Sellevision (20 page)

Max nodded again, scribbling a note on his script.

“One last thing, ‘not available in Florida’ should be really fast. Just kind of throw it away.”

“Okay,” Max said, and cleared his throat.

The copywriter leaned back in his chair, took a sip of Diet Pepsi and said to the agency producer, “I think this guy’s gonna work. He really seems to
get
the script. This is gonna be pretty cool.”

The engineer pushed a button on his console and said, “Tender Tasties, take twenty-four.” He pointed at Max and mouthed the words, “You’re on.” Max again recited the advertising copy.

This was Max’s fourteenth voice-over audition. So far, he hadn’t landed a real spot. But so far, nobody had made him do more than three takes. Maybe this would be the break he needed.

“You just have to be patient, it’s nothing personal. It’s all about finding the right voice for the right product. Eventually you’ll land something,” Laurie had told him on the phone the other day.

“Yeah, but Laurie, what if it doesn’t happen? I mean, if I can’t even land an advertising job, what chance will I have of ever getting back on the air?”

“Just go to the audition and do your best.”

After Max read the spot, he saw the copywriter beckoning him to come back into the main room. Max removed the earphones and walked through the two soundproof doors into the main room.

“Dude, that was great,” the copywriter said. “Really great— you
rock
.”

Relieved, Max smiled. “Yeah, I was okay?”

“Totally.”

The producer slid a contract in front of Max and handed him a pen. Max would get paid $250 for his demo, and thousands of dollars if he was chosen. He filled out the contract, providing his name, address, and social security number, along with his agent’s name and address.

“So, do you think it’s gonna happen?” Max asked. “I mean, do you think it’s really gonna air?”

“Gotta split, I’m already late for an edit, take care, man,” the copywriter said as he got up from his chair and left the room.

The engineer tapped at his computer keyboard, removing breaths and pauses from Max’s reading. The producer shrugged his shoulders. “I think it’ll probably air, yeah. Of course you never know with these things until it’s actually on the air, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t.”

Max handed the contract and the pen back to the producer, extending his hand. “Great, well, thanks a lot, it was really nice working with you.”

“Same here. Take care, Max.”

“Okay then. Well, I’ll see you around.”

“Uh huh,” the producer said, looking over the contract.

Once he was outside the ad agency, Max smiled broadly.
“Yes!”
he shouted, raising his fist in the air. His luck was finally turning, he could feel it. Standing on the corner of Third Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, Max closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the sun on his face. He exhaled deeply, a huge sense of relief filling him. As he walked toward Grand Central Station, Max could not help but imagine what his life might be like if he continued to get work as a voice-over talent. Regular trips into New York City, royalty checks, perhaps even a big, national television campaign—maybe for someone like Burger King or Kmart.

For the first time in weeks, Max felt excited, not depressed. As he walked, he repeated the ad copy he had just read: “New Tender Tasties, the first cat food that protects cats from fleas by working internally with the natural digestive process.”

“I was pretty good,” he admitted with a smile. “I really did okay.”

A

s she sank down into the steaming hot bath, inhaling the soothing aroma of Mandarin Orange and Cedar, Peggy Jean smoothed the rich lather of Joyce’s Choice Mid-Life Oasis Foaming Bath Purée over her arms, enjoying the luxury of the moment. For the first time in weeks, thanks to Debby Boone, Peggy Jean felt calm, centered, and
feminine
.

As it turned out, Debby had in fact been stalked. It was 1977, and “You Light Up My Life” was the number-one song in America for the ninth straight week. Debby’s life was a dream. Until, as she told Peggy Jean, the nightmare began. Through a series of terrifying letters, her stalker made threats of unspeakable rudeness. Somehow, the stalker even obtained Debby’s home telephone number and repeatedly called, swearing into the phone and singing a perverted version of Debby’s hit single that confused and frightened Debby’s broken-English-speaking maid. Poor Nellie quit, fearing the phone calls were from immigration officials who were going to tell her they had scored her test wrong and she was now going to be deported. “Alone and forced to answer the telephone myself, I suddenly smartened up,” she told Peggy Jean. By involving the local authorities, and by virtue of her celebrity, the stalker’s identity was revealed to be a harmless fourteen-year-old boy in Pasadena with a cleft palate and little parental supervision. And although she had never actually been in any real danger, Debby had learned a very important lesson. She would never again play the role of victim.

Facts were facts: The Smythes’ home telephone number was unpublished. All articles of mail sent to Sellevision hosts were now X rayed. And Peggy Jean’s address was known only to friends, coworkers and relatives. In truth, E-mail was the only way this Zoe person had of contacting Peggy Jean. And the odds were that in real life, this Zoe person was a confused, lonely, and sad individual who had, for whatever reason, focused on Peggy Jean. Debby even suggested that it could quite possibly be an adolescent girl who was suffering from a distorted self-image and was projecting her own fears and insecurities onto the celebrity host. Debby had been quite clear with her instructions: “Ignore her E-mails, and eventually they’ll go away.” She had told Peggy Jean that “a stalker is like a fire; if you stop feeding it wood, the fire eventually dies out.”

As for taking Zoe’s personal comments to heart, Debby had laughed, saying, “Peggy Jean, if I listened to every terrible thing people have told me over the years, I would have just buried my head in the sand long ago.”

Even the crucified rat didn’t worry Debby. “It’s time for a little tough love, Peggy. You’re a celebrity; that’s what happens. People have sent me used underwear, bags of fingernail clippings—you name it. What you do is you throw it away and move on.”

How foolish Peggy Jean had been to let this confused person interfere not just with her own self-image, but even her marriage. Tonight, she had decided, she would show her husband not only how much she loved him, but how much she desired to please him, and how confident she was in her own femininity. Tonight, Peggy Jean would get on top.

Beginning to feel a bit like a prune from the long bath, Peggy Jean climbed from the tub and gently towel-dried, using a plush England’s Rose Palace Collection bath sheet.

Wearing her pink robe and kitty-kitty slippers, she walked into the kitchen and mixed herself a gin and tonic, because she’d read that the quinine in tonic water was actually healthful. Just as she was about to take the health drink and the latest copy of
Soap Opera Digest
into the living room to catch up on her reading, the telephone rang.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Peggy, it’s Tina from next door.”

“Well hello, Tina. How are you?”

“Listen, Peggy. I don’t want to alarm you or anything, but I’m looking out my window and it seems like one of the neighborhood kids has played a dirty little trick on you.”

“A dirty little trick?” Peggy Jean asked, confused.

“Well, maybe you should just go and look for yourself.”

“Tina, what is it, has somebody knocked over the mailbox or something?”

“Not exactly—look, Peggy Jean, I really think you should just open your front door and take a look.”

“Well, all right, but I can’t imagine any of the boys’ friends playing a prank. But I’ll go see for myself. Thanks for letting me know.”

Peggy Jean hung up the phone and padded across the mint-green wall-to-wall carpeting in the living room, sipping her beverage. She paused to straighten one of the white rococo arm chairs. What on earth had Tina been talking about? The kids in
this
neighborhood were good kids. That Mexican family moved away months ago.

Peggy Jean opened the front door and looked outside.

Then she screamed, slammed the door shut, and called 911.

“T

hat’s fantastic, Max. I mean it, congratulations.”

“Well, it’s not official yet. But I have a really good feeling about it, you know?”

Leigh took a sip from her iced tea, then lowered her head. “Shit, I think it’s a reporter. Don’t turn around.”

They had gone to the darkest, most unhip place they could find for lunch, but even here, she wasn’t safe from the tabloids. Leigh seemed a little strung out by the whole thing, but Max found it kind of exciting.

She peeked up, surveyed, then raised her head. “False alarm.”

“I can’t even imagine what it’s been like for you.”

“I’ll tell you how it’s been. It’s been worth it.” She gave Max a kick under the table. “I feel so much better now, it’s amazing. I mean, I never thought I was a vengeful person, but you really made me feel I could be.”

Max laughed. “So this is all my fault now?”

“It was your idea,” Leigh teased.

“Yeah, but you actually did it.”

“God, what kind of monster have I created?” she asked, taking another sip from her iced tea. “I mean, you would not believe the amount of people calling me, the talk shows, the magazines, it’s fucking insane. I had no idea it would have had such an effect. I was on the Internet last night, and there are all these sites about it, talking about how many selfish bastards there are out there.” She raised her chin in the air. “I’ve become something of a modern feminist icon.”

He dipped his fingers in his water and flicked them at her face.

She laughed, wiping her chin. “You’ll become this big celebrity voice-over and I’ll have my own little woman’s show on CNN or something. What a riot.”

“So when are you going to write a tell-all book?” he teased.

The waiter set the check down on the table, and she snatched it up before Max had a chance. “Don’t joke, five New York literary agents have already called me.”

“You’re kidding,” he said, wondering what he could ever do that would draw so much attention.

She placed a $20 bill on top of the check, and then set the salt shaker on top as a paperweight. “Thanks for coming out today. I really needed to be around somebody who wasn’t holding a camera or microphone.”

They stood up from the table and walked through the restaurant, each taking a mint from the dish beside the cash register on their way out the door and into the unknown.

S

itting at her desk, Bebe opened her latest American Express bill. A mistake, it seemed, had been made. It showed the amount due as $19,287.64. How, she wondered, was that possible? What had she purchased in the past month besides a few basics from the catalogs and a couple of early Christmas presents? She spread out all seven pages of the itemized bill on the desk. Nothing unusual: shoes, sheets and such, hair products, projection TV, restaurant charges, etc.

Oh. She had forgotten about the bronze gong from eBay. But of course, that was really more of an investment.

Still, the amount due on her American Express card was, in fact, correct. It seemed clear that she was on the verge of having a shopping problem.

She’d always been a shopper. When she was a girl and feeling a little blue, her mother would say, “Let’s go shop ’til we drop.” Shopping was her form of therapy, a relaxing thing to do.

It seemed obvious to Bebe that she needed to remedy the situation, curb her spending. So she put away the bill and logged onto Amazon.com to look for a book on the subject. She did a search and found
ShoppingStoppers: The Breakthrough Bestseller that Can Help You Curb Your Compulsive Shopping
. She clicked on it. The book jacket appeared on her screen. Beneath the book jacket the text said, “Customers who bought this book also bought . . .” and then listed seven other titles. So Bebe purchased them all, along with a book about investing in Chinese artifacts. She logged off feeling tremendous relief.

fourteen

“I 
don’t know what to tell you, Max. I can’t create a job for you out of thin air.”

Slumping down into the couch, Max pressed, “Are you
sure
Discovery Channel has nothing? Did you actually
talk
to Radio 102?”

“Yes, Max, I’m sure and I did. The programming director at Discovery was familiar with the penis incident, and he—”

“Jeez,” Max interrupted, “do you have to keep calling it that?”

“I’m sorry. Okay, anyway, he knows why you were terminated from Sellevision and he’s just uncomfortable becoming involved with the situation.”

Max pounded his fist on his thigh repeatedly. “Well, what about Radio 102?”

“They feel—and this was said to me in the strictest of confidence—that they already have a sufficient gay male presence on the air. They’re looking for either an Asian or a lesbian.”