Free The Last Manly Man by Sparkle Hayter Page B

Meatpackers slaughterhouses. I was completely mistaken when I reported that frozen meat from mad cows had been shipped from New American Meatpackers to supermarkets all over the Midwest. The president of New American, Bill Carlan, is not ‘an irresponsible megalomaniac insensitive to consumer concerns in pursuit of a bloody butcher’s dollar,’ as one of our sources called him. ANN and I personally extend our apologies to Mr. Carlan and his many satisfied customers.”
    We were damned lucky we didn’t get sued. It was only because of Jack Jackson’s personal intervention that we didn’t end up in court, Jack’s intervention, plus free advertising time on Jack’s all-sports network and my on-air retraction that ran hourly for two days. Somehow, Jack convinced Bill Carlan that a lawsuit would bring New American Meatpackers more bad than good publicity.
    But you’d fall for a hoax like that too, I bet, if you had witnesses (who later vanished), shipping documents (faked), vet reports (forged), and a video of black-clad people smuggling the alleged “mad cows” into an existing herd.
    And you might rush it to air too, in order to keep Solange and Reb from stealing the story out from under you.
    Would those mad cow hoaxers have the nerve to try to scam me a second time? I wondered. It seemed unlikely, but maybe that unlikeliness made a second hoax all the more brilliant. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
    There was only one way to make sure I didn’t get scammed a second time: drop the whole thing. Jason had managed to push a couple of my buttons and make me curious. But the truth is, even if Jason’s tale was a real story, if Dewey and the man in the hat had taken a drubbing in an effort to liberate some chimps, it wasn’t a story for Special Reports. Animal liberation stories, if they ran on ANN at all, were done as quick voice-overs or on-cam readers.
    If the John Doe had been connected to it, it would have been a different story. As it stood, my time would be better spent reading up on the next day’s interviews and getting ready for my date the following night with Gus, or as my friends referred to him, the Liar. On our seven dates in the past eight months, Gus and I communicated almost exclusively with lies, if we talked at all.
    Gus and I had met the previous autumn at a party and art show opening down in SoHo, a group show featuring seven artists, all unusual. I was there with my friend Tamayo, who had just started dating Herve, a guy who painted with his own blood, which limited his output considerably. Unfortunately, the previous night, after he finished the piece for this show, he put it down on the floor to dry and his Doberman ate it. His dog ate his painting. He was still distraught the night of the art show, and while Tamayo consoled him, I wandered off to mingle and see the other paintings and artwork. At the complimentary Skyy martini bar, Gus and I had amazing eye contact over the heads of three other people. (At the time, I thought it was a magic look of recognition between strangers, but later I saw him on TV and realized I recognized him from commercials.)
    I made my way to him, but he spoke first, asking me what I thought of the show. After I told him about the dog who ate the painting, Gus told me about his family’s salmon cannery and how when he was a kid he had this pet salmon named Harry. Harry was so named because the fish had a freakish tuft of hairlike bristles at the back of its head, like a balding man. According to Gus, this anomaly made Harry stand out, a fish among fish, and saved him from the tin can. Sometimes, Gus said, he’d put Harry in a bucket and take him outside for a walk.
    Playing along, I told him my name was Lola and I worked at a Think Tank where the taxpayers paid me obscene amounts of money to think about whatever the hell I wanted. Our motto was “Don’t worry your pretty little