Kamikaze Lust Read online

  “What about the TV footage? Who shot the footage?”

  “As far as we know they rigged the video camera themselves, and my guess is they hit the netherworld long before Kaminsky called the TV people. I’m on line trying to get a copy of the reel. And that, darling, is all she wrote.”

  “You’re a peach, Andrew.”

  Having come through for me, he excused himself to go and check the dockets.

  “Now about your job…” I called after him. He pivoted, blew me a kiss, and then was gone. I hung around asking questions, annoyed by the reaction of my colleagues, some of whom greeted me in cloying sympathy as Andrew had initially, while others ignored me as if I had huge red welts on my skin. That was the toughest bit yet. We always shared information, though I found it best not to believe anything anyone said until I confirmed it myself. You never knew when somebody was trying to fake you out of doing a story or to plant a dud in your laptop. Contrary to popular belief, there were not a million stories in the naked city. You had about three a week. If you weren’t floating the few that became water-cooler conversation, you went unnoticed.

  I needed Kaminsky. I’d been one of the first reporters to interview him a few months back, and he’d been ecstatic about the coverage. Surely he owed me some kind of exclusive. And with the strike hanging over me, a cumulonimbus ready to burst any second, I needed this story. If I was going down it would be with a bang and not a whimper. I laughed at myself: You talk a good game in your head, Slivowitz. When I talked to myself recently I was sounding more and more like Shade.

  I left the press room to look for her, figuring I could use her cell to call Kaminsky on his private line. She was standing a few doors down talking to a woman with burgundy hair and a biker jacket. A camera and press pass swung from her neck while she stood, her feet spread and thumbs through her belt loops, as if she were leader of the pack in a Russ Meyer film, and Shade, her sweet prey, leaned her shoulder against the wall, her hips swaying back and forth. Her flirting pose. I’d seen her work it on both women and men—she was bi—but, for some reason, today, I couldn’t stomach watching her. A current ran through my body, and I felt claustrophobic.

  I hung back until the feeling passed, then decided to interrupt Shade. We were a team: I was transportation, she communication. Damn that woman, I needed the phone. I started walking toward them when Shade caught my eye and met me half-way. Motorcycle Woman fled into a herd of photographers.

  “Give me the phone,” I said, setting aside all thoughts of her and the woman. “Kaminsky’s doing a press conference at three.”

  “Forget it, Slivowitz, we’re out. Tina heard it on her police radio, they sent a fucking flotilla of cops up to the paper.”

  “Then maybe we should just drive by his office.”

  “You’re not listening.” She tugged at my sleeve and looked me straight in the face. “We’re on strike. You’re not going anywhere. You know what they call people who cross picket lines, don’t you?

  “Um…employed?”

  “Definitely not that.”

  “Look, you go strike if you want. I’m not into this…this strike thing, these picket lines, any of it. It’s bullshit…some driver gets a cramp in his back and we’re all supposed to run around like retards carrying placards.”

  “Watch it, watch it with the tough-girl act.”

  “Tell me you want to spend the rest of the day screaming hey, hey, ho, ho.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “It’s not like a peace march.”

  I ran my hand through my hair and looked away. Cliques of media thronging the press room, gray-suited attorneys flocking in and out of the hallway, administrative types wandering outside with unlit cigarettes cupped in their palms… the general life of the courthouse proceeded as usual. It took me back to high school, the cramped corridors, lockers slamming, kids laughing their way into classrooms with tiled floors and dusty windows, as I stood off to the side, watching with institutionalized dread. I hadn’t felt this way in a while.

  I turned back to Shade, whose lips were pursed to the side and bobbing.

  “Stop biting your mouth,” I said.

  “I can’t help it.”

  “Well, stop. We should go up there, huh?”

  She nodded, “I don’t think we have a choice.”

  I threw my bag over my shoulder, and we started walking. “We’re not going anywhere without some M&Ms.”

  “Okay, but I get the green ones.”

  “You always get the green ones.”

  We stopped at the candy counter. I searched the colorful packages for a medium-size bag of M&Ms. “What about the blue ones?” I said, paying off the candy man.

  Shade raised the corner of her lip. “They’re so depressing.”

  “Depressing?”

  “You can have those, I don’t even want to deal with blue candy.”

  We were leaving the candy counter when a woman shouted Shade’s name. I knew who it was before she and her burgundy hair made their way over. Shade introduced us. Her name was Tina Macadam, and I immediately thought, phony. Having changed my own name, I suspected the same of everyone else, but Macadam? That was like wearing a fake fur or becoming a platinum blonde. Why didn’t she just call herself Tina Motorcycle?

  Shade told her she couldn’t talk now, the strike was calling. “I’ll call you,” she smiled at Tina Macadam.

  “Good, ’cause I’m ready to roll whenever.”

  “Yeah, it sounds great.”

  I looked up as if I had important things on my mind while they finished talking about some elusive project and said goodbye. Shade and I were silent on the walk back to my jeep.

  “What were you and what’s-her-name planning?” I asked as we were buckling up.

  “Oh, she’s doing a film. She wants me to help write it.”

  Bullshit, I thought. I didn’t trust Tina Macadam around Shade, who was now saying that I, if anyone, should see how a creative project would interest her. A closet fiction writer, Shade had let me see a few stories she’d written, most of which I found too risqué. Who used the word pussy with the frequency of a conjunction? Nevertheless, I sympathized with her yearning for something greater, a passion that would throw her into a deep depression whenever she interviewed a screenwriter or novelist she believed wasn’t half as good as she could be if she only had the time. “Our lives are shit,” she use to tell me, pluralizing. “We gotta get out of here, everything’s so small-time.”

  “It’s Miami, not Chattanooga.”

  “Not the place, the pattern. I can’t stand the thought of spending my life writing about other people who think they’re so damn fabulous.”

  “So quit.”

  But I knew she wouldn’t quit. She suffered from what she called “upper-middle-class paralysis,” which, in English, meant her parents had worked their butts off and then spoiled her silly with cars and clothes and cruises while not paying her the least bit of attention. To her family, value was the tangible: a salary, a byline, or, even better, a spot on the local TV news. As for myself, I was the product of an autodidactic electrician who worked sporadic construction jobs and a housewife who before marrying harbored dreams of starring in a Broadway musical, though she was utterly tone deaf. I never understood the tenets of this new-monied anxiety. It seemed to me that Shade, if anyone, could afford to quit her day job. She had rich parents, an IRA, a broker named Butch. A suspicion was borne in me, therefore, that there was more to her existential dilemma than a crisis of materialism.

  Perhaps that’s why I felt nervous as she spoke about this gig with Tina Macadam, and there was something I didn’t like about that woman, an attitude I couldn’t quite verbalize, but if I told Shade she would accuse me of being judgmental. As if that were a bad thing.

  I downshifted for a red light and found myself saying, “Just be careful.”

  “Please.” She dropped a red, a blue, and a brown M&M into my palm and ate a few green ones. I had to lau
gh at the determination with which she isolated them, as if she were mining a pile of dirt for diamonds.

  “Don’t think I didn’t see how you looked at her,” I said.

  “Doesn’t matter. I’m through with women.”

  “Oh you’re heterosexual now?”

  “No, men too, I’m done with it all,” she laughed. I shifted into first as the light changed; then second; and third, moving around a bus with a billboard for men’s underwear, thinking how nice it was to be briefly insulated in a little bubble on the streets of Manhattan. If only we could bag the strike and drive around the city all day long eating candy.

  Shade had her elbow up against the window, two fingers pressed against her temple in her thinking pose. “Maybe you’ll understand this better when you’re my age.” She raised her eyebrows and I sighed. “Dating is a business negotiation. Everything’s an Issue with a capital I, and nobody wants to have fun anymore. It’s pathetic, really. Where are the fucking snows of yesteryear?”

  “The snows of yesteryear, haven’t you heard? They’re out on strike.”

  She smiled. “So it’s welcome to the new celibacy.”

  “Which for me is the same as the old celibacy.”

  “I don’t understand, you’re such a catch.”

  “It’s just not that important.”

  “What?”

  “You know, sex, love, whatever.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true,” I said, though the real truth was I wasn’t very good at any of it. I’d never been in love, moved from one hopelessly inappropriate relationship to the next, and couldn’t have an orgasm in the presence of anyone besides Freddy. Men often called me frigid. But how could I explain this to Shade, a woman far less rigid with sex than with her M&Ms?

  “Give me a green one, come on,” I said.

  “All right you can have one, but just one.” She turned sideways and leaned her arm over the stick shift. I was busy dodging traffic. “Open.”

  I did and she dropped the smooth, green pellet on my tongue. I bit down with a loud crunch. “Remember, those things can be dynamite in the wrong hands,” she said.

  “Who died and made you M&M boss?”

  “I was born that way.”

  “Elitist.”

  I turned the corner on Forty-second Street, and we were immediately dead-locked in a honking maze of cars, buses, and trucks that even the cyclists and rollerbladers had difficulty cutting through. We sat; we listened to reports of the strike on public radio; we watched the cars pass in the other direction; we moved an inch. Slowly, the stagnating traffic throbbed its way into my brain. I felt as if my head would pop off. “Shit!” I said. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

  “Okay, calm down,” Shade said. She had plan B in mind. “Jut out a little bit to the left…that’s it, now keep pushing out until you can break into a U-ey.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “No, look, there’s a few feet of opening, go go go!”

  “It’s a double yellow line—”

  “Go!”

  I went. Cars honked madly. My heart accelerated, my fingers sweat against the stick shift. Someone called me Jackass. But within a few minutes we were out of traffic. The tingling in my neck settled, though my heart kept its brisk pace. I’d never crossed a double yellow line before. I felt rebellious, nihilistic even. Shade and I couldn’t stop smiling, as we headed west toward the second parking garage of the day.

  Only when we left the jeep and started walking toward the picket line did it hit me that this strike could get expensive. Very expensive, indeed.

  Unlike the molluscan mass outside the courthouse, the crowd gathered in front of The City News formed an amorphous and angry blob swallowing anything in its wake. I stayed along the outskirts of the police barriers, while Shade adapted more quickly to the scene. Someone handed her a placard, and I lost her to the sea of black jackets, television cameras, and receding hairlines, until she returned and dragged me kicking and screaming to the center of the crowd where a few other reporters had staked out turf next to a hot dog stand.

  I was uncomfortable with the spectacle of these hereto-fore mild-mannered, Clark Kent and Lois Lane reporters morphing seamlessly into fiery Bolsheviks. There were James, the Asian mensch as Shade called him, raising his fist in the air, and Carrie, the twitchy City Hall reporter who always wore business suits, wielding a placard that said: Union Rights = Human Rights. They had to know how ridiculous they looked. The whole scene was as absurd as a song and dance number from the Broadway musicals my mother revered. Even Shade was screaming loud enough that her voice became Lauren Bacall husky. Slowly, however, amid all of the shouting and sloganeering, a strange energy overwhelmed me, and I wondered whether I was the one who appeared ridiculous among the frenzied ralliers. Testing myself, I took a step forward, raised my fist and shouted: “Back off union busters!” My cheeks flushed, but nobody seemed to notice. I was just another voice in the crowd. A few more chants and I felt invigorated, unraveled, as if my life had a discernible purpose, if only temporarily. Soon, I was cheering along as strikers threw bottles at armored delivery trucks and chided any mutt who crossed the line. I became indignant when reporters from the other dailies, gathering material for tomorrow’s papers, descended upon us. Was frozen as photographers snapped our pictures.

  Later, other unions joined a solidarity rally. Thousands of people gathered around us, the nucleus, chanting, carrying signs, even hurling a few cans or old newspapers. The smell of sauerkraut stained the air.

  At once, we’d become part of history, descendants of the Boston Tea Party, brothers and sisters to the Pullman Strikers, United Auto Workers, and Air Traffic Controllers. We were the working-class darlings of the moment, which, after a while, made me nervous. For we in the media should know better than anyone how quickly the moment comes and goes. Tomorrow, as the fringes of this angry mob reported for work, we would remain in the streets alone.

  I broke from the cacophony and leaned back against a grimy, brick office building. Looking westward I spotted the sky, a magical cast of blue peeping in between the buildings as if the atmosphere itself had been artificially manufactured, pink and blue as far as my eye could see. This was the sky I’d imagined in those junior high science classes when I first tripped the magic of acids and bases, the sky I’d even earlier taken it upon myself to draw with a rainbow of Crayolas.

  “Moron girl!” Rowdy had said. “There ain’t no pink clouds.”

  “There are,” I tried to explain, recalling something Dad had read to me from the encyclopedia about the sun’s rays being refracted, which I’d heard as reefer-acted, like the reefer Rowdy and Neil smoked. There was smoke and there was light and it all came from the sun.

  “When the sun moves,” I said, “it paints the clouds different colors, it makes them pink.”

  “Pink like your cunt,” Neil said, barreling into the living room with his tongue wiggling around his lips. “Pink to red and then you’re a bloody-cunted bitch for the rest of your life.” He put his face close to mine and whispered, “Blood cunt, blood cunt.…”

  I ran upstairs to my bedroom, locked the door behind me and waited for the pounding to stop. When I got my period a few years later, I knew that Neil had foretold it. By then he’d started his watching, too. I couldn’t insert a tampon or take a shit in the house without feeling his eyes on me. Even though Neil was gone now, living in Las Vegas, he was probably still drilling holes in some wall or door to scope out other unsuspecting women. I was as certain of this as I was then of those pink clouds in Brooklyn.

  We congregated across the street at The Corral to see the strike unfold as the rest of the world would see it, but soon found the top spot on every six o’clock broadcast devoted to Kaminsky and his dead protégés. Our fifteen minutes arrived after the Kaminsky story. Tony ordered pitchers of margaritas and tequila shots for everyone.

  “Look look, there I am!” Michael said, pointing to his face on the three tele
vision screens behind the bar.

  “You look like a longshoreman,” Tony said. “That’s why they used you.”

  It was true. Some of us may dress like lawyers or talk like street-corner philosophers or eat in trendy restaurants, but when the line is drawn, reporters fall on the side of labor. Working class was the look the TV cameras were going for.

  “Turn it up, I want to hear my sound bite,” Michael said.

  The curmudgeonly bartender obliged. He’d been working at The Corral long enough to know that a strike meant increased business.

  “Oh man they cut it,” Michael said. “They cut the part where I said seeing all of you run out to the picket line was like watching people march to the gallows.”

  “That was too literary, too dramatic,” I said.

  “Just you wait. Try Channel Seven, let’s see if superstar Kim Mathews gets all weepy.”

  “There was some survey recently,” Shade said, “I don’t remember where, but eight out of ten Americans said they would rather have dinner with Kim Mathews than the President.”

  “Seems reasonable,” Tony said and nobody argued.

  The bartender surfed the channels, but kept coming up with the same old story told through the same somber eyes of our TV brethren. There were the management spokesmodels spouting about generations of padded wage and benefit contracts that had made the paper a money pit; the union leaders swearing they would cripple the paper and force the Aussies out of town; and a few comments from strikers, mostly reporters, and, within that subgroup, mostly Michael. Who knew he was such a publicity whore?