“Derek.”
He looks up at me squinty-eyed, the light from the overhead fluorescents making his scalp gleam at the crown, where his hair is thinnest. “You wrapped up?”
“Not yet.”
“We really need a new angle on this Britney bullshit, Sammy. Got to freshen it up, mate.”
“Yeah, well, sadly for us, there wasn’t a second photographer on the grassy knoll.”
If he gets the Kennedy reference, his face doesn’t show it. “What have you got, then?”
“Nothing.”
“Mate.”
“Derek, we broke the story. Then we broke Britney’s denial. Then we went to the man on the street for his opinion. The only thing left to do is wait until she checks into rehab.”
For the first time, he seems interested in something I have to say. “Is she checking into rehab?”
“I have no idea. But I don’t think there’s any way you can abuse ginseng, so I’d say it was unlikely.”
Derek picks up the photo of Britney and stares at it like a man hoping to hear voices from above. Suddenly he says, “What about her body language?”
“Excuse me?”
“Her body language, mate.” He runs a bony finger along the length of Britney’s body. “The way she’s positioned. Does it or does it not indicate whether she’s drinking a health supplement, or whiskey?”
If you ever find yourself working for a tabloid publication, remember that it’s important not to laugh at moments like these. You’ve got to take every editor’s suggestion as seriously as Marie Curie took the tons and tons of dirt she boiled to get that one little teaspoon of radium. The only difference in the tabloid game is that you boil tons and tons of bullshit to get one little spoonful of dirt.
My heart is hammering away. I am actually afraid to ask this man for the afternoon off. I am ashamed of myself for being afraid to ask. I am angry at myself for being so cowardly about the whole thing.
And I’m gasping as if I’ve just run a hundred-yard dash.
Derek notices. “Are you all right, there, mate?”
I force myself to calm down, wondering where the tumor that’s sure to be triggered by all this pent-up anxiety will strike me—lungs? Liver? Kidneys? Ten years from now, I’m going to die of cancer of the something-or-other because of my reluctance to ask for a few hours off in the middle of a workday. This is insane. I’ve just got to go ahead and do it.
“Thing of it is,” I begin, fighting unsuccessfully to quell the quaking in my voice, “I’m going to have to hand the story off to somebody.”
Derek’s eyes narrow. “Why must you hand the story off?”
“I need to duck out of here for about two hours.” I’ve picked a bad verb with “duck.” It sounds like I mean to run out to the racetrack, but it’s too late to worry about it now.
Derek is shaking his head. “I need a reason, mate.”
I stare at him long and hard, this son of a man I liked very much, a man who used to bring little Derek to the newsroom when he was a toddler. He had a red fire engine that he’d roll back and forth along the floor, and once one of its rubber wheels came off its rim and rolled out of sight, so I got down on my hands and knees and found the little black doughnut under a desk and squeezed it back onto the rim, good as new. I handed the truck back to the teary four-year-old and urged him not to cry, because everything was okay, and the kid even thanked me for what I’d done, unbeknownst to anyone but the two of us.
And if someone had tapped me on the shoulder that day and told me that the cute kid in short pants would grow up to become my boss, busting my balls over a request to take a few hours off from work, who would have believed it?
Of course, there is a way out. I could tell Derek that it’s an emergency of some kind involving my son, but I wouldn’t even share my zip code with this man, much less a problem from my personal life. I’m actually suffering a miniature nervous breakdown here, having imagined everything up to and including my son’s death, and all I want to do is get to his school and find out what the hell is going on.
“Derek,” I manage to say, “just trust me. I have something important to do, so I’m going.”
“No, you’re not,” he singsongs.
“I’m not?”
“Leave now and you’re fired.”
He says it flat out, no emphasis on the word “fired,” no real emotion in his voice. He means what he says, and not only that, he’s happy to say it. This has been building for months now, I suddenly realize. He knows I think he’s a lousy editor, and he can taste my contempt for him. I guess he’s grown tired of the taste.
I’m not exactly dealing from a position of strength. I’m one of the dinosaurs in the newsroom, older than most of the reporters by fifteen, twenty years. The paper has always been lousy, but there was a time when it was the best lousy thing around, funny and irreverent and occasionally even sympathetic to the plight of the little man. We used to do stories about honest cabbies who returned lost wallets. Now the only time we write about a cabbie is when he turns out to be a suspected terrorist, or when a celebrity stiffs him out of a tip or pukes in the backseat. Mostly we’re up the asses of celebrities—following them, photographing them, trying to guess what they do with their genitals, and how often. It doesn’t take much to become a celebrity anymore, so the field is huge, a cluster of idiotic young people either posing for the camera or pretending to dodge it.
Something in me snaps. Suddenly my fears are gone. All that’s left is rage, but it’s not a blind rage. In some weird way, this is exactly how I wanted it all to play out—me versus the asshole in charge.
I clear my throat and say, “You’re going to fucking fire me, Derek?”
He’s almost smug about it. He leans back in his chair and folds his hands together behind his head. “You heard what I said. If you want permission to go, I’ll need a reason.”
I think it’s the word “permission” that does it. It’s in the same league with “guardian.” Suddenly the ridiculousness of it all comes into diamond-hard focus. I am literally embarrassed by the way I have spent my working life.
I want to bash Derek’s face in. There hasn’t been a newsroom punch-out since the old days, when boozing chain-smokers would mix it up and then buy each other drinks after hours. Now nobody smokes, and nobody fights. The reporters belong to gyms and exercise in spandex pants, to the barking commands of their personal trainers. When conflicts arise, they phone their lawyers. I know that if I touch Derek, I’ll wind up in court. Enraged as I am, I remain sane enough to know I don’t want to go to court, so I can’t hit him.
All I can do is leave. In my head, I can hear the drumroll that precedes my next words.
“I’m going now, Derek.”
“You’re fired, Sullivan.”
These are the words every man in the world is supposed to fear, right up there with “It’s inoperable,” but the first thing that hits me is the absurdity of the fact that this little weed should have the clout to speak such a sentence. A short, perfect sentence, noun-verb, bang-bang. Hemingway couldn’t have put it more succinctly, and Derek Slaughterchild is no Hemingway.
I look at my hands, where I can feel a tingle of blood flooding to my fingers. Without realizing it I’d balled my hands