Love Monkey by Kyle Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

have to stay in rhythm and listen for the climactic moment.
    The third one is the piano.
    I start to type. Type, type. Today I’m doing headlines. The heds. Screamers. They’re meant to scare you and make you laugh at the same time. Kind of like Mike Tyson. And like Mike, we enjoy duking it out with the mighty, but sometimes we’re just as happy to gnaw on somebody’s ankle.
    There’s a story about the sexploits of Tommy Lee and his former bandmates: “COCK-A-DOODLE CRÜE,” I type.
    Here’s one about the future of topless bars: “THE STRIPPING NEWS.” Writes itself.
    We’re doing another piece on The Producers hype. It’s the biggest smash on Broadway. You can’t go wrong with Nazis in dresses. We’ve already done six feature articles on it. This one is about the costume designer. “STURM UND DRAG,” I write.
    A new offshoot of Judaism that attracts lots of young professionals back to temple. “SECTS AND THE CITY,” of course.
    And the one from our Hollywood stringer, who has seen and enjoyed an early cut of Jurassic Park III . Well, not enjoyed, exactly. His words to me on the phone were, “It sucks less cock than youwould expect, considering Spielberg didn’t direct it.” I rewrite the story to make it more enthusiastic, for one reason: I’ve always wanted an excuse to use the hed, “IS IT GOOD? YOU BET JURASSIC.”
    I’m good at this job. Yes, I am the one who imported “Wacko Jacko” from the British press. And I was the first headline writer ever to describe Hugh Grant as “overblown.” I still remember with pride the time I saw a pretty young thing with that page of the newspaper on West Eighty-second. She was using it to pick up her Airedale’s giant Mississippi mud pies. You can’t say I’m not a man of strong words. Absorbent ones too.
    At five-thirty a gentleman wobbles up to my desk looking like the world’s best-dressed derelict, an apparition held together by hair-spray and gin. His chalk-striped double breasted is about a hundred years out of style and it hangs on him like a bedsheet on a hat rack. His skin is parchment. You could open an envelope on his cheekbones, or on the silver prow of his proud pompadour. If he showed up at a wake, people would tell him to get back in the coffin. There are only two jobs this guy could do: vampire, or journalist.
    â€œHow are you, mate? Name’s Rollo,” he says, proferring a talcumed pink claw.
    â€œTom,” I say, adding, for old time’s sake, “we’ve known each other for three years.”
    He puts both hands on the edge of my cubicle and hangs on, doing what appear to be involuntary deep-knee bends, absorbing this new information, looking for his sea legs. His faraway eyes whir into focus. His wedding ring is like a hula hoop rattling around his skeleton finger.
    â€œAnd your position here, lad?”
    â€œI’m your editor,” I tell him.
    London grown, Sydney reared, Rollo Thrash is the Obi-Wan of hacks, chief revenue stream for Elaine’s and Langan’s, foremost defender of the voodoo tabloid faith in an age when journalism hasstarted to act like a kid born in a whorehouse who grows up to preach chastity and temperance. He could drink you under the table, through the floorboards, and into the basement, where he would call down to prompt you to stop mucking about and fetch him up another case. No one has ever seen him eat.
    Best Rollo story—and the best ones don’t even come from Rollo, they have to stew in Langan’s for a while, slow-cooking in entirely implausible detail—is the one about how he’s in Hong Kong, sent up from one of the Sydney rags to cover some Sino-Australian dissident who, after his imprisonment on ludicrous charges caused a diplomatic uproar, is finally being released. This is when it was impossible to get a visa into China. So they let the prisoner out