What's a Girl Gotta Do?

by Sparkle Hayter

  I was a little late for work, but not so late that I couldn’t stop to scan Democracy Wall, a ten-foot bulletin board that covered the left wall in the hallway leading to the newsroom. Under the heading FAN CLUB was a letter from one of Madri Michaels’s crazy fans, asking her to please send a pair of her freshly worn panties, autographed. There were contests to provide captions for wire-service photos, goofy stories, and a little bit of legitimate news, although the primary purpose of Democracy Wall was to provide labor with a forum to spoof management, world leaders, and anchors. I’d been the butt of a few Democracy Wall jokes myself.

  That day I was looking for a note referring to the joke played on me. But there was nothing.

  It was ten minutes to the top of the 10 A.M. show and just outside the newsroom anchorman Patrick Lattanzi was speed-smoking a cigarette before he went on. He smiled at me, but didn’t waste any smoking time in salutations.

  “Hi, Pat,” I said anyway, as I went into the newsroom. A desk assistant ducked between us with freshly ripped copy while an editor veered around us with a freshly cut videotape.

  If you’ve never been in a television newsroom, it’s a little like being inside a giant pinball game. Tapes whirred, typewriters clacked, computer screens hummed, phones buzzed, lights flashed, and images flickered. Along one wall were bright monitors showing what the other networks were running as well as our own picture and the feeds we were pulling off the satellites. Underneath the monitors was the assignment desk, manned by one African-American woman and a half dozen harried-looking and overweight white men in their shirtsleeves.

  The assignment desk branched off into the satellite desk on one side and the international desk on the other, forming a wall of desks around the room’s perimeter. In the middle of all this were the writers, who sat at circular “pods” with a copy editor on an elevated area in the center. Producers were at the producer pods, associate producers at associate producer pods, and lower forms of newsroom life without a pod to call their own were eeking past each other like bats careening around a cave.

  Across the newsroom, Bob McGravy was standing by the supervisors’ desk, talking to the day super. He saw me and waved, then he held up a small Slinky and grinned. Recently, he had completed a smoking-cessation program kicking a thirty-five-year-old cigarette habit he picked up as a copy boy for Edward R. Murrow in the 1950s. Every day he had some other substitute in his hand—a dollop of modeling clay, a harmonica, even a rosary. I’d given him the Slinky, wrapped in paper made up of supermarket tabloid headlines.

  We had a good relationship, McGravy and I. He was my mentor, but despite the company rumors to the contrary, our relationship was strictly platonic. Even if I had had lust for him, I never would have acted on it; the guy was my boss’s boss, and I’m just not that kind of girl.

  At that moment, someone sidled up to me and blurted, in a whisper, “Turk alert!” and I fixed my eye on the far exit and headed straight for it.

  All over the newsroom, people scattered, looking for edit rooms to hide in or frantically hitting typewriters or picking up phones in order to look busy. But I reacted a little too slowly; just inches from the doorway, I felt the large hand of Turk Hammermill on my shoulder.

  “Robin!” he said.

  I turned around slowly, working up a polite smile as I did. “Turk. I didn’t see you,” I lied.

  Turk was wearing what he wore every day, a Mets sweatshirt over jeans. As a sports producer he didn’t have to worry about what he wore, and he didn’t.

  “You know what I did this weekend?” he said, not waiting for an answer. “I watched a tape of the Mets-Expos game from last September. Did you see that game?”

  Then I made my second mistake. I hesitated before answering.

  “Man! It was brilliant!” Turk began. “Okay, Mets are up, it’s the bottom of the ninth, score is seven-three ‘Spos. Two down, three men on, and …”

  By now I was trying to devise a new strategy for escape, looking around the newsroom for someone to rescue me. But everyone had seen Turk by now and they were avoiding my eyes. Cowards.

  “… first pitch is a strike, second pitch is a strike, and the third—oh, first I should tell you about the ’Spos pitcher. This pitcher, his name is …”

  In a business that specializes in them, Turk was the biggest bore. Not only was it impossible to get a word in edgewise, but he digressed from the main story before completing it and then digressed from his digressions, constantly interrupting himself to go off on tangents, each less interesting than the one before.

  “… his father used to pitch in the Carolina League. Of course, that was long before major league baseball went up to Canada …”

  Widely told newsroom joke: What’s the least heard sentence at ANN?

  Answer: I’m looking for Turk.

  What kept me, and legions before me, from saying “Turk, shut up!” was that he was really a nice guy, a little on the sensitive side and not too bright, and nobody could bear to hurt his feelings. Oh yeah, and he was Georgia Jack Jackson’s nephew.

  Relief for me came from an unlikely quarter. As Turk was reciting the History of Major League Baseball, Jerry Spurdle came up beside me and began chewing me out.

  “Jesus, Robin, we’re waiting for you. The production meeting was supposed to start half an hour ago. Jesus. Excuse us, won’t you, Turk?”

  Spurdle led me out of the newsroom and down the hall to the Special Reports offices, which were housed in what was once an extraneous set of men’s and ladies’ bathrooms. The stalls and plumbing had been removed and replaced with three large offices and a central conference area and it had all been repainted, but we still had ceramic tile on the floor and you could still see the outline of the word “Gents” where it had been on the swinging door to the hallway.

  Occasionally someone from another floor would walk in, expecting a urinal, and be surprised to see people working in there. Frankly, a lot of people at ANN still considered it the biggest urinal in the building. Special Reports was where stories like “Sex for Sale,” “Hollywood Hunks,” and “Your Child and Satan” were done, “investigative” shows that were rating grabbers, heavy on clichés and light on investigation. It was also where I was paying my debt to journalism for professional gaffes committed in the last year.

  When we got to the office, Claire, the producer, was waiting with a box of chocolate frosted doughnuts and a fresh pot of coffee. She did it for us, bless her soul, and not for her because she never let refined sugar or caffeine cross her pure lips.

  “Your phone messages,” Claire said, handing me a couple of pink papers. Two calls from Elroy, one of my “special fans,” who sees me as his dominatrix and gets off by calling or writing me to describe the many ways he wants me to punish him. This time he wanted me to spank his bare bottom with a razor strap and then glue his eyelids shut with Krazy Glue.

  And they say romance is dead.

  I crumpled them up and pitched them into the wastebasket by the coffee machine, where they hit with a satisfying ping.

  “I didn’t see you at the party last night,” I said to Claire as I got coffee.

  “I flew back late last night and by the time I got to my apartment, it was after midnight and I didn’t see the point.” She brushed her thick black hair with her fingers to get it off her face. “Was it fun?”

  “It was weird. Burke was there with Amy Penny,” I said as we sat down at the conference table and waited for Jerry to quit stirring his coffee, which he drank in a cup that said CHIEF MELON INSPECTOR, WTNA TV AND RADIO.

  “Sorry I missed it,” Claire said. “Was it terrible? Did you maim him?”

  “Nah. I think they’re engaged, although Burke wouldn’t give me a straight answer.”

  I pulled at a chocolate doughnut, breaking off a sticky, doughy piece. “Well, what the hell. I had to see them together sooner or later. Now it’s behind me. Anyway, I made her feel more uncomfortable than she made me feel, so I won the party.”

  Je
rry sat down between us at the conference table, still stirring his coffee loudly. “Where were you last night?” he asked Claire.

  “I had a family thing,” Claire said. “My people celebrate New Year’s with an animal sacrifice. My mom expects me to be there, you know.” This was for Jerry’s benefit.

  “I don’t believe you anymore,” he said, scowling.

  “What did you sacrifice?” I asked. “A small child?”

  “God no, a small rodent. Robin, you know human blood used in a sacrifice stains.”

  Around the newsroom, the Spurdle-Thibodeaux production team was known as Beauty and the Beast. Jerry had what is commonly known as “a great face for radio,” which is where he came from. He had a soft and sinister look, pale and blond, gone to fat, “a mediocre sack of Aryan genes,” as Eric had put it the night before. I’d said that Jerry looked like that unmarried uncle who hung out in the shed during family gatherings, the one your mother always warned you in a whisper not to be alone with.

  What made Jerry even uglier was his habit of trying to disguise it by adopting the personal styles of famous handsome men. For a while, he went through a Don Johnson phase, where he moussed his hair, slicked it back, and sported a five-o’clock shadow all day long. He looked like Goofy.

  Claire, on the other hand, had the kind of exotic beauty that made grown men in responsible positions stutter when they talked to her. She was half African-American, a quarter French and a quarter Cherokee, and when Jerry first hired her—to prove once and for all that he wasn’t a bigot—he speculated that it was really something for someone like her to actually graduate from college and he asked her a lot of questions about voodoo. To her credit, Claire took it, and him, as a joke and went along with it, and every day she’d feed him some shit about animal sacrifices and black masses. By implying that her poor, illiterate swamp-trawling parents needed every cent she could give them, she actually squeezed a raise out of him.

  Claire knew a lot about Cajun folk magic and she even believed some of it, the way I believe astrologers, but the truth was, Claire’s father was a dentist in Metairie, Louisiana, and her mother was a dental hygienist. And they were Baptists.

  “Enough chitchat, you two,” Jerry said, leaning back into his chair. Please, God, I prayed, make his chair fall over, but it remained perfectly balanced.

  “The holidays are over now and so it’s time to get back to work on our sperm bank series. I’ve done some thinking and I’ve decided we will have to go undercover on this story.”

  I groaned. I hate undercover work. Sometimes it’s necessary, but I hate it. It’s dishonest, it’s often gratuitous, and I didn’t think it was needed for this story as we had a half dozen disgruntled same-race couples with mixed-race children—to make the point.

  “Robin and I will pose as man and wife and go in with concealed cameras,” Jerry said.

  “God, you’re not going to make a donation, are you?” I asked, horrified.

  “Well, Robin, I think I might have to, for credibility.”

  “Credibility?” I asked. I made a face.

  “Give it up, Robin. We are not doing that special report on death you want to do so badly.”

  “It’s a good idea, a no-nonsense look at what happens to you when you die, your body, I mean, and what it costs. Boomers are facing the last half of their lives and it’s starting to become an issue. I thought we could demythologize it.”

  “You want to do it because it’s morbid.”

  “No, I want to do it because…,” I began.

  “Because you fear death,” Claire said.

  “It’s morbid,” Jerry said. “And how are we going to get someone to sponsor death? No company wants its products associated with that subject—except funeral homes and places like that.”

  “And arms makers,” Claire said, although she didn’t really like the idea either. Her area of interest was exotic diseases. At the last editorial meeting, she fought for a series on a virus emerging in Africa that made your blood boil over until you kind of exploded.

  “Don’t go running to McGravy again, crying about how I’m a sexist sleazeball who makes Edward R. Murrow turn over in his grave,” he said, reading my mind. “At least I never belched during a White House news conference carried live over national TV. While the mike was right above me.”

  Touché.

  And he went on. “At least I never asked a woman who ate her dead companion after their plane crashed what he tasted like.”

  (Like tough, fatty chicken.)

  “At least the mailroom still delivers my mail.” It was the best retort I could come up with as I stomped off, the office door swinging behind me, and went to find McGravy to lodge my daily complaint about Jerry Spurdle.

  God. If I close my eyes I can still see that mike hovering over me; I can feel the eyes of the other reporters on me, the eyes of the vice president, and on the other side of the television screen the eyes of thousands of hard-core ANN viewers. It is the first question I’ve been called on to ask (and now, for the life of me, I can’t remember what it was). I stand, I open my mouth—and I burp. Not one of those delicate, barely a hiccup, burps. A ripping Richter-registering roar of a belch. After that, all I remember is tumultuous laughter and a hot chill of mortification.

  All right, so I belched during a White House news conference carried live to half the globe, thus aborting my brief career as a Washington correspondent. Consider this: Everybody belches. It’s natural. The queen and the pope belch.

  The trick is not to do it when there’s a high-powered mike hovering right above you.

  And yes, I asked a woman who survived a plane crash by eating her dead companion, Bud, what human flesh tasted like. She was very open about the incident and I am a curious person. Don’t you wonder about things sometimes? Don’t you ever say things you regret?

  Somehow, though, I got a reputation as being sensational, grotesque in my thinking, and with my career spinning out of control, down towards the hard earth, Bob McGravy convinced the powers to be at ANN, the network mandarins and the court eunuchs, to give me another chance. I thought they’d give me my old beat, Crime & Justice. Instead, they plugged me into Special Reports.

  I never thought I would end up like this, writing and reporting on such gems of journalism as “Grannies Who Like Sex” and “The He-She Report,” with everything given an extra sensational twist in the copy-edit process by Jerry Spurdle.

  But Jerry’s all-time low, the worst series he ever did, was “The Cancer That Dare not Speak its Name,” on colon cancer, before I worked for him. A previous special reporter, now in our London bureau, told me about it. It wasn’t a bad idea really, looking at colon cancer as a sidebar to the Reagan polyps story, dispelling some of the myths, encouraging people to have themselves checked out.

  The mistake was asking viewers to send samples of their excrement on a Popsicle stick implement available in kits distributed free at outlets of a popular drugstore chain. Actually, ANN asked them to send their Popsicle sticks full of shit to a lab on Long Island to be analyzed at ANN’s expense.

  It was a humanitarian gesture that backfired, so to speak. On part one of the series, Jerry neglected to include the full-screen graphic with the lab address, which was to be run at the end of each “Cancer That Dare not Speak” segment, and as a consequence thousands of people with bowel problems throughout the tri-state area just sent their shit samples to ANN. Most didn’t even bother with the Popsicle stick. They just wrapped up a good-sized hunk and slipped it into a padded envelope.

  Needless to say, the folks in the mailroom have had it in for Jerry Spurdle ever since.

  After roaming the byzantine hallways of ANN for forty-five minutes, I finally learned that McGravy was tied up in meetings with the mandarins. But just as I was about to abandon giving Jerry his RDA of grief, I saw Turk in the hallway outside the newsroom.

  “Turk, how are you?” I said. “You should have been over in Special Reports five minutes ago.”

/>   “Yeah?”

  “Well, Jerry and I were talking about the ’69 Mets.”

  “Is he still there?”

  “Sure. Why don’t you go over?” I suggested.

  Turk took off like a man on a mission.

  I felt much better now.

  In the afternoon, we had an interview with a white woman whose husband banked sperm with Empire Semen before he died of cancer, and who had given birth to an Asian-looking child, leading her troublesome in-laws to believe she’d had an affair with an Asian man while her husband’s body was still cooling.

  The sperm bank’s lawyers played up this theory in order to get it off the hook, and there was no way she could prove otherwise. She loved the child dearly, she said, but she wanted her reputation restored and she wanted her late husband’s sperm found so she could try to have his child as well.

  After that, we interviewed a doctor who did genetic typing on another baby conceived from Empire Semen semen. While he was 99.6 percent sure it was the wrong semen, he couldn’t prove the woman hadn’t slept with other men.

  With those two in the can, we went back to the office. We had another such interview to shoot later that week, along with at least one undercover shoot, before we’d start writing and assembling the series, so at the moment I was rather underemployed. The pace could get kind of slow in Special Reports between interviews. I missed the action of general news.

  I logged into the computer and an E-mail message blinked in the corner of the screen. I retrieved it. It was from Eric.

  “Stairs?” it said.

  I laughed. The night before, I’d quizzed him on his sex life, where he’d done it, in what position, how many times, etc. Now he was reciprocating. I hesitated before answering, but then decided it was okay, it was safe to proceed.

  I typed back, “Not yet.” I sent the message and then typed, “Public transportation?”

  From his computer terminal in a far corner of the building, he answered, “Yes. Please be more specific.”

  “Subways, buses, trains, planes, helicopters, elevators, escalators, moving sidewalks, the Staten Island Ferry?” I typed.