It would be better, in any case, to just leave and come back tomorrow. Tomorrow the picture of that guy with the pipe would be gone. Tomorrow somebody else’s picture would be there, on the 251
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lower right corner of page one. People always dying, right? People who aren’t superstars or anything, just famous enough to get their pictures down there in the lower right corner of page one. And sometimes people were puzzled about it, the way folks back home in Harkerville had been puzzled about Skipper’s death—no alcohol in his blood, clear night, dry road, not the suicidal type.
The world is full of mysteries like that, though, and sometimes it’s best not to solve them. Sometimes the solutions aren’t, you know, too eventual.
But willpower has never been my strong point. I can’t always keep away from the chocolate, even though I know my skin doesn’t like it, and I couldn’t keep away from the Columbus Dispatch that day. I went on inside and bought one.
I started home, then had a funny thought. The funny thought was that I didn’t want a newspaper with Andrew Neff’s picture on the front page going out with my trash. The trash pick-up guys came in a city truck, surely they didn’t— couldn’t— have anything to do with TransCorp, but . . .
There was this show me and Pug used to watch one summer back when we were little kids. Golden Years, it was called. You probably don’t remember it. Anyway, there was a guy on that show who used to say “Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.” It was like his motto.
And I sort of believe that.
Anyway, I went to the park instead of back home. I sat on a bench and read the story, and when I was done, I stuck the paper in a park trashbarrel. I didn’t even like doing that, but hey—if Mr.
Sharpton has got a guy following me around and checking on every little thing I throw away, I’m fucked up the wazoo no matter what.
There was no doubt that Andrew Neff, age sixty-two, a columnist for the Post since 1970, had committed suicide. He took a bunch of pills that probably would have done the trick, then climbed into his bathtub, put a plastic bag over his head, and rounded the evening off by slitting his wrists. There was a man totally dedicated to avoiding counselling.
He left no note, though, and the autopsy showed no signs of dis-252
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ease. His colleagues scoffed at the idea of Alzheimer’s, or even early senility. “He was the sharpest guy I’ve ever known, right up to the day he died,” a guy named Pete Hamill said. “He could have gone on Challenge Jeopardy! and run both boards. I have no idea why Andy did such a thing.” Hamill went on to say that one of Neff’s “charming oddities” was his complete refusal to participate in the computer revolution. No modems for him, no laptop word processor, no handheld spell-checker from Franklin Electronic Publishers. He didn’t even have a CD player in his apartment, Hamill said; Neff claimed, perhaps only half-joking, that compact discs were the Devil’s work. He loved the Chairman of the Board, but only on vinyl.
This guy Hamill and several others said Neff was unfailingly cheerful, right up to the afternoon he filed his last column, went home, drank a glass of wine, and then demo’d himself. One of the Post’s chatter columnists, Liz Smith, said she’d shared a piece of pie with him just before he left on that last day, and Neff had seemed “a trifle distracted, but otherwise fine.”
Distracted, sure. With a headful of fouders, bews, and smims, you’d be distracted, too.
Neff, the piece went on, had been something of an anomaly on the Post, which sticks up for the more conservative view of life—I guess they don’t come right out and recommend electrocuting welfare recipients after three years and still no job, but they do hint that it’s always an option. I guess Neff was the house liberal. He wrote a column called “Eneff Is Eneff,” and in it he talked about changing the way New York treated single teen mothers, suggested that maybe abortion wasn’t always murder, argued that the low-income housing in the outer boroughs was a self-perpetuating hate machine. Near the end of his life, he’d been writing columns about the size of the mil-itary, and asking why we as a country felt we had to keep pouring on the bucks when there was, essentially, no one left to fight except for the terrorists. He said we’d do better to spend that money creating jobs. And Post readers, who would have crucified anyone else saying stuff like that, pretty much loved it when Neff laid it down. Because 253