The bartender moved in front of Don and Richard but never stopped wiping the zinc-topped bar. Richard ordered a Bloody Mary with peppered vodka, and Don said, “God, that sounds good,” but when the bartender asked, “One for you, sir?” Don shook his head and ordered club soda, two limes, a dash of bitters.
“Sour stomach?” Richard asked.
“Actually, I was in bed by ten, up at four forty-five, and had to tip a guy at my hotel twenty bucks to let me into the gym. Forty-five minutes of cardio and forty-five minutes of trying to do some decent weight work with twenty-pound dumbbells. All followed by a fruit-and-yogurt parfait and a pot of coffee for the low, low Pilgrim Hotel price of twenty-eight dollars.”
“I hope that wasn’t a New Year’s resolution. You’re going to make me feel guilty,” Richard said, filling his mouth with a handful of bar peanuts.
Don put a slate-blue folder embossed in silver foil with the logo of his television station on the bar top. “Instead of making you feel guilty, how about I try to make you feel wanted? You should know two things right from the get,” Don said, tapping the folder with his index finger. “What’s in here is negotiable, within reason. It’s a four-year contract, with a station option for two more. A good-faith gesture that we’re committed. It contains certain easily attainable benchmarks that would allow you to automatically renew for another two years after that. That is, if you are the successful candidate.”
“Candidate for what?”
“I thought you’d be one step ahead of me on this one. You’re the number one draft choice. Eyewitness News at Six and Eleven, with Richard MacMurray and Anna Sogard. Thom Rollins on sports, and Gordon Helmer with your Doppler Eight Thousand forecast. Your reel tested off the charts. Our focus groups say that middle America would believe just about anything you tell them.”
“I didn’t even know I’d applied for the job. Until this morning, I didn’t even know I had a reel.”
“Well, what you need to know now is that, while you’re the leading candidate, you’re not the only candidate.”
Richard had used this ploy himself during his years of hiring research assistants and paralegals. The pay wasn’t much, he’d say, but the experience was invaluable, the same bullshit salt-of-the-earth rap his father must have given to the decidedly earnest young people who wanted to work in a congressional office. It’s not the dollar, it’s the experience, he could imagine Lew saying, especially since the entry-level jobs on Capitol Hill didn’t pay much more than McDonald’s. His father had been full of clichés and a fervent belief in a peculiarly American brand of opportunity (or was it opportunism?), often sounding like a cross between Elmer Gantry and Zig Ziglar. Twenty years after Lew died, and Richard could still hear him bungling messages together into malaprops like You have to leave the door unlocked for opportunity.
“How do I know I’m not the other guy?” Richard asked.
Don looked pleased. “What other guy?”
“The second choice. The fallback. The one that the other reporters really want. Say, a veteran network correspondent who’s being phased out of Washington because his Q rating is too low or he tests as too old.”
Don motioned for the bartender. “That guy doesn’t exist anymore, and even if he did, we couldn’t afford him. He’s got a second wife and a kid at Williams or Bowdoin that’s costing him something like forty grand a year, so he abandons the true calling of journalism for public relations or corporate communications and makes the world safe for special-interest organizations and comes up with slogans like Beef, it’s what’s for dinner.” Don narrated the slogan in the resonant fakeness of a voice-over artist, but when he started talking again, any hint of artifice was gone. “And as for Q ratings, well, your Q rating isn’t much greater than zero. They’ve seen your face before, maybe even know you’re on television, but they can’t quite place you. The focus group described you as conventionally handsome. That beach bum who lived with O. J. Simpson, he’s got a higher recognition factor. You, my man, are the proverbial blank slate. Give me six months, and I’ll convince people that you’ve been doing this for twenty years.”
“Kato Kaelin.”
“What?”
“The beach bum. The freeloader. Before I even give this serious thought, you need to tell me one thing. Why me? What do I bring to the table?”
Don’s answer came quickly enough for Richard to think it had been scripted. “You bring the fresh face, the new perspective. You bring a tiny bit of gravitas, but you do it at a small-market friendly price.”
“As in cheap,” Richard said.
“I prefer to think of it as value,” Don said, smiling.
“I don’t know what they say in television, but in politics, you never want to be the guy who succeeds a legend. You want to be the guy who comes after that guy.”
“If you start next month, during sweeps, you can be the guy who works alongside the legend. His name is Jack Shea. Been everywhere for every network. Vietnam for CBS, White House correspondent during the illustrious Gerald Ford administration. Anchored the Sunday-evening news, though he didn’t get to do the broadcast very often because they’d preempt for tennis and golf and football running long. Shit, you grew up here. You’d know the face. Guy looks like he was born wearing a trenchcoat. When he shows his vacation pictures around the office, you half-expect him to begin narrating in his on-air voice. ‘Good evening tonight from Paris, where in just twelve hours, all parties will gather once again around the famous round conference table to begin a final set of peace talks.’” Don’s voice came in staccato breaks that sounded more like Johnny Carson imitating Cronkite than anything else, but Richard knew the type. The MacMurray dinner table had always meant Cronkite blaring in from the Magnavox in the living room, Marvin Kalb in Saigon, Bernard Kalb at the State Department, Bert Quint near Khe Sanh, South Vietnam.
Richard said, “So he’s not getting forced out. He’s retiring?”
“Not exactly. He’s dying.”
“Jesus. What happened?”
“The guy’s diet consisted almost entirely of fast food and Marlboros for the better part of three decades. Who knows what happened? Maybe time. Maybe Jack got a flu he couldn’t shake. The insurance company sends him for a physical. He gets some blood work. There’s an elevated this or that, so they call him back for more tests. And those tests spell out a particularly aggressive form of lung cancer. Five-year survival rate is zero. He’s making a series. The unrepentant anchorman faces his mortality, tonight at six. We’ll send camera crews with him to chemo, to the lab for blood work, to his support groups. You’ll help him edit it for a series of two-minute drop-ins during sweeps.”
“What exactly am I getting into here?”
Don took a handful of bar nuts. “Let me tell you a little story. For the first four years Jack Shea was on the air up there, he was in third place. For sixteen consecutive quarterly-ratings books, he wasn’t within four points of the lead. Right up until this one afternoon when he’s filming a stand-up in front of the oldest furniture store in Wilkes-Barre. He’s there to tease the night’s feature story, thirty seconds, when a woman across the street gets her purse snatched. She starts screaming, and the camera follows her voice, and the thief runs right toward them. Jack Shea tosses his cigarette aside, very casually jogs across the street and clotheslines the guy, just a little close-combat hand yoke to the fucker’s throat. The guy falls backward onto the sidewalk, comic book–style, out cold. And the camera guy is right there, and Jack just picks up the purse, daintily pushes the tissues and lipstick or whatever back into the bag, and walks up to the lady and says, ‘Ma’am,’ like he’s Sergeant Joe Friday or something. Then he looks at the camera and winks. He’s been in first place ever since.”
“How long?”
“Since 1983,” Don said.
“That isn’t what I meant. He’s got what, six months? I’m not sure I’m ready to help someone put together a grand theorem on mortality.”
“Why not?” Don a
sked, a question for which Richard had no prepared answer.
The only person Richard had ever known who died of cancer was his mother, and she hadn’t exactly been the poster patient for a dignified last few months. She had gone to her general practitioner several times with minor complaints, and he’d frowned indecipherably at computer printouts, EKGs, and lab results, and then one afternoon, she went on a referral to a gastroenterologist, who sent her for some sort of scan—Richard couldn’t remember what type—and before the afternoon was out, was telling her, “It’s time to put your affairs in order.” There were options that would shrink, but not eliminate, her tumor. There were synthetic opiates for her pain. Injections to keep up the platelet count so that she could endure more of the treatments that would shrink, but not eliminate, the tumor. After her diagnosis, she’d lasted fourteen months.
Suddenly Richard was aware that if he failed in his new gig, he’d become the answer to a trivia question. Conversations that began, “Whatever happened to…?” were the city of Washington’s greatest pastime. One week, you were the young politico of the moment; the Secretary of State was at a party at your rented Georgetown townhouse, drinking white wine from a gallon jug and hitting on the intern from the Style section of the Post, and you were being lampooned in Doonesbury; the next week, you had fallen so spectacularly that people avoided your phone calls, and a few months after that, the Style section of the Post was running a feature on you, five thousand words in a tone best described as postmortem.
“Tell me why I’d even want to do this,” Richard said.
“Of all people, I’d think you’d understand what it means to shape the news. To understand the power there.”
“Here’s what I know about the news. The news suggests death, decay. News is over. It’s a thing of the past.”
Don smiled. “Just the opposite. News connects us with the parts of our past you think are dead. It’s resurrection. If you want to see it as a monster, then it’s a perpetual monster. And the thing is, this monster can’t be killed. Last year we did a series of two-minute features. Your basic whatever-happened-to stories on all the things of our childhood. Whatever happened to the guy with the ridiculously long fingernails?”
“The Indian guy? From the Guinness Book?”
Don poked Richard in the arm, a quick and unobtrusive jab that said, Yes, you understand. “Who still hula-hoops? Do children even buy Slinkys anymore? Why is it that nearly every guy around my age knows that the fastest car on the planet was once called the Blue Flame? Or how that kid Mikey from the cereal commercials was supposed to have died from mixing Pop Rocks and Coke?”
“Eddie Haskell got killed in Vietnam.”
“That was an urban legend. Hell, for a while, it was rumored that Eddie Haskell was actually the porn guy. Johnny Wadd. But people don’t want to hear about that. They don’t want to hear about the former child star who robbed the video store to feed her crack habit. They want to remember everything just the way it was. They get nostalgic for the totems of their childhood. The Legos and Lincoln Logs, GAF View-Masters, Gnip Gnop, Tang. They get homesick for places that no longer exist. It forces us to adapt to our environment. Harry Reasoner came to ABC to make five hundred thousand dollars a year, and then he was bitching about Barbara Walters and her million-dollar contract, and then he was back with the geezers of Sixty Minutes, and a few years after that he was dead, and you never hear anyone at some journalism school lamenting the grand old legacy of Harry Reasoner. Why? Because he didn’t adapt. The future tapped him on the shoulder, and he said, Not now. I’m busy. And right now you are being tapped on the shoulder, and I want to know if you’re ready to face the future.”
“And you expect me to say what, exactly?”
“I expect you to say yes,” Don said. “I can’t believe that what you are doing in DC is enough. Being a pundit. Smoothing over a message that someone else has already shaped.”
“I look at it as trying to correct the record.”
Don tapped the folder. “What’s in here is an opportunity to be the record. The first draft of history and all that. Unless you’re going to tell me that you’re satisfied being a hired gun.”
Richard figured he’d play the scene out, no matter how preposterous it sounded. “I’m a hired gun who gets to speak, for roughly four minutes a week, to about three point four million people per quarter hour. But just for entertainment value, let’s say I’m actually interested. I’m interested despite the fact that the job is in the farthest reaches of Transylvania. Despite the fact that, outside of college, I’ve never lived beyond a radius of about seven miles from this very bar stool. Or despite the fact that I’ve never done the news. I didn’t even work for my high school paper. Other than that, I’m a logical choice.”
“I’m not going to shit you. You’re a long shot. Most likely you’re going to fail, and you’re going to do so in spectacular fashion. But if you do fail, you’re not going to fail alone. If you fail, it’s because I’ve failed you. You come up to Scranton and spend four weeks shadowing Jack; you’ll watch Action News at Six, and then you’ll do it again, live to tape, at seven o’clock. Just for us to critique. After the four weeks are up, we’ll send our co-anchor on a little assignment, and you can anchor side by side with Jack for a week. We’ll take some publicity photos, get you fitted for a wardrobe, have you do some local promotion work. We’ll get you an official anchorman’s haircut,” Don said, laughing, showing his brightest smile. “So what say I run this by your agent?”
“I don’t have an agent. I get a phone call. I take a cab to a news bureau and unwrap my IFB and appear for union scale, sometimes more, and I rarely if ever negotiate. A few weeks later I get a check in the mail. Once every couple of weeks, I give a speech to the annual meeting of the National Association of this or that. They have a breakfast where I inhale a Danish and nod gravely at the idiotic opinions of Earl from Milwaukee, who owns the largest feed store in all of whatever county. I pick the most obvious thing that he says, and when no one is looking, I jot it down on a napkin, and then, when I get up on the podium, I applaud his political skills and tell him he should be the one on Crossfire, and the other guys at the head table slap him on the back. I congratulate them for being dedicated enough to fly down to Washington and for being smart enough to hire me to talk to them. And then, because I’m on television, I stand there and repeat the exact same things that were in that morning’s Washington Post, and somehow, the mere act of repeating it makes it true, and for those two hours I pocket a check for ten thousand dollars.”
“You’re what passes for conventional wisdom.” Don laughed.
“In other words, I’m already a newsman.”
Don slid the folder over to Richard and excused himself. “You can think it over for as long as you want. At least as long as it takes for me to piss.”
Richard mulled the offer. Mulled. He thought the unfamiliar word. Serious decisions required more than mulling, didn’t they? You don’t change your life because you’ve had two Bloody Marys and decided that the best strategy for the New Year is to look opportunity in the eye and say, What the fuck. Or do you? This is probably what it felt like to go to the crossroads and be offered a deal with the devil. The devil probably borrowed Don’s black suit for these sorts of things. Still, in nearly every facet of conversation, Don Keene had been right. It wasn’t enough, being on television for one o’clock here, two-thirty elsewhere. His mind flashed on a memory, the women who’d worked for Lew wandering, stunned, through the MacMurray kitchen after the funeral. Lew’s whole office had that feel, of teamwork, of family, and Richard got exactly none of that feeling from what he was doing now. He needed courage, and if he found some after two drinks, what the fuck? Some spontaneity could do him good. A tandem jump from eight thousand feet above the Mojave? Sure, why not, what the fuck. A long weekend in Tulum filled with margaritas and naked tanning with a woman you’d met the evening before? What the fuck. Try that Japanese soup that might kill you? What
the fuck. Buy a house he’d seen only pictures of? What the fuck? That lack of spontaneity had always been an issue in the previous regime, his first wife and her ridiculous calculations and her research at the library—a Saturday afternoon wasted as she pored over magazines, seven months of back issues of Consumer Reports—all to buy a $40 blender. He billed his time at $380 an hour, and once he’d had enough, he finally told her that he might have to charge the same rate if she was going to make everything such a goddamn ordeal, and it had been a dick thing to say (her words), and he knew she was right.
Surely it was ego to think he could slide right into the anchor chair and make jokes about the hapless Phillies and then be serious about two dead, four wounded, in a shoot-out at a Wilkes-Barre branch of some monolithic national bank. Why would he even think he could do this job? The Greeks knew this feeling for what it was. Hubris. Richard supposed it couldn’t actually be hubris if he was aware of it, but that didn’t mean he was going to turn the job down. He would have to be vigilant for any omen that augured his failure. That’s what hubris really meant, after all: “failure.” Hubris meant flying too close to the sun on his handmade wax wings, hubris meant saying the ship was unsinkable, it meant building a plane the size of an ocean liner only to watch it rise a mere eight feet before falling, as did Icarus, into the sea. The time felt right for that kind of leap. He could picture the handful of reporters and assignment editors he knew shaking their heads at the word Scranton. Still, what did Washington have to offer him now? Subpoenas and bureaucrats. There was nothing left to tether him here. Washington was over.
36
FOR TWO years now, Sherri Ashburton had worked at the Canyon Room Tavern and Grill, four nights a week, either as a bartender or as a cocktail waitress. If Ash was around, she played it straight, wore a modestly short skirt and hose with black seams running up the back. When things were tight and her husband wasn’t behind the bar, she switched out the hose for thigh-highs and kept some bills for change in the elastic around her right thigh. Her tips went up by twenty or thirty bucks.
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