Nice Girls Finish Last

by Sparkle Hayter

  A skeptical murmur swept the room. True, our founder, Georgia Jack Jackson, had installed Star Trek airlock doors leading into and out of the broadcast facilities, as well as a vast system of video surveillance cameras, all of which gave the place a combination biosphere-prison farm atmosphere.

  Despite this, there had been a number of security breaches and other disturbing incidents that put everyone a bit on edge. First, shortly after the new security force came aboard, someone had taken advantage of the transition to swipe a bunch of purses, including mine. Our TV psychologist, Solange Stevenson, had been menaced by an elderly Kansas widower who showed up at ANN, waved an unloaded hunting rifle, and complained that Solange was sending him secret messages (on that special frequency they shared) accusing him of homosexuality. Someone had broken into anchorwoman Bianca de Woody’s dressing room and stolen her wig, two pairs of her shoes, and her spare underwear. And Kerwin Shutz, ANN’s right-wing talk-show host, had been getting these perplexing phone calls that sounded distinctly like someone farting for about a minute before hanging up.

  (Contrary to a popular rumor, I did not make those calls.)

  As if that weren’t bad enough, ANN’s senior war correspondent, Reb “Rambo” Ryan, recently “grounded” after a disturbing incident in Haiti, claimed someone had taken a potshot at him as he was walking down Eighty-fourth Street.

  Pete couldn’t do much about that, but we all felt he could do more about building security, which was why the on-air “Talent” had got together and demanded this meeting. The death of the doctor the night before gave it added urgency.

  Pete and his personally assembled army of fifty company cops marked the third step in the year-long fortification. Keeping nutty fans and nutty terrorists out, not to mention busting cigarette sneaks who defied the company-wide ban on smoking, was a tough job.

  It was the opinion of the masses that Pete was not up to it. Before Pete took over our security a few months earlier, he had done bodyguard and security work for a few celebrities in Hollywood, including Georgia Jack when Jack was in LA trying to buy another movie studio.

  Jack had hired Pete capriciously. Jack did that sometimes. Met someone at a cocktail party, got drunk with him, and the next thing you know, he’s head of security, or of the Documentary unit, or, in the case of my boss, Jerry Spurdle, of the Special Reports unit. Jack stood by his capricious hires to the bitter end, too damn proud to admit to making mistakes. That meant we were stuck with Pete for a long time.

  So Pete’s reassurances rang hollow.

  “We all have to be aware and keep an eye out for each other. If you see anyone suspicious lurking around, you have to let us know immediately. Hector, get the lights,” Pete said, and one of Pete’s deputies, the one we knew as Barney Fife, flicked the switch.

  What followed was a slide show of some of our most dangerous known fans. Most of these we knew by name, like Donald Forcus, an ex-con who was carrying a very big torch for Bianca de Woody (bad luck, him being an arsonist and all). Donald had what my Aunt Maureen would call an “unfortunate” face, reminiscent of a cartoon duck, which made his given name all the cruder.

  Also easily recognizable was Hank, the fan who was stalking Dillon Flinder. Hank was an unemployed drifter who had lost a series of jobs because he would only walk backward.

  “How does he stalk you?” I whispered to Dillon. “With a mirror? Or does he just walk backward until he bumps into you?”

  “I’ll see Hank coming a mile away,” Flinder conceded. “By the way, I hear you’re going out with Fenn Corker when he conies to town.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I don’t remember. Is it true?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why, Robin? He’s such an ass. Yet you won’t go out with me.”

  “I know too much about you, Dillon,” I said.

  Dillon was known for his admitted sexual adventures with large fleshy fruits, and it was just too weird to me, dating a man who had dated a watermelon.

  After the slides and a short film on self-defense, the lights came up and Pete went to the blackboard and began writing platitudes down for us. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Be alert!

  “Better safe than sorry,” he said about six times during his little lecture. Afterward, he asked for questions and I was tempted to put up my hand and say, “Duh, is it better to be safe? Or sorry?”

  What a waste of time this was, not that I had anything against wasting time. The more time I spent in this boring meeting, the less I spent with my boss, Jerry Spurdle, who was living proof that the people inside television are just about as nutty as those outside television, maybe more so.

  Some of the biggest nuts in the business were, in fact, inside this very room. In the front row, Sawyer Lash, fresh off his overnight shift, was nodding earnestly at Pete’s every salient point and taking notes. Known as the network’s dumbest anchorman and biggest goody-goody, Sawyer’s star had risen for a while during our Time of Troubles at ANN a year earlier. But it had fallen again quickly, and now he was back in the netherworld of overnight news updates, where viewers were less likely to notice if he confused Liberian rebels with librarian rebels.

  A few weeks earlier, someone had sent Sawyer a sick gift— a dead sparrow in a plastic hosiery egg. And that was from someone who claimed to like him.

  Just in front of Dillon and me, Dave Kona was talking softly to Solange Stevenson. Solange was a huge security headache, not only because as a TV psychologist she attracted a deeply disturbed viewership, but also because she actually invited clearly insane people onto her TV show, with bad results on more than one occasion. Like the time she reunited all those adopted people with their birth parents on her show and a fistfight broke out. Or the time two rival girlfriends of an imprisoned serial killer got into a hair-pulling catfight on the show and gave Solange a bloody nose when she tried to intervene.

  As for Dave Kona, he was just twenty-three, hadn’t been on air long, and so hadn’t really had time to attract a cadre of deranged fans.

  Too bad. The supercilious pip-squeak was after my job.

  “When I was guarding Barbra . . . ,” Pete said, segueing into one of his war stories.

  My attention wandered further. Pete’s other deputy, Franco, had just come into the conference room and was hulking by the door. He was bigger and stronger than Hector, but he didn’t inspire much confidence either. Franco was famous for getting lost while on patrol.

  I’d never noticed it before, but Franco sure had a lot of hair in his ears. Big tufts of brown hair stuck out of his ears. I’d never seen that much hair in someone’s ears before. Where did it come from? It looked like it was growing out of his brain. His head must be full of hair, I decided. I hadn’t noticed his hairy ears before because he’d worn his hair over his ears, apparently for a reason. But Pete had ordered haircuts for all the company cops the day before and Franco, being a good Boy Scout, complied.

  Maybe he didn’t get his hair cut, I thought. Maybe he just grabbed on to those tufts and pulled his hair down through his ears.

  “Are you paying attention, Robin?” Pete asked suddenly, and I jerked my head and nodded guiltily. “We all have to be alert.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “These common household items can aid in your self-defense,” Pete said, listing a fine-toothed comb (run tooth-side under an assailant’s nose, it could slice right through the septum and cause a massive nose bleed), an umbrella, and a can of hair spray.

  Kid stuff. I have a self-defense system that makes the DEW line look like a spite fence. In addition to the poison ivy I grow in my window boxes as a kind of burglary disincentive program, I keep a bottle of cayenne-spiked cologne, an automatic umbrella, and a number of small weaponlike appliances around, such as an Epilady hair removal system and a high-velocity glue gun with two settings, stream and spray, so I could give an attacker a face full of hot glue at ten feet. This last marked an escalation of the arms race for me. I wasn’t ready t
o join the masses and get a real gun.

  “Be careful,” Pete said, dismissing us.

  Wish I’d thought of that.

  “Did you hear about the murder on the twenty-seventh floor?” Louis Levin asked me as I passed through the giant human pinball game that is the ANN newsroom. I was on my way to Special Reports.

  Louis, a disgruntled news producer, was sitting in his wheel-chair at the afternoon producer pod, a stationary island amid streams of people carrying armfuls of videotapes and news copy, pencils clenched in their teeth, rushing to get the news on the air.

  “Yeah, I heard. I just came from the security meeting.”

  “What was the mood of the room?”

  “Scared,” I said.

  “You know who’s really scared? Reb Ryan. He’s been on a tear about this murder for the last hour,” Louis said. “He thinks he’s a sitting duck here.”

  “I wouldn’t believe anything he said.”

  “Well, Reb’s crazy, but he has a point,” Louis said. “If someone has been able to get in to kill a gynecologist, what’s to prevent a crazy fan from getting in to shoot an anchorman, or a methodical terrorist group from getting in and taking over a broadcast beamed around the planet?”

  “Don’t say that too loud. You know management is looking for ways to boost our ratings.”

  I didn’t tell him that I was one of Kanengiser’s patients, or near-patients. Louis ran the oldest established permanent floating rumor file in New York—a locked file known as Radio Free Babylon, with constantly changing passwords— which moved around within the ANN computer system. Why invite controversy and sick jokes?

  I changed the subject. “Any news from the executive suite?”

  “Not yet,” he said, as an intern handed him some wire copy. He scanned it quickly and then said, “The meetings are very hush-hush.”

  “Louis, here’s the AOA on the new school prayer bill,” an edit assistant said, handing Louis a tape.

  (AOA stands for “Any Old Asshole,” known in more polite circles as MOS, “Man on the Street.”)

  Louis took the tape and popped it into the monitor on his pod while talking both to the edit assistant and to me. He has the amazing ability to conduct two or three conversations simultaneously without losing the narrative thread of any of them.

  “My best source is on the job, though,” Louis said, winking at me. Louis didn’t know it, but his best source was my best source, Phil the omnipotent janitor. Louis didn’t have any new information because Phil had been out with flu the day before.

  The phone rang on Louis’s desk. “I’m listenin’,” he said when he answered. “No. Haven’t seen her.”

  He hung up and turned to me. “That was Jerry. He wanted to know if you were in the newsroom. I lied.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Who’da thunk Jerry Spurdle would become such a big success? Great ratings, big moneymaker, and on top of everything else, he won that ACE award. Bet he really has a swelled head. How is it, working with him these days?” Louis asked.

  “Oh ... you know.”

  Louis was goading me, expecting me to say something like, “He’s more fun than a flesh-eating virus.” But I clammed up. If you can’t say something nice and all that. Anything I said about Jerry was bound to end up in the rumor file, and I didn’t need the trouble because, as you know, my trouble-making days were over.

  Louis gave me a sad look and shook his head.

  “You know,” he said, “Jerry’s been bragging that he broke Robin Hudson, the rogue filly.”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” I said.

  “He says, like all women, you can be subdued by a strong hand, metaphorically speaking. I dunno, Robin. You gotta do what you gotta do, but your reputation is suffering with the troops. They think you’ve sold out to that sleazebag.”

  “Why do I have to hassle with Jerry? The job’s being done without me. Tamayo drives him nuts and I can concentrate on my work. Besides, Dean Wormer has me on double-secret probation. Another mess-up and I could be working the cash register in the cafeteria for the duration of my contract.”

  “You were the rogue filly,” Louis said, wistfully.

  The Rogue Filly. I think he knew I’d like the sound of that.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Special Reports offices are housed in an extraneous set of men’s and ladies’ rooms a couple of hallways off the newsroom. Although the swinging bathroom door from the outer office to the hallway has been replaced, we still have tiny, ceramic bathroom tiles on the floor and the suite retains a certain residual bathroom ambience, especially in the afternoon, when the sun shines through the narrow, opaque glass windows placed high in the wall.

  As the network’s number-two moneymaker, behind Kerwin Shutz, Jerry Spurdle could have had the plushest offices in the building. But he was known as much for his low overhead as for his high advertising revenues. Having a spartan, utilitarian office was part of his image, one especially appreciated by ANN president George Dunbar, a man who expected his employees to provide their own pens and paper clips and once proposed letting corporations sponsor aircraft carriers, space shuttles, and national parks to reduce the deficit. How proud our fighting boys and girls would be, shipping off to war on the battleship Pepsodent.

  “There’s tobacco in the shredder,” Jerry was screaming at our associate producer, Tamayo Scheinman, when I walked in.

  “I’m quitting smoking,” Tamayo said, as she says three or four times a week. I noticed she had a nicotine patch on her arm. “I shredded my cigarettes so I couldn’t smoke them.”

  Tamayo came from Japan, where she grew up with dual citizenship, daughter of an American man and a Japanese woman. While her American father was a devoted Japano-phile, Tamayo loved all things American, especially unfiltered Camels.

  Unfortunately for her, ANN and its affiliated networks under the Jackson Broadcasting umbrella, like many other companies, had become completely nonsmoking, and had banned smoking for employees even outside of work. As you can imagine, this just added to the jolly newsroom atmosphere.

  So when they transferred Tamayo from the Tokyo bureau, they made her sign a pledge that she would quit smoking by the end of her three-month probationary period. She had ten days to go.

  “Guten Morgen, Robin,” Jerry said to me. He was studying German.

  “Good morning.”

  Tamayo handed me a message and left me to absorb Jerry’s loathsomeness singlehanded.

  “You look like you put on a little weight, Robin,” Jerry said, walking around me to size me up. “You know that’s a sin in television.”

  One of Jerry’s favorite old-style sexist ways to cut a woman down to size was to criticize her physical appearance. Ever since I had begun trying to adapt and mature and behave myself, Jerry had been milking it for all he could. He knew he could say anything to me and I would say nothing nasty back to him. So I couldn’t, for example, point out to Jerry that he was pale, soft, and somewhat overweight and dressed like an aide in the Nixon White House. In fact, he looked like a Nixon White House aide who had swallowed another Nixon White House aide whole. Claire, who used to work with me in Special Reports, called Jerry a “smug, dissipated white boy” with an ego so big you could tie a rope to it and fly it in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. But Claire could talk that way. She was a rising general-assignment reporter who’d been trying out in Washington and was expected to be offered a full-time job there in the reshuffle. I, on the other hand, had to be a good girl.

  So I just smiled.

  “Gotta watch out. Lose your looks in this business and ...” He made a slashing motion across his neck.

  What an asshole. Quite honestly, losing my looks is the least of my worries. I am a five-nine, buxom, good-looking redhead, at least I think I am, and if you think you are, it’s as good as true. Not to brag about it, because believe me, beauty can be a curse. I know it’s not the sort of thing one should complain about, but you see, I’m also very cl
umsy. My looks draw attention to me, so that many more people are watching me when the spike heel buckles under me in a restaurant and I accidentally mow down a passing salad girl, who sends a giant bowl of iceberg lettuce flying, raining greens on a whole section of diners.

  This is not a hypothetical example. This is my karma, beauty without grace. I am Jerry Lewis’s nutty professor . . . in the body of Rita Hayworth.

  “You need a haircut too. But that isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about. Come into my office,” Jerry said.

  I followed him.

  “Have a seat,” he said, waving me in and slamming the door so the glass walls of his cubicle shook. “We’re going to shelve the Congressman Dreyer story.”

  No argument here, I thought, since there wasn’t any story as far as I was concerned. Jerry had it on “good information” that Dreyer, a staunch proponent of morality and traditional family values, was having an affair with his secretary, and was holed up with her somewhere in Manhattan. But when I looked into it, I couldn’t find anything to substantiate the story. Despite the fact that I despised Dreyer’s politics and would have loved to have proven him a hypocrite, I learned nothing except good things. He spent a lot of time with his family, he worked hard, and colleagues past and present said his word was his bond. All we had to go on was that his wife, an antiques collector, had gone to Belgium on a buying trip, the kids were with her parents, and the congressman had gone off on some hush-hush fact-finding trip with his secretary and personal assistant, Lizbeth Greyfarm.

  Personally, I think Jerry wanted to fry Dreyer because Dreyer was rigidly anti-porn and anti-strip club, and Jerry was rigidly pro-porn and pro-strip club.

  “I still think there’s a story there,” Jerry said. “But you’re unable to find it for some reason. And we need a story for next Monday night’s slot, thanks to your death series bombing out, which threw the whole Special Reports sked out of whack for the year.”

  “There’s that blind tap-dancing troupe,” I began.