“Nineteen-five,” Carter said. “Everybody wants to work here, Kowalski.”
It was one thousand more than he was making in Missouri. He made the move with his brown-haired wife and their boy. Their girl came later.
That was three years ago and he still had a chance at anchor work and goddamn it, it was a long way from Wilkes-Barre, PA. Shit yes. He patted his crotch.
Maybe Paige Allen bleached her pussy. Hell, maybe it was even bald. God, would he love that. God, would he love to anchor.
*
They all came from somewhere else, Des Moines, Topeka, Bismarck, Fresno. Bakersfield was a big feeder for the station because Tom Carter often stopped in Bakersfield on his driving vacations in his big Chrysler. He made a point of watching the news coming out of that city. He never had a problem getting a reporter to leave Bakersfield.
Sure, his station might be number two but they loved them in New York. The reporters did the kind of hard-hitting, in-depth reporting that was often picked up by the network for the national newscasts. Across the Street it was all flash and trash, that’s what they told each other. That they happened to be number one was answered with a shrug and a no-accounting-for-taste eye roll.
Once Carter brought you in, you did what you were told to do. You were the ingénue, the new kid. In the morning you would find your two assignments on your desk, usually combined with articles clipped from the morning newspaper with notes attached from George Harding, the assignment editor, or from his assistant Kim Palmeri. You could get a news conference in the morning about yet another delay on a forever-being-built freeway and an afternoon story on illegal dumping in the desert.
You might pick up some spot news, a fire or accident, on the way back to the station. That was the low-rung work, two stories a day and whatever you were passing.
Second rung up and you were on a beat. Jack Benton handled cop shop and the courts and the legislature, when in session. Richard Ferguson covered medical and science. Paige Allen, who knew nothing about them, worked energy and environment. Harold Lewis was on arts and entertainment. That didn’t mean those were their only stories.
If they didn’t turn up their own beat stories, they too would find themselves out on the street, at lunches and press conferences. They fought those assignments, usually at the top of their lungs.
*
“What the hell is this?” Richard Ferguson demanded from his three-sided cubicle. “What the hell is this, George?”
George Harding hunched over his silent black phone, the receiver held to his ear.
“I said, what the hell is this, George?” Ferguson yelled.
“It’s a story.”
“A story? A story? How the hell am I supposed to do this? I have a series I am supposed to be working on. Do you know that? Do you, George?”
“I know. I know.”
“What?”
“I said I know,” George yelled in exasperation. “I haven’t got anyone else. Nobody else is here. I got three people out sick and two photographers out of town. I need that story.”
“Not from me, George, not from me,” came the taunt.
“Yeah, yeah,” George turned to the cards of his middle Rolodex.
“Do you hear me?” Richard Ferguson was now standing on his chair so he could see over the cubicles to the assignment editor’s desk.
“I hear you.”
“I said I am not doing it, dickhead,” Ferguson yelled.
A snicker came up from Jack Benton’s cubicle.
“Do you hear me?” Ferguson demanded.
“I hear you.” George stood up, now shouting as well. “And you will do it. You will. I can’t run a goddamn newsroom with no reporters. Shut up and do it.” He stomped out of the room.
“Sure, sure,” Richard Ferguson said, and then broke into a wide grin.
“What a schmuck,” he proclaimed for the benefit of all those who were listening.
*
What the beat reporters were protecting was their sweet little niche that made them almost as important as the anchors. They were semi-stars. People would stop them in checkout lines, would hover over their tables in restaurants.
“Oh,” they would say. “I watch you on the news.”
The beat reporter was guaranteed a seat on-set at least once a week, maybe more. They introduced their stories and answered a question or two from the anchor team. It gave them a chance to talk directly to the big cameras, to the audience. They had time for a friendly nod or a knowing wink. It was that precious gift of time that would make them remembered and, when pushed, they scrambled and kicked and screamed for every second of it.
“Don’t I see you on television?” was the puzzled query the street reporters heard.
“I watch you all the time,” was what the beat reporters heard and those people knew their names.
Oh, they knew the names of the sportscasters and the weathermen but, for most reporters, what those guys did was hardly worth the effort. How many weathermen actually got to New York or LA or even Miami? The only way to break into sports was to be some old jock twenty years away from a college bowl game, or some kid with manicured hair. Even then, you had to wait around for some old sports fart to die.
As for any new guys moving into weather, even if they wanted to, you might need some kind a degree in meteorology and about the only time you ever got out of the station was to stand outside when there was some sort of freak weather with your hair blowing and your eyes squinting. Come on, who needed that? Old ladies and middle-aged men knew the sportscasters and weathermen. Who else watched them?
The old-time weathermen and sportscasters looked at the whole business differently. They didn’t think of themselves as stars, never had. Most of them were genuinely surprised that some piece of luck put them in such an easy job.
At The Best, it was John Devlin on weekday sports and Art Novak on weather, older men. Behind them, if they had been the type to sniff the air like the older reporters did, they would have smelled that coy scent of youth, cologne and hairspray.
Devlin and Novak were a dying breed, guys who had been there, who knew the game and didn’t overdo the science. But, for right now, they were enjoying every surprising minute of where they found themselves.
Tom Carter wasn’t worried about any sweet, sticky smell. He knew the young punks were taking over. Hell, he was hiring them. He put them right close on the necks of Devlin and Novak. He liked it, waiting and watching for that moment when the old dogs knew it was over. For their backups, he hired pampered models of men. He got the ones with the glittering black eyes and white teeth. Slightly seedy in the newsroom with their looks of used car salesmen, they somehow fit the camera perfectly at night. They had no aspirations for anchoring or even reporting. They had it made, a little smile, a little tooth glitter, and the bucks rolled in.
Youth couldn’t carry the evening anchor slot. Only Carter could do that and he knew it would be at least ten years before anyone would even dare suggest they find a backup for him. Carter also knew that when the time came he’d pick the man. He’d find him out there in Fresno or Bakersfield and he’d watch as the balding, aging reporter boys in his newsroom died a little each day, knowing if he ever left his seat they wouldn’t be the one to sit in it.
He earned seventy-three thousand a year plus a brand new Chrysler, top of the line, every two years. He read one newspaper a day, starting with the sports section and working his way quickly through the rest of the paper. He subscribed to one magazine, Sports Illustrated. He did check the wires twice a day and he kept in touch with the men who ran the city from their downtown clubs and restaurants.
He never watched a television documentary from start to finish. He did not watch public television. He went to no art or charity event unless it was to be in a front table seat with the men who ran the state. He did not own a tuxedo. He dressed down. He was, after all, a humble man, a man of the audience, a mean, racist, sexist, son-of-a-bitch man of the people. And, thought th
e salivating male reporters, if that son of a bitch could do it, so could they.
“Hell, he doesn’t even know where to wipe his ass,” Jack Benton shook his head.
“They love him. They sure love him,” said Richard Ferguson. “Damn.”
It was Tom Carter who coined the phrase The Best in the West. By that he meant his station first, his news team second, and himself a humble third.
*
On her first story for The Best, the construction foreman asked her, “What do you think of television people?”
Debbie Hanson smiled, slowly winding the mike cord in the prescribed manner, from hand to elbow and over again in neat gray circles.
“They’re great,” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said wiping the sweat off his forehead. “I once was at this party with a bunch of TV people and they all acted like they thought they were real important, you know? Like they were better than everybody else.” He hesitated.
“I mean …”
“I know,” she smiled, her blue eyes pained in the sun. “I guess we can be like that. But, we’re really like everyone else.”
SEGMENT ONE
“A major fire in our valley tonight,” Tom Carter told them. “Jack Benton is live at the scene with that story. Jack?”
Behind Tom Carter and Jean Ann, Jack Benton appeared on a large screen. Behind him were flashes of red lights and the movement of passing figures.
“That’s right, Tom, Jean Ann. I am standing here at what’s left of the Allied Tire Warehouse.”
With a punch of a button, he was full screen and Jean Ann and Tom Carter were gone. As he spoke, the words Allied Tire Warehouse materialized beneath him. Beneath them was an address.
“The fire broke out at about three o’clock this afternoon and may have been the largest and smokiest fire in this city in many years.”
Then, he too disappeared but his voice continued as the tape shot that afternoon rolled. The fire at the Allied Tire Warehouse at Desert Way Industrial Park was dead but on tape it burned bright.
Jean Ann searched her script. Wasn’t there a question she was supposed to ask? What was it? She bit her lower lip. Didn’t she write it down here somewhere? Arson, that was it. She was supposed to ask it if was arson.
She had to ask the question the right way. There had to be that note of care and interest, like she didn’t know the answer. Well, she didn’t know the answer but she could guess. Why else would they tell her to ask the question? The producer always gave them the questions to ask. It was safer that way.
4
Ellen liked Debbie Hanson right from that first day. She liked the tallness of her, the innocence, the laughter. Right from the first day in her flower-print dress with the bared arms, Debbie had been fine. The blue eyes, cornflower blue, Ellen imagined, were wide with excitement and, Ellen thought, a touch of fear.
“You came here because it was cold or wet or something back there and this is the flagship of the network and …,” she teased.
Debbie laughed.
“I wanted the job,” she said. “I love reporting. You search for the truth. It’s what I want to do.”
“Really?” Ellen asked.
“Yes,” said Debbie. “And, gosh, it’s hot here.”
“This is nothing,” Ellen told her. “Full-time reporter?”
“Yes, and they said I might get some weekend anchor work.”
“Yeah?” Ellen searched Debbie’s face for the hidden gloating or greed that usually came with that promise. She didn’t see either.
“That’s what they tell everyone,” she said. “They tell everybody they might be able to anchor.”
That wasn’t completely true. They hadn’t told her that. They didn’t need to. She was a street reporter and, as she told Carter, a good one. She came to The Best because it had all gone to hell in New Mexico. By the end of her first day at the station, she had the feeling she had probably made one of the biggest mistakes of her life.
That was over a year ago. Now she felt that it really didn’t make much difference. Here, there, it was all the same, for now.
“Same people, different faces,” she’d tell the others in the newsroom.
A couple of things shot worry through her that first day. There was Jim Brown, a big man with a soft belly and a sweet smile but whose words did not seem to match what she saw in his face. There was the harried George Harding who had no time for anything but a quick upward glance at her before reaching for the phone. There was Jack Benton asking her for a date.
“Good party Saturday night. How about going with me?”
“Aren’t you married?”
Carter told her about his preference for married male reporters.
“Yeah. So what?”
“I don’t go to parties with married men.”
“What are you, a prude?” He laughed. “Hey, Ferguson, we got ourselves a prude.”
Great start. A few minutes later, the photographer with the baseball cap and the sloppy wet unlit cigar yelled at her.
“You don’t drive my fucking van,” he shouted when she asked him if the photographers usually drove. In Albuquerque the reporters sometimes did the driving.
“Well, I didn’t mean …,” she stumbled to explain.
“Nobody drives my fucking van but me. You got that?”
“The last thing I want to do is drive your fucking van,” is what she should have said. Instead, she said nothing.
“What’s wrong with your voice?” Carter demanded after her first story hit the air. “I didn’t hear that thing before.”
“What thing?”
“You talk through your goddamn nose. You talk like this,” he twanged in a high nasal imitation.
“I don’t think so.”
“Yes, you do, missy.”
“Well?” She was at a loss.
“Sounds like shit.” He stomped away.
She was Brown’s choice, not his. He got to another Brown choice early on as well. Two years ago a strawberry blond from Des Moines had somehow been hired for reporting and that possible weekend anchor slot.
“What’s wrong with your nose? It’s a real beak, isn’t it,” he laughed at her.
She swallowed hard. She was twenty-six. She needed this job, that’s what the agent said. If she paid her dues at The Best she had a chance at the top markets. She needed that weekend anchoring.
“You ain’t going nowhere with that beak, missy.”
After one year, she took her vacation days and had the job done. The nose came back shorter, thinner.
“You’re not good enough, not good enough for The Best,” Carter told her after her one fill-in at the anchor desk.
“Maybe you could anchor in a smaller market,” he told her. “But, not here.”
Jim Brown cocked his head and clicked his tongue in sympathy when she finally asked to be taken off weekend reporting.
“I’d like to at least have my Sundays free,” she told him.
“No can do right now,” he said.
“But that’s not fair. I’ve been on weekends for more than a year.”
“I know, I know, but that’s the way it has to be right now.”
She resigned and went to a station in South Carolina, somewhere around the ninety-fifth market. Carter smirked over that. He was right all along. Shouldn’t have been hired in the first place.
Ellen Peters didn’t change anything. The voice stayed the same, sharp, nasal and, often, loud.
“So, why did you come here?” Debbie returned the question.
“Needed a job,” Ellen said.
“How long have you been here?”
“For fucking ever.”
The newsroom began to fill with reporters and photographers. Monday noon marked the time for the weekly staff meeting. Debbie would be introduced as Ellen had been, as they all had been.
“Grab anything. They are all terrible,” Ellen said of the pile of plastic-wrapped sandwiches from a downtown cafeteria.
Jim Brown walked to the center of the room. He hitched up his pants and smiled, including all of them in his good mood.
“We’ll try to make this short. I want us to take a look at a few tapes from last week and I have a few announcements to make.
“But first, Tom, you have a few things you want to talk about. Right?”
“Yes, I do,” said Carter who moved next to him. “We’ve got a real problem here and I want it corrected and I mean now.”
Most of those in the newsroom came to quick attention. The row of photographers standing near the back door folded their arms across their chests in unison.
“Now, I want to know what the hell is going on here at night,” Carter demanded. “I want to know and I want it stopped.”
No one made a sound. Each person wondered what it was they had done to bring this on. Slowly, the glances were passed, from reporter to reporter, producer to producer.
What went on at night was reporters and photographers copying tapes to send out to other stations. It was silent, furtive work, looking for another job, pirating their own work in order to get one.
“I want to know,” Carter gritted his teeth, “who the hell has been playing around and leaving spots on the sofas and chairs around this place.”
Heads shot up. More wide-eyed looks were exchanged with exaggerated shrugs and grimaces.
“I know something is going on here at night. I know it. And, I want to know who the hell it is who thinks he or she can come down here for a little fun and games at night.” He turned quickly, including all of them in his glare.
Ellen looked across the room to Chuck Farrell who was pulled down low behind the chest-high partition of the producers’ area. All she could see of him was his tousled red hair and his brown eyes as they peeked over the cloth-covered panel. Suddenly one eye winked at her and she knew she was going to burst out laughing.
“You think it’s funny, missy?” Carter swung on her.
She shook her head, holding back the smile.
The Best in the West Page 3