The day the video was released, the site’s Web servers got sluggish a few times but they never crashed. Doug had seen to that. The video was released on a Monday morning so the story would dominate the entire week’s news, and probably the next week’s. Doug had seen to that, too. He knew it...
The business was not how the average person who was not in the business would imagine it. Sheila wouldn’t understand, that was for sure. She never did. Certainly, he hadn’t really understood how it all worked before he became a part of it. People don’t really know what they don’t really know is how he...
When news of Marty Erndel’s debauched poker game leaked, initially on an Internet celebrity gossip site and subsequently, almost instantly, onto the Web feeds of “legitimate” news organizations, the gentlemen whose lives were about to be ruined dealt with the developing calamity in one of three ways. Peterphile (and others) denied that beneath the Toy...
“No, that’s not going to happen right now. I love you. Goodbye,” Lia Chang mumbled into her phone. She shook her head. “No, Monroe. Not at Planetary Pictures. Goodbye. I love you…Because. I told you. Goodbye.” She hung up. Monroe was Lia Chang’s boyfriend. At least that’s how she viewed their relationship. She didn’t envision...
The investigator’s report, neatly collated and stapled, and hand-signed by Ed Keen, with his detective’s license number typed below and embossed with a notary’s seal, looked official and convincing. If you read it carefully, which Sheila Harvey had done twice, in one sitting, you wouldn’t be inclined to argue with its findings. There were copies...
Ted Denenberg hadn’t wanted to take this meeting. He had all the ideas he needed. He wasn’t looking. But a friend of a friend knew his friend, Cohen, who another friend, Freeman, knew from shul (until Cohen stopped going a few months back) and who Freeman thought could be coaxed back into the congregation with...
Doug Bishop loved to ride his bicycle around Hollywood, on Sunset Boulevard, and Melrose, and Thai Town and Little Armenia. He considered the activity a kind of window shopping, although he seldom had any inclination to buy the clothes and used tires and garden supplies he saw on his perambulations. Doug was window shopping for...
He found his center. He inhaled until he no longer could. He exhaled slowly through his nose. And although he knew nothing had changed, that he was still Ross Newman, working actor, to everyone else he was no longer Ross Newman. When he stepped from behind the scrim and into the lights, the man they...
“So you’ll think about?” Marty Erndel pleaded. Lenny Wizenberg grinned, delighted less at the terms of the deal than with the abstract idea that a man as putatively important as the Kike would want to do a deal with someone like him. “I said I would, Marty.” “It’s good for all of us.” Lenny inhaled...
How old they were really didn’t matter. It was how old their paperwork said they were that mattered. So long as the boys who showed up at Larry Cohen’s office could produce a government-issued document, a driver’s license or a passport, something official that proved they were 18, Larry could offer them work. It didn’t...
An Open Letter to Councilmember Hugo Soto-MartinezDear Councilmember Soto-Martinez,
The man you replaced, Mitch O’Farrell, was perceived by many as a cynical politician who placed the desires of wealthy real-estate developers over the concerns of the people he was supposed to represent. Sensitive to any perception of impropriety, you’ve made it a point to not accept…
For more than forty years one of our favorite writers, Detroit-based Peter Werbe, has been publishing provocative essays about capitalism, technology, religion, politics, and popular culture in the anarchist journal The Fifth Estate, where he’s long been an indispensable member of the editorial collective. Some of his best work is now organized in a compulsively readable...
