Back(stabbed) In Brooklyn

by Lenox Parker

  I then realized how much of a journalist I wasn’t. I was using a reductive method to get these guys to provide answers to questions that were leading to only one place: Howard being a prick. There’s an angle, and then there’s an agenda. I was using both. But why was I so interested in nailing this guy? What did I have against him? The whole thing started to make me uncomfortable. I’m sitting at my kitchen table nursing a chocolate milk and staring at the wall. What the hell was I doing this whole thing for anyway?

  I thought back to when it struck me that doing an expose on Howard Kessler would be my next project—without an assignment, without having worked on any celebrity pieces before. I had been sitting at my folks’ house when Howie was there. I remember seeing him skulk around the house and then jolt outside when he received a phone call he appeared to be waiting for. I watched him pace the back yard absentmindedly kicking some wet leaves while on his call. He started to kick with a rhythm, but I don’t think he really even noticed it since he appeared to be very engaged on the call. This wasn’t a “Hey how are ya” call. It was important. I could see from the window in the den when he walked back up to the porch, put his phone back in his pocket, and stood at the back door for a few moments. I couldn’t tell if he was hesitating to go inside or if he was looking inside without engaging.

  At that moment I knew there was so much more to the guy than met the eye. I mean, there always is. But I didn’t trust him. I didn’t trust the whole scenario with him staying at the house, charming my mother. I didn’t trust his fucking yoga and morning jogs. I didn’t trust his fucking green smoothies he made with my mother’s 30 year old blender. I know my brother and I have been very protective of my dad ever since he lost the leg. Really ever since this disease started ravaging him. But he’s not softie, my dad. He could take a hit and get back on his feet. I never recalled him talking about Howie much. I knew they were friends, but there never seemed to be an occasion when I remembered my dad seeking his old friend out, despite his fame. I don’t know if that meant anything at all, and I suppose I was trying to find out.

  I’ve always been driven. Not too much and over the top, but driven to acute objectives. Zeroed in on them like a laser and picked them apart to analyze and examine. Putting them back together, unfortunately, was never successful. My career in journalism has been interesting. Every story I’ve covered I’ve left an indelible message. At first it wasn’t deliberate; and my mentor kept steering me to be less conspicuous. Having attended Columbia Journalism School I have a principled approach to journalism, but my own imprint has been more than just a signature. So in a way I’d like to be more of a Theroux than a Cronkite.

  When it struck me that the story about Howie and the old gang reuniting was unfolding before my eyes, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to document it. Though I realized—after getting some unintended distance from the project—that I was doing more than documenting. I was influencing the characters in this real-life story and how they thought about their own lives, and Howie’s. I was changing the story.

  Not sure how I feel about that.

  ** *

  I spent the next couple of days making a few phone calls to line up my next assignment. I postponed a call with a producer for a story with no pressing timelines because I just didn’t have it in me. Wednesday night my phone rang and it was a representative from Newark Airport. After I had lost nearly all hope and couldn’t even decide if I could even piece together a story with what I already had written, plus my own recollection without it sounding totally fabricated, they found my laptop!

  Apparently I didn’t grab it when I hung it on the back of a bathroom door stall in the luggage pickup area. After the exhilaration and embarrassment wore off, I asked why it took three days. She said that budget cuts had led to the elimination of daily cleaning of restrooms in certain sections of the airport. I couldn’t believe a public restroom at Newark Airport hadn’t been cleaned in three days, but OK. And of course now that it was 5:45pm, I couldn’t just hop in a car and run over there to pick it up. I had to wait until office hours tomorrow.

  It was the longest night of my life. I sat at my desk, sans laptop, staring at where it should be, eagerly awaiting 8am when I could reclaim it and get on with my work.

  It will be the last goddamned time I ever save anything on a hard-drive without making daily backups to the web. Never again.

  I walk into the office beaming with glee. After I present identification and answered a series of really dumb, irrelevant questions, the woman handed me my laptop case. I sat down and opened it to ensure it was indeed mine and that nothing had been erased.

  Fine, looks good, still my baby.

  I got home and went to get right to work on the piece again and reached in for the tapes.

  No tapes.

  Where are the tapes? I still hadn’t even unpacked, so I ran over to the suitcase still sitting in my hallway and tore it open, knowing about four seconds into ravaging the bag that the tapes weren’t in there because I was listening to them doing the transcriptions on the plane.

  After countless calls and two more visits back to Newark, I had to admit that my tapes were gone.

  I’m not sure there’s anything ok or good about that, either.

  Focusing on the article, I thought I was actually in OK shape since I had actually listened to many of the interviews and logged especially interesting quotes already. So the comprehensive transcription was for context. But they were now gone.

  I didn’t even think about whether they would get into the wrong hands. What did that even mean—the wrong hands?

  I spent the next few days in total seclusion and finished it.

  I had to put all the distractions aside that were clouding the objectives of this piece. Not my everyday distractions like Oprah, HuffingtonPost, or Twitter. Distractions like the thought of who had these tapes with my name, Howie’s name, and the subjects’ name on each tape. The revealing details of the contents of the tapes. The sworn-to-secrecy oaths I took with Frank, Mo, Art and my dad that only the on the record stuff would appear in the article—which didn’t preclude me from still recording (with disclosure) the entirety of the conversations. These were unedited, raw tapes to be used as context for me as a writer. These were not tapes intended to disparage Howie—though they absolutely could, as an unintended circumstance. Or maybe intended.

  This is one project that has sucked the life out of me. I have never submerged myself in such a project that was simply an article. Emotionally, though I didn’t know these subjects, they were all a part of who my dad is. All those years growing up we were close, but I felt there was a huge part of his life that he didn’t reveal easily to me because, well, it was ugly. He protected me from even knowing about the details that for him, and the others, were so agonizing. The poverty, negligence, chaos, from which he ran and aspired to escape. I learned that he pushed my brother and I hard to excel and provided an overbearing hand of guidance that he never had. He didn’t want us to struggle through our youth and wander through our adolescence without the tools to make the right decisions. My dad learned the hard way how to make the right decisions. He never learned to take care of himself, physically at least, and here he is rolling around in a chair.

  I have a beta-reader group I usually use for writing before I get it to an editor. This time I sent it to my dad, instead, to get his approval first. I decided to bring it over in person—since sending by email couldn’t assure he’d get it.

  I handed him the print-out of the article, double-spaced and stapled. He looked at it for a moment as if he’d never seen a piece of paper before. He knew I was bringing it over, so I’m not sure what his hesitation was.

  “You sure you want me to read this? I mean, is it done—or, is it really for me?”

  “What do you mean? I want you to read it. You’re in it. You are the eyes that I saw this whole thing from. You have to read it.”

  “Hm.”

  It was the m
ost loaded “Hm” I’d ever heard. He does that. He does it in order to have me—or whomever he’s questioning—ask all the questions he wants to ask, but without having him have to ask them. Like a brilliant lawyer, except not one.

  “Do you not want to read it?”

  I know he wanted me to ask that, so I hesitated a moment, but he held the article and looked at it as if he had all the time in the world to sit there holding it.

  He wavered his head. “No, I do want to read it. I just want to make sure that—”

  “Dad, enough, ok, I get it, I understand you. I hear what you’re saying. Just fucking read it, please.”

  “Ok, ok.” He paused for a long while. “Now?”

  “Oh jesus,” I exclaimed as I stood up and walked out of the room.

  I looked around for my mom who I found was cleaning the stove.

  “Hi, Ma. I finished the article, you know, and Dad’s reading it now. Inside. I’m going to wait here.”

  “Oh that’s fine. That’s just fine. You want something? I have some chicken in the fridge.”

  “Really? Because I am kind of hungry. It’s been a weird few days.”

  “You don’t look good. I mean, you’re thin, what happened to your hair?”

  “I haven’t taken care of myself—been really trying to eke out this article. It’s been a little rough.”

  “Well that’s just crazy, you know, crazy. You can’t travel around like that and work and not eat or take care of yourself. This article isn’t worth that much to anyone.”

  Yeah, it started out ok, but in seconds the conversation went south, as usual.

  “Some chicken sounds great, Ma. You have some potatoes? Or noodles?”

  “Of course. Which would you like? I’ll get both—”

  There, that’s where the conversation should stay.

  After I ate I actually felt better. I hate when she’s right.

  I started to become anxious about my dad’s thoughts on the article. I tried not to focus on it, but conversation with my mom wasn’t a good distraction. So I went upstairs to watch some TV and surfed around a bit. I fell asleep on my parents’ bed—it was the first time I’ve taken a nap in about 20 years. It was perfect. I was starting to feel like a human being again.

  I groggily came downstairs just as the sun was leaving its colorful mark on the sky to rival the fiery autumn leaves. My parents were both sitting at the dining room table. My mother was leaned across holding my dad’s hand. His other hand was propping up his head, it seemed.

  “Everything ok?”

  The both looked startled.

  “Oh, honey, yes, fine—” my mother said.

  “Jess,” he started, “This is one piece of work.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant. I became terrified that he thought it was shit. Or worse, exploitive or untrue. I couldn’t actually tell in my yawning state if he was being sarcastic. I sat down at the table one seat away and perched my elbows on it and leaned in, hoping he would continue, which of course he didn’t.

  “I can’t believe these guys said some of those things. They did say them, right?”

  “Of course, I have the tapes—” I almost choked on the words, but decided to keep on rolling, “Nothing is fabricated.” I still didn’t know where he was going. “Dad, did you like it? Is it publishable? Are you angry?”

  He didn’t reply.

  “Ok, now you’re hurting me—”

  “Jessica, no, please. It’s—this is very hard, you know.”

  “What? What is hard? Expressing feelings? Are you going to turn me into Dr. Phil?” I heard my own impatience and sounded like an impetuous teen waiting for the answer to her request for the keys to the car for the night.

  “This is my youth you have here. This is the pockmarked, ugly, sad, lonely, abusive youth you have in here and it’s just hard. It’s hard to read.”

  He didn’t look at me.

  “I need your approval to move forward on this. If it’s not right, if you don’t feel right about this, please be explicit with me and help me decide what to do next,” I said in my most woken-up, together and with-it tone. “This could be pivotal for me.”

  I had no idea what I meant by the last statement. I then thought of the guy on the plane, and the optioning and scripts and development and studios. I was becoming quite full of myself. I think I really finally had the confidence in my work without needing my father’s approval. I just needed him to think I needed it before I moved forward.

  “It’s a beautiful article. It’s really, really incredible. I’m stricken with overwhelming memories that I think you helped me stir up. Some I’m not so happy about, so just forgive me if I don’t sound so pleased here. It’s not your work; it’s the actuality that hurts. I spent a good part of my lifetime trying to forget, and here it is all plain and in neatly typed words. It’s hard to digest, again. As I’ve told you a thousand times, you are an excellent writer.”

  I stayed at my parents’ house for a couple more days. I called the cat lady first, this time. I got my energy back, rested and ate well, and got the gumption to call Alan Shiner, the guy from the plane, to send him the article to see if he was interested in reading it. I called my contacts at the magazine and told them I was delayed a bit and would be back in touch.

  Chapter 26

  Howard

  Howard knew that writing wasn’t a strong point. He had a story to tell, but with most start-up writers, couldn’t put pen to paper. He had dozens of sheets of paper piled up around the apartment, random thoughts, quotations, statements.

  He also discovered the Russian nightclubs. There were few people who recognized—or even cared—about him. Though he continued to evade the aggressive press, he knew that there would be a time when he came down to the lobby of his building that there would be a cache of paparazzi there. He’d already gotten a new cellphone number in the hopes of avoiding his own publicist. He was beginning to feel independent and liberated for the first time in his life. He made dinner for himself. He drove himself around to the store, the track, and the nightclubs. He didn’t have to answer to anyone, as long as he kept a low profile and didn’t cause any drama. It was a new life and he was sorting out how he felt.

  Without a purpose, though—a reason for getting out of bed in the morning—he knew he didn’t have long before he’d slip into what he and his shrink in L.A. called ‘recession.’ He kept a routine. Morning run, yoga, breakfast. News. Daily Racing Form. Coffee. Track. Lunch. Track. Nap. Dinner. Nightclub. Hooker. Sleep.

  He occasionally found some time to scribble down some notes about the script, the characters, or a plotline. He knew it couldn’t continue. Though he had more than enough money to continue on a losing streak at the track and with the routine he had, Howard’s ego wouldn’t let him fade away into the background like he was beginning to feel he was.

  He was alone.

  Though he constructed a wall around him for years, he still had companions and a support network in L.A. He never felt anyone was honest with him, so he kept everyone at arm’s length. In the month or so he’d been really on his own and alone, he wasn’t sure it’s what he really cared for. He liked arguments and debates. He liked conversation. These days he spoke to hookers and waitresses more than anyone else.

  It wasn’t working. And he wasn’t finding a direction in the screenplay. He had to rescue himself from obsolescence.

 

  ** *

 

  He hadn’t been over to Sheepshead Bay since he was in high school. He was a little surprised at some of the development. Before he parked his car, he drove back down Emmons Avenue to go into Manhattan Beach to see the houses. As a kid, this was the ritziest neighborhood anyone knew of, and they were in proximity to it. While they used to run through Manhattan Beach to get to the old Coast Guard base, Howard used to stop to look at the homes. The yards, the trees, the different styles of facades. The cars parked on the street and in driveways
. It was another world. He never even knew anyone from Manhattan Beach. Though Art’s cousins lived there and Howie had always hoped to be invited to an extended family celebration of Sukkot, he was never asked.

  He was surprised to see the old Guard station was now Interboro College. He lamented the open space and dunes and trees that used to be there behind the fences.

  In a flash, he turned around and hurried back to Sheepshead to find Mo, his reason for coming there. He found the boat, walked right up the dock, and jumped on.

  “Mo, it’s Howie, lemme in.”

  He banged on the window, and then the door. There was no answer or movement on the boat. Howie stood there a few minutes, wondering what he should do. He wasn’t even sure why he was here. He didn’t have much to say to Mo, even before the confrontation at the Duck House.

  He sat down on the dock and gathered his thoughts. It was on impulse that he drove here. After a while he contemplated leaving; but he knew he’d never come back. So he went across the street to the deli for a coffee and the Post. He kept his head down and his hat low, sensing eyes on him. He’d already made a few grand escapes from the media in recent weeks and wanted to keep it that way.

  He walked back to his car and got in to wait for Mo. About an hour later he saw someone walk on to the dock. It was Mo, carrying a large bag. He appeared to be limping. Howard hesitated for a few minutes to get a closer look; he wondered if it wasn’t a good time to do this.

  “Mo! Hey!” Howard shouted as he got out of the car and slammed the door shut.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” Mo said, not appearing to be joking.

  “Can I talk to you?”

  “Whaddya want? I—this isn’t the best time. I thought we caught up a coupla weeks ago. What’s going on?” Mo said, not so suspicious this time.