Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  “Let’s boogie,” Featherstone says to George, and then to the dogs, “Avanti!”

  “ ‘Sort of’?”

  Lizzie turns down La Cienega toward the airport. George has asked if they had a good time with Buddy.

  “Yeah. It’s always vaguely depressing for me to talk to him.”

  Yes! George thinks. Okay!

  “Maybe we should’ve taken the freeway,” she says, slowing down for traffic. “I do think Max and LuLu had fun with Buddy. They got to sit on his client’s horse.”

  “Daddy,” Louisa says, “did you know that if a horse gets sick? They just kill it.”

  “And,” Lizzie continues, “I think it was interesting for Sarah to see Buddy.”

  “He’s kind of a cretin,” says Sarah from the backseat.

  “She’s saying that,” Max explains to George, “because when Buddy asked when I’ll turn ten and I said ‘Saturday, April eighth,’ he said, ‘Wow, I couldn’t tell you what date next Saturday is.’ ”

  George is glad his children have visited Buddy Ramo.

  “Timothy’s house is in Bel Air?” Lizzie says. “I thought he said something on Mose’s jet about Los Feliz.”

  “His girlfriend Ng’s studio is in Los Feliz,” George says.

  “And what does Ng do in her studio?”

  “Keeps a pet gibbon and ‘makes dance pieces.’ And does her homework, I guess.” But George wants to get back to the very promising Buddy Ramo discussion. “What was so depressing about Buddy?” he asks carefully, evenly, not quite fake-sensitively—as if he really cares about the well-being of the has-been pretty-boy who impregnated his wife fifteen years ago—but definitely glee-free.

  “Nothing. He’s not depressing. His life is so simple. He’s so happy. It’s really kind of … I don’t know. Beautiful. He lives in some two-room cedar pavilion he designed and built himself up near Point Dume. He makes me feel like we’re doing something wrong.”

  Oh, hell. On a bad day, Buddy has always looked like Jeff Bridges or Kurt Russell on a good day, and now he’s achieved some kind of Zen mastery as well. Making no-account stupidity look like bliss: impressive. Even when George feels blissful, he never radiates a glow of inner peace or smiles infectiously—another reason he was not a very good hippie in the seventies.

  “Oh, wow.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Oh, honey,” George says, “come on. It’s just so California. He’s a caricature.”

  “Mommy, why did he call you ‘my Pally gally’?” Louisa asks. “And is that good or bad?”

  George waits for the answer, too.

  “The high school I went to was called Pally,” Lizzie tells her, and then says to George, “You don’t have to tell me about California caricatures. I’m just telling you, I felt jealous. It tasted awfully real to me. And I’ve got to say, it tasted pretty good.”

  George doesn’t reply. It tasted good? That’s an intimate verb, tasted. Suddenly a knot of ethical anxiety relaxes: Featherstone told him, over whipped mochaccinos brûlée in his rock garden this morning, that Mose is “seriously kicking the tires” of TK Corporation, Penn McNabb’s internet video software company, as a possible acquisition. “Still a ways to go before we open our kimono, but Harold’s definitely aroused.” George knows, strictly speaking, that he shouldn’t pass this news along to Lizzie, but he has assumed this morning that he will tell her anyway, because she is his wife and it’s good gossip. Right at this moment, however, George feels rigorously committed to the rules of fiduciary confidentiality.

  “Buddy has the whole first sentence of The Hobbit tattooed on his chest,” Max says. “In big fairy-tale-book letters. It’s awesome.”

  “So I’ve heard,” George says. Seconds pass. “I’m surprised he hasn’t updated himself, and tattooed The Celestine Prophecy on his butt.”

  LuLu giggles. “Daddy said ‘butt’!”

  “Uneducated people can have deep feelings,” Lizzie says.

  George’s phone vibrates in his shirt pocket.

  “You’re right.” He grabs his phone. “Maybe you could have that needlepointed on a saddle blanket for him,” George says, regretting the line even as he utters it. “Hello? Hi, Em. On the way to the airport. Uh-huh. Why? Really? You really think I need to be there? I mean, we’re five minutes from LAX right now, on our way out.” He’s looking at Lizzie, who now looks over at him. “Oh, sheesh. Whose idea was that? Yeah, sure. Yeah. What, so he can personally manage the California primary coverage? Bullshit. According to whom? Well, Harold is probably right about that. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Bye, Em.”

  “What?”

  “Mose wants Emily and me to spend Tuesday explaining Real Time to everyone out here. Timothy’s people, the ad sales guys. According to Emily, according to Timothy, Harold said, ‘If you want to go out of the box, first you have to sell it in-house.’ ”

  “And Emily can’t do that alone?”

  “Barry Stengel from News just happens to be flying out here tomorrow. For the primary. He’s already trying to poison the well against us.” George realizes he’s never told Lizzie about eavesdropping on the phone conversation between Featherstone and Stengel the other day. And he’s not going to tell her now, in front of the kids. “Emily can’t go up against Stengel by herself. I’ve got to be there.”

  Lizzie sighs. “Whatever.”

  “So,” George says, “I guess I’ll drop you guys off at the airport and fly home Tuesday night.”

  “This sort of sucks,” Lizzie says.

  “You’re telling me. We go back into production this week.”

  “You’re not coming on the airplane with us, Daddy?”

  He turns around. “No, honey, I guess not.”

  “That’s bad, but it’s also good,” Louisa says. “Because if our plane crashes? You can be alive to hunt for the pieces of us.”

  Beverly Hills, Sunday afternoon, family eight miles over Iowa, nowhere he has to go, nothing he must do. Such scrumptious sloth! The TV is, of course, on. He’s lying on the half-made king-size bed, naked. He has already finished a little six-dollar bag of minibar blue corn chips, half a five-dollar eight-ounce Evian, and six minutes of Spectravision. (Just as video pornography is more pornographic than filmed pornography ever could be, pornography watched in daylight is almost too pornographic to enjoy. Almost. But maybe, it occurs to George, he’s just old–fashioned.) He has dumped a fourteen-dollar jar of minibar macadamias onto one of the four huge, plump pillows, and he swigs a nine-dollar minibar Heineken. He’s discovered Channel 53, something called the Chopper Channel. It runs nothing but news shot from helicopters, all aerial panning all the time—a high-speed police chase in Orange County and a five-alarm fire in downtown San Diego and an overturned tractor-trailer on the 10, but also the Dublin Marathon, a herd of wild mustangs in Montana, a five-hundred-acre oil spill in the North Sea, surprised rock climbers in Yosemite, guerillas cowering in the helicopter’s backdraft somewhere south of Oaxaca, live and taped, from southern California and the world. The Chopper Channel! George isn’t sure if it’s insane, or brilliant, or both. So many things today are both. The Americas Cup training race off Catalina is losing him, though, and the third time he hears Morgan Freeman giving the channel ID slogan—“The big picture, from the air, on the air, for you”—he flicks off the TV. This set, however, is a kind he’s read about: push TV. It can’t be turned off. Pressing the off button only switches the set into a low-power mode, during which advertising copy appears noiselessly on the screen. George hops out of bed, idly fluffs his pubic hair and ruffles his testicles, and, wandering toward the desk, shoves the door of the TV cabinet shut with his elbow so he won’t have to look at the flashing words WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO SEE YOUR MESSAGE HERE? YOU CAN! alternating every ten seconds with NOT JUST THE FINEST HOTEL IN LAS VEGAS. THE MOST SPLENDID EXPERIENCE ON EARTH. THE VENETIAN.

  He phones Iris at home and, blessedly, gets her machine. “Hi, Iris, it’s George. Lizzie and the kids are flying back, but I’m st
aying in L.A. for meetings in Burbank on Tuesday. First, I need a reservation Tuesday on an afternoon flight back to JFK. Or Newark. Second, I need to fly to Las Vegas tomorrow afternoon, returning to LAX first thing Tuesday morning. And a room in Vegas tomorrow night. At the, um, the Venetian, I guess. Third, you need to get all my Real Time files there, in Las Vegas, by tomorrow night. Okay? By courier or whatever. Tomorrow. Thanks. Bye.”

  This morning the room had been theirs, George and Lizzie’s, a comforting fifty-fifty mingle of his scent (espresso) and hers (lavender), her detritus (Chinese vitamins, jade earrings, a fax from Nancy McNabb, loose tampons that inevitably remind George of the rubber bullets he picked up off the street one night in Bethlehem as souvenirs of the intifada) and his detritus (paragraphs torn from newspapers and magazines, NARCS faxes, spare lithium ion batteries for the fake driving hand, inside-out black socks on the floor, which always look like husks left to rot after the fruits have been extracted). Now it’s just his—his Post-it stuck to the lamp, his wads of fives and ones in the armchair, his room-service tray and salad leavings, his damp towel on the couch, his warm PowerBook G3 on the desk.

  Their PowerBook, technically, but he uses it more. Given her profession, Lizzie is only desultorily wired, aside from e-mail indifferent to computers in her personal life. George finds this charming. Neither of them fully embraces the web lifestyle. If you’re a reporter who requires many disparate bits of information quickly, fine. Or a trader in stocks or bonds or currencies who really does need prices and news this very instant. Or if you’re a person in the thrall of a cult or pathology or hobby, or some lonely loser who can’t make friends the ordinary ways. Or a curious child. But otherwise, what is so compelling about the web? Instant access, at any time of day or night, to ten million corporate brochures, card catalogues, and strangers’ queer obsessions?

  “But you just said it, sweetheart,” George told her the night in 1994 she was trying to convince herself not to go to work for Rupert Murdoch’s new online service. “You just hit on exactly why this World Wide Web”—the phrase World Wide Web already sounds as antique as motorcar or aeroplane—“really will work.”

  “Because it’s a tewwible tongue twister?” Lizzie said.

  “Because most Americans are in the thrall of some cult or pathology or hobby. Or don’t have any friends because they live in some ten-minute-old suburb in the middle of a cornfield or desert and spend all their spare time commuting and watching TV and looking at catalogues. Highways made the suburbs happen. The suburbs will make your World Wide Web happen.” She took the Murdoch job the next day. (And lost it a year later when the business had its plug pulled.)

  Similarly, George has very little personal interest in prime-time television. Except for shows he produces and shows that compete directly with shows he produces, he literally has to force himself to watch TV at home. As a child, he watched his full American ration and then some, thirty-five or forty hours a week. Eating thickly frosted cookies, reading Tom Swift, doing homework, talking by walkie-talkie to his friend Tuggy Masterson two houses down or by phone to Jodie Eliason, building plastic models of military vehicles from the past and the distant future, jerking off—almost nothing George did as a child wasn’t done while watching TV. (“That’s why men multitask so much better than women,” Lizzie concluded from George’s description of his all-TV childhood. “That’s why they like looking at Bloomberg screens with seventeen different data streams. You’ve all been in training for this since you were boys.”) But in adolescence his TV gluttony was slaked, or suppressed, or desublimated. As an adult, George hasn’t watched more than a minute of most series on television—a disengagement that would have been simply unimaginable when he was young. He’s never admitted to anyone at work that the final episode of Seinfeld was the first time he watched the show. The night he had the idea for NARCS, half drunk, inventing on the spur of the moment, seated next to Emily at a dinner party, he had to ask Lizzie on the way home if his idea for Drug War (as he called it then) sounded too similar to NYPD Blue or Homicide, since he had never seen either show.

  “What do you mean, ‘too similar’?” George remembers Lizzie saying in a taxi hurtling in the rain down Fifth Avenue. “All TV shows are like other TV shows. Fuck, George, just for having a police show with cool music and a woman commander and a virtuous cop who smokes pot you’ll get credit for being revolutionary. Make it good too, and you’ll be home free.”

  George catches himself, and smiles: he has been standing for two minutes in front of his big window overlooking the hotel’s parking area, naked, combing through his pubic hair with his hand, staring at the top of a browned palm tree on Sunset, in full view of a pair of parking attendants sharing a cigarette. He grabs the curtain closed. Emily won’t be here for two hours to pick him up for Hank Saddler’s charity cocktail party. He’ll read the new script they e-mailed him from New York yesterday. The PowerBook is in sleep mode, which is more properly eyes-closed-pretending-to-sleep mode, since the computer springs instantly to full wakefulness the moment he touches it. Barely but precisely tickling a rectangular indentation near the keyboard, the body heat of his index finger moves the cursor (that is, the tiny drawing of an arrow) over the ragged mob of icons (that is, the little pictures of file folders) to the one labeled NARCS 99–00, and he clicks, bursting open a sublist of file folders. Then, tickling the cursor down an alphabetical stack of other little file folder pictures, past BUDGETS, CASTING, DIRECTORS, MEMOS, and KALMAN, toward SCRIPTS, he comes across a file he doesn’t remember creating, tucked between LINE PRODUCERS and NETWORK. It’s called MOSE. He clicks it open without thinking, like swatting a gnat away.

  Filling half the screen is a catalogue of three documents: HAROLD MEMO, WEBTV-REALVIDEO RESEARCH, and BLAH-BLAH-BLAH NOTES.

  It’s a folder of Lizzie’s, stored automatically and inadvertently in his NARCS folder.

  HAROLD MEMO? Not MOSE MEMO. Not MBC MEMO. HAROLD.

  He looks at the names of each of the files again, taking refuge in the mechanical act of reading and rereading. Suddenly the quiet in the room seems noisy: the soft but audible electronic gear shifting inside the idling computer, the breeze jostling the plastic wand hanging from the drape rod, the burble of valet Spanish from the asphalt outside.

  George pulls the MOSE window open wider. He looks at the column of three dates. She last worked on HAROLD MEMO and WEBTV-REALVIDEO RESEARCH this morning, SUN, MAR 5, 2000, 8:05 AM. While he was out running. She must have stopped when he called from the street. The last time she worked on BLAH-BLAH-BLAH NOTES was SUN, MAR 5, 2000, 12:05 AM. Which was last night, after they turned off Saturday Night Live. (Paul Simon was guest host and the Rolling Stones were the band, the announcer said, for the first of twenty-five twenty-fifth-anniversary shows; Lizzie thought it was a joke; George wasn’t sure.) It was after she declined to make love, after he turned his light back on to read and mope and punish her for a few minutes, after he fell asleep.

  He wiggles the cursor over HAROLD MEMO hesitantly. He presses the execute button once, blackening the name of the file. And then with a flick of his index finger he shoots the cursor up to the top of the screen, slides it to SPECIAL and SHUT DOWN, then in one quick motion pushes himself away from the desk and stands up, moving away, into the bathroom to get clean for Saddler’s party.

  “I’ve never been to an apartment in Los Angeles.”

  The elevator door opens. “Tasteful,” Emily says as they step into a car covered in a LeRoy Neiman mural of snowboarders, except for the floor, which is a spiral of throbbing green neon tubing beneath a translucent plastic sheet.

  “Which level do you desire?” says a deep, young male voice from out of nowhere. It sounds like a soap opera actor playing a butler.

  “What is that?” Emily says, looking up.

  “Penthouse,” George tells the elevator, his chuckle turning the word into several syllables.

  “I didn’t understand,” the elevator says, now a little put out. “Please
repeat your request for me.”

  “Pent-house,” George says, this time unconsciously imitating the machine intonation, the same way he puts on a slight French accent whenever a maître d’ answers the phone, “Bon soir!”

  “Tell me again, what’s this for?”

  “Just Get Along.”

  “What?”

  “Just Get Along is the charity. Pro bono anger management counseling for the poor of Los Angeles.”

  “Have a splendid time at The Wellingtons on Wilshire!” the elevator says, its tone once again deferential as George and Emily step out, and then, after the door is almost closed and they’re too far into the apartment to hear, adds softly, even a little wistfully, “It’s five thirty-five P.M.”

  They see Saddler before he sees them. He stands in a semicircular white-shag-carpeted depression—what used to be called a conversation pit—shirt unbuttoned, left hand on his hip and right hand hanging on to his right nipple the way another man might park a thumb in a belt loop. He’s looking down at two young Latino men, both in turquoise-colored shirts and pants, on their hands and knees just in front of him, scrubbing furiously with toothbrushes. Two other turquoised Hispanics stand precariously on the arms of chairs set on the rim of the pit, wearing oven mitts as they reach up toward the blazing halogen track lights bolted to the ceiling. The lights are all pointing toward a single patch of floor.

  “I still see a smidge of green,” Saddler says, indicating with his bare foot the intensely illuminated spot of carpet. “¡Verde! ¡Aquí! ¡Verde!”