Limo, page 21
The waiters at Marble Arch Station were asked to dress like guards at Buckingham Palace.
A fast look told Cooper and me that Cindy was not among the clientele. So with Cooper on one arm and me on the other, we lifted up a Buckingham Palace guard and carried him out to the sidewalk.
Jeff ’s fur hat fell off on the ground. A black kid grabbed it and started running toward Harlem.
“In Hong Kong, Jeff, they televise executions live,” I said. “It’s a fairly new thing but it’s getting good ratings. We’re going to pretend we’re in Hong Kong now. Do you have any final words about where Cindy is?”
Jeff had only to look at Cooper to believe this was a serious conversation.
“Hey, I was really stoked on that chick, man,” said Jeff. “But I thought she was older. Like I thought she was nineteen, you know?”
“That little old girl is just on the outside of sixteen,” Cooper said. “She just finished the eleventh grade two weeks ago.”
“Wow,” Jeff said, softly. “It was lookin’ good, too, man. Really.”
“Where is she?” I said.
“I don’t know, man,” said Jeff. “Like I talked to her on the phone and told her I was thinkin’ I might split. I’ve got this buddy in Fort Lauderdale and he told me it was righteous down there. I didn’t think it would get heavy, man.”
“So she came in?”
“Yeah, she came to my pad about four hours ago. We were all laid back there, you know. I was getting’ my head fixed to go to work. And all of a sudden, this chick comes in, man.”
“Her name is Cindy,” I said.
“Right,” said Jeff. “All of a sudden Cindy’s there. She’s lookin’ good at first. We were talking. Then she starts in on Fort Lauderdale and how if I go down there she’s never gonna see me again. I tried to cool her out. Like give her the water pipe to get straight, but she starts crying, man. Then she follows me down here. Full on.”
“How long was she here?”
“She ate three cheeseburgers,” Jeff said. “Like she was taking up a whole booth by herself. And this cat I work for in there, man, he’s giving me looks. So I finally asked her if she had some cab fare. She did. So I told her to go back to my pad, and when I got off, I’d come up there and we’d just lay back and listen to some sounds, or maybe walk around and catch some moon rays.”
“That’s where she is?” I said.
“Far as I know, man,” Jeff said. “Hey, like I’m sorry, you bein’ her dad and all. Like we never did anything you’d be ashamed of her for. That was kind of radical on my part because
I was really stoked, man. But it’s true.”
Cooper said, “I think if I was you, cousin, I’d get on down to Fort Lauderdale quick as I could. Otherwise, them feet of yours might have an accident and you wouldn’t be able to scuff on no more scuff boards like old Duke Kacooney-mackey.”
Cindy was not at the storefront.
In fact, there was no one at the store front but a grizzled derelict asleep on a cot.
When I shook him, he said, “Doughnuts!”
I asked if a young girl had been in there recently.
“Jeezy place got doughnuts,” he mumbled. And he rolled back over to dream of better days.
Cooper said Cindy might have taken a taxi home. Pelham wasn’t that far. And this late, she would have sense enough to get a taxi instead of the train.
I said I wasn’t sure how much sense she had exactly.
I also knew that if Cindy had not gone home, I didn’t know where she was. If I phoned Marcie to see if Cindy was home—and she wasn’t—well, I didn’t need that, either.
In the limo I phoned my apartment and let it ring ten or twelve times, just to make certain Cindy had not gone to my place while I was interviewing Jeff.
Nobody answered. Not even the service.
Terror is too strong a word for whatever I was feeling. Worry is too weak. Alarm? Maybe something like that.
“D. Wayne, run me over to Sally’s,” I said. “I need to talk to somebody smart.”
On the ride to Sally’s apartment I did a very fatherly thing. From the bar in the limo, I poured myself a hell of a drink.
Even though the Rita Hayworth poster on Sally’s door was clearly identifying me as the same Glenn Ford she knew in Gilda, I banged on Rita’s gown anyway with my fist.
Cooper stayed in the limo. He had an idea that he might call Marcie and say that he and I were looking for Cindy in different places. That way, he would take the heat, but we would find out whether Cindy was back home yet.
Music came from inside Sally’s apartment.
James Taylor was apparently helping Sally type.
I heard several bolts turning and chains being unhinged, and the door opened. In a long yellow nightshirt, Sally smiled at me with a glass of white wine in her hand.
“The trouble with the world is, a sixteen-year-old girl can’t even believe in her goddam, motherfucking, phony-ass, cocksucking heroes,” I said.
“Daddy!”
Cindy’s head was poking into Sally’s living room from the walk-in kitchen just off of it.
She raced over and grabbed onto me with a can of 7-Up in her hand.
I had any number of questions, but the one I thought of first was, “You okay, babe?”
“Sure,” Cindy said. “I mean, I am now. Like I probably wasn’t so okay a while ago, but now I’m cool. Only, wow. I’m in big trouble this time, huh?”
“You won’t get life, but you’ll do some time,” I said.
Cindy said, “It isn’t like I robbed a bank or anything, Dad. All I did was, I wanted to see Jeff, you know?”
I said, “Kids have a hard time learning two things. You get in more trouble than ever if you lie. And always let your parents know where you are.”
Cindy said she guessed she thought she could come into the city, see Jeff, and get back to Pelham in a taxi before Marcie came home from the club.
“Mom usually stays late on Tuesday. Sometimes she even calls up and says she’s going on to dinner with friends and she tells Frankie and me to find something to eat in the frozen food thing,” Cindy said.
“I hope seeing Jeff was worth getting caught,” I said.
Cindy wrinkled her nose and said, “Yuk. Jeff. Blaaah.”
The recuperative powers of a young girl always amazed me. If Cindy had been crying, you couldn’t tell it. In college, Marcie could sob for twenty minutes over TCU upsetting the beloved Longhorns, and then in an instant she could look ready to go to the Lake Austin Inn and sing Tri Delt songs.
I said, “Your mother is borderline frantic.”
Cindy said, “I should have called her, but Sally and I got to talking about life and things, and I didn’t know how to tell her where I was. We tried to call you. Your service didn’t even answer.”
Cindy added, “Sally decided the best thing was for me just to stay here. She said you were bound to call.”
Sally said, “Hi, sailor. How about a champagne cocktail?”
I said Scotch would do.
While she made my drink, Sally spoke of destiny’s role in our lives. Sally said she was typing when she realized her thesaurus was missing. She had loaned it to Lisa. So she walked over to Lisa’s apartment to get it, and that was how she ran into Cindy on Columbus Avenue.
“What were you doing?” I said to Cindy.
“Nothing,” Cindy said. “I mean, just standing outside the store front. And maybe crying. I was waiting for Jeff, but I knew he wasn’t coming. Jeff, yick. Daaah.”
Sally said, “We’ve had a good time. I’ve told her about all the other Jeffs she’ll meet along the dusty old trail.”
Cindy said to me, “Some boys take all they can get and don’t give anything back. And some girls are so determined not to get robbed by that they’re never willing to give anything.”
“Which are you?” I asked Cindy.
“I want to give,” my daughter said. “Only I’ve got to learn how to pick my spots better.”
Sally raised her wine glass in a toast.
I went to the phone. It sat on the floor next to a stereo and some scattered albums.
Cindy was fine and she was with me, I said to Marcie. Cindy had done a stupid thing but maybe she had learned something from it, I said. She didn’t seem to be addicted to anything but 7-Up. Since it was late, I said, Cindy would spend the night with me.
Cindy tugged at my arm and said, “I want to see the show in the studio tomorrow night, Dad. Ask Mom.”
I asked Marcie if that would be all right.
Marcie said, “That child is not going to terrify me and then get rewarded for it.”
I said, “She’s interested in television, Marcie. She likes being in the control rooms. And this show is going to be a little something different.”
“She has piano tomorrow,” Marcie said.
I said, “Cooper will have her home before noon. You can beat her up. Then he’ll take her to piano. Then they’ll come to the studio. And Cooper will bring her home tomorrow night after the show.”
“Very well, Frank,” Marcie said. “Are you home now?”
“We’re in a restaurant,” I said. “Are you going to watch the show?”
“If I get back from dinner in time,” Marcie said. “We’ve had these reservations at La Crémaillère for over a week.”
“That place up in the country that serves fat duck?”
“It’s excellent,” Marcie said.
I asked who her dinner companions were.
“Eddie Burns,” she said.
Eddie Burns?
Eddie Burns was the assistant golf pro at the club. Compared to Eddie Burns, Rex the Wonder Horse was a gerbil.
“May I speak to Cindy now, please,” Marcie said. “I want the satisfaction of telling my child that after tomorrow night she is grounded for a month!”
Cindy took it like a trooper and hung up.
I told Cindy to run on down to the limo and wake up DWC. I would be there in a minute.
Cindy gave Sally a hug and left.
With the front door standing open and Rita Hayworth looking on, I kissed Sally and held her.
“Did I hear you say you were in a restaurant?” Sally whispered.
“Unfortunately,” I said. “Why the hell was I afraid to say where I was?”
“I don’t know,” she said, doing things to my ear. “Why was Anna Karenina?”
I looked down at her.
“If you came to the broadcast center early enough tomorrow, I could take a break and kiss around on you for good luck,” I said.
“Darn right,” Sally said. “Half the fun is watching you matadors kneel in front of the crucifix before you get your asses gored.”
PART THREE
31.
“WE’RE ‘JUST UP THE STREET’ in Akron, Ohio . . . and inside this pleasant four-bedroom, three-bath ranch-style house, Mr. and Mrs. Franklin Lincoln Perry are working out on their Exer-Genies before sitting down to a dinner of . . .”
Rod DeRoache, the commentator in Akron, glanced at a card in his hand and bent his mouth into a horrible smile.
“. . . fried okra, sweet potatoes, cornbread, navy beans, hamhock, beets, and raisin pie. God almighty, are they really? Listen, Jack, do I have to say this?”
Rod DeRoache was speaking from Franklin Lincoln Perry’s front yard in Akron. We were seeing DeRoache on monitors in our biggest and newest control room in the CBC broadcast center on the eighth floor of the Chambers building in Gotham.
It was twenty minutes before air time for “Just Up the Street.”
Jack Nathanson was doing a whip-around of the four cities, checking the hookup and letting the crews out there know we were really going through with it.
“What’s the matter, Rod?” Nathanson said into his headset.
“Nobody could eat a meal like this. It turns my stomach,” Rod DeRoache said.
“You don’t have to eat it. Just report it,” Nathanson said.
There were pictures on all twenty monitors in the control room. Jack Nathanson sat in a leather chair in the middle of the front row with the monitors covering the wall in front of him. Four assistants sat in leather chairs on each side of Nathanson. All nine wore headsets. Nine more leather chairs on the second row, one step higher than the first, were occupied by people connected with putting “Just Up the Street” on the air.
Unless you wore a headset and had access to the right switches, you couldn’t hear what the people were saying on the twenty monitors. But you could see them.
The way you could tell which picture was appearing on America’s TV screens was to look at the monitor labeled Air Screen.
The Air Screen was in the high panel to the right of Nathanson. Another large monitor was labeled Line Screen. That one showed the same picture that was on the Air Screen but without the commercials.
Next to the Line Screen was the Preview Screen. The Preview Screen showed the picture Nathanson was preparing to move to the Air Screen and thus into the homes of our audience.
If that seems confusing, remember also that machines were whirring, people were talking about tapes and levels and feeds, others scurried in and out carrying clipboards, telephone lights flashed, and a half dozen technicians pointed urgently at different things that might go wrong.
On the Preview Screen we had a lovely color picture of Hank Judson digging a finger into his nose and studying the script for his opening.
Once Hank had agreed to do the show as a “favor” to me, he never complained or expressed doubt or criticism of anything involving “Just Up the Street.” He never did say he enjoyed it, either. To Hank, in his field a pro was a person who said what was supposed to be said when the red light came on, and said it clearly and convincingly. Hank could be humorous when the story called for humor, but he didn’t believe an anchorman ought to joke with his colleagues while on the air. “Some of these fresher blokes, they josh the weatherman about being wrong, and they ask the political reporter who’s going to win the primary, and they even allow themselves to be kidded about their golf scores. In other words, dear fellow, they appear to be victims of the news rather than authorities on it,” was what Hank said when Herb Grant suggested CBC try a lighter news format.
I walked around the control room sipping coffee, putting down the cups and losing them.
Actually I wasn’t any more frightened at that moment than I was when our helicopter got shot down near the Cambodian border.
Sally approached with a notebook and a Pentel in her hands.
“You understand, Frank, that as a journalist it is my responsibility to report honestly to my readers on what happens here tonight,” Sally said. “Even if it means describing the humiliation and ruin of a man I could have loved.”
I knew she was trying to amuse me and smooth me out.
Also I knew what she said was true.
If Sally decided to write a New York magazine column on “Just Up the Street”—as any columnist with any sense at all would do, especially given an inside look at this monumental act of insanity—she might fry me until there was nothing but a grease spot where once had parked a silver Rolls limo.
To my mind, Sally would be doing the right thing if “Just Up the Street” turned out to be as stupid, ill-conceived, trivial, and monotonous as the daily newspapers had been predicting.
The New York Post had said, “What Frank Mallory is doing is saying, look at CBC, America, we’re going to cross our eyes, stick our tongues out sideways, and blow spit bubbles on our lips.”
If the Post had suggested that earlier, I might have been able to do something with it.
On the other hand, if “Just Up the Street” turned out to be as wonderful as our promotion department predicted, then Sally might write something nice about me and fling herself into my arms and beg me to take her.
So I wished to think.
“A crack reporter can’t afford to go soft on nobody, baby,” I said.
“I only cry at weddings,” Sally said.
D. Wayne Cooper came in with Cindy.
Cindy said to Sally, “Have you ever heard DWC explain television?” Cindy was grinning.
Cooper said, “All them screens are showing pictures from cameras in all them different towns. The director picks out a picture he wants the folks at home to see. So he tells somebody to move that picture from one of them little screens to this big screen here. That’s about the main thing there is to television.”
“But tell Sally how television works,” Cindy said.
“I just told her,” Cooper said.
“Tell her how a picture gets from Akron to New York,” Cindy said, “and stays in the room for a while and then a director sends it to your home.”
Cooper said, “The picture flies through the air and sticks in all them tubes and wire deals in the back of the set. You unscrew the back of a set sometime and look in there. You’ll see what I mean.”
Cindy laughed and was pleased that Sally laughed.
“It’s dangerous to unscrew the back of a TV set, though. You can get electrocuted,” Cooper said. “That’s how come you ought to leave the picture flying stuff to the scientists and just stick with what I’m telling you.”
Cindy hugged Cooper.
I edged past them and went into the next-door VIP room. Behind me I heard Cindy say, “Daddy just patted me on the head and said nice doggie.”
“Your old daddy’s got a lot of electrical do-dads to think about right now,” Cooper said.
Stanley Coffman, a public-relations girl and a bartender in a white jacket were the only people in the VIP room.
Stanley stared at the Electro-Check board. The board was ten feet high and ten feet wide. The tiny electric bulbs glowed red, blue, green, and yellow on the map of the Greater New York area. There were a fair number of green lights for CBC. We might even have been out front.
That was because I had talked Stanley into ordering an extra half hour of news specials on the schedule that week. On the theory that many people would rather keep watching news than those shows that usually come on right after the news, from 7:30 to 8:00, and are aimed at the car-up-on-the-blocks-in-the-front yard crowd.
