“Why, Puff, I believe that is the biggest crock of horse poop I’ve heard yet,” I replied.
“Puff,” she said, “remind Shorty of how his mama ran his daddy off so she could control her boy better.”
“Lies, Puff. You’re lying, ya miserable cat.”
And on it went. I gave it my best shot but was no good at therapy, and one morning I said, “I’ve decided that you’ve probably done as much for me as you possibly can, Puff, so this will be my last visit. Thank you.”
Mary Ellen was stunned, as if I had slapped her. Her eyes welled up with tears. “How can you do this to me?” she cried. “Don’t you realize that you’re my only client? You’re important to me, Shorty! How can you walk away from me like I was just your hitching rail?”
This was much too complicated for me. So I saddled up and without a word to Leonora I rode off down the trail toward the Bitterroot, feeling dumber than dirt. Couldn’t bear to be alone, couldn’t bear the company. Thought it might be due to a lack of fluoride. Or it could be genetic—it’s hard to tell. My daddy left home when I was two. If we had any fluoride, he took it with him.
Rode seven days through Arapaho country and was full of loneliness and misery, thinking only of Leonora, her touch and smell, until finally I began to sing “Mi amor, mi corazón,” and burst into tears and turned around and rode back to Pit City. A bitterly cold day, windy, snow flurries, and me without shoes—I’d forgotten them at a campsite—and I was a sorry sight but when Euphonia saw me she said, “Welcome back, honey, and come in and let me get you a pair of Bill’s shoes.”
I took a shower, and the towels were soft and smelled lemony. You miss that softness, that cleanliness, on the trail. Had split-pea soup and Leonora came home and hugged me and cried, and the next day I got a job at the stagecoach office as assistant director of customer service and group sales, and the next few days went along like a song. Euphonia made my breakfast and Leonora made my bed and I bought six new place settings of Amaryllis, and we made plans to marry.
Then the Chautauqua put on a play called The Secret Forest of the Heart that Leonora had a big part in, so I went and I hated it, it was the dumbest sheepdip show you ever saw, about good women who nurture and heal and men who rob and control, and Leonora held out a magical garland of flowers and vines and herbs and celery and sang, “Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk.” People with big wet eyes stood and clapped and a stagecoach driver named Gabby turned to me and said, “I could sure use a big hug right now.” I got out of there as fast as I could.
I told Leonora, “You hate me ’cause I walked out on yer dagnabbed play and you’re going to give me my walkin papers, aintcha?” and she said, no, she wasn’t, she didn’t expect me to like the play, she knew me well enough to know that, and I said, “Oh there you go again, just like always, you never stop finding fault with me, so I might as well go be bad, there’s no percentage in being good,” and she said I was crazy. “Well, to hell with you,” I said, and I got so mad, I went in and robbed the bank. Pulled my hat down low and went in with six-guns in hand and yelled, “Everybody face down on the floor! Nice and easy, now, and nobody gets hurt.”
They said, “Why are you doing this, Shorty? You’re a wonderful guy and have a good job and you’re blessed with the love of a wonderful woman.”
“If that’s what you call blessed, then I’d like to try damned to hell for a while.”
“What do you have to be mad about?” asked the lady teller.
“Doggone it, I can be mad if I want to be. If I say I’m mad, I mean I’m mad.”
“You’ll never get away with it,” someone yelled as I rode away with thirty-four thousand dollars on me, and as it turned out, they were right, but I didn’t know it yet.
I headed off across the sandy flats on Old Dan toward the big mesas, rode hard for a week, then lay back. I was rich, and lonesome as an old galoot. Wanted to hook up with a partner but then thought of the trouble involved and decided against it. Made up a song as I rode along, “Livin inside/I’m dissatisfied/Guess I’m qualified to ride.” Rode to Big Gap. No family took me in, no woman offered me comfort, and I sought no solace in the church. I paid with cash. A man in a saloon said he knew my old partner Eugene. “He got bit by his horse and was laid up with gelding fever and had fits and hallucinations and talked a blue streak for a month before he died, mostly about economics,” he told me. I was sorry I had not been there to see it.
I rode on. I tried not to think about Leonora but I missed her terribly.
I wished I knew how to patch things up but there’s no way. The love between two people is fragile and one false move can break it like fine china, and when it breaks, it’s broken. I rode on, but I rode slower, and after a while I felt sick. I was so lonely. I lay down in the dirt and wrapped myself in a blanket and lay shivering all night and woke up in the morning and—I was about thirty feet from the Colorado Trail! All these wagon trains were going by and now and then a pioneer or a gold prospector’d call over to me—“Howdy! How are you doing over there yonder? You headin west too?”
And I’d answer: “I feel like I’m coming down with something. I don’t know, I got a headache and chills and I feel weak and listless. You got a thermometer with you? Is saltpeter supposed to be good for this? You think maybe I should bleed myself?”
And they’d lope over near me and ask if I had a fever. “You’re supposed to starve a fever,” they said. “Just lie there and rest and don’t eat anything and pretty soon you’ll feel better.”
And I did that, and three days later I died. The vultures came and feasted off me and the dogs fought over my bones and some old bum came and took the thirty-four thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills out of my saddlebags and stomped on my china set and pretty soon what was left of me lay bleached and white on the lone prairie, but I didn’t care because I was in heaven. I assume it was heaven. It was like Brown’s Hotel in Denver, a suite, with a bathtub eight feet long, and a canopied bed, and an angel to bring me my breakfast.
It’s a good breakfast: fresh biscuits and butter and two strips of thick crisp bacon and two eggs soft poached and fried potatoes and all of it on a beautiful pale-blue Amaryllis plate. But it does not vary from day to day, and neither does the angel, who sings beautifully but always the same song.
It is perfect here and a person should be grateful, I reckon, but I am about fed up with it and ready to move on to the other place, if only I could think of something bad enough to say that would get me sent there, and, being a cowboy, I suppose, that won’t be a problem. Something will come to mind.
THE CHUCK SHOW OF TELEVISION
Monday
ULDOON (10 A.M.): NEARSIGHTED GUYS DISTURBED BY THE BLUR WHO WENT BERSERK AND KILLED AGAIN AND AGAIN
AGNES ERSKINE (10 A.M.): DEALING WITH LOVED ONES WHO SMELL BAD
HECTOR (10 A.M.): THE FATTEST FOLKS YOU EVER LAID EYES ON—WE HAD TO BUY A SPECIAL COUCH FOR THIS SHOW!
ELAINE TIBBY POMFRET (10 A.M.): KIDS FROM NICE HOMES WHO EAT FISTFULS OF DIRT
HAROLD DERN SHOW (10 A.M.): PLEASE DON’T WATCH THIS IF YOU WEEP AT THE SIGHT OF CRUELTY!
CHUCK (10 A.M.): PARENTS FROM DISTRICT 18 DISCUSS BUS TRANSPORTATION
It was the week after Flag Day, a slow time for morning talk shows. The week before, Muldoon had led the pack with five shows on young Wall Street executives who suddenly cut loose and became primitive herdsmen in the Adirondacks, living in yurts and subsisting on currants and elk milk, and now, on Monday, the pack was off again, Muldoon with men whose poor vision had sent them down the trail toward multiple homicide, and Agnes probing the problem of family members who smell like wet dogs, and who, if you tell them this, may never speak to you again or, worse, may suffer such loss of self-esteem they lose their careers and take up drugs—last week, she had done people who try to deal with their anonymity by writing a book about it and going
on television. Hector was doing obese male exhibitionists who enjoy putting on organdy tutus and dancing to the “Waltz of the Sugarplum Fairy” in public and were pleased to do so on his show, and Elaine Tibby showed dirt eaters, and Harold Dern ran around the studio with a pickax and did $150,000 worth of property damage as the studio audience cheered.
Meanwhile, on The Chuck Show of Television on PCN (the Pedersen Cable Network, Minneapolis), you saw four parents discussing the fact that the school had canceled the late bus, which made it necessary to drive all the way into town every afternoon and pick up the kids after field-hockey practice and choir rehearsal. “I don’t want to make a big thing about it, and all I’m saying is that it would’ve been nice if the process had allowed for some input from the parents,” one parent said.
The next morning, Chuck’s producer, Big Al, hit the ceiling. “You guys are dumber than dirt! Gosh, for boring! I’d rather watch a man paint a house. What a bunch of dummies! Whose dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb idea was this bus show anyway?” he screamed, when he saw how bad Chuck got beat in the overnight ratings. “A zero point six! That’s as low as you can go and still be talking English.” In fact, Chuck got beat out even by Miklo Pstachek’s talk show, which is in Latvian. Mik had a woman guest who picked up and threw three spinet pianos fifteen feet and then lowered her head and busted through an oak door and ran down the alley with her clothes off. Mik got a one point two.
By the time Big Al saw the overnights and had calmed down enough to sit the Chuck staff down for a meeting, however, it was Tuesday already.
Tuesday
MULDOON: MYOPIC EXECS WHO BECOME HERDSMEN RATHER THAN MURDER THEIR WIVES AND KIDDOES
AGNES ERSKINE: AUNTS WHO STINK—SHOULD YOU SEND COLOGNE FOR CHRISTMAS?
HECTOR: BIG BLUBBERY GUYS IN POOFY DRESSES (ONES WE DIDN’T SHOW YESTERDAY, AFRAID YOU’D BE OFFENDED)
ELAINE TIBBY POMFRET: THEY EAT DIRT AND TOUCH THEMSELVES IN BAD PLACES AND WHAT DO PARENTS DO? NOTHING
HAROLD DERN SHOW: HE WILL RAGE AND FOAM AND SCREECH AND POUND—HE WILL RIP HIS CLOTHES TO SHREDS AND SHAKE THE BARS OF HIS CAGE UNTIL THEY ARE SO LOOSE YOU ARE SURE HE WILL JUMP OUT IN THE AUDIENCE AND WHOMP YOU
CHUCK: WHAT’S NEW THESE DAYS IN VOCATIONAL COUNSELING IN AND AROUND BROOKLYN PARK?
“Who is killing this show by booking guests who are dumber than stumps?” inquired Big Al when the whole Chuck crew assembled in his office at PCN’s long, low cinder-block headquarters on Cheyenne Drive, next to the Wal-Mart, on Tuesday afternoon. Big Al’s office is full of stacks of pornography (research for an unfinished master’s thesis) and they had to scootch in tight, Eliot and Melody and Fielding and Shazzaba and Bob, all of them afraid they were about to be fired, each with a clipboard, a cup of coffee, and a stopwatch.
None of them said, “Al, those are exactly the guests whom your predecessor producer, Mary Ellen Hare, would have described as really neat people. Okay, so you were brought in from Chicago three weeks ago to shake things up, but don’t blame us if it takes a while to get out of PTA-mode and into mud-wrestling.” Nobody said that.
Big Al closed the office door and locked it and stood in the middle of the room and roared like a buffalo. "Fess up and tell me which one of you dumbbells is stiffing this show by hauling in dead meat and dumping it on Chuck’s couch. What’s the deal? This is a show, not a civics class! We need the elephants and acrobats and instead you dumbheads are booking a bunch of librarians!” But in fact it had been the Chucker himself who booked those two shows. Those guests were all Friends of Chuck (FOC). And here in the swamp of paper on Big Al’s desk was a Chuck memo saying they ought to do a show on recycling. Chuck’s wife, Marge, is a lifelong recycler, a fanatic who carries a garbage bag to other people’s parties and collects cans, bottles, paper, and recyclable plastic, and one of Chuck’s big interests at Pedersen Cable is recycling: he’s the one who persuaded President Bill T. Pedersen to put a recycling bin next to the soda machine.
But none of the staff cared to point out the obvious: the host himself, a pleasant man and lifelong Minneapolitan, was dragging the show to the bottom.
“One problem is that here in the Twin Cities it’s hard to find that many freaks—at least, any who care to come on TV and talk about it,” said Fielding. “We don’t have a reliable supply of cross-dressers, hermaphrodites, eunuchs, or geeks. We have plenty of alcoholics, but how interesting are they? They don’t remember anything. This is Minnesota, we’re a journalistically challenged state. I mean, when was the last time a band of Lutherans holed up in a compound with automatic weapons? We don’t have that here. We have a few fatties, but nothing like you see in New York or L.A. I was in New York once and I saw a man as wide as the whole sidewalk. He was driving himself along on a forklift and singing in a sweet, high-pitched voice and lifting up his T-shirt to show his belly button. I’ll bet Hector has him booked for Friday.”
They discussed some combos who might be fun to have—alcoholic execs who abused their elk, obese cross-dressing grandmas who eat dirt as a way to erase memories of childhood trauma—but could The Chuck Show afford the airfare? Probably not.
“Anyway, no more of these Dumb Dora guests or I’ll throw you all out the window,” said Al. “We got to have some sad weird people—some people who make you go, Whoa-oa-oa-oa—or else I’m going to start kicking fanny around here. Now, go work the phones.”
Ironically, Al was a potential guest himself—forty-seven, unable to read or write, terrified of cats, addicted to sugar, chronically depressed because of a rare disease called Phelps, trying finish a masters-degree thesis on masturbation—but of course as the show’s producer he needed to be in the control room, not sitting on the studio couch sobbing over the bum hand that life had dealt him. Though Big Al could have cried plenty about his dad, who abdicated the parental role and married Big Al’s beautiful Aunt Nick and thereby became Al’s uncle, a kindly but distant figure who sat on the porch chuckling and spitting but never giving the boy a smidgen of discipline. Growing Up with Dads Who Are More Like Uncles. But was that the reason Big Al was illiterate? And did it matter? Loneliness was Big Al’s major bugaboo. He felt like the only person like himself in the whole world. There were no books about his ilk, not even a color brochure. His problems were apparently so unspeakably vile that nobody dared talk about them. Was that why he always ran around the Pedersen offices yelling and waving his big arms—to cover up his uniqueness? “What’s the matter with you people!” he said. “How come you can’t think? You want this show to go down the toilet?”
The Pedersen Cable Network
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Demolition Derby
Bowling for Prizes
The Chuck Show of Television
THE MEETING CONT’D: “I don’t think it’s just guests. The star has been looking a little peaked since the show started to cool off,” said Bob. “We need him looking fresh and eager again, like when we had the barking spiders on the show.”
True, said Melody. Eliot smiled. That spider segment had been good. Six months after Chuck went into syndication, he had four Girl Scouts on the show, and one of them, a spider hobbyist, owned three rare barking spiders, and it was fascinating to see the tiny hairy insects and hear their unmistakable woofing and arfing. It got Chuck in papers from coast to coast, and the next day 2.2 million Americans tuned in—
“What???” yelled Al.
Their all-time best audience tuned in the show the next day, thanks to big spider word-of-mouth.
“What happened?”
Chuck’s guests that next day were four old coots who sat and reminisced about Days Gone By and grumped about high property taxes and the cost of prescription drugs.
“You finally got yourself an audience and you blew it on old farts—how could you be so dumb?”
But the old farts had been booked for weeks; it was the only day they weren’t busy at the senior center; they were looking forward to being on TV. So Chuck couldn’t bear to cancel them.
“If I had been producer then, I woulda taken them geezers and heaved them out the door and I woulda signed those barking spiders back for a week!” cried Big Al.
He beat his fist on the desk. “Animals!” he said. “Go out there and bring back live animals!”
Wednesday
MULDOON: $500,000-A-YEAR GUYS WHO QUIT AND GO TO THE WOODS AND BANG AWAY AT ELK BUT MISS, BEING NEARSIGHTED
AGNES ERSKINE: HOW DO YOU TELL YOUR DAD THAT HE HAS BADGER BREATH?
HECTOR: WILL GUYS THIS FAT BOUNCE IF WE DROP THEM? WILL THEY ROLL? WHAT DO THEY LOOK LIKE HANGING UPSIDE DOWN?
ELAINE TIBBY POMFRET: PARENTS WHO SIT AND WATCH KIDS STUFF FISTFULS OF DIRT IN THEIR MOUTHS
HAROLD DERN: HE ESCAPES FROM HIS TRAINER! HE LEAPS INTO THE CROWD OF INNOCENT BYSTANDERS! HE HAS A SMALL CHILD IN HIS HANDS AND IS ABOUT TO CRUSH ITS HEAD LIKE A BEER CAN!
CHUCK: RABBITS COPULATING IN CAGES
The rabbits belonged to Melody’s brother Donald, who had a hobby farm in Chanhassen, three males and three females in heat. The males mounted the females and pumped fast and furiously for six seconds like furry pistons and then fainted and toppled over and lay on their backs twitching, with their legs sticking up in the air, and then awoke and jumped up and remounted.
The PCN crew did some fantastic camerawork—slow-mo and stop-action and split-frame—and the minute Chuck went off the air all three major networks were calling and begging for footage. All three evening newscasts ran a story on it, deploring the depths to which television now descended and the implications of this for literacy and the arts, and that night Big Al took the Chuck staff out for prime-rib Angus at Harry’s Cafe. The big guy was so happy and so drunk that he almost stood up and said, “I’m illiterate, sugar-dependent, catophobic, Phelps-infected, and a self-abuse abuser, and every day I feel sadder than you’ll ever know, but I still love you so much I could hug you to pieces!” Anyway, that’s how he felt.
The Book of Guys Page 4