Like We Care (20 page)

He edged past her and reclaimed his desk. He had been dreading this encounter all week.

“Have a seat. We’ll work this out.”

She sat down opposite him. Her extended duty in the field had allowed Hutch to forget how attractive Annie was. Once again, he felt stirrings. No doubt she had dressed this day to produce that very effect.

He leaned back casually, adopting his most earnest guise. “Am I glad you’re back. I think I’ve finally found a position for you that you’ll soar in, and which will—by happy coincidence—drag my ass out of one very big fire.”

He was dodging the issue. Annie’s antennae went up as she leaned in warily.

Hutch set to rumba nimbly between the shit and the Shineola. “Executive Producer.
The Ripple Room
.”

She blinked. “You’re kidding me.”

“It’ll keep you here in town, which I know is important to you. Ten hours a week of prime programming, all under your command. A couple specials a year, live from Spring Break. It could be a launching pad to anything you want to do in this industry.”

Annie, straight-faced: “So,
I’d
be the one making sure the dancers are wearing panties before the cameras start rooting around up there?”

“Or you’d make someone else do it. The privilege of power.”

“Hutch,” she laughed. He also had forgotten how cutting her laugh could be. “
The Nipple Room?
”

“Annie—”

“Did you even look at this tape?” She gestured to the monitor. The silenced Joel was in mid-speech, looking fine.

Hutch went hardball.

“Annie, it’s shit. It’s less than shit. This is. . . a bunch of ugly teenagers, standing around in a parking lot, preaching about how bad cigarettes are for you. Christ, where are the kids hyping church on Sunday and chastity belts? Our viewers would shit themselves if we laid this on them.”

“You—”

“How is it that you don’t understand our demographic?” he said cuttingly, jabbing toward the monitor. “Bring me videotape of
our
kind of teenager kicking the shit out of
those
teenagers and I’ll give you a two-hour special. I mean, Christ. . . Look at them!”

“This isn’t an anti-smoking movement!” she said, not surprised that Hutch had missed the point entirely. “This is an anti-exploitation movement, an anti-
adult
movement. These are teenagers saying ‘Go fuck yourself’ to institutions that thrive on taking advantage of them. If
you
understood our demographic, you’d know that nothing would appeal to them more.”

“Hey!” he cried, legitimately offended.
Never
slight a media titan’s grip on his demo.

“Yeah, okay,” Annie pressed on smartly. “There are no pimp clothes. There are no tattoos. There’s hardly even a damned backwards baseball hat. But you know what? Most of our viewers don’t look like the caricatures we sell. They look
just like that,
” she said vehemently, pointing to the screen. “They look like that. And I guarantee you, they
feel
like that. Or maybe they would, if they knew kids somewhere else felt the same way.”

“Annie,” he said with condescension, “we are a
music
network.”

“Oh, yeah right. But somehow you’ll find space for multiple airings of
Anal Sex: The New Virginity,
” Annie said. “Ever find anybody who would help you with your personal research on that one?”

Her shot was withering. Hutch flinched.

“That was a public service program. There was a
question mark
in that title.
Is
anal sex the new virginity? No, it is not.”

“Yeah, with host Mimi SoWett, who could fit a Volkswagen up her ass she’s had such a workout up there.”

She bore down forcefully. “There is machinery in place right now for this network to produce and air non-music-based programming when you can find some leering angle you can exploit. All I am asking for is one half-hour to see if we can’t broaden our scope just a little bit.”

“A half-hour?!”

“Fine. A segment, five minutes. Drop it into
Week In Review
. Run it in place of
this
week’s arraignment hearing for Phat Bastard.”

Hutch had heard enough. Annie was running down R
²
Rev’s artists and its on-air talent—she was way out of line. And her veiled hints of blackmail could only be tolerated for so long.

He looked at her grimly. “Look, you think about
The Nipple Room
. If that’s not of interest to you, then maybe it’s time you find a more suitable outlet for your aspirations.”

Annie was struck dumb, not expecting Hutch to dig in so tenaciously. He took the remote from her hand and prepared to send Joel and his friends back to obscurity.

“Four dead in O-hi-o!”

Hutch and Annie turned. It was John Viceroy, the MediaTrust liaison. He was watching the videotape as the camera panned across the gathered Happy Snack faithful.

“What’s this?”

Hutch quickly shut down the tape, portraying just the right amount of toadying for his boss. “Nothing. We were just—”

“No, no. Turn it back on,” Viceroy commanded genially.

He drew closer to the monitor as Annie’s tape played. He studied the teenagers closely, their placards and their youthful indignation seeming to strike a deep chord of fondness inside the powerful corporate player.

Their inflamed faces were contorted with purpose. The sound was still off, but the tenor was clear.

“Look at that,” Viceroy sighed wistfully. “Christ, does that take me back. . .”

John Viceroy was 55-years-old—20 in 1969.

Ah, the mind grasps it:
he was from the ’60s!

He had been there, neck-deep in the revolution. He and his friends were the ones who were going to snatch the country away from the adults, the oppressors, and deliver a compromised and diseased America to the young and pure of heart to be nurtured back to wellness. Together, they would embark on their
own
adulthood, cleansed of the craven behaviors that had marked their parents’ generation. When the time came, they would pass a gentle and enlightened country along to their children, who would be raised in a land in which cynicism and self-interest would know no place.

It had been a beautiful time, John Viceroy still believed, when anything seemed possible. Anything but the possibility that they were all full of shit.

“Do kids
do
this anymore?”

“Well, you know. . .” Hutch shrugged. “You guys had a war to protest.”

“Yeah,” Viceroy reflected dreamily. “You know, if you were lucky enough to take a billy club to the head in the midst of an anti-war protest? Once you came to, you’d find yourself in so much pussy and so much dope, you’d finally have to beg them to let up. Literally beg them. You were a hero!

“‘Stop the War’ was just the password to get into the speakeasy,” he chuckled. “Might as well have been ‘swordfish.’”

Annie, sensing an opportunity, ignored her turning stomach. She bit her tongue and let Viceroy ooze. His nose was practically pressed against the TV screen.

“
That’s
the problem with teenagers today. Nobody’s fighting anything, they don’t learn the value of taking stands, taking sides.” He shook his head forlornly. “Dylan, my oldest, could care less about politics.”

“He’s how old?” Hutch asked intently, holding up his end.

“Sixteen. Seventeen?” Viceroy whipped out his Palm and stylused his way to enlightenment. “Seventeen. Last month.” He grimaced weakly and tapped in a note to his assistant to send the boy something pricey. “So what’s this bunch on about?”

“Corporate disobedience,” Annie said with cool but deliberate emphasis. She had all but stood herself between Hutch and Viceroy.

“These kids in Berline, Illinois, a couple hundred of them”—well, sort of—“have decided to send a message to corporate America by boycotting products that are most aggressively peddled to them. They’re sticking it to The Man by withholding their money.”

“The Man!!” Viceroy beamed. “Whatever became of The Man?”

“He’s in Berline. And he’s feeling the heat. Stores that had been making their living off teens are out tens of thousands of dollars since this started. These kids are starting to feel a real sense of empowerment.”

“Yes, that’s it! That’s what we had: empowerment. People—
adults
— had to take notice, had to take us seriously, because we were just so fucking obnoxious!”

Viceroy saw one of Todd’s
We’re Not Buying This Shit!
signs. He sighed and offered his solemn blessing.

“Well, good for them.”

He turned to Annie. “What’re your plans for this?”

“Well. . .”

“We were thinking of doing a half-hour on activism among teenagers, maybe try to stoke the fires a little bit,” Hutch offered without shame. Annie whirled on him.

“We have some other tape—I don’t think Annie’s seen it yet—of some skinheads in Portland who joined up with the ACLU to stage First Amendment rallies against their high school because the principal ordered some of their racist tattoos covered up. And somewhere in the archives, we have something about some kids boycotting a Wal-Mart somewhere because they wouldn’t stock the first ScroatM album.

“You know, we could contrast today with the ’60s. Run a lot of clips, from back in the day,” Hutch suggested eagerly. Annie had to admire his ability to set a hook. And if this is what it took to get her piece on the air. . .

Viceroy grinned. “I’ve got a picture. I was eighteen. I had this huge bong hanging out of my pants, like it was my dick. But all the water ran out— fucking genius, right?—so this dog that lived in this house I was crashing in, it was licking the floor in front of me. And right when they took this picture, the dog looked up at this bong hanging between my legs, and it had its tongue out, like it was going to. . .” He was yanked back from his reverie with the vague sense that this was not appropriate conversation for these politically correct times.

“But, hey, I love your idea! Wouldn’t hurt us to bring some politics into our programming. We have a responsibility to educate as well as entertain,” he concluded, recalling something he had heard at a Senate hearing or someplace.

“Sure!” Hutch sucked up effortlessly. “Most of our viewers, they’re just like those kids on the tape. They’re probably charged up by the same issues, but they might not even know it yet.”

Annie bit down hard, praising herself for her thick-skinned pragmatism. She sat down and immediately began scribbling in her notepad, roughing out an outline for the show. By the time she delivered it for air—and she
would
be the person delivering it for air—skinheads and Wal-Mart protests would only be a sidebar. She knew she had the real story.

“Hey, look,” John Viceroy said, shyly but with pride.

From his wallet, he produced a yellowed photograph of a lanky, cloudy-eyed hippie appearing to be fellated by a Labrador full of bong water. All around him, Viceroy’s fucked-up teenage friends could be seen giggling and pointing with glee.

One beamed stupidly and offered a peace sign.

The future was theirs.

I
f anybody wanted to watch, the weekly Common Council meetings aired live every Tuesday from Berline’s City Hall. A more turgid slog through municipality minutia one could not hope to find, but it was politics in motion—democracy in action—right there on public access channel 25, smack dab between professional wrestling and whatever knee to the cultural groin R
²
Rev was serving up.

If a bus stop was due to be relocated, if low lying neighborhoods were besieged by flooding, if the drive-thru at the new McDonald’s was causing traffic to back up onto South Street—solutions were forged here. The public was invited to peer in, to see how the stultifyingly mundane decisions were made that kept a community functioning.

But no one cared. If things ran properly, no one should.

This week, though, the Council chamber was packed, and televisions were tuned in: the adults had come to shut down the Happy Snack protest.

The store’s parking lot there at the corner of Cypress and Donner, always a worrisome gathering spot for Dickinson students, had grown too small to contain the hordes of young people determined that the longer they gathered in the greatest possible numbers, the better the chance of pissing somebody off. The unlikely appearance of the R
²
Rev crew—and the rumor that they would soon return to flesh out their story—had caused the students to dig in. They weren’t going anywhere.

The neighborhood surrounding the strip mall bore the brunt of the action. Curbside parking, already sparse, was now hogged by beaters and compacts that throbbed incessantly to bass-laden hip-hop and metal roaring inside. Even with the boycott, garbage was being generated and discarded everywhere—
somebody
was doing an awful lot of buying.

Boys were seen pissing alongside Bert and Doreen Franklin’s garage. Old Lady Drake found used rubbers in her front hedge. When fluids were inadvertently dribbled into the palm of Mrs. Drake’s hand, her son was forced to accompany her to the family doctor for an AIDS test. She was 86-years-old.

For weeks, it was assumed that somebody responsible for the store would eventually flush the students out—if not Happy Snack or its corporate parent, then the partnership that owned the corner on which the property stood. Neighbors had had it with the traffic and the mess. Parents were disgruntled with the self-impressed air that their children were taking on as they slighted their studies, and ignored their athletic commitments and other responsibilities, in order to stand around to play at being rebels.

Now it appeared that national TV would be lending validity to their children’s noisy break with conformity.

What would the world think of them?

When no one in charge of the property made a move to kick the kids out, when persistent calls to the police yielded no results, the town’s adults made enough noise to prompt a public hearing in the Council chambers. For many residents—the ones who never voted, the ones who felt indefinably spiteful toward those who did—this would be their first visit to the halls of their local government.