Breath Play

"Although my eyes were open, they might just as well been closed"- Procul Harum

“Here is the The List”.

She said it just like that- capital “T”, capital “L”. In the sing-song voice of the professional PR. In the smile practiced to perfection, somewhere between reassuring and “I must be going”. The List of approved questions we might like to ask The Celebrity. The Artist.

We had never heard of “RXR”. Until last week. Then he was all over social media like a rash on a baby’s bottom, the Editor said. Yes, we had heard that one before. Bob said “Gabi” had whispered last night in the bar, that it was all part of the Grunge/hip-hop genre performer’s strategy. Stealth-hype was in. Promotion was so yesterday. Hence the star’s well-rehearsed spontaneity.

He was subtle- her word. She loved his urban femininity. Like, you know what I mean, as he says. So granular in his black aware-ness. How Kell- his real name back in South Chicago- was uber-famous, after using the F-word at the inauguration. (Worth $6.5 million the accountants said, for one four-letter word). He thought he was being edgy talking about his “masturbatory career”. His “installation”- a semi-naked girl in a Perspex box doubled in value. Always kinda naked. Always a girl. All Art is pornography, so he said. You notice, it’s never a Danny DeVito in his Y-fronts, not even in a Perspex cube. If he hadn’t been black and South side, no one would have given his Art a first look, let alone a second.

Ping. His Lear jet was just touching down. Ping. His co-star Angel was delayed. (Aligning her chakras). (Don’t ask, said Bob). Ping.

If that was talent, Gabi beamed, to know how to F-word at just the right moment, Kell had it. By the spreadsheet. Didn’t we know, people saw his films by invitation only. The Artist formerly known as “XES” would send a link if he got your brand. We live in hope I said.

No, He didn’t need “analogue” journos and dinosaur reviewers. Forgetting, over a second margarita on expenses, that “Bronto Bob” had bought her, that he was most definitely Jurassic Park. Down to his preppy Basswejun loafers and button-down shirt-n-tie combo, nobody would be seen dead in, except her father. But Bob still liked to dress up for receptions. Made him feel right when he felt wrong. Even before a drag to calm him down. And besides, a collar and Yale Frat tie hid the wrinkled iguana neck that had returned to taunt him; even after the face-lift his ex had bought Bob for his 45th, to make it his 40th birthday, again.

“So Galapagos”. As no doubt Gabi would tell her girlfriends later that night, after Bob had gone for his “beauty sleep”. Locking himself in the bathroom of the suite so he could Google her, and fantasize to her Instagram under the halogen lights. His aching right hand next day, when he took shorthand of RXR’s words of wisdom, on world geopolitics, his mother’s fried chicken and his new graffiti tag. Swiping right, Bob even found The Bikini shot, the one she absolutely had to show him in the bar. “Hawaii 07”. Scuba fins, background. Not the deleted one with Jake, in the Resort Instructor sweat, sucking the pineapple out of her belly-button.

Downstairs, Gabi gabbling to her support bubble about the “silver-fox” she had met that evening. And how his hand was all over her ass all evening. But then he was a partner in the media group’s New York office. She knew a stepping stone when she dug in her Louboutin stiletto red heel into the flesh. Bob casually dropping how he took the corporate heli to play the “back-nine”- Gabi knew better than to ask- playing golf with The owner and his son. And how Foxy Bob had known Jackie O. Whom, as Bob breathed in her ear over the thumping muzak of RXR, even someone as young and smart as she was, had heard of. A woman of the world.

Skipping the buffet breakfast, Bob appeared distracted when he came down next morning. Calm for a man who had just killed, by design or accident. Or had it been some trick of the night and those blue-and-white pills he took. How he had killed her seemed strangely unimportant. Holding his right hand steady with his left, he poured a black coffee he did not want. You can’t do anything normal in such a distorted moment, without it seeming abnormal. Absurd. For death itself is absurd. It’s why it terrifies, or attracts us; butterflies to petals.

In his pocket was his last review he had just posted. “I’ll never forget him, what’s-his-name”, wrote Bobby W. of the Times in his opening line…

Referring to himself in the third person was a neat trick. Telling the “Dead Horse” joke another. The voice of someone who had seen it all before. And would do, again. His “five-incher” column “Kulture Vulture” said it all. No more treading water until his retirement. Despite RXR being the owner’s son’s new pet-project. The free hotel and mini-bar that was never free. He was going to tell the truth. Call the Old Man’s bluff. Describing RXR as “The artist”, only made the first cut deeper.

All the time he was writing, remembering, how the girl’s blood that splashed his lips tasted of iron, so he knew it was real. That it had happened. He never knew death was so quick. The body upstairs on the bed, growing colder with his coffee. The light from the wardrobe revealing the rip on the stocking around her ankle. The purple birthmark, death mark on the neck.

We only think we decide, Bob once told me. What’s a “Good” film or production- and what’s a turkey. Carrion. Flies and all. That’s “The Machine’s” finest trick, he said. Its’ power. To make you think you are free to choose. The Machine- that’s what he always called it. Not The Owner. Not even the puppeteer son. Deus Ex Machina- the ghost in the Machine decides today what the consumers will want tomorrow.

Everyone was now famous for being famous. The singer not the song listened to. Art was dead. No one could paint a Sistine chapel. Or worse, know why. Spray can it white. Erase history. The Producer, the artist, was left with only the shock of the new. The gimmick. The tattooed Rap star turning the rings round and round on his fingers. His blue-haired co-star silent on his left. Called her, Girly-Girly. Who, in her desperation to be different looked like, all the others. In these post-Truth times we are told we live in, we have forgotten to separate our trash. We can only recycle. Offend. Recycle the talent and ideas and sweat of the past. There is nothing against which to judge mediocrity. Strange days indeed. Finding ourselves living in an Andy Warhol quotation- albeit for 15 minutes.

We, the media Groundhogs. The collective noun of critics and reviewers. Perma-tanned Hollywood reporters and Has-beens and Wannabes, moving the card on their Reserved seat. RXR fashionably late to build the expectation by wasting your check-in time for the last flight home. Media groundhogs condemned to praise. Our judgment clouded by our career progression. By old loyalties to older bosses who had given us our first break after stint on the Des Moines Calendar. No we didn’t want a “career-break” teaching night school, even if Arizona was a fantastic place to live. We wrote to pay our monthly payments, alimony. Because we could not think what else to do, to mark time between life and death.

The enforced laziness of keeping our heads down and avoiding attention that a libel-suit or fall in circulation and “click-thrus”. Anything that might prompt a head-count review of the Features department. So we regurgitate the same lines. Sea birds choking on a stinking mush of dead-fish. Like me, rewriting and reading the same news for thirty years, just with different politicians names- often sons of the Senator fathers. It’s always the same news just with different titles. Bob was right about that. They had bought and sold me so many times. But I was the auctioneer, catching their eye, or the in my case the eye of the national editor’s wife, and hitting the gavel hard on the wood to the lowest bidder.

Thick with make-up. Praising the talentless shiny-new Rap Star, Celeb. Because what else can we do? The Media Emperors have decided what we will decide. Thumbs up. Thumbs down. It does not matter, if Art- or religion- is simply opinion. Subjective. If the wind of hype is strong enough, even a turkey like this film will fly. Or President. Surely the whole room can’t be wrong when its right. But when everyone thinks alike: someone isn’t thinking. A Star is born. A Party wins. A nation made, new under God. For this is America. The land of the euphemism. Founded on self-delusion. The self-deception required to cross East-West the great dividing mountains and beat the plains. So we have to invent other words to paint over the cracks of reality. Death of the innocents becomes “Colleterial Damage”. Torture, “Rendition”. “Republican”, Democrat. The USA is itself proof that you can fool all of the people all of the time. A wonderful, grand deception.

Just insert the same old same old Peace, Prosperity into the prefabricated sentence of the speech. Cut-and-paste fame. So we play the game, and give the film three or four stars. Perhaps just for an easy life. To keep our boss in their job so we keep ours. We grip tight to being average. It’s quite an art. A skill, being Average. Harder in its way than mere genius. We don’t want to be a Mozart of the qwerty keyboard. We don’t want to be remembered on the 200 anniversary of our birth, by people who will not be able to read or write, even if they wanted to. Because they will not want to. That is the Future we, mere humans did not expect for ourselves. Slaves to the bank, to The Algorithm; the mortgage and 45 days statutory holiday entitlement we can’t afford to take. A pension offset against tax. A present off set against a future and mortgaged to the past. A sophomore daughter; blonde and face lined, old with thoughts she should not have. That’s me. All of me, me, me. Living inside a gold fish bowl, inside a gold fish bowl of a small Eastern town. Guilty of being Average.

Bob-The-Theatre man hasn’t any dreams left to sell. Suddenly realising he doesn’t believe in what he is asking them to believe. Telling his gauche, eager to please new interns wafting around the office, about journalism without Fear or Favour. That there is truth and Father Christmas. Non-binary now. Especially the red-head from Dartmouth. The one he singled out last summer for his purely avuncular attention. How she fell in love, or thought she had, with the deal and the pasta vongole he made her. Jerking to his vision-thing. Until she left in what her mother called, a flood of tears. And how no one talked about the girl. The one he promised never to forget, like all the others, what’s her name.

He did not see her, how could he, back in her hometown a month too late. Leaving the clinic by the side door. Not looking at her reflection in the the blackened glass. Ten weeks and ten years older. Sore, inside out. What was it his PA said, cryptically? How Bob never employed anyone who wasn’t Ivy League and less than a 38D. The Head of HR slapped his junior’s back and take some holiday somewhere nice and expensive. And on the seventh green of a golf course in Florida, an old man said to his son, “That’s just Good Old Bobby, being Bobby. How glass ceilings only existed for the talentless. For losers and for Commies and lesbians. Like the whole Goddam country these days…

Who could forget Bob’s rendition of “Come Fly With Me” at the Annual Publishers & Proprietors’ Ball at the Excelsior. The Boss was in love with Sinatra. Even after the trial, he believed no man could be all bad who loved old blue eyes, could he. Was that how we all came to turn a blind eye. Dazzled by the mirrored ceilings and waiters with trays held high above their heads; elbowing through the cream of society, rich and thick. Thinking we had something to say. That we were doing good.

I sometimes feel like the boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes. Raising my hand in class. Surely Miss, this “Epic”, “Modern Classic in the Making”, isn’t any good. Nominated, judged by- the famous. Probably I’m just in the wrong job. The Academicians. The Gods of Fame can make you. And break you twice as easily. A few calls here and there. A doubt sown in the back of limousine in the mind of a backer. A word can turn your trashy script into a Golden Globe. And vice versa.

Reminds me of comedian John Cleese who was staying with some friends in New York. They had tickets “money could not buy”, to some Broadway show that was the talk of the town that year. The one people wanted to go to, to be seen going to. Now long forgotten. The Python said he didn’t want to go. It was a lousy show he told them. They looked aghast. “Who cares”, they replied, “It’s a Hit”.

Bob’s a Good Bloke. Everyone says that. Life and soul of the Third Floor at the magazine. We are stuck, we agreed, between the floors. Digital gerbils on our wheel. A wheel of fear we turn ourselves. That are slipping. Getting out of touch, past 41. The can-we-have-a-quiet chat at an unexpected lunch with the publisher outside the newsroom. Where it will be suggested to us that it would perhaps, be best for all, if we Moved On. To that start-up in Alberqueue. “The climate’s better”. An Exit Level “opportunity” Or whatever euphemism the Executive Editor uses for our coming failure. We have nothing to fear, but FOMO itself. Fear of Missing Out on the irrelevant. Missing what we have already forgotten.

The PR was one of those conference apparatchiks. Black pencil-suited, long blonde pony tail and all. Not quite bright enough to get that lawyer job her parents back in Wisconsin wanted. Drifted into the pale-imitation of The Oldest Profession, the prostitution that is PR and Digital Marketing. On The Game. Bob of The Times says she is half-Chinese or something. And I hear myself saying “Something”, absentmindedly, without quite knowing why.

Bob thinks to himself, he’s in half in love with her- Gabi- on the name badge. Reminds him of the the daughter in Maine he never sees. He likes that little laugh at the end of every other paragraph she makes. That guise of mock insecurity, hiding the ambition and the scheming calculation behind everything she doesn’t say. “Types” like her always have an agenda. Sometime one that do not know themselves. Water cooler gossips joked which of the office girls was he dating now? It was always the same girl. Always falling for the same Gabi in Aspen or DC.

He falls because he knows she could never, would never love a man like him. Something now slightly less than a man. More an opportunity. Hair thinning on top. Mirroring his thinning patience with the world and all its’ limitless capacity for stupidity. Tired lines under his eyes, etched like a tree, one for each decade and each failed marriage. However early the night, or early the gym opens, the lines laugh back at him in the bathroom mirror. Hecklers. Would a beard make him look younger, or just metrosexual/borderline gay? So that was why as Wife No. 2 noted in her deposition, he never changed. Sceptical, in a tweed jacket he had since college, and now a size too big. Or perhaps, he was a size too small.

“Not half the man he used to be”, he thinks aloud. Telling himself, what I told him, at least he’s retained his sense of humour. But I know he knows, that’s the tragedy of it. He has forgotten how to laugh. To love. How to be himself.

The secret of a happy marriage was to marry your second wife first. We agreed last night, 2AM, over that last bourbon. Drinking together down to the label of the bottle of Makers’ Mark. Bob returning to the silence that is always Room 411. Too used, too experienced in life to pile hope upon hope again, that this time it would be different. Like a gambler stacking his chips on 12 Black. Or would he even even notice if Gabi had left the bed warm. When he invited her back just to “chill”. Or the rape he told the judge he hadn’t meant to plan, rehearsing over and over since his divorce. Perhaps, as he spilt his drink that night, spilling his life, telling me it was all because he was still in love with his wife.

How we swap our time on this earth for next month’s pay-check. Mortgage our life, for so little. For however low the interest, we never seem to be able to afford the deposit. To have enough of enough.

The Clones, we hacks call them. We the feeder fish clinging to the smooth grey of the media sharks and stare into their dead calculating eyes. You see the Bimbos- male and non-male- at every staged Media Conference, Release or whatever trash they are “Launching”; despite there being no such word, at Thursday EST. Eastern Standard Time. The latest pulp Book/Film/Production, whose six-figure contract never was worth the paper it was written on.

Nine out of ten “Hits” and award-nominated whatever, is instantly forgettable. For we live in the age of the great Overrated. Groupthink. Bull, digitized. An age which, no doubt, is itself, overrated. The incestuous censorship of the politically correct means we can’t write that it’s lousy, disjointed, third-rate show. That impossibly, the film of it, is even worse. Why?

Bob paused, sucked his teeth. “Black Director”, he said finally. “They’ll think we’re being unconsciously racist. Something like that. Being white, male, of a certain age, we can’t help but be racist. That’s the thing about prejudice: there’s always one finger pointing at, and three pointing back. The more we justify, explain, the deeper the hole we dig. So I just give it four stars, take the shuttle home and file my expenses in time.

“For telling the truth”.

“No one wants The Truth anymore… Just as Free Speech is never free… And how we’d be about as popular as a turd in a swimming pool if we told the paying public what their Dollars really bought. He went on. Inhaled and exhaled the resentments, the petty office squabbles, the regrets of being the wrong side of 40 and stiffed. I, like a passive smoker, drifted in and out.

Bob reminding me, about The Editor’s wife. Don’t forget because she won’t let you, that she is A Woman of Color. That’s why we critics can’t criticize the all-black production. Or give it one star less. We were “too male too pale”, to be entitled to our opinions. The right to remain silent, our First Amendment. Whatever we said, or did not say, would be “culturally loaded”. Unable to tell the truth even if we wanted.

Don’t you want to get on? Bob pointed. Of course I did. Up to the Fifth Floor some day. Irony is, we’re the victims of that casual racism, the editor’s wife is always campaigning about up in D.C. For being, Too male, Too pale. For being 41. Guilty in search of a crime.

"Bob was a good bloke”, that’s what the Editor said after the trial. “Until you got to know him. Too clever by half. That was always our Bob’s flaw- and pills so I hear. Women. How old was the girl?”. I didn’t answer.

“And Bob was still young. Future Editor material”. He paused. “Young enough to know better”.

“I guess”.

Closing the glass door behind him, I watched the editor straighten his tie round his sweaty neck. Off to the monthly board luncheon with his majority shareholder wife at Circe. The door that still had Bob’s name in white letters on it, backwards- “Trebor Edisrag”. It did make a great pen-name, as Bob had said.

Roll Up, Roll Up. Meet “Trebor Edisrag. Book signing Tonite with “The unforgettable Danish Crime Writer. “Without equal” since what’s-his-name. The greatest living author… Oscar-nominated. Bob couldn’t stop himself now. “The greatest since the last hyped creature of the mediaocrity we made. Stitched together, limb by limb”. Waving his arms, he looked straight at me, but didn’t see me. “Dr. Frankenstein meet Dr. Frankenstein. We made the stars, Stars”…

“Useful too”, he thought aloud, to have an alter ego. A false identity. For checking anonymously into one-night stand motel rooms, and the Bauhinia massage parlour over on the other side of town. Where no one, not even the dealers, knew him. Or strangely, he knew or recognised himself. The sweaty face of another man looked back in the mottled shaving mirror. It was always the same room in whatever city he found himself. The same room, in which he had tried to grasp onto the last of his youth, choking for his very life perhaps. As he squeezed Gabi’s neck. As she had asked him too.

No one understood the accused muttering something under his breath in the witness box. About “covering mine eyes”… No one on the jury was old or educated enough, he knew, to remember. Remember his career break Broadway review of The Duchess of Malfi. He was right. The world had to wait twenty years to find out. Olivier was second to none. Primus inter pares. Who wouldn’t have to Google translate that nowadays. Pearls before swine, broken and scattered like those round the PR bimbo’s neck. Fingers beginning to squeeze, pulsing, skin smooth, so close now he could see the hairs bristle under the make up. Tighter and redder than he had ever intended. How could Death, killing, be so easy… So lazy.

As his Attorney argued, she “led him on”. Her target. That she wasn’t a victim. He was. That she liked, “That sort of thing”.