Side Effects

by Harvey Jacobs

  The man never stopped moving. He opened and closed a ball point pen while he talked, tapped both feet on a plastic shield that protected his carpet, exercised neck muscles by moving his head to the left, the right, dropping his chin to his collarbone then lifting his eyes toward the ceiling.

  The thought of Benny Valaris working with Wallace Waldo, who dressed like a deposed monarch and spoke with the voice of Queen Elizabeth slightly seasoned with testosterone appealed to Simon’s developed sense of the absurd.

  Valaris, a jack-in-the-box across a desk loaded with newspapers, magazines, glossy headshots of actors and models, memos, résumés, binders, a Smith Corona typewriter and a gooseneck lamp, leaned his badger face toward Simon, pushed aside his Diet Pepsi, stopped playing with his ballpoint pen, squeezed his cheeks between his hands. Simon sensed that this was a moment of truth. “So make up your mind because I got a hundred people ready to die for this crap job including a few from boys and girls trapped in the classy piano store. So? You want in?”

  “The answer is yes, Mr. Valaris,” Simon said. “But I’d appreciate it if you tell me which industry will be fighting to hire me down the road, because I’m in the dark about what you do here or what the position involves.”

  “For sure it ain’t a missionary position,” Valaris said. “The job is hard to describe. Wallace Waldo has his hand in a lot of pies. Many enterprises. Mostly, you’ll be part of the one that pays the rent, Starfire Endorsements. We’re the septic tank of showbiz and proud of it.”

  Benny Valaris led Simon along a corridor lined floor-to-ceiling with brown cartons, leading to a door marked Studio B. The door opened into a space about the size of Simon’s room at the Flatiron. A gray-haired lady teetered on a stool, bending over a wooden plank anchored by two file cabinets. She was surrounded by recorders, monitors, speakers, a video editing system, cassettes, turntables, a tangle of wires and cables. Industrial strength extension cords sucked the electricity out of smoking sockets.

  Simon saw that she sliced and spliced long strands of audiotape. “Meet Rosy Freeman,” Valaris said. “Rosy thinks she’s exploited, underpaid and a victim of sexism. There’s nothing wrong with her that an enema wouldn’t cure. Rosy is our resident surgeon. Honeybun, meet Sinbad the Sailor, Bachelor of Arts. Could you show him around our cathedral and explain him what it is we do here so he can explain it to me?”

  “Flee while there’s still time,” Rosy said. “Use the fire exit.”

  “Rosy’s got million dollar hands,” Valaris said. “She could cut diamonds. She’s indispensable but that don’t mean you shouldn’t slap her around if you get bored.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Simon said after Valaris left. “I think I just got a job here but I have no idea what’s expected of me. I know I have something to do with Starfire Endorsements and I was hoping you could fill me in on which stars in the planetarium are endorsing what.”

  “Endorsements?” Rosy said. “Screw endorsements. We do plugs. Step one. An ad agency comes to Wallace Waldo Enterprises with a product they’re trying to pitch. The client wants some celebrity spokesman to swear by whatever junk he’s peddling but the agency don’t have enough budget to use a top name in a paid commercial. Step two. They’ll settle for a plug. A rave from a hotshot that sounds spontaneous. Maybe they want a top banana to say how great a movie is or pull a certain brand of fountain pen out of a pocket or blow a famous nose in a particular brand of tissue.

  “The first thing for you to know is that nothing you see used on a TV show or in a movie or hear praised on the radio or read in the paper is by accident. Well, there are a few exceptions but not many. Every product plug is laid on.

  “So, step three, when the ad guys come here with the name of a client ready to pay a price to get his product spontaneously plugged, Benny shows them a rundown of the stars Wallace Waldo can deliver either directly or through some manager or producer. Next to each name on the list is what we charge to plant a plug. Naturally there’s one price for prime ribs and another for some half-assed comedian doing a late night guest shot on Tom Snyder.

  “It’s all broken down. Different prices for different celebs, different prices for different shows, and a big difference between radio and anything on TV. We hardly ever get involved with movies, most of that’s done on the coast, and never with the gossip columns.

  “Step four. When the ad guys put an offer on the table and check off the stars they want to use for endorsements, we do the deals. Which means we negotiate a payoff through our contacts, arrange for the star to say something on, say, Ed Sullivan, like, My girlfriend shaves her private garden with a Schwartz Electric Razor so no more rashes. Next morning, Wallace Waldo Enterprises pays off the plug dropper, bills the ad agency who bills the client and everybody is happy.”

  “Could I ask a delicate question?” Simon said.

  “You mean is this stuff strictly legal?” Rosy said. “Not exactly. Does that bother you?”

  “Not exactly,” Simon said. “But somewhat.”

  “You’ll get over it,” Rosy said. “And hold your horses because we’re not done yet. Step five. What I do while a plug is dropped is record it live, then add a touch of Rosy magic here in my editing room, like a few screams from the audience or some applause. Next, the audio or videotape is messengered to the ad agency and they buck it to the client to prove what a great job they’re doing. And so it goes. Here’s a sample, Sinbad.”

  Rosy lifted a strip of audiotape from the splicer, wound it onto a spool, clicked on a player. Through two hanging speakers, Simon heard the familiar voice of sportscaster Speed Sage hosting a call-in radio show with a panel of hockey heroes. A caller finished complaining about the performance of the New York Rangers. “Yeah,” Sage said, “they’re so far down in the basement it would take five hundred tubbos on their way to jack ribbon’s gym to pull them up.” Sage’s fellow panelists broke into wild laughter and applause.

  “So,” Rosy said, “you heard the jerk plug Jack Ribbon’s Gym, and then we got dead air to fill. So Rosy adds some hoots and claps. The sponsors like it when that happens. This whole Jack Ribbon job will bring in maybe six hundred bucks. Speed Sage is no Red Barber and we’re not even talking network radio. I don’t know why Benny Valaris goes bottom fishing for such two-bit accounts. I guess nothing better came along yesterday and six hundred is still six hundred. Editing the audios is a snap. Videotape is a pain in the butt. That takes some doing. I get to show off. You’ll be handling the radio edits after some practice. And the deliveries.”

  “Delivering tapes?”

  “And gifts. We call them gifts. Sometimes to the stars, sometimes to their lackeys, sometimes cash money, sometimes things, sometimes both. You’d be surprised what they ask for in exchange for their eminence. Toasters, vacuum cleaners, barbecue grills, chazerai like that. Stars who make millions and fuck Ava Gardner trade their clout for a ten-dollar cuckoo clock with a fat bird that sings ‘Ave Maria.’ Oh, we might sweeten the pie with a few bottles of Smirnoff but so what? I’ll never understand human nature. Waldo gets the goods wholesale, don’t ask me where.” Rosy made a fist and pretended to clunk her head as she arched her eyebrows.

  “Kiddo, you understand that none of this is for publication. When you make a delivery, especially of a gift, you say as little as possible. Only that you’re from Wallace Waldo Enterprises, then hand over the crapola or the envelope you get from Benny and you back off. You do not ask for a receipt or an autograph for your kid sister. And you never discuss details about your job outside this office. If you’re asked what you do here, you say you’re a communications trainee at Wallace Waldo. Hubba-hubba-hubba.”

  “Speaking of Mr. Waldo,” Simon said, “he seems like a nice man—very poised, very classy—but he shuffles around the Flatiron looking like a rag doll that escaped from a flea market. Frankly, without sounding ungrateful, he looks a little dead.”

  “Waldo is a sweet old bastard,” Rosy said. “He’s almost ninety-five. In his day he wa
s as big as Arthur Godfrey or Kay Kaiser. His name still means something to old guard execs who remember The Wallace Waldo Amateur Hour from back when they chewed on pacifiers. Which is why the syndicate that owns this company pays Wallace to rent his name but they don’t pay him enough to buy a new suit.”

  “He misses his dog,” Simon said.

  “He told you the dog story? That goes back twenty years. Good story but the dog happens to be dead. Wallace married a June Taylor Dancer from the Gleason Show who cleaned him out in the divorce. That leech and the dog she took expired during the Joe McCarthy era. But not before she named Waldo to Red Channels as a communist sympathizer. After that he couldn’t even land a voice-over. The man didn’t know what a communist was. Lucky for him, Eisenhower invited him to dinner at the White House so the storm blew over, give or take. A few of his dear and trusted friends, the more courageous ones, allowed themselves to have lunch with him at Lindy’s about the time his lunch money ran out. And he’s always allowed into the Friar’s Club.”

  “Does he come to the office?”

  “Once in a blue moon. He makes Benny nervous. It’s Benny who runs this place, hustles the talent, cuts the deals. Waldo doesn’t know what the business is about. He likes seeing his name on the door. When he’s here he sits behind the table in the conference room, reads the trades, has a turkey sandwich with a glass of water and goes back to the hotel. I guess he thinks he really owns the company.”

  “He doesn’t own the place?”

  “Hell no. But don’t ask me who does because I don’t know and I don’t want to know Benny refers to them as da boys. Doors open for Benny so I imagine da boys have serious credentials. I know they brought Benny in from Vegas to liven things up after they fired the guy who hired me. We get along. He’s an acquired taste. And Mr. Valaris is the man you got to please.”

  By the end of the week, Simon was allowed his first solo as an audiotape editor. In Simon’s hands, a simple plug dropped by a disc jockey cuddling the microphone at some FM station in Nebraska (Did you see the cover of the latest issue of Playboy magazine? What a bod on that lady! And she’s more than just a pretty face or whatever. That gal can really belt out a tune!) got a “live” audience reaction like Lindbergh’s reception in Paris, even though the plug was dropped at 3 a.m. in an empty studio.

  Drawing on Rosy’s library of effects, Simon chose hysterical laughter and a thunder of applause to rival the sound of the surf in a gale. The fact that the show in question had no live audience except for a stray owl peering into the station’s window didn’t bother the gods of broadcasting. The talent agency executive who commissioned the plug was nothing but ecstatic when Simon hand-delivered the tape, neatly packaged in a Wallace Waldo Starfire Endorsements envelope. Rosy called him a prodigy.

  By the end of a month, Simon was doing all the radio edits and Rosy was considering teaching him the more intricate art of juggling video cuts and editing sound bites to eliminate glitches like lip-flap when picture and sound were wedded.

  New business poured into Starfire Endorsements as the Christmas season approached. After Thanksgiving, when Simon would arrive at the office, Benny Valaris was already there eating chocolate-covered donuts, swallowing coffee, and working the phones. Simon heard him stroking egos, wooing performers, offering clients special discounts, soothing over complaints.

  “You got to be nice to the clients and the talent, Simon. In showbiz you never know which grub will turn into a swan. In showbiz, today’s putz is tomorrow’s wunderkind. Take Seymour Stekel. When I met him at Sardis he was doing voice-overs for a product called Wonder Sponge. Today he’s the head honcho on Happy Hearts which just happens to be the top-rated daytime show in Nielson and Arbitron. We get four thousand plus expenses for a good plug on that program and there’s a waiting list. Do you know what Stekel gets in return for his spon-tay-nee-ous raves? Aside from an occasional blow job when he’s in Vegas which he’d get anyhow?”

  “I know,” Simon said. “I deliver to his apartment. Every Monday he gets a box of Admiration Cigars of which we have three cartons in the hall, third row right, next to the boxes of flashlights and pencil sharpeners Waldo had shipped over.”

  “Can you imagine? Admiration Cigars when he could have Cubans. Stekel’s still a putz but he’s my putz,” Benny said. “He remembers I was nice to him when his socks didn’t match and now I own him.”

  The more business that came in, the more work there was for Rosy and Simon. When he wasn’t dicing and splicing tapes, Simon was out delivering finished edits to Madison Avenue or payoffs to Benny’s collection of power putzes in their Upper East Side apartments. In the beginning it was exciting to come into contact with such famous faces, and Simon was tempted to say a few words to those kings and queens but he followed Rosy’s instructions about discreet anonymity.

  He deviated from the routine only once; he couldn’t resist asking Horace Hadle, who hosted the Mind Blowers series, for an autograph to send home to Rowena who loved the show. When he got back to Wallace Waldo Enterprises, Benny chewed him up and spit him out for violating the code of silence. Hadle had called to complain about Simon’s crass behavior. He felt his autograph was worth more than the Mr. Coffee machine Simon gave him in exchange for plugging a new remedy for arthritis.

  “Name, rank and serial number, Sinbad. No small talk. None. I don’t care how good you are. Another gaffe like this and you’re flushed down to where alligators live in the sewer. You do not cross my line of no crossing. You remember your place in the scheme of things. Our celebrity friends do not acknowledge these little transactions. You never met Horace Hadle, you never handed him a Mr. Coffee machine in exchange for a perfectly delivered plug and he never heard of Wallace Waldo Enterprises. This is about official denial. You know about the quiz show scandals? You heard about payola? This is a serious game we play, Sinbad. Shame on you for forgetting.”

  After a day of editing and delivering, Simon would rush back to the Flatiron holding a bag of Chinese food or a tub of Kentucky Fried Chicken to monitor radio and television shows until after midnight, listening for plugs and taking careful notes on who said what, where, when and how. He also logged phone calls from stringers in different time zones, who’d been hired to confirm that the “endorsements” were delivered as promised on stations in cities and towns Simon never heard of.

  He fell into bed too tired even to masturbate despite the uproar in his balls. The Yuletide business surge meant he had to be back at the office by seven, complete the day’s editing chores by late afternoon, then turn into a messenger boy loaded down with bags and boxes destined for the blessed ones or their go-betweens.

  If the stars practiced official denial, their agents and managers were worse. The more paranoid among that set had Simon leave his wares with a doorman in the lobby or try to shove envelopes stuffed with cash money under locked doors to luxury apartments, aware that he was being watched by suspicious eyes framed inside peepholes. When Simon came with a cash payoff, one mega manager of a pop singer insisted that he leave a bottle of acidophilus milk on his threshold as a logical explanation for his presence in a building so posh the porters wore braid. The man had legendary dyspepsia so the milk delivery was self-explanatory.

  After the daily drops were made, it was back to the Flatiron to watch TV and take collect phone calls from Benny Valaris’s secret army in the boondocks. He even got a call from a girl in Glenda who convinced DJ Bobby Slaw to plug an LP from Essman Records. His payoff was a fifty-dollar gift certificate from Sears. The girl got one of Waldo’s wholesale pencil sharpeners for her services.

  59

  The seasons slid, one to the other. There was a lull after the New Year then a rush toward Valentine’s Day, another lull then a burst of activity around Easter.

  One night in early spring, Simon was so overextended that after he made his drops, including chocolate bunnies compliments of Benny Valaris, he had to go back to the office to finish some last-minute edits.

  S
imon was startled to see Wallace Waldo sitting in the conference room thumbing through a scrapbook, too engrossed to notice Simon’s presence. Simon heard Benny Valaris on the phone, arguing terms and conditions of a low-level deal to plug a line of flower bulbs with an Ohio station manager.

  In Studio B (there was no Studio A) Simon settled at his editing table, turned down the volume on the loud speakers out of respect for Mr. Waldo, and played the next tape to be adorned. Even with the studio door closed, he heard Benny finish his call with a burst of obscenities, then stomp toward the conference room ordering Wallace Waldo to get the hell out of there. “Go the fuck home,” Benny yelled. “Suck off one of your Emmys.”

  There was a soft murmur of protest from Wallace Waldo that turned into crackling screams when Benny Valaris got physical and gave the company’s namesake the heave-ho, pushing him into the hall.

  “Brain dead son of a bitch,” Benny yelled toward the elevator.

  Simon felt he’d overheard something he had no business hearing—humiliation beyond the pale even for Valaris. When Benny would make his usual rounds before closing up the office, he’d discover that Simon was still there. Instead of his presence coming as a shock, Simon concluded it would be better to let Valaris know he’d been putting in overtime without making any reference to his boss’s tirade. Simon came out of his cubicle looking as innocent as possible, and headed for the water cooler.

  Benny wasn’t anywhere to be seen. For an instant, Simon assumed he’d followed Wallace Waldo down the hall, pushing the old man onto the elevator. By Benny’s standards that would have been a decent gesture, so Simon dismissed the possibility.

  While he tried to puzzle out Benny’s disappearance, Simon heard a weird squeak at the entrance door and went to investigate. Better safe than sorry; there’d been some burglaries in the building that left everybody edgy. There was no burglar waiting; Benny Valaris stood on tiptoe at the half-opened door using strips of packing tape to paste a cardboard square over the Wallace Waldo Enterprises logo. Before Benny noticed him, Simon saw the cardboard was a sign that read: