Chump Change (20 page)

But even that wasn’t much of a consolation, after a while. I found the more “information television” I watched, the less I retained. I can remember things I’ve read for months, years, a lifetime, but I couldn’t remember any facts I’d learned from all my TV watching for more than a few hours. It was as if my brain were made of Teflon, and sprayed with Pam. In the end, I decided “information television” only provides an illusion of information, an info-llusion. Or maybe it’s just me.

Of course, I didn’t regale Bill Frizell with these thoughts and observations when I returned to his office at the end of the week. Instead, I laid a carefully edited version of my more positive points of view on him, liberally salted and peppered with praise for all Cosmodemonic newscasts. Hey, man has to eat, me more
than most. This body of mine, as I believe I’ve mentioned, is no compact little econo-model; it’s a block-long 1972 El Dorado Gas Guzzler Supremo, with fins and a steer-horn hood ornament. I need four squares a day just to keep this baby idling, let alone operating at peak efficiency. I had it with this starving-writer business. Knut Hamsun could have it.

Frizell seemed pleased.

“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “I’ll start you observing on the overnight shift, with Roxanne Jones, the producer, and we’ll see where we’ll go from there.”

“So you’re offering me the job?”

“Frankly… yes, yes I am.”

I screwed up my courage and asked about salary.

“How does 40 sound?” he responded.

For a split second I didn’t know what he was talking about. Dollars an hour? Lashes with a whip in the public square unless I got out of his office immediately? Then I realized he meant thousands a year. I blinked; I may have swallowed.

“It sounds good,” I said. “Forty? Forty sounds about right.”

That night, over dinner, with Max and Sam — Les was working late — I announced the news. I accepted their congratulations and huzzahs like a beloved emperor returning from exile, or like Elvis returning from the army.

“Thank you, thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.”

“How much are you making?” Max asked.

“Max! That’s not a polite question,” Sam said.

“No, I don’t mind,” I said. “Forty grand a year.”

Max stared at me, trying to imagine, perhaps, what a David Henry with money might look like. Then a slow smile spread across his face and he held his glass aloft for a toast.

“Dave? Welcome to the middle class.”

“Welcome back,” Sam said.

Clink!

It’s my first night on the job, and I’m observing, sitting behind a sour-faced French-Canadian woman named Roz, watching her work. Roz is a writer, Rox the producer. The “Roz and Rox show,” the overnights are called.

“Write to the pictures,” Roz keeps saying. “Write to the pictures.”

Roz takes me downstairs with her, to “E.N.G.,” Electronic News Gathering. On the way down the stairs she says, “You have to change the picture about every three seconds. The eye grows bored with an image longer than that. And clips shouldn’t be any longer than ten seconds.”

“What’s a clip?”

She looks at me strangely.

“A quote. Something someone says.”

E.N.G. is a rabbit-warren of editing suites, each stacked to the ceiling with elaborate-looking electronic equipment that turns out to be basically a bunch of VCRs linked together with electrical wire and manned by a touchy, unionized tape editor.

Our mission is to “cut down the kicker,” i.e., shorten the last piece in the newscast, which in this case is an item about a 13-year-old Armenian paraplegic girl who lost her legs in an earthquake, then came to Canada to be fitted with prosthetic limbs. Stories of this tearjerking type are an ancient journalistic tradition, known within the trade as “brave gimp stories.” The item ends with the Armenian girl leaving the hospital to return
to her homeland. As she walks across the parking lot on her new plastic legs, wobbling like a newborn fawn, the narrator intones: “ … and that was the moment young Annie paid her debt of gratitude with her tears.” Hold on her cheerful/tearful face. Hold. Ho-o-ld. Dissolve.

Because of the brevity of the overnight newscasts, we have to edit this piece from one minute thirty seconds to one minute in length. But it’s not so easy. Under Roz’s direction, the E.N.G. tape editor takes out a doctor’s comment here, some facts about the earthquake there; but we’re still 10 seconds short of our goal. We scroll back and forth through the piece several times. Both Roz and the E.N.G. editor are stumped.

“I don’t know what to take out,” Roz says. “This piece is just too tight.”

I know I’m supposed to be simply observing, not making observations, but finally I can’t help myself.

“What about the bit at the end?”

Roz cranes her head around to stare at me.

“What bit at the end?”

“The bit where she’s crossing the parking lot in tears and the camera zooms in on her. Is that so important to the story?”

Roz’s face is a mask of disdain and disbelief.

“But that’s the money,” she says.

“Yes, but don’t you think it’s a little maudlin?”

Mystified, she trades a where-do-they-get-these-guys look with the editor, then back to me.

“Listen, where are you from anyway? Print?”

She spits out the word like a piece of bad fish. Never in my life have I heard anyone screw such contempt into a single syllable. I vow, then and there, for the rest of my Cosmodemonic career, to keep my eyes open and my mouth shut.

A vow I wasn’t able to keep for long, unfortunately.
I worked hard, attempting to master my new craft. There was a certain art to it, similar to writing a haiku. Every word counts, and you have to pack a lot of information into a few lines:

See? They were haikus, info-haikus. I bought a book called
Writing for Broadcast
which advised, among other things, to keep your sentences short, eleven words or less. Avoid commas. Tell every story as if you had just met someone you knew on the elevator, and you only had two floors to tell it. Oh, hey, Dave. What’s happening today? Hi, Ralph. Well, tanks rolled on Tiananmen Square today. Four people were killed and dozens more were injured. Hilary Smith is in Beijing, and she has the story. Oops, here’s my stop. Catch you later.

At the end of every night, per Frizell’s request, I dropped photocopies of my scripts on his secretary’s desk so he could monitor my progress.

One day, he phoned me at home. It was about one in the afternoon, and after working all night, I was just waking up.

“Can you come see me in my office?”

“Sure. When?”

“How about today, about four?”

“O.K.”

Pedalling to his office, I assumed the worst. Oh, well, it was good while it lasted, I thought. I made a little extra cash. Wonder what my next step will be?

But when I arrived in his office, I found he had a surprise in store for me.

“Sit down, sit down.”

I sat.

“I’ve been looking over your work, David,” he said. “And frankly… I’m impressed.”

As you see, he had an unnerving habit of saying “frankly” before many of his comments, even the positive ones.

“I don’t like all of your verbs,” he continued. “And some of your sentences are still too long, but you show a great deal of promise. I’m going to put you on the
Saturday Evening News
, with Reed Franklin. You’ll work there Wednesday to Saturday. Sundays you’ll work on the
Sunday Report.”

Sunday Report
was the flagship newscast, the highest-rated of all Cosmodemonic info-productions, anchored by none other than the 600-pound gorilla, the heaviest of all Cosmodemonic anchors, Peter Rockwell himself. I sat for a moment, in stunned silence.

“You mean you’re promoting me?”

“Frankly, yes. Yes, I am.”

I got up and pumped his hand.

“You won’t regret this, Mr. Frizell. I appreciate this chance.” When I exited his office, I was walking on air. In the newsroom, I paused and looked around. Watch out, you hacks, I thought. I’m going to take over this place!

My new job on the
Saturday Evening News
was to write the “continuity” for the show, also to write and produce “The Week in Review,” a round-up of the highlights of the week’s news events. Our meetings, the meetings of the
Saturday Evening News
crew, took place right after the main morning editorial meeting. Just the four of us: me, Reed Franklin, Cynthia Butch (the producer), and her sidekick, Joanna Knelman.

Cynthia and Joanna did most of the talking at these meetings. I understood occasional words, and sometimes whole
phrases, but for the most part their mumbo-jumbo technobabble might as well have been Swahili:

“We’ll need a flyaway feed for the talkback,” Cynthia would say.

“Maybe we should do a live hit from the microwave truck,” Joanna would respond.

“We’d better buy a window on the NBC bird.”

“I’ll get Resources to put it on the A3R.”

The only consolation was, I think even after all those years in the news business, Reed Franklin was equally baffled. He and I sat in stumped silence, waiting for the conversation to turn to editorial matters.

Talk about imposter syndrome, I had it. I not only thought I was an imposter in my new job, I knew it. I was a spy, an interloper, a double-agent, a double-crossing Benedict Arnold, a cross-dressing Mata Hari.

Cynthia Butch had an unnerving habit of her own. I’d usually roll in around 10:30, since there wasn’t much to do until the all-staff morning meeting at 11:00. Chill, read the paper, get some coffee. Sometimes I’d meet Cynthia in the hall and she might say something like: “We should do something about those murders in Moncton.” Or: “They caught the Fratellinis.”

Statements like these never failed to put me into a cold sweat. What murders in Moncton? Who the fuck were the Fratellinis? This was obviously something I should know about, be conversant with, but I wasn’t. I’d give her some sort of neutral answer, accompanied by a neutral facial expression that implied neither knowledge nor ignorance, in case she followed up with a question like: “You know all about the Fratellini story, don’t you?” Which she sometimes did. After these harrowing encounters, I’d scoot back to my computer and check the wires
and find that these stories were only a couple of hours, maybe even only a few minutes old. They had “moved” only that morning, yet Cynthia talked about them like they were old hat.

Eventually, I learned this was just a facet of newsroom ball-breaking etiquette. No matter how fresh and recent a story was, you have to talk about it like it’s ancient history. It was a complex dance. You start with something neutral, only a few code words, and the other person has to show they already know all about it, even though the story broke only a few minutes ago.

So someone might say to you, out of the clear blue: “They say that new planet is actually smaller than Pluto.”

GOOD ANSWER: “Yeah, it seems they had to double-fibrillate the electro-micron sensors to be able to detect it at all.”

BAD ANSWER: “What new planet?”

Not that I really cared. It was all a matter of context, I felt. If I mentioned the name of a writer, or even a less-than-major historical figure, I got blank looks. I was a fish out of water in their world, but they’d be fish out of water in mine, too.

Unfortunately, their world — the world of the endless flow of contextless information — was on the rise, while mine — the world of literature, print, books — was shrinking, diminishing, a fading image on the screen. History is bunk, as Henry Ford said (now he’s resting in that bunk). The point was to keep up with the present, the ever-changing present.

Just hang on as long as you can, I said to myself. Keep a low profile, cling like a barnacle to the mothership until someone scrapes you off. That was the essence of my Cosmodemonic career strategy.

A few weeks into my new job, I’m at the general editorial meeting. Everyone gathered at these meetings; from the anchors, the “talent,” down to the editorial assistants or E. As., the info-serfs.
Foreign and domestic reporters not in Toronto listened to the proceedings, and sometimes commented, via speakerphone.

There was a certain etiquette to these meetings. Frizell would usually open by asking, “So, what did everyone think of last night’s show?” Everyone around the table would murmur and mutter, like movie extras: “Rhubarb, rhubarb, murmur, mutter, great show, yeah, mumble, mutter, really liked it.” The idea was to throw your voice around.

On this particular day, though, Bill Frizell was away. Sitting in his chair was the producer of
Canada Tonight
, Nigel Trotts, an imposing, even terrifying, chrome-domed Brit. Nigel Trotts had been hired away from the BBC, and he made no secret when he felt its Canadian counterpart was in any way lacking. You never knew, for example, when he might say, in his booming voice that could be heard all across the newsroom, “This is a piece of shit!” Scary.

Nigel Trotts came in, sat down, coughed, and everyone fell silent.

“So, what did everyone think of last night?” he asked the assembled multitude.

The usual murmur and mutter arose. But Trotts, unlike Frizell, wasn’t satisfied with this. He looked around the table, his gleaming dome like a searchlight searching out falsity, bad coin, counterfeit currency.

“Does anyone have anything specific to say about last night’s program?”

Silence. Then he said the last thing I wanted to hear:

“Mr. Henry? How about you? Do you have any thoughts about last night’s show?”

To this day, I have no idea why he singled me out. Because of my size, I guess. At 6′5″, it’s hard for me to keep a low profile, though that was my dearest wish at that moment. Perhaps
he thought, What does that huge new guy have to say for himself?

Faces swivelled towards me, many of them famous, people you’ve seen in your living rooms all your lives. God programs certain creatures to be unable to hide their feelings. Cats purr when they feel pleasure; it’s involuntary. By the same token, whenever I’m embarassed or lying, I blush fiercely. I was doing it now, I could tell. My scalp prickled, my armpits trickled.