Angry Candy

by Harlan Ellison

  Had I known that on the evening of Thursday, September 14, 1978 Ain't It the Truth was to premiere opposite a new ABC show called Mork & Mindy, and that within three weeks a dervish named Robin Williams would be dining on Nielsen rating shares the way sharks devour entire continents, I might have been able to hold onto enough of my sanity to weather the Dark Ages. And I wouldn't have gotten involved with Wally Modisett, the phantom sweetener, and I wouldn't have spoken into the black box, and I wouldn't have found the salvation for my dead Aunt Babe's soul.

  But early in September Williams had not yet uttered his first Nanoo-nanoo (except on a spinoff segment of Happy Days and who the hell watched that?) and we had taped the first three segments of Ain't It the Truth before a live audience at the Burbank Studios, if you can call those who voluntarily go to tapings of sitcoms as "living," and late one night the specter of Bill Tidy appeared in the doorway of my office, his great horse face looming down at me like the demon that emerges from the Night on Bald Mountain section of Disney's Fantasia; and his sulphurous breath reached across the room and made all the little hairs in my nostrils curl up and try to pull themselves out so they could run away and hide in the back of my head somewhere; and the two reflective puddles of Vegemite he called eyes smoldered at me, and this is what he said. First he said:

  "That fuckin' fag cheese-eater director's never gonna work again. He's gonna go two days over, mark my words. I'll see the putzola never works again."

  Then he said:

  "I bought another condo in Phoenix. Solid gold investment. Better than Picassos."

  Then he said:

  "I heard it at lunch today. A cunt is just a clam that's wearin' a fright-wig. Good, huh?"

  Then he said:

  "I want you to stay late tonight. I can't trust anyone else. Guy'll show up here about eight. He'll find you. Just stay put till he gets here. Never mind a name. He'll make himself known to you. Take him over to the mixing studio, run the first three shows for him. Nobody else gets in, kapeesh, paisan?"

  I was having such a time keeping my gorge from becoming buoyant that I barely heard his directive. Bill Tidy gave new meaning to the words King of the Pig People. The only groups he had failed to insult in the space of thirteen seconds were blacks, Orientals, paraplegics, and Doukhobors, and if I didn't quickly agree to his demands, he'd no doubt round on them, as well. "Got it, Bill. Yessiree, you can count on me. Uh-huh, absolutely, right-on, dead-center, I hear ya talkin', I'm your boy, I loves workin' foah ya Massa' Tidy-suh, you can bank on me!"

  He gave me a look. "You know, Angelo, you are gettin' stranger and stranger, like some kind of weird insect."

  And he turned and he vanished, leaving me all alone there in the encroaching darkness, just tuning my antennae and rubbing my hind legs together.

  I was slumped down on my spine, eyes closed, in the darkened office with just the desk lamp doing its best to rage against the dying of the light, when I heard someone whisper huskily, "Turn off the light."

  I opened my eyes. The room was empty. I looked out the window behind my desk. It was night. I was three flights up in the production building. No one was there.

  "The light. Turn off the light, can you hear what I'm telling you?"

  I strained forward toward the open door and the dark hallway beyond. "You talking to me?" Nothing moved out there.

  "The light. Slow; you're a very slow person."

  Being Catholic, I respond like a Pavlovian dog to guilt. I turned out the light.

  From the deeper darkness of the hallway I saw something shadowy detach itself and glide into my office. "Can I keep my eyes open," I said, "or would a blindfold serve to palliate this unseemly paranoia of yours?"

  The shadowy form snorted disdainfully. "At these prices you can use words even bigger than that and I don't give a snap." I heard fingers snap. "You care to take me over to the mixing booth?"

  I stood up. Then I sat down. "Don't wanna play." I folded my arms.

  The shadowy figure got a petulant tone in his voice. "Okay, c'mon now. I've got three shows to do, and I haven't got all night. The world keeps turning. Let's go."

  "Not in the cards, Lamont Cranston. I've been ordered around a lot these last few days; and since I don't know you from a stubborn stain, I'm digging in my heels. Remember the Alamo. Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Forty-four forty or fight."

  "I think that's fifty-four forty or fight," he said.

  We thought about that for a while. Then after a long time I said, "Who the hell are you, and what is it you do that's so illicit and unspeakable that first of all Bill Tidy would hire you to do it, which puts you right on the same level as me, which is the level of graverobbers, dog catchers, and horse-dopers; and second, which is so furtive and vile that you have to do it in the dead of the night, coming in here wearing garb fit only for a commando raid? Answer in the key of C#."

  He chuckled. It was a nice chuckle. "You're okay, kid," he said. And he dropped into the chair on the other side of my desk where writers pitching ideas for stories sat; and he turned on the desk lamp.

  "Wally Modisett," he said, extending a black-gloved hand. "Sound editor." I took the hand and we shook. "Free-lance," he said.

  That didn't sound so ominous. "Why the Creeping Phantom routine?"

  Then he said the word no one in Hollywood says. He looked intently at all of my face, particularly around the mouth, where lies come from, and he said: "Sweetening."

  If I'd had a silver crucifix, I'd have thrust it at him at arm's length. Be still my heart, I thought.

  There are many things of which one does not speak in the television industry. One does not repeat the name of the NBC executive who was making women writers give him blowjobs in his office in exchange for writing assignments, even though he's been pensioned off with a lucrative production deal at a major studio and the network paid for his psychiatric counseling for several years. One does not talk about the astonishing Digital Dance done by the royalty numbers in a major production company's ledgers, thereby fleecing several superstar participants out of their "points" in the profits, even though it made a large stink on the World News Tonight and everybody scampered around trying to settle out of court while TV Guide watched. One does not talk about how the studio frightened a buxom ingénue who had become an overnight national sensation into modifying her demands for triple salary in the second season her series was on the air, not even to hint knowingly of a kitchen chair with nails driven up through the seat from the underside.

  And one never, never, no never ever talks about the phantom sweeteners.

  This show was taped before a live studio audience!

  If you've heard it once, you've heard it at least twice. And so when those audiences break up and fall on the floor and roll around and drum their heels and roar so hard they have to clutch their stomachs and tears of hilarity blind them and their noses swell from crying too much and they sound as if they're all genetically selected high-profile tickleables, you fall right in with them because that ain't canned laughter, it's a live audience, onaccounta This show was taped before a live studio audience.

  While high in the fly loft of the elegant opera house, the Phantom Sweetener looks down and chuckles smugly.

  They're legendary. For years there was only Charlie Douglas, a name never spoken. A laugh man. A sound technician. A sweetener. They say he still uses laughs kidnapped off radio shows from the Forties and Fifties. Golden laughs. Unduplicable originals. Special, rich laughs that blend and support and lift and build a resonance that punches your subliminal buttons. Laughs from The Jack Benny Show, from segments of The Fred Allen Show down in Allen's Alley, from The Chase & Sanborn Hour with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy (one of the shows on which Charlie mixed it up with W. C. Fields). The laughs that Ed Wynn got, that Goodman and Jane Ace got, that Fanny Brice got. Rich, teak-colored laughs from a time in this country when humor wasn't produced by slugs like Bill Tidy. For a l
ong time Charlie Douglas was all alone as the man who could make even dull thuds go over boffola.

  But no one knew how good he was. Except the IRS, which took note of his underground success in the industry by raking in vast amounts of his hard-earned cash.

  Using the big Spotmaster cartridges — carts that looked like eight-track cassettes, with thirty cuts per cart — twelve or fourteen per job — Charlie Douglas became a hired gun of guffaws, a highwayman of hee-haws, Zorro of zaniness; a troubleshooter working extended overtime in a specialized craft where he was a secret weapon with a never-spoken code-name.

  Carrying with him from studio to studio the sounds of great happy moments stolen from radio signals long since on their way to Proxima Centauri.

  And for a long time Charlie Douglas had it all to himself, because it was a closely guarded secret; not one of the open secrets perhaps unknown in Kankakee or Key West, like Merv Griffin or Ida Lupino or Roger Moore; but common knowledge at the Polo Lounge and Chasen's.

  But times got fat and the industry grew and there was more work, and more money, than one Phantom Sweetener could handle.

  So the mother of invention called forth more audio soldiers of fortune: Carroll Pratt and Craig Porter and Tom Kafka and two silent but sensational guys from Tokyo and techs at Glen Glenn Sound and Vidtronics. And you never mention their names or the shows they've sweetened, lest you get your buns run out of the industry. It's an open secret, closely held by the community. The networks deny their existence, the production company executives would let you nail them hands and feet to their office doors before they'd cop to having their shows shot before a live studio audience sweetened. In the dead of night by the phantoms.

  Of whom Wally Modisett is the most mysterious.

  And here I sat, across from him. He wore a black turtleneck sweater, jeans, and gloves. And he placed on the desk the legendary black box. I looked at it. He chuckled.

  "That's it," he said.

  "I'll be damned," I said.

  I felt as if I were in church.

  In sound editing, the key is equalization. Bass, treble, they can isolate a single laugh, pull it off the track, make a match even twenty years later. They put them on "endless loops" and then lay the show over to a multitrack audio machine, and feed in one laugh on a separate track, meld it, blend it in, punch it up, put that special button-punch giggle right in there with the live studio audience track. They do it, they've always done it, and soon now they'll be able to do it with digital encoding. And he sat right there in front of me with the legendary black box. Legendary, because Wally Modisett was an audio genius, an electronics Machiavelli who had built himself a secret system to do it all through that little black box that he took to the studios in the dead of night when everyone was gone, right into the booth at the mixing room, and he didn't need a multitrack.

  If it weren't something to be denied to the grave, the mensches and moguls of the television industry would have Wally Modisett's head right up there on Mt. Rushmore in the empty space between Teddy Roosevelt and Abe Lincoln.

  What took twenty-two tracks for a combined layering on a huge machine, Wally Modisett carried around in the palm of his hand. And looking at his long, sensitive face, with the dark circles under his eyes, I guess I saw a foreshadowing of great things to come. There was laughter in his eyes.

  I sat there most of the night, running the segments of Ain't It the Truth. I sat down below in the screening room while the Phantom Sweetener locked himself up in the booth. No one, he made it clear, watched him work his magic.

  And the segments played, with the live audience track, and he used his endless loops from his carts — labeled "Single Giggle 1" and "Single Giggle 2" and slightly larger "Single Giggle 3" and the dreaded "Titter/Chuckle" and the ever-popular "Rim Shot" — those loops of his own design, smaller than those made by Spotmaster, and he built and blended and sweetened the hell out of that laugh track till even I chuckled at moronic material Bill Tidy had bastardized to a level that only the Jukes and Kallikaks could have found uproarious.

  And then, on the hundredth playback, after Modisett had added another increment of hilarity, I heard my dead Aunt Babe. I sat straight up in the plush screening room chair, and I slapped the switch on the console that fed into the booth, and I yelled, "Hey! That last one! That last laugh . . . what was that. . . ?"

  He didn't answer for a moment. Then, tinnily, through the console intercom, he said, "I call it a wonky."

  "Where'd it come from?"

  Silence.

  "C'mon, man, where'd you get that laugh?"

  "Why do you want to know?"

  I sat there for a second, then I said, "Listen, either you've got to come down here, or let me come up there. I've got to talk to you."

  Silence. Then after a moment, "Is there a coffee machine around here somewhere?"

  "Yeah, over near the theater."

  "I'll be down in about fifteen minutes. We'll have a cup of coffee. Think you can hold out that long?"

  "If you nail a duck's foot down, does he walk in circles?"

  It took me almost an hour to convince him. Finally, he decided I was almost as bugfuck as he was, and the idea was so crazy it might be fun to try and work it out. I told him I was glad he'd decided to try it because if he hadn't I'd have followed him to his secret lair and found some way to blackmail him into it, and he said, "Yeah, I can see you'd do that. You're not a well person."

  "Try working with Bill Tidy sometime," I said. "It's enough to turn Mother Teresa into a hooker."

  "Give me some time," he said. "I'll get back to you."

  I didn't hear from him for a year and a half. Ain't It the Truth had gone to the boneyard to join The Chicago Teddy Bears and Angie and The Dumplings. Nobody missed it, not even its creator. Bill Tidy had wielded his scythe with skill.

  Then just after two A.M. on a summer night in Los Angeles, my phone rang, and I fumbled the receiver off the cradle and found my face somehow, and a voice said, "I've got it. Come." And he gave me an address; and I went.

  The warehouse was large, but all his shit was jammed into one corner. Multitracks and oscilloscopes and VCRs and huge 3-mil-thick Mylar foam speakers that looked like the rear seats of a 1933 Chevy. And right in the middle of the floor was a larger black box.

  "You're kidding?" I said.

  He was like a ten-year-old kid. "Would I shit you? I'm telling you, fellah, I've gone where no man has gone before. I has done did it! Jonas Salk and Marie Curie and Lee De Forest and all the rest of them have got to move over, slide aside, get to the back of the bus." And he leaped around, howling, "I am the king!"

  When I was able to peel him off the catwalks and made a spiderweb tracery above us, he started making some sense. Not a lot of sense, because I didn't understand half of what he was saying, but enough sense for me to begin to believe that this peculiar obsession of mine might have some toe in the world of reality.

  "The way they taped shows back in 1953, when your aunt went to that Our Miss Brooks, was they'd use a ¼" machine, reel-to-reel. They'd have directional mikes above the audience, to separate individual laughs. One track for the program, and another track for the audience. Then they'd just pick up what they want, equalize, and sock it onto one track for later use. Sweetened as need be."

  He went to a portable fridge and pulled out a Dr. Pepper and looked in my direction. I shook my head. I was too excited for junk food. He popped the can, took a swig and came back to me.

  "The first thing I had to do was find the original tape, the master. Took me a long time. It was in storage with . . . well, you don't need to know that. It was in storage. I must have gone through a thousand old masters. But I found her. Then I had to pull her out. But not just the sound of her laugh. The actual laugh itself. The electronic impulses. I used an early model of this to do it." He waved a hand at the big black box.

  "She'd started sounding weak to me, over the years," I said. "Slurred sometimes. Scratchy."

  "Yeah, yeah,
yeah." Impatient to get on with the great revelation. "That was because she was being diminished by fifth, sixth, twentieth generation re-recording. No, I got her at full strength, and I did what I call 'deconvolving.'"

  "Which is?"

  "Never mind."

  "You going to say 'never mind' every time I ask what the hell you did to make it work?"

  "As Groucho used to say to contestants, 'You bet your ass.' "

  I shrugged. It was his fairy tale.

  "Once I had her deconvolved, I put her on an endless loop. But not just any kind of normal standard endless loop. You want to know what kind of endless loop I put her on?"

  I looked at him. "You going to tell me to piss off?"

  "No. Go ahead and ask."

  "All right already: I'm asking. What the hell kind of endless loop did you put her on?"

  "A moebius loop."

  He looked at me as if he'd just announced the birth of a two-headed calf. I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. That didn't stop me from whistling through my two front teeth, loud enough to cause echoes in the warehouse, and I said, "No shit?!?"

  He seemed pleased, and went on faster than before. "Now I feed her into the computer, digitally encode her so she never diminishes. Slick, right? Then I feed in a program that says harmonize and synthesize her, get a simulation mapping for the instrument that produced that sound; in other words, your aunt's throat and tongue and palate and teeth and larynx and alla that. Now comes the tricky part. I build a program that postulates an actual physical situation, a terrain, a place where that voice exists. And I send the computer on a search to bring me back everything that comprises that place."

  "Hold hold hold it, Lamont. Are you trying to tell me that you went in search of the Land of Oz, using that loop of Babe's voice?"

  He nodded about a hundred and sixteen times.

  "How'd you do that? I know: piss off. But that's some kind of weird metaphysical shit. It can't be done."