What's a Girl Gotta Do Read Online Free PDF Page B

phone.
    It was a pretty good setup, I had to admit.
Page 1 of 3. Very clever. I wondered who had masterminded it and
when and how they’d reveal themselves. I started gleefully plotting
my revenge as I returned to the party.
    I hoped it wasn’t too late to catch up with
Eric Slansky.

Chapter Three
     
    I HAD MORE THAN A SLIGHT HANGOVER as I rode
the subway down to Jackson Broadcasting the next day, New Year’s
Day, a working day in the news business. An electrical storm
cracked and thundered at regular intervals inside my skull.
    It was one of those days when everything on
the subway seemed slightly unreal, when I thought of the city as
New York: the Movie. Everything and everyone seemed self-conscious
and surreal. Across the aisle, this kid was staring at me and in
spite of my imploding brain I smiled at her. Suddenly, she burst
into tears. I turned to the guy next to me and said, “Kids just
love me.” The man looked surprised that I had spoken to him, like
he too might start bawling at any moment.
    I’d dressed, fed Louise Bryant, and boarding
the subway on autopilot, and only now was the night before
returning to me, in flashes. Burke . . . Amy . . . Eric Slansky. Oh
God.
    Had he really told me he was HIV negative and
liked “slightly” older women? Had I really mentioned that at
thirty-five I was at my sexual peak? Had we really discussed all
the different places we’d had sex?
    And that practical joke. The ginger-haired
man who’d never showed. After waiting around outside room 13D I’d
gone back down to the party and had another lemon Stoly, so the
rest of the night was still kind of blurry around the edges. I
vaguely remembered Jack Jackson on stage toasting the new year and
leading us in a countdown to it. Some asshole who thought he was
being funny randomly shouted nonsensical numbers to confuse us,
which, thanks to our inebriation, he was able to do briefly, until
Jackson restored order.
    When midnight struck, with corks popping and
confetti swirling I the air above, I kissed Eric Slansky.
    Yeah. I remembered that kiss pretty clearly.
Eric and I danced and kissed until about 1:30 A.M. Shortly after
that, with everything around me wobbling, the air wavy like hot air
over a fire, I vanished from the screen.
    The subway stopped directly beneath Jackson
Broadcasting headquarters, a massive black-and-pink granite
building in the east fifties, and I got off with a horde of waxy
white people who worked nearby, including a few JBS types whose
names I didn’t know.
    JBS is really three networks: DIC, the
Drive-In Channel; JNC, Jackson Network Corporation; and
    ANN. DIC is a movie channel aimed at the
beer-and-gun-rack crowd, while JNC is a bit of everything,
including tractor pulls, a highly rated if critically ignored
wrestling show, and plenty of Mr. Ed reruns.
    ANN, however, is the prestige of JBS, the all
news network nobody thought would fly but did, bringing honors and
black ink to our esteemed founder and chairman, Georgia Jack
Jackson.
    We’d come a long way, baby. In the early days
of ANN, there were only two kinds of people there, old-timers with
checkered careers rescued from the fringes—and drunk tanks—of
journalism, and newcomers, right out of college and willing to work
for peanuts. The freshly scrubbed and the nearly washed-up. Back
then, it took a peculiar mix of genius and low self-esteem to work
for ANN. The low self-esteem allowed them to work us long hours for
low pay without dissent. The genius kept us on the air and built
the quality of the network.
    I read somewhere about this Afghan tribe that
could build a Kalashnikov from a Chinese bicycle. That’s sort of
what we did in those early years. Back then our equipment was cheap
and broke all the time. We broadcast an entire interview with Henry
Kissinger in various hues of green, klieg lights fell in the middle
of newscasts, and one day someone came and repossessed the set
while we were on the air.
    We were hapless but we had this