Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  “I don’t watch much television,” Rex Dinsmoor confesses. “A little MSNBC and the Chopper Channel is about all. I sometimes don’t get home from work until eleven, so I miss most of the entertainment shows.”

  “My husband’s on Charlie Rose tonight.” This startles her a little too, the bragging and the chattiness. Maybe, she thinks, it is just a convenient excuse to say “my husband.”

  “Who’s Charlie Rose?”

  Lizzie explains, feeling like she’s in a foreign country.

  “I’d love to send you a demo of the Secret. It has a next-generation plain-language translation engine. Really powerful. It takes global frictionlessness and transparency to the next stage. To a real tipping point.”

  She nods. Frictionless transparency. Maybe he is trying to pick her up.

  “I honestly think,” he says, “it’s going to change the way humans think about doing business in the twenty-first century.”

  She nods again and examines a photo spread on the new Mrs. Leonardo DiCaprio. Out here, everyone sincerely does believe his own bullshit, believes it thoroughly. Rex Dinsmoor knows he’s helping to build some kind of late-capitalist utopia, a wired Cascadia, Oz. A few years ago, they all gushed about “push” technology transforming the web—but then it didn’t because it was fake, a hysterically overbilled replica of real bandwidth. Before that, they said ordering movies over cable TV was imminent, any movie you wanted. But the technology was a decade away at a price anybody could afford, so a big cable company faked video-on-demand, too. As the innocent Dorothys at home pushed buttons to order Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and The Bonfire of the Vanities, a kid on roller-skates in a room in Denver cued up each videocassette by hand, grabbing another tape, rolling to the next VCR, grabbing, rolling, madly trying to fulfill twenty-first-century dreams (frictionlessnessly!) in slapstick twentieth-century fashion. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. These people out here are the men behind the curtain—Rex Dinsmoor, truculent Buster Grinspoon, the smug Goat Rodeo boys, even Microsoft. But unlike the Wizard of Oz, they believe in their magic! It isn’t cynical bluster. These wizards have faith. And Lizzie knows she’s an agnostic.

  They call her flight.

  26

  George was asleep, almost, when Lizzie got home from Seattle the night before last, and pretended the rest. Before he left at six-thirty yesterday morning to make his NARCS call at seven, they exchanged goodbyes—just that, his “Goodbye” from the bedroom doorway and, from under the sheets, her “Bye.” Last night, the children were around as buffers and objects of affection, and George was asleep by quarter to ten. This morning, George and Lizzie are alone for the first time in a long while. She is eating her daily $2.49 cup of Old Chatham Sheep-Herding Company yogurt, with pecans and cinnamon, while she reads the Times. He is eating his daily strip of bacon and Grape-Nuts with skim milk as he turns the pages of the Daily News. The little kids are already at school, and Sarah is staying home her first two periods, rescoring her civil rights video upstairs.

  Since Lizzie asked George, “Did LuLu take her umbrella?” and he answered without looking up from Doonesbury, “I didn’t notice,” neither of them has said a word for sixteen, going on seventeen, minutes.

  He slides the News away and grabs the Post.

  “You know,” he says, “I really hated finding out about Microsoft from Ben.”

  “I called you. At the office. I even tried your cell.”

  “It died,” he says, looking down at the front-page—WILD-MAN RUDY! “I told you it died last week.” He opens the paper. “You could’ve tried the car.”

  “I didn’t know you’d driven. I’m sorry, George. Okay?”

  “Whatever.”

  “I’m the one who got fucked,” she says, standing, walking over to the Bose, turning it on. “I apologize that you weren’t the very first to find out I got fucked.” She pushes the channel button preset for 92.3.

  “Sarah’s still here,” George says.

  “I know. I think she’s old enough to hear Howard Stern and survive.” She sits down. “You still sneak it from the kids in the car?”

  George doesn’t answer. In the Post he reads a story about a bipartisan pack of congressmen who have drafted a bill to outlaw “mind-reading microchips” and “mental modems” as a “threat to every American’s privacy and human dignity. ‘We stopped cloning and Ebonics,’ declared Representative Horace Wolfe (R-South Carolina), ‘and we’ll stop this.’ ” The story also quotes a Democratic congresswoman from Oregon on “the frightening animal-privacy-rights implications.”

  “Hmmm,” George says.

  “What?”

  “Your friend Buster Grinspoon.” He holds up the paper.

  “How completely stupid. Save that for me, okay? They’re not really going to pass a law, are they?”

  “Nah. The story doesn’t actually mention Grinspoon.” He turns the page to “Page Six,” one of the four gossip columns in the paper—five, if you include the biweekly publishing column; six, if you include the column of items about TV; seven, if you include the new column summarizing the gossip reported the previous day on TV and in other newspapers. Eight, in fact, if you include the “Hey, Sport!” column in the sports section, but George doesn’t know that exists.

  Like every Times reader who buys the Post, George subscribes mainly for “Page Six.” Yet he reads “Page Six” (which is on page eight) as quickly as he can, scanning the bold-faced names and then pausing over the stories about fashion models and musicians and unalloyed socialites only if they seem to involve grotesquely gothic misbehavior, glancing at the stories contrived simply to promote restaurants and nightclubs, and of course, entirely skipping the stories about professional athletes. After twenty years, his scan-and-skip technique is now so deeply ingrained that when there’s a bold-faced name of a person George knows personally, his eye moves to it before he’s even registered the name consciously. It’s a kind of simulated half-second precognition.

  And so he takes a quick hot dilated breath, aware that in a moment he’s going to read a “Page Six” item about himself. “Insiders on the hit MBC show NARCS say that costar Lucas ‘Cowboy’ Winton kept his cool the other day when producer George McTeer ripped into the politically conservative hunk in the West 57th Street studios in front of cast and crew. The dispute concerned a minor money matter, and network sources say McTeer ‘overreacted like an insane person.’ After screaming at Winton and dissing the actor’s pro bono anti-drug-abuse work, the producer suddenly pink-slipped his own longtime personal assistant. ‘He really lost it,’ says a witness to the confrontation. ‘But Lucas was a total class act. Everybody worries that George is stretched too thin, with personal problems, and trying to launch a new show and keep NARCS running at the same time.’ The superexpensive top-secret new show, Real News, which one MBC source calls ‘a totally fake-news soap opera’ and ‘a ticking time bomb for the network,’ is being coproduced with sexy Al Gore fund-raiser Emily Kalman. Real News is expected to premiere this summer on MBC. Stay tuned.”

  Jesus Christ. Lucas Winton; Barry Stengel; who else has become a lifelong enemy? He rereads the story. They didn’t even call him for a comment! Unless he didn’t get the message, since he has no assistant. And, of course, he couldn’t have denied the story, since their account of the incident is more or less correct. George takes a deep breath.

  “Listen to this.” He reads the story out loud to his wife.

  “What ‘personal problems’?”

  George looks at her.

  “That sucks,” Lizzie says, “but you said yourself that the new show will create a shitstorm. I guess this is the beginning of that. These are the shit flurries.” She sips her tea. “You changed the name to Real News?”

  “No! And it isn’t superexpensive, or a ticking fucking time bomb, either. Jesus! Barry Stengel has to die.”

  Lizzie cringes. “Don’t say that.”

  “Your career hasn’t just been blown apart in the goddamn New Yo
rk Post.”

  “George, you’re overreacting.”

  “Oh, fuck you, Miss Yoga Perfection. I live in a fishbowl, okay? You don’t.”

  Lizzie gets up and walks to the other end of the kitchen, ostensibly rummaging for some half-and-half in the Sub-Zero.

  It’s eight-thirty. When he gets to the office he’ll call Featherstone. He’ll call Emily. He’ll call Saddler. He’ll call Lucas, pretend to apologize, smooth things over, and pretend to believe him when he denies that he had anything to do with the Post story. He’ll call Stengel, and … what? No, he won’t; he’ll call back his friend at the Journal instead.

  “I’m sorry I shouted, Lizzie,” George says, swigging his coffee, returning to “Page Six” to read the story a third time, and then a fourth, before moving on to the day’s blind items.

  “WHICH brilliant zillionaire,” George reads to himself, “is pressuring business associates to back the latest lamebrain creative project of his arrogant young progeny-about-town?” He thinks: Which one isn’t? “WHICH erratic, egomaniacal rap superstar drove his $150,000 foreign car up onto a SoHo sidewalk to stop his gamine starlet girlfriend from stalking off?” Still a little generic, but better. “WHICH teen-media tycoon was spotted at a Village gay bar partying heartily with two members of his demographic? WHAT distinguished casino mogul and real estate genius arranged to get which liberal newspaper columnist reprimanded after the writer unfairly attacked him?” Much more interesting, although George wonders how many items Donald Trump must offer to “Page Six” that they decline to run. “WHAT married show biz whiz (and former network journalist) was canoodling over cocktails with what rock-and-roll news babe the other night at the new chattering-class boite Madison Avenue?”

  He thinks the owners of the bar must have phoned it in, but then decides they wouldn’t know who he was. He feels a sickening pang: was it Zip? No; please not. Maybe one of Zip’s new best friends who sat down with them … Vesto? Or one of the blowsy women accompanying Vesto? George’s eye flicks up to the top corner of the newspaper page, as he has another of his instantaneous pseudo-precognitions: Clarise was the overinterested woman with the insinuating smile sitting on the other side of Francesca, and there it is, Clarise Flannagan, one of the names in the Post’s group byline. George is relieved: Zip hasn’t betrayed him.

  “You won’t believe this,” he says to Lizzie, grinning. “ ‘What married’ um,” but then he pauses, noticing on the next column over a continuation of the item. “(The man’s a serial extracurricular canoodler, since he was also spotted engaged in some semi-heavy petting with an actress half his age at a celebrity-studded Las Vegas party last month.)”

  “What is it?” Lizzie says.

  He reads the Donald Trump item to her.

  “So?” she says.

  “I wonder who the ‘liberal columnist’ is?”

  “No idea.”

  George used to think he isn’t prone to feelings of guilt. He used to think that guiltiness per se wouldn’t be a problem for him if he ever, say, committed adultery. But after Las Vegas and the episode with Shawna Cindy Switzer, he realized that one of the reasons he didn’t take her back to his room was his horror at the prospect of self-loathing—a kind of early warning guilt-perimeter trip wire. As a practical matter, he realizes, self-hate is probably indistinguishable from guilt itself, and in the end may be indistinguishable from morality. Now, however, he’s feeling anxiety over trespasses he didn’t really commit, certainly not with Francesca, and not even with Shawna Cindy Switzer. Well, honey, she did fondle my arm, and shoved it between her tits, actually—in public, yes, at Ben’s BarbieWorld party, and then she did ask me to fuck her, really begged. But I declined! Why didn’t I tell you at the time? Because, because, because, because … He shuts the Post.

  “Hand me that,” Lizzie says from across the table, “I want to read the article about Congress outlawing Grinspoon’s research.”

  George thumbs open the Post and, holding down the bottom of page seven with his bad hand, tears out the CAPITOL HILL MIND-READING PANIC article rather more carefully than he usually rips newspaper articles, and hands it over to Lizzie.

  “Thanks,” she says.

  Turning the ripped tabloid half-page, George sees the blind items in “Page Six” are still there.

  “Georges Cinq! You crazy-ass gangsta man of the hour!”

  “Hello, Timothy, I didn’t know you were in town.”

  “Here, there, everywhere! I thought you gentlemen of the Fifth Estate were supposed to protect each other. I guess the Post isn’t a signatory to that deal.” He waves George ahead toward the NARCS offices. “After you—tu oficina es mi oficina.”

  George goes in ahead of Featherstone, past Daisy’s replacement at the reception desk, toward his corner of the floor.

  “You saw ‘Page Six,’ ” George says.

  “¡Que será! As long as they spell your name right.”

  “They didn’t. Or get the name of the show right. Good morning,” he says as they get to his office.

  “Good morning, George,” Daisy says. “Hello, Mr. Featherstone.” Featherstone acknowledges Daisy’s greeting by putting his left index and middle fingers together in a kind of Boy Scout salute, then kissing the fingertips.

  “Buzz is buzz, my G-man. Gross media impressions are gross media impressions. Although Hank Saddler’s a little freaked about the ‘ticking time bomb’ line.”

  “Me too,” George says, tossing his briefcase on his desk and sitting down. “And gee, I wonder what president of News gave them that quote. Hmmm.”

  Featherstone sits, leans back, and puts his Guccis up on the maple desktop. He’s not smiling.

  “George, as a friend, level with me if we’ve got budget problems on Real Time. Better to lance the boil now, before it kills us.”

  “How could we have budget problems? We’re still staffing up and commissioning scripts. We’re just reading actors for the roles. Everything’s fine.”

  “Cool. Yeah, that’s what I told Harold. By the way, he says thanks for rubber-stamping the NARCS agreement, for the bonds.”

  “No problem.”

  Featherstone and Mose have discussed his “Page Six” humiliation. Featherstone is nodding, looking at George. George wonders if he’s here to tell him he’s fired, and to clear out of the building by noon. But Featherstone and Mose can’t fire him. He’s not an employee.

  “Really,” George says, “we’re completely on track.” He pauses. “It was the Post.”

  “Hey, I know. Been there, dumbed that.” He lowers his feet to the floor and rests his elbows on the desk.

  “George?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The personal problems. This is totally nonjudgmental. But if it’s a sabbatical you need, or a medical leave—well, whatever we need to do. I love you, man. Like a brother.”

  George wonders if Featherstone has a brother in addition to the one he accidentally killed crashing his Porsche.

  “I’m fine. Real Time is fine. Everything’s fine.”

  With his elbow still on the desk Featherstone puts his left hand up, as if he’s about to arm-wrestle. “Steady as she goes, bro.” As George shakes the hand, Featherstone says, “That’s exactly what I told Harold.”

  George is not reassured by his reassurances or, fifteen minutes later, by Hank Saddler’s call. “A minor bump,” Saddler says, “totally minor, in all likelihood, I’m sure, although this does make me think I want to start keeping a mini-MPI for you, track the little press problems before they become big press problems.” Since NARCS is almost finished for the season, George has more time to pay attention to this new rising tide of anxiety and dread. The instant he hangs up on Saddler, Daisy says she has Jess Burnham and Emily Kalman both holding, Emily from her car.

  “Hello, Ms. Burnham,” he says playfully.

  “Just one moment,” a dour young man says back. Will George never learn to avoid that mistake? (A few years ago, Zip asked George to track down a piece
of BBC tape on which he’d been told that a Republican congressman had used the c-word to describe Hillary Clinton on English television. When Zip called back, and George picked up the phone and said brightly, “ ‘C-U-N-T, cunt, absolutely,” Zip’s female assistant hung up and complained to the TVTVTV human resources department.) It’s only a tiny dose of mortification each time when he speaks to an assistant that way, but it is mortifying, not only as a stumble in the status contest, but because it requires George to repeat the cheerful greeting a second time. The Take Two hello is always self-conscious, a performance, fake.

  “Am I speaking to the serial canoodler himself?”

  What are you talking about? will not do. Nor will stunned silence. “Hello, Ms. Burnham!” George says, repeating the line verbatim as he plays for time.

  “You’re going to hire Francesca to anchor Real Time, aren’t you? George?”

  “She’s one of the people we’re talking to.” If he doesn’t say something more, he’ll be on the defensive. “So why did your boss call Real Time ‘a ticking time bomb’?”

  “Because he doesn’t get it. And because you’re smarter than he is, and a traitor to journalism, and you’re having fun.”

  “I’m not having fun today, I swear.”

  “And because I told him on Friday that I want to anchor Real Time.”

  George feels hot. Everyone wants to work for him! Except for the people who want to destroy him. Daisy ducks in, points to the phone, and mouths, “Emily,” but George puts up his index finger and turns away. He asks Jess why she wants to do this, and she says she wants to invent something new, and he proceeds to give her arguments against it—she may never be able to go back to straight news; she’ll have to move up from Washington; it would pay a lot less. She replies that Mike Wallace used to host a game show (not to mention that Ronald Reagan went from Death Valley Days to the presidency), she and Marie would kill to live in New York, and the money is the money.

  “What about NewsNight 2000?” George asks.