“Pick you up at eleven?” my driver Joe asked as he braked near the elevator bank in the Glass Tower’s Midtown underground parking area. “Or is this day not usual?”
“It’s very usual,” I said, exiting the Volvo, blissfully unaware of what a lousy prophet I was. “You think you might get the car washed?”
“No. It start looking too good, somebody steals it.”
He didn’t wait for an argument, not that I had one.
As he aimed the dirtmobile toward the exit, he swerved to avoid a rider in yellow leather zooming in on a motorcycle. The newcomer parked a few feet from me, dismounted, and removed his black helmet. He peeled off a glove and hand-combed his long blond locks, regarding me with sleepy blue eyes. He put a grin on his pale poet’s face and said, “Yo, Bless-sing, wha’s happ-a-ning?”
Chuck Slater was Wake Up, America!’s new film and television critic. Barely in his twenties, Chuck had gained fame as an Internet blogger and host of the popular website Flicpic.com. He was an arrogant, impatient young movie nut, either overly effusive in his reviews or devastatingly brutal. Quite the opposite of our former entertainment critic, George Miles, a Pulitzer Prize–winning twenty-year veteran of the Washington Post, whose critiques were thoughtful and informed. Unfortunately, all that experience meant nothing to management except that George was getting on in years. Which in turn meant that he had to be out of touch with our audience. Unlike Mr. Slater.
“Nice bike, Chuck,” I said.
“Sy-kel, baby, not bike. Ka-wa-saki Z One Thousand. A kick-ass machine. You oughta get yourself one, Bless-sing.”
“I’ll go out right after the show and buy one,” I said, pressing the button for the elevator, “if you can name the director of The Seventh Seal.”
He frowned. “Real cute, Bless-sing. You know I don’t waste my time on kiddie flicks.”
We were among the last to arrive at Studio 2.
Stepping into the vast array of sets, wires, cameras, monitors, and bustling people, Chuck took one look at anchorman Lance Tuttle and said, “Damn. I forgot it’s Western Day.”
Lance was wearing a fake handlebar mustache, a ten-gallon hat, a starched white shirt, black trousers as tight as Gene Autry’s, and hand-tooled boots with heels that brought him nearly up to six feet. He waved to us and yelled, “Howdy, pod-ners.”
On occasion, usually a holiday like Halloween or St. Pat’s, the show took on a special look, with decorations, costumes, and theme-appropriate guests. That day we were celebrating the old Wild West. Why? The ostensible reason was that the Professional Bull Riders were in town holding an exhibition at Madison Square Garden; some of them would be dropping by to talk up the contest and shake hands with the street crowd. But more important to the network, we would be promoting The Golden Lady, a dramedy set in a San Francisco casino during the 1849 gold rush that, judging by its ratings, needed all the publicity it could get.
“I hate this bullshit,” Chuck grumbled. “They’re making me dress up like an Indian. Hell, you’d make a better Indian, Blessing.”
“Thank you, Chuck, but they see me as more of a General Custer type.”
“You’re shitting me, right?”
“Yes, I am shitting you, Chuck,” I said, and headed for my dressing room/office.
Before I could get there, Gin McCauley, done up in Ultrasuede pants and shirt, Calamity Jane–style, called out, “Billy, mah hero!” She ran to me, hugged me, and kissed me on the cheek. “Thank you, thank you,” she whispered in my ear.
“For what?” I asked.
“For bein’ you,” she said.
Before I could press for a slightly more specific answer, she was on her way across the floor to where our producer, Arnie Epps, was chatting with Lance. Both men stopped talking, looked at Gin, then at me, and frowned. Actually, it was more of a scowl. Two scowls.
Puzzling over that, I wandered into the dressing room my assistant, Kiki Owens, had been slowly transforming into an office over the past few years. She was seated at a Formica-topped desk, typing away at a computer.
Kiki is a tiny, thin, seemingly fragile black woman who, though attractive, consists primarily of brain, bone, and muscle. She can get any job done if she puts her mind to it. Her role in life was helped by a British accent, earned by birthright, that, depending on her mood, fluctuated from charming to brutally intimidating.
She gave me a disappointed look and said, “Today’s a ‘special’ costume show, Billy. And you’re late.”
“My bad. I sort of put it out of my head.”
“I got Arnie to sign off on your cowboy costume,” she told me. “He gave someone else the Indian outfit.”
“I know,” I said, smiling. “Thanks.”
“I told him about your feather allergy. But I don’t think he believes it any more than I do.”
“It’s just the whole deal—the paint on the face, the feather headdress. I think it’s demeaning to Indians. Like asking me to wear a bone in my nose.”
“We’ll save that worry for Jungle Day,” Kiki said. “Now I think you should change into your outfit and go to makeup as quickly as you can. Lo and Jolly have been popping in and out for the last twenty minutes, looking ever more anxious.” Lo and Jolly were our cosmetics artistes.
The costume that I’d handpicked consisted of a white ten-gallon hat, a black shirt and white string tie, tight gray pants, and black boots. And, of course, a black leather holster with twin shootin’ irons. When Lo, a very round Jamaican-American woman who had been with the show longer than I, finished removing my facial sheen and applying a thin mustache, I purposely avoided looking in the mirror. I wanted to preserve the mental image of myself as Herbert Jeffrey, the handsome cowboy star of the old movies my father would pop into the video player when I was a kid. The actor went on to sing with Duke Ellington’s band as Herb Jeffries and become one of the top vocalists of the forties, but to me, he’ll always be the heroic “Bronze Buckaroo” and “Two-Gun Man from Harlem” who rode the plains on a small black-and-white TV set in our living room.
Channeling the non-singing Herbert, I galloped through the morning, palavering with the bull riders while howdying the visitors lined up outside on the street, joining trail cook Buck Parminter in rustlin’ up some gold-rush griddle cakes, and introducing the C&W singing group The Sons of Sacramento.
We were nearing the end of our third half-hour segment when I sensed a shift in the on-set atmosphere. Usually, we’re crisp, fresh, and a little brittle at the start of the show, unless there’s breaking news or a special guest to create an immediate burst of energy. Toward the end of the first half-hour segment, we’ve loosened up a bit. During the third half-hour we’re relaxed enough to goof around.
But not that day.
I noticed there was whispering among the crew members and a tension in the air. At the start of the show, coanchors Lance and Gin had been gleefully outdrawing each other. Now it looked as if they wished they were carrying real guns. When news anchor Tori Dillard delivered a report on progress in the Middle East peace talks, she sounded so glum, you’d have thought a new war had broken out. Chuck Slater, interviewing a starlet from The Golden Lady show, angrily tore off his Indian headdress on camera and then tossed a wet blanket over the actress’s effervescence by reminding her of the show’s low ratings.
But it was our eccentric, usually genial meteorologist, Professor Lloyd Sebastian, transformed by Lo and Jolly’s magic into Randolph Scott’s crusty old sidekick, Gabby Hayes, who made me realize something was definitely amiss. Lloyd approached me, even more sour-faced than Gabby, and said, “I thought we were friends, Billy.”
“We are friends, Lloyd.”
“Actions speak louder than words,” he said, before returning to his green screen.
The show’s closing theme had barely stopped playing when Kiki informed me that Gretchen Di Voss wanted me in the conference room immediately.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Her assistant didn’t say. But …”
“What?”
“I’ve heard grumbling about … you and Gin.” Kiki looked at me expectantly.
“What about us?”
“I assumed you’d know.”
“Well, I don’t.”
She shrugged. “I imagine Gretchen will clear it up,” she said.