Inner Tube: A Novel (4 page)

I smiled encouragingly.

“All right, it can be taken care of. Not much point in shoveling as much shit as I do if I can’t get a thing fixed every once in a while. So I can make some calls and I can get you a deferment. Takes me twenty minutes. But you have to pay your way here, my friend. You have to take whatever job I get you and stick with it and make a contribution.”

CBS had its news operation in a one-time milk factory on Eleventh Avenue. The halls were extremely narrow, like the walkways in a submarine. People were forever flattening themselves. They called us desk assistants and took our fingerprints, but we were really copy boys. A hundred and ten a week, shirt and tie required, and all the pencils we could sneak out of the building. I worked turnaround shift on the TV side, midnight to eight. Four a.m. was the real dead spot and that’s when I’d slide next door with Ron, the gay telex operator from Palm Beach, and toke up on the Evening News set.

It was a large blue room, but not that large. File cabinets, a blackboard, a few glassed-in cubicles, the big desk with the wall map behind, and off to the right the bank of wire-copy machines it was part of my job to look after. (The only time they were ever turned off was during the actual show, when a background tape was substituted; the real clack-clacking would have drowned out every word.) At that hour the place was sure to be deserted, and other than that we didn’t give it much thought. But sometimes, sitting in that great delphic throne and hoodooing my brain, a peculiar sensation would steal over me. Looking into the dead eye of the camera, I would imagine millions of American hearthsides visible only from where I perched, that I could somehow reach through the eye and deposit in those deeply slumbering places all the secrets kept off the air. What I sent to them instead were lungfuls of smoke.

One night a network correspondent called in from Bonn. He was mournful and drunk and wanted to talk to anyone. They’d thrown him out of the hotel bar. His girlfriend had dumped him for a Hungarian diplomat. He had a gun in his room and was thinking seriously about using it.

I said, “Shall I tell them to cancel your satellite time for tomorrow?”

“Kid, listen to me, kid. I’ve lost it. Pride, control, whatever it is. Totally lost it. I’m nothing but a foul ball out here.”

I told him to hold on while I got a cigarette. When I came back someone else was on the line and they were speaking German. I hung up.

But the man was on air the following night with his transatlantic feed, standing in front of the Bundestag solid as a pilaster, steam wisping out of his nostrils, eyes steady and hard. A real old-time reporter’s face, on which a smile was a deformity.

The calls became a semi-regular thing, even after his transfer to Prague (“Best beer in the world, kid”). He was usually tanked, but not always, and we’d talk about whatever was bothering him that particular night: his colitis, his ex-wife in Cincinnati and the kids who never wrote, the articles
Atlantic Monthly
kept rejecting. It amazed me how anxious he was for my good opinion.

“How was the piece Tuesday? Did you see it?”

“Well, the fur hat. I don’t know.”

“So I looked ridiculous? Like a cat fell asleep on my head?”

“More or less. But the piece itself was fine. Really.”

“Really?”

He wasn’t the only one easily wounded in those days, so I told a lot of lies. I was young and I wanted to please.

It was in general a time for euphemism, of a withdrawal from fact as from an open grave. There was great outcry over negativism in the news. The populace was battered by candor and innovation and they were tired. They had no interest in narrowing the credibility gap. They did not wish to be notified on the black-bordered cover of a national magazine that God was dead. They didn’t want their dinners spoiled by the nightly recitation of body counts, by images of angry milling dissenters in the street. Be gentle, they begged. Tell about the self-made millionaires, and kids who don’t take drugs.

Network executives exchanged worried memos, then came out into the open rumbling about professional integrity and the free flow of information, their neatly barbered heads held high. The public’s right to know was sacrosanct and they would defend it to the very last rating point. Few were owning up, but the heart of the matter was the power to decide what was Important. The old milk factory as colonial fort.

Like the time I was waiting on the corner for the cross-town bus, overheard these two studs from the documentary division:

“What I said was, ‘You want me to recut the interview to make it sound that way, I can do it, but take my name off the credits.’”

“Did he freak out?”

“Nah, just gave me the line about this is bigger than both of us and locked himself in his office.”

“Running scared.”

“So who isn’t?”

The weight of Policy bore down on all and sundry, making their movements wobbly, creasing their foreheads. Instead of “How about lunch?” people would say, “Let’s have a dialogue.” They clustered like blowflies at the edges of the newsroom to discuss detachment and accountability Voices were sometimes choked, sometimes grave. They compared measurements of cultural drift and electorate mood. They gestured with their hands and said things like “Morality cannot be legislated” and “Well, sometimes, guys, we can get a little insular.” Early one morning, not twenty feet from my desk, two reporters interviewed each other for a Sunday think piece.

On one point wide agreement was reached: that the decade was of pivotal significance—that through turbulence and upheaval we were living a kind of instant history. How quaint that now seems, the earnest belief that all the noise amounted to something more.

Myself, I took to chalking slogans on the Cronkite blackboard:

THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE

FOLLOW PACKAGE DIRECTIONS CAREFULLY AND DO NOT EXCEED THE RECOMMENDED DOSE

But slogans, you know, are the easiest things. The best I could do was share a little bourbon in paper cups with the uptown women who came to clean the offices at night. In one way or another, we were all fools.

C
ONSIDER THE HEDGEHOG, WHOSE
stiff, spiny hairs discourage attack. Often, before eating a toad, it chews the amphibian’s poison gland, lathering itself with toxic froth and augmenting its defenses. An efficient mechanism for an efficient mammal nicely placed in its niche.

Consider the overevolved creature whose most dangerous enemies come from within. Imagine the first useless panic, the first nightmare, the first crushing turn of anomie. Ten thousand generations later, all we can do is palliate. Misery abhors a vacuum and history is a list of sedatives; from animism to humanism to Haldol.

We choose our own methods for treating grief and fear. Superstitions and pharmaceuticals have their cost, and confession is too cheap. Brutality is circular and flight inevitably leaks. But there is a folk remedy as simple as the hedgehog, something more valuable in the institutional dayroom, the widower’s autumnal parlor, than any drug or counselor’s bromide. It is television.

I had a friend in New York named Chris Bruno. His father, a hotel man, kept trying to give him large sums and he kept refusing. Not that Chris had an overdrawn sense of his own integrity; only that the entailments of wealth didn’t interest him. He did airbrush paintings of office equipment and kitchen appliances. He wanted to be a lounge lizard, bitter and languid, but he was too excitable and no lounge would hold him. How close were we? Chris is the only man I’ve ever wanted to sleep with.

It was a long time ago. He called me on Christmas Eve from his parents’ apartment across town. He was just back from camping in Trinidad and very excited about music he’d heard there, fruit bats and clownfish he’d seen. We talked a long time, promised to meet the next day and eat oysters.

Just about one hour later Chris went sailing off his snowy balcony thirteen stories onto Fifth Avenue.

Wham.

A tragic suicide, his family announced. The guilty lamentation seemed so important to them that I withheld the more terrible truth: Woozy with goose and cognac, Chris had gone out to plot the stars over Central Park and, simply, slipped.

When his sister called me in the morning, I thought at first it was a joke. But the quaver in her voice turned harsh and she cursed my stupidity. I threw the phone into the wall. And then I sat for a long time on my bed waiting for something to come out or come up, for some physical sensation, but it was as though I were inside a test tunnel with everything unnaturally still. I went in the next room, turned on the television, lay naked in front of it. There was an electronic living-room show, a man in pinstripes being interviewed about group therapy. I thought how thin Chris looked in pinstripes, then stopped thinking at all.

For days, stuporous and inured, I lived there on that floor. The flickering blue screen was the only light in the room when night came down, and it was like lying at the bottom of a lake with people calling down to me, faces blurred and words indistinct. Now and then I closed my eyes to rest them, but never really slept. I absorbed loose time while stimuli bypassed my brain. Ashtrays overflowed, fur grew in the empty food cans, and the drone of noise and light went into me like an intravenous drip.

At the same time that I began to distinguish intervals in programming, I began to recognize, if not to comprehend, my pain. I wept at a hockey game, at a Petula Clark variety special. I slept dreamlessly, holding to me like some stuffed fuzzy toy a great armful of hissing air. On waking, my skin seemed unfamiliar, a stolen envelope. Not quite dawn and the sky was a test pattern. I groped in muffled ignorance and found, horribly, the nub. Chris died.

I showered, put clothes on, watched warships crisscross a billowing flag for the sign-on anthem, then a tornado of identical cartoon mice engulfing Farmer Gray. Regaining volition now, I could pick and choose my channels. I knew right where I was and I didn’t care. Chris died, but here was Bill Cullen to numb me.

It was January by the time I went outside. The streets were iced and I sprawled forward inside two blocks. No hurry to get up, now it was safe, safe to picture everything—Chris still smiling as he toppled, gracefully taut in his fast dive, landing, no bounce, with a sound like planks clapping, the bright blood, the taxis pulsing yellow at the corner.

I limped to a steamy restaurant and ate two portions of shredded beef with oyster sauce. “A poor workman always finds fault with his tools,” my fortune cookie said irrelevantly. I phoned Chris’s sister from a booth. She said come on over, there’s plenty to drink. The TV was on when I got there. It was on loud.

Richard Conte said: “Ease off, buster. I’ve had about all I can take.”

We drank rum highballs and glanced at each other.

Lisa said: “He had nothing to be angry about. Not one fucking thing.”

I said: “He wasn’t angry.”

We stopped talking once the bottle was empty. We slept in one bed, touching, but fully dressed. I woke energized, without a hangover, and thinking widely: This could be easy. I could leave my whole sorry life behind like a pile of bloody clothes. Lisa was still asleep when I went out, and the TV was still on.

It was on loud.

I
CAME TO SAN FRANCISCO
with a clear calling, with an insatiable appetite for squalor. I’d torn up my privileges like losing exacta tickets. I despised my soft youth, and wanted to get rid of it as fast as I could. What could be easier? Snug as a bug.

I took a job in a porno shop and soaked up the desolations of my customers. I gorged myself on simplicity. Black latex capes and ball gags, all-wet full-color spreads, gobbling nymphos, teens in bondage, lesbian nurses. When Mr. Bob came by to pick up the receipts, I’d go for a fast meal at a Chinese cafe where the waitress had a harelip and the fried rice gleamed with fat. Then it was back until closing time, aligning vibrators in the display case and listening for murders on the all-news radio. Oh, I was a man for all seasons in there, like something growing on the wall. I wore the same brown corduroys for weeks at a time; they got so shiny that when I stood under the colored bulbs at the back of the shop, it was like a rainbow up and down my thighs.

I slept in my clothes and had breakfast in bed, canned bonito and chocolate milk. I’d smoke slowly, picking dead skin from my scalp and watching my ashes soak into the fish oil at the bottom of the empty can. Then, assuming I hadn’t gone back to sleep, I’d be out prowling the neighborhood like some spawn of the freight yards—raking shoppers with my menacing eyes, spinning out heinous imaginings of the grimy little playground girls—until it was time for work. My off-days were spent in a bar where I was sure not to encounter any chess players or political theorists. The Forest Club was where beaten, cirrhotic honkies brought their pension checks and helpless repetitions. It smelled like old washcloth and the cigar box was always out, inviting contributions for one of the boys who’d landed in the VA—or worse. There was a notice in the john:
DON’T THROW BUTTS IN THE URINALS—IT MAKES THEM SOGGY & HARD TO LITE.

Turpitude without hardly trying. I felt proud. But, unavoidably, I would recognize myself in the next instant, burrowed deeply into the muck at the bottom of Lake Success and still trapped. Would I ever get free of this Halloween posing? Would I stay sixteen the rest of my life?

I’d conditioned myself, following the squalor trail like a set of dancing-school footprints. But if I didn’t find some new moves, it would be too late for everything—or so I thought. Everything seemed portentous that season, even the new “kneeling” buses that the city introduced.

On my birthday I walked twenty-two miles and made copious notes on everything I saw. Rewind, begin again. I bought two new pairs of pants, sprinted through books of crossword puzzles, switched to a new brand of cigarette, planted geraniums in a windowbox, rode the ferry to Angel Island and hunted starfish on the beach. I vacated the Forest Club for chummy cafes where I was sure to come up against members of my own subspecies, beings in flight from manifest destiny and Danish flatware. But I stayed on at the porno shop because, honestly, I liked the work.