The Last Magazine: A Novel (21 page)

“Oh.”

The next morning, Sanders Berman walks by my cubicle. He’s leaving the bathroom, wiping at his face.

“Hastings, can you believe the nonsense these bloggers write? I’d never even heard of a blog until this morning,” Sanders says. “No standards.”

“Yeah, blogging is a big thing, everyone is reading them.”

A look of fear.

“Everyone?”

“Well, depends.”

“Heard of Wretched.com?”

They say when you lie your eyes dart to the side. My eyes really want to dart to the side.

“Sure, yeah, it’s popular.”

“Popular? How popular?”

I’ve never heard a southern drawl reach such a high pitch.

“Pretty popular.”

“They wrote some trash about me this morning, saying I wanted
to take Henry’s place, and then that Henry hadn’t talked to me and that Nishant was going to take it over. Unbelievable.”

“Oh, yeah, wow, that’s horrible. Who knows where they get their stuff from.”

“Milius is writing them right now to correct the record.”

“That’s a good idea, yeah.”

Sanders continues down the hall.

I check Wretched.com. Under Sarah’s byline, there’s an item that, almost verbatim, though unnamed, repeats the conversation I had with Grove.

I’ve never been a deep-background source before. It gives me kind of a thrill, to be honest.

T
he winter and spring have vanished, and the clothing on women in the city has vanished with it. A.E. Peoria walks down the street, and he swears there must be an uptick in emergency room visits from men running into parking meters, newspaper stands, lampposts, doors, taxis, heads whiplashing at what the city has hidden in the winter months, bounciness, unfettered gravity, bare skin, and Peoria wonders if women have always dressed like this or is it just another sign of the times.

There is a determined shuffle in his steps, head up. A peppiness through his entire being that is the spiritual correlation to the perky breasts and large breasts and mountain breasts and canyon breasts and fake breasts and real breasts that rise and fall so confidently, so healthily, that like him, shout out life.

A.E. Peoria has broken out of the darkness. He is working on himself.

Self-acceptance.

Embracing the teaching gig. Embracing therapy. Embracing salads and 2,500 calories a day. Embracing friends who he felt betrayed him. Embracing emails that went unreturned. Embracing time, embracing
taking a nap. Embracing sweatshop Bikram yoga. Embracing moments of solitude, meditation, clearheadedness. Embracing three hours a day of work. A tentative embrace of sobriety and a marijuana- and pill-free existence, of higher powers and powerlessness and fate. Embracing the idea that it is possible to heal. Embracing working out. A surprising embrace of the gym culture.

A.E. Peoria is on his way to see his personal trainer, part of the six-month membership he has with the Platinum New Members Package at the Ultimate Fitness gym on West 83rd Street.

“Five minutes’ warm-up on the ’mill,” Norm says.

Peoria, in blue and white Nike sneakers and breathable nylon-blended shorts and a gray T-shirt that hangs out over his gut—a gut that is already getting smaller—starts walking on the treadmill, four minutes, three minutes, two minutes, one minute, a sip of water at the fountain before the workout session begins.

Norm, big eyes, thick-muscled body, specializes in self-acceptance, three or four mornings a week, at the gym. Two days for legs, two days upper body, fifteen minutes of core, cardio up to Peoria. His core starts to feel better. His core is something that exists somewhere in between his legs and arms and chest, some strange network of muscles that ties his entire body together that can be reached with strange duckwalks and massive green-and-yellow ball exercises and squats.

“You better not puke again,” Norm shouts, his way of encouragement.

In the sweat and the claustrophobia of the low-ceilinged workout room at Ultimate Fitness, the treadmills and all these different machines, these weight machines bending this way and that, twenty reps, twenty reps, twenty reps—“Feel the burn,” Norm yells at him, feel the burn, and he feels the burn, and between sickening gasps, he explains to Norm that, wow, working out really makes a difference. It’s all part of accepting himself even as he’s changing himself—
he is getting into shape, and it doesn’t take long before he is in some kind of shape, the fifteen pounds he put on since the age of twenty-seven dropping to only twelve pounds, but it’s twelve pounds of near muscle.

“Feel the burn!” Norm says, as Peoria lies over on a reverse lateral pulley system, ass up high, knees jerking back with the weight of fifty-five pounds.

Triceps, biceps, lats, squats, thrusts, mountain climbers, steps, push-ups, sit-ups, crunches, and curls—he sees why the exercise industry booms. He’s never really been a fan of gyms before, never really understood them. There are two kinds of dudes, Peoria has always said, dudes who like to shower with other dudes and dudes who don’t like to shower with other dudes. Gym culture reeked of the former. He hadn’t minded sports in high school, played soccer, kept fit, but then didn’t go out of his way to embrace the unnatural experience of the gym—too artificial. He now sees why they’ve become so popular—working out feels good, right, it’s supposed to feel good, with all the endorphins and such.

He can now be one of those people who say, “Yeah, just going to the gym.” Or, “Man, what a great workout it was today.” To talk of the natural high. It hasn’t taken long for him to look at those around him, on the street, who clearly aren’t working out, who clearly aren’t taking care of their bodies, and feel some measure of superiority over them.

And Norm, he can talk to Norm between suction pops of oxygen. Norm doesn’t care about the Internet or the front page of
The New York Times
. Norm doesn’t care about scandal and disgrace.

Norm cares about the burn, about the core, about his progress, about his health.

Because, as he has told Norm, there are still wounds, still things that protein shakes and chocolate milk can’t fix, torn muscles of his
heart and brain that just won’t go away. Things he can’t face. Like newspapers and magazines and the Internet. Peoria has stopped reading them. He can’t stomach Googling his name anymore. He can’t stomach more than a glance at the front page of
The New York Times
. He can’t stomach any magazines, because he doesn’t want to know what’s going on in that world, his old world. It hurts too much to think about it, and so, he believes, it’s better to just accept the fact that he can’t look at it.

“I get how celebrities feel,” A.E. Peoria tells Norm, sweat-soaked T-shirt and face splashed with water from the fountain. “Why so many television and film stars don’t watch TV and film. You know why George W. Bush doesn’t read the newspapers? It hurts.”

“I hear you, man,” Norm says. “Let’s stretch you out.”

And on his back, leg bending, Norm’s weight pushing into his chest, Peoria explains how a television star, career up and down, can’t stand to watch a half-hour drama because he’s thinking, I could have gotten that part! I auditioned! I had that part, I was once that person, and then the industry cast me aside. Or how a director whose film had bombed doesn’t want to hear of other films. He doesn’t want to see interviews of other directors. No, an actor who has tasted success and then has that success pulled away is not too interested in watching
Inside the Actors Studio
, of course not. It’s too painful to see: the actor knows the fates of career paths, and career implosions and explosions are the only difference between why he’s sitting on the couch and flipping past
Actors Studio
and why the actor is sitting in the studio basking in his actingness.

And so it is the same with him—no CNN, no MSNBC, no Fox News or
Time
magazine or
Atlantic
.

“I hear you, man,” Norm says. “Like these dudes over at Crunch. I left after some bullshit, and it took me like a year before I’d set foot in a Crunch again. Any branch.”

Peoria leaves in the early morning to work out; he slides on flip-flops and a Nike tracksuit, sneakers tossed in his gym bag, and he likes that. Like a doctor who wears his scrubs at any opportunity for comfort and as a status symbol, he likes his workout clothes, his workout bag slung over his arm, dried sweat at the corner deli, dried sweat at Gristedes, dried sweat while walking the aisles of Whole Foods, getting healthy drinks of organic cherry and bunches of organic bananas, and he can feel that he is part of this elite club, the club of those who have worked out, and that his dress, his comfortable tracksuit, is accepted as the sign of a man who has released all the bad energy in the gym, the sign of someone who has learned to accept himself.

Self-acceptance.

Three hours a day, that’s how much A.E. Peoria works out now. Three hours a day—self-acceptance.

Or is it all work? Working on himself.

After working out, a coffee in the morning, a walk to get the coffee. An hour of writing in his journal. An hour of thinking about the syllabus. An hour or two of reading
Teaching for Dummies
, where he learns tips about how to relate to students, how to present himself, how to share his experiences and his learning in a way that is engaging, Socratic, compelling, fascinating, thought-provoking. Tips like “Treat the students like equals, but remember they aren’t your friends.” Tips like “To relate to students, make sure to use references to cultural phenomenon that they understand—for instance,
Laverne and Shirley
might mean something to you, but don’t be surprised if your group of students reacts to dropping that reference with blank stares.”

And he swears he’s okay. It’s true he’s not going totally unmedicated. How can one go totally unmedicated and why would he go totally unmedicated? He doesn’t want to go back to that darkness, he
doesn’t want to go there. So he is medicated, yes, a mild antidepressant, a few hundred milligrams a day, just to take that edge off a little bit, just to give his emotions some space from his brain.

The excitement, the buoyancy, of the teaching gig lifts his spirits. Barnard College, an all-girls Ivy League school. He will be teaching undergraduates at this school the art of journalism, a little subject called narrative nonfiction. He will mold and guide and show the way forward into promising careers, careers with the promise that his career once had, careers that he will not envy. No, he’s now, at least on some days, accepted his fate, accepted the fact that sometimes in life you need to take a break, sometimes it’s okay to take a nap.

His friends call—he realizes he does have friends, he supposes. He tells them all what he is telling himself. I’m not drinking. I’m not taking pills. I’m not even missing
The Magazine
. Life is more important than
The Magazine.
You know, it’s time for me to do something else anyway, time for me to try something else. Really, they haven’t totally fired me, I think, once things settle down, I probably can go back—if I want. If I want. My choice.

And he says this to Norm and to whoever will listen. He’s come to embrace this summer as part of him. The summer after high school was the summer he lost his virginity, and the summer after that was the summer he tried LSD, and the summer after that was the summer he had an affair with an older woman, and the summer after that was the summer he traveled to Europe, then came the summer of an internship at the magazine, then the summer he wrote
Desperation Points West
, then the summer of Baghdad and Iraq—how far away that seems. (A quick flash of Chipotle in his mind that he shakes off.) And so, if every summer in his mind has a theme, the theme this summer is self-acceptance. I’m okay, I’m okay.

I
t’s like
Laverne and Shirley
,” Peoria tells his class of twenty-six students. “You want the beginning of the story to grab the readers’ attention, whether you’re writing a nonfiction book, like
Desperation Points West
, or an article. You want to really get them into it. So, like
Laverne and Shirley
, that opening sequence—‘We’re going to do it!’ Laverne is putting a glove on the beer bottle in Milwaukee. Lenny and Squiggy. You get the sense that it’s a comedy, it’s about friendship, it’s set in Milwaukee—you get all of that just from the opening sequence.”

Very little reaction.

“But you know, that theme song—rules are meant to be broken. That also applies to narrative nonfiction. I’m going to give you rules, but you can break them. But like that show, if you’re going to break them, it better be, you know, brilliant.

“That’s called, in journalism, we call that the lede. The opening paragraph is the lede.

“There can be an anecdotal lede.

“An analytical lede.

“A news lede.

“An omniscient-narrator lede.

“A lede in the second person. You.

“Most popular is probably the anecdotal lede, at least as far as magazines go.”

He’s scanned the list of students in his class, and there they are sitting in front of him. He knows that it’s only natural for him to find the most attractive students first—he knows that he will not be able to resist that. There are three, two blondes and a brunette, and there is a fourth, a Mexican woman who makes fierce eye contact with him. She isn’t really as attractive as the other three, but there is something appealing about her body language. He doesn’t know if he’s imagining it—perhaps it’s something in Mexican culture where eye contact doesn’t mean as much as it does in the States. Like in France, where women stare down men all the time and that’s just part of the deal.

No, he scans his class of twenty-six, and he says what he says about
Laverne and Shirley
, and the rest of his first class is a rambling blur of handouts, stapled pages going back over back, of explanations about what he hopes to accomplish, about the different books on the syllabus, about how many papers he expects, about how he isn’t going to accept just anything, he really wants reporting, about where they can obtain copies of the books on the syllabus—including, for extra credit,
Desperation Points West
, which, although out of print, can be ordered through a variety of websites for a good price: only 7 cents plus $1.35 shipping.

After the first class ends, he takes a breath and shuffles papers on his desk, finding it funny that he is the teacher, the professor. How very strange that is, waiting for the class to file past, smiling at the students, organizing, flushed, waiting to see if there is going to be anyone with questions or comments or concerns, waiting to see who is going to brownnose, who the kids are who don’t care, looking for signs of drunkenness and drug abuse. He remembers college well.

He’s pleased that one of the blonde girls stays behind and tells him that she has already read
Desperation Points West
. She has a copy. Will he sign it?

He smiles—“Karen, right”—and makes it out to Karen and then talks to her for five minutes, explaining how it was an important book, probably an overlooked classic, and that he appreciates greatly this kind of reader feedback. And while he’s talking, he notes that his instincts were right about the Mexican, because she’s also staying behind, waiting patiently for Peoria to finish speaking with the blonde.

The Mexican woman approaches his desk.

“Hi there, what can I help you with?”

“Professor Peoria,” she says.

He looks at her, perplexed, and has a jolt of fear. Did he at some point hook up with this woman somewhere? She does look somehow familiar. Strong, slanted cheeks, a thick build for a woman, definitely third tier, maybe second tier. Certainly not first tier. He knows he must have hooked up with her or hit on her. Maybe he hit on her at some bar at some point during one of his periods in New York when that’s what he was doing. Or maybe this woman is a friend of his ex-girlfriend’s? Could that be? She would be the type that his ex-girlfriend would hang around—not quite that attractive, not much competition.

“Justina, is it?”

“Yes, Justina.”

She waits.

He waits.

Does she want him, in this first class, to put a move on? This does seem like something out of a porn fantasy, something that isn’t supposed to happen to a professor until at least mid-semester. No, Peoria resists the impulse to try something, and instead says, “I’ve blacked out a lot,” he says.

She doesn’t respond.

“What’d you think of the class?”

“You don’t recognize me?”

“Oh, shit—I mean, excuse my language. Sure, I recognize you.”

“You do?”

“You’re a friend of my ex-girlfriend’s, right? I met you at a slam poetry event?”

“No.”

“Okay, we didn’t, and I mean, this is awkward, we didn’t hook up before, did we? Because if we did, I don’t know what the school policy is about that. Fuck, I’m sure it’s against policy.”

“No, we never hooked up.”

“Shit, then I’m sorry—did I interview you for an immigration story?”

“You saved my life.”