The Sixth Station
1
New York City, N.Y., USA
Thirty-three Years Later
It wasn’t my beat, it wasn’t my assignment, and it wasn’t my intention to alter reality that morning when my cell phone rang at 7:15 after a night highlighted by too many martinis with Donald, the ex.
Oh, God. Why didn’t we stay away from each other? Again.
We had no future and the past was a decade-old fantasy.
Baghdad, October 5, 2005
Kick-ass war correspondent and bad-boy photojournalist married by army chaplain amidst horrors of war in the lounge of the Palestine Hotel. Many drunken colleagues in attendance.
Or something like that.
Two days after the terribly romantic nuptials and drunken party that followed, the retreating Iraqis gave Donald and me an unforgettable wedding present: A bomb hidden inside a cement-mixer truck was detonated outside the hotel, taking out the lobby. Gucci bags and Fendi fur coats from the high-end lobby shops were blown out of the stores and lay among broken glass and giant hunks of falling plaster.
When the blast hit (we were in bed, of course), Donald jumped up, threw on jeans, and grabbed his cameras. He wasn’t worried about our (my) safety; he was worried about missing the action, i.e., the photos.
Instead of thinking he was a big horse’s ass, I jumped into a tracksuit and we both took the partially collapsed stairs four steps at a time. I too was probably more terrified of missing the action (i.e., the story) than I was about the danger. I should have realized it was a defining moment.
We weren’t allowed back into our hotel to collect our things, so we bunked down with three other journos in the apartment of a friend of a friend.
Donald left early one morning—he was imbedding with the Second Battalion of the Fourth Infantry Regiment. He gave me a perfunctory kiss, but I grabbed him tight and pulled him close. “Be careful,” I said.
He put his big hands around my face and kissed me as though we were alone. “I’m too mean to get hurt,” he said.
About two hours later Donald was riding shotgun in a jeep when another roadside bomb exploded, throwing him thirty feet, breaking his femur and a few ribs.
When I finally got to him in the makeshift army hospital, I kissed his head and said, “Time to get outta Dodge, baby,” trying for sardonic and missing completely.
I made arrangements for us to get back to NYC, where I nursed his cranky self back to health and got my first and only Pulitzer nomination from the New York Post, who’d employed me at the time.
Our crazy wartime marriage was hot and dangerous. We couldn’t get enough of each other—and even though he was a giant pain in the ass when he was busted up, the broken-femur sex was sensational. Who knew?
I—we—were very happy, happy enough, in fact, for me to start thinking about maybe having a baby. Yikes.
Donald said he didn’t think a baby was a great idea, because a family would keep me tied at home when he knew I’d be desperate to get to the next war/murder/scandal/whatever. I pouted for three months straight.
Finally, one night when he was well enough to hit the road again—he was off to cover the wildfires in Texas—he turned to me with a dopey grin and said, “Okay, whatever you want.”
“You’re acting like I want to get a dog,” I said.
“Not a bad idea—maybe test-drive the mother thing with a nice German shepherd for a few years first?” he teased, and we fell onto the bed laughing.
Somehow, though, it—a pregnancy—never happened. Great sex doesn’t always lead to greater things.
Two years later we ended as abruptly as we had started, although not as dramatically.
It was a fast and clean break to a messy marriage, which involved much sex and even more fighting. Kiss-and-make-up is only fun in the movies.
One Monday morning Donald and I were off to cover different assignments—he back to Iraq, me to cover the presidential campaigns.
As I got out of the cab at JFK, he kissed me hard and simply said, “Time to get outta Dodge, baby.” I knew he wasn’t talking about leaving the country. He was talking about leaving the marriage.
And that was that.
I knew he was right. He liked gambling on sports, staying up all night, and hanging out in strip clubs in disease-riddled cities with names that weren’t composed of letters in the English alphabet. He was a horrible dancer who made duck lips when he was really feeling it.
I like sports that I play myself, getting into bed early with a good book or, better yet, a bad boy, and going dancing with my gay men friends who never make duck lips no matter how much they’re feeling the music.
Donald and I had nothing in common other than that we were both agnostics, preferred fast stick shifts to fancy SUVs, and would risk everything for a story.