After the frenzy of the subsequent few days died down, Jack and I had dinner at his men’s club.
“Why didn’t you tell me what was going on?” Jack asked.
“One, I was sworn to confidence. Two, after you gave me your support on the Man of the Future series, I didn’t want you to know I was chasing another story, and maybe on a wild-goose chase.”
“Well, it all worked out,” he said. “We got a helluva lot of free publicity out of it. That don’t hurt none.”
“It hurt a little,” I said.
“Yeah, you’ve been through a lot. You’re quite a gal. You know, I actually asked you here to fill you in on a few things,” he said, changing the subject.
“Shoot.”
“First, it was no accident I came down to Keggers that night and spoke with you, the night we went barhopping. Bob McGravy told me I should talk to you.”
Bob McGravy was an executive vice-president at ANN and one of my far-flung mentors.
“Bob said that I should talk to you informally, give you a few belts of vodka, loosen you up.”
Someone else would have found a wee sexist element in this—you know, getting the girl drunk to loosen her up. Except Jack got guys drunk too.
“It loosened me up all right,” I said, ruefully.
“Don’t be sorry about it. It’s good to do that once in a while. My lawyers tell me I shouldn’t … but lawyers, sometimes they just interfere with human communication,” he said.
“Why did Bob think you should talk to me?”
“We were discussing women and feminism. Some of our biggest stockholders are prominent suffragettes and feminists, but I always felt a little uncomfortable around them. So I called up some feminists to find out what was going on with them these days, somehow rubbed them the wrong way. Got me thinking. And Bob, he says, there are a lot of different feminists. I asked him for a name, and he gave me yours. Said you called yourself a feminist, but you didn’t have a stick up your ass about it, and you’d know the right people to talk to.”
“That was good of Bob.”
“I like your ideas. Not all of them, but a lot of them. People have to think globally now, Robin, beyond the group.”
His eyes were bright and the pupils had shrunk to dots.
“The thing is this: Big things are happening with women all over the planet. Even women who stay home these days aren’t like women who stayed home in my day.”
“Now they’re soccer moms with power.”
“Right. And, hell, there’s money in women. Look at all the corporate sponsorship that lined up for that conference, and the coverage. So I figure, this new network will have an audience, if we do it right.”
“And Solange will be the president.”
“What do you think of her?” Jack asked.
Solange Stevenson is a passive-aggressive asshole who, under the guise of sympathy, probes for people’s weaknesses and then delivers a toxin-dipped stiletto to those vulnerable points. But as I get more, you know, mature, I play my cards closer to my chest and say the polite, politic thing when I absolutely have to.
“I respect her a lot,” I said. “She had to kick down the doors to break into broadcasting. That made it easier for the rest of us to come through.”
Jack smiled. “Good answer. The truth is, she’s a manipulative bitch sometimes, but we need some of that at the top.”
“I’m a bitch too,” I said.
“Not enough of one sometimes,” he said. “But enough of one to stand up to Solange Stevenson.”
He smiled slyly, and I realized then that he had seen what was really going on between Solange and me at his cocktail party.
“And you got ideas. What I’d like you to do is be in charge of programming for the new network. It’s a lot of work, a lot of travel, a lot of risk. But somehow, I think you’ll do okay. You’ll be number three in the network. That’s a big leap up for you.”
“Who’s number two?”
“Your old boss in Special Reports. Jerry Spurdle. Solange will be president, he’ll be vice president, and you’ll be the programming executive,” Jack said.
Jerry Spurdle was my old archnemesis, who had been running the Berlin bureau into the ground for the last couple of years. He believes women are just vehicles for the transport of their breasts.
“Jerry is number two all right,” I said.
“The guy knows how to handle advertisers. You’ll be a good team. So what do you say?”
Life. Man, the choices sometimes. Here, have a great job, working for two people you can’t stand. But come to think of it, I’ve had a fair bit of experience with that situation in the past. It was a good gig, no doubt about it. A chance to make up my own programming and maybe foment a little rebellion out there in the wider world.
“I’ll take it,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Boy, I can’t get over it. Morton and Mandervan, conspiring together. I always thought they were nuts, but I thought they were nuts like me. You know, nuts in a good way.”
“Jack, the world has too many insane people in it, and too many of them have money,” I said.
“Power can corrupt,” Jack said. “You can start thinking you’re a demigod, that you know better than other people what is good for them, and what the future holds. You watch out for that, Robin, now that you have a little power.”
“Yeah, hubris. But I’ve got a curse on my head. Whenever I start thinking I’m hot shit, a man leaves me, or I fart in a private pre-interview with a handsome actor and there are only two of us in the room, so he knows it’s me, or a dead body turns up in my life.…”
“I was just reading this thing by Benjamin Franklin, Fart Proudly, about how much pain and embarrassment is caused because we can’t fart freely without offending others. Benjamin Franklin proposed creating some drinkable tonic that would perfume people’s intestinal gas, so we could fart without offending others with an unpleasant odor.”
“You know, with America’s appetite for deodorants, it’s amazing someone hasn’t invented and marketed just such a thing,” I said. “People would be a lot happier if they could fart perfume.”
“But you’d still have to do something about the sound, wouldn’t you?” Jack said. “It’s worth looking into though. I’ve got me an ethicist now, may get an anthropologist, why not a biochemist?”
“Why not, Jack?”
“Now I have to run. I have a date.”
“Oh? With whom?”
“Shonny Cobbs,” he said.
Something about the way he smiled just then made me wonder if all of this—Jack trying to understand and empathize with women, his sponsorship of and speech to the women’s conference, even this new network—was more about winning back Shonny than making a quick buck off women. Probably it was both. Two birds, one stone.
I had to run too. Had to stop by Litigious Liz’s house and make sure she was okay, despite that broken arm, and head over to the Bog to meet Jason.
“More soda?” asked the Rasta bartender.
“Thanks,” I said. “How is Dewey?”
“Much better,” Jason said. He was dressed like a man again. “But he is disappointed he wasn’t part of the actual bonobo liberation.”
“He was a big part of it overall though,” I said. “How’s his vocabulary?”
“Improving. So, you want to join the Organization?”
“I’m a journalist. I have to try to be objective. Besides, it sounds nice in theory, Jason, this Disney utopia of happy animals and happy indigenous peoples, with no sexism or racism and all that. But I don’t know if I want to live in some multicultural unisex world where everyone speaks Esperanto. I kinda like people’s differences, you know?”
“I may yet convert you to the shining path,” he said, taking a swig of his organic microbrew and swallowing hard. “Are you still going to eat meat, in spite of everything?”
“I’m giving up meat,” I said.
“Really?”
“No. I’m
just kidding. I like meat. My body absolutely craves it at least once a month,” I said. “Don’t you ever miss it?”
“No.”
“Have you ever had a Beauchamp Inn ham?”
“God, no.”
“They poke holes all over it and then cover it with an inch-thick crust of bourbon, brown sugar, and spices and then they slow-bake it so the ham absorbs all but a quarter inch of the crust. The meat is so juicy, and the mixture of the apple-smoked ham, the bourbon, the brown sugar, the spices … it is heaven.”
“It’s a pig’s ass.”
“And so tasty. What about bacon? The smell of hickory-smoked bacon and coffee when you’re out camping.… C’mon, don’t you ever miss having a big juicy steak at a barbecue or a ballpark hot dog and a beer at a baseball game?”
“Eat a cow? Ugh.”
“You want everyone to stop eating cows, don’t you?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I could go for everyone cutting back to once or twice a month, for health reasons …”
“And because, for example, valuable rain forest is cleared to provide grazing land for beef cattle,” Jason said.
“True. But no more beef, ever?”
“If I were dictator of the world, yes,” he said.
“But if we stop eating beef, what are you going to do with all the cows? Kill the ones who can’t be dairy cows? Can’t have them just standing around gobbling up valuable land, breeding …”
“You could neuter the males.”
“Don’t kill ’em, just maim them … so they can’t have sex! But give them a long useless life chewing the same patch of grass in the same field day in, day out, emitting methane gas into the air and screwing up the atmosphere.”
“You could put them to work.…”
“Doing what? Train them to be watchdogs? Or circus cows? I guess a few dozen of them could haul Amish plows, but what kind of life is that? Hauling a plow all the time. I believe in giving them quality of life, and then slaughtering them humanely, and then eating them.”
“Eating them is the humane option? Please. How would you feel if some superior species landed on this earth and because it ranked higher in the food chain, it got to eat you?”
“Well, presumably, I’d win them over with my endearing personality,” I said. “And they’d make me a house pet while they ate all the animal rights activists and vegetarians.”
He laughed.
“Endearing personality? You’d be lunch,” Jason said. “They’d keep the vegetarians as pets, because we are more highly evolved.”
I laughed. “And too skinny to make good eating.”
“You know, I’m a nice guy,” Jason said. “You bring this nasty side out in me.”
“Way to take responsibility.”
He just smiled at me. Wow. Jason and I were finally at a point where we could discuss this stuff without any antagonism and name-calling. There was hope for the world yet.
EPILOGUE
So, you see, I saved the world from the past, saved the world from returning in the future to a time of docile, contented women and overly aggressive men. Oh, I’m not saying I did it alone. Reb got the official credit, along with “unidentified animal rights activists,” and I don’t mean to deny Reb or the others their due, seeing as they saved my life and all. But they couldn’t have done it without me. If I hadn’t stopped for the man in the hat, if I hadn’t gone to 7 Mill Street, if I hadn’t stumbled into a story and unwittingly led Reb and Solange in that direction.… Well, you know.
Miss Trix has now fully recovered. Most of the damage was from smoke inhalation, but there was some facial scarring and she required plastic surgery on her face to erase signs of the fire. People who have seen us both say we no longer resemble each other. I never thought we did to begin with.
The first thing Hufnagel did after the conference ended was file a patent for Adam I, not because he wanted to market it, but because he wanted to keep it off the market. The patent ties it up for a long time. Nobody else can make the stuff now without his permission. Hufnagel is going back to face the embezzlement charges against him, and it looks like he’ll probably get probation or a pardon.
Mandervan is in jail. Gill Morton, meanwhile, escaped and at this writing has not been located. Escape is easy when you’re rich. It’s tougher if you’re a regular slob like me. However, one of his men turned state’s evidence against the guy who shot at me, another of Morton’s men, despite their assurances at the time that the bullet had come from elsewhere.
Though hindsight is not always twenty-twenty, sometimes things do seem clearer later, after you have more facts. Morton’s motivations for being involved in Mandervan’s scheme, aside from the moneymaking potential involved in making women more docile and getting them to use more cleaning products, became clearer to me after I again read through all the Morton materials I had. One old ad struck me, a Morton ad that ran in the back of Popular Mechanics, circa 1957. A dejected looking man, wearing a short-sleeved plaid shirt and high-waisted trousers with a perfect crease, was eavesdropping on a circle of boys. Underneath was the caption: “When the other boys ask ‘What does your dad do?’ how does your boy answer them?” Then, in smaller type: “So your job isn’t what it should be, maybe you had to leave school early, maybe the war interfered. Don’t let these things stop you. Start a dynamic new career and be your boy’s hero. Be a Morton Man!”
Below, it showed a man in a hat and a suit, carrying his Morton Products sample case, which came free with the purchase of a “starter kit.” The man was smiling confidently and looking slightly upward toward the Gleaming White Future, while his boy stood beside him looking up at his dad worshipfully.
“All it takes is a small investment and the desire to be a business success. Have you got what it takes?” it asked.
Hard to believe now that any man who had the brains and ability to be any kind of business success would be naïve enough to fall for this manipulation. But hundreds of thousands of men did over the years, and many succeeded.
That man in the ad, and all the men he represented, made me so sad. How could he know that in just a few years, chances were his boy would either be off fighting in Vietnam or wearing his hair long “like a girl” and protesting the war. The son might look at him not as a hero but as an Establishment toady who compromised his values for the sake of a dollar. The man couldn’t know that in another decade, his wife might be burning her bra and exploring her own sexuality and raising her consciousness. The future he’d been promised by the Morton Company, which was also Gill’s vision, had been betrayed.
It just served to underscore that old saying, that when people make plans, God laughs and cries. Or, to put it more succinctly: Murphy’s Law.
Whatever can go wrong, will. That had certainly been true in my life, time and again. After you’ve seen enough evidence of the law in action, you find it hard to put much faith in anything, even evolution.
After all this, I took a little time just to try to figure out what life lessons could be pulled out of all this. You know, it’s a curse to be as smart as me. I’m not boasting—I’m just smart enough to know how stupid I am, and that’s a curse. Isn’t there a saying that man is the only animal who knows how stupid he is? If there isn’t, there should be.
You just don’t know what to expect, do you? Who knew, at the end of the millennium, that bowling and square dancing would be “hip”? Did you ever in a million years think you’d hear a newscaster say the phrase “money-laundering Buddhist nuns"?
It’s a strange new world. Today I read that a scientist has found a way to implant the natural behavior of one animal into another species, creating a chicken that acts like a quail. Last week, I read that in the Khansi tribe in northern India, roles are completely reversed. Women are considered the more successful businesspeople, and so they have always run the outer society while men have stayed home to cook, clean, and look after the kids. But the Khansi men are rebelling, and the women are trying to
keep them to their traditions.
Maybe I’ll do a program on them.
Going completely behind the scenes as a programming exec, and going off the air, should make me more anonymous. I’m looking forward to that. On the other hand, it has put Solange Stevenson directly in the firing line as president of the new, risky network. I hear Lynn Hirschberg from Vanity Fair wants to interview her.
Solange and I have had a few preliminary meetings, and I can foresee some trouble down the road. After all this, I went to her and said, “Look, I know I haven’t always been fair to you, and I really respect what you’ve done and how you’ve succeeded despite the ill will of slobs like me.” I meant it too. And I figured she’d respond by saying, “Yes, I haven’t always been fair to you, and I respect what you’ve done, etc.” A little give-and-take, is that so much to ask? But instead she said, “I’m glad you’re strong enough to acknowledge that, Robin.” That’s it. No give on her part. And I have to work with her, and my oily former boss, Jerry Spurdle.
But I’m going to give Solange her due, because she’s taking the heat with the new network, and I’m having all the fun … for now.
Dewey and Jason disappeared with the wind, off to rescue animals somewhere, before I remembered to ask Jason to help me find the mad cow hoax culprits.
The bees disappeared almost as quickly as they arrived, following their queens elsewhere.
Blue Baker is still dating his ex-wife.
Among the perks that resulted from this whole thing was that I got to hear some of the stuff people said about me when they thought I was dead. It was very Tom Sawyeresque. Louis Levin made a dub of the on-air report, including the Huddon obit and the president’s relieved comment that Robert Huddon was not dead, Robin Hudson was dead. Louis also gave me a copy of the rumor file postings during “my” death and hospitalization. People called me brave, outspoken, funny, and several men I’d never dated claimed they had dated me. Life is great and people love ya when you’re dead.
The Last Manly Man Page 23
