Turn of the Century (53 page)

“Jesus Christ, your scalp looks like a hedgehog!” Zip says. “You might as well just shave the sodding thing.”

“Ten percent shorter every year, that’s the plan. Keep changing the subject, so assholes like you call me a hedgehog instead of making cracks about the gray, or the hairline.”

“You should go all the way with that, George. Slough off another body part every so often—left foot when you get fat, right foot when you hit fifty. Elective cosmetic amputation.”

“Then I’d be almost your size.”

This is the boyo badinage they’ve always had, George with Zip Ingram. They grew close during their six weeks in a car in Central America, covering insurrections and death squads and civil wars for
Newsweek
, and Zip probably saved George’s life after the mortar shell hit by somehow forcing a Sandinista helicopter to fly them back to Managua. But it was the surprise detour on the way home, to Disney World in Orlando, which has been the bonding moment for George. “Why, Zip?” George asked him as they boarded the plane in 1984 in Nicaragua bound for Miami and Orlando instead of Miami and New
York. “Because,” Zip replied, “it is Dr. Ingram’s opinion that it would be too stressful for a man in your condition to go
directly
from Nicaraguan totalitarianism back to Manhattan freedom. As a transition, you need a chocolaty couple of days of
American
totalitarianism first. To decompress, so you don’t get the bends. Also, I’ve got an assignment shooting migrant lime pickers.” Zip arranged for two Scottish au pairs he knew in Miami to fly in for the weekend, the first blind date of George’s life, and Zip and the two women took turns pushing George around in a wheelchair through the Magic Kingdom and Epcot. It was a very chocolaty couple of days of American totalitarianism, British sex, and Jamaican marijuana.

Zip leads George back to the bar (ever since Nicaragua, he has been reflexively protective of George), and orders him his Bombay martini. One of Zip’s new drinking pals looks like the old MTV veejay Kennedy; George remembers about Francesca.

“We should probably get a table, Zip,” he says apologetically. “I’m afraid someone’s joining us. A woman. Whom neither of us knows.”

“Don’t
be
afraid.”
Zip grabs his cigarette box and both of their drinks and heads toward one of the tiny cocktail tables lining the banquette by the wall opposite the bar, just behind George. “So can I start dating Lizzie?”

“Without asking me, or even telling me, my ridiculous goddamn assistant invited this woman Francesca—you know, Francesca who does the news on MTV?—to come here. She wants a job on this new show.”

“No problem. We’ve already said everything to each other we ever need to say. Sticking a girl celebrity between us might just put the spark back in our tired old relationship.”

A waiter places little bowls of bocconcini and breadsticks on their table. At least the bar food isn’t themed.

“So,” George says, “cheers. When do you start inventing synonyms for
beige
and
taupe?
When do you get rid of the Winnebago?”

“I’m at Home Again beginning next week—as soon as I finish this meat gig. And actually, George, I am seriously thinking about keeping the motor home. Really. I’ve sort of fallen in love with it. At the end of the day, why do I need an apartment? I never eat at home. I don’t ‘entertain.’ ” Since last August, when Zip was fired from his job as creative
director of TheMedia.com and TheIndustry.com, after
The New York Observer
revealed that his résumé was spurious (under “Education/Experience” his “Oxxford, etc., 1971–75” turned out to be a reference to his five years as a part-time salesclerk in the English suit department at Barneys), he has been living parked on the streets of Manhattan in a thirty-foot RV he leases by the month. “I’ve got a beautiful permanent spot now, downtown, at Pier 57, the Hudson right out the windscreen. You’ve got to come visit.”

Zip has, in the seventeen years George has known him, transformed himself from photographer to salesclerk and necktie designer, to music-video producer, to children’s newspaper-and-TV executive, to advertising executive, to author, to web-site mogul. As soon as he knows how to do one thing, he always says, he tries to find a new thing to do that he doesn’t know how to do yet. The fact that each successive job ends in a spectacular shambles only reinforces Zip’s doctrine of what he has taken to calling “adventure careering.”

“What ‘meat gig’?”

“For the National Lamb Board. It’s
fantastic
. The average American eats only a pound and a half of lamb a year. Shocking! And most of the people eating it here are wops and Pakis. I persuaded the lamb people they need a new name. How’s Lizzie?”

“A new name for the National Lamb Board?”

“Yes, right, how do
you
think the ‘North American Sheep-Meat Commission’ sounds? No, shithead! For ‘lamb.’ For the meat.”

“The other red meat.”

“
Precisely
. Precisely. It’s just a nomenclature problem, right? Beef isn’t called ‘steer.’ A sirloin steak isn’t a ‘cow chop.’ It’s ‘barbecued ribs,’ right? Not ‘rack of pig.’ You think if the menu word for venison was ‘deer’ that anyone would order it, ever? They need a new name for lamb that isn’t so
beast
ly, that doesn’t remind Americans they’re eating a cute animal.”

“How much are they paying you for this insane scheme?”

“A hundred grand.” He giggles. “And another hundred if they go with one of my names. No back end, though. Not a dime in royalties. How’s Lizzie?”

“What are your names? Like nondairy creamer, or Bac-Os, or what?”

“We did make up some words. Disasters. And we went through every language, every dialect. Anyway, for
lamb
, we got close in German.”

“Zip. These fools are not going to pay you a hundred thousand dollars for telling them to call lamb ‘l-a-m-m.’ Are they?” The only vestige of his
Newsweek
tour in Bonn is menu German, which very seldom comes in handy.

“ ‘Hammelfleisch.’ I put it in as kind of a joke, a control, but it tested really well, surprisingly, and they may use it, right, for some shitty new smoked-lamb lunch meat. The runner-up for regular butcher-shop lamb is
agneau
, which I frankly don’t think is, what do you call it,
scalable
—at the end of the day, it’s too pseudo and froggy for people in, your, you know …”—he waves his hand toward George—“… Nebraska.”

“Minnesota.”

“In the fancy vein,
I
liked
mouton
, but the Board thought the Rothschild wine people would sue. Classic and Anglo-American is what you need. Like breakfast cereal—the bestselling cereals, still, are almost all the brands from fifty, a hundred years ago. Cornflakes and raisin bran, Rice Krispies, Cheerios, Grape-Nuts. The classics, right?” Zip sits back. “The first choice, my big idea? It’s still a secret, George. Off the record. I’m trusting you. ‘Baby mutton.’ ” Zip grins proudly and evilly.

“Kind of like the young elderly.”

“It’s classic, ‘mutton.’ But
‘baby
mutton’ is totally new and just a little sexy, right? Stylish.” He finishes the pink dregs of his champagne. “It’s a shame they don’t give fucking Pulitzers for this work, you know? Or a Nobel.” He pops a bocconcino in his mouth. “Did you know,” he says, chewing and pointing, “that mozzarella consumption in this country has
quadrupled
since Ronald Reagan was elected president? Quadrupled! A classic cheese for classic times.”

“People are
not
suddenly going to start calling lamb ‘baby mutton.’ They aren’t.”

“If the Board is clever enough and spends enough, people will, at the end of the day, yes they will. The girl who invited Francesca here, what do you call her?”

“Iris.”

“No, she’s your … what?”

“Assistant? Was—I just fired her.”

“And when you first went to ABC, the gorgeous Armenian girl who worked for you, Sabrina, what was she?”

“My assistant.”

“Your
secretary
, George. In 1985 you called her your
secretary
. And by 1990 you were calling her your administrative fucking
assistant
. The word ‘secretary’ doesn’t exist anymore! It’s been wiped away by marketing. Ninety-nine percent replaced by ‘assistant.’ What do you call black people?”

“Black people.”

“But African-American is halfway there, right? This country went from ‘nig-nog’ to ‘colored’ to ‘Negro’ to ‘black’ to ‘Afro-American’ and back to ‘black’ in, what, ten years?”

“Black people were never called ‘nig-nogs’ in America, Zip. And how is mozzarella classic? What, compared to Velveeta?”

“Fucking quibbler.”

George spots Francesca at the door. She is more blond than she was in Los Angeles, somehow more news, less MTV. He stares at her and cranes his neck an inch or two to get her attention.

“Okay,” Zip says. “A thousand dollars. April third, 2010: if ‘baby mutton’ isn’t on menus within, what, three blocks of this joint, you win.”

“Hi, is this really okay?” Francesca says, taking off her floor-length white down overcoat, even before George and Zip both nod and murmur ‘of course, yes, of course.’ She’s wearing a serious brown-and-green-striped suit. “Hi,” she says, putting out her hand to Zip, who stands. “I’m Francesca.”

“Hello. Zip Ingram.”

“I know you, don’t I?” she says, sitting down next to George on the banquette. “Didn’t you publish an autobiography last year that got all kinds of attention?”

“
An
autobiography, nicely put, yeah, that’s me.” On publication day the
Times
reported that Zip had plagiarized passages in
Conceit: Memoir of a Postmodern Man
from the autobiographies of Winston Churchill, Malcolm X, and Tammy Faye Bakker (“Haven’t you ever heard of sampling?” Zip responded at the time), but Zip meant to cause a ruckus anyway. He revealed, for instance, that his marriage to an Anglophilic socialite PBS producer (“You’ll forgive the triple redundancy”)
was purely for green-card purposes; that he has used cocaine with relatives and employees of presidents in the White House during all of the last five administrations; that at one of the magazines where he worked the major celebrity profile subjects “literally got writer, photo, photo-caption, adjective, and adverb approval”; and that his boss at TVTVTV had wanted to tuck subliminal pro-Christian and pro-sugar messages into the channel’s programming. (TVTVTV was Zip’s idea: beamed onto video monitors mounted in locker rooms, Cub Scout den meetings, candy stores, and its own fleet of school buses, it runs nothing but paid promotional clips for TV shows aimed at children and teenagers.) Zip’s memoir was published as a downloadable computer file as well as a hardcover book, which enabled reviewers to scan and savage it with unprecedented effectiveness for its special tics and inconsistencies. One critic reported that Zip used the phrases “As I told Andy that night,” “wildly entertaining as well as a creative breakthrough,” and “at the end of the day” twenty-seven, twenty-nine, and sixty-seven times, respectively, and that six of the twenty-seven “Andy” conversations took place at events during 1988 and 1989, even though Warhol died in 1987. Zip lifts his fresh goblet of champagne and cassis toward Francesca and says, mock gallantly, “A toast to me, the first digital victim in the last year of the twentieth century.”

After a few minutes of flirty introductions and mutual flattery (“The scratch-and-sniff patch on your book jacket was excellent”; “I loved your covering the New Hampshire primary with Marilyn Manson”), Zip’s pack of bar acquaintances move to their banquette and the one next to them, and after more introductions by Zip—“Clarise, Wendy, Vespa (sorry,
Vesto
), Trevor; Francesca and George”—the seven of them become a de facto cocktail party. And Francesca, squeezed between George and Clarise on the narrow blue leather bench, gets down to business. She uses her résumé like a libretto, turning it into entertaining light conversation (“During my year at Columbia I got to be pals with Moynihan’s finance committee guy, and Russert used to work for Moynihan too, so …”). She demonstrates her savvy about news unrelated to Lauryn Hill or the Beastie Boys, first by analyzing the presidential nominating process (“I know next Tuesday is
supposed
to be the final slam dunk, but I think Gore may be sort of a Pennsylvanian,
psychographically”), then by comparing today’s Mexican death squads to the Salvadoran death squads of the eighties (which gives her an opportunity to recite a shot-by-shot rundown of Part Three of George’s fifteen-year-old
Wars Next Door
).

Why do women, at least young and youngish women, always become a little prettier when they’re holding a big glass of red wine? She is talking, gesticulating with her free hand, occasionally touching his sleeve for emphasis. George has explained the show to her in detail, and now he is listening, nodding, catching Clarise and Vesto and other patrons repeatedly stealing looks at Francesca. Her intelligence and shrewdness impress him—for twenty minutes she lobbies for the
Real Time
job without quite seeming to lobby. “So,” Francesca says finally, “shall I send you tape? What do I need to do to convince you to make me one of the
Reality
anchors?” She sips her twelve-dollar glass of merlot, her foreplay finished.

“It’s called
Real Time
now.” Did Iris slip his original treatment for the show to Francesca’s agent too? Christ. “And yes, we’d really like to look at your tape.” The “we” is not entirely bogus, since Emily has been meeting with all the candidates too, but it does give him an out later, if they pass. And since he is interested, he uses
like
, which is a more serious verb than
love
. They’d have to make her use her last name. But would that be bad for the brand, her brand, like forcing Madonna to start calling herself Madonna Ciccone? No, he decides, it’s more like John Mellencamp dropping the “Cougar.” “I have a question.”

“Ask.”

“What’s your last name?”

“Mahoney.”

“Francesca Mahoney,” George pronounces, thinking:
three-syllable first name, three-syllable last name, no first-syllable emphasis
—if they hire her, Saddler will want to change it to Fran Markey. George might have to use Christiane Amanpour as his counterargument.