by Adam Sommers
“Shut up? Why of course. What’s there to talk about, anyway?”
“Three thousand dollars.”
“You’ll have to do better than that.”
Eric just made a gurgling sound and tried to retch again, but there was nothing left.
“Come on, get up. You’re famous.”
“I’m what?”
“You’re on the news.”
“What?”
“You are Eric Berger, aren’t you? Rookie reporter with The Washington Standard.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re on TV.”
“TV? I’m in a tub full of puke.”
“Right, not you exactly. Your story.”
“What story?”
“The kid who died.”
“Tobias? Tobias Jones?”
“Yeah, Tobias Jones. The ambulance case.”
“That’s not even ready to go. It’s supposed to start Sunday or a week from Sunday.”
“You didn’t see today’s paper?”
“No.”
“What the hell were you into?”
“I’ll tell you later—maybe. Get me up.”
Mitch did the best he could, heaving the dripping wet, fully clothed, desperately pale Eric Berger over to the living room and turned on the television. The five o’clock shows had led with Eric’s story but they were over. Now, at just after six, Mitch hoped to be able to catch at least some piece of the rehash. The tube flicked on and the anchor at Channel Eight was just saying, “…through a spokesman, declined to comment other than to say they were looking into the incident, and their prayers were with the Jones family. In Congress this afternoon…” Mitch snapped off the TV.
“Jesus,” said Eric, “How’d they get the story?”
“The paper, you moron, look.” Mitch put The Standard on the kitchen table as Eric continued to drip water on the floor. Across the entire top of the paper were the giant letters.
AMBULANCE ERROR KILLS BOY, 6
“Holy shit!” Eric whistled.
“Where have you been?”
“I uh. I can’t exactly…uh.”
“She was that good? Hha muhah.”
“It’s a long, long story. I’ll tell you later.” Eric did not look at Mitch as he talked. He was much too embarrassed, plus he was transfixed by the beautiful face of Tobias Jones on the front of his newspaper. And there were his words underneath, telling exactly how ego-driven incompetence and nepotism had led directly to his death.
Then his eye caught on a familiar image, his own face. Instead of a byline, they had put a columnist logo on the story. It was his face and his name. It looked like the picture he’d taken for his I.D. badge when he was hired.
Why was his face on the front page? Had Jayne Grayman just made him a columnist?! Why was his story on TV? What made her run the story after their confrontation? What the hell was going on in this woman’s mind? Eric’s world spun, but at the very least it appeared his job was safe for the moment. That came as an unexpected relief. His other feelings he’d try to sort out later.
Mitch pressed the button on their answering machine: You have fifty-three new messages. “Muh ha Muh hahmuh.”
The TV stations and the radio stations wanted to talk to Eric as soon as possible. They wanted to put him on their talk shows that morning (which had already passed), that afternoon (also, already passed), that night, the next day, any time he could fit them in. Even as they were listening to old messages, the light on the phone flickered.
“Eric Berger’s office, will you hold, please?” Mitch answered a few in a row before the joke got old. He then called Gino’s and ordered two large pies.
The phone rang again. “Hello,” Mitch answered in a falsetto voice.
“Mitch, it’s Carrie.” She sounded frantic.
“Hi, honey.”
“Stop it. Where’s Eric?”
“Hold on, Carrie,” he said and looked over at Eric questioningly.
“Tell her I’m dead.” He had too much to think through to reassure Carrie all was well, which it wasn’t.
“Eric says to tell you he’s dead.”
“Cut it out, Mitch. Put him on the phone.” The playful, happy Carrie was gone. She was serious, and furious. She didn’t tell Mitch, but she’d already left five other messages, plus she was mad at Mitch who had pooh-poohed her concerns all day at work when she asked if he knew what was wrong.
“He’s just hung over, Carrie. But he’s fine. He just isn’t up for talking right now.”
“But he’s okay?”
“He’ll be fine.”
Eric turned down all interview requests. The old guy from The Post, Carl, came and knocked on his door, and Mitch told him to fuck off. ABC sent a van but Mitch told them they were wasting their time. Both the guy Carl and the ABC van sat outside for a couple of hours in case Eric ventured out and they could try to pry an interview out of him. But eventually they got the message and wandered off.
The phone rang again. It was nearly nine at night. “Mitch, it’s John Williams, put him on.”
John Williams was an entirely different animal from Carrie Scanlon or those hoping for interviews. “Sorry, John, he’s a little…uh…under the weather.”
“Give him the phone, Matt.”
Yikes! thought Mitch, and gave Eric the receiver, whispering, “It’s Williams.”
“Oh crap,” said Eric. Taking the phone he said with as much pep as he could, “Hi, John.”
“How are you?”
“Uh, I’ve been better.”
“Do you have the flu?”
“No.”
“Do you have a stomach virus?”
“No.”
“Heart attack?”
“No.”
“Tuberculosis?”
“No.”
“Good. If you don’t have any debilitating disease and if it’s not too much trouble, can you make sure you come to work tomorrow morning? And the next time you decide not to show up without calling you’ll be in some deep shit. You’re not the first reporter in history to get hammered.”
Then the phone went dead. If Eric hadn’t been so freaked out about what had happened he’d have felt a tidal wave of guilt. John Williams had been nothing short of magnificent to him, starting with the fact that he’d given him this job. And here he’d totally dissed the man. But that professional lapse could not compete with his other more immediate mental crises.
Mitch saw the crestfallen look on Eric’s face and gently took the receiver from his hand and hung it up. Standing right there in the living room, Eric simply ran out of gas to do pretty much anything and slumped to the floor.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Mitch Lozatti coaxed, “clothes first, then sleep.” He helped Eric back to the bathroom, sat him on the toilet and gingerly pulled his sopping wet clothes off while Eric drifted in and out of consciousness. When Mitch got down to Eric’s underwear, Eric revived enough to politely push his roommate from the bathroom and summoned the energy to carefully examine his genitals.
There was no trace of any damage. He looked and felt normal. Touching himself, not to masturbate, just to caress, was tremendously therapeutic, as if he were reclaiming it for himself. By the time he had showered and dried off he felt enormously better.
A lot of that had to do with the overwhelming evidence that he was still going to work at The Standard. All the stories he’d done, all the ones he had planned, everything, including his career, was still on track. The grabbing and groping certainly confused and revolted him, but he was not going to have a breakdown over that nut job. He put on a pair of sweats, went into his room, curled up in a ball and didn’t stir until morning.
At work the next day, Eric pushed everyone who came by away from him. He dutifully answered phones, wrote up a couple of short police-bl
otter items and a longer piece about an office building being approved. (It was in John Williams’s neighborhood, and he was quite put out.). At the end of the day, Eric congratulated himself on not doing anything to get himself any additional attention. The news cycle was such that if Eric refused to push the story, in twenty-four hours the TV stations, radio and even The Post would move on. And they pretty much did.
Tobias Jones was yesterday’s news. Even if The Post fired back in a day or two with some element Eric had not explored, they could not possibly hope to win. Eric already had four follow-up pieces in the can, which John and Debbie had signed off on. The first was running the following Sunday.
At 6 p.m., he was gathering up his notebooks and backpack, looking forward to going home and spending the night, soberly this time, planning what to do with his future. He had not heard from Jayne Grayman all day, not that he expected to, but still he was kind of on tenterhooks waiting to be summoned to her office. Thankfully, that didn’t happen.
Was splashing his story somehow her way of apologizing? Was it part of a scheme to get him to have sex with her? Was there some other motivation he was not able to see? If he had enough time alone he could sort through all these possibilities and create a strategy.
Carrie saw him getting ready to go and hurried over. Although she’d been dying all day just to be with him, to talk to him and make sure that he was okay, she had not dared approach. There was far too much attention on him and she recognized she could only hurt herself by distracting him needlessly. But now that the day was over, she felt it was worth the risk.
From her perch on the mezzanine, Jayne Grayman watched as Carrie stood close to Eric. Jayne couldn’t hear what was being said but she saw Carrie’s pale and freckled face at first show concern and then break out into a big laugh.
All Eric wanted to do was be alone, to be able to think through the chain of events, but Carrie was so cute and so happy to see him Eric caved and agreed to let Carrie take him to a steakhouse for dinner. She just had to go back to her desk to get her things.
When she got there, the phone rang. “Come up for a moment.”
Even from where he was, Eric could see the color drain from Carrie’s face. She quickly walked over to Eric’s desk. “I have to go upstairs for a second. I’ll call you later, okay?”
Eric scowled in concern, but really he was relieved. He didn’t feel much like company. “Okay, let me know what happens.”
“Come in, but don’t sit down. You won’t be staying long,” Jayne Grayman told Carrie when she got to the open door of her plush office.
Carrie’s heart raced, fearing she was about to be fired, but she could not for the life of her think of any offense she had committed.
“You’ve got to get more productive, Carrie.”
She swallowed hard. Phew. Not getting axed. “I’m sorry?” she said as much to apologize for whatever lapses in productivity Jayne imagined as to express her confusion.
“Nine stories a month is not going to get it done. That’s barely two a week.”
“I didn’t realize…”
“Never mind what you realized. The point is these puff pieces are actually among the most popular in the paper, and they should be churned out one or two a day. Maybe if you focused on your work a little more instead of socializing we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’d hate to have to send you out to the Fairfax bureau.”
Nooooo, screamed Carrie in her mind. Fairfax, Virginia, was the dark side of the moon.
No one ever came back. It was the ejector seat.
“Oh, absolutely. I will. Definitely,” she hurried to say.
“Just focus on your work and you’ll be fine.”
“Got it. Thank you. I’ll get busy right away.”
Jayne waved a hand shooing her out of the office. Message received: No more flirting in the newsroom.
Chapter 25
Immediately after scaring the hell out of Carrie, Jayne got into her Mercedes and drove to Falls Church, an exclusive enclave reserved for people who did not just have money—plenty of people in Greater Washington had money—but for people whose money was attached to a name. Her friends were already in the living room. Anita Juarez and Pam Morgan had unfettered access. In turn, Jayne had keys to their homes as well.
“You look delicious,” said Anita Juarez, a dark-skinned bunny rabbit of a woman with flowing black hair and bright brown eyes. She was not what you would call pretty, but neither was she an ugly woman, unless you happened to see her without the hair and makeup. Two ex-husbands, the second richer than the first, had left her with seven-figure settlements, which she had parlayed into some very lucrative investments, at first in oil and then in oil production equipment. It didn’t take long for her to realize that it didn’t matter if oil went up or down, people were always looking for it. Now she spent most of her time shopping, talking on the phone with other women who were shopping or about to go shopping, and, on occasions such as this, indulging her appetites with her friends.
Jayne came into her living room, where her friends were seated on the white calfskin couch in front of the teak sushi table. Jayne was a little unusual among her friends in that she had an actual job. Ordinarily, she’d be looked down upon for having to go to a specific place for a specified number of hours a day to earn (gasp) a paycheck, but two things prevented this: First, Jayne had plenty enough money to stop working if she so chose (in fact, she could buy and sell her friends several times over, a reality they were well aware of), and second, her friends were fascinated by tales from her office. In their world any gossip was good gossip.
Pam Morgan, blond (but not really) had a body that gave men whiplash, not because it was so great, but because it was so weird, with surgically altered pieces that didn’t really fit together. Her magnificent breasts were too big and her butt was too small. Plus, those lips didn’t belong on any human being.
“My coochie’s killing me,” she sighed as Jayne Grayman helped herself to the wine the others had already opened.
“Oh, poor thing,” teased Anita Juarez, emphasizing the world “thing,” so that it was clear she had zero sympathy for her friend. “Who was it this time?”
“Same guy from the week I went to New York. He’s down here for a few days. Fucking thing is like a bazooka.”
Jayne nearly spit her drink laughing.
“That’s what I call him.”
“What?” asked Anita.
“Bazooka Joe.” They all giggled.
“Last time you called it a cannon,” Anita Juarez said. “Sounds like it’s shrinking.”
“Uh, no, honey. There’s no shrinking this bad boy.”
Anita rolled her eyes. Pam Morgan was not a liar, exactly, but she did exaggerate. Besides, this was not a contest. They all shared.
“Kirk asked about you,” Jayne told Anita.
“Yeah?” and something in Anita Juarez changed just for an instant.
“You must have left quite an impression.”
“Yeah, an impression of my heels on his balls,” Anita said, recovering quickly.
“Is that how he likes it?” Jayne Grayman wanted to know.
“He likes it any way you want to do it. Backward, forward, upside-down, tied up, swinging from a chandelier. He’s hard twenty-four/seven and doesn’t care what you do with it.”
“I know, remember? I hooked you two up.”
“He did this thing where I was on my back and he’s like planking on top of me. I couldn’t even breathe. And it feels like I’m about to pass out and suddenly I’m cumming, and he gets off, and all the air and blood and whatever rushes back, but like it all rushes to my hooch and my brain explodes.” Jayne crossed her legs hard and let out a little sigh.
“See,” said Pam Morgan, “That kind of thing I like once in a while. The guy takes charge. I’m his toy. Not every time, but sometimes. A l
ot of the time I’m looking for someone like that actor, that Marine-looking guy. Big bulging muscles. You think he’s gonna be all bam bam bam, pound pound pound. And that’s fine. But then he comes in and says how would I feel about putting him in a cage?”
“A cage?”
“Yeah, like a lion or something.”
“I gotta tell you, it sounded bizarre, but then I started thinking, having this big guy trapped in a cage and I can do anything to him I want, and I just started getting wet from thinking about it.”
“So you did it?” Anita asked, unbuttoning the top of her blouse.
“Not yet. I can’t exactly call up someone and say, ‘Can you bring over a cage about the size of a Marine?’ ”
“Go to the Fetish Store,” Jayne suggested.
“The what?”
“It’s a real thing. That’s what it’s called. I’ll give you the address. It’s in Tyson Center. If I give you the address you can have your Marine get it.”
“Ohh.”
“Look at you.”
She turned to Anita, “You have anyone on the horizon?”
“Not specifically. I’m always looking. In the meantime I was thinking about my doorman, just for kicks.”
“The guy from your lobby? He’s like sixty!”
“No! Don’t be ridiculous. The other guy. You should see his ass in that uniform. Oh, my God. I would bite that bitch till he screamed.”
“If you do, let me bite the other side,” said Pam.
“It’s so great when you find a guy who’s into our sort of thing,” Anita said.
“The fun part,” Jayne countered, “is when you get a guy and he thinks it’s going to be a straight-up night, and you get him so crazy he’ll take anything.”
Jayne could tell that hit a nerve. Anita was starting to twist and squirm, she took off her top completely, revealing small brown breasts contained in a pink lace bra.
Pam Morgan followed suit, pulling her sweater over her head. Her fake boobs were far out of proportion, but Jayne had to acknowledge the surgeon had done an outstanding job. They were beautiful. Not only were they big and round, but they didn’t have that Barbie-doll plastic stiffness so many of them did.
