Ronnie pretended that the building's security system required all his concentration.
Doug ignored Ronnie's discomfort and finished lecturing me. "To football, they're Ernest Hemingway and Vincent van Gogh all rolled up. They only do highlight films, not TV coverage or print or anything else, and they're the best. You can see ten seconds of an NFL Films' product and know it's their work. Hell, you can hear ten seconds..."
I smiled my undivided attention, although my cousin-in-law wasn't telling me anything new. Even when Ronnie first landed the job, I understood that he would be turning admiration into art, creating the polar opposite of the commercial hype I hated.
"The president should be so lucky," I remarked.
Ronnie's grateful glance included surprise, but no sympathy for our elected official's chronic public relations problems.
"Yes," Doug agreed.
Ronnie ushered us into a short narrow hallway. "Here's where we drop off our cans of film when we first come back." He gestured toward a shoulder high section of gray cubbyholes, each marked with the upcoming Sunday's games written on strips of masking tape.
"Cans of film?" Garry asked. "Don't you use videotape?"
"Nope," Ronnie replied. "Videotape looks too harsh, too realistic."
"So?" Garry pressed.
"We're after a softer, more polished effect. True, film is more expensive, more perishable, and less convenient, but we think it's worth it."
Garry's expression was dubious, pure Iowa, and Ronnie laughed as he led us toward the film processing lab, a darkroom with little to see, but apparently the largest of its kind. Here a working print would be made from the negatives, which would then be checked for scratches, dirt, edge fogging and so on. The whole area smelled strongly of chemicals.
"Nasty stuff,” Ronnie admitted. “Every time film is handled, it has to be cleaned," he explained.
Further along he took us into another office with a pink sweater hung on the back of a chair. Signed pinup posters of male athletes adorned the corkboard on the wall. Ronnie impatiently poked at a keypad at the end of the room. "This door stands open all day," he said, "so I don't usually have to deal with the daily password."
"Turkey?" Doug teased.
"Got it." Ronnie reached around to turn on the light then stood back to let us enter a tall, long room not quite big enough for basketball.
"Wow!" Garry exclaimed.
Left and right, floor to ceiling it contained blue metal shelving nearly full of fifteen-inch red, silver and blue cans of film. Miniaturized, it would have looked like poker chips on scaffolding built from an erector set.
"These are all negatives, everything we shot of every game," he said. "All carefully labeled and pretty easy to find. Only the older stuff, the silver nitrate film, is stored in an old church somewhere."
"Why?" asked my son, the nudge.
"Flammable."
Garry mouthed an O.
"We have the first football game ever filmed, too," Ronnie boasted. "Rutgers versus Princeton. Filmed in 1895 by Thomas Edison himself."
"Who won?" Doug wondered.
"No idea," Ronnie admitted. Cutting through a side door, he led us into another lengthy hall illuminated by safety lights. Most of the walls were white, but in the middle, horizontal strips of decorative wood sparkled with rows and rows of gold statuettes, their graceful arms holding an open globe aloft.
Garry's eyes bulged. "How many?"
"Emmys? A hundred and seven the last time I checked."
"And counting," Doug added.
"Any of them yours?"
"Garry!" I scolded.
"Two," Ronnie replied. "Want to see which ones?"
The two new soul-mates shambled off around a corner, leaving me alone with Doug. I took the opportunity to ask how Michelle was doing with her pregnancy.
"Pretty good," her husband answered, "all things considered. She hasn't had it easy."
As a quarterback, Doug was permitted to buck the trend and have a neck and an ordinary hairstyle. Aside from his size, the most intimidating thing about him was the intelligence in his eyes. Yet just the mention of his wife had reduced the man to putty.
"When's she due?"
"Seven weeks, give or take a couple weeks." His worry lines told me he feared she wouldn't last that long.
Not sure what else to say, I stood there in silence until Doug threw me a lifeline.
"Hard to get into that school Rip runs?"
"Not for relatives," I answered with a grateful laugh. Maybe I would include an application in with our baby present, a little joke Michelle and Doug could smile over then throw away.
Garry and Ronnie returned, and we walked through the Tele-Cine #1 room, a curved bank of monitors with a computer keyboard and a big batch of slide switches. Here the film's colors would be enhanced and the edited work print transferred to video tape.
"Hey, Gin," Ronnie had whispered as he showed us out the opposite door. "Didn't you sort of solve a murder a month or two ago?"
How on earth would he know that? Then it hit me. He was a relative, therefore Cynthia had access to him. My mother, The Mouth, had been bragging about me again.
In an attempt to keep a certain portion of my sleuthing activities to myself, I said, "Not exactly."
"But..." Ronnie sputtered. "That dog bite thing. I thought..."
"No," I lied with conviction. "That wasn't me."
Ronnie scratched behind his ear, leaving a clump of medium-brown hair poking out like a hook.
We had arrived outside the room where Ronnie told us the 'lower thirds' were added. "That's the graphics showing the name of a speaker, or the score..."
"Next to the picture of the helmets?" Garry was indeed tuned in, absorbing like a high-priced paper towel.
"You didn't...?" my cousin quizzed me out of the side of his mouth.
"No." I had solved the crime, of course, but denial seemed to be the only way of undoing my mother's damage. If it were up to Cynthia, I'd be up on a shelf holding the world in my hands like one of those Emmys.
Ronnie gave an exasperated little sigh and adjusted his volume back to tour-guide level. "We use several different tracks of sound–dialogue, ambient sound, music, narration, sound effects, and so on; and we fade each one in and out however we want." This time we were viewing a room with several banks of NASA-like switches and a large television monitor high up on the wall.
"You tape the sound separately?" Doug inquired.
"Yes. The camera only has film in it. The soundman carries a DAT–digital audio tape–machine, and I'm sure you've noticed the boom mikes–the fuzzy ones on long poles. Also, we occasionally wire coaches and certain players. That's how we get the calls on the field, the sound of the hits," he turned toward Doug, "things you guys say to each other on the sidelines. Neat stuff."
We came to the end of a hall. "Here's one of the places we mix the sound...using machines from the CMR," Ronnie told us, opening yet another door.
CMR stood for Central Machine Room, which was a long rectangle, its side walls filled with boxes with buttons and monitors and wires. "This is where the final edits really bring the shows together." Technicians also worked there with outside customers who were getting ads done.
"What about the Philadelphia Flower Show?" Ronnie quizzed me while Garry ran his finger along a chest high table. "I suppose you had nothing to do with that?"
He alluded to the murder of my mother's friend, Iffy Bigelow, but the way he phrased the question allowed me to say, "Nope. Not me."
Ronnie scrunched up his nose and squinted his eyes. "You're bullshitting me," he whispered, after checking that Garry wasn't near enough to hear.
"Moi?" I gave him a dainty blink.
My cousin responded with a have-it-your-way glance. Then he knocked his knuckles against a door marked, "Engineering."
"We repair our own video equipment," lectured Ronnie the Guide. "In fact we have shops to fix anything we use. Even a wood shop to build sets for our stud
io."
We also passed a few rooms containing AVIDs, machines that allowed film editors to cut and paste by way of computer commands. "Word processing for film," Ronnie called it. "Greatest thing since football."
Upstairs, we found a door marked "MIDI Room," named after the computer program the in-house composers used to write music.
"Garry," Ronnie shepherded my son into a modest-sized theater. "This part is pretty amazing." He explained about hired TV watchers Ronnie referred to as "kids" who sat across the front row viewing all the Sunday NFL games by satellite. Each with their own TV, they logged the highlights as they happened. "Their selections are edited into one-minute highlight packages that get transmitted back to the stadiums and shown to the crowd."
"Wow!" Garry exclaimed, his eyes wide with awe.
At other times the theater would be used to screen the finished products, such as the latest Super Bowl film headed for the Football Hall of Fame.
Ronnie joined me back in the doorway. "Seriously, Gin," he whispered. "You can tell me."
I tilted my chin toward my son. "Not now I can't."
"Oh. Gotcha. Little pitchers have big ears."
"What if the electricity goes out?" the little pitcher piped up.
"We have an uninterrupted power supply, a UPS," Ronnie answered patiently.
"What about if it rains or snows real bad on game day?"
"We live for bad weather."
"Why?"
"Because that's when we get our best stuff, like icicles on the goalposts, steam coming off a bald head, or maybe rain pouring down the stadium steps like a waterfall." Visual stories, the pictures that were worth a thousand words.
"You ever get sued for filming somebody who didn't want to be filmed?" I wondered aloud.
Ronnie nodded for the professional player to answer that one.
"Our contracts state that every move we make on the field is fair game."
We passed by another video library, bar-coded and carefully guarded by a librarian who helped producers find whatever they needed for whatever piece they were putting together.
The master vault was especially memorable to me. Several wide white metal shelves were crowded tight together with only one adjustable gap large enough for a man to walk through.
Ronnie gestured toward a shiny black handle protruding from a ten-inch white wheel at the end of the nearest shelf. "Try turning that," he challenged Garry.
My skinny eleven-year-old prepared himself to set to, but to his astonishment the twenty-foot long shelf loaded with tapes moved with ease.
"One pound of pressure can move nine hundred pounds of weight," we were told.
Yet another room stored and duplicated the audio tapes for each game.
Back downstairs we saw the "Green Room," the lounge for the visiting "talent"–the host and guests from NFL Films' three regular weekly shows, or celebrities there for the industrial or rock videos that were the mainstay of the company during the off season.
Ronnie named a few of the current hit bands he had worked with personally, and Garry's eyes took over his whole face. "Wait till I tell Chelsea. She'll go bonkers."
"What's with Elvis?" I finally asked. Collages of Elvis Presley photos seemed to be everywhere.
"Steve Sabol," my cousin answered. "His father was founder of the company, and he runs it now. Steve's the big Elvis fan."
"Why?" Garry again.
Ronnie shrugged. "Elvis's favorite sport was football."
Garry left it at that, but my own imagination connected the dots.
Elvis had possessed an astonishing charisma. He was, and continued to be, a larger than life phenomenon. There would never be another icon of popular culture like him. But, I realized, the same could be said of Jim Brown or Dick Butkus. Looking closely at one of the oval, decoupage tributes to Elvis, I realized that it illustrated the wonderfully personal connection between pro football and NFL Films perhaps better than anything else I had seen.
Further along the hallway an in-house fifties style diner featuring plenty of chrome over black and white tile furthered the theme.
"Breakfast, lunch, and dinner on Sundays. Breakfast and lunch Mondays, of course. Dinner Tuesdays and Thursdays. We've got beds and lockers available here, too."
Plus their own travel agency and a shipping department that handled five hundred packages a day.
"Overwhelming," I decided.
"Want to see my building?" Ronnie asked.
"There's more?"
We toured Ronnie's video domain politely, but I was on technical overload. Only Garry remained jazzed and wide-eyed.
When Doug's stomach growled audibly, he asked whether Ronnie had caught the noise on tape.
Soon afterward we piled back into Ronnie's Audi and returned to Aunt Harriet's, all of us weary from hunger.
Before we went inside Garry pulled me aside. "I'm going to try it, Mom," he announced.
"What?" I asked.
"I'm going to film the ultimate frisbee game they play Sunday mornings at Bryn Derwyn. What do you think?"
"Go for it," I said. The puzzle of what my son would grow up to be would remain unanswered for another decade or more, but this made for a most interesting start.
Aunt Harriet's house finally passed the sniff test. Turkey and jokes and old family stories would soon circulate around the table.
And later, over coffee in the kitchen, I would tell Ronnie whatever he wanted to know.
"Everybody out," the limousine driver joked, for I was the only passenger he had. Glancing out the window I noticed a bas-relief blue cross next to the words "Virginia Beach General Hospital" on the portico of the building's main entrance. Reading signs usually centered and reassured me, but this trip was too sudden and unexpected. For a second I couldn't believe what I read.
My driver helped me to the curb with my luggage and accepted his fee and a tip with a grunt. I let out a plume of cold breath as the building's doors slid aside for me to enter.
Like all hospitals, the lobby ambience projected a cool sterility. And as usual, I felt as if I were defiling a private sanctuary that welcomed only health-care professionals and their patients.
I hefted my travel gear over to the information desk and asked the receptionist the easy question: Where would I find my cousin, Michelle?
The answer to the difficult one–what I was really doing there–I would have to work out for myself.
Chapter 5
MICHELLE WORE a pale blue hospital gown and a lavender cable-knit cardigan. A stiff white sheet and a flannel blanket covered her bulging lap. When I stepped into her private hospital room, she set her paperback aside and pushed her glasses back in place.
"Gin!" she greeted me with weary cheerfulness. "Pardon me if I don't get up." I noticed then that she was attached to a monitor.
"How you feelin'?" I asked.
"Scared shitless. How about you?"
"Not bad," I replied neutrally. "Actually I'm hungry."
"I'd offer you something, but..."
"But you're already eating for two."
A tear slipped down her cheek.
"Hey," I said, sliding my rump onto the bed beside her and stroking her arm with my hand. "Kewpie's going to be fine. So are you." Doug had jokingly named their unborn baby "QB," for quarterback, his position with the Tomcats. Michelle teased him by slurring the name into Kewpie, as in Kewpie Doll, to remind him the child could also be a girl. My use of her pet name made her laugh, but not for long.
"What does your doctor say?" I asked.
Michelle shrugged. "I'm stabilized now, but, but he's making me stay another day or so just in case. He thinks I do too much when I'm home."
"Do you?"
Another shrug. "I never thought so."
With hospital beds costing so dearly these days, my guess was that Michelle's doctor worried about another emergency, enough to keep her near medical help until he believed her crisis to be past.
Yet, if there was any truth to his exc
use about her overdoing it, he had provided me with plenty of reason to be there. If I could relieve Michelle in any way that would help her carry the baby longer, my trip would be more than worthwhile. From my own experience and female common knowledge, I realized that every day a premature birth could be delayed increased the chances of the child's survival and decreased the possibility of any number of frightening complications.
Yet when Ronnie phoned, he had pitched me with other, more pointed arguments. "They need you, Gin," said he. "You're exactly the person for the job. Nobody else in the family has done what you've done."
"I'm sorry, Gin," Michelle protested now. "You have enough to do without coming down here. Ronnie..."
"Ronnie knew if he told me what was going on, I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. Besides, you and I just started catching up on Thanksgiving, and now we can do it right."
Ronnie and I had been the tight ones when we were young. Born when we were eight, Michelle was ten when we were eighteen, a staggering difference back then and the reason I didn't know her well. My loss, I realized, a sentiment which she discerned with a flattered smile.
She had a marvelously expressive face, one that invited you to join her every emotion. On Thanksgiving I had noticed Doug flicking his eyes toward her every so often, like someone habitually touching a new wedding ring to make certain it was still there. I realized now he had been monitoring how she felt and taking his cue from her.
Deliberately choosing a harmless conversational path, I referred to our Thanksgiving dinner gossip. "I couldn't believe you never heard some of those family stories."
"Grandpop Siddons!" Michelle widened her eyes and nodded. An advance man for the circus, the Siddons' storybook contained many of the old man's escapades. A favorite was that he threw his uncomfortable false teeth into the Grand Canyon and never wore teeth again.
"And Fanny Topliss," I reflected. "That was the first I heard about her." About eight p.m., nearly sated with dry turkey and wet stuffing, we had lingered over our cold, store-bought mince pie listening to my mother. The best of the tales was about a widowed aunt named Fanny Topliss, who lived next to her brother and loved to tease him about his pipe. One day when Fanny was hanging bedclothes out a window, she caught a whiff of tobacco smoke and shouted, "I smell a man!" in a booming voice. By the time she got downstairs all she could see were the heels of a door-to-door salesman sprinting down the road.
A Score to Settle Page 3