Although Operation Tenderize was never officially discussed in board meetings or acknowledged to exist in the corporate minutes, its ongoing purpose was to gather incriminating bribe-worthy data—photographic, electronic or otherwise—about anyone or anything that got in Tailburger’s way. It also allowed Ned, Ted and Fred to get rich and abuse their power without impediment.
Not surprisingly, with the use of a police radio, a few bugs and a well-placed wiretap, Ned, Ted and Fred’s flunkies, reminiscent of Nixon’s plumbers, had discovered the only available skinny on Sister Ancilla. She had given up Tailburger for Lent, a considerable sacrifice, given her fondness for the Fanny Pack. Coincidentally, her decision came at a time when the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother convent, overweight and out of shape, had been ordered by the mother superior to slim down. Unfortunately, with the donation of a remote-controlled television and the advent of fat-free cookies, too many evenings were being spent watching reruns of Notre Dame football games and scarfing down Snack Well’s. To combat this trend, the sisters had convened and committed themselves to diet and discipline in the name of God. Collectively, they served as one enormous support group and took a firm vow of caloric obedience that was not to be broken by anyone. In order to provide additional incentive, the mother superior had each nun solicit sponsors to pledge $10 per week to be donated to the Shriner’s Hospital for Crippled Children, so long as the sponsored sister continued to meet specific weight-loss goals.
Thus when Sister Ancilla quietly drove the convent’s lamb van up to the Tailburger window on that warm spring night, just days before the Easter Bunny would arrive, she was letting many people, both ordinary and supernatural, down. The source of her burns and her subsequent lawsuit, however, had somehow been kept a secret. How? She lied. Wanting to surprise the mother superior by contributing the settlement money to the Shriner’s Fund in order to absolve her of her sins, Sister Ancilla said she had a cooking accident.
Whatever the cause of Sister Ancilla’s burns, however, she remained an unsympathetic actor to the Link.
“I say we blow her in to the mother superior.”
“Frank, this could be bad publicity for the company,” Mayor McNabnay observed.
Annette McNabnay wore her honey-blond hair pulled back and dressed only in DKNY. She was well-spoken and intelligent, and her sophisticated good looks, distinguished by wonderful bone structure and fine features, lent a certain elegance to any gathering she graced. Picture Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, but add underwear. Elected to Rochester’s top office two years earlier, her honor possessed both a J.D. and an M.B.A. For her, putting up with the Link’s shit was nothing more than savvy political posturing.
“Annette, in case you haven’t noticed, the clergy isn’t one of our big demographics. Do you think I care what that fat penguin Ancilla Satter has to say? Let’s go to the papers and tell them what a phony she is and all about this Shriner’s Hospital scam.”
“Dad’s right. I say we blow her in,” said Ned.
“I agree. Blow her in,” added Ted.
“Blow her,” Fred followed. “The whole thing is a scam.”
Annette didn’t give up.
“Frank, with all due respect, I don’t think we should blow Sister Ancilla in to the mother superior or the press. Ever since she came up with the idea for Palm Funday, she’s been a very popular figure in the local community. Plus, the Shriner’s Hospital weight-loss drive is not a scam. They’re raising thousands of dollars to make these kids’ lives a little more pleasant. Just because they don’t fit into our demographic doesn’t mean we want to alienate them. It’s too big a risk.”
Discomfort crept across the main sitting room of the Kerfoot Inn, where we had gathered for the afternoon’s meeting. The wooden duck decoys and scaled schooner replicas that surrounded us were pretty to look at but held no answers. Biff Dilworth, our resident academic, and Chad Hemmingbone, our resident banker, sat silently while Tim Truheart, king of the carpet sample, stared out the window at Bastard Boy, the Link’s sixty-five-foot cabin cruiser. Truheart had a good mind, but was unable to put it to use in our meetings. Through Operation Tenderize, the Link had obtained compromising photos of him with the seventeen-year-old French au pair Truheart’s wife hired to look after their three kids. According to Ned, the pictures represented some of the “raunchiest shit” he’d ever seen, and rivaled anything in his silver-anniversary issue of Swank. In this version of the Mexican standoff, Truheart supported all of the Link’s positions, and the Link let him continue to collect $40,000 annually in director’s fees. One bit of insurrection, and Truheart knew that a less than flattering picture of his tongue wrapped around someone other than his wife would find its way into the Democrat & Chronicle, Rochester’s major daily.
Finally, the Link interrupted our solitude to ask me a question.
“How much are Sister Ancilla’s lawyers asking for?”
“Nine hundred and sixty thousand dollars.”
“You’re shitting me, Sky! That’s outrageous!”
“The money will go primarily to charity,” I reminded him.
“My ass. Those bloodthirsty lawyers will be shoving their noses in the trough for at least a third.”
“That’s true, Frank, but there’s no getting around it.”
The Link gazed off into the distance and rubbed his hands together. In moments like this, I realized how sick and tired I was of waiting for this fat ball of pus to make decisions.
“Okay, fuck it. Settle with the sister, Sky. But here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna build a gym at the convent for the sisters to work off all that flab. There’s nothing more disturbing than a fat nun. It really creeps me out.”
Talk about the blimp calling the balloon overinflated. The Link paused for a minute before adding more.
“And, Thorne, get the gym named after me. I want some positive publicity out of this fiasco. You know the drill. Give the press the whole ‘Tailburger has a heart’ routine, and send some burgers to the crippled kids.”
“Got it, Frank,” I said as I jotted a note to myself. “Burgers for the cripples.”
I agreed with my corpulent commander for no other reason than to get rid of the matter. I still had to break the bad news about the SERMON suit, an item that might push him over a dangerous anger ledge. Mostly dangerous to me. Biff Dilworth, however, couldn’t leave well enough alone.
“Frank, have you thought about lowering the temperature of the Fanny Pack? I mean, isn’t that how we got into this mess in the first place?”
“What do you think I am, Biff? Some kind of douche bag? Of course I’ve thought about that. Why don’t you think about this? Our customers like their food good and goddamn hot, and that’s how they’re gonna get it.”
Biff was showing unusual resolve.
“I’m all for hot, Frank. Gracious knows I enjoy a steaming beverage on occasion, but scalding the faces of our clientele seems a bit extreme.”
The Link never reacted well to direct assaults on his opinion.
“Look, Dilworth, when I want any shit out of you, I’ll squeeze your head, all right?”
“It was just a suggestion, Frank. By the by, your chosen riposte is a bit dated.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” the Link responded dismissively. “What else do we need to discuss, Sky?”
As I prepared to answer, I noticed that Biff, Annette, Chad and the rest of the board had become dejected and disinterested, sitting with their heads down and their eyes averted.
“Well, there is a small annoyance involving our good friends from SERMON.”
“What do those a-holes want now?”
News of the industry-wide suit was too much for the Link to take. He started whipping Triscuits at the board members, causing Ned, Ted, Fred and the rest to clear the room. After taking out a flask of shandy and downing what he referred to as his “medication,” he asked the recording secretary to draft a proclamation of war against SERMON. Delivered in a rage, most of its prov
isions rambled on about the capture of Savannah and the resignation of Salmon P. Chase. I took cover under a conference table until he calmed down.
“C’mon out from under there, Thorne.”
Strangely, the Link felt obliged to explain himself.
“I don’t mean to get so agitated, Sky, but those jag-offs from McDonald’s and Burger King have been trying to drive us out of business for years, and we’ve beat ’em back with nothin’ but muskets and spit. So I’ll be goddamned if I’m gonna sit by and watch SERMON destroy us now. You understand me, Thorne. I know you do. Hell, you’re like a son to me.”
This was how the Link concluded most meetings with me. By tacking on a few words of encouragement, he made sure I remained his number one Union soldier—an unquestioning loyalist. I, of course, dutifully listened, but I knew the sentiment was a chocolate Easter bunny—sweet and hollow.
“That’s why it’s so difficult to say what I have to say to you.”
Wait a minute. The Link was adding something new.
“Thorne, if you don’t get our market share up to five percent by the end of the fiscal year, I am going to be forced to make some changes.”
“What do you mean by changes?”
“You’ll have to leave. The stockholders will demand it.”
“Frank, you know I don’t have direct control over our market share figures.”
“Thorne, when performance isn’t there, heads have got to roll. We’re all slaves to Wall Street.”
“I understand that. But why should my head roll?”
“Visibility, Thorne. You are one visible motherfucker. I’ve been running your name up the flagpole for so many goddamned years, everybody knows you. And they like you. But if you don’t hit the figures, you’re gone.”
“Frank, we’ve never had a market share higher than three and a half percent in the history of the company.”
“You’ll find a way to make it happen. I’ve got confidence in you, boy.”
“I’ve got nineteen years with Tailburger. One more and I get my pension. If I don’t make that, I walk away with nothing.”
“I don’t want to hear those negative thoughts. Just get out there and kill Confederates. You got me? (Pause) Oh, one last thing, Thorne. How’s the membership list look out at Crooked Creek? Any openings for an old guy like me?”
“I haven’t heard of any,” I replied, as if I’d lift one finger to help this fuck join a golf club.
“Well, let me know if you do. I’m itching to tee ’em up out there. You know that’s always been a dream of mine.”
I nodded, turned and walked out, ending our confrontation. Exchanges like this were difficult to take at my age. The Link had been a reasonably sane man when I went to work for him years before, but now he’d lost his way to the wheelhouse, and whatever respect I originally afforded him had diminished dramatically. Why the hell did I put up with his shit? I felt like a child in his presence, continually trying to please this oafish, hatemongering, manipulative maniac. Who was he to jeopardize my twenty-year record? All I could think about was getting out, but I couldn’t. The company had to hit the 5 percent market figure or I was looking at the loss of any retirement plans I’d ever entertained, and the end of my insular Tahitian dream.
5
Hooray for Hollywood Scum
BACK IN LOS ANGELES
To bolster our impending Torture campaign, I returned to L.A. for a meeting with Ship Plankton, a hot young Hollywood director whose new movie, Dongwood, was due for a summer release. With “blockbuster” written all over it, and some of its scenes still not in the can, Dongwood was the perfect vehicle for a Tailburger product placement. If we could get Dirk Harrington, the film’s star, to chow down a Tailpipe with cheese in front of thirty million people, sales would soar.
Although Ship insisted by telephone that no opportunity existed for this kind of crass commercialism in his movie, I begged him for five minutes of his time. When that didn’t work, I reminded him of my closeness with Congressman Roxby and the pending National Endowment for the Arts funding bill that could go either way. With his leftward-leaning underbelly exposed, he agreed to a meeting within seconds.
Ship worked out of a bungalow on the back lot of Worldvision, a small production company he snared a development deal with after an ugly fallout with RCM, one of the industry’s big players. The sordid details of his split, splashed all over the cover of Variety and the other trade papers, involved laughing gas, male prostitutes, gerbils and an expense account. I decided not to bring it up.
On a small brick patio, my prey, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, sat sipping a Coke. Lanky and in his late twenties, with a full head of hair, he rose to his feet and smiled as we shook hands.
“Good to see you, Ship.” I greeted him like an old friend.
“Likewise, Sky. How’s the burger biz?”
“Hey, we’re in the entertainment biz, just like you.”
“I guess so. May I offer you something to drink? A soda?”
“Sure. Anything diet.”
Ship handed me a glass and struck an arty pose.
“So you want to talk about Dongwood?”
“I do. I’ll be direct, Ship. We want to do a product tie-in with your brilliant new film.”
“But you haven’t seen my brilliant new film yet.”
“I know. That’s true. I admit it. But with you at the helm, it’s bound to be that good.”
The fact that I hadn’t seen this brilliant new film didn’t hold me back a bit. To Ship’s credit, he ignored my transparent, and altogether pitiable, attempt at ass-kissing. When a man has to ask someone twenty years younger than him for anything, there’s something askew in the world.
“Sky, you’ve got to understand. Dongwood is a drama. It isn’t an action movie. It isn’t a romantic comedy. It’s the delicate story of a disgruntled carnival worker who wants a better life. In many ways, it defies categorization. I don’t want to trivialize this picture with fast food. Can you appreciate that?”
“I do appreciate that, but I believe Tailburger has a place in your film. I mean, what carnival worker in the world doesn’t eat a Tailpipe Deluxe now and again? Especially when he’s feeling discouraged.”
“Not discouraged, Sky. Disgruntled. There’s a difference.”
“Got it. Either way, he’s hitting the drive-thru.”
“Sky, I’m trying hard to be polite here, but let me explain things more clearly. The lead character in Dongwood is a born-again Christian and longtime vegetarian who subsists on nothing but leaves and berries. He quits his job assembling the Tilt-A-Whirl, wanders aimlessly, suffers a complete mental breakdown and eventually blows his own head clean off with a .357 magnum.”
“It’s perfect for us, Ship. It’s a temptation story. Here he is, the model, upstanding vegetarian and he gets weak. He drives by a Tailburger billboard and suddenly finds himself craving a huge, fried hunk of meat. Or better yet, he develops a sinful addiction to the Tailfrap, our beef-flavored shake.”
“Sky, the buzz is that Oscar may be watching this one. I know its sounds trite, but I can’t risk compromising my artistic integrity.”
Despite Plankton’s growing reputation and success, the rights to his last three pictures were owned by RCM. Meanwhile, Worldvision had suffered a recent series of box-office duds, including Honey, I Had an Embolism and Son of Sharkboy III, and was cash poor. Advantage Thorne.
“How does eight hundred thousand dollars sound?”
Ship put his drink down slowly and shook his head.
“For a single product-placement shot?”
“Of course not. We want four shots. We also want a licensing deal for clothing and toys—the usual stuff.”
“Sky, unless you think the kiddies will want a manic-depressive suicide doll, I don’t think my film lends itself to a toy line.”
“Oh, I’m not talking about toys for kids. I’m talking about toys for our heavy users: dysfunctional adults and prison inmates. Our ne
w campaign is all about self-torture, which is why your film ties in so nicely. We’ll get four million doohickeys made cheap in the Far East, slap the word Dongwood across them and give them away with our special-edition Dongwood burger. They’ll be little pieces of plastic crap.”
“I’ll want creative control over the crap, of course.”
“No problem.”
“Eight hundred grand, Sky?”
“Eight hundred.”
“Well, I agree that it’s important for an audience to see the full depravity of a man’s soul. It makes him that much more appealing. I’ll tell you what. Let me fiddle with the script a bit and see what can be done.”
I had Plankton’s ass on a platter and he knew it. I left the lot of Worldvision and drove to the Staples Center to check up on Jelloteous, our other big L.A. investment. Having returned to the lineup the week before, he was averaging forty-two points and fourteen blocks during games and three Laker girls afterward. The team was thirty-six and eight and talking about a possible championship run.
“Jelloteous, hello.”
“Mr. Sky, hello. How are you?”
“Still breathing. And you?”
“I am cool.”
“Glad to hear it. How’s the ticker?”
Jelloteous thumped his chest with a closed fist.
“Berry good.”
“And the video shoot with Blatherskite? How’d that go?”
“It was fun, but Blatherskite is crazy guys.”
Blatherskite, an Orange County, California, outfit whose first album, Stinky Finger, had rocketed to number one, was known for its sophomoric antics. Although Jelloteous didn’t mention it to me, I found out later that the band had set his gym bag on fire during the filming of the video. As a good-natured sort, Jelloteous took the stunt as well as could be expected, considering the fact that his passport and work visa were in the duffel. Fortunately the Belgian embassy straightened everything out and halted the deportment proceedings in plenty of time.
Red Meat Cures Cancer Page 4
