“Okay,” said Ziggefoos, “that’s’zackly what I was fixing to tale you. Being in a military unit’s abaout being a
man,
and what the unit tales you and keeps on taling you is, ‘This here’s the
test
of a man. A man
don’t cut and run. A man risks his laf . . fer the unit.’Yeah, I reckon he risks it fer his country and fer the flag and fer the folks back home and all’at, but you talk to anybuddy’s ever been in a real far fat, a real field a far, and if he’s honest, he’s gon’ tale you what I’m taling you rat now. You risk yer laf fer the unit, and the unit’s alia time hammering away at one thang: ‘Be a man.’ H’it don’t say, ‘Be a good person, and h’it shore’s hell don’t say, ‘Be a good woman.’ I mean, you start putting women in combat, and I kin tale you sump’m jes as shore’s the sun comes up in the moaning: You kin fergit abaout having real fattin’ units. Because the unit’s got jes one thang to say to you: ‘Be a man.’ Same thang with hom’seckshuls. ‘Zackly same thang. You try to put hom’seckshuls in a fattin’ unit? You kin jest fergit abaout thayut, too. The unit caint say, ‘Be a man—more or less,’ or ‘Be a man—in most respecks,’ because the kinda ol’ boy you got to have jes ain’t gon’ set still fer that, and you kin wait a thousand yers and try to
en
latin’im, and he still ain’t gon’ set still. Naow, you kin call ‘at prej’dice if you want, and maybe h’it is, but that don’t change the facks a laf a’tall. You folks, you teevee folks, you best tale ‘Merica she better look after her Jimmy Lowes and her Florys,’cause when push comes to shove, she’s gonna need ‘em, and push always comes to shove sooner or later, an’ you gon’ need somebody—you teevee folks, too—you gon’ need somebody to fat yer wars for ya, and those somebodys gon’ be and always has been your Jimmy Lowes and your Florys.”
Long before he could begin to analyze what he had just heard, a red
alert
had gone off in Irv’s head. This kid Ziggefoos was a
Tobacco Road
throwback, an unrenovated native, a true Southern primitive, a Florida redneck—a
skinhead—
and he was spouting total fascist bullshit—but no way could this rant be allowed on
Day & Night
. To witless segments of a TV audience, to the idiot millions, he might come across as a sincere young fighting man from the bosom of rural America who had risked his life in the service of his country and been grievously wounded in a
far fat
in the godforsaken streets of Mogadishu, Somalia. He wasn’t blinking with nervousness the way Jimmy Lowe and Flory
were. He wasn’t being hysterical or defensive or evasive. He was looking Mary Cary right in the eye. There had to be something Irv could do, something in the editing—
Apparently Mary Cary sensed the same sort of thing. “That’s all very well,” she said, “but do you call assaulting a gay soldier ‘being a man’?”
“Nawwwwww, I wouldn’t call ‘at being a man,” said Ziggefoos, “and neither’d anybuddy ailse I know, but we don’ need you to tale us’at. I know you’re ver
en
latined. Everbuddy you see on TV is ver
en
latined abaout all’ese thangs. But I wunner how you live yer own lafs. How many hom’seckshuls you got close to you? How many a you want yer own chilrun to be hom’seckshuls? How many a you want hom’seckshuls working’longside you? You don’t mind taling the U.S. Army, you don’t mind taling a fattin’ unit, whirr a man’s job is to risk his laf, you don’t mind taling
us
to jep’dize the integrity a the unit, when it’s laf and death, but what abaout you—when it ain’t nothing but yer own comfort and peace a mind?”
Why, the sonofabitch!
He was turning the whole thing around! He was bending the English language out of all recognizable shape, but he was managing to turn the whole thing into an attack on the so-called media elite! It was a cliché, and it was preposterous, but he was managing to do it.
“You’re forgetting one thing,” snapped Mary Cary. “Nobody in the television industry, nobody I know of, is going around murdering colleagues just because their sexual orientation is different.”
It was a good retort, made under the gun, but there was something peevish and argumentative about it. Irv’s mind spun rapidly; this whole last part, the skinhead’s disquisition on the media elite, would have to go, too. No way would it be part of the broadcast. Much of the disquisition on the fighting unit—the
fattin’
unit—Christ!—and Bloody Sunday—most of that would have to go, too. Ziggefoos had turned those two skinhead thugs, Jimmy Lowe and Flory, into some kind of heroes, and that
Hee Haw
accent might just put it over. Of course, he couldn’t cut it all, but—ahhhh! He had an idea. He’d let the sonofabitch talk,
but he’d take the camera off him. He’d use the cameras trained only on Jimmy Lowe and Flory. You’d hear Ziggefoos’s voice, but you’d see the other two with their mouths open, looking alarmed and blinking …
blinking …
Lots of blinking! On television the close-ups of people blinking furiously were devastating. The blinks looked like uncontrollable admissions of guilt. Besides, Jimmy Lowe looked like a brute. If I, Irv Durtscher, kept Jimmy Lowe’s animal face on the screen, blinking guiltily, while Ziggefoos spoke, no one would really be able to pay close attention to Ziggefoos’s argument. He could use Flory and his guilty blinks, too. Flory looked like the usual gang runt, willing to go along with any caper the big boys dictated. Ah!—and he had another idea. Every time Ziggefoos used gross language, every time he said
sheeut
or anything else of that sort, he’d bleep it. That would make him seem cruder than the actual words would. Oh, he could fix this brute’s hash, him and his Dogpatch theories about manhood and the unit and life and death.
Laf’n’death—meeyahhhh—
“Maybe not,” said Ziggefoos. “Maybe you don’ go’raound murdern each other, but you do sump’m ailse. You go’sem’natin’ stuff abaout the gay lafstyle you don’ even believe yer ownsef, and don’ nobuddy ailse believe it neither, and you git everbuddy worked up, and fellers’at jes natch’ly resent hom’seckshuls, fellers’at know dayum wale it ain’t gon’ work to put’em in a fattin’ unit, they git riled to whirr they do thangs they won’t lackly to do if you people’d jes to!’ the plain truth.”
“All right,” said Mary Cary, “for the sake of argument, let’s say that’s true. Are you telling me
that’s
why the three of you assaulted Randy Valentine?”
“I ain’t said nothin’ lack’at,” said Ziggefoos.
“But you did!” Mary Cary said, gesturing at the television set once more. “There you were! You said it in your own words! Jimmy just spelled it all out. He said he kicked in the door. The door knocked Randy Valentine up against the wall. And then he grabbed him.”
Good girl, Mary Cary! She was steering it back to the confession made on videotape.
“Wale, you got it all wrong,” said Jimmy Lowe, giving the television set a dismissive wave and getting up and turning his back on it, as if to leave.
“‘At’s rat,” said Flory, doing the same thing, “you got it all wrong.”
“But they’re your own words,” said Mary Cary, “from your own mouths.”
“Yeah, but y’all rigged’is all up,” said Jimmy Lowe.
It was beautiful. He didn’t even look at Mary Cary when he said it. It came out as a whine, not much above a mutter. For television purposes, it was as good as an outright confession. The retreat, the pout, the refusal to look the accuser in the eye, the muffled voice—it had guilt written all over it, and by now every television viewer knew the vocabulary.
Even Ziggefoos had gotten up and turned away. All three seemed like whipped dogs. They were gravitating toward the door of the RV.
Ziggefoos looked at Mary Cary and said, “If you think we’re gonna set still and talk to
Day’n’Nat
abaout all’is bullsheeut, you got another think coming.”
Irv couldn’t figure out what he was talking about at first. Then it dawned on him: they didn’t even know the ambush had been taped! They never dreamed that four cameras had been trained on them ever since they stepped into the RV! They thought this was some sort of preinterview! They didn’t even know it was an actual
ambush
!
Oh, it was beautiful. He had dreamed that this piece would work out, and now he could see that it would.
“Nevertheless,” said Mary Cary, “we’d like to give you a chance to respond.”
Jimmy Lowe, who was at the door, wheeled about. “Me, I’d lack a chance to respond to’at ho’at brought us aout here, whirrever the hale she went.’At’s who I’d lack to respond to. Didn’ know you people hard hose to do yer dirty work.”
Hard hose
? Even Irv, practiced as he was in these boys’ patois, needed an extra moment to translate:
hired whores
. He’d love to use that line—even though referring to Lola as a whore was a little too
close to the truth-because Jimmy Lowe sounded so ominous when he said it. Suppose he became violent? Attacked Mary
Cary?
(Attacked
Irv
Durtscher!) Had he gone too far in using a topless dancer to make sure the three skinheads watched their incriminating tape? Well—editing would solve everything. Could
Gordon and
Roy
and Ferretti
stop them,
if it came to that? They were big, but these three skinheads were …
Rangers! Irv crouched there in his secret compartment, his headset on, his eyes pinned on the monitors, his world lit only by their lifeless cathode glow, his mind furiously double-tracking from … Irv Durtscher the crusader against … fascism! … in America … to Irv Durtscher the possessor of this one and only skin, which God had never intended to go up against young Lords of Testosterone such as he saw on these screens.
To his vast relief, as he watched the monitors, he saw the three boys file through the door and depart the RV. He saw Ferretti pull the door shut behind them and lock it. Then he saw Ferretti break into a silent laugh and look at Mary Cary. Then he saw Mary Cary heave a big sigh and shake her head, as if severely disappointed. Then he heard Ferretti, grinning and chuckling, say, “If you think we’re gonna set still and talk to
Day’n’Nat
abaout all’is bullsheeut …” And still Irv did not take off his headset and forsake his secret compartment and join them in the RV’s living room.
Suppose they came back! Suppose they stormed back into the RV!
But then, on the monitor, he saw Mary Cary heading back toward the partition.
Mustn’t let
—
Quickly he took off the headset and went through the concealed door. She was right there in front of him, breathing rapidly, her eyes flashing. She looked furious.
“Mary Cary!” said Irv. “That was great! You were fabulous!”
“Oh, I blew it, Irv,” said Mary Cary. “I lost’em. I couldn’t keep’em here. And I
had
them! They were finally where we
wanted
them! They were
defensive
! They were getting
angry
!”
He stared at her. He couldn’t believe it. “I don’t know what you’re worried about,” he said. “We got everything we needed.”
“That’s not true.”
“Besides, the big one, Lowe, he was getting pretty hot. I was afraid—you never know with a guy like that.”
“Oh,
please,”
said Mary Cary. “Those kids didn’t know whether to whistle ‘Dixie’ or go blind.”
“All the same—” Irv broke off the sentence and studied Mary Cary’s big Blond Bombshell face. She was genuinely angry. She meant it. She actually wanted to stay here and keep slugging it out.
“I know what you mean,” he said finally. “But don’t worry about it. You were great.”
In fact, he didn’t know what she meant. He couldn’t even imagine it. His hide, the mortal vessel that contained Irv Durtscher the Rousseau of the Cathode Ray, was saying, Thank God, that’s over! Or is it? Keep one ear open lest those three return. Get this vehicle packed up! Let’s get out of here—out of Hell!—off Bragg Boulevard!—back to civilization!—back to enlightenment!—back to New York!
THE ONE WITH THE BALLS
Well, this was New York, all right. Walter O. Snackerman, the network’s chairman, CEO, and corporate predator in chief, lived in one of those three-story apartments on Fifth Avenue in the sixties you wouldn’t believe could exist unless you actually set foot in it the way Irv was now doing. The building, which was twelve stories high, had been built in 1916 to compete with the ostentatious mansions that lined Fifth, so that each apartment was, in effect, a containerized ostentatious mansion with an enormous entry gallery, sweeping staircases, vast rooms, views of Central Park, walls a foot thick, and a legion of doormen, porters, and elevator men dressed like a Gilbert and Sullivan Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The library, where the great Snackerman had now assembled his
guests, was twice the size of Irv’s living room, or at least his present living room, now that he had to foot the bill for both his ex-wife Laurie’s apartment and his own. This one room, this library, had more leather couches, leather easy chairs, more antique bergères and
fauteuils
than Irv had furniture in his whole place. The assembled hotshots had their eminent fannies nestled into all the plush upholstery, with, of course, Mary Cary—
Merry Kerry Broken Berruh
—sitting at the right hand of Snackerman the Omnipotent. A ceiling projector was beaming
Day & Night
onto the 5- by 7-foot Sony television screen that had descended with such a soft, luxurious hum from a slit in the ceiling a few minutes earlier.
Irv, clad in a shapeless blue blazer, a button-down shirt, and a so-called Pizza Grenade necktie, which looked as if a pepperoni-and-olive pizza had just exploded on his shirt front, was seated over here on the side, at the right hand of Cale Bigger. In an ordinary network setting this might have been considered a prime spot. But tonight the mighty Cale was a mere hired hand, the chief executive of the News Division and a shameless, gibbering suck-up to the ruler. Most of the seats were filled by Snackerman’s fellow titans and Big Names, such as Martin Adder, the general partner of the law firm of Crotalus, Adder, Cobran & Krate; Robin Swarm, the comedian and movie actor; Rusty Mumford, the forty-one-year-old dork, wuss, nerd, and billionaire founder of 4IntegerNet; and the nitwit Senator Marsh McInnes; plus their wives. Mary Cary’s husband, Hugh Siebert, the eye surgeon, was sitting over on the side next to the senator’s overripe second wife. The good Dr. Siebert was a long-faced, wide-jawed nullity. Tall and handsome in a certain way, Irv supposed, with a head of steel-gray hair—it looked as if he probably spent two hours each morning brushing it back just so; but a nullity, a big somber zero, for all of that. At dinner—prepared and served by Snackerman’s own house staff of five—Siebert had sat between the Present Mrs. Martin Adder and Robin Swarm’s early-twenty-ish live-in girlfriend, Jennifer Love-Robin, or whatever her name was, and he hadn’t said a word. What a nullity, what a cipher, what a fifth
wheel Mary Cary had married … What a stiff neck … Why would a block of wood like that even want to live in an electric city like New York?
Actually, Irv wondered if he himself would have been invited if his name hadn’t been mentioned so much in broadcasts and the newspapers, not as much as Mary Cary’s, naturally, but a lot. The network’s PR elves had started pumping out press-screening tapes yesterday, plus transcriptions, thirty-six hours before tonight’s network showing. The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina and the state attorney general of North Carolina and the judge advocate of the U.S. Army and the sheriff of Cumberland County, where the DMZ was physically located, were already making a lot of noise. They were torn between the fact that
Day
&
Night—
Irv Durtscher, producer—had violated the laws of every conceivable jurisdiction by bugging the DMZ with cameras and microphones and the fact that they had nailed three murderers dead to rights in a sensational case.
Snackerman had put together this dinner and prime-time-television viewing on the spur of the moment. The story of the
Day
& Night coup had been on every network-news program. It was too big for the rival networks to ignore. It had been on page 1 of
The New York Times
this morning. Oh, what a surge, what a mighty cresting wave of publiciy! At this very moment
Day
&
Night
lit up the television screens of not merely 50 million but maybe 100 million souls, including Walter O. Snackerman and his friends.
On Snackennan’s huge Sony screen, there was Mary Cary, in her Tiffany-blue cashmere jacket and a cream-colored turtleneck, a jersey that covered up the age lines on her neck, sitting behind a futuristic news desk.
“For three months,” she was saying, “the United States Army has insisted it could find no link whatsoever between Army personnel and the savage beating and murder of Randy Valentine, a young soldier with a distinguished service record, a member of the Army’s elite Rangers—who happened to be gay. We found more than
a link
. Simply by listening in on the enlisted men’s own grapevine, we located three of Randy
Valentine’s fellow soldiers at Fort Bragg—and you are about to see and hear them describe in harrowing detail, before our hidden cameras, how they committed this senseless assassination—and
why
: for no other reason than that Randy Valentine’s sexual orientation was …
different
… from theirs.”
For an instant, on the screen, Mary Cary’s face seemed to shudder with emotion. Her thick lips parted, and she executed a sharp intake of air, and she leaned closer to the camera, and her blue eyes blazed. “We try to avoid being personal, but I don’t think any of us at
Day & Night,
and certainly not myself, have ever stared more directly … down the bloody …
throat
… of wanton slaughter.”
Oh, it was dynamite. Irv glanced at Snackerman and noticed the slightly giddy expression on the tycoon’s wrinkled face, beneath his odd crew-cut dome, as revealed by the room’s soft lights and the glow of the television screen. He was leaning toward Mary Cary, and then he tried to look right into her face, but she kept looking straight ahead at the screen, reluctant to sacrifice even one millisecond of Merry Kerry Broken Berruh ego infusion. Her blond hair was fluffed out in full backtease. She was wearing a conservative, very expensive-looking red Chanel-style suit (Irv didn’t know the names of any more-recent designers), but with a creamy silk blouse open low enough to offer a hint of the lusty Brokenborough breasts and a skirt hemmed high enough to put a lot of the Brokenborough legs, sheathed in shimmering, darkish but transparent pantyhose, in Snackerman’s face as she crossed and uncrossed them.
Merry Kerry Broken Berruh was not about to tell Snackerman or anybody else that every word she had just uttered
and
the catch in her voice
and
the indignant blaze in her blue eyes had been scripted for her by Irv Durtscher.
Now there was a long shot of Fort Bragg, and then there were medium shots of buildings, drill fields, obstacle courses, barracks, and packs of soldiers off-duty in the Cross Creek Mall, as Mary Cary’s voice-over explained that Fort Bragg was command central for the Army’s elite troops, the Special Operations Forces, the commandos, the Army’s
best, in short—and that one of the very
best of the best
was a young man named Randy Valentine.
Then you see some still pictures, the kinds of photographs you find in family albums, pictures of Randy Valentine in uniform shortly after his enlistment and Randy Valentine with his parents in Massilon, Ohio, and Randy Valentine in his high-school yearbook, and then two pictures of Ranger Randy Valentine at Fort Bragg.
Suddenly the shocker: Randy Valentine’s handsome young smiling face was replaced by a close-up of that same face as it appeared in the morgue photo, a face battered, cut, swollen, and caved in on one side until it no longer looked like the face of a human being. Then came the Cumberland County Sheriffs Office police photo of the young man’s body sprawled in a slick of blood on the floor of a men’s room in a gin mill on Bragg Boulevard, as the police had found it—Mary Cary’s voice explained—on that fateful night.
And next came the flinty face of General Huddlestone blinking with nervousness as he denied any knowledge of any of his men’s involvement in the case, despite an exhaustive investigation, blah, blah, blah.
Now you could see gaudy footage of Bragg Boulevard as Mary Cary explained how “we” had soon learned that the word around Fort Bragg was that a certain three soldiers had beaten Randy Valentine to a pulp in a Bragg Boulevard dive in a drunken rage over the fact that he was gay … the sleazy neon sign of the DMZ winking away at night … the interior of the joint … bored strippers shaking their booties and their hooters up on the DMZ’s bar runway … a medium shot of Ferretti, Gordon, and Roy installing the bugging devices, while Mary Cary’s voice says, “As we were now the duly registered lessees of the DMZ, its proprietors of record for the next four weeks, we set about installing our hidden cameras and microphones” … Jimmy Lowe, Ziggy, and Flory in the booth … then Mary Cary saying, “We spent one night, two nights, three nights, an entire week—and then a second week—monitoring the conversations of Lowe, Ziggefoos, and Flory without hearing anything out of the ordinary for three young soldiers who liked to come to a bar and drink beer and look at strippers. But then, three days into
the third week, came the break we had been waiting for. Virgil Ziggefoos brought up the subject of …
gay rights .
. .”
Now you’re looking straight at Ziggefoos in that booth, and he’s finishing a sentence with those very words, “gay rats.”
It occurred to Irv, as he sat here in the Snackerman containerized palace on Fifth Avenue, that the camera and the light caught Ziggefoos’s thin face in a
perfect way
. He looked especially lean, mean, and menacing. The kid was a redneck Dracula.
“They nebber tale you what the hale they deeud fo’ they got that way,” this clay-sod skinhead was telling 150—or was it 175?—million Americans. “You jes see some may’shated
bleep”—
Irv had bleeped out
son of a bitch
to make it sound worse than the term itself sounded … then Jimmy Lowe, with his pumped-up muscles and his brutally strong face, saying,
“Bleepin’ A.”
Now you’re looking at Ziggefoos again, and he’s saying, “Oncet my old man rented us a
ho
tel room somers up near the pier at Myrtle Beach, an’ rat next doe’s this
bowadin
haouse or sump’m lack’at’eh, and abaout five o’clock in the moaning?—when it’s jes starting to geeut lat?—me’n’ my brother …” At this point Ziggefoos’s voice fades under the sound of the Country Metal music in the background, and Mary Cary’s voice comes up. You can see Ziggefoos’s lips moving and his hands gesturing, but what you hear is Mary Cary paraphrasing his description of how his father had imbued him with a hatred of gays one morning in a hotel in Myrtle Beach.
And now Ziggefoos’s voice comes back up, and you hear him say, “And the ol’ man, he’s smoking, I mean, he’s flat out on far by now, he’s so mad, and he yales out, ‘Hey, you faggots! I’m gonna caount to ten, and if you ain’t off’n’at roof, you best be growing some wangs, ‘cause they’s gonna be a load a 12-gauge
bud
shot haidin’ up yo’
bleep!’”
Now, via another hidden camera, we see Jimmy Lowe and Flory grinning and nodding their approval of this call for violent action in response to public displays of gay closeness, and we hear Mary Cary say:
“Thus was the lesson passed on from one generation to another, and the lesson was: You do not
tolerate
homosexuality … You
exterminate
the gay life, if you can … You do so
violently
, if necessary … Lessons like that, taught in a hotel room one murky dawn in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and, no doubt, many other places in the years that followed, led these boys”—and now we see all three of the young Rangers grinning and drinking beer—“directly, as if impelled by Destiny, to the moment in which they …
slaughtered …
Randy Valentine because he
dared …
to display gay affection where they could see it.”
As he watched the screen there in Snackerman’s regal library, Irv’s heart quickened, and his spirits soared. The crux of the entire show was about to begin. The entire nation was about to hear the incriminating words of Jimmy Lowe, Ziggefoos, and Flory. He cut a glance at Snackerman, at Cale Bigger, at Mary Cary. Their faces were lit up by the glare of the great Sony television screen. This show was going to have the highest rating of any television newsmagazine show of the decade; of all time, maybe. Naturally, Snackerman, Cale Bigger, and everybody else of any consequence at the network had already seen a tape of the show. But even for them, and certainly for Irv, there was nothing quite like watching a blockbuster such as this
as it aired,
nothing quite like
feeling the ineffable thrum
of the tens of millions of other nervous systems of people all over this country and Canada who would be resonating to it
at this very moment.
Snackerman, needless to say, cared nothing whatsoever about social justice, about gay-bashing, about
Day & Night’
s artistry, or about the entire News Division, except that it was only the existence of the News Division that enabled him to give his speech about “The People’s Right to Know” at conventions, conferences, annual meetings, etc., etc., etc. After all, the network’s top-rated show, a sitcom called
Smoke’at Mother
, didn’t do much to lend the great man dignity and gravitas. But not even a cynical, money-loving predator like Snackerman, this shark, this corporate eating machine, could resist the communal, tachycardiac heartbeats of the millions that vibrated in your bones when you watched a triumph like this
as it aired.
Yes, even he, Snackerman, would, on the morrow, with genuine enthusiasm, look into the faces of other American television watchers and say, “Did you see
Day & Night
last night?” and “Remember the part
where …” Oh, you could talk all you wanted to about cable TV and the Internet and all the things that were supposedly going to supplant network television, but Irv knew, if others didn’t, that
the network
had a unique magic to
it
, the magic of the Jungian
communal heartbeat …
teased into tachycardia by the brilliance of the great producers of the new art form, the
Irv Durtschers.
True, Snackerman was listing heavily toward Mary Cary as if he just naturally assumed that all this magical tribal consciousness had been created by
her …
But if the whole thing ended up in court, as Irv prayed it would, even Snackerman would realize the truth at last.