A sudden small stab of guilt … I, Irv Durtscher. He was letting himself get carried away by personal ambition … Mustn’t let that happen … But then he worked it out. He was not doing all this for Irv Durtscher, or at least not
just
for Irv Durtscher. He was doing it for a dream passed on to him by his father and mother, two little but fiercely idealistic people who had eked by with a glass-and-mirror shop in Brooklyn, who had sacrificed everything to send him off to Cornell, who had never had the means, the opportunity, to bring their dream of social justice alive. This piece on the martyrdom of Randy Valentine, a poor, harmless gay soldier at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was part of the final battle, the battle to end America’s secret feudal order and her subtle but pernicious forms of serfdom. The hour was at hand. The day of the Cale Biggers, the General Huddlestones, and those who did their dirty work, the Jimmy Lowes and Ziggy Ziggefooses and Florys, the day
of the WASPs and their wanna-be’s with their constricted version of “families” and “the natural order”—that day was in its dusk and fading fast, and a new dawn was coming, a dawn in which no authentic genius of the future would ever need hide behind a mask of whiteness or heterosexuality or WASPy names and good looks … or Merry Kerry Brokenberruh.
He looked her right in the face. She stared back at him with a certain …
something
in her eyes, something he’d never seen there before. It was as if it was suddenly dawning on her what this all meant and she was seeing him, Irv Durtscher, in an entirely new light. Their eyes engaged in what seemed like a blissful eternity. He somehow knew that now if he just—well, why didn’t he go ahead and try it? She was … she had just gotten married for the third time, but it was ludicrous … The guy, Hugh Siebert, some eye surgeon, was solemn, pompous, pretentious, a stiff neck
and
a nonentity … Couldn’t last … Why didn’t he just reach forward and take her hand in his, and whatever happened … would
just happen …
Irv and Mary Cary … There was no one around to see them … He upped the voltage, stared into her eyes with the eyes of a victorious warrior. A confident, manly, and yet warm and inviting, even seductive, smile stole across his face.
And then he went ahead and did it.
He reached out and took her hand in his and let the current flow from him into her, let it surge up from his very loins, all the while pouring his victorious gaze into her eyes.
For a moment Mary Cary didn’t stir, except to bring her eyebrows together quizzically. Then she lowered her head and stared at his hand, which still held hers. She stared at it as if it were a Carolina anole, a tiny tree lizard, that had somehow made its way up twenty-odd stories in New York City and wrapped its little lizard self around her hand. She didn’t even deign to take her hand away. She just lifted her head, cocked it to one side, and gave him a look that said, “What the hell’s gotten into you
?”
Pop
. The bubble burst. The magic moment deflated. Sheepishly, oh
so sheepishly, he took his hand away. He felt as repulsed and humiliated as he had ever felt in the eight years he had known this infuriating woman.
That did it. She had to go. From now on—if she actually thought her celebrated presence was the heart and soul of
Day & Night—
Then his spirits sank all over again. The plain truth was, he needed her more than ever right now. This story, the Randy Valentine story, was far from over. In keeping with the newsmagazine format, somebody was going to have to execute the ambush. That was the term they used, the
ambush.
Somebody was going to have to confront the three violent redneck murderers on camera. Somebody was going to have to find them, surprise them on the base, on the street, wherever, and shove the incriminating evidence right in their faces, and stand there and take whatever they had to say—or do—while the cameras rolled. In his sinking heart, he, Irv Durtscher, knew he could never pull off an ambush like that, even if the network was
dying
to see him on camera. And yet it wouldn’t faze Mary Cary for a second. It wouldn’t worry her before, during, or after. She’d do an ambush, of anybody, anywhere, any time, in an instant,
just like that
, with gusto and without a moment’s fear or regret.
He looked away, out through the glass of the cubicle at the great bank of control-room monitors, which glowed and flared from feeds all over the world. The new palettes … the new art form … the new dawn … The very notions began to curdle in his mind.
He looked back at her. She was still staring at him, only now with a look of boredom. Or was she merely tired?
“Well, I guess that’s all we can do tonight,” he said. He sounded as if he had lost his last friend. Moreover, he knew he sounded that way.
I, Irv Durtscher … damn that woman! … Why was it that everything, even the grandest designs, boiled down at last, when all was said and done, to sex?
THE IMPORTANCE OF LOLA THONG
Ferretti, the field producer for the Fort Bragg gay-bashing piece, had been down in Fayetteville for weeks, and it seemed as though every time he called Irv in New York he had some new war story about Bragg Boulevard. Not only that, back in New York, Irv had spent untold hours monitoring the live field feed from the DMZ itself, which was a typical Bragg Boulevard topless joint. So what could be so surprising about Bragg Boulevard? He had had a picture of this garish, hellish nightmare alley in his mind long before he got here yesterday.
But actually being on Bragg Boulevard, as he was tonight—this had unnerved Irv Durtscher. Seriously. It had rattled him so, he wanted to talk to someone about it. Immediately. But how could he? The stakeout had already begun, and soon, all too soon, any minute perhaps, the ambush would be underway. And he, Irv Durtscher, the Costa-Gavras of television journalism, the Goya of the electronic palette, was supposed to be the maximum leader of this operation.
Once more he ran his eyes over everybody who was here inside the RV with him—the RV, the recreational vehicle, a term he, having lived all his life in New York City, had never heard of before yesterday, when Ferretti showed him this monster. They were all crammed into the RV’s rear compartment … Ferretti … Mary Cary … Mary Cary’s fat makeup woman … the two hulking technicians, Gordon and Roy … and Miss Lola Thong, the Thai-American topless dancer Ferretti had recruited … too many bodies in too tight a space … too much equipment … lit entirely by the Radiology Blue glow of a bank of monitor screens … so that Mary Cary’s famous shock of blond hair now looked a sickly aquamarine … Irv scanned his entire army, looking for emotional support and wondering if they could tell the maximum leader had the hoo-hahs.
From the outside, to anybody passing by on Bragg Boulevard or anybody turning in here to the DMZ’s parking lot, the RV was just an ordinary
beige High Mojave touring van, a big boxy house-on-wheels. Nobody would even look twice (Ferretti had assured him), because Fort Bragg was a huge base with more than 136,700 soldiers, support personnel, and family members, a highly transient population that practically lived in RVs, trailers, and U-Haul-its. But if anybody had been able to look inside the van, that would have been a different story. Ferretti had had a partition installed two-thirds of the way back, with a concealed door; and the technicians, Gordon and Roy, had turned the hidden rear section, where they were now, into a spaghetti of wires, cables, monitor screens, headsets, and recording equipment that reminded Irv, morbidly, of
Bone Zone
, the notorious counterterrorist movie.
They were parked right behind the DMZ, which from the rear was a crude, one-story, cinder-block-and-concrete structure with a flat roof weighed down by air-conditioning compressors and rusting ducts. The three rednecks, Jimmy Lowe, Flory, and Ziggefoos, were inside the topless joint at this moment, drinking, as usual, and jabbering away in rural Romanian, as Mary Cary called it. Mary Cary was watching them on the two monitors that took the feeds from the cameras hidden inside the DMZ and listening to them over a headset that had the unfortunate effect of compressing her Blond Bombshell hair. Every now and then she took the headset off, and the fat girl, her makeup woman, fluffed up her hair and put some more powder on her forehead. Irv wondered if all the powder meant she was sweating. Other than that, Mary Cary didn’t show any sign of nervousness at all. She didn’t seem to have a nerve in her body. Look at what she was wearing!—one of her creamy white silk blouses, a short creamy white skirt, a Tiffany-blue cashmere jacket, and bone-white pumps with medium-high heels. For an ambush! The blouse was unbuttoned practically down to her breastbone. It was almost as provocative as the cocktail dress the topless dancer Lola Thong was wearing, which showed so much cleavage it was ridiculous. Irv, on the other hand, was wearing regular ambush gear: jeans, running shoes, and a Burberry trench coat. (The Daumier of the Digitized
Era was unaware that if he, a short, bald, fat, fortyish little man with a freckled dome, a double chin, and bad posture, walked anywhere near Fort Bragg in the Burberry trench coat, he would be taken for a child molester; at best.)
Irv didn’t even want to look at the monitors anymore. The sight of the three young rednecks in that booth, probably no more than twenty yards from where he was right now, only jangled his nerves more … but his eyes kept straying to the monitors all the same. All three were wearing T-shirts, and even on these two small screens you could see the muscularity of their arms and the firmness of their necks and jaws and, above all, the way their ears stuck out. Their ears stuck out because the sides of their heads were shaved, and the way their heads were shaved—
Mary Cary took off her headset again, and Irv moved over beside her and said in a low voice, “So what are our three—our three skinheads talking about now?” Breezy and laid-back, and not nervous, he wanted to sound.
“Our three what?”
“Our three skinheads,” said Irv. “This whole place—I’ve figured out what it is.” He gestured, as if to take in all of Bragg Boulevard, Fayetteville, Fort Bragg, Cumberland County, and Hoke County, the state of North Carolina, the entire South. “You wanna know what this place is? Skinhead country.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Irv,” said Mary Cary. “Relax.”
“What he say about skinheads?”
Whadee say’bout skeenheads?
It was the stripper, Lola Thong, talking to Mary Cary. “They’re skinheads?”
Dey’re skeenheads?
Mary Cary shot Irv a reproachful look, as if to say, “You and your nerves and your big mouth.”
Lola, offspring of an American father and a Thai mother, was a tall, slender creature with black hair and pale skin that appeared milky blue in the glow of the monitors. She had an exotic Asian look through the eyes and cheekbones, and a trace of a Thai accent, which turned the short
i
in
skinhead
to a long
e
.
Skeenhead.
But her diction and grammar,
like her jumbo breast implants, were strictly Low Rent American. At the moment she was agitated, twisting about on her high heels, so that her prodigious head of teased black hair bobbed about.
“He don’t say nothing to me about skinheads,” she said, nodding toward Ferretti, who stood a couple of steps away, looking at the monitors.
Mary Cary said, “They’re not skinheads, Lola. I promise you. They’re in the U.S. Army. That’s the way they make them cut their hair. You know that.”
“Then why he say skinheads?” To Lola, Irv was not the maximum leader. He was merely
he
.
Mary Cary sighed and shot Irv another look. “He was only making a joke. Because they cut their hair so short.”
“That’s true,” said Irv, whispering, afraid that Lola would start making too much noise. “It was just a figure—I was just talking about their hair. They’re just kids. They’re Gls. I was just trying to be funny.”
Lola did not look terribly reassured.
And funny Irv Durtscher had not tried to be since he had first laid eyes on Bragg Boulevard after arriving from New York thirty hours ago. The boulevard, which was six lanes wide in some places, ran right through the eastern end of Fort Bragg. Right through it; you could see the barracks. You weren’t separated from them by a wall or a fence or anything else. The soldiers could keep cars at the barracks. And did they ever! They spent everything they had on cars. You could see them barreling along Bragg Boulevard, three, four, five to a vehicle. You knew they were soldiers because you could see their shaved heads, with just little mesas of hair on top, and their ears, which stuck out. Many were black, but more were white, and it was the white ones Irv feared. Skinheads were white.
Between the base and Fayetteville, Bragg Boulevard turned into the sleaziest commercial strip Irv ever hoped to see. Not a tree, not a blade of grass, not an inch of sidewalk, not a redeeming architectural feature from one end to the other—just a hellish corridor of one-story cinder-block sheds and wooden huts and blasted asphalt and stomped-sod parking lots and garish signs and fluttering Day-Glo pennants proclaiming
pawnshops, mobile homes, trailer parks, massage parlors, pornographic-video stores, check-cashing establishments (KWIK KASH), dry cleaners (SPECIAL FOR FATIGUES), car washes, multiplex cinemas, takeout stands (SUBS, CAROLINA BAR-B-Q), automobile dealerships, motorcycle dealerships, auto suppliers, auto upholsterers, gasoline stations, fast-food franchises, Korean, Vietnamese, and Thai restaurants, discount liquor stores, discount cigarette kiosks, Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, Black & Decker tools, concrete garden birdbaths and figurines, gun stores, attack dogs (K-9 C-Q-REE-T) and topless bars, topless bars, topless bars, one after the other, such as this one, the DMZ.
Last night, before Irv’s very eyes, as soon as the sun had gone down, this appalling fever-line of late-twentieth-century instant gratification had lit up. Ten thousand backlit plastic signs and banks of floodlights came on in every hot toxic radioactive microwave pastel shade perceivable by the eye of man, until a look down Bragg Boulevard led your gaze right into the gaudy gullet of hell itself. Irv knew it was hell because of what he had seen late in the afternoon. Late in the afternoon, Ferretti had taken him—just him, not Mary Cary, because her face was too well known—over to a shopping center off Bragg Boulevard called the Cross Creek Mall. The place was mobbed, and with a clientele such as Irv could not have imagined. By the hundreds, the thousands, they swarmed over the Cross Creek Mall: young males with the sides of their heads shaved, young males whose ears stuck out, young males and their young females, young females and their young children and their children-to-be. To Irv all of them appeared to be … bursting … The males were all young, tough, sunburned, pumped up with muscles and bursting out of their jeans. So many bulging crotches! Made him think of codpieces in those old prints, they bulged so much. Fort Bragg was the training ground for the Army’s elite divisions, the Special Operations Forces: Green Berets, Rangers, unorthodox-warfare and psychological-operations (PSYOP) units, commandos of every sort. Testosterone on the hoof! So many soldiers from Fort Bragg had fought in Vietnam, they used to call Fayetteville Fayettenam. Even now many of the wives of these young soldiers, as anyone at the Cross Creek Mall
could tell, were Asians. And so many of the wives, Asian as well as American, were bursting, too. They were swaybacked from being so grandly, gloriously pregnant with the next generation of swaggering … skinheads … Skinheads they were! To Irv it had come as a revelation, a flash of insight right there in the Cross Creek Mall. Skinheads! Sex and aggression! Hell on earth! These young males, bursting with testosterone, were but the officially sanctioned, government-approved versions of the skinheads of Germany!—or the survival cults of Montana! And at night they poured out onto this nightmare alley, Bragg Boulevard, unbound, free of Army discipline, through the very gates of Hell, where he now waited inside a High Mojave RV for his rendezvous with—with—with—
What was he, a nice Jewish boy from New York, doing here, about to try to ambush—
ambush!
—three of this virulent, hormone-crazed species who had already murdered one man and would be primed with alcohol to … to do God knew what?
Irv Durtscher, the Zola of the Ratings Sweeps, was terrified.
Lola moved over beside Ferretti, who threw his arm around her shoulders. Even in this feeble light and these cramped quarters she rippled with sexuality beneath the little black cocktail dress. She touched Ferretti on the shoulder and whispered something to him. Then both of them looked around at Irv, who shrugged and arched his eyebrows in the look that says, “What can I tell you?”
Ferretti hugged Lola to him in a jolly fashion and turned her back toward Irv and Mary Cary. Irv envied Ferretti. He was a jovial Alley Oop of a man with a grizzled beard he allowed to grow down beneath his chin and his jawline, covering his jowls. He wore a polo shirt that barely made it over his beefy midsection, a Charlotte Hornets Starter jacket, and a John Deere Backhoe cap. He lit up when he smiled. He had the common touch. He was perfect for field assignments because he could deal with anybody, high or low. He leaned over until his head touched Lola’s. He was purring to her.
“For Christ’s sake, Irv,” he said with a big grin, “what’s this ‘skinheads’? These guys are yo-yos.” He hugged Lola again and said, “Yo-yos,
baby, yo-yos!” He gave her such a squeeze and such a grin, it forced a reluctant smile out of her. “Besides, you don’t have to deal with ‘em. Mary Cary deals with’em, Irv deals with ‘em, these guys deal with’em.” He nodded toward Gordon and Roy, a Hawaiian and an Albanian, two great sides of beef in field jackets, the biggest technicians on
Day & Night
’s staff. (Irv had seen to that.) “You’re just the official greeter,” said Ferretti. “You issue the invitation. And Miss Lola, honey, when you issue an invitation, people are gonna come to the party. You know what I’m saying? The whole country’s gonna come to the party.”
Ferretti was shamelessly reigniting Lola’s craving for stardom. Lola was currently performing as a topless dancer at a Bragg Boulevard joint called Klub Kaboom. Just how she and Ferretti had become such buddies Irv didn’t know; on this subject, Ferretti’s only comment was a smile. The deal was that for her part in the ambush, Lola would receive $2,500, and more important, 50 million panting Americans would get a look at the ravishing but hitherto unknown entertainer Lola Thong. Ferretti had provided Lola with an entire catalogue of girls who had made their fortunes through tangential involvement in sensational cases. But as the moment approached, Lola was getting cold feet.