The Sixth Station(4)

“Good,” he screeched. “Frankie, that putz, is stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s at a standstill.” So the impossible had happened after all.

“Get your ass outta bed, Russo.…”

“I’m not in bed,” I lied, my heart racing like I’d been shot up with adrenaline. I was back in the game!

“Whatever. Get your ass outta bed, and get over to the UN. It’s right outside your door, so make it fast. You caught the winning lotto number.”

You mean the one dropped by Frankie, that putz, I wanted to say, but didn’t. Frankie was golden, and I was still—what?—tarnished. At forty-two, I was, yes, a known front-page-breaking reporter, but one who had a real talent for running afoul of the powers-that-be wherever I worked. Rebel or maybe just too bullheaded to play the boys’ game, I always bucked whenever they wanted to saddle me, tame me, and teach me to behave.

I’d been given a second chance at The Standard when they hired me following nine long months of unemployment. I’d been “laid off” at my last job—a political Web site—after uncovering the fact that the editor’s best pal, a supermarket mogul slash movie producer, had a penchant for Filipino midget hookers. The mogul, in addition to supping once a month at Rao’s with the publisher, had also been, up to that point, the Web site’s biggest advertiser. Oops.

Editorial differences, they called it.

Bottom line: I wouldn’t protect the editor’s friends when it came to voicing my opinion, and they didn’t protect me when I stood my ground.

So when I was offered the gig at The Standard, I grabbed it in hopes of one day getting a column again. I was back to general assignment reporting, and I’d been behaving.

“The kid whazzizname is already at the UN Press Office making the switch,” Dickie continued. “We want you to file throughout the day and final copy half hour after the close. Got it? Good.”

“Do I get to column on it?” I asked.

“Depends on what you get,” he said, and with that he hung up—and I found myself out of bed and under a hot shower in less than sixty seconds.

A column possibility on the biggest story of the decade? Oh, baby! I said a quick prayer to whatever god might be listening at that moment that I’d somehow score an exclusive “get” despite being a pool reporter heading into a venue that was as tightly orchestrated as any in recorded history.

I had been out of work two years earlier when taxicab bombs had detonated simultaneously outside St. Pat’s, the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, the Synagogue Adath Israel in Riverdale, the Light of God Tabernacle on Staten Island, and the Imam Al-Khoei Islamic Center Benevolent Foundation in Jamaica, Queens. The terrorist attacks, dubbed the “Unholy Day Bombings,” killed almost two hundred innocent people. I started a blog, but it was just one of thousands, perhaps millions of blogs out there. It wasn’t the same; it was too crowded. Cyberspace had evolved into a worldwide public-announcement system for ill-informed windbags with too little knowledge and too much time on their hands.

And now? If I had believed in God I would have prayed for a break like this—a chance to not just cover but possibly voice my opinion on the ben Yusef tribunal for a mainstream news outlet. Yes, I was unprepared, bleary-eyed, and retaining water. But still …

I hadn’t done serious prep work, because I’d been told earlier in the week that I was to cover “color” only—getting reactions from local parish priests, imams, and rabbis.

But I was never better than when I was under pressure.

I picked up the same white T-shirt that had looked so good when it was still clean the night before. I sniffed it. Clean enough. I pulled on a pair of black jeans, my beat-up brown leather jacket, and Frye boots. Then I looked down. Damn! Dead center on the T was a moderate-to-terrible chicken-scarpiello stain from the night before. With no time to change, I grabbed the white gauze Gap scarf hanging on my doorknob, looped it long around my neck, and—voilà—instant stain repair. Good enough.

I hauled my red leather satchel that held my iPad holographic tablet, cell phone, four reporter’s pads (I still take notes the old-fashioned way), pens, wallet, keys, lipstick, and under-eye concealer, which I buy by the kilo, onto my shoulder and started out of my apartment.

A quick look in the mirror revealed that my formerly chic bob had frizzed and I now looked like I’d stolen Eleanor Roosevelt’s head.

Whatever.

I hung my press credentials—three plastic cards with my photo—on a cheap hardware-store drain chain around my neck and checked that my passport was in the zipper compartment of my bag for backup ID just in case. Then I took the elevator down the twenty-four flights and walked out of my apartment building into the gorgeous spring day and into the end of my life as I knew it.