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Authors: Sparkle Hayter

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BOOK: What's a Girl Gotta Do
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That day I was looking for a note referring
to the joke played on me. But there was nothing.

It was ten minutes to the top of the 10 A.M.
show and just outside the newsroom anchorman Patrick Lattanzi was
speed-smoking a cigarette before he went on. He smiled at me, but
didn’t waste any smoking time in salutations.

“Hi, Pat,” I said anyway, as I went into the
newsroom. A desk assistant ducked between us with freshly ripped
copy while an editor veered around us with a freshly cut
videotape.

If you’ve never been in a television
newsroom, it’s a little like being inside a giant pinball game.
Tapes whirred, typewriters clacked, computer screens hummed, phones
buzzed, lights flashed, and images flickered. Along one wall were
bright monitors showing what the other networks were running as
well as our own picture and the feed we were pulling off the
satellites. Underneath the monitors was the assignment desk, manned
by one African-American woman and a half dozen harried-looking and
overweight white men in their shirtsleeves.

The assignment desk branched off into the
satellite desk on one side and the international desk on the other,
forming a wall of desks around the room’s perimeter. In the middle
of all this were the writers, who sat at circular “pods” with a
copy editor on an elevated area in the center. Producers were at
the producer pods, associate producers at associate producer pods,
and lower forms of newsroom life without a pod to call their own
were eeking past each other like bats careening around a cave.

Across the newsroom, Bob McGravy was standing
by the supervisors’ desk, talking to the day super. He saw me and
waved, then he held up a small Slinky and grinned. Recently, he had
completed a smoking-cessation program kicking a
thirty-five-year-old cigarette habit he picked up as a copy boy for
Edward R. Murrow in the 1950s. Every day he had some other
substitute in his hand—a dollop of modeling clay, a harmonica, even
a rosary. I’d given him the Slinky, wrapped in paper made up of
supermarket tabloid headlines.

We had a good relationship, McGravy and I. He
was my mentor, but despite the company rumors to the contrary, our
relationship was strictly platonic. Even if I had had lust for him,
I never would have acted on it; the guy was my boss’s boss, and I’m
just not that kind of girl.

At that moment, someone sidled up to me and
blurted, in a whisper, “Turk alert!” and I fixed my eye on the far
exit and headed straight for it.

All over the newsroom people scattered,
looking for edit rooms to hide in or frantically hitting
typewriters or picking up phones in order to look busy. But I
reacted a little too slowly; just inches from the doorway, I felt
the large hand of Turk Hammermill on my shoulder.

“Robin!” he said.

I turned around slowly, working up a polite
smile as I did. “Turk. I didn’t see you,” I lied.

Turk was wearing what he wore every day, a
Mets sweatshirt over jeans. As a sports producer he didn’t have to
worry about what he wore, and he didn’t.

“You know what I did this weekend?” he said,
not waiting for an answer. “I watched a tape of the Mets-Expos game
from last September. Did you see that game?”

Then I made my second mistake. I hesitated
before answering.

“Man!” It was brilliant!” Turk began. “Okay,
Mets are up, it’s the bottom of the ninth, score is seven-three
‘Spos. Two down, three men on, and . . .”

By now I was trying to devise a new strategy
for escape, looking around the newsroom for someone to rescue me.
But everyone had seen Turk by now and they were avoiding my eyes.
Cowards.

“. . . first pitch is a strike, second pitch
is a strike, and the third—oh, first I should tell you about the
‘Spos pitcher. This pitcher, his name is . . .”

In a business that specializes in them, Turk
was the biggest bore. Not only was it impossible to get a word in
edgewise, but he digressed from the main story before completing it
and then digressed from his digressions, constantly interrupting
himself to go off on tangents, each less interesting than the one
before.

“. . . his father used to pitch in the
Carolina League. Of course, that was long before major league
baseball went up to Canada . . .”

Widely told newsroom joke: What’s the least
heard sentence at ANN?

Answer: I’m looking for Turk.

What kept me, and legions before me, from
saying “Turk, shut up!” was that he was really a nice guy, a little
on the sensitive side and not too bright, and nobody could bear to
hurt his feelings. Oh yeah, and he was Georgia Jack Jackson’s
nephew.

Relief for me came from an unlikely quarter.
As Turk was reciting the History of Major League Baseball, Jerry
Spurdle came up beside me and began chewing me out.

“Jesus, Robin, we’re waiting for you. The
production meeting was supposed to start half an hour ago. Jesus.
Excuse us, won’t you, Turk?”

Spurdle led me out of the newsroom and down
the hall to the Special Reports offices, which were housed in what
was once an extraneous set of men’s and ladies’ bathrooms. The
stall and plumbing had been removed and replaced with three large
offices and a central conference area and it had all been
repainted, but we still had ceramic tile on the floor and you could
still see the outline of the word “Gents” where it had been on the
swinging door to the hallway. Occasionally someone from another
floor would walk in, expecting a urinal, and be surprised to see
people working in there.

Frankly, a lot of people at ANN still
considered it the biggest urinal in the building. Special Reports
was where stories like “Sex for Sale,” “Hollywood Hunks,” and “Your
Child and Satan” were done, “investigative” shows that were rating
grabbers, heavy on clichés and light on investigation. It was also
where I was paying my debt to journalism for professional gaffes
committed in the last year.

When we got to the office, Claire, the
producer, was waiting with a box of chocolate frosted doughnuts and
a fresh pot of coffee. She did it for us, bless her soul, and not
for her because she never let refined sugar or caffeine cross her
pure lips.

“Your phone messages,” Claire said, handing
me a couple of pink papers. Two calls from Elroy, one of my
“special fans,” who sees me as his dominatrix and gets off by
calling or writing me to describe the many ways he wants me to
punish him. This time he wanted me to spank his bare bottom with a
razor strap and then glue his eyelids shut with Krazy Glue.

And they say romance is dead.

I crumpled them up and pitched them into the
wastebasket by the coffee machine, where they hit with a satisfying
ping.

“I didn’t see you at the party last night,” I
said to Claire as I got coffee.

“I flew back late last night and by the time
I got to my apartment, it was after midnight and I didn’t see the
point.” She brushed her thick black hair with her fingers to get it
off her face. “Was it fun?”

“It was weird. Burke was there with Amy
Penny,” I said as we sat down at the conference table and waited
for Jerry to quit stirring his coffee, which he drank in a cup that
said CHIEF MELON INSPECTOR, WTNA TV.

“Sorry I missed it,” Claire said. “Was it
terrible? Did you maim him?”

“Nah. I think they’re engaged, although Burke
wouldn’t give me a straight answer.”

I pulled at a chocolate doughnut, breaking
off a sticky, doughy piece. “Well, what the hell. I had to see them
together sooner or later. Now it’s behind me. Anyway, I made her
feel more uncomfortable than she made me feel, so I won the
party.”

Jerry sat down between us at the conference
table, still stirring his coffee loudly. “Where were you last
night?” he asked Claire.

“I had a family thing,” Claire said. “My
people celebrate New Year’s with an animal sacrifice. My

mom expects me to be there, you know.” This
was for Jerry’s benefit.

“I don’t believe you anymore,” he said,
scowling.

“What did you sacrifice?” I asked. “A small
child?”

“God no, a small rodent. Robin you know human
blood used in a sacrifice stains.”

Around the newsroom, the Spurdle-Thibodeaux
production team was known as Beauty and the Beast. Jerry had what
is commonly known as “a great face for radio,” which is where he
came from. He had a soft and sinister look, pale and blond, gone to
fat, “a mediocre sack of Aryan genes,” as Eric had put it the night
before. I’d said that Jerry looked like that unmarried uncle who
hung out in the shed during family gatherings, the one your mother
always warned you in a whisper not to be alone with.

What made Jerry even uglier was his habit of
trying to disguise it by adopting the personal styles of famous
handsome men. For a while, he went through a Miami Vice Don Johnson
phase, where he moussed his hair, slicked it back, and sported a
five-o’clock shadow all day long. He looked like Goofy.

Claire, on the other hand, had the kind of
exotic beauty that made grown men in responsible positions stutter
when they talked to her. She was half African-American, a quarter
French and a quarter Cherokee, and when Jerry first hired her—to
prove once and for all that he wasn’t a bigot—he speculated that it
was really something for someone like her to actually graduate from
college and he asked her a lot of questions about voodoo. To her
credit, Claire took it, and him, as a joke and went along with it,
and every day she’d feed him some shit about animal sacrifices and
black masses. By implying that her poor, illiterate swamp-trawling
parents needed every cent she could give them, she actually
squeezed a raise out of him.

Claire knew a lot about Cajun folk magic and
she even believed some of it, the way I believe astrologers, but
the truth was, Claire’s father was a dentist in Metairie,
Louisiana, and her mother was a dental hygienist. And they were
Baptists.

“Enough chitchat, you two,” Jerry said,
leaning back into his chair. Please, God, I prayed, make his chair
fall over, but it remained perfectly balanced.

“The holidays are over now and so it’s time
to get back to work on our sperm bank series. I’ve done some
thinking and I’ve decided we will have to go undercover on this
story.”

I groaned. I hate undercover work. Sometimes
it’s necessary, but I hate it. It’s dishonest, and I didn’t think
it was needed for this story as we had a half dozen disgruntled
same-race couples with mixed-race children—to make the point.

“Robin and I will pose as man and wife and go
in with concealed cameras,” Jerry said.

“God, you’re not going to make a donation,
are you?” I asked, horrified.

“Well, Robin, I think I might have to, for
credibility.”

“Credibility?” I asked. I made a face.

“Give it up, Robin. We are not doing that
special report on death you want to do so badly.”

“It’s a good idea, a non-nonsense look at
what happens to you when you die, your body, I mean, and what it
costs. Boomers are facing the last half of their lives and it’s
starting to become an issue. I thought we could demythologize
it.”

“You want to do it because it’s morbid.”

“No, I want to do it because . . . ” I
began.

“Because you fear death,” Claire said.

“It’s morbid,” Jerry said. “And how are we
going to get someone to sponsor death? No company wants its
products associated with that subject—except funeral homes and
places like that.”

“And arms makers,” Claire said, although she
didn’t really like the idea either. Her area of interest was exotic
diseases. At the last editorial meeting, she fought for a series on
a virus emerging in Africa that made your blood boil over until you
kind of exploded.

“Don’t go running to McGravy again, crying
about how I’m a sexist sleazeball who makes Edward R. Murrow turn
over in his grave,” he said, reading my mind. “At least I never
belched during a White House news conference carried live over
national TV. While the mike was right above me.”

Touché,’

And he went on. “At least I never asked a
woman who ate her dead companion after their plane crashed what he
tasted like.”

(Like tough, fatty chicken.)

“At least the mailroom still delivers my
mail.” It was the best retort I could come up with as I stomped
off, the office door swinging behind me, and went to find McGravy
to lodge my daily complaint about Jerry Spurdle.

God. If I close my eyes I can still see that
mike hovering over me; I can feel the eyes of the other reporters
on me, the eyes of the vice president, and on the other side of the
television screen the eyes of thousands of hard-core ANN viewers.
It is the first question I’ve been called on to ask (and now, for
the life of me, I can’t remember what it was). I stand, I open my
mouth—and I burp. Not one of those delicate, barely a hiccup,
burps. A ripping Richter-registering roar of a belch. After that,
all I remember is tumultuous laughter and a hot chill of
mortification.

All right, so I belched during a White House
news conference carried live to half the globe, thus aborting my
brief career as a Washington correspondent. Consider this:
Everybody belches. It’s natural. The queen and the pope belch.

The trick is not to do it when there’s a
high-powered mike hovering right above you.

And yes, I asked a woman who survived a plane
crash by eating her dead companion, Bud, what human flesh tasted
like. She was very open about the incident and I am a curious
person. Don’t you wonder about things sometimes? Don’t you ever say
things you regret?

Somehow, though, I got a reputation as being
sensational, grotesque in my thinking, and with my career spinning
out of control, down towards the hard earth, Bob McGravy convinced
the powers to be at ANN, the network mandarins and the court
eunuchs, to give me another chance. I thought they’d give me my old
beat, Crime & Justice. Instead, they plugged me into Special
Reports.

BOOK: What's a Girl Gotta Do
6.19Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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