by Tom Wolfe
In fact, he didn’t know what she meant. He couldn’t even imagine it. His hide, the mortal vessel that contained Irv Durtscher the Rousseau of the Cathode Ray, was saying, Thank God, that’s over! Or is it? Keep one ear open lest those three return. Get this vehicle packed up! Let’s get out of here—out of Hell!—off Bragg Boulevard!—back to civilization!—back to enlightenment!—back to New York!
PART FOUR
THE ONE WITH THE BALLS
Well, this was New York, all right. Walter O. Snackerman, the network’s chairman, CEO, and corporate predator in chief, lived in one of those three-story apartments on Fifth Avenue in the sixties you wouldn’t believe could exist unless you actually set foot in it the way Irv was now doing. The building, which was twelve stories high, had been built in 1916 to compete with the ostentatious mansions that lined Fifth, so that each apartment was, in effect, a containerized ostentatious mansion with an enormous entry gallery, sweeping staircases, vast rooms, views of Central Park, walls a foot thick, and a legion of doormen, porters, and elevator men dressed like a Gilbert and Sullivan Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The library, where the great Snackerman had now assembled his guests, was twice the size of Irv’s living room, or at least his present living room, now that he had to foot the bill for both his ex-wife Laurie’s apartment and his own. This one room, this library, had more leather couches, leather easy chairs, more antique bergères and fauteuils than Irv had furniture in his whole place. The assembled hotshots had their eminent fannies nestled into all the plush upholstery, with, of course, Mary Cary—Merry Kerry Broken Berruh—sitting at the right hand of Snackerman the Omnipotent. A ceiling projector was beaming Day & Night onto the 5- by 7-foot Sony television screen that had descended with such a soft, luxurious hum from a slit in the ceiling a few minutes earlier.
Irv, clad in a shapeless blue blazer, a button-down shirt, and a so-called Pizza Grenade necktie, which looked as if a pepperoni-and-olive pizza had just exploded on his shirt front, was seated over here on the side, at the right hand of Cale Bigger. In an ordinary network setting this might have been considered a prime spot. But tonight the mighty Cale was a mere hired hand, the chief executive of the News Division and a shameless, gibbering suck-up to the ruler. Most of the seats were filled by Snackerman’s fellow titans and Big Names, such as Martin Adder, the general partner of the law firm of Crotalus, Adder, Cobran & Krate; Robin Swarm, the comedian and movie actor; Rusty Mumford, the forty-one-year-old dork, wuss, nerd, and billionaire founder of 4IntegerNet; and the nitwit Senator Marsh McInnes; plus their wives. Mary Cary’s husband, Hugh Siebert, the eye surgeon, was sitting over on the side next to the senator’s overripe second wife. The good Dr. Siebert was a long-faced, wide-jawed nullity. Tall and handsome in a certain way, Irv supposed, with a head of steel-gray hair—it looked as if he probably spent two hours each morning brushing it back just so; but a nullity, a big somber zero, for all of that. At dinner—prepared and served by Snackerman’s own house staff of five—Siebert had sat between the Present Mrs. Martin Adder and Robin Swarm’s early-twenty-ish live-in girlfriend, Jennifer Love-Robin, or whatever her name was, and he hadn’t said a word. What a nullity, what a cipher, what a fifth wheel Mary Cary had married … What a stiff neck … Why would a block of wood like that even want to live in an electric city like New York?
Actually, Irv wondered if he himself would have been invited if his name hadn’t been mentioned so much in broadcasts and the newspapers, not as much as Mary Cary’s, naturally, but a lot. The network’s PR elves had started pumping out press-screening tapes yesterday, plus transcriptions, thirty-six hours before tonight’s network showing. The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina and the state attorney general of North Carolina and the judge advocate of the U.S. Army and the sheriff of Cumberland County, where the DMZ was physically located, were already making a lot of noise. They were torn between the fact that Day & Night—Irv Durtscher, producer—had violated the laws of every conceivable jurisdiction by bugging the DMZ with cameras and microphones and the fact that they had nailed three murderers dead to rights in a sensational case.
Snackerman had put together this dinner and prime-time-television viewing on the spur of the moment. The story of the Day & Night coup had been on every network-news program. It was too big for the rival networks to ignore. It had been on page 1 of The New York Times this morning. Oh, what a surge, what a mighty cresting wave of publiciy! At this very moment Day & Night lit up the television screens of not merely 50 million but maybe 100 million souls, including Walter O. Snackerman and his friends.
On Snackennan’s huge Sony screen, there was Mary Cary, in her Tiffany-blue cashmere jacket and a cream-colored turtleneck, a jersey that covered up the age lines on her neck, sitting behind a futuristic news desk.
“For three months,” she was saying, “the United States Army has insisted it could find no link whatsoever between Army personnel and the savage beating and murder of Randy Valentine, a young soldier with a distinguished service record, a member of the Army’s elite Rangers—who happened to be gay. We found more than a link. Simply by listening in on the enlisted men’s own grapevine, we located three of Randy Valentine’s fellow soldiers at Fort Bragg—and you are about to see and hear them describe in harrowing detail, before our hidden cameras, how they committed this senseless assassination—and why: for no other reason than that Randy Valentine’s sexual orientation was … different … from theirs.”
For an instant, on the screen, Mary Cary’s face seemed to shudder with emotion. Her thick lips parted, and she executed a sharp intake of air, and she leaned closer to the camera, and her blue eyes blazed. “We try to avoid being personal, but I don’t think any of us at Day & Night, and certainly not myself, have ever stared more directly … down the bloody … throat … of wanton slaughter.”
Oh, it was dynamite. Irv glanced at Snackerman and noticed the slightly giddy expression on the tycoon’s wrinkled face, beneath his odd crew-cut dome, as revealed by the room’s soft lights and the glow of the television screen. He was leaning toward Mary Cary, and then he tried to look right into her face, but she kept looking straight ahead at the screen, reluctant to sacrifice even one millisecond of Merry Kerry Broken Berruh ego infusion. Her blond hair was fluffed out in full backtease. She was wearing a conservative, very expensive-looking red Chanel-style suit (Irv didn’t know the names of any more-recent designers), but with a creamy silk blouse open low enough to offer a hint of the lusty Brokenborough breasts and a skirt hemmed high enough to put a lot of the Brokenborough legs, sheathed in shimmering, darkish but transparent pantyhose, in Snackerman’s face as she crossed and uncrossed them.
Merry Kerry Broken Berruh was not about to tell Snackerman or anybody else that every word she had just uttered and the catch in her voice and the indignant blaze in her blue eyes had been scripted for her by Irv Durtscher.
Now there was a long shot of Fort Bragg, and then there were medium shots of buildings, drill fields, obstacle courses, barracks, and packs of soldiers off-duty in the Cross Creek Mall, as Mary Cary’s voice-over explained that Fort Bragg was command central for the Army’s elite troops, the Special Operations Forces, the commandos, the Army’s best, in short—and that one of the very best of the best was a young man named Randy Valentine.
Then you see some still pictures, the kinds of photographs you find in family albums, pictures of Randy Valentine in uniform shortly after his enlistment and Randy Valentine with his parents in Massilon, Ohio, and Randy Valentine in his high-school yearbook, and then two pictures of Ranger Randy Valentine at Fort Bragg.
Suddenly the shocker: Randy Valentine’s handsome young smiling face was replaced by a close-up of that same face as it appeared in the morgue photo, a face battered, cut, swollen, and caved in on one side until it no longer looked like the face of a human being. Then came the Cumberland County Sheriffs Office police photo of the young man’s body sprawled in a slick of blood on the floor of a men’s
room in a gin mill on Bragg Boulevard, as the police had found it—Mary Cary’s voice explained—on that fateful night.
And next came the flinty face of General Huddlestone blinking with nervousness as he denied any knowledge of any of his men’s involvement in the case, despite an exhaustive investigation, blah, blah, blah.
Now you could see gaudy footage of Bragg Boulevard as Mary Cary explained how “we” had soon learned that the word around Fort Bragg was that a certain three soldiers had beaten Randy Valentine to a pulp in a Bragg Boulevard dive in a drunken rage over the fact that he was gay … the sleazy neon sign of the DMZ winking away at night … the interior of the joint … bored strippers shaking their booties and their hooters up on the DMZ’s bar runway … a medium shot of Ferretti, Gordon, and Roy installing the bugging devices, while Mary Cary’s voice says, “As we were now the duly registered lessees of the DMZ, its proprietors of record for the next four weeks, we set about installing our hidden cameras and microphones” … Jimmy Lowe, Ziggy, and Flory in the booth … then Mary Cary saying, “We spent one night, two nights, three nights, an entire week—and then a second week—monitoring the conversations of Lowe, Ziggefoos, and Flory without hearing anything out of the ordinary for three young soldiers who liked to come to a bar and drink beer and look at strippers. But then, three days into the third week, came the break we had been waiting for. Virgil Ziggefoos brought up the subject of … gay rights . . .”
Now you’re looking straight at Ziggefoos in that booth, and he’s finishing a sentence with those very words, “gay rats.”
It occurred to Irv, as he sat here in the Snackerman containerized palace on Fifth Avenue, that the camera and the light caught Ziggefoos’s thin face in a perfect way. He looked especially lean, mean, and menacing. The kid was a redneck Dracula.
“They nebber tale you what the hale they deeud fo’ they got that way,” this clay-sod skinhead was telling 150—or was it 175?—million Americans. “You jes see some may’shated bleep”—Irv had bleeped out son of a bitch to make it sound worse than the term itself sounded … then Jimmy Lowe, with his pumped-up muscles and his brutally strong face, saying, “Bleepin’ A.”
Now you’re looking at Ziggefoos again, and he’s saying, “Oncet my old man rented us a hotel room somers up near the pier at Myrtle Beach, an’ rat next doe’s this bowadin haouse or sump’m lack’at’eh, and abaout five o’clock in the moaning?—when it’s jes starting to geeut lat?—me’n’ my brother …” At this point Ziggefoos’s voice fades under the sound of the Country Metal music in the background, and Mary Cary’s voice comes up. You can see Ziggefoos’s lips moving and his hands gesturing, but what you hear is Mary Cary paraphrasing his description of how his father had imbued him with a hatred of gays one morning in a hotel in Myrtle Beach.
And now Ziggefoos’s voice comes back up, and you hear him say, “And the ol’ man, he’s smoking, I mean, he’s flat out on far by now, he’s so mad, and he yales out, ‘Hey, you faggots! I’m gonna caount to ten, and if you ain’t off’n’at roof, you best be growing some wangs, ‘cause they’s gonna be a load a 12-gauge budshot haidin’ up yo’ bleep!’”
Now, via another hidden camera, we see Jimmy Lowe and Flory grinning and nodding their approval of this call for violent action in response to public displays of gay closeness, and we hear Mary Cary say:
“Thus was the lesson passed on from one generation to another, and the lesson was: You do not tolerate homosexuality … You exterminate the gay life, if you can … You do so violently, if necessary … Lessons like that, taught in a hotel room one murky dawn in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and, no doubt, many other places in the years that followed, led these boys”—and now we see all three of the young Rangers grinning and drinking beer—“directly, as if impelled by Destiny, to the moment in which they … slaughtered … Randy Valentine because he dared … to display gay affection where they could see it.”
As he watched the screen there in Snackerman’s regal library, Irv’s heart quickened, and his spirits soared. The crux of the entire show was about to begin. The entire nation was about to hear the incriminating words of Jimmy Lowe, Ziggefoos, and Flory. He cut a glance at Snackerman, at Cale Bigger, at Mary Cary. Their faces were lit up by the glare of the great Sony television screen. This show was going to have the highest rating of any television newsmagazine show of the decade; of all time, maybe. Naturally, Snackerman, Cale Bigger, and everybody else of any consequence at the network had already seen a tape of the show. But even for them, and certainly for Irv, there was nothing quite like watching a blockbuster such as this as it aired, nothing quite like feeling the ineffable thrum of the tens of millions of other nervous systems of people all over this country and Canada who would be resonating to it at this very moment. Snackerman, needless to say, cared nothing whatsoever about social justice, about gay-bashing, about Day & Night’s artistry, or about the entire News Division, except that it was only the existence of the News Division that enabled him to give his speech about “The People’s Right to Know” at conventions, conferences, annual meetings, etc., etc., etc. After all, the network’s top-rated show, a sitcom called Smoke’at Mother, didn’t do much to lend the great man dignity and gravitas. But not even a cynical, money-loving predator like Snackerman, this shark, this corporate eating machine, could resist the communal, tachycardiac heartbeats of the millions that vibrated in your bones when you watched a triumph like this as it aired. Yes, even he, Snackerman, would, on the morrow, with genuine enthusiasm, look into the faces of other American television watchers and say, “Did you see Day & Night last night?” and “Remember the part where …” Oh, you could talk all you wanted to about cable TV and the Internet and all the things that were supposedly going to supplant network television, but Irv knew, if others didn’t, that the network had a unique magic to it, the magic of the Jungian communal heartbeat … teased into tachycardia by the brilliance of the great producers of the new art form, the Irv Durtschers. True, Snackerman was listing heavily toward Mary Cary as if he just naturally assumed that all this magical tribal consciousness had been created by her … But if the whole thing ended up in court, as Irv prayed it would, even Snackerman would realize the truth at last.
And now, on the screen, Jimmy Lowe is into the evil heart of the matter. “Soon’s I walked inair and I looked unner that tallit doe and I seen that guy’s knees on the flow, and I hud these two guys going, ‘Unnnnnh, unnnnnh, unnnnnh’—I mean, I knew’zackly what h’it was. And when I walked overt the tallit and stood up on tippytoe and looked daown over the doe and seen it was a feller fum my own goddayum cump’ny—”
And now Jimmy Lowe’s voice sank below the Country Metal throb of the DMZ, and Mary Cary’s voice-over rose up, and once more she paraphrased, just the way Irv himself had written it:
“Now it was Jimmy Lowe who was witnessing—by eavesdropping—a display of gay affection. Randy Valentine was in that locked toilet booth, embracing another man—the two of them driven there by the public’s and, more severely, the military’s sanctions against amorous gestures in public by persons of the same sex.”
Then Mary Cary’s voice disappears, and Jimmy Lowe’s rises up again, as he says:
“I mean, I saw some kinda rayud, and ‘at was when I kicked inny doe. Broke’at little metal tab rat off’n it.”
“Summitch mussa wunner what the hale hit him,” says Ziggefoos.
“Whole goddayum doe hit him, I reckon,” says Jimmy Lowe. “That summitch, he was lane upside the wall when I grabbed him.”
Now the Bombshell face of Mary Cary fills the screen, and she says with the sincerity that only a truly gifted video performer can summon up: “As you have just seen … in unmistakable terms, these three young men, these three soldiers of the United States Army, these three members of an elite corps, the Rangers, revealed the motive for the crime they had committed: homophobia, pure and simple. They revealed the fact that the killing began with an unprovoked, blindsided assault. And they reveal
ed the fact there exists an as-yet-unidentified witness to this senseless murder … the young man who was with Randy Valentine when the assault began …”
Once more Mary Cary stares into the camera without uttering a sound. Another eternity seems to elapse. Those blue eyes blaze as they have never blazed before. And then she says:
“We urge that young man … to come forward, to make himself known. We urge anyone who may know his identity to come forward. This crime was too monstrous … for anyone to allow society’s prejudice against the gay life or current military law and custom regarding the gay life to muffle … the ringing call for justice … in this case.”
Now, all at once, you’re back in the DMZ with Jimmy Lowe, Ziggefoos, and Flory, and they’re grinning again and drinking beer again and chuckling and leering up toward what the viewer must figure is the bar and the topless dancers, as if nothing has happened, as if they don’t have a worry in the world. The same old Country Metal music is banging and sloshing away. And then you hear Mary Cary’s voice:
“James Lowe, Virgil Ziggefoos, and Randall Flory had made it clear, in their own words, as caught by our microphones and cameras, precisely how the murder of Randy Valentine had occurred. But here at Day & Night we were determined to show them what you have just seen and get their response. So we enlisted the services of a well-known Bragg Boulevard exotic dancer, Lola Thong”—now you see Lola, walking through a parking lot—“to invite the three of them back to a High Mojave recreational vehicle we had parked out back of the club. She was the one person we could find, on short notice, whose invitation … to view their own videotaped confession … the three soldiers just might accept. That night we sent Lola Thong into the DMZ … to make the trio a proposition. As you will see, it was not an entirely candid proposition, but it seemed to us that, under the circumstances, her less than full disclosure was justified …”
