The Last Manly Man (7 page)

When Morton opened the door to leave, the room said, “Good-bye, Mr. Morton. Come back soon. I'll miss you.”

On the way out, Morton stopped in front of the dead doughboy statue and gave us the familiar history of Hock Morton and the Morton Company. People in the lobby began to gather around to watch—tourists, delivery guys, visiting “Morton Families” wearing special buttons. The crowd was respectful and stood back quietly, and though that may have had something to do with the security detail, it seemed to have something to do with Gill Morton too. The man had presence, an aura of power and vision.

“Remember: Courage, tenacity, and responsibility, that's what makes a man, in the past, in the present, and into the future,” Morton said. “Look, there's the courage of the common man, the courage that Morton has always supported and honored.”

He gestured toward the angel and doughboy.

Behind the statue was a large copper plaque, almost as big as the wall, listing Morton employees who had given their lives in this century's many wars. There were at least a thousand of them. If you stand in that lobby and squint, you can imagine it is 1917, that the clerks and office boys are leaving their jobs to go off to some strange country to shoot Prussians and such. (It was sad, and only served to underscore Alana DeWitt's point about men and war. Still, I couldn't help wondering if women hadn't provoked a war or two. We sure had supported a few. I remembered some old, jerk-time film footage I saw once that showed the streets full of doughboys and old women on corners handing out white flowers, to symbolize cowardice, to any man who had not enlisted.)

There was a small ethical problem in using Gill Morton in the series. We were essentially providing free advertising to the Morton Company at a time when our CEO Jack Jackson was courting Gill Morton to get some of his paid advertising. Call me suspicious, but I figured this was why Jack suggested I use Gill Morton and his archives in our series, to curry favor.

But Phase Two was too good to pass up over piddling ethical things, and when you threw in the Morton archives, it was irresistible. For example, one of the videos Morton's man Duffin had given me was a tape copy of a film that had run in the Morton pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair. The 1964 video would give us a RetroFuture angle, visions of our future from our past, to contrast with current visions. It would work especially well intercut with footage of the Phase Two Workplace of the Future.

Narrated by a bland, soothing male voice, the kind prevalent in educational films and advertising in the fifties and sixties, the 1964 Morton video guided us room by room through the brave new world. There was the kitchen with the perfunctory robot servants (actors in costumes clearly) doing household chores or giving the missus a manicure. The bedrooms had voice-activated lights, automatic pillow fluffers, and for the children, robot nannies to tuck them in and read them stories. The den had a giant wall television and a bar that mixed drinks with the press of a button. They managed to avoid the bathroom completely, so evidently we won't be seeing any space-age toilets or automatic ass wipers.

Still, it was full of surprises. In the workplace of the RetroFuture, computers are really huge and do most of the work, all the secretaries are robots, and, of course, everyone zips around from home to work in rockets. Doctors smoke, of course, and their brand of choice is Morton Bolds. You may recall the slogan for Morton Bolds, “Calm your fears—with a Morton Bold.” Who knew courage could be inhaled? (Taken off the market after the tobacco arm of Morton was sold to Smith Tobacco in 1970, Bolds were also the cigarette of choice for Olympic swimmer Loffy Moffat, war hero Widdy Boone, and Father Frank Carpus, who smoked them while delivering his five-minute inspirational message at the end of the
Morton Bold Variety Hour
, which ran until 1956, when Father Carpus was found unconscious in bed with a dead Hollywood starlet, his opium pipe on the bedside table. But you probably know all this.)

In the year 2001, men will drink highballs and smoke cigarettes and women will be pampered by machines. And everyone in the future is white. Who knew? Boy, Yogi Berra was right. The future ain't what it used to be.

CHAPTER FIVE

“When you were a kid, did you think the world would turn out this way?” I asked my cabdriver that evening. The cabbie had already told me that he thought being a man meant being strong, brave, and taking care of his family. The man had been quite cheerful when I got into the car, and so far, we had been talking like two human beings. But for some reason, this question rattled him.

“No, I thought the Palestinians would have a homeland and I'd be a millionaire with a beautiful wife,” he said sharply. After that he just glowered as he drove. In one fell swoop I had taken a happy man and turned him into a depressive. Not that that hadn't happened before …

When the cab pulled up to my street, my elderly neighbor Mrs. Ramirez was just leaving, going out with her Chihuahua on one of her crime-fighting rounds, no doubt.

“Take me around the corner and down the block toward Eighth Street,” I said to the driver. “Drop me there.”

As he pulled away, I ducked down to escape the woman's vicious but unreliable gaze. My theory was, Dulcinia Ramirez had an air bubble in one of her cerebral arteries or something, in addition to a huge rough stick up her ass. She looked at me and saw the Devil Incarnate, thought at various times that I was a call girl, a transvestite, a drug dealer, a madam, a child abuser—basically an all-around agent of iniquitous infection. Oh, and she was violent. More than once I'd felt the smack of her mighty oak cane on the top of my head and was unable to defend myself because she's a tiny Catholic lady in her eighties with blue hair and pearls. Pummeling the elderly, even in self-defense, is frowned upon in our society—not to mention an awful hard sell to a jury. Recently, Mrs. R. had given up her cane in favor of her pistol. I'd always believed she needed the cane to walk, but it turned out she'd just used it as a weapon, before she joined the arms race.

The cab dropped me in front of a mom-and-pop bodega, a vanishing breed in the increasingly gentrified East Village, where I bought the evening newspapers, a piece of beige milk fudge from a large glass jar on the counter, and a six-pack of beer.

“You need two
Posts
?” The young guy behind the counter asked. Or that's what I heard. He seemed to have trouble with English.

“You need two
News-Journals
?”

“Uh, no, just one is fine,” I said, and wondered if his English was this bad all the time, if he asked customers nonsensical questions all day or just hadn't really grasped the concept of suggestive selling. Had to be hard, coming to a strange country and trying to make a go of it without being fluent in the language.

Walking back from the store, I ate my milk fudge and read the
News-Journal
, which had a small blip on the John Doe I'd seen at the morgue that morning. The only new info on John Doe was that a waitress named Gina at Erin's Coffee House had identified him as an eccentric customer known only as Frenchie.

A lone dead man was a small story to the
News-Journal
. A bigger story was the update on the bees, a swarm of which had taken a sudden dislike to a bond trader, who was stung twenty-seven times and now calling for the extermination of the bees.

An even bigger story was the one on Jack Jackson on page 5.

“JACK JACKSON—FRIEND OF WOMEN? OR A WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING?” asked the headline.

Underneath this was an old photo of a much younger Jack Jackson slapping a famous feminist on the ass at the 1972 Democratic Convention and calling her “Honey,” according to the caption.

The text mentioned that Jack was the only man invited to speak on the last day of the women's conference, and suggested this was a sellout by women on account of Jack's massive sponsorship, along with other corporate giants, of the festivities. A collection of photos paired with historic quotes, or perhaps misquotes, from Jack followed, such as this one, from the early 1970s: “If God wanted women to be men, he would have made 'em men.”

Jack had, I was sure, changed his views since he made that comment. Also his clothes. Another picture showed a drunken, partying Jack at Studio 54. He was dressed in tight black satin bell-bottoms and a yellow shirt unbuttoned to his navel, and he still had hair then, a shaggy brown afro.

In a similar vein and around the same time, Jack had commented on the feminist truism, “If men had babies, they'd give out medals for it.”

“If men had babies,” Jack had said, “they'd be women.”

Lord Otterrill, who owned the
News-Journal
, was no historic friend of women and had once said that women were a lot more sensitive, vindictive, and petty than men. But that didn't stop this overly sensitive sore loser from seizing the vindictive opportunity to poke Jack in the eye with a sharp stick. With a gossipy story, no less! Men are such gossips.

The coast was clear on Tenth Street. Mrs. Ramirez was nowhere to be seen. Sitting on my stoop was a young man in a baseball cap, bearing the logo of a famous hamburger chain, and dark glasses. When I approached, he said, “Hudson?”

“Yes.”

“I need to talk to you. Do you know my friend Dewey? I think you might be in danger.”

He took the glasses off. It was the crazy vegetarian.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“My name is Jason, and I need to talk to you.”

“You're the Jason who has been calling? How did you get my address?” I asked. “It's unlisted.”

“It wasn't easy, but I have ways. Hear me out, all right?”

“You're not gonna run away this time?”

“No. I've checked you out. You're sort of a respectable journalist, and your CEO Jack Jackson is a big supporter of environmental causes.”

“Thanks. What's with the hat?”

“I'm incognito,” he said, putting the sunglasses back on.

“Oh, I get it. The hamburger logo is to make you look like you're
not
a vegetarian. That's clever.”

“I think you might know my friend Dewey,” he said.

“And Dewey is?”

“My friend who is in the hospital, in a coma.”

“I don't know anyone by that name. This Dewey, is he young? Old?”

“He's in his twenties.”

Dewey wasn't the man in the hat or the John Doe then. “Heavy? Thin? Blond? Brunette?”

“Tall, blond, thin. I don't have a photo. He was beaten up yesterday, our offices were burgled, and I think it has to do with that hat-wearing man you met, because I found your name in Dewey's notes.”

“My name?”

“Yes. Can we go to your apartment and talk? I don't feel safe out here on the street.”

Let a stranger into my apartment. Let me think.

“No,” I said. But the next second, Mrs. Ramirez rounded the corner of Avenue C, and I changed my mind. “Aw hell, come on up. But don't try anything funny.”

“What would I try with you?” he asked.

I waved him ahead of me into the building and followed him onto the elevator.

“You're old enough to be my aunt or something.”

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Twenty-one.”

“I'm old enough to be your mother. Christ. Well, all the same, let me warn you. I beat the last person who messed with me with her own comatose granny. That's just for starters.”

Not only did I have pepper spray, I had six bottles of beer that could do some damage.

“I'm not going to mess with you. Shit.”

No, he was loony, but he was not evil, just young and idealistic, a Sonny Boy in the parlance of my girlfriends and me.

“So my name is in your friend's notes. What do these notes say?”

“‘Asking questions. Hudson.'”

“And you think that's me? We have a Hudson River, a Hudson Street, lots of companies with that name, at least two other reporters named Hudson in this town.”

“Yeah, but you're the one who showed up with our address in your hand.”

“Hmmm. Good point. This is my apartment. Excuse the mess. The maid's in detox.… Why was your friend Dewey beaten up?”

“I don't know. That's what I'm trying to find out. Look, I'm trusting you because I don't know where else to turn.”

“How about the police?”

“The police are lackeys of the corporations,” Jason said. “They are part of the conspiracy.”

I thought, Oh Christ, another fucking paranoid conspiracy theorist. In Special Reports, we hear from a lot of them, obsessives who've been sitting in their mothers' basements for the last thirty-some years thinking about what really happened on the grassy knoll in Dallas, to hunched-over men with wild eyes who want to warn the world about the existence of the “inner earth people” (who were feeling a tad cramped in the bowels of the planet, and would soon be coming aboveground to conquer us surface dwellers). Add to that the small businessmen who think big business is engaged in a conscious conspiracy to drive them under and shut-ins who think the guy next door is a serial killer, and you have an idea why all my calls are screened by my staff to weed out the nutcases, small-timers, and hoaxers.

“Can I see these notes?”

“Before I say anything else, this has to be off-the-record.”

“Yeah, okay, sure.”

He pulled a folded yellow sheet of paper out of his pocket and handed it to me. It was from a legal pad.

“This was all I found. Whoever broke into our offices took the computers and every scrap of paper they could carry. I found this down the back of the desk.”

At the top it said, over and over in a childish scrawl, “bonobos.” Down a few inches, he had scribbled, “Asking questions. Hudson.” And below that, “Why?”

“What are bonobos?” I asked.

“Chimps.”

“Now who are you exactly?”