The Best of Subterranean

by William Schafer

  So what if no-one respected it? I could do it. That’s what counts.

  * * *

  Which is why, after a couple of months with the station, I found myself doing a lot of the Specials. Every evening there’d be a product the station had some particular deal on. They’d wheel on the manufacturer or some other front person with the promise of shifting extra units, and stick him or her on the screen to demonstrate the product. These slots lasted a whole hour and of course needed a professional to guide the civilian through the live television experience. To keep things running smoothly. And increasingly that professional was me.

  Talking about something for ten minutes is one thing. An hour is a whole different kettle of ballgames. The big factor you have in your favor is that you aren’t just a talking torso any more. You’re there, live on camera, standing next to some guy demonstrating a CD player or salad shooter or car wrench. You can use everything about yourself, not just your voice. Employ your body to suggest things, use hand movements, shrug; if you weren’t too proud you could even pout winsomely. God knows I’ve pouted on occasion, winsomely and otherwise.

  All that helped, but the Specials were still tough, and I enjoyed the challenge. As the months went on I might resort to a little cocaine on occasion to keep myself humming along; but my main juice was pure adrenaline. That and a genuine drive to dance the jig of semi-relevance, to keep the balls in the air when they didn’t deserve to be up there in the first place—to just keep talking.

  To communicate with the viewer at home.

  Once the products were shifting nicely, you see, we’d start taking calls from people who were buying the merchandise. Initially this was the part of the job that most freaked me out. I mean, who the hell were these people? What were they doing, calling a shopping channel at 1:30 a.m. on a Wednesday night to tell us why they’d bought some neo-bosnium trinket? Didn’t they have beds to go to? Didn’t they have lives? Ninety five percent of the callers were middle-aged women, too, which I found especially hard to get my head around. I could have understood guys in their twenties, maybe, too stoned to change the channel or just thinking they were being ironic. I even suggested to Rod that we should have a Stoner Hour, where we sold big bags of candy and potato chips along with small glittering baubles which might appeal to the chemically-enhanced mind. People would call up in droves, go to bed later and forget all about it, and then be completely bemused when boxes of munchies arrived a couple days later. We could probably get away with not sending out the product at all, which would be a big fat profit all round. (The idea wasn’t taken up, which I think reveals commercial timidity).

  I quickly realized that taking the calls was a crucial part of the selling process, however, and made it my specialty. Because nobody called in to say that something they’d bought was a piece of shit—they rang in to say it was great. They wanted to say something nice, which meant that everyone else listening got a ringing product endorsement from someone who was just like them. I would imagine these callers, dumpy and doughfaced, sitting in darkened rooms around the country, their faces lit by the flicker of the selling screen. Just occasionally I believed that once they’d finished talking to us they abruptly switched off, like abandoned robots, their heads tilting forwards onto their chests, hands folded in their laps— and that they would remain that way until the following night, when they got a chance to talk about their obsessions again. Sometimes this impression was stronger, and I felt I could imagine them all at once, all sitting in their rooms, bathed in the twinkling eeriness of television light, eyes focused on the screen, their loneliness and need pouring back through the cables towards me.

  God Bless Cocaine.

  * * *

  The job settled into a rhythm. I’d do a couple of sessions late afternoon or early evening, just standard stuff—then at the beginning of the late shift, somewhere between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m., I’d do a Special. The late shift is when the real action starts, the time when the heavy hitters of couch potato-purchasing settle down with their buckets of soda and sacks of potato chips and get into their stride. The products varied wildly but that was part of the fun. The manufacturers were also mixed, from a monosyllabic sauté pan dude who said maybe three words all hour to a woman I worked with on a home organ, who was damned nearly as good as me. Christ did that woman know a lot about organs. I thought she’d never shut up. Then…okay: here we go.

  The night in question I was doing a Special for a cleaning product called Supa Shine. Some guy from Texas had spent ten years working on polishes and finally come up with a real humdinger. The stuff had been on the channel once before but this was the first time it had got its own segment. When I heard what the Special was that evening I thought even I was going to have some trouble. Metal polish: it’s useful, it may even be essential to some people. But say what you like, it’s really just not very exciting.

  An hour before we were due to go on air I dropped by the green room to meet the guy. Rusty, his name was. He was about fifty, greyhaired, bearded and kind of heavy ’round the gut, but affable enough in a good-old-boy kind of way—and wow, did he like his job. I’m not kidding. Polishing was this guy’s life. He’d got into town early that morning and straightaway gone trawling junk stores and antiqueries picking up old bits of silver and copper to use on the show. He showed me how to use the product. The polish was a silvery paste which came in a very small tin. You put a subliminal amount on a rag, wiped it over your metal in a desultory way and then rubbed it off. And it worked. It worked to a freakish degree. I was genuinely impressed. He took an old coin, so dirty and corroded it looked more like a disk of wood, and after about ten seconds it looked better than the day it popped out of the mint. I relaxed. Okay, so polish was dull. But this stuff worked, by Jesus. Selling something that works is never too hard.

  I hung out for a while, took a couple of minutes in the john to tip my chemical balance in the direction of enthusiasm, then got the five minute call. I murmured encouraging things to Rusty—who’d begun to shake slightly—and strode out under the lights. I don’t know why I did that, because we weren’t on air. They always cut in with you already in position. But I always stride on anyway. Call it professional pride.

  Then the floor manager counts you down, the light on Camera One goes red, and you’re on. It’s showtime. Suddenly it’s not just you and some perspiring Southerner—it’s you and the rest of the world. Well, the world that’s up and watching a shopping channel at 12:02 a.m., anyway.

  I started the hour with a searching but light-hearted meditation on the amount of old metalware in people’s houses, and went on to muse how folks would get a lot more fun out of antique stores and yard sales if it weren’t for the prospect of having to clean their prizes when they got them home. I didn’t mention the other metal in people’s houses—the silverware, furniture, even the fascias of DVD players. Not yet. Throw out all your ideas in the first minute on a Special, and by twenty after the hour you’re going to be treading water until you drown.

  I segued direct from this into Rusty doing his thing. He was okay, even pretty good. There was something so down-home about him that you couldn’t help watching. “Christ,” you were soon thinking, “This guy’s fucking obsessed. If he gets off this much on polishing, there’s got to be something in it. Let me have a go.”

  He took a pair of old candlesticks, equally tarnished. Talking slowly, he described the process of using his wonder-polish, demonstrating as he went. I didn’t do much more than provide an echo every now and then—“Okay, so you put it on a cloth, right?”—because I knew as the hour progressed he’d run out of steam. A minute later one of the candlesticks was looking brighter than the day it was made. I’d kind of preferred it with the tarnish, to be honest: for me taking an antique and making it look new was like sprucing up Stonehenge with fiberglass. But I knew that the audience would feel differently, and Rod the director was already chattering happily in my earpiece. The calls had started right away, and Supa Shine was out of t
he starting blocks.

  For the next fifteen minutes Rusty tirelessly polished and buffed. I tried it myself, of course, affably pouring the full weight of my personality into restoring the shine to a variety of pieces of old trash—while being careful to make it clear that James Richard, like the viewer at home, had no pre-existing expertise in the field. We did gold, we did silver, we did copper, we did chrome. They all worked spectacularly. We actually had to start being careful about the way we held the pieces because the glitter was throwing the cameras off.

  Twenty five minutes in I took over from Rusty, helping him out of a circuitous ramble he’d trapped himself into. The calls were really flooding in by now; Supa Shine was shifting big time.

  It was time to start talking to people.

  Our first call was typical. Lori from Black Falls rang to say that she’d bought Supa Shine when it’s been on before and it had changed her life. She described in detail how she’s polished everything in her street and how happy that had made her. She’d called that evening to buy stocks for her sisters, daughters and friends. She was so patently sincere that I let her run on for quite some while, knowing she was doing our job for us. Rusty nodded benignly, dislodging a small droplet of sweat from his hairline, which rolled slowly onto his forehead. I covertly signaled the director to switch to a close up product shot, and Mandy the makeup girl darted on to powder us both. No more than six seconds, then back to a medium shot of the two of us, and all the while I kept the banter going with the caller until she’d said all she had to say.

  Lori finally stopped yakking and went off to polish her dog’s head or something and we took a call from Ann in Raenord. Ann had called because she was concerned that Supa Shine might harm her gold-plated jewelry. Rusty whipped a piece of plated stuff off the pile and polished it there and then. It came up beautifully, and Ann was mollified. She thanked us for talking to her and was transferred to the purchase operators.

  It was a natural point to take five, and so I signaled to Rod and talked us into a short break…giving just a hint of some of the exciting polishing action still to come.

  * * *

  As soon as the ident was on the screen I winked at Rusty, and disappeared behind the set and into the green room. None of the production staff batted an eyelid. I’d left a line chopped and ready on the one table which wasn’t covered with crap from previous shows, and so it was the matter of a moment to get the marching dust into my bloodstream.

  I strode back into the studio—taking care to grab a glass of water for cover—and stood next to Rusty. “Going just great,” I enthused. “Just had a word with the guys—you’re selling by the shitload.”

  Rusty smiled shyly, and I noticed that another droplet of sweat was already forming. Mandy swabbed, Rod counted us back in and we were on air less than three minutes after I’d left.

  The next five minutes were fine. Rusty told us how it would only take two cans of Supa Shine to clean an entire 747, and it didn’t seem hard to believe. I must admit that by this time I was kind of wondering what was in the stuff: the pile of metal in front of us was gleaming so much it was starting to hurt my eyes. I got Rusty to tell his story about working in his mother’s garage for ten years coming up with the formula, then decided it was time to take another call.

  And that’s where the evening went a little weird.

  “Hi,” I said, smiling direct to Camera One. “So, who do we have come to talk with us now?”

  The normal response to this is the caller’s name and location, utterly promptly and clearly. They’ve been briefed by an operator and most of them blurt the information out super-fast, as if eager to prove they can follow instructions properly and will make a great addition to the program. This time there was a silence.

  Which is fine—sometimes people get overawed once they realize they’re really on air. The tactic then is to ask them a very simple question to start them off.

  “Have you already experienced Supa Shine’s cleaning miracles, caller?” I asked. “Or do you have a question for friend Rusty here before you try it?”

  Usually that’ll do it. The silence continued, however, and I began to let my right hand wander up towards my neck—in preparation for the agreed code for cutting a caller off. But then the caller spoke.

  “He’s not Rusty.”

  The voice was deep and ragged and wet and rough. My heart sank. Every now and then one of the directors, Rod in particular, would let a weird one slip through. The stated intention was “keeping it real,” but as Rod wouldn’t know real if it slapped him upside the head I believed it was more likely to be about fucking up the presenter for the delight of the assembled spear carriers. Kind of irresponsible when the product was shifting so well, but that’s assholes for you.

  “Well, not literally, of course,” I smiled (winsomely). “But you know what? It wouldn’t surprise me one bit to find that Supa Shine wasn’t only great with stains and tarnish—but could handle a little spot of rust as well. In fact, I was just going to ask…”

  “His name isn’t Rusty,” the voice said. Sounded like the guy had the world’s worst ever cold. Or flu. Or maybe the plague.

  “Well, no, it’s kind of a nick-name, isn’t it?” I chuckled. “No-one gets called Rusty right off the bat, do they. Just like some of my friends call me Jim. And so caller, while we’re talking, what’s your name?”

  There was no reply.

  Screw this, I thought. I very obviously scratched my Adam’s apple. In other words, get this loser off air. Meanwhile I turned to Rusty, who was starting to look real nervous. It’s often the way with the guests. When things start well they can get lulled into forgetting that they’re on live television—but it’s a perilous relaxation. The smallest upset can unsettle them for good.

  “So how about that, Rusty?” I asked, holding his eyes to lock him back into where he was and what he was doing. “Obviously Supa Shine isn’t going to be able to cope if something’s totally covered in rust, kind of falling apart, but how about a little spot or two?”

  Rusty opened his mouth to speak but then a very bizarre noise came over the studio monitor. It sounded like a loud, liquid cough, mixed up with the sound of a handful of nails being dropped on a metal surface.

  “Whoa! I apologize for that, viewers,” I laughed. “Little technical glitch here in the studio, don’t know if you heard it at home—just goes to show that we really are live tonight in your living room, live and alive, bringing you the very best in bargains 24/7 and right around the clock. So…”

  Then the noise happened again. I laughed once more, throwing my hands up in the air for good measure—as if helpless with mirth at the hilarious events which tumbled through life: not just my life, you understand, but the lives of the viewers at home too.

  Then something else came over the speakers. The deep, broken voice said: “That’s my name.”

  “What?” I said, momentarily thrown.

  “That’s my name,” the voice repeated. Then the strange liquid noise rumbled through the speakers again. “That’s it.”

  “That…noise is your name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well make sure you spell it out when you talk to our purchase operators…” I said, with a wink directly into camera—to the normal man and woman on the couch. “…because I’m not sure they’ll have come across that one before. Eastern European, is it?”

  “No.”

  “Well okay then. I know that we have many, many other viewers out there who really want to share their experiences with Trusty’s Supa Shine polish with us, so maybe if…”

  “It’s not his.”

  By now I was finally beginning to get pissed off. The entire exchange had probably only actually taken forty seconds so far, but that’s a long time on live television. Rusty was looking extremely wary again, and a whole army of perspiration drops were massed at the hair line, ready to roll down his face. That could not happen, not on my watch. Nobody wants to buy something from a guy who’s sweatin
g like a pig. I made the cut sign again, even more clearly.

  “Jim, there’s something odd going on.”

  This voice didn’t come out over the speakers, but only into my earpiece. It was Rod.

  I turned to Rusty and cheerfully suggested he show us his polish working magic on the second candlestick, which was weak, but I needed a few seconds’ cover.

  As I watched him get to this, I raised my eyebrows quickly, just about the only way I could communicate to the box I needed to hear more. Rod spoke again, and what he said was strange.

  “We can’t get this joker off the air.”

  I took the risk and risked a glance off. Normally you never do this. You look direct to the camera, at the object, or at your civilian co-host. Anywhere else looks weird to the viewer at home, reminding them you’re in a studio. But I swept my eyes quickly over the window to the director’s booth—their lair was sealed from the studio so chatter and techspeak didn’t leak onto live microphones—and saw Rod was standing and looking directly at me, his hands held up in mime-quality “I have no fucking clue what is going on” pose.

  Behind him a couple of techs were moving quickly about the room fiddling with wires. By this time I had done many, many hours of live television. I’d never seen something like that before. I realized there and then that I was entering new and uncharted territory.

  “He has stolen it,” said the speaker voice, loudly.

  “Stolen what?” I said.

  “His so-called polish. It is not his. It belongs to us.”