Naked Brunch: A Howlingly Funny Novel of Love Run Wild Paperback - 2003

Excerpt

1

The wolf crouched atop the low-slung iron awning of a wholesaler in the Meatpacking District. The smell of meat was everywhere, raw, rotten, and cooking--the humid summer air threaded with smoke from the neighborhood's latest steakhouse, this one defiant enough to call itself Carnivore. It had been described by Time Out as "nouvelle caveman cuisine, slabs of meats marinated in lightly spiced nut oils, accompanied by imaginative side dishes and postmodern presentation (don't miss the Flintstone-size rack of ribs basted with jalapeno honey and beer and served with smoked apple-bacon salsa)."

The wolf was more interested in another smell, approaching from Carnivore on two legs, an odor so strong it could be tasted. It wasn't a pleasant smell. Every soul has a unique scent, and this one smelled of enthusiastic compromises with dictators, devious ambition, greed, lost children. This smell was not detectable by normal humans, but if they could have sensed it, they would have been overcome by the stench of wormy meat that had been kept in a dirty sock in the hot sun for a week or so, then set afloat in petroleum.

On the empty cobblestone street below, Robert Bingham searched for a taxi to take him back to his hotel. It had been good to be in the city for a while. His meeting at headquarters had gone well and he was rewarded with more stock options and a hearty handshake from the head of the entire organization, Lord Harry, who said, "Good job, Bob," so many times in their last meeting that it was now his nickname, Good Job Bob. When Lord Harry, who had a naming whimsy, bestowed this particular blessing on someone, that person was golden. And though Lord Harry had had to back out of their dinner at the last moment, he promised to make it up to Bob. Lord Harry always made good on his promises to the people who counted, and he was particularly pleased with the way Bob had handled overseas operations and put down the threat to the company's operations.

"I have big plans for you, Good Job Bob," he said.

Bob was speculating about what those plans were, and hoping they'd take him far from sub-Saharan Africa, when what looked like a bear leapt from the awning above him. He only had time to think, "No, it's a dog!" before his throat was in its jaws. The wolf broke his neck with one snap, ripping out his throat in the process, leaving Bob on the cobblestones in his own pooling blood.

The wolf sniffed the body as all life left it, then headed home.

2

Sam Deverell had been lucky most of his career.

Some people are just like that. They are blessed from birth with everything they need to win friends and influence people. They may be good-looking, but not too good-looking, and smart, but not too smart.

If they are too smart or too good-looking, they learn to play it down.

Sam didn't have to. He wasn't too smart, not in the way the kids in the newsroom were, and he knew it. It wasn't that he didn't try to improve himself. He had always tried to keep up on the big news stories of the day, and back when he was an anchorman he made sure he knew how to pronounce every strange foreign name perfectly. Before he did an on-set interview, he humbly consulted with his producer to find out what questions to ask, and if the producer barked a new question in his ear during the interview, he asked it without skipping a beat. Afterward, if anyone said, "Hey, great interview," or "Good show," he always said, "Yeah, tell the producer and the crew that. They did it all."

He'd watched too many too-smart guys who insisted on showing it go down to defeat, just like that guy Ichabod who made the wings of wax and feathers, flew too close to the sun, and fell into the sea. The too-smart guys, some of whom were unlucky enough to be too good-looking as well, had their way while things were going well and ratings were good. Then they got arrogant, they made demands, they pissed people off, and the whispering campaigns began. The first major fuck-up brought the glint of hidden knives. Just the glint, just enough to make the smart guy paranoid.

Performance soon suffered as viewers picked up on the arrogance and the paranoia. Ratings dropped. The guys who were too smart ended up dropping in weight class to smaller media markets, where they bitched and moaned over their copies of Atlantic Monthly and Foreign Policy Review about the injustice of a culture that rewarded mediocrity and punished brilliance.

Before he came to the city and Citywide Cable News, Sam had been the top anchor in four markets because he was likable and he read news well. He'd worked his way up the TV news ladder from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Albuquerque to Phoenix and to Atlanta, where he'd been pretty happy, co-anchoring the six p.m. newscast with his wife, Candace Quall. They were both southerners and felt at home. They had a two-million-dollar house in Buckhead, they were Atlanta A-list, and whenever they went to the mall or to a Braves baseball game people would get excited and ask for their autographs.

Sam had been lucky. He hadn't gone to college, and until he got a job at seventeen sweeping up and fetching food at the local radio station, "The Voice of Eastern Arkansas," he'd had no career aspirations. When the too-smart guy who was djing the afternoon easy-listening show quit in a principled dispute over the mandatory playlist, Sam got his chance to test his pipes, and he was on his way.

After that, it all just fell into place. Soon he took over the late-night show with an eye on that morning drive-time hour. On a clear night, a station owner from Nebraska, in Nashville for a convention, happened to pick up Sam's show from Arkansas. He found Sam to be a refreshing note in a time of antiwar protests and crazy hippies, a young man with a friendly, soothing voice who played Perry Como without any sarcasm and cheerfully took requests from the middle-aged women who tuned in, always calling them "Ma'am." The Nebraska station owner called in his own request and Sam took off for Lincoln and his own drive-time show. Soon he was anchoring on television.

Because Sam was so careful and deferred to others he rarely made a mistake on the air. He was no Ted Baxter. That's why he had always been loved, almost universally.

He was lucky in his career--and he'd be the first person to say so--until his station in Atlanta was sold to a big conglomerate and he was laid off and replaced with a younger man. His young wife, Candace, fared better. Synergy tv had courted and won her, so he followed her to the city and hit up an old friend for a job at ccn. He had hoped to be an anchor, but he didn't fit in with the network's anchor strategy, so he grudgingly accepted a job as a low-level features reporter.

When the kids at ccn looked at him, they didn't see a nice older guy who had had a bad break, they saw a guy who didn't know Icarus from Ichabod, who had his job because the owner owed him a favor--and there was a lot of speculation around the newsroom about just what that favor was for. They saw the two production assistants they could have hired for Sam's salary, or the five all-in-one audio-video cameras called Gizmos they could have bought. Or one production assistant, two cameras, and ten thousand Krispy Kreme doughnuts . . . a group of them had spent a slow news day translating Sam's value into various other commodities, like doughnuts, condoms, and Budweisers.

It wasn't just that he was so much older than almost everyone else, though they were trying to "brand" themselves as the edgy news network with a young, eclectic, and "post-ethnic" look. Sam was incompetent as a reporter; everyone knew it, even the owner. It's a temporary thing, the owner told them, Sam will be here just long enough to get on his feet here. Six months tops. Give him the easy stuff.

Six months went by, Sam had no other job offers, and he was still at ccn. Complaints about Sam escalated to the point where even the owner knew he had to go, though he didn't have the heart to fire the guy. Instead, he put Sam on the overnight shift and instructed the desk to only use him if they had to. He dropped hints about openings at easy-listening radio stations just outside the city. Eventually, he figured, Sam would take the short sword, quit on his own, and maybe go back to radio.

The overnight shift at ccn was considered a transit point for reporters on the way up or the way out. At fifty-two, almost twice as old as the other two overnight reporters, Sam's direction seemed clear. He'd been shoved onto the newsroom equivalent of an ice floe.

Sam knew this, but he didn't let on. He knew the kids in the newsroom made fun of him and wanted him gone. That made friendly old Sam turn kind of bitter, like those too-smart guys he'd outrun in the past. His wife was busy with her own career and had little time for him. Lonely, isolated, and frustrated, Sam fell into a stupid affair with a nutty young woman, which blew up in his face. His wife left him and the young woman, Micki, wouldn't even take his calls.

His luck had almost run out the night of that full moon. Then he got lucky again.

The newsroom was so quiet he could hear the hum of the fluorescent lights above, along with the soft ticka-ticka of an old-fashioned teletype news wire, kept around in case the computer system crashed. The overnight newcast was playing on a monitor near the assignment desk, where the night editor occasionally laughed at something or swore. Flies, which had invaded the newsroom with a promotional basket of gourmet fruits and meats left too long by a sunny window, buzzed around. The police scanner crackled with police talk. It was Sam's job to listen to the scanner, and he was half listening to it while shooting flies out of the air with his can of industrial-strength hairspray, when he heard the words ". . . Caucasian male, dead of neck injuries consistent with dog attack."

What a way to go, killed by man's best friend, Sam thought as another fly paralyzed by lacquer plunged out of the air mid-flight.

It took him a moment to realize that this was a real story, not a photo op of the Mayor's wife or a spot piece about a downtown club being closed down for violating the city's noise ordinances or any of that other idiot-proof crap he was sent to cover by the smirking assignment editor.

I found a story, he thought. Ha! He looked up at the assignment desk. The producer was leaning on it, talking to the assignment editor. When he got up and walked toward them, Sam had every intention of telling them what he'd just heard. But as he approached, the looks on both their faces changed. They looked superior and mocking. If he told them about this, they might just pull one of the other reporters from the field and put him on it.

About halfway to the desk, he smiled and said, "Just heading out to grab a bite. Haven't had my lunch yet."

On the way to the elevator, he circled back to the crew room to grab a Gizmo.

Forbidden to use a news car because of an excessive number of parking tickets, he had to take a taxi to the Meatpacking District, where the body had been found just around the corner from a trendy new steakhouse called Carnivore.

It was the first real story Sam had had in the six months since he moved here from Atlanta. Before ccn, he hadn't really done much . . . well, any . . . reporting. He was an anchorman and he found the reporting part hard, but he'd eat his own foot before he'd ask one of the young reporters for help again, not after the alligators-in-the-sewers fiasco. Those kids didn't appreciate that he'd been in the news biz a lot longer than they had. Where had they been when Reagan defeated Carter, when the Iran hostages were released, when the U.S. was bombing Iraq? Where were they while Sam was covering the local angle to the world's big stories in Lincoln, Albuquerque, Phoenix, and Atlanta? Well, he hadn't actually reported on those stories, but he had anchored the newscasts and read them to the viewing audience. He was there, on camera, speaking with authority about places like Baghdad and guys like the Ayatollah Khomeini.

The city's overnight news crews were covering two big stories that night, a five-alarm fire in the Warehouse District and a late-night post-premiere party that a horde of celebrities was attending. That alignment of stars was another lucky break for Sam. There were no other media at the scene yet, just cops and emergency medical guys, and a handful of stray trendoids coming home from a club who had stopped to see what all the cops were doing. The body was still there, lying in a brightly lit circle and surrounded by uniformed cops. To the side, a plainclothes detective--a short blond woman--was going through a wallet and talking into a cell phone while a tall black man, Detective Macy, took notes. A police photographer took pictures while a second videotaped the scene.

Sam turned the Gizmo on and casually approached the circle, in the center of which was a middle-aged white man, his head snapped to the side like the head of a broken doll. He lay in a pool of congealed blood that formed a shiny red halo in the bright police lights. The victim's mouth was wide open as if he had died in the middle of a scream. His eyes were also open wide.

Sam moved around the circle to the plainclothes detectives. A uniformed cop held his arm up.

"Crime scene, stay back," he said.

Sam flashed his press pass.

"Citywide Cable News."

"You should talk to the media people at headquarters. We're busy with an investigation here," Detective Macy said. He was chewing gum.

"I just have a few questions. Who's the victim?" Sam asked.

"Can't talk right now," Macy said.

"His neck was ripped out in an attack consistent with a dog attack. Right? Because that's what I heard on the police scanner."

"It would be irresponsible to put anything speculative on the air before we have a chance to do our jobs and develop our leads," Macy said.

Media reviews

“It will have you howling at the moon.”
–NOW Magazine

“These werewolves are stunning.…[Naked Brunch] is bold, new, and readable.…It’s hot.”
–Rosemary Aubert, Globe and Mail

“Wacky and irreverent.”
–Elle


From the Hardcover edition.