Phantom Angel by David Handler

need to find yourself a nice girl.”
    â€œYeah, I’ll get right on that.”
    I caught the No. 4 train up to Grand Central, then rode the Shuttle across to Times Square where I was, in fact, looking for a girl. Although the one I was looking for wasn’t somebody whom I’d call nice.
    The sun was setting by the time I climbed the steps up to 42nd Street. Times Square is no longer the deliciously raunchy Times Square of old with its XXX movie houses, dive bars and sleazy strip clubs. It’s now a gaudy Las Vegas-style re-creation of Times Square. Ginormous Diamond Vision TV screens soar one atop another twenty stories into the sky hawking Coca-Cola and Bud Light. There’s a Hard Rock Cafe. There’s a Levi’s store. Families of tourists wearing fanny packs crowd the sidewalks, walking four, six, eight abreast, loaded down with shopping bags. Times Square just doesn’t feel like New York anymore. Although on a steamy hot summer night it does still smell like New York—that oh-so-distinctive blend of car exhaust fumes, molten blacktop, street vendor hot dogs, maxed-out sewage pipes and decomposing garbage.
    It was nearing curtain time, and the sidewalks of the theater district were crowded with people. I took Shubert Alley to West 45th Street and made my way past the Booth, the Schoenfeld, the Jacobs and the Golden, knowing I’d find her eventually. Cricket O’Shea was never anywhere else once evening fell. I walked past the mammoth, shuttered David Merrick Theatre on West 46th, where Wuthering Heights had been in rehearsals until Hannah Lane broke her ankle. I tried Joe Allen’s, but the bartender there told me he hadn’t seen Cricket. I stuck my nose in Bruno Anthony’s on Eighth Avenue, hangout of choice for out-of-work actors. No sign of her. Nor at Margot Channing’s, the bar across from the Hirschfeld. From there I made my way along West 44th to Zoot Alors, a boisterous Parisian-style bistro that was popular with theatrical agents, flacks and journalists. They were stacked three deep at the hardwood bar and filled the tables under the brightly lit chandeliers. I didn’t see her there either, but since Zoot Alors was her favorite haunt I figured she’d end up there eventually. Plus my stomach was growling. So when a barstool opened up I slipped my way onto it and ordered myself a cheeseburger with fries and a glass of milk.
    She came hurtling through the door—all four-feet-eleven of her—with her laptop and a fistful of iPhones just as I was biting into my burger. Cricket weighed no more than ninety pounds and had no boobage to speak of. Her pale arms looked like cooked spaghetti in the sleeveless black T-shirt that she was wearing with tight black jeans and a pair of vintage white go-go boots. She had a mountain of black hair tinged with blue, a nose ring and a neck tattoo that read I L OVE T HIS D IRTY T OWN —a tribute to J. J. Hunsecker’s famous line from The Sweet Smell of Success, which is Cricket’s all-time favorite movie. We saw it together at the Film Forum when we were freshmen at NYU. She and I were classmates. Cricket started out wanting to act, same as me. She ended up writing about the theater. Covered Broadway for the Village Voice before she became sole owner and content provider of crickoshea.com, which now ranked as the Web site for theater world gossip. If a show was on its way up or on its way down Cricket knew it. If an actor or actress was in trouble, Cricket knew it. She worked nonstop, updated her postings day and night and dug up amazing dirt on Broadway’s best and brightest—thanks in part to her live-in boyfriend, Bobby, who was a personal trainer to a number of top stars. Also their pot dealer.
    She said hey to the bartender before she spotted me scarfing my cheeseburger and shrieked, “OMG, it’s Benji !” Low-key Cricket was not. “How are you, cutie?” Her cell rang