack. There isn't time."
Back at my desk, I dial three phone numbers: the rabbi's wife, the rabbi's brother and the synagogue. I bat out twelve inches in twenty minutes flat, shipping it to Emma with the following note:
"You were right. The hang-gliding stuff makes the whole piece."
On the way out of the newsroom, I hear her call my name. Walking back to her desk, I see the rabbi's obituary up on her computer screen. It's easy to guess what's coming.
"Jack, I like the brother's quote better than the wife's."
"Then move it up," I say, agreeably. Emma needs this one more than I do. "See you tomorrow."
Out of the blue she says, "Nice kicker on Jimmy Stoma." Not exactly oozing sincerity, but at least she's making eye contact.
"Thanks. Was it Abkazion who bumped it to Metro?"
Emma nods. "Just like you said. Our new boss is a Slut Puppies fan."
"Naw," I say, "a true fan would have put it on Page One."
Emma almost smiles.
Dinner is a lightning stop at a burger joint. Then I go home, open a beer and ransack the apartment in search of my copy of Reptiles and Amphibians of North America.Finally I unearth it from a loose pile of Dylan and Pink Floyd CDs. At the touch of a button, Jimmy Stoma is alive and well, shaking the rafters of my living room. I flop on the couch. Maybe he's no Roger Waters, but James Bradley Stomarti is not without talent.
Correction: Was.
I close my eyes and listen.
One night I fell through a hole in my soul,
And you followed me down, followed me down.
I fell till the blackness broke low into dawn
And you followed me down till you drowned ...
Smiling, I drain the beer. Irony abounds! Poor Jimmy.
Again I close my eyes.
When I awake, it's daybreak. The phone is ringing and with chagrin I realize I've forgotten to turn off the call-forwarding from my newsroom number. It can only be a reader on the other end of the line, and no possible good can come from speaking to a reader at such an ungodly hour. Yet the interruption of sleep has made me so bilious that I lunge for the receiver as if it were a cocked revolver.
"Yeah, what?" I say gruffly, to put the caller on the defensive.
"Is this Mr. Tagger?" Woman's voice.
"Yeah."
"This is Janet. Janet Thrush. I read what all you wrote about my brother in the paper."
Idiotically, I find myself anticipating a compliment. Instead I hear a scornful snort.
"Holy shit," says Jimmy Stoma's sister, "did you get scammed, or what!"
4
When I went to work for this newspaper I was forty years old, the same age as Jack London when he died. I'm now forty-six. Elvis Presley died at forty-six. So did President Kennedy. George Orwell, too.
It's an occupational hazard for obituary writersmemorizing the ages at which famous people have expired, and compulsively employing such trivia to track the arc of one's own life. I can't seem to stop myself.
Not being a rotund pillhead with clogged valves, I am statistically unlikely to expire on the toilet, as Elvis did. As for succumbing to a political assassination, I'm too obscure to attract a competent sniper. Nonetheless, my forty-sixth birthday brought a torrent of irrational anxieties that have not abated in eleven months. If death could snatch such heavy hitters as Elvis and JFK, a nobody like me is easy pickings.
Implicit in the dread of early demise is a lugubrious awareness of underachievement. At my age, Elvis was the King; Kennedy, the leader of the free world. Me, I'm sitting in a donut shop in Beckerville reading a newspaper story about a dead musician, a story I apparently have botched. Nice display, though: front of the Metro section, above the fold. The text is accompanied by a recent Reuters photo of the deceased, looking tanned and happy at a benefit barbecue for Reef Relief. Even the headline isn't terrible: Ex-Rocker Dies in Bahamas Diving Mishap.(James Bradley Stomarti, by the way, passed away at the same age as Dennis Wilson and John Kennedy Jr.)
Janet Thrushwho else could it be?takes the stool next to me and says, "First off, nobody calls me Jan."
"Deal."
"It's Janet. My ex once called me Jan and I stuck a cocktail fork in his femoral artery."
I am careful to display no curiosity about the marriage.
"So, Janet,exactly how did Cleo Rio scam me?"
"She lied about her new record'Waterlogged Heart' or whatever. Jimmy's not producing it."
Janet has freckles on her nose and unruly ash-blond hair and green bulb earrings the size of Yule ornaments. She's wearing Wayfarers and a pastel tube top over tight jeans, and looks at least five years younger than her brother.
"How do you know he wasn't producing it?" I ask.
"A, because Jimmy would've told me. B, because he was too busy working on his own record."
"Hold on." I reach for my pen and notebook.
"Fact, I didn't even know Cleo hada CD in the works. My brother never said a word about it."