Deliriously Happy (17 page)

The Crying of the
Whole Sick
Brady
Crew

t.V.

T
HE
F.J. M
UGGS
I
NSTITUTE
for Video Studies, a public-private joint venture of the Japanese Ministry of Efficiency and the La-Z-Boy people, jutted from the Southern Californian hillside like a crystal mother lode, 6.2 acres of mirrored-blue polyhedron that evoked, perhaps not coincidentally, Galvantica, the geological nemesis of Godzilla in one of his lesser-known features. The highly reflective Institute shone like a citadel on a hill, particularly brightly between the hours of 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., when it tended to start brushfires. For this reason the Institute employed its own squad of firefighters, who scurried about the complex in hooded blue lamé jumpsuits, fooshing clouds of CO
₂
at anything that smoked, and who at this moment stood ready to extinguish the heaving, steaming car wreck that poly-rolled into the parking lot with Zenith, at the wheel, still marveling at the airworthiness of these German automobiles.

“Oh, rilly! I shall be too late,” Zenith declared, tumbling out of the Volk and grabbing up her entire academic career, with then a mad dash through the doors of the Institute, blood trickling down her left temple and her big hair festooned with beads of tinted glass.

By the time Zenith arrived, or rather landed, on the stage of the Institute's 950-seat $24 million Viditorium, there sitting in the front row already and bored, idly flipping through the Soaps on the Big Screen, was a jury of her peers.

•   Victor La Mastersvoice, Acting Director of the Institute, who had made his reputation in the late '70s by delineating the Gilligan Paradox, positing that the reason the castaways did not simply kill the eponymous Gilligan was because even though the hapless sailor constantly bungled their attempts to escape the island, his survival was a sufficient and necessary condition for the continued existence of said isle, and thus their own continued survival.

•    Bud Couchpotato, a rising star at the Institute, and someone with whom Zenith shared a kind of David-Maddie sexual tension/intense hatred, both on-campus and off. Couchpotato was currently experimenting with transferring film to video and back to film again, repeatedly, for reasons he had yet to make clear.

•    Hanna Barbara DePatie-Freleng-Merrymelodies, a fortysomething woman who Zenith secretly suspected was her mother, on the basis of peripheral glimpses she had caught of her during commercial breaks throughout her childhood.

•    And, finally, Quasar Qualitygoesinbeforethenamegoeson, who, though nearly 50 in this 18–34 game, had managed to maintain his sharpness and contrast. It was he who had successfully cracked the Minimum-Comedies Situation (a perplex on a par with the Four-Color Theorem in mathematics), proving that all situation comedies could be deconstructed into five basic plots, rather than the six previously believed the minimum.

“Yer late!” La Mastersvoice barked, hitting the mute button to command Zenith's full attention. “We were rilly hoping to wrap this up in time for
Jeopardy!
”

“I know I'm rilly rilly sorry,” Zenith replied, shaking her head and knocking bits of windshield loose. “But, like, I was shot at on the freeway and I—”

“You should make allowances for that kinda thing,” interrupted La Mastersvoice. “Now, let's just have it, huh?”

“Yes, yes, yes, um—” Zenith said, trying to regain her vertical hold. “I'm like rilly honored—” said Zenith, bowling over the stage to let him have it, her dissertation and a shower of shatterglass.

“Yeh—” gruff La Mastersvoice, with the old academic brush-off and a shove of Zenith's dissertation into the state-of-the-art vidsystem, which blipped the Big Screen then into the big bright face of Zenith Remotecontrol, looking considerably more poised and sheveled than she did just now, saying “I'm, like, rilly honored…”

Zenith sat beside herself, small hot and big cool, the hot bothered for she suspected her thesis, while high-concept, was not a this-crowd pleaser. Zenith's thesis was this, that:

People watch way too much TV these days
.

Heavy, talking-heady stuff, especially difficult to dissert in a fifteen-minute video, fersure, and yet a supposition Zenith hoped would as hosted by PBS's Bill Moyers make low-calorie high-fiber good television. But the glazed look of the four in the front row told Zenith she was not yet mediuming her message.

And then, to her further horror, La Mastersvoice raised his arm and, taking jaded aim at her dissertation, pushed the fastforward button.

Eight years of study swirled by like a badly edited Emmy retrospective, La Mastersvoice slowing it only once, for a classic scene in which Beaver and Whitey discuss the old new math, chuckling, and then zapped Zenith's academic career to an end.

In the deep dead air following, Zenith, going over her employment options, which were zip, stood awaiting the final credits.

After what seemed like miniseries, La Mastersvoice was heard: “Not bad. Coulda used more clips, but not bad atall.”

Zenith felt renewed, picked up for a full season, as La Mastersvoice looked casually left and right, and went on: “An'body else got anything to say?”

“I have a question,” a familiar voice descended from the dark back of the Viditorium.

Zenith squinted to make out the tall figure now dissolv—
omigod!

It was a blast from her immediate past: the man on the freeway, still carrying the shotgun, which was the tipoff. But Zenith's gasp was accompanied by at least three others.

“Great Caesar's ghost!” said Qualitygoesinbeforethenamegoeson.

“T.V. Pychor!” bellowed La Mastersvoice.

“t.v.,” whispered Merrymelodies.

It was, in a sense, all three: Dr. T.V. Pychor, founder of the Institute and in fact the entire Telegenic Movement, the High Priest of Low Culture, the man about whom NBC's Marshall McLuhan had said “T.V.
is
TV!,” the current academic world-record holder of longest sabbatical at seventeen years so far, additionally the one-time mentor and lover of a young graduate student named Hanna Barbara, and moreover—

“I have a question,” Pychor repeated. “Zenith, could you please name the Brady Bunch, in chronological order?”

“Greg, Marcia, Peter, Jan, Bobby, Cindy” came out of Zenith's mouth before she could think.

“And now, in order of popularity, based on fan mail, average per week?”

“Greg, Jan,”—again, Zenith speaking before it occurred to her that “—
daddy?
”

“Hey there, Opie Dopie,” Pychor replied softly. “I came by to apologize for taking a shot at you on the freeway back there.”

But this bit of epiphany went entirely unnoticed by the others, spitting as they were out questions or fragments thereof as they scrappled up the aisle, bowing down before the Father of Videotics:

Where have you what have you been doing watching taping all my wonder years latenight with large ensemble dramedy Bochco primetime soap Tabloid TV declining network-shares and furthermore MTV heavy or lite Bud Melman?
until all the questions trailed off into the expectant faces of five, now joined by Zenith: global-village elders gathered around their T.V. Pychor.

“Wish I could help you,” Pychor beamed back, “but my old thirteen-inch black-and-white blew out in '86, so right now I'm into this Ginny Woolf thing—who, as Cyril Connolly says, can spin those cocoons of language out of, like, nothing.”

All together now their jaws dropped
bwoing!
to the floor in homage to the zanier alltoo infrequently broadcast Tex Avery cartoons.

You have reached Gwynn Paley and Dave Maguire's Official Nuptials site. To continue, enter the GUEST ID and PASSWORD you received with your Wedding e-vitation. Please enjoy this short ad while the site loads.

Two blushing brides
,

one rich, one poor
,

both have their hearts set

on getting married at

the same romantic location
.

On the same day
.

Reese Witherspoon. Jennifer Lopez
.

In love and at war

for:

The Wedding Pagoda

Opening June 14

Friends and Family (Who We Also Consider Friends)!
I can't tell you how excited Dave and I are that you'll be able to join us as we Pledge our Love for years to come! Below you'll find all the info you need to help us make this Occasion as Special and Perfect as we have planned.

GUEST POLICY

E-vites are for the Guest only; there is no “implied plus-one.” We're sorry, but it's a
very small mountaintop
, with limited ruins. We have gone to exhaustive lengths to achieve a proper mix of personalities, races, classes, ages, and orientations to ensure a Fun and Romantic Event for everybody. So don't be at all surprised to find that your True Plus-One is already there! (Though just one plus-one per guest, please; do you hear me, Erika?)

We regret, too, the no-children rule. Some of us feel that Children bring nothing but Joy to all occasions; others feel differently, and this is a discussion we've agreed to table until a later time. (Not
too
much later!
Tick tick tick
…) If it's any consolation, you'll be sparing your Little Loved Ones many
painful inoculations
, and then there's the whole
child-slavery thing
.

DIRECTIONS

Upon arriving at the
Aeropuerto Internacional Jorge Chávez,
in Lima, look for the Aero Sendero Terminal. It's a corrugated-metal shed, painted orange and possibly brown. Sendero, your pilot, should be there (he looks just like Erik Estrada, had things not gone so well for him). His
Piper Apache
is completely airworthy, and if it comes to that, somewhat seaworthy. After my father conducts a quick sobriety check, Sendero will wing you to a private airstrip on the shore of Lake Titicaca. From there, you'll travel via
balsa de tortoro,
or reed boat, to the island of Amantaní. The voyage is quite Authentic and will take about eight hours. Once ashore, llamas will take you up the mountainside of
Pachatata
(Father Earth), where you will be given a sleeping bag and assigned to a ruin.

A FEW TRAVEL TIPS:

•  
Do not let Sendero sell you any cocaine
. We have made an exclusive arrangement with another supplier. Anybody wishing to partake of this indigenous fare
must
contact Dave's brother
Drake
. If you fail to do so, we may find ourselves short a best man.

•  
Lake Titicaca
is a sacred Incan site. Their god or something rose out of it. Mocking its name, or the name of nearby
Lake Poopó
, is considered incredibly rude and has resulted in
spontaneous stabbings
.

•  Since
Pachatata
is 13,615 feet above sea level, you may
not be able to breathe
. We will have oxygen on hand, but in limited supplies, so, unless you are absolutely certain you are going to die, please be considerate of others.