Lou stepped out on the floor and the room became silent.
“Okay, we’re back in five, four…”
Lou signaled the last three numbers with his fingers, and Adam continued down the hallway, waving playfully at Jason. Carol’s face lit up suddenly as the cameras turned on.
“Reviewing our top stories, municipal bond prices fell sharply at the start of trading today, while the Ford White House issued a statement denying that it was, quote, ‘out to get’ New York City. And Mayor Cohen announced that to deal with the traffic crisis he was ordering increased road construction and maintenance at night. The overtime will be paid for by emergency surcharges at all city tolls, parking meters, and garages.”
It was Nathan’s turn. All this sharing was actually worked out by their agents in advance. The less formal it looked, the more precise the rules were.
“Be sure to join Cathy and Steve for the five-o’clock report, with updates on all our stories, Tommy Thompson with local sports, and our nightly feature on rush hour traffic tips.”
“What are we going to do, Nate…? We’re heading home right now!”
“I watch the night before, and try to plan ahead.”
“I’ll have to give that a try.” Carol swiveled slightly in her chair to pick up the first camera. She went from a grin to a smile.
“Hope you have a great day. For Nathan Johnson and the rest of the Channel Six News Team, I’m Carol Chase. We’ll see you bright and early with the morning report at six A.M. tomorrow.”
Everybody froze for a second, till Lou cut in. “That’s it people, we’re out.” He started to walk off the floor.
Carol took off her glasses and tossed them aside as she rose from her chair. She called after Lou, but he didn’t hear her, and she chased him down.
“Lou, we’re supposed to have forty-five seconds of head shots after the recap.”
“Sorry honey, big news day. We ran long.”
“My contract doesn’t say anything about the size of the news. You need extra time, take it from somewhere else. You owe me thirty seconds.”
“You want ’em right now?”
“Spread ’em out over the rest of the week. Ten a day, I don’t care if the fucking mayor gets shot.”
Carol turned and walked away, with Jason in pursuit.
“Good show today.”
Carol didn’t break stride, and the sound of her heels striking the floor marked her pace. “I didn’t know you had a TV up there.”
“I, uh, saw the beginning and the end.” Jason had looked down for a moment, and now hurried to catch up. “So, what do you do now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s ten o’clock, and you’re pretty much through for the day.”
Carol stopped walking and stared, hard, and Jason scrambled to recover.
“I mean, on camera.” Carol started walking again, and Jason figured this was progress. “And I was kind of wondering, you know, how the rest of your day went.”
“Why?”
“Just curious. Actually, I play in this band, and I thought—”
They reached Carol’s dressing room, and she turned on her heel and stared again, silencing him once more. It was a hell of a stare. Jason wondered if she practiced it, or if it just worked because when a really good-looking woman stares you down, you stop talking.
“Not interested.”
Jason decided to interpret this as a specific rejection rather than a global one. “So what do you do with your free time?”
“Apparently you haven’t read the memo instructing staff not to bother the talent with personal matters.”
“I’ve never been much of a memo person.”
Carol looked Jason up and down. “No, no, I suppose not. You been wearing that same outfit for ten years?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, though I doubt you’ve noticed, that I’m the only woman at this station who’s not answering phones. It means that I’m looking forward. I’m not here to be patronized by the director or hit on by the staff.”
Carol closed the door to her dressing room, sharply but without a slam, which was reserved for more important business. Jason waited for a moment and studied the name on her dressing room door. The two names ran together in gold letters with oversized C’s: cAROLcHASE. He slid a finger gently across them and then headed down the corridor, passing a slightly open door. The room was dark, and Jason, curious, peered into the room. Suddenly a giant picture of Dave Edwards appeared on the wall. It started talking.
“…and the Tappan Zee Bridge is piled up as far as the eye can see. More and more people reading their papers, not even bothering to look up at the.…”
The film flickered off, and the lights came on. Dave was sitting at a small desk, taking notes.
“Last Thursday?” Jason offered.
“Uh-huh.”
“A particularly memorable moment?”
“Nope. I watch every film we shoot. At least three times.”
“Hmm. Making a compilation for your mother?”
“I told you. I’m going to anchor. You want to anchor, you have to connect with the camera. That’s not like a person, something that comes naturally.”
“More like a mirror.” Jason wished Adam was there. That was a great line. And he nailed it, without missing a beat. But it just blew over Dave’s head and out the window, gone.
Dave kept on talking while Jason thought this through. A really good line is only good once. You couldn’t tell it as a story, it was an in-the-moment sort of a thing. He made a mental note to consider the meaning of this as a potentially important division of life’s experiences into two distinct categories. Probably not.
“Like just then when I said ‘people reading their papers,’ ” Dave’s voice resurfaced. “That should have been ‘people reading their papers.’ ”
“Not ‘people reading their papers’?”
This counterpunch finally got Dave’s attention. “Don’t look at me like that. Just ’cause a guy is trying to make something of himself. What’s it to you?”
Dave set down his pad, dimmed the lights, and turned the projector back on. “At least I’m going somewhere,” he called out as Jason left.
4
I’m going down
I’m going down, down, down, down, down
Yes, I’m going down
I’m going down, down, down, down, down
Yes, I got my big feet in the window
I got my head on the ground
There are some songs that can only be sung by a really big black man. Of course, as with most good rules, there are exceptions. Stevie Winwood was a slim seventeen-year-old white kid when he sang “Gimme Some Lovin’,” and somehow he managed to sound like a big black guy, but in general, the rule holds. Freddie King’s “Going Down” is an example. Freddie was six-five, and when he sang “Going Down,” you went down with him.
Oz McKinley wasn’t six-five, but he was six-two, and he wore boots. Oz was the leader of One Mile Short. He sang and played lead guitar. Jason played rhythm, and there were two kids who played bass and drums. Oz and Jason had played together for years, mostly three nights a week at the Irish Cottage, a bar not far from Jason’s apartment. Every now and then they opened for bigger acts, once at the Felt Forum next to Madison Square Garden. It wasn’t much money, but it wasn’t nothing. Oz made a pretty good living as a session man for a couple of the studios in the City, and he was able to turn down stuff he didn’t want to play.
“Going Down” was one of their big closers, and Oz tore into it, giving up whatever he had left. Jason was a pretty good guitarist, but he always felt a little bit desperate when they played that song. Oz had astonishing concentration, and would lose himself in his solos, as if the world had been reduced to him and his guitar. This was not an ideal recipe for collaboration, and Jason had to watch his hands to keep up, while at the same time making sure not to trip over his wire when it was time to step
forward and scream “down, down, down, down, down” into his mike. A decent second guitar gets out of the way of the lead. But a good rhythm guitarist doesn’t just fill space, he creates a platform that allows the lead to shine, to explore new places to take his stuff. Jason put a lot of stock into being a good rhythm guitarist.
Oz was winding up, firing notes that seared through the room, and Jason felt good about how it was going. Oz leaned in to sing, and the bass player, a black kid with an afro that was more 1968 than 1975, dropped to his knees for the culminating round of “going downs.” The move was a little too cute for Jason, but it worked for the song.
With one last crescendo they were out.
“Thank you!”
The louder Ozzie said thank you, the better he felt about the gig. Jason always listened like it was his report card.
A little while later, Jason sat at the bar, off to the corner, having a beer. Jason spent a lot of time at the Cottage, but didn’t usually hang out at the bar on nights he played. The kind of small talk that people made with musicians was so boring you’d think Rod Serling had stopped by and turned the bar into a giant elevator. But by the far corner of the bar the racks of unwashed glasses provided a buffer, and Jason could talk to Pat, one of those bartenders who had a sharp eye for details, and with the confidence in his opinions that good bartenders needed. Pat had thick, small-fingered hands and a boxer’s nose, and he wasn’t afraid to keep order when necessary. But he was surprisingly well-read, though he more or less kept that to himself.
Jason looked around. “She here?”
“Uh-huh.”
He looked more carefully. “Where?”
Pat gestured at an empty table in the corner, underneath a large TV set mounted on the wall.
“Went to the ladies’ room.” Pat paused to wipe down the bar. “She was looking your way, though.”
Jason looked toward the restrooms, which were off the side of the soundboard, down a dimly-lit hallway. Sitting on the stage was a skinny white kid, who couldn’t have been much over twenty, fiddling around with an acoustic guitar and chatting with several young women who had gathered at the foot of the stage. He was dressed for the part—tousled hair, studiously unshaven, black T-shirt, faded jeans, decent sneaks. Jason was familiar with the look.
“She alone?” he asked Pat, without turning his head.
“She will be till somebody has the balls to go over and talk to her.”
Jason looked back toward the restrooms and then shifted his gaze back to the kid with the guitar, who had stepped to the front of the stage. The stage stood only about two feet off the ground, a raised black platform that went back about ten feet to the wall, not enough to discourage amateurs, and if you weren’t booed off the stage they let people play after the band had quit. This kid stood close to the edge of the stage, which was a pro move for a bar singer because it made you look larger than life. He started to sing a plaintive version of the Pink Floyd song “Wish You Were Here.”
Jason was impressed, and thought it was a good omen. If this was the night he was going to make his move, it was hard to beat “Wish You Were Here” for a soundtrack. Adam had raved about it in print, controversially declaring that its spare lyrics and understated arrangements “captured a quiet despair that was too often drowned out by generic, would-be cathartic arena-rock extravaganzas that pass for greatness in these vestigial times.” Taking names, as it were, he added that the lines “Can you tell a green field/from a cold steel rail/A smile from a veil,” had more to say “than the ten songs the Rolling Stones sleepwalk through in It’s Only Rock ’n Roll.” Jason thought that was a bit harsh, but when Adam got worked up he was hard to stop. There were a couple of decent songs on Rock ’n Roll. And while he thought the line “Did they get you to trade/your heroes for ghosts” from “Wish You Were Here” was incisive, and more than a little moving, he didn’t share Adam’s interpretation that it “was a deliberate slap in the face of audiences holding their hands out for recycled imitations of comfort-food classics.”
Jason turned back to Pat. “Who’s he?”
“Some college kid. Just started coming around.”
“Not bad.”
“The chicks dig it. Doesn’t sell much beer.” Pat half-raised his eyebrows.
“Heads up, Romeo.”
Jason slowly swiveled his seat and watched as Alison Monroe emerged from the small corridor to the left of the stage. About thirty, she had dark hair and was casually but neatly dressed. There was something immediately intriguing about her. She had a kind of wholesome look but confident manners, the kind of daughter that June Cleaver would have had if James Bond had passed through town one weekend. The music filled the room, and you couldn’t hear people talk, or their feet on the floor, and so from Jason’s perspective she seemed to float across the room. He was right about the song, too. “Two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl/year after year,” was great first date material, though Jason knew he was projecting—she didn’t look lost.
Alison sat down to the applause in the background. In the movie in Jason’s mind, it was as if they were applauding her entrance.
“Something wrong with your legs?” Right. It wasn’t a movie. Pat was real. She was probably real, too.
Jason downed the last of his beer. “Okay, okay.”
As Jason got up, Pat grabbed his arm. “Don’t use any of that soulful shit. And don’t look at the fucking floor. Be a man.”
Jason negotiated his way across the room and made it to Alison’s table. She was reading a newspaper that had been left at the table, or she was pretending to; he was never sure when it came to women. He waited for her to look up, but she didn’t. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice you here the last three times we’ve played.”
She lifted her head most of the way. “It could just be a coincidence.”
“Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a story.”
“A story?”
“I was almost a reporter once.”
Pat arrived carrying two beers. He exchanged one for Alison’s empty glass, and set the other down by the chair on the other side of the small round table.
“Your drinks, Mr. Sims.” Obviously Pat didn’t think Jason could make it into the chair on his own.
“Uh, thanks.”
“Almost once?” She said it cheerfully, but she seemed to know how to get the most out of small talk.
Jason sat down. “I went to the Columbia School of Journalism. Never finished.”
“How come?”
“I had this problem with deadlines.”
“So now you’re a musician? Don’t they have to—”
Adam suddenly appeared. He plopped himself down at the table and started to talk to Jason.
“Jason, there is something very wrong going on in this city. Very wrong.” He grabbed a handful of pretzels from the bowl sitting on the table, and stared at Jason, waiting for the obligatory “What do you mean by that?” response.
“That’s Adam,” Jason explained to Alison. “He finished Columbia, a real reporter now.”
“Covering the same story?”
“Sometimes he misses the big ones by staring too hard at the little ones.” He looked over at Adam. “Didn’t you once tell me that there was a pact among men about coming over—”
“There’s an escape clause. News first, women second.”
“A close second?” Alison offered.
Adam finally acknowledged Alison, but didn’t miss a beat. “Depends on the story.”
“And the woman?” Jason suggested pointedly.
“Alison Monroe.” She extended her hand to Adam, who shook it. “I hope there’s nothing wrong with the City that can’t be fixed. I don’t want to lose my security deposit.”
Adam resumed talking, essentially to himself. “The corruption in this city is thicker than the traffic. You can’t tell the trustees from the teamsters.…”
Adam kept on going, and Jason decided to tune out the monologue. Following her
example, he shook Alison’s hand and introduced himself. “I’m Jason. You just moving in? Everyone else is heading out.”
“That’s the best time to head in, don’t you think?”
“Depends on what you’re looking for.”
Adam poked Jason with his finger, emphasizing his current point. “Nobody will touch the story. Not with a ten-foot pole. Forget about TV going anywhere near it. City owns them.”
“You sure you guys are reporters?”
This managed to register with Adam. “Journalists,” he replied, a little sharply.
“He is. I never finished, remember?”
“You don’t look like a reporter.”
She had definitely gotten Adam back into the room.
“What time is it?” he asked, with sudden inspiration.
“Eleven twenty-two.”
“Matter of fact, I’m on TV right now. Hey Pat—put on Channel Six.”
Pat looked at the stage, which was empty. The scruffy musician was now on the floor engrossed in conversation with several young women. Pat pulled a large remote control clicker from behind the bar and pointed it at the TV.
“Oh, a television reporter,” Alison noted, as if classifying a species of some obscure insect. “I don’t have one.”
Jason thought about playing off the double entendre, but it seemed too risky. The TV image slowly came on, and Adam was already speaking, with a picture of an album cover behind him. In the bar, Adam lifted his chin and looked around with a hint of triumph in his eyes, like he could turn on a TV in a bar any time of day and poof, there he’d be.
“…turned away from protest toward an examination of the soul. The result is aching, almost painful at times, but without doubt a masterpiece. Blood on the Tracks is the Dylan album fans have been waiting almost a decade for. This is Spotlight with Adam Shaker.”
“Is it really that good?” Alison asked.
“Uh-huh. Rolling Stone is going to run a special issue on it.” He turned to Jason. “They called this afternoon—asked me to write something.”
“Cool.”
Alison seemed more impressed with the Rolling Stone bit than she was by the TV. “I saw him at Newport in ’sixty-five.”
Urban Flight Page 3