by Amy Gray
“Well … it was nice to meet you.” It seemed like as soon as I'd said that the subway doors were opening and I was spilling mindlessly onto the platform. “Nice meeting ya,” his voice trailed after me, as I turned around with a thousand other semiconscious people, none of whom knew I'd just blown my opportunity with what seemed like a nice guy and forgotten to give him my number. “Fuck!” I yelled to myself, drawing irksome looks from the straphangers swarming past me. The train pulled away, leaving only a rush of wind and the memory of my blunder.
He'd Be Hot if He Weren't Heavy
Renora and I had become regular smoking buddies. Although our friendship was forged out of convenience—Linus, Gus, and Wendy had decided they were all quitting—they were all back off the wagon and Renora and I were actually becoming friends. Plus it was a gossip-fest.
“Any budding romances you know about around the office?” I asked her. The only in-office action I had known about had gone down—literally—years prior between Diana Flynn and the infamous stapler-thrower.
“No.” We were yearning for some secret tryst to spice up the office life. Never mind that there was a serious dearth of women to participate in said dalliances, or that by recusing ourselves we eliminated 70 percent of the possibilities for further entertainment.
“I think Linus is kind of cute.”
“Yeah,” I said mindlessly. “Wait, Linus? Seriously?”
Though she was already red-faced, it still wasn't hard to detect some embarrassment from Renora. “Yeah, well, he's smart. It's just his personality, I guess, that's cute. Whatever.”
I thought about them together. It was too weird to contemplate, but they did have similar coloring. Pale-skinned, Germanic, high-cheekboned features mixed with a little rosiness around the cheeks from hard drinking. “You guys would look cute together,” I offered.
“Okay,” Renora said, pulling a fresh American Spirit out from behind her ear. “So, if you had to sleep with anybody in the office, who would it be?”
“Ugh. That's not a choice, it's a curse.”
“That's why it's so fun.”
I went through the checklist in my mind. No, no no, no no, no.
“So?”
“I can't pick.”
“C'mon. You have to.”
I wanted my choice to be original, and saying “Evan” would have been obvious, and the thought of him in any amorous light was disturbing.
“Okay. I have it. But my pick is conditional.”
“On what?”
“On the person losing fifty pounds.”
She looked stumped. “Is it Adrienne?”
“Ha-ha. No, it's a man. Or a boy, at least.”
“I have no idea.”
“It's Assman.”
“Whaaaaaaatttttt???!” Her scream made my eyes water. “Are you joking? Assman? Ha! Ha-ha-ha!” Renora was laughing and coughing, with her cigarette hand cupping her mouth. “Ha! Assman!”
I was protective. “He used to be an athlete. He was the captain of his high school football team. He'd be hot if he weren't heavy,” I protested. “He's a diamond in the rough!” But the cork was out of the bottle. She danced in the hallway back into the office, quietly singing “Amy and Assman, sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G …”
Speak of the Devil
It was mid-July I sensed the onset of emotional gangrene. Numbness set in. It was alarming but predictable, considering my symptomatically dormant love life. When one doesn't use a limb, it starts to die. But I was also due for a new case, and it was possible I was just bored.
Evan was trying hard to look like he was working. Eyes squinted. Lips parted. I walked around behind his desk and leaned over and whispered in a gravelly voice, “ Whatcha doin’? ” He nearly ejected from his seat.
“Uh, nuthin’.” He slammed his laptop closed. Now I was embarrassed.
“Sorry to sneak up on you, Ev I just wanted a new case.”
He sighed. “Okay, okay.” He opened his computer again and appeared to shudder at the barely distant memory of me freaking him out. “Gray, don't sneak up on me again.”
“Now that I know you're gathering intel on the teen-porn industry, I won't tell a soul.”
“Ha-ha,” he erupted, expressionless. “Nah, I was downloading Napster shit.”
“I haven't gotten into that yet,” I confessed.
“Dude,” he protested. “It's insane. Check this out.” He opened his computer screen and pulled up a window with songs written down it. “Okay, I have the entire Bob Dylan Basement Tapes.” He scrolled down. “The new Built to Spill album, every Yo La Tengo album ever, the AC/DC song TNT, a bunch of ELO …” He suddenly eyed the room nervously as Sol plodded past him, and slammed his computer shut. “Just don't let Sol see you doing it, he's onto us. He told Assman the other day that if he caught him again he'd cut him loose.”
“Believe me, I won't.”
He handed me a folder. “So it's two guys. Niels Norrsken and his son Nars.” He put his hand to his mouth to indicate he was divulging top-secret intelligence. “They're father and son.”
“Thanks, dickwad. I figured.”
“Hey,” he admonished, “you're insulting dickwads everywhere.”
The subjects, Evan explained, were Swedes, but had lived in Paris, Prague, and Berlin, which made finding information on them somewhat more difficult. European countries have different laws about public information, and often it's not available through our databases. But the son, Nars, had married and divorced an American girl, and both of them had done some business in the U.S. They ran a massive publishing empire headquartered in Sweden, and the father, Niels Norrsken, had recently retired and put the son in charge of their company. The client was a wealthy New York hedge-fund manager considering about $20 million of diversification in their company's publishing wing. The Norrskens’ company was called KNUT, which gave the perenially gutter-minded Evan and me a good chuckle.
I went back to my desk and started working on the case. The Norrskens had assembled their filthy publishing fortune managing a group of trashy tabloids and soft-porn publications sold all over Europe. In the new technology-based economy, the Norrskens and their smutty rags were practically throwbacks. There was something almost charming about these robber barons making their living printing actual newspapers and magazines. Piddle Paddle, The Daily Rear, Granny Fanny: These formed the foundation of the ill-gotten Norrsken fortune.
Their American presence was appropriately immoderate. When in New York they were socialites of the order that attended events hosted by Puff Daddy. The father, once a dashing playboy, now looked more like a pastier version of the aging Siegfried and Roy. (Either one, really; I can't tell them apart.) The skin on his face appeared partially collapsed after facelift surgeries. Pulled tightly across his mouth and over his eyes, it showed effects of hard living and age in the corners of his eyes and neck, where he had a suspended purse of tissue like a chicken's gizzard.
There were a number of defamation lawsuits against their company, KNUT Enterprises, and the umbrella company KNUT Publishing. Lawsuits aren't necessarily a red flag, however. In fact, so rarely do we investigate a company that has no lawsuits against it that finding nothing would probably be a red flag. Such lawsuits were considered routine, and they usually were, since they rarely went to trial and were typically settled out of court. But the moral implications of the flagrant lies they printed were considered incidental. The subject of many stories featuring infidelity, sex addiction, or other disgraces were expected to suck it up. Unless the financial awards were huge and threatened the sine qua non, no one cared.
Just then I got an e-mail from George, who was sending me their newest press release, just put out that day: “A. Gray, to be reviewed, sincerely, George.”
KNUT Enterprises had made a net profit of $4.9 million in 1999 on gross revenue of $38 million. In case you're wondering, that's good. The company was clearly very profitable, but these figures were way down from the previous year, when t
hey had made $19 million on $59 million. Most of the losses were for the final quarter of the year, when they had acquired a papermill in Canada and a bunch of real estate investments. The release warned about possible net losses in the next quarter, but insisted these were “largely resulting from recent acquisitions,” and, they insisted, “were not to be taken as an indicator of the financial results of the company.” It didn't seem to be coincidental that this release had just been made available, long after most companies had already published their earnings for that quarter.
The company's CFO had resigned only weeks before, according to wire reports, and he was the fifth individual with that job in the past twelve months. Also, I noticed KNUT had changed its American accounting firm only a few weeks prior as well. Something seemed afoot, and I was ready to trip them up.
At lunch that day, Sol sauntered in and began picking pieces of Swiss from the waxed paper under my ham-and-cheese.
“Hey, how about, Can I have your cheese?” I said. “Or thank you?”
Sol, smiled, chewing. “I don't have to ask. It's the lunch tariff. It's written into your contract.” He grabbed some of Otis's supersize fries and chomped with satisfaction. George was laughing.
“What you've got to do is have a decoy lunch,” Gus advised.
“I keep a stash of Doritos on me at all times,” Linus added.
Sol's pilfering meant that we all had to mooch off one another. It was a vicious cycle of graft. I stole a couple of bites off Evan's meatball sub, who took Otis's bag of salt-n-vinegar chips, while he pilfered Wendy's pickle and the crusts from a homemade peanut-butter sandwich, and so on. Wendy even purloined a bite of Wally Yoo's potato chips, promptly spit it back out on a napkin, and said, “What the hell is this?”
“They're crispy dried shrimp,” Wally said, smacking his lips together with satisfaction, popping in some more freeze-dried crustaceans.
That was the last time anybody tied to steal from Wally. Sol bid me adieu, saying, “See ya, Graystein.” And with that he left me in the conference room, joined only by old Zinger wrappers and the lonely remnants of Otis's foot-long egg-salad-and-hot-pastrami hero.
An Upside-Down Snow Day
I closed my laptop for the day at 6:45 and breathed in the steamy air. It was eighty-four degrees, and we hadn't even hit the weeklong heat wave that was supposed to slog New York. Hot air was rushing in through the three open front windows looking over Twenty-first Street and swirling through the office, blowing loose documents into lifting helixes. Then I realized it was snowing. I pointed out the window.
“You guys! It's snowing. In July!” There were only a handful of us left in the office. Evan, sitting closest to me, yelled, “What the fuck?” and we all ran to the end of the office. Sure enough, mirroring the swirl of paper near the window, outside there was a torrent of flakes, rising up toward the rooftops of New York buildings, like a fun-house mirror image. “It's snowing upside down!” I said, and we were wide-eyed and delighted when Wendy said, “Wait a minute—I caught one.”
There in her sweaty palm, framed by her glistening green-polished nails, was a perfect unmelted crystal. When we looked outside again, the storm had subsided enough to reveal a New York City Sanitation truck, parked on Twenty-first Street about one hundred yards west, from which was soaring like a covey of tiny birds the equivalent of a hundred old pillows’ worth of feathers. When I looked back at Wendy's hand, I saw the feather, still pristine and unchanged. It was almost better than the real thing, I thought to myself.
SEVENTEEN
In the age of transparency, the allure of the secret remains stronger than ever.
—LUC SANTE
Stan Lee Is Not Dead
Less than a week after my fateless meeting with Cute Subway Boy I was riding to work in the morning, pining for my Starbucks fix. Usually when I got on the train, I tried to position myself standing in front of people I thought would be getting off before me. There were a few I recognized as getting off at Jay Street, the stop after mine, and I'd always position myself to the far side of the door I thought they'd use. That way, when they got up I wouldn't be blocking their way, and I could jump in their seats as soon as they stood. Usually there was an equally ambitious person on their other side who tried to grab the seat, too, but I always won out with my away-from-the-door strategy.
Today I had strategically placed myself in front of a mother and son. Child-parent groups were usually a good bet because most parents in Brooklyn didn't take their kids into midtown for school, so they'd likely be getting off before me. It worked, and I was practically falling asleep when I heard a subway panhandler asking for my attention.
The world of subway hustlers is a microcosmic universe unto itself, with the requisite bottom-feeders and high-rollers. Usually, the panhandlers’ scripts are humdrum: “Ladies and gentlemen, My name is I'm homeless, I don't drink or do drugs, any money you can give me would be appreciated, God bless.” There were a few talented performing-artist regulars: the doo-wop groups, the guys who did old-school breakdancing and a two-man cartwheel down the length of the car, and the balloon artist I'd seen only once, on the R train.
But this guy, this guy was different, and I had seen him before. “My name is John Wilder. I'm a comic-book artist and I used to work at DC comics, where I was a protégé of Stan Lee. He died and I was left custody of his two daughters. I need money to support these girls, so I'm selling off my DC comic-book collection to support them.” The weird thing about this guy was that he was nothing like any other panhandler I'd ever seen on the subway. He was wearing a tweed jacket and matching vest underneath. He looked like someone I'd know, like a grungy Williamsburg boy, a skinny-tie-wearing member of the Strokes meets an 1850s English schoolboy. The familiarity of him tugged at me, and I figured at the very least I could acquire a comic in the process. Several people on the subway held up dollar bills, and Tragic Comic Guy tried my patience by spending eons talking to two giggly teenage girls.
“What do you guys like to read?” he asked.
“I don't know,” they laughed nervously.
“Well, you look like White Lotus types. She's a really cool character, actually. She's a chick and she's beautiful…. See, look at her—but she also kicks butt. See, in this one, she's in the Supermen of America team.” The girls were exchanging glances and giggling. I kept crumpling my bill and smoothing it out again, undecided if I still felt so sorry for him. He seemed to be getting plenty of money and action without me.
By the time he got to me, he seemed tired and eager to get off our car.
“Sorry.” He looked at me and then looked away. “Did, did you want one? ” Feigned caution, self-effacement: classic manifestation of a well-oiled shyster.
“I dunno.” Now I played disinterested and distracted. “Do you have any White Lotus?”
He checked through his messenger bag. “Actually, I'm out of those. Here—this is Crazy Jane.” I looked down. Crazy Jane wasn't beautiful and ass-kicking like White Lotus. She was a scarred blue-haired girl who, the cover boasted, “has multiple personality disorder after a gene bomb explosion.”
“Thanks,” I said.
I was reading about Crazy Jane's ability to channel sixty-four distinct personalities from Scarlet Harlot to Hangman's Daughter— ugh—when I heard on the subway-car P.A.:
“Ladies and gentlemen, due to an incident at West Fourth Street, this train is being held. Please be patient and we'll be moving shortly.” Boos and sighs echoed across the subway car, and the cartoon guy, seemingly spooked about hanging around, crossed over to another car. We were between East Broadway and Delancey Street.
Stuck underground with nothing to read except for my crappy comic, I tried to read the Post off the guy next to me until he caught on and double-folded it. Bastard. At least I figured I'd done a mitzvah, a good deed, as my mother would have said.
“Which one did you get?” I heard coming from above me.
Looking up, I saw Dan standing over me. He was clu
tching his comic book—from the Tragic Comic Guy, too. Just like that, Mr. Maybe-Right had resurfaced in my life. I was euphoric.
“Where did you come from?” I asked, smiling.
“I was over there”—he pointed to the far opposite side of the train car.
“Wow. This is a nice coincidence.” I blushed.
“A very very lucky one,” he added.
Embarrassed, I asked him, “So, which one did you get?”
“Some shitty piece of crap.”
“Well done.”
“Yeah, well, I only bought it because I was curious about the guy and I was gonna ask him some questions. But I didn't get a chance. When the train stopped, he split.”
“Why? Is Stan Lee alive and well?” I joked.
“Yeah, he is, actually.” Dan, it turned out was more than an amateur comic-book fan. “I knew he was lying, the second he said he worked at DC—Stan Lee is and always was at Marvel. But his spiel was so cogent. You've got to admire that ambitious capitalist spirit. Even if it is misguided and fraudulent.”
“Really? So you think he was really lying? ” I catch people in lies every day. It's my job. But the Tragic Comic Guy had put me in a state of cognitive dissonance. I couldn't square his nice White Guy looks with the very desperation and debasedness of his scam. How could someone like him—like me—panhandle in the subway? It made me angry at myself and all the other guilty liberals who saw ourselves in him and wasted a dollar on his crappy comics.
“I just saw a profile of Stan Lee on the E! channel the other day,” Dan added. “I'm pretty sure that, as of last week, he was still kicking it.” We agreed that I would check him out at work that afternoon.
As we pulled away from Fourteenth Street, Dan dug into his pocket and pulled out a small spiral notebook.
