The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

It was Katie Curran, a tall, svelte blond for whom I felt a strong lust that was almost certainly unrequited. She was always kind to me, and unfailingly sweet. She laughed at my jokes. Such characteristics rarely signal lust. Was I surprised? Not at all. She was hot; I am not. I am, if I may be frank, exactly that geek all the teenpix make fun of. Until my third month working at Circus, I even had the perfect geek accessory: spectacles mended with tape.

‘A little,’ I said. I could smell her perfume. Some kind of fruit. Fresh pears, maybe. Fresh somethings, anyway.

She sat down at the next desk, a long-legged vision in faded jeans. ‘When that happens to me, I type The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog three times, real fast. It opens the creative floodgates.’ She spread her arms, showing me how floodgates open, and incidentally giving me a breathtaking view of breasts snugly encased in a black tank top.

‘I don’t think that will work in this case,’ I said.

Katie wrote her own feature, not as popular as Speaking Ill of the Dead, but still widely read; she had half a million followers on Twitter. (Modesty forbids me to say how many I had in those days, but go ahead and think seven figures; you won’t be wrong.) Hers was called Getting Sloshed with Katie. The idea was to go out drinking with celebs we hadn’t dissed yet – and even some we had went for the deal, go figure – and interview them as they got progressively more shitfaced. It was amazing what came out, and Katie got it all on her cute little pink iPhone.

She was supposed to get drunk right along with them, but she had a way of leaving a single drink but a quarter finished as they moved from one watering hole to another. The celebs rarely noticed. What they noticed was the perfect oval of her face, her masses of wheat-blond hair, and her wide gray eyes, which always projected the same message: Oh gosh, you’re so interesting. They lined up for the chop even though Katie had effectively ended half a dozen careers since joining the Circus staff eighteen months or so before I came on board. Her most famous interview was with the family comedian who opined of Michael Jackson, ‘That candy-ass wanna-be-whitebread is better off dead.’

‘I guess she said no raise, huh?’ Katie nodded toward Jeroma’s office.

‘How did you know I was going to ask for a raise? Did I tell you?’ Mesmerized by those misty orbs, I might have told her anything.

‘No, but everyone knew you were going to, and everyone knew she was going to say no. If she said yes, everyone would ask. By saying no to the most deserving, she shuts the rest of us down cold.’

The most deserving. That gave me a little shiver of delight. Especially coming from Katie.

‘So are you going to stick?’

‘For now,’ I said. Talking out of the side of my mouth. It always works for Bogie in the old movies, but Katie got up, brushing nonexistent lint from the entrancingly flat midriff of her top.

‘I’ve got a piece to write. Vic Albini. God, he could put it away.’

‘The gay action hero,’ I said.

‘News flash: not gay.’ She gave me a mysterious smile and drifted off, leaving me to wonder. But not really wanting to know.

I sat in front of the blank Bump DeVoe document for ten minutes, made a false start, deleted it, and sat for another ten minutes. I could feel Jeroma’s eyes on me and knew she was smirking, if only on the inside. I couldn’t work with that stare on me, even if I was just imagining it. I decided to go home and write the DeVoe piece there. Maybe something would occur on the subway, which was always a good thinking place for me. I started to close the laptop, and that was when inspiration struck again, just as it had on the night when I saw the item about Jack Briggs departing for that great A-list buffet in the sky. I decided I was going to quit, and damn the consequences, but I would not go quietly.

I dumped the blank DeVoe document and created a new one, which I titled JEROMA WHITFIELD OBIT. I wrote with absolutely no pause. Two hundred poisonous words just poured out of my fingers and onto the screen.

Jeroma Whitfield, known as Jerri to her close friends (according to reports, she had a couple in preschool), died today at—

I checked the clock.