‘I’ll write the obit. But we’re going to revisit this, Jerri.’
‘Not on my watch, we’re not. And don’t call me Jerri. You know better than that.’
I got up to go. My face was burning. I probably looked like a stop sign.
‘And have a Yook,’ she said. ‘Hell, take two. They’re very consoling.’
I cast a disdainful look at the bowl and left, restraining (barely) a childish urge to slam the door.
If you’re picturing a bustling newsroom like the one you see behind Wolf Blitzer on CNN, or in that old movie about Woodward and Bernstein nailing Nixon, reconsider. As I said, most of the Circus writers do their work from home. Our little news-nest (if you want to dignify what Circus does by calling it news) is roughly the size of a double-wide trailer. Twenty school desks are crammed in there, facing a row of muted TVs on one wall. The desks are equipped with battered laptops, each one bearing a hilarious sticker reading PLEASE RESPECT THESE MACHINES.
The place was almost empty that morning. I sat in the back row by the wall, in front of a poster showing a Thanksgiving dinner in a toilet bowl. Beneath this charming image was the motto PLEASE SHIT WHERE YOU EAT. I turned on the laptop, took my printouts concerning Bump DeVoe’s short and undistinguished career from my briefcase, and shuffled through them while the cruncher booted. I opened Word, typed BUMP DeVOE OBIT in the proper box, then just sat there, staring at the blank document. I was paid to yuk it up in the face of death for twentysomethings who feel that death is always for the other guy, but it’s hard to be funny when you’re pissed off.
‘Having trouble getting started?’
It was Katie Curran, a tall, svelte blond for whom I felt a strong lust that was almost certainly unrequited. She was always kind to me, and unfailingly sweet. She laughed at my jokes. Such characteristics rarely signal lust. Was I surprised? Not at all. She was hot; I am not. I am, if I may be frank, exactly that geek all the teenpix make fun of. Until my third month working at Circus, I even had the perfect geek accessory: spectacles mended with tape.
‘A little,’ I said. I could smell her perfume. Some kind of fruit. Fresh pears, maybe. Fresh somethings, anyway.
She sat down at the next desk, a long-legged vision in faded jeans. ‘When that happens to me, I type The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog three times, real fast. It opens the creative floodgates.’ She spread her arms, showing me how floodgates open, and incidentally giving me a breathtaking view of breasts snugly encased in a black tank top.
‘I don’t think that will work in this case,’ I said.
Katie wrote her own feature, not as popular as Speaking Ill of the Dead, but still widely read; she had half a million followers on Twitter. (Modesty forbids me to say how many I had in those days, but go ahead and think seven figures; you won’t be wrong.) Hers was called Getting Sloshed with Katie. The idea was to go out drinking with celebs we hadn’t dissed yet – and even some we had went for the deal, go figure – and interview them as they got progressively more shitfaced. It was amazing what came out, and Katie got it all on her cute little pink iPhone.
She was supposed to get drunk right along with them, but she had a way of leaving a single drink but a quarter finished as they moved from one watering hole to another. The celebs rarely noticed. What they noticed was the perfect oval of her face, her masses of wheat-blond hair, and her wide gray eyes, which always projected the same message: Oh gosh, you’re so interesting. They lined up for the chop even though Katie had effectively ended half a dozen careers since joining the Circus staff eighteen months or so before I came on board. Her most famous interview was with the family comedian who opined of Michael Jackson, ‘That candy-ass wanna-be-whitebread is better off dead.’
‘I guess she said no raise, huh?’ Katie nodded toward Jeroma’s office.
‘How did you know I was going to ask for a raise? Did I tell you?’ Mesmerized by those misty orbs, I might have told her anything.
‘No, but everyone knew you were going to, and everyone knew she was going to say no. If she said yes, everyone would ask. By saying no to the most deserving, she shuts the rest of us down cold.’
The most deserving. That gave me a little shiver of delight. Especially coming from Katie.
‘So are you going to stick?’
‘For now,’ I said. Talking out of the side of my mouth. It always works for Bogie in the old movies, but Katie got up, brushing nonexistent lint from the entrancingly flat midriff of her top.
‘I’ve got a piece to write. Vic Albini. God, he could put it away.’
‘The gay action hero,’ I said.
‘News flash: not gay.’ She gave me a mysterious smile and drifted off, leaving me to wonder. But not really wanting to know.
I sat in front of the blank Bump DeVoe document for ten minutes, made a false start, deleted it, and sat for another ten minutes. I could feel Jeroma’s eyes on me and knew she was smirking, if only on the inside. I couldn’t work with that stare on me, even if I was just imagining it. I decided to go home and write the DeVoe piece there. Maybe something would occur on the subway, which was always a good thinking place for me. I started to close the laptop, and that was when inspiration struck again, just as it had on the night when I saw the item about Jack Briggs departing for that great A-list buffet in the sky. I decided I was going to quit, and damn the consequences, but I would not go quietly.
I dumped the blank DeVoe document and created a new one, which I titled JEROMA WHITFIELD OBIT. I wrote with absolutely no pause. Two hundred poisonous words just poured out of my fingers and onto the screen.
Jeroma Whitfield, known as Jerri to her close friends (according to reports, she had a couple in preschool), died today at—
I checked the clock.
—10:40 A.M. According to co-workers on the scene, she choked on her own bile. Although she graduated cum laude from Vassar, Jerri spent the last three years of her life whoring on Third Avenue, where she oversaw a crew of roughly two dozen galley slaves, all more talented than herself. She is survived by her husband, known to the staff of Neon Circus as Emasculated Toad, and one child, an ugly little fucker affectionately referred to by the staff as Pol Pot. Co-workers all agree that although she lacked even a vestige of talent, Jerri possessed a domineering and merciless personality that more than made up for it. Her braying voice was known to cause brain hemorrhages, and her lack of a sense of humor was legend. In lieu of flowers, Toad and Pot request that those who knew her express their joy at her demise by sending eucalyptus drops to the starving children of Africa. A memorial service will be held at the Neon Circus offices, where joyful survivors can exchange precious memories and join in singing ‘Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead.’
My idea as I started this diatribe was to print a dozen copies, tape them up everywhere – including the bathrooms and both elevators – then say see-ya-wouldn’t-want-to-be-ya to both the Neon Circus offices and the Cough Drop Queen for good. I might even have done it if I hadn’t reread what I had written and discovered it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t even close to funny. It was the work of a child having a tantrum. Which led me to wonder if all my obits had been equally unfunny and stupid.