ULDOON (10 A.M.): NEARSIGHTED GUYS DISTURBED BY THE BLUR WHO WENT BERSERK AND KILLED AGAIN AND AGAINMonday
ULDOON (10 A.M.): NEARSIGHTED GUYS DISTURBED BY THE BLUR WHO WENT BERSERK AND KILLED AGAIN AND AGAIN
AGNES ERSKINE (10 A.M.): DEALING WITH LOVED ONES WHO SMELL BAD
HECTOR (10 A.M.): THE FATTEST FOLKS YOU EVER LAID EYES ON—WE HAD TO BUY A SPECIAL COUCH FOR THIS SHOW!
ELAINE TIBBY POMFRET (10 A.M.): KIDS FROM NICE HOMES WHO EAT FISTFULS OF DIRT
HAROLD DERN SHOW (10 A.M.): PLEASE DON’T WATCH THIS IF YOU WEEP AT THE SIGHT OF CRUELTY!
CHUCK (10 A.M.): PARENTS FROM DISTRICT 18 DISCUSS BUS TRANSPORTATION
It was the week after Flag Day, a slow time for morning talk shows. The week before, Muldoon had led the pack with five shows on young Wall Street executives who suddenly cut loose and became primitive herdsmen in the Adirondacks, living in yurts and subsisting on currants and elk milk, and now, on Monday, the pack was off again, Muldoon with men whose poor vision had sent them down the trail toward multiple homicide, and Agnes probing the problem of family members who smell like wet dogs, and who, if you tell them this, may never speak to you again or, worse, may suffer such loss of self-esteem they lose their careers and take up drugs—last week, she had done people who try to deal with their anonymity by writing a book about it and going on television. Hector was doing obese male exhibitionists who enjoy putting on organdy tutus and dancing to the “Waltz of the Sugarplum Fairy” in public and were pleased to do so on his show, and Elaine Tibby showed dirt eaters, and Harold Dern ran around the studio with a pickax and did $150,000 worth of property damage as the studio audience cheered.
Meanwhile, on The Chuck Show of Television on PCN (the Pedersen Cable Network, Minneapolis), you saw four parents discussing the fact that the school had canceled the late bus, which made it necessary to drive all the way into town every afternoon and pick up the kids after field-hockey practice and choir rehearsal. “I don’t want to make a big thing about it, and all I’m saying is that it would’ve been nice if the process had allowed for some input from the parents,” one parent said.
The next morning, Chuck’s producer, Big Al, hit the ceiling. “You guys are dumber than dirt! Gosh, for boring! I’d rather watch a man paint a house. What a bunch of dummies! Whose dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb idea was this bus show anyway?” he screamed, when he saw how bad Chuck got beat in the overnight ratings. “A zero point six! That’s as low as you can go and still be talking English.” In fact, Chuck got beat out even by Miklo Pstachek’s talk show, which is in Latvian. Mik had a woman guest who picked up and threw three spinet pianos fifteen feet and then lowered her head and busted through an oak door and ran down the alley with her clothes off. Mik got a one point two.
By the time Big Al saw the overnights and had calmed down enough to sit the Chuck staff down for a meeting, however, it was Tuesday already.
Tuesday
MULDOON: MYOPIC EXECS WHO BECOME HERDSMEN RATHER THAN MURDER THEIR WIVES AND KIDDOES
AGNES ERSKINE: AUNTS WHO STINK—SHOULD YOU SEND COLOGNE FOR CHRISTMAS?
HECTOR: BIG BLUBBERY GUYS IN POOFY DRESSES (ONES WE DIDN’T SHOW YESTERDAY, AFRAID YOU’D BE OFFENDED)
ELAINE TIBBY POMFRET: THEY EAT DIRT AND TOUCH THEMSELVES IN BAD PLACES AND WHAT DO PARENTS DO? NOTHING
HAROLD DERN SHOW: HE WILL RAGE AND FOAM AND SCREECH AND POUND—HE WILL RIP HIS CLOTHES TO SHREDS AND SHAKE THE BARS OF HIS CAGE UNTIL THEY ARE SO LOOSE YOU ARE SURE HE WILL JUMP OUT IN THE AUDIENCE AND WHOMP YOU
CHUCK: WHAT’S NEW THESE DAYS IN VOCATIONAL COUNSELING IN AND AROUND BROOKLYN PARK?
“Who is killing this show by booking guests who are dumber than stumps?” inquired Big Al when the whole Chuck crew assembled in his office at PCN’s long, low cinder-block headquarters on Cheyenne Drive, next to the Wal-Mart, on Tuesday afternoon. Big Al’s office is full of stacks of pornography (research for an unfinished master’s thesis) and they had to scootch in tight, Eliot and Melody and Fielding and Shazzaba and Bob, all of them afraid they were about to be fired, each with a clipboard, a cup of coffee, and a stopwatch.
None of them said, “Al, those are exactly the guests whom your predecessor producer, Mary Ellen Hare, would have described as really neat people. Okay, so you were brought in from Chicago three weeks ago to shake things up, but don’t blame us if it takes a while to get out of PTA-mode and into mud-wrestling.” Nobody said that.
Big Al closed the office door and locked it and stood in the middle of the room and roared like a buffalo. "Fess up and tell me which one of you dumbbells is stiffing this show by hauling in dead meat and dumping it on Chuck’s couch. What’s the deal? This is a show, not a civics class! We need the elephants and acrobats and instead you dumbheads are booking a bunch of librarians!” But in fact it had been the Chucker himself who booked those two shows. Those guests were all Friends of Chuck (FOC). And here in the swamp of paper on Big Al’s desk was a Chuck memo saying they ought to do a show on recycling. Chuck’s wife, Marge, is a lifelong recycler, a fanatic who carries a garbage bag to other people’s parties and collects cans, bottles, paper, and recyclable plastic, and one of Chuck’s big interests at Pedersen Cable is recycling: he’s the one who persuaded President Bill T. Pedersen to put a recycling bin next to the soda machine.
But none of the staff cared to point out the obvious: the host himself, a pleasant man and lifelong Minneapolitan, was dragging the show to the bottom.
“One problem is that here in the Twin Cities it’s hard to find that many freaks—at least, any who care to come on TV and talk about it,” said Fielding. “We don’t have a reliable supply of cross-dressers, hermaphrodites, eunuchs, or geeks. We have plenty of alcoholics, but how interesting are they? They don’t remember anything. This is Minnesota, we’re a journalistically challenged state. I mean, when was the last time a band of Lutherans holed up in a compound with automatic weapons? We don’t have that here. We have a few fatties, but nothing like you see in New York or L.A. I was in New York once and I saw a man as wide as the whole sidewalk. He was driving himself along on a forklift and singing in a sweet, high-pitched voice and lifting up his T-shirt to show his belly button. I’ll bet Hector has him booked for Friday.”
They discussed some combos who might be fun to have—alcoholic execs who abused their elk, obese cross-dressing grandmas who eat dirt as a way to erase memories of childhood trauma—but could The Chuck Show afford the airfare? Probably not.
“Anyway, no more of these Dumb Dora guests or I’ll throw you all out the window,” said Al. “We got to have some sad weird people—some people who make you go, Whoa-oa-oa-oa—or else I’m going to start kicking fanny around here. Now, go work the phones.”
Ironically, Al was a potential guest himself—forty-seven, unable to read or write, terrified of cats, addicted to sugar, chronically depressed because of a rare disease called Phelps, trying finish a masters-degree thesis on masturbation—but of course as the show’s producer he needed to be in the control room, not sitting on the studio couch sobbing over the bum hand that life had dealt him. Though Big Al could have cried plenty about his dad, who abdicated the parental role and married Big Al’s beautiful Aunt Nick and thereby became Al’s uncle, a kindly but distant figure who sat on the porch chuckling and spitting but never giving the boy a smidgen of discipline. Growing Up with Dads Who Are More Like Uncles. But was that the reason Big Al was illiterate? And did it matter? Loneliness was Big Al’s major bugaboo. He felt like the only person like himself in the whole world. There were no books about his ilk, not even a color brochure. His problems were apparently so unspeakably vile that nobody dared talk about them. Was that why he always ran around the Pedersen offices yelling and waving his big arms—to cover up his uniqueness? “What’s the matter with you people!” he said. “How come you can’t think? You want this show to go down the toilet?”
The Pedersen Cable Network
Their exciting showcase productions:
Championship Spelling! (Boys vs. Girls!)
Science Fairs! featuring hundreds of exhibits!
Thrilling Piano Recitals by Artists of all ages!
Professional Trolling Tournaments!
Bob’s Cavalcade of Furniture Refinishing
Demolition Derby
Bowling for Prizes
The Chuck Show of Television
THE MEETING CONT’D: “I don’t think it’s just guests. The star has been looking a little peaked since the show started to cool off,” said Bob. “We need him looking fresh and eager again, like when we had the barking spiders on the show.”
True, said Melody. Eliot smiled. That spider segment had been good. Six months after Chuck went into syndication, he had four Girl Scouts on the show, and one of them, a spider hobbyist, owned three rare barking spiders, and it was fascinating to see the tiny hairy insects and hear their unmistakable woofing and arfing. It got Chuck in papers from coast to coast, and the next day 2.2 million Americans tuned in—
“What???” yelled Al.
Their all-time best audience tuned in the show the next day, thanks to big spider word-of-mouth.
“What happened?”
Chuck’s guests that next day were four old coots who sat and reminisced about Days Gone By and grumped about high property taxes and the cost of prescription drugs.
“You finally got yourself an audience and you blew it on old farts—how could you be so dumb?”
But the old farts had been booked for weeks; it was the only day they weren’t busy at the senior center; they were looking forward to being on TV. So Chuck couldn’t bear to cancel them.
“If I had been producer then, I woulda taken them geezers and heaved them out the door and I woulda signed those barking spiders back for a week!” cried Big Al.
He beat his fist on the desk. “Animals!” he said. “Go out there and bring back live animals!”
Wednesday
MULDOON: $500,000-A-YEAR GUYS WHO QUIT AND GO TO THE WOODS AND BANG AWAY AT ELK BUT MISS, BEING NEARSIGHTED
AGNES ERSKINE: HOW DO YOU TELL YOUR DAD THAT HE HAS BADGER BREATH?
HECTOR: WILL GUYS THIS FAT BOUNCE IF WE DROP THEM? WILL THEY ROLL? WHAT DO THEY LOOK LIKE HANGING UPSIDE DOWN?
ELAINE TIBBY POMFRET: PARENTS WHO SIT AND WATCH KIDS STUFF FISTFULS OF DIRT IN THEIR MOUTHS
HAROLD DERN: HE ESCAPES FROM HIS TRAINER! HE LEAPS INTO THE CROWD OF INNOCENT BYSTANDERS! HE HAS A SMALL CHILD IN HIS HANDS AND IS ABOUT TO CRUSH ITS HEAD LIKE A BEER CAN!
CHUCK: RABBITS COPULATING IN CAGES
The rabbits belonged to Melody’s brother Donald, who had a hobby farm in Chanhassen, three males and three females in heat. The males mounted the females and pumped fast and furiously for six seconds like furry pistons and then fainted and toppled over and lay on their backs twitching, with their legs sticking up in the air, and then awoke and jumped up and remounted.
The PCN crew did some fantastic camerawork—slow-mo and stop-action and split-frame—and the minute Chuck went off the air all three major networks were calling and begging for footage. All three evening newscasts ran a story on it, deploring the depths to which television now descended and the implications of this for literacy and the arts, and that night Big Al took the Chuck staff out for prime-rib Angus at Harry’s Cafe. The big guy was so happy and so drunk that he almost stood up and said, “I’m illiterate, sugar-dependent, catophobic, Phelps-infected, and a self-abuse abuser, and every day I feel sadder than you’ll ever know, but I still love you so much I could hug you to pieces!” Anyway, that’s how he felt.
They all whooped and laughed and chowed down on oysters and Martinis and the twenty-four-ounce portions of Angus, and then flaming fudge sundaes for dessert. Chuck wasn’t there—he and Marge had their Amnesty International meeting on Wednesday nights, when they and their friends sat and listened to Paul Winter albums and wrote protesting postcards to totalitarian regimes—but Chuck sent a chocolate cake with green icing that said “CONGRATULATIONS TO A GREAT BUNCH OF PERSONS!” Chuck was happy about the rabbit show—he felt it would open the door to a greater frankness in sex education in the schools.
“The bunnies were fabulous, and the dumbest thing we could do would be to sit on our keesters at this point and coast,” Big Al said. “We’ve got our work cut out for us now. The hardest thing is to stay on top!”
Thursday
MULDOON: THOSE EXECS AND THEIR ELK—WHAT ELSE MIGHT BE GOING ON THERE?
AGNES ERSKINE: PEOPLE WHO SMELL RIPE NEED TO DEAL WITH IT SO THEY CAN MOVE ON
HECTOR: MUCH FATTER PEOPLE THAN THE ONES WE SHOWED BEFORE. THOSE WERE JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG
ELAINE TIBBY POMFRET: MOTHERS WHOSE KIDS EAT DIRT. OFTEN THEY ARE GROUND-FEEDERS TOO
HAROLD DERN: THE CHILD WEEPS COPIOUSLY, THE PARENTS SCREAM IN TERROR, BUT IT’S TOO LATE—IN ANOTHER SECOND, THE MADMAN HOST WILL RIP IT TO SHREDS
CHUCK: HYPNOTIZING CHICKENS
Bob’s brother learned about hypnotizing chickens when he was in 4-H. You hold the chicken gently in the crook of your arm and murmur “Cheese chips, parsnips, and Charlie” over and over and stroke its beak until the bird’s eyes cross and it goes limp as a pillow. Then you can set it down on the ground (chickens’ knees lock when hypnotized; nobody knows why) and it’ll stand, motionless, its white feathers riffling in the breeze, the eyes focused on the tip of the beak, until suddenly it falls over on its side. Or you can prop it against a stake.
The PCN crew shot some footage of hypnotized chickens on location at several egg ranches in the area, including the controversial segment in which a chicken under hypnosis is beheaded with an ax and tears around in circles for a full fifteen seconds, blood pouring from its neck. Some stations cut that segment from The Chuck Show, and then all three networks did stories that showed the execution segment—on MacNeil/Lehrer, three psychologists agreed that the sight could have been traumatizing to small children and do damage that might not show up until they were in their late fifties. The PCN switchboards were jammed all day, and Thursday night the radio call-in shows were full of it, and Friday morning there were big newspaper stories, and the overnight ratings showed Chuck with the highest numbers ever recorded by a daytime cable talk host.
Phenomenal!
Big Al burst into Chuck’s office laughing and screaming like a maniac, waving the survey, jumping up and down as he danced around and around, singing, “We did it, we did it, we did it, we did it!” and what did Chuck say? He glanced at the numbers and said, “This is great. You know why? Because it gives us a platform to say some things about urban planning. I think the Reagan-Bush years left us with huge urban problems—we turned our backs on the cities and left them to drown in garbage—and now we need to decide if we have the national will to invest in our cities, and if so, what they should be like. We have a chance to set the urban agenda in this country for the next fifty years. It’s an incredible opportunity.”
Big Al felt sick to his stomach. “That’s interesting, I’ll have Bob work up a proposal on that,” he muttered, but he thought to himself, “You dumb Norwegian, we beat our brains out and make you the king hell man-eating champion of the white race and all you can think about is urban planning. Man, now I know why Mondale lost.”
Big Al went to his office and got a sawed-off shotgun out of his desk drawer and came back to Chuck’s office and stood in the doorway with the muzzle pointed at his own head and told Chuck the truth. “I cannot read or sign my own name, I am dying of Phelps, I drink three six-packs of Coke every day, my cat terrifies me at night, and I masturbate in unnatural ways. This show is the only bright spot in my life. If you want to be high-minded and pretentious and pompous and ruin this show, I am going to blow my head off right here and now.”
Chuck offered to obtain professional help for Big Al.
“I don’t need professional help, Chucker. I need to win. We got to go out tomorrow and kick their butts off the air.” He put down the gun and walked over to Chuck and kissed him on the lips, hard, a big wet smacker. “Chuck honey, if it meant higher ratings, I’d make love to you in slow motion, and, Chuck, you aren’t even attractive.”
Friday
MULDOON: I WILL QUIT MY SHOW, DRINK ELK’S MILK, AND DON FEMALE APPAREL IN FRONT OF MILLIONS!
AGNES ERSKINE: FOUR TOPICS I USED TO REFUSE TO DISCUSS ON THIS SHOW, INCLUDING BESTIALITY, PHONE CALLS FROM THE DEAD, RUMORS ABOUT NUNS, AND MY RECENT OPERATION TO HAVE MUSK GLANDS REMOVED FROM MY LOWER BACK
HECTOR: OBESE PEOPLE INVOLVED IN SECRET SATANIC-CULT RITES? (EXTREMELY VIVID PHOTOGRAPHS, NO CHILDREN, PLEASE)
ELAINE TIBBY POMFRET: YOU WERE RIGHT, VIEWERS, I WAS WRONG! MILLIONS OF YOU TOLD ME, “DON’T KNOCK IT IF YOU HAVEN’T TRIED IT!”—SO TODAY I WILL! A WHOLE BIG BUCKET!
HAROLD DERN: LOOK! A DOG RUSHES IN! HE BARKS, “DERN! DERN!” AND BIG TEARS RUN DOWN THE ARCHFIEND’S CHEEKS AND HE RETURNS THE CHILD UNHARMED TO ITS PARENTS! IT IS HIS BOYHOOD DOG, CHIPPER, WHO RAN AWAY AND NOW HAS COME BACK! THE CHILD IS SAVED AND THE MONSTER REDEEMED BY THE LOVE OF A PET!
CHUCK: MY PRODUCER AND A GUY I’M PRIVILEGED TO CALL A FRIEND, BIG AL
Big Al knew that his guest appearance was a mistake the minute the “On Air” light flashed, but what could he do? Too late. He told everything in five minutes, and it was nothing. Masturbation—big deal. Adult illiteracy. Sugar addiction. Cat fear. Depression. Phelps. It was old hat. Noise. He wished so badly that he’d listened to the staff—the great stuff they’d gone out and found. The world’s tiniest horse! A cow with two heads and two separate udders with a total of ten teats! A pig with a wooden leg who dives and swims and attacks on command!
The Big Al segment was lame. Al was even more depressed afterward, and locked himself in his office, and stared listlessly at pornographic pictures for an hour. But he cheered up later when the weekly ratings came in and The Chuck Show finished the week on top, followed by Agnes, Muldoon, Hector and Harold tied for fourth, Elaine Tibby dead last. E.T. promptly issued a press release decrying low standards in television and said she would devote two weeks to showing clips from the most disgusting TV shows of the past year.
There was quite a bit of soul-searching around the Chuck Show office in the Pedersen Cable Network building that afternoon. Chuck was gone—he and Marge were spending the weekend at a conference on American policy toward Canada—and basically what Big Al said was, “My fault, guys. I let you down. Autoeroticism isn’t what got us here. We gotta get back to basics.”
Bob reported that Hector was planning a whole week on capital punishment, comparing the merits of hanging, electrocution, firing squads, lethal injections, stoning, and pressing under heavy weights, and Muldoon was going to do grandmas hooked on methadone and nobody knows it except they seem sleepy in the afternoon, and Agnes was going to do death itself and her guests would be terminally ill persons hovering on the edge who could go at any moment, and Elaine Tibby would have a week on sex in car pools, and Harold Dern would go berserk and rave and foam as usual.
“Don’t worry about them,” said Big Al. “We’re going to play our game and do what we do best. Otherwise you’ll all be fired and hurled naked into a vat of acid.”
By three o’clock that afternoon, they had worked up a tentative schedule:
MONDAY: Snakes eating live rats, and lizards eating the snakes, and giant horned toads eating the lizards
TUESDAY: Pigs vs. horses (IQ)
WEDNESDAY: Transvestites wrestling alligators
THURSDAY: Various pets from tiny towns near nuclear testing sites who look exactly like different celebrities, such as William F. Buckley, Jr., Joan Collins, and David Letterman
FRIDAY: A hundred-foot-long white whale, named Ruby, captured from the North Atlantic, who swallowed several men (perhaps six or seven) who are thought to be still alive inside, at least doctors listening with powerful infrared stethoscopes hear what sounds like English emanating from the behemoth’s lower digestive tract
“The gigantic creature will be carefully anesthetized and opened up on Friday morning at ten-thirty,” said Big Al. “Ambulances will be standing by to take the survivors, if any, to the hospital. No expense will be spared to rehabilitate these men and restore them to a useful role in society.”
“How is this whale going to get to the studio?” asked Eliot.
Big Al said she would be flown by Federal Express in a special tanker plane from Bedford, Massachusetts, and would be kept in a large plastic tank outside the PCN building. After the operation, she would be returned to Bedford.
“Why don’t we do the show from Bedford?” asked Shazzaba.
“Because we’re here,” Big Al explained. “People expect the show to come from the Midwest. You take Chuck east and people will think we’re putting on airs.”
Melody wondered if they shouldn’t try to extricate the men from the whale right away and then have them as guests when they recovered.
“No,” he said. “We’re going to wait and cut the whale open on live television. Otherwise we get scooped. We’d wake up Monday morning and there they’d be on Today.”
Fielding was troubled. “We could put exclusive-interview contracts into spitproof cylinders, make the whale swallow them, get the men to sign them, and recover them from the other end, and then open her up tonight and out they come.”
Big Al screamed “No!” He pounded his fist and stamped his feet: No no no no no no no no no! He locked his office door and he tore all the pictures and awards from the walls and stomped them to bits! He cursed and he screeched! He hurled heavy objects out the window and onto the parking lot!
“We’re not going back to the old days, never, never, never, never, never! We worked hard to get us a king hell man-eating shin-kicking daytime TV show and we are not going to wimp out—hear me?”
Melody pointed out that there could be negative publicity if the whalectomy revealed the limp lifeless bodies of sailors recently expired, sailors who could have been rescued had the TV folks called 911—“You ever hear of third-degree manslaughter?” she said.
“You ever hear of losing your job?” he replied.
“What if there are no guys inside that whale?” cried Fielding.
Al looked around the room. “I personally guarantee you that there will be at least one man inside, and two if we can manage it. Don’t ask me how I know. I know. I’m paid to know. That’s how I know. Money makes me smart. Two guys in that whale and neither one of them is going to speak English. We’ll need translators. Can you translate from the ancient Aramaic, Fielding?—good, I’m glad.”
Fielding, who hadn’t known of his Aramaic fluency until that moment, looked at Bob, and Bob looked at Melody, and Melody looked at Shazzaba, and Eliot looked at his shoes. None of them said a word, only sighed. There would be no sleep for any of them the next week—they could see that. Four big shows to produce (and where were they ever going to find transvestites willing to get in a pit and wrestle with gators?), and then the whale story—good gosh, the headaches—they could feel a tightening in their temples—and then what would they do the week after next?