The News of the World

by Ron Carlson

  There were actually two strippers. The first guy was announced as Rick. He came out to a record, the Supremes singing something, and he was very serious about removing his brown silk shirt, and then his brown silk pajama bottoms or whatever they were, and then he played a coy game of thumbs with his G-string for the rest of the song. The second and final song for Rick was The Four Seasons singing “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” He came stepping between the tables like a stretching cat, and Susan actually reached out and stuffed a dollar bill inside his jock along with all the other dollars hanging there like a bouquet.

  I’m a buns person. Why that is, I don’t know. But buns can start me up. I loved the arch of Rick’s rear, and when he finally stripped off the G-string and flopped his petunia before us all, Susan and the girls went wild! Susan was laughing and bouncing in her seat and reaching for what she was calling “that banana.” But Rick was a professional; I could tell by the way he kept just beyond an arm’s length.

  Then there was a very funny vodka intermission with everyone groaning and laughing and snorting and Susan laughing and asking me wasn’t I glad I came, and you know, I was glad. Not because of Rick’s buns, but because of a warm feeling I had. I really liked Susan and her attitude and the fact that she was a friend of mine.

  In high school, when we were juniors, she stopped me after homeroom one morning in the spring and took my arm tightly and walked me down to her locker, smiling so her eyes nearly shut, and she told me she was going to get married. “You’re the first person I’ve told,” she said to me. “And you’re the only person. Do me a favor,” she laughed, “break it to our dear classmates.” And then she said, “You know why we’re doing it?” And she laughed so hard she dropped a book and could hardly get through her own answer, which she had to whisper: “To give the baby a father!” Then she straightened herself out and lifted her chin like a queen and walked off down the corridor, turning once to announce: “The facts of life.”

  Now, I’m no good judge of penises. Grant had one, I’m sure. He must have, I think. But the next stripper, Doug, made it clear from his entrance on, that he was out to set new standards for us all. Susan was crazy for him. He would back way up then open his shirt and stride toward the audience as if he was going to jab us all with that heavy G-string. Everyone would scream when he did that. Susan couldn’t stop laughing. She did yell: “What have you got in there anyway, Dougie?” And everybody thought the same thing: that is not all him. Susan would yell, “What is that, a shoe?” and the Redwood Club would just go nuts. But at the end of the third song (Doug stretched his strip to three records), which was Elvis singing “My Way,” we all found out the truth. He turned his back on us and flexed his buns in a way that almost made me shudder, and he flipped his G-string into the fourth row, another eruption of screaming, and he rotated to us revealing the most god-awful THING—and that is the right word, “THING”—in the whole world. It looked like a hammer. The place exploded. There was more screaming than if there’d been a fire. He lobbed it around for a good while, and I’m sure people passing by in cars could hear The Redwood Club rising off the earth. It’s lucky for me I like buns, I told Susan, or I would have embarrassed myself. A lot of women did.

  After that session died down, we plunged outside and the fresh air really made us drunk. Susan hopped on the hood of her car and leaned against the windshield. The sky was full of stars. It was funny sitting there. I thought: all these stars, are they out every night? I’d never seen the stars before. We sat on her car and drank a little more vodka. Susan had been sweating and the hair over her face was wet in a little fringe. She was smiling, kind of wicked, like she knew things were going to be like this all along. After a while, she said, “You know, all this entertainment has made me kind of hungry. Let’s go eat.”

  We went over to Rose’s, where I’d never been at night before, and the place was empty except for Leo, Rose’s husband, who served us two Burrito Specials and cold beer. God, it was fun sitting there at night, like being girls. When Leo would bring another beer, Susan would keep her head down, her eyes under her eyebrows going to his crotch, and then back to my eyes, and we’d laugh until we couldn’t even eat. It was like we had this great big secret on all men.

  Grant had never liked to go out to dinner with me. I always liked to read the whole menu, every word. For me it’s part of the pleasure of dining out. Grant liked to order the same thing all the time: spaghetti or burgers. He’d order and I wouldn’t be through reading Column A. I loved to read phrases in some of the places like “nestled amid french fries aplenty” or even “smothered with onions.” I always ordered the item which was the most well written. I don’t need to tell you what Grant thought of that.

  The rest of the night with Susan happened a little too quickly. We were driving down Front Street and we hit the hill a bit fast, and Susan couldn’t make the corner. That part went slow. We drifted wide in the turn, and when the tire hit the island between the four lanes, I looked at Susan, and she was still smiling like this was all expected. The Pinto wouldn’t straighten up. It rose over the island and gently and quietly steered into the deserted lobby of the Cambert Hotel. Grant and I spent our wedding night at the Cambert Hotel, and as the glass doors burst and I saw the front desk, I knew I was going to die. There was no sound. The last thing I felt was my back coming through my chest, and I was dead.

  Now, this is the real part: it was not a white room. I did not float above a white room. There was no white room into which my relatives floated one at a time. Do you see? There was no white room. It was not a room at all, but a tiny cave, black as black, no light whatsoever. No relatives drifting in to hug me. I felt like I’d been hammered in the little cave, and there was a pair of sunglasses underneath my right hip, poking me. It really hurt. I could feel the cave wall with my hands and the wall was damp and cold, and I could tell I was stuck. There were piles and piles of old shoes on top of me and there was no music. I listened for a long time and there was a little noise, it was a distant rasping, muffled by all the shoes, and it sounded like a fork on a pie plate. Then it was quiet for I don’t know how long. I couldn’t move and I couldn’t go to sleep. But there was no music. I waited and waited, just feeling those sunglasses under my thigh, and I thought any minute I might hear Susan laughing or see some person in a white robe coming to greet me. Nothing. I was smothering under all those shoes in a dark cave, rubbing my fingertips up and down the walls feeling the slime, and I did this for a long time. I mean, up to what I thought was three or four weeks. Nothing. And I came to know that this was it: I was dead, that’s all. I wished I had something to read. But even if I’d had something, it was too dark. I did get kind of mad at those twenty-one liars who had made money spinning fibs to The Realms of Twilight Tabloid News of the World.

  Later I heard some quiet chipping noises, like someone putting cups away. Then in the quiet dark, I realized that I was going to come back from the dead. All that happened was this: the rock became softer and I stretched my legs through it and pushed my hands through it and reached around and removed that damn pair of sunglasses jabbing my butt and the shoes floated away and I leaned my head back into the soft putty-like rock and I was in this bed. A moment later Dr. Fergus came in and used his little flashlight on me.

  Later still, Grant came by and brought me some magazines and said some words while I lay very still and squinted at his crotch.

  So, all I want to say is this. I’ve read those goddamned liars in the papers, and I’m here to tell you there’s no white room. I crashed into the lobby of the Cambert Hotel, where I spent my wedding night, and I was killed along with my best friend since before high school, Susan McArgul. And after being dead for three and half weeks my time, and almost four minutes your time, I was allowed to return from being dead. Susan McArgul didn’t get to return. Now, those are the real facts of life.

  THE USES OF VIDEOTAPE

  EVERYTHING that happens when I sleep does not need explanation, only some things. I
am sixty-six years of age, which seems about right. Lorraine is sixty-six years of age as well, and this, if you think about it, is simply a coincidence. We have both been married forty-one years, because we are married to each other. And now, in the nights when the bedspread leaves for the floor, after such an epoch of remaining on the bed, I want to know why.

  The bedspread is the center of my inquiry and is becoming the main topic in my conversations. Lorraine, who has made the bed every day for forty-one years, is not interested. She is not the one who wakes up cold in the morning; she is not the one of us who anticipates being cold when we lie for sleep.

  Before I leave in the morning, I come back in and point at it and tell her: “The bedspread.” She is under the covers and it cannot matter. When I come home from the hospital at night, the spread is back in place waiting to trick me again.

  So it is the main topic in my conversations. Oh, not with the other janitors, I do not mention this affliction to them. I talk to Jerome, the son, the offspring of our hearts. He is married, but does not live in the city. At their house, Lilly fixes the coffee and Jerome tells me to forget it, to purchase an electric blanket if I am cold. That I become chilled is not the point. Lilly tells me not to worry about it, and Lorraine concurs by saying nothing, but asks instead about seven topics which they have going by and by. I have stood up at their own table, interrupting everything, to indicate that I do worry and I should worry about these occurrences in my household which have begun at so late a date.

  This is not a way to act and I know it, and when I have apologized, Jerome asks then if I have any theories, if perhaps I should pin the bedspread to the blanket. I will not stoop to pins, and I am shouting. I love Lilly as my own. She is so dear I tremble for her happiness, and I am blessed to have my own son, Jerome, married to such loveliness. It is a heartache that she thinks that I am no longer a sensible man.

  Then, every week when we visit them, I shut up, but it leaves me unable to think. I stare at the table and Lilly’s flowers and see only the spread knotted on the floor. My staring bothers Lilly, and my heartache is multiplied. Lorraine is not worried. She knows me, and she drinks her coffee. There have been worse items in a marriage. Luckily, it is not affecting my work.

  From time to time, when I talk to only Jerome about it, he is logical, and I appreciate that, but it does not help. I took his advice once and stayed up until after three in the morning, sitting in a chair watching the bedspread, but it did not move, and I wore the next day across my back like a fire. I cannot ask Lorraine, my wife, to sit up for me. That she is steady is at least a minor comfort in this tribulation. Then Jerome begins to get the look on his face for me too, and he has new and final advice.

  TWO

  I TOLD the man I am sixty-six years old and feel odd renting this machine. He rewound the reels and then ran the pictures of ourselves in the showroom. He pointed to the man next to him in the television and told me that it was me. The picture was all gray, but they were my clothes.

  That night, when Lorraine is asleep, I am up again, assembling the cords and the components. The components fit easily, like the man said, and I am like a boy on the carpet, plugging everything with three prongs together and everything with two prongs together. Erected, the camera does not look like something that belongs in my house, but it will do for one night. Because I have only four hours of video tape, I must sit until two in a chair with one lamp and the hospital newsletter. When it is after two and the camera sees it all, I climb into the bed wondering if I can sleep now with the small lamplight.

  Lorraine cannot sense my exhilaration in the morning when I wake and the spread is gone away again, and the camera is still turning. I have recorded it all. “Do not touch this rented equipment,” I tell her. “I will be home this evening and talk to you.”

  This is a wonderful day with a purpose. It is a very clean hospital, and the staff receives notice of their good work from Dr. Richter. He speaks to me personally, and his questions show his respect for me, which I return. And the drive home is like a long breath. I am free, going home to see at last the solution to the problem. There is simplicity in the way all the cars go in their ways.

  At home, I start with Lorraine, but she is not interested in the equipment and what I have done. She goes after a while to the telephone to talk to her friends of other topics. After rewinding the equipment, I sit in the chair in the bedroom and begin witnessing the videotape. Though I can stop it with a switch, I ask Lorraine to bring my dinner in, because the show is almost four hours in length.

  The light is gray, like in the showroom, and I see myself go in bed. Though I do not look like that, I trust the machine. The spread is over the man and the wife; the man is on the near side. I know his thoughts, and I think I can see the instant sleep arrives for him. I watch the two people sleeping while I eat my dinner. Lorraine looks for a minute, but moves elsewhere in the house. She is moving in the way she does before she goes in bed.

  The tape seems endless, reel to reel, and I watch the grayness of sleep. Lorraine comes to bed and turns off her lamp. She is a kind woman, and I have known her for a long time in this life. Her form under the covers is the continuity of my days. On the screen the gray light does not change; the equipment hums like sleep.

  Lorraine is breathing up the night, and I sit in my chair until the gray light goes white and then the tape slaps and flickers, so I turn off the equipment. I have watched the entire program, and I trust the machine. Near the end I could see the bedspread on the floor. After a while the man arose in his pajamas, and I could see his feet standing by the rumpled spread. I watched the entire videotape, and I did not see it move. It was on the man; then it was on the floor.

  I dismantle the components and coil the cords, and I climb onto the bed with my wife Lorraine. We were born in the same year. I pull the covers to my ears, feeling the quilted bedspread in my fingers. I put my hand on Lorraine’s side, and she turns halfway to me, not asleep at all. “You thought it was me.” She laughs, moving the bed. She laughs with enjoyment. “You thought,” the bed is moving, “that it was me.” This requires that I too laugh, and she moves to me fully now, laughing in our bed. The bedspread will work its little magic every night, a new thing I must accept within this life.

  PHENOMENA

  FIRST of all, I’m not one of these people who ever wanted to see a UFO, an unidentified flying object. I have never wanted to see an unidentified anything. The things in my life, I identify; that’s good with me. I’m not one of these people who is strange or weirded-out over unexplainable phenomena. I don’t want any phenomena at all, and we’re lucky in Cooper, because there isn’t much phenomena. About the time there is a little phenomena, I identify the phenomena and throw them in jail.

  I’m the sheriff.

  So I’m not a weirdo. Things happen sometimes and I do my best. My name is Derec Ferris, and I’ve traced the Ferrises back all the way to Journey City, near the border, and there isn’t a weirdo in the whole bunch. Now, I’m the sheriff; you notice I didn’t say I’m the law around here. Whitney used to say he was the law around here. That was when he was sheriff. I can tell you exactly when he stopped saying that. Four years ago in September. We were together in his car late one night after coffee at The World, and we nailed this speeder right down from the high school. A rented Firebird, gunmetal gray. Actually we flashed him on the curve of Quibbel’s Junk Yard and it took us the whole mile of town to slow down.

  We pulled him over in front of Cooper Regional, where Whitney and I had been Cougars for four years together. It was about two in the morning. Whitney put his hand on my arm and went up to the Pontiac. I could see he was working up his sarcastic rage; he used to say that eighty percent of being a good sheriff was acting. Anyway, he starts: “Who do you think you are, endangering the lives of the citizens of Cooper by whipping through here at eighty-two miles an hour?” And the guy goes: “I’m Dan Blum, and I’m late. Who do you think you are?” Whitney loves that, an opening. “
I’m Whitney Shields and I’m the law around here.” Well, Dan Blum, as his name actually turned out to be, thought that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, and after a little chuckle, he said, “Say, that’s great. So, it’s your wife that sleeps with the law.” That comment seemed to confuse Whitney, even though he slapped the guy for seventy-five big ones, and he never said that about being the law again.

  That was, like I said, four years ago, and since then Whitney’s in-laws have had troubles outside Chicago, and he and Dorothy, who was also a Cougar with us, and whom I had also known for forty-one years, moved over there, and they might as well be on another world for all I hear from them. This is all to say, I’m not the law. I’m fifty-five years old and I’ve lived in this county all my life, except for fourteen months when I lived in Korea employed by Uncle Sam. My name is Derec Ferris and that’s who sleeps with my wife.

  The fact is, I’m still surprised that Whitney left. I mean, where is he? I still expect to see him squashing his stool at the counter at The World every time I walk in there. Hell, he grew up here along the river just like I did; he and I and Harold were the three musketeers. We worked for Nemo at Earth Adventure two summers in high school, and we gained four hundred and forty-four yards passing as Cooper Cougars in 1949, setting a record that stood until 1957. Then: poof! he’s gone, and I’m sheriff. I’ve got his car and everything. It still smells like him.

  I don’t want to talk about it. At all. What I want to talk about is the Unidentified Object that has come into my life, the whole unidentified flying object day, so that you can see I’m not a phenomena weirdo; I’m only Derec Ferris, the sheriff here in Cooper.