They all whooped and laughed and chowed down on oysters and Martinis and the twenty-four-ounce portions of Angus, and then flaming fudge sundaes for dessert. Chuck wasn’t there—he and Marge had their Amnesty International meeting on Wednesday nights, when they and their friends sat and listened to Paul Winter albums and wrote protesting postcards to totalitarian regimes—but Chuck sent a chocolate cake with green icing that said “CONGRATULATIONS TO A GREAT BUNCH OF PERSONS!” Chuck was happy about the rabbit show—he felt it would open the door to a greater frankness in sex education in the schools.
“The bunnies were fabulous, and the dumbest thing we could do would be to sit on our keesters at this point and coast,” Big Al said. “We’ve got our work cut out for us now. The hardest thing is to stay on top!”
Thursday
MULDOON: THOSE EXECS AND THEIR ELK—WHAT ELSE MIGHT BE GOING ON THERE?
AGNES ERSKINE: PEOPLE WHO SMELL RIPE NEED TO DEAL WITH IT SO THEY CAN MOVE ON
HECTOR: MUCH FATTER PEOPLE THAN THE ONES WE SHOWED BEFORE. THOSE WERE JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG
ELAINE TIBBY POMFRET: MOTHERS WHOSE KIDS EAT DIRT. OFTEN THEY ARE GROUND-FEEDERS TOO
HAROLD DERN: THE CHILD WEEPS COPIOUSLY, THE PARENTS SCREAM IN TERROR, BUT IT’S TOO LATE—IN ANOTHER SECOND, THE MADMAN HOST WILL RIP IT TO SHREDS
CHUCK: HYPNOTIZING CHICKENS
Bob’s brother learned about hypnotizing chickens when he was in 4-H. You hold the chicken gently in the crook of your arm and murmur “Cheese chips, parsnips, and Charlie” over and over and stroke its beak until the bird’s eyes cross and it goes limp as a pillow. Then you can set it down on the ground (chickens’ knees lock when hypnotized; nobody knows why) and it’ll stand, motionless, its white feathers riffling in the breeze, the eyes focused on the tip of the beak, until suddenly it falls over on its side. Or you can prop it against a stake.
The PCN crew shot some footage of hypnotized chickens on location at several egg ranches in the area, including the controversial segment in which a chicken under hypnosis is beheaded with an ax and tears around in circles for a full fifteen seconds, blood pouring from its neck. Some stations cut that segment from The Chuck Show, and then all three networks did stories that showed the execution segment—on MacNeil/Lehrer, three psychologists agreed that the sight could have been traumatizing to small children and do damage that might not show up until they were in their late fifties. The PCN switchboards were jammed all day, and Thursday night the radio call-in shows were full of it, and Friday morning there were big newspaper stories, and the overnight ratings showed Chuck with the highest numbers ever recorded by a daytime cable talk host.
Phenomenal!
Big Al burst into Chuck’s office laughing and screaming like a maniac, waving the survey, jumping up and down as he danced around and around, singing, “We did it, we did it, we did it, we did it!” and what did Chuck say? He glanced at the numbers and said, “This is great. You know why? Because it gives us a platform to say some things about urban planning. I think the Reagan-Bush years left us with huge urban problems—we turned our backs on the cities and left them to drown in garbage—and now we need to decide if we have the national will to invest in our cities, and if so, what they should be like. We have a chance to set the urban agenda in this country for the next fifty years. It’s an incredible opportunity.”
Big Al felt sick to his stomach. “That’s interesting, I’ll have Bob work up a proposal on that,” he muttered, but he thought to himself, “You dumb Norwegian, we beat our brains out and make you the king hell man-eating champion of the white race and all you can think about is urban planning. Man, now I know why Mondale lost.”
Big Al went to his office and got a sawed-off shotgun out of his desk drawer and came back to Chuck’s office and stood in the doorway with the muzzle pointed at his own head and told Chuck the truth. “I cannot read or sign my own name, I am dying of Phelps, I drink three six-packs of Coke every day, my cat terrifies me at night, and I masturbate in unnatural ways. This show is the only bright spot in my life. If you want to be high-minded and pretentious and pompous and ruin this show, I am going to blow my head off right here and now.”
Chuck offered to obtain professional help for Big Al.
“I don’t need professional help, Chucker. I need to win. We got to go out tomorrow and kick their butts off the air.” He put down the gun and walked over to Chuck and kissed him on the lips, hard, a big wet smacker. “Chuck honey, if it meant higher ratings, I’d make love to you in slow motion, and, Chuck, you aren’t even attractive.”
Friday
MULDOON: I WILL QUIT MY SHOW, DRINK ELK’S MILK, AND DON FEMALE APPAREL IN FRONT OF MILLIONS!
AGNES ERSKINE: FOUR TOPICS I USED TO REFUSE TO DISCUSS ON THIS SHOW, INCLUDING BESTIALITY, PHONE CALLS FROM THE DEAD, RUMORS ABOUT NUNS, AND MY RECENT OPERATION TO HAVE MUSK GLANDS REMOVED FROM MY LOWER BACK
HECTOR: OBESE PEOPLE INVOLVED IN SECRET SATANIC-CULT RITES? (EXTREMELY VIVID PHOTOGRAPHS, NO CHILDREN, PLEASE)
ELAINE TIBBY POMFRET: YOU WERE RIGHT, VIEWERS, I WAS WRONG! MILLIONS OF YOU TOLD ME, “DON’T KNOCK IT IF YOU HAVEN’T TRIED IT!”—SO TODAY I WILL! A WHOLE BIG BUCKET!
HAROLD DERN: LOOK! A DOG RUSHES IN! HE BARKS, “DERN! DERN!” AND BIG TEARS RUN DOWN THE ARCHFIEND’S CHEEKS AND HE RETURNS THE CHILD UNHARMED TO ITS PARENTS! IT IS HIS BOYHOOD DOG, CHIPPER, WHO RAN AWAY AND NOW HAS COME BACK! THE CHILD IS SAVED AND THE MONSTER REDEEMED BY THE LOVE OF A PET!
CHUCK: MY PRODUCER AND A GUY I’M PRIVILEGED TO CALL A FRIEND, BIG AL
Big Al knew that his guest appearance was a mistake the minute the “On Air” light flashed, but what could he do? Too late. He told everything in five minutes, and it was nothing. Masturbation—big deal. Adult illiteracy. Sugar addiction. Cat fear. Depression. Phelps. It was old hat. Noise. He wished so badly that he’d listened to the staff—the great stuff they’d gone out and found. The world’s tiniest horse! A cow with two heads and two separate udders with a total of ten teats! A pig with a wooden leg who dives and swims and attacks on command!
The Big Al segment was lame. Al was even more depressed afterward, and locked himself in his office, and stared listlessly at pornographic pictures for an hour. But he cheered up later when the weekly ratings came in and The Chuck Show finished the week on top, followed by Agnes, Muldoon, Hector and Harold tied for fourth, Elaine Tibby dead last. E.T. promptly issued a press release decrying low standards in television and said she would devote two weeks to showing clips from the most disgusting TV shows of the past year.
There was quite a bit of soul-searching around the Chuck Show office in the Pedersen Cable Network building that afternoon. Chuck was gone—he and Marge were spending the weekend at a conference on American policy toward Canada—and basically what Big Al said was, “My fault, guys. I let you down. Autoeroticism isn’t what got us here. We gotta get back to basics.”
Bob reported that Hector was planning a whole week on capital punishment, comparing the merits of hanging, electrocution, firing squads, lethal injections, stoning, and pressing under heavy weights, and Muldoon was going to do grandmas hooked on methadone and nobody knows it except they seem sleepy in the afternoon, and Agnes was going to do death itself and her guests would be terminally ill persons hovering on the edge who could go at any moment, and Elaine Tibby would have a week on sex in car pools, and Harold Dern would go berserk and rave and foam as usual.
“Don’t worry about them,” said Big Al. “We’re going to play our game and do what we do best. Otherwise you’ll all be fired and hurled naked into a vat of acid.”
By three o’clock that afternoon, they had worked up a tentative schedule:
MONDAY: Snakes eating live rats, and lizards eating the snakes, and giant horned toads eating the lizards
TUESDAY: Pigs vs. horses (IQ)
WEDNESDAY: Transvestites wrestling alligators
THURSDAY: Various pets from tiny towns near nuclear testing sites who look exactly like different celebr
ities, such as William F. Buckley, Jr., Joan Collins, and David Letterman
FRIDAY: A hundred-foot-long white whale, named Ruby, captured from the North Atlantic, who swallowed several men (perhaps six or seven) who are thought to be still alive inside, at least doctors listening with powerful infrared stethoscopes hear what sounds like English emanating from the behemoth’s lower digestive tract
“The gigantic creature will be carefully anesthetized and opened up on Friday morning at ten-thirty,” said Big Al. “Ambulances will be standing by to take the survivors, if any, to the hospital. No expense will be spared to rehabilitate these men and restore them to a useful role in society.”
“How is this whale going to get to the studio?” asked Eliot.
Big Al said she would be flown by Federal Express in a special tanker plane from Bedford, Massachusetts, and would be kept in a large plastic tank outside the PCN building. After the operation, she would be returned to Bedford.
“Why don’t we do the show from Bedford?” asked Shazzaba.
“Because we’re here,” Big Al explained. “People expect the show to come from the Midwest. You take Chuck east and people will think we’re putting on airs.”
Melody wondered if they shouldn’t try to extricate the men from the whale right away and then have them as guests when they recovered.
“No,” he said. “We’re going to wait and cut the whale open on live television. Otherwise we get scooped. We’d wake up Monday morning and there they’d be on Today.”
Fielding was troubled. “We could put exclusive-interview contracts into spitproof cylinders, make the whale swallow them, get the men to sign them, and recover them from the other end, and then open her up tonight and out they come.”
Big Al screamed “No!” He pounded his fist and stamped his feet: No no no no no no no no no! He locked his office door and he tore all the pictures and awards from the walls and stomped them to bits! He cursed and he screeched! He hurled heavy objects out the window and onto the parking lot!
“We’re not going back to the old days, never, never, never, never, never! We worked hard to get us a king hell man-eating shin-kicking daytime TV show and we are not going to wimp out—hear me?”
Melody pointed out that there could be negative publicity if the whalectomy revealed the limp lifeless bodies of sailors recently expired, sailors who could have been rescued had the TV folks called 911—“You ever hear of third-degree manslaughter?” she said.
“You ever hear of losing your job?” he replied.
“What if there are no guys inside that whale?” cried Fielding.
Al looked around the room. “I personally guarantee you that there will be at least one man inside, and two if we can manage it. Don’t ask me how I know. I know. I’m paid to know. That’s how I know. Money makes me smart. Two guys in that whale and neither one of them is going to speak English. We’ll need translators. Can you translate from the ancient Aramaic, Fielding?—good, I’m glad.”
Fielding, who hadn’t known of his Aramaic fluency until that moment, looked at Bob, and Bob looked at Melody, and Melody looked at Shazzaba, and Eliot looked at his shoes. None of them said a word, only sighed. There would be no sleep for any of them the next week—they could see that. Four big shows to produce (and where were they ever going to find transvestites willing to get in a pit and wrestle with gators?), and then the whale story—good gosh, the headaches—they could feel a tightening in their temples—and then what would they do the week after next?
THE MID-LIFE CRISIS OF DIONYSUS
ionysus, the god of wine and whoopee, the son of Zeus and Semele, Dionysus the eternal party animal, to his great surprise one sun-drenched afternoon suddenly turned fifty years of age as he reclined on a languid young woman in his temple on Mount Cithaeron in Boeotia. He was dipping his finger into a very fine 1925 B.C. Pinot Noir and swabbing it onto her lips, and he was fussing about the orgy scheduled for that evening, saying that he had laid in six gallons of extra-virgin cold-pressed olive oil—“You think that’s too much or not enough?” he asked—“All depends,” she said, licking the wine off her lower lip with her rough pink tongue. He said he hoped that nobody would use Roquefort salad dressing at the orgy, it was hard to clean the cheese out of his ears, and then he heard the unmistakable clip-clomp-clomp of the sensible shoes of the Muse of maturity, Gladys, clambering up the steps, clipboard in hand, knapsack on her back, wearing a frumpy brown dress with sweat stains under the arms. She blew a hard tweet on her whistle and cried, “Climb off that girl, Gramps, and put down the beverage. And brace yourself for a major news item,” and then she broke it to him hard. He was fifty. Fifty years old.
Dionysus sat up—“What?” he said, letting go of the supple young woman. “Fifty. Ha! I’m immortal! Ageless! You can look it up!”
“Everybody gets just so much immortality and then it’s time to grow up,” said Gladys in her deep horsy voice. “You were young for thousands of years, like everybody else, and now you’re fifty. Better face the music and learn to dance to it.”
But acceptance was not part of Dionysus’ godly nature. He was the god of revels, the god who resisted dull care and deadlines and the long grim slide of mortality, the one who always shouted, “Play, gypsy fiddlers, play! Dance on, you fools! Throw the theologians in the cellar and bring us more oysters and more hot sauce! More young women! And make them even younger!” He wasn’t ready to sit in a sunny corner with a knitted comforter on his lap and chuckle to himself over geezer news in the newspaper.
He looked at her, dumpy Gladys! and laughed his big careless laugh, haw, haw, haw, and tossed his raven tresses, which suddenly felt—what? thin? his hair? Dionysus’? He touched it delicately. The hair was there, sort of, but it felt stringy, not flowing as before, not flowing fluidly and bouncing. It hung like dry dead moss.
The young woman squirmed away and put on a robe. She kissed him nicely on the cheek, said “Thanks, lover,” and wandered off to find a toothbrush.
Dionysus strode to the edge of the reflecting pool and looked down. His hands looked old, mottled, with big ropy veins, the skin wrinkly and raspy as a lizard’s. Big tufts of hair poked from his ears, and his jawline felt poorly defined, his chin seemed not so much to thrust forward as to be a lump atop his neck, and his chest had descended about five inches. “Who did this to me?” he asked. “Whose handiwork is this?”
Gladys shrugged. “You don’t look that bad, mister. Your back looks youthful. And your prostate’s okay. So far. Slightly enlarged but good for another two or three years anyway. Your brain function seems fairly sound, considering. Health’s good, considering. You’re no gem but you’re in good shape. You should live well into your senility and beyond.”
Dionysus called up the nymphs and satyrs, the madwomen and bull-roarers and wild swine, and called off the orgy, told them he wasn’t in an orgy mood, that he felt stiff and achy and blue and wanted to be alone. To the last orgiast, they told him that a good orgy was exactly what he needed to restore his spirits—enjoy a skin of good wine, strip naked, feel the oil trickle down his thighs, feel the heat of golden down-covered young women writhing upon and around and under him moaning and crying out his name, their proud young breasts, their taut brown bellies, their limber shanks, their—no thanks, he said, he’d just stay home and work the crossword with his wife, Ariadne.
He returned the olive oil to the store, and the manager, a solemn fellow with a nose like a chisel, said, “It didn’t feel right? Too slick? You want something with more texture, like a basil vinaigrette or honey mustard? Myself, I find that mustard irritates the privates, but maybe you’re into that, I don’t know. You interested in molasses? Or we have this new strawberry body jam.” The leer in the man’s voice seemed dreary and disgusting.
He drove slowly home, through the leafy suburbs of Boeotia. A flock of dark birds poured out of a poplar tree, skimmed the ground, and wheeled, their undersides flashing brilliant silver, like a burst of rockets.
Ar
iadne had fixed poached grouper for supper, not his favorite, and the potatoes were burnt and covered with a cream sauce. And there was a papyrus salad, rather dry to the palate. Dionysus put down his fork and reached for the wine. Ariadne leaned across the fish and took his hand, her eyes large with compassion. “Dio, we need to talk about your drinking,” she said.
Dionysus rolled his eyes. “Look,” he said, “I’m the god of wine, okay? I’m not the god of iced tea. I am the god of revelry, a crucial element of the fertility process. The dancing and drinking and whooping and wahooing is what makes the wheat grow, babes. That’s what gives us the corn crop. Why am I telling you this? You know this.”
Nonetheless, she said, she was concerned about his health. She had read an article that said most people drink to build up self-confidence and compensate for low self-esteem. She thought he needed to see someone.
“I have no lack of self-esteem!” he cried. “I’m a god!”
“Are you?”
“Of course I am! What do you mean, are you? What do you mean by that? Of course I’m a god.” Dionysus leaned forward. “Aren’t I?”
“You’re fifty,” she said. “To me, fifty spells m-o-r-t-a-l.”
He held out his hands. “I’m the same beautiful guy with the same flowing locks as when you married me. Look.” And he touched his hair, and it was still limp. Was he using the wrong conditioner?
“Drinking too much wine is hard on your hair, honey. And it causes loss of memory. And it makes you flatulent,” she said.
The Book of Guys Page 5