I. It Comes With The Territory
Mr. Fox was weary with the weight of the world, and no wide wale corduroy suit nor sweet-sounding Beach Boys riff could lift his woes from his vulpine shoulders. Winter had arrived and with it snow, cold, famine and frost. Mrs. Fox petted down her husband’s impetuous cowlick, noticing—but not out loud—how thin his hair had become of late. Mr. Fox sighed and pushed open the knot of his sycamore tree. A gust of arctic wind, a foreboding unbidden guest, blew in behind him as he left.

Mr. Fox left small Mr. Fox footprints in the snow all the way to the office. The chilling touch of winter wind was felt there, too. Empty Styrofoam coffee cups lay like Grimm Brothers breadcrumbs leading to the cubicle of Cal McCaffrey, one of the last of the schlubby newsroom heroes.

“Half our paper’s staff took the latest buyout offer,” McCaffrey said, a finger of Jack Daniel’s in his throat slurring his words ever so slightly so that his voice, already harried, took on a Antipodean tinge. His skin was sallow, years under fluorescent light had taken the glad out of this gladiator. “Steve Lopez left this morning,” said McCaffrey.

“But he just got here from Los Angeles. I mean, he won a Pulitzer, for Christ’s sake. Fucking shit,” said Fox. “Bitchy shit titty shit.”

McCaffrey’s phone rang, and McCaffrey picked it up. “Uh-huh, this,” he agreed, “nah-ah, that,” he disagreed. “Sex scandal. Cursory cinematography. An excuse to gain weight and not shave for a while. I’ll be right there.”

Fox sighed and began to settle in when a cub reporter, peppy and precocious, popped her head out of the adjoining foxhole. “Excuse me, Mr. Fox or,” she giggled, “is that Mr. Fantastic?” Fox shot her a look less devious than deadly. Her foxy blue eyes widened, stunned as if caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck, but this truck was Fox’s weltschmerz. Her full lips quivered and her eyes began to run rivulets. “I’m fragile, Fox,” she warned, “My…my…husband, he keeps disappearing.”

Fox felt bad. “Men are pigs,” he said.

“No, you don’t understand,” said the big-eyed girl. “He time-travels, and when he isn’t doing that, we spend our entire life caressing each other’s faces and looking at each other real intense-like.”

Mr. Fox was ready to dispense the wisdom with which middle age had endowed him when the phone rang. “Metro,” snarled Fox.

“Fantastic,” said a rough voice, “that you? You’se better get over here.” It was his source at the NYPD’s 28th Precinct, working the beat in the heart of Harlem. “There’s been a 130.50 in the 1200 block of St. Nicholas Ave. It’s pretty bleak. Dad raped a sullen girl. Her mom’s mean, a washed up comedian as far as I can tell. Baby on the way.” Fox groaned. “You know what, Fox?” paused Sarge, “it’ll end up being heartwarming. You just wait.” Fox threw on his coat, left his “#1 Dad” coffee mug on his desk and scampered out. On the way to the subway, he saw a black man wearing a tin foil hat playing cello in an underpass. “Why the fuck is Ray Charles playing Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major?” He slowed down and peered, “What the fuck. Is that Steve Lopez kneeling at his feet?”



II. A Bunch of White Assholes With Problems
Sarge looked up from behind his old oak desk. Criminals, or those unfortunate souls soon to be adjudged as such, had cribbed surreptitiously their alibis and last words in tiny letters into its side so that the desk was more than a workspace; it was a palimpsest for the American criminal mind. “Fuck the pigs,” Fox read.

“Fuck the foxes,” retorted Sarge. Fox smiled, happy for their old routine, and he banged a Parliament free from its pack. It fell to the floor. “Son of a bitch,” he said, “I wish I had thumbs.”

“You should quit anyway,” Sarge said.

A barrage of curses burst out from the other room, drowning out the usual lesser barrages of curses. “What the fuck are these iguanas doing on my coffee table?” yelled the Lieutenant. “Ain’t no iguanas,” Sarge yelled back. “Yes there are,” insisted the Lieutenant, but Sarge had shut the door to his office. “That motherfucker just hasn’t been right since National Treasure,” he said and then paused. “Anyway,” he continued, “that girl, the sullen one, turns out she’ll be OK. She has HIV but is also getting her GED. So no great shakes there. But I’ve got a potential DV case around the block. Wanna tag along?”

“Sure,” said Fox, sniffing a story—or at least a sadness to displace his own. “What else am I going to do?”

As Fox and Sarge pulled up, the doorman nodded to the elevators and said, “Penthouse. They’ve been at it all day.”

Fox and Sarge both appreciated the Muzak version of “Broken Wings” in the elevator ride up, both being big Richard Page fans in the ’80s. But when the car dinged open, their vertical reverie was broken by a clamor of heavy doors that WASPy smiles couldn’t mute. “Great,” snorted Sarge, “a bunch of white assholes with problems.”

“Fucking story of my life,” grumbled Fox. Sarge knocked politely on the door. Fox hung a few inches back. For a moment, the yelling stopped. A grizzled old man in a Cosby sweater opened the door like Winkie, the Wicked Witch’s guard. His grimace so deeply crinkled his skin, Fox thought he was wearing a kabuki mask. He wasn’t. “Frank,” said the man, “Frank Goode.”

“Sarge,” said Sarge, “Sarge, NYPD. May we come in?” entering before he had finished the asking. The foyer was polished travertine, and crowded and cacophonous—at least a dozen people were standing there, fingers frozen mid-point, foreheads fretted, arms folded. It was a tableau of domestic terror. “What seems to be the problem?” asked Sarge.

“Everybody’s fine,” said Frank. Fox, sensing though this wasn’t the case—but it was the moment for which he had gone to journalism school—stepped in.

“If everybody’s fine, we wouldn’t be here,” Mr. Fox said.

Frank sighed and relented. “My kids lied to me,” he said, sadly. “My kids lied to me, and they don’t like me very much. I’m old and not challenging myself professionally. My son is a percussionist but told me he was a conductor. My other boy is as dead as Basquiat but not nearly as talented. I have another daughter who’s fancy but hates me and another one who is a liar,” he said, gesturing with his old kabuki head to a nearby moon-faced blonde.”

“I’m not a liar, Pops!” his daughter yelled, a good-looking girl with puppy dog eyes and a nice rack (all characteristics duly noted in Fox’s notebook). And then she launched into it: “It’s just that I want to date Conor who wanted to date Anna who wanted to date Ben who wanted to stay married to Janine, but Ben’s friend Neil didn’t want to get married to Beth because she used to date a handsome Nazi Hunter and he, meaning Neil, felt like he could never live up to the memory of her ex and now I’m confused and this is all so confusing and poorly, if overly, wrought.”

Fox and his notebook, too, had become illegible and poorly, if overly, wrought, like some sort of Mentaculus of misery. Sarge just nodded sagely and told the girl, “It sounds like he’s just not that into you.”

Beth, for her part, was standing right next to the blonde. She was a cool drink of water, thought Fox, but one rendered slightly opaque by sitting out in the sun too long. She’d probably have a bitter aftertaste, anyway. “Look, I’m already in love with someone else.” Beth insisted, “His wife died in a car crash—“

“My wife died too!” interrupted Frank.

“And, plus,” she continued, “he’s good-looking and a successful self-help author, and I help him cope with his issues of grief and my own issues of being an exceedingly annoying stereotype.”

Vince Vaughn, his ridiculous tropical shirt not quite covering his beer belly, was there researching a role for a movie about couples arguing. He rolled his eyes. “That’s offensive to stereotypes everywhere.”

Sarge eyed Fox. The situation was unhappy, sure, but illegal it wasn’t. Besides, thought Sarge, as long as these fools are arguing with each other, they’re off the streets.  “Well, we’ll be going now. Everyone calm down,” said Sarge, inching toward the door, “go to therapy and I’m sure it’ll all work—”

“What in God’s name is going on here?”

It was a familiar voice: a high-pitched woman’s warble. Fox knew he knew that voice. He placed it in a kitchen somewhere, making casseroles and pot-au-feu. A hastily wrapped sheet concealed the large, though sagging, breasts of a middle-aged blonde. It was as if David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women was having a 40-year reunion. The broad’s skin was flushed from intercourse too hastily broken off. But as she burst into the foyer, her skin went from a maiden’s blush to ghostly pale.

“Fox,” she gasped, looking at her husband, “what are you doing here?”

Fox, frozen, just stared back. “Not what I need. Not what I need. Not what I need,” he thought. From behind Mrs. Fox, wearing a white dress shirt and no pants, emerged a handsome, dimpled man. It was Mrs. Fox’s ex, Jake. Fox looked from Mrs. Fox to Jake’s crotch up to Jake’s dumb unctuous eyes and then up to the dead heavens in despair. Jake approached Mr. Fox slowly and opened his arms to embrace him. “Fox,” he said, soothingly, “we’re going to be fine.” Fox evaded the hug and took a step back. “Mrs. Fox,” he said, turning toward Mrs. Fox, “what…the…fuck?”

Mrs. Fox, who thought it was relatively clear that what she was doing was grasping at a passion that had once flamed in her still-young breast in the hope that that passion would once again restore her breasts to youth, sighed. “It’s complicated.”

But Fox was already out the door.

III. Where The Wild Things Are
When Sarge found him again, Fox was slumped on a bar stool at the Barney Cove, pawing at the peanuts and downing shots of Jameson. His friends, Carol, a kind-eyed monster with a bowl cut and the voice of James Gandolfini, and B.O.B., a dull amorphous blob (that sounded surprisingly like Seth Rogen), were with him. Carol nodded to Sarge. “Rough day, huh?”

Sarge nodded back and, behind Fox’s slumped shoulder, asked Carol quietly, “You’ll take care of him, right?”

“We’ll handle it,” Carol said. “Don’t worry.” Sarge patted a senseless Fox on the shoulder, cinched up his police belt, patted his nightstick and walked into the frost. Carol, taking up two bar stools, ordered another round. “Why me?” asked Fox sounding a lot like Job. “I’m a serious man.” B.O.B., who couldn’t hold his alcohol (his whisky was in fact pouring through him onto the bar stool), corrected Fox, “No, you’re a single man.” Carol put his arm around his friend. “Fox,” he said, “we’re all wild things here.”

By the time Fox got back to the office, it was already dark and, though he wasn’t sober, Fox could see sobriety on the horizon. “Cal,” he called out, “I’ve had the worst day…Cal!..Cal!” He peeked into Cal’s cubicle, but it was empty. The buttock-shaped depression on the chair told Fox he hadn’t been gone long.

“He’s not coming back,” said the foxy cub. “Cal left. He took the buyout, but he left this for you.” It was a half-empty handle of Jack and a note taped to it that read: couldn’t take it, foxy. i’m sure you’ll be fine without me. and foxy, be a pal and file some copy for me. deadline’s 8 o’clock. yours always, Cal.”

Fox crumpled the note, muttering “Cal, you asshole,” and clicked on his computer. It was already 6 p.m., but Fox wasn’t worried. He had no hole to go home to now and no one waiting there for him. Anyway, he already had his story. He opened a word document, took a swig of the whiskey and typed, “Chaos Reigns.”

--Footnotes--

1. Notable not for its pattern of four small toes and a pad or the fact that the prints fell in a straight line as much as the tiny Jack Lobb imprint on each sole. This is, after all, Wes Anderson’s world. We’re just slumming in it.

2. Preceding Russell Crowe’s Cal McCaffrey in his role of newsroom hero are Clark Gable in It Happened One Night (1934), Cary Grant in His Girl Friday [1940], Robert Conte in Blue Gardenia [1953] and, of course, Messrs. Redford and Hoffman in All The President’s Men [1976]. All roles more deserving of an Oscar than Crowe’s phoned-in performance in State of Play.

3. Pour a forty out for Allen Salkin. He’ll have to peddle his fake trend stories elsewhere now.

4. Weltschmerz: [German] world-weariness. In this case, weariness caused by the central existential cinematic preoccupation of 2009: the tension between honoring one’s wildness on one hand, and conforming to societal pressures—be they financial, moral or ontological in nature—on the other.

5. If anyone, even angel-seeming Rachel McAdams, wins anything for The Time Traveler’s Wife, the world has run its course. Of course, we only have two years to 2012. So we’re almost doneski anyway.

6. Sarge was right. Precious, the movie based on the novel Push: A Novel by Sapphire is almost guaranteed an Oscar nod and Mo’nique, washed-up though she may have been, has been thrown back in the sweet waters of Hollywood embrace.

7. No offense to Jaime Foxx meant here. He was great playing “Georgia on My Mind” in Ray, and he does schizo Bach well too. But, producers! There’s more than one piece of cello music out there to use to move us. Try Elgar’s “The Enigma Variations.”

8. And thus Nic Cage’s double-dealing soft shoe routine continues: Peddling bad overacting off in Bad Lieutenant as both blockbuster fare and idiosyncratic arthouse cinema. Is Herzog really such a sucker?

9. I mean this is a pretty obvious joke here, right? No footnote needed. Carry on.

10. It was! Along with Everybody’s Fine, another ensemble cast movie where stars act like crisscrossing waves, so that Drew Barrymore’s (many) troughs counteract Jennifer Aniston’s (few) highs.

11. Seriously, what is Meryl Streep trying to prove? We get it, Nancy Meyers. Streep is still an attractive old lady. Now put some clothes on and leave your boudoir.

12. Separated at birth: Alec Baldwin and Fred Melamed as Sy Ableman (from the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man)—except one is Jewish and also went to Yale.

13. Monsters v. Aliens, the underrated classic of 2009. Where the Wild Things Are, the overrated classic of 2009.