I, IRV
W
ay past midnight, up in the network’s New York control room, a man and a woman sat in a glass cubicle watching a pair of television monitors. The man was only in his early forties, but already he was bald on top except for a narrow little furze of reddish hair that arched up over his freckled dome like an earphone clamp. He had jowls, eyeglasses for nearsightedness, a shell back, rounded shoulders, and a ponderous gut, which his old gray sweater only made look worse. He also had a slovenly way of slouching in his seat so that his weight rested on the base of his spine. In short, a slob; which he realized; and the hell with it.
The woman was almost exactly the same age he was, but she had a terrific head of blond hair and correct posture to burn. She had big bones and nice broad shoulders, and she wore a pair of creamy white flannel pants, a heavenly heathery tweed hacking jacket, and an ivory silk blouse. Any single item of her ensemble, even her flat-heeled shoes, cost more than all the clothes he was likely to wear in a week.
She made him look insignificant by comparison. He also realized that, and the hell with that, too.
Every now and then he glanced at her, a big blond mama sitting there as primly erect as a thirteen-year-old girl on a horse at a horse show, and he just slumped down a little farther. He was giving up on posture, poise, graceful bearing, first impressions, and all the other superficialities at which Her Blondness excelled. What did it matter, all this poise and grace, if you were up in a cubicle in the middle of the night monitoring a remote feed, f’r chrissake? Through the cubicle’s glass walls he could see an entire bank of monitors glowing and flaring in the control room outside. Or he saw them and he didn’t see them. The only things on his mind right now were the two screens in front of his face and getting Madame Bombshell to pay attention to them. To him, what was going on on those screens was the most important event in the world.
Both monitors were being fed the same action, via a hellishly expensive private fiber-optic hookup, from different camera angles. On both sets he could see the same three young white men in T-shirts, twenty-one or twenty-two years old, certainly not much more than that, boys really, drinking beer in a beat-up booth with leatherette seats, a speckled Formica tabletop, and a little café lamp. All three had smooth, tender jawlines and roses in their cheeks. Their hair was cut so close, their ears stuck out. Happy and high, they radiated the rude animal health of youth, even in the gloom of a topless bar as transmitted to this cubicle over the remote fiber-optic feed.
By now, after midnight, they had reached the garrulous stage. Their conversation chundered out against the irritating thud of a Country Metal band, which was beyond camera range. And yet such were the wonders of modern electronic surveillance—in this case, the microphone planted in the café lamp—he could hear every word they said, assuming you could call them words.
The biggest of the three boys was speaking, the one with all the muscles. His voice had a babyish quality: “Man … was some adder wit chew?”
“Dear God in heaven, Irv,” said the Blond Pomposity, “what’s he saying?”
“He’s saying, ‘Man, what’s the matter with you?’” said Irv. He spoke in a low voice and never took his eyes off the monitors and slouched down even farther into his seat, as if withdrawing into a shell, to indicate that questions and comments were not welcome.
On the screen, the boy continued: “You in see no snakes. I mean, hale, you caint tale me you seen no snakes outcheer in no broad
day
light.”
“Deed I did, too, Jimmy,” said the rawboned boy right across the table from him. “You know, lack it gets sunny late’na moaning, toad noon? They lack to come outcheer on the concrete strip overt the
de
pot? —whirr it’s warm?—and just stretch out fer a spale? Saw one yistitty, big ol’ rattler. Sucker mussa been big araound’s a
gas
’leen hose.”
The big blonde let out a ferocious sigh. “What—are—these—people—
say
ing?! We’re gonna have to use subtitles, Irv. And see if somebody can’t do something about the light.”
“I don’t wanna use subtitles,” said Irv in a whisper meant to admonish her to keep quiet. “I don’t wanna create the impression that gay-bashers are some kind of strange alien creatures. Because they’re not. I wanna show they’re the boy next door. They’re as American as 7-Eleven or Taco Bell, and they’re bigots, and they’re murderers.”
“Well, that’s fine,” said Her Erect Highness, “but these three kidssuppose one of’em blurts out the whole thing while we’re sitting here. Suppose one of ‘em says, ‘Right, I’m the one who killed him,’ and it comes out, ‘Rat, ah’m the one whut kaled the quair.’ How’s the viewer supposed to know? I mean, these kids are speaking rural Romanian. I say we use subtitles.”
“It’s not
that
hard to understand,” whispered Irv, getting testy. “I thought you were
from
the South.”
“I am, but—” She broke off. Her eyes were pinned on the monitors. “Besides, the light’s too dim.”
Irv’s voice rose. “Too
dim
?” He gestured toward the screens. “Whattaya think that is,
The Wonder Years?
That’s a dive, a saloon, a gin mill,
a topless bar in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Mary Cary! I mean, Jesus Christ, that’s real life you’re looking at, in real time, and that’s …
the light that’s there
!”
“Fine, but considering we’ve already gone to the trouble of wiring the place—who’s the field producer on this piece?”
“Ferretti.”
“Well, get him on the line. I wanna talk to him.”
“I’m not calling him in the middle of a
live feed
—when he’s monitoring
an undercover operation
!”
“I don’t see what difference—”
“
Shhhhhh!
” said Irv, slouching down still farther and concentrating on the monitors as if the three boys were about to say something pertinent. But it was just more redneck saloon jabber about snakes and God knew what else.
The truth was, Mary Cary was right. They probably
would
have to use subtitles. But he didn’t feel like giving her the satisfaction of saying so. He couldn’t stand the way she was already saying we, as if she had actually done some work on this piece. Up until tonight, when she finally agreed to spend a couple of hours monitoring the feed with him, she hadn’t done a thing. But obviously she was ready, as usual, to march in and take credit if the piece worked out. He had a very strong instinct about this piece. It was
going to work out.
And suppose he hit the jackpot. Suppose the three soldiers hung themselves right on that videotape. Who would get the credit? All the newspaper stories, the editorials, the Op Ed pieces, all the pronouncements by the politicians, all the letters from the viewers, would talk about this big, gross, aging blonde sitting up in this chair with her regal posture as if she actually ran the show. All anybody would talk about would be Mary Cary Brokenborough.
The dumb, irritating way she said her own name on the air started running through his brain. On the air she still spoke with half a Southern accent.
Merry Kerry Brokenberruh.
That was the way it came out. She pronounced her own name as if it were a piece of rhyming trochaic duometer. It was ridiculous, but people loved it:
He stole a glance. The light of the monitors played across her big broad face. Up close, in person, she wasn’t much; not anymore. There was something gross about her supposed good looks. She was forty-two, and her skin was getting thick, and her nose was getting thick, and her lips were getting thick, and her hair was turning gray, so that she had to go to some hair colorist on Madison Avenue, or he came to her; whichever. Eight years ago, when she had first signed on with the network, she had still been—he closed his eyes for an instant and tried to envision her as she had been then; but instead of
seeing
her, he
felt
, all over again, the humiliation … the insouciance, the amusement, with which she had repulsed every effort of his to … get close … “
Ummmmhhhhh
.” He actually groaned audibly at the recollection of it. Little fat bald Jewish Irv Durtscher was what she had made him feel like … and still made him feel like … Well, her Southern Girl good looks were decaying fast … Another five years … although it was true that on camera she still looked great. She got away with murder. On camera she still looked like a blond bombshell; a cartoon rendition of a blond bombshell, but a blond bombshell all the same; and 50 million people tuned into
Day & Night
every week to see her.
And who the hell knew the name Irv Durtscher?
Well, that was nothing more than the nature of the business, and he had always known that. Nobody even knew what a television producer was, much less who Irv Durtscher was. Nobody knew that the producers were the artists of television, the creators, the
soul
, insofar as the business had any … Mary Cary knew that much. She wasn’t stupid, but she suffered from
denial
, in the sense that Freud used the word. She wanted to deny that she was really nothing but an actress, a mouthpiece, a voice box reciting a script by the creator of
Day & Night
, whose name happened to be Irv Durtscher.
They’d been sitting here in front of the feed for almost three hours,
and she hadn’t stopped thinking about herself long enough to even acknowledge what a superb piece of investigative journalism she was looking at. Not a peep out of her about the ingenuity of what he had managed to pull off! What the hell would it cost her ego to say, “Wow, this is really fabulous, Irv,” or, “Nice work,” or, “How on earth did you know they’d be in that particular bar and exactly what booth they’d be sitting in?” or, “How’d you ever manage to install two hidden cameras and wire the place, for goodness’ sake?” … or just any goddamned thing …
No, she sits there and complains about the
light
. The
light
!—and up until now the Army and the locals in Fayetteville have managed to stonewall this whole atrocity, utterly, and insist there’s no evidence that anybody from Fort Bragg was involved. These three kids, these three rednecks he and Mary Cary were looking at right now—in real time, on these monitors—had beat up another soldier, a kid named Randy Valentine, killed him, murdered him, in the men’s room of a dive just like the one they were in at this moment, for no other reason than that he was gay. Everybody on the base knew who had done it, and there were soldiers who went around giving high fives to the big muscular kid there, the one who started it, Jimmy Lowe—and yet General Huddlestone himself denied all, and
Day & Night
had Huddlestone’s square, creased, lithoid, American Gothic WASP face on tape denying all—and I, Irv Durtscher, will gladly bury the general along with his three young Neanderthal enforcers … I, Irv Durtscher … I, Irv Durtscher, am the true artist of the modern age, the producer, the director, who can at one and the same time draw in television’s stupendous audiences and satisfy the network’s gluttony for profits—and advance the cause of social justice … The big thing in newsmagazine shows now was sting operations with elaborate setups, hidden cameras and microphones, incriminating statements on camera, and this case was perfect. It was
I
,
Irv Durtscher
, who convinced Cale Bigger, the network’s News Division chief, to authorize the huge expense of the spook operation to install the equipment and a live fiber-optic field feed from a dump, a topless bar called the DMZ, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. And why did Bigger
say yes? Because he cares for one second about the cause of gay rights?
Eeeeyah
, don’t make me laugh. It’s solely because I, Irv Durtscher, am the artist who can draw in the millions, the tens of millions, no matter what—and yet nobody knows my name …
He cut a quick glance at Mary Cary. She was looking straight ahead at the monitors. Why couldn’t he come on at the very beginning of the program, the way Rod Serling used to in
The Twilight Zone
or Alfred Hitchcock used to in
Alfred Hitchcock Presents?
Yeah, Hitchcock … Hitchcock was just as short, round, and bald as he was. More so. He could see it now … The titles come on … The theme music … and then …
I, Irv Durtscher
… but then he lost heart. They’d never go for it. On top of everything else, he looked too …
ethnic
. You could
be
Jewish and still be a star in television news, an anchorman or whatever, so long as you didn’t
seem
Jewish. And a name like Irv Durtscher didn’t help. No fat little baldheaded Irv Durtscher was going to be the star, the personality, of a big network news production like
Day & Night
.
So he had his mouthpiece, this big, blond, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant from Petersburg, Virginia, Mary Cary Brokenborough …
Merry Kerry Brokenberruh
… What did
she
care about the cause of gay rights? Who the hell knew? Did
she
even know, herself? Well, at least she was smart enough to know that she should act enlightened about such things. She’d be savvy enough to take directions …
A small cloud formed in Irv Durtscher’s brain. Why was he himself so passionate about gay rights? He wasn’t gay himself; he’d never even had a homosexual experience; and the truth was, every now and then he worried lest his two young sons, who seemed so passive, timorous, overly sensitive … (effeminate?) … lest they turn out gay … Christ, that would be a real goddamned horror show, wouldn’t it? Of course, he would never express anything like that to them. Their orientation would have to be … their orientation … Nevertheless, he felt so goddamned guilty … Ever since divorcing Laurie, he really hadn’t seen that much of the boys. So if they turned out gay, it might be considered
his
fault …
Still
—that had nothing to do with whether he was truly committed to gay rights or not, did it? Social justice was social justice,
and he was truly committed to social justice; always had been; learned it at his mother’s knee, saw the importance of it in his father’s anguished face—