Shooting for the Stars by R. G. Belsky Read Free Book Online Page B

out through the lobby of my building, the doorman gave me a friendly greeting.
    â€œHow are you, Mr. Malloy?” he said.
    â€œI met a TV star today,” I told him.
    â€œGood for you.”
    â€œAbbie Kincaid.”
    There was a blank look on his face.
    â€œShe has a news program called The Prime Time Files . It’s a newsmagazine kind of thing. Sort of like Barbara Walters or Diane Sawyer. Take my word for it, Abbie Kincaid is a big star.”
    â€œI’m sure she is.”
    â€œA big, big star.”
    â€œGood for you,” he said again as he held the door open for me to go out.
    Yep, this was my new life.
    High-rise apartment.
    High floor.
    High rent.
    Same old high anxiety.

Chapter 8
    I WATCHED Abbie Kincaid’s show at a place called Headliners. Stacy Albright wanted me to write a follow-up article on whatever Abbie said about Laura Marlowe. She’d invited several of the editors and reporters to watch with her. I was one of them.
    For those of us in the newspaper world in New York City, Headliners bar is legendary. There’s an old-style printing press in the front. Blowups of famous Page Ones from the city’s newspapers—most of them no longer around—hung from behind the bar. There was also something called a Gallery of Page One Heroes on another wall, pictures of reporters who had broken memorable stories over the years. One of them was me for a big exclusive I’d done. There was a plaque above the picture, which said: Gil Malloy, Reporter of the Year . I was smiling in the picture, standing between Marilyn Staley, who was the Daily News city editor then, and Rick Hodges, the managing editor. Hodges died of a heart attack a few years later, and Staley was fired more recently to make room for Stacy Albright. It all seemed like a million years ago now.
    When I got to the bar, Stacy and the others were sitting around a table underneath a big wide-screen TV. I pulled up a chair at the end of the table, as far away from Stacy as I could get. Jeff Aronson, a reporter who covered the federal courts for the News , was next to me. He was drinking a bourbon on the rocks.
    Jeff and I had started out at the paper together as copyboys. My rise had been more rapid, but then so had my flameouts. Aronson, on the other hand, had been a steady contributor for the Daily News the whole time. Never a big star, but highly thought of as a federal court reporter.
    I’d drunk with Jeff before, and I knew his routine. Always drank bourbon on the rocks. He’d have two of them—no more, no less. Then he’d catch a train to the suburbs in New Rochelle, where he’d go home to his nice house with his nice wife and his four nice little children. He was one of those people who seemed to have it all. He even went to church and visited hospitals on Sunday. Of course, you never really knew for sure about a person. A guy like Jeff Aronson could have bodies of teenaged girls buried in his basement, I suppose. But as far as I could tell, he seemed to be a good reporter, a good husband, and a good father. He had his life in order, everything under control. I never understood how people could deal with all that kind of responsibility. Me, I had trouble just getting to work on time. Maybe it was some sort of a character flaw in me.
    â€œHow many stupid things has she said so far?” I asked Aronson.
    â€œWho?”
    â€œStacy.”
    He laughed.
    â€œHer record is twelve in one hour,” I said. “That was the day she said Joe DiMaggio played for the Brooklyn Dodgers and she couldn’t remember if there were four or five Beatles.”
    â€œShe’s young.”
    â€œYouth is no excuse for ignorance.”
    â€œWeren’t you ever young?”
    â€œNo,” I said, “I was born at the age of thirty-seven and immediately became a cynical, embittered newspaper reporter.”
    The Laura Marlowe story was the first segment of The Prime Time Files . It