Love Monkey by Kyle Smith Read Free Book Online

Max’s lash by throwing his computer through a window. After that no one would hire him except US magazine. I ducked the shells of three deadlines a day until they started a Sunday edition. Somebody had to become weekend features editor. My hand was the first one up.
    There was no increase in salary, but I gladly accepted a 10 percent cut in my pulse. Now I edit the movie reviews on Friday, the starlet interviews and hot-bars blurbs for Saturday, the best-in-town stuff for Sunday. At the time I thought, This is success. I felt it important to succeed for the same reason everyone does: because I secretly hoped to be able to lord it over my classmates at some imagined high school reunion. But it’s been a couple of years since I was last called an up-and-comer, and at some point even wonder boys awaken to discover they’ve become middle management.
    I’ve made the stuff so light that the ink nearly floats off the newsprint; mine are the pages that don’t slam or rock or ooze or indict; the stuff, in other words, that we can close four days in advance to make our production schedule. If I come up with something too newsy, it gets taken away from me and put in the dailypaper. Which creates a hole in the Sunday paper that I will then have to scramble to fill with something commissioned on the fly. My job therefore is: don’t do your job too well, and mediocrity is my middle name. Ten best places in the city to get your nails done? We did that one last month. Also in November, January, and April.
    Tabloid ’s frosted gray 1940s-style-private-eye glass doors—even our entrance is hard-boiled—open into the city room. Under the all-night bug-zapping fluorescent burn, tough guys and the women who don’t mind them make dirty jokes, yell insults at each other, cluster in front of TVs. Wastebaskets overflow, the smell of fried food clouds the air, phones ring, empty pizza boxes form unstable skyscrapers. Add a couple of bongs and it could be Delta House at any state U.
    At the bank of TVs by the window a guy dressed entirely in mail-order casual clothing is watching New York 1 news. He is my rarely sighted archfoe Eli Knecht. At one time he was my archfriend, a fellow drinkslayer whose stucco complexion, unpressed 60/40 shirts, and inner-tube waistline, I thought, provided a constant subliminal reminder to women that they could wind up with someone even less attractive than me. Eli grew up in a small town in upstate New York hungering for big-city hackdom, skyscrapers glinting in his irises, his broad-beam forehead aching to butt down doors. All he ever wanted was the honor of a cheap suit. Not only couldn’t he wait to grow up, he couldn’t wait to grow old , to own the weary staff of knowledge so he could club people with it. The guy is my age yet his conversations are full of casual references to dead mayors, ancient work stoppages, forgotten scandals. Rewrite has long whispered that he is bald as a friar on purpose, to live up to the look of someone old enough to remember the 1965 mayoral race. Now Eli is our third-string City Hall reporter, devouring every zoning decision and PAC donation so he can prove without a doubt that rich people have more political influence.
    When I started, he introduced me to the street. Unlike a lot ofreporters, he was generous with his knowledge and taught me a few things when, years ago, I took my first trembling steps onto the long carpets of broken glass that invariably mark a neighborhood where crime is the leading industry. Eli knows more tricks than a forty-dollar hooker: always carry a pencil because pens always explode, run out of ink, or freeze; don’t bother with a tape recorder because then you’ll spend half your day transcribing (a suggestion seconded by our lawyers—who can prove you misquoted someone unless there’s a tape?); and keep your press pass in your pocket, not dangling around your neck, unless you want to spend the