I figured an extended early evening news would give us a sizeable lead-in audience to “Just Up the Street” and would arouse their voyeuristic curiosity about human behavior.

  And I also hoped they might consider “Just Up the Street” as news, which was what I had told Hank Judson it was.

  “It’s gonna be a hell of an awesome sight,” Stanley said, looking at the board.

  “What is?” I said.

  “In seven minutes, all those green lights are gonna turn off,” Stanley said.

  On the twenty-five-inch color screen built into the wall, a skier swooped down a mountain at seventy miles an hour, caught a tip in the ice and did cartwheels into the forest.

  We had been running clips of great sports action on the sports segment of the extended early evening news. We had run film of tornadoes in Kansas and nude bathers in St. Tropez on the weather segment. The news itself had been a circus of civil wars, cute puppies at the pound, world leaders nodding at airports, lingerie fashion shows, killer whales, babies for sale, a Con Edison scandal, highlights of the day’s fires and murders, a two-minute piece on how to open a Swiss bank account, whither bears and wolves, etc. At no time all week did we have three or four CBC experts sitting in plastic chairs discussing the economy.

  Stanley held out his empty glass to the PR girl.

  “It’s lonely at the top but nobody has to stay long,” he said.

  We hadn’t invited press or sponsors or special guests to the VIP room for “Just Up the Street.” We had liquor and hors d’oeuvres in the event some insisted on coming anyhow. So far they hadn’t.

  I left the VIP room and walked up and down the hall. In one studio they were taping a Girl Scout chorus singing songs about America. In another they had been spending the day knocking off a week’s worth of celebrity game shows. In a third, the tail of the news was fighting the clock. Perspiring writers whose faces would never be seen on camera sat inches away from our not-as-famous-as-Hank-Judson-but-still-worth-$200,000- a-year substitute anchorman. His face shone a rich beige color from the pancake makeup. It was a fast-breaking story, and the writers wore earphones and typed big letters on sheets of paper they shoved in front of the anchorman, who looked into the camera and recited the words. It took him twenty seconds to read a page. The main writer had about a thirty-second lead on the anchorman. If the main writer toppled out of his chair dead, the anchorman would have no idea what to say next.

  It was kind of exciting.

  Two minutes till air for “Just Up the Street.”

  I had been staying out of the control room as much as I could, so as not to intrude too heavily on Jack Nathanson.

  Marcie was partly right about some aspects of my personality. I do have an inclination to take charge and run everything. There have been times of emergency when I knew at the bottom of my soul that I could handle the situation better than anyone else, that I was in fact the only person who could handle it. Like at the political convention when the riot started, and our floor men were getting crushed. I took over the board that day. My action caused certain people to call me a megalomaniac, and the replaced director to threaten suicide. But anybody in the business will admit our coverage was the best.

  That was just about the last working trip Marcie made with me. She said she couldn’t stand the way I behaved after the convention riot. She said I acted like I thought I was a hero. She was partly right about that, too. I wasn’t a hero like our guys on the floor who were being punched and having their equipment smashed. But I felt I deserved a rush of pride and pleasure. Because pretty soon in the TV news business I was bound to hit a screw-up, and I would feel just as low as I had felt high.

  I slipped back into the control room just as Jack Nathanson was saying into his headset:

  “Five seconds, gang . . . and—Go Hank!”

  “Just Up the Street” was on the air.

  If you were watching CBC television somewhere out there in America, you saw Hank Judson sitting at a roll top desk in what appeared to be his study. Hank looked into your eyes and said, “Good evening. Tonight we are going on a journey into the heart of this country. You will be an eyewitness to history . . .”

  As Hank Judson spoke, Nathanson called for the picture from Rochester to be put on the Preview Screen. I slipped on a headset and flipped a switch and heard our man in Rochester saying, “Get away from me. I don’t need any more hair spray.” America didn’t hear that. America was still watching Hank Judson, if America was watching CBC—TV.

  Hank finished his opening by saying, “. . . so sit back and let’s travel together . . . and maybe learn to love each other a little more.”

  Next on the Air Screen was the face of Jerry Cummings, our man in Rochester. Jerry was six-feet-six and had a jaw like Basil Rathbone.

  “This is Jerry Cummings, ‘Just Up the Street’ in Rochester, New York, at the home of Ralph and Ann Getz and their daughter Roxie. Mr. and Mrs. Getz have both put in a hard day of work on their respective jobs at Kodak and Xerox . . .”

  In the control room, on the Preview Screen, Nathanson’s next shot was ready. It was an interior of the Getz home. Mrs. Getz wore a party dress with risky cleavage and was rushing around the living room, dusting tables, straightening cushions. Ralph Getz was fiddling with the battery pack on his hip and glaring offscreen at our guy with the mini-camera, whose shot was showing on another monitor in the control room.

  The teenage daughter, Roxie, sat at a table doing her summer school homework. A black Labrador dog gazed at the activity and thumped her tail on the floor.

  “Looks good, Jug,” Nathanson said into the headset. He was talking to the director in the remote truck in Rochester. Through my headset I heard the Rochester director say, “Getz is hot about something.”

  “We’re coming to you anyhow, Jug,” Nathanson said.

  To the technical director on his left Nathanson said, “Take the living room,” and swept a finger through the air like a musical conductor.

  The Getz living room now appeared on the Line Screen and the Air Screen in the control room at the CBC-TV broadcast center, and in the homes of all who were watching.

  Nothing was happening except Mrs. Getz nervously skipping around. Ralph Getz sat down on the couch, scowled and shifted his weight off the battery pack, and studied the floor between his bare feet. He had on Madras Bermuda shorts like I had not seen in fifteen years.

  Ann Getz fluffed the cushions behind her husband’s back and said, “Did you have a hard day in assembly, dear?”

  Ralph Getz said, “What do you care?”

  “Come on, Roxie, do something,” I said.

  On the hope that she might, Nathanson cut to a mini-cam closeup of Roxie. She was a cute little rascal, and she did put the pencil in her mouth and chew on it in a kind of suggestive manner.

  I flipped through the biographies that research had prepared on our four American families.

  “ROXIE GETZ—age fifteen; twirler in high school band, average student, popular with boys. Hobbies: dancing, archery. Wants to be a paramedic when grows up, or else a dance instructor. . . .”

  By the Big Guy’s rules, our on-the-scene commentators were not allowed to ask the families questions. But the biographies gave Hank Judson and the commentators something to say when we cut back to them to fill time.

  Roxie looked at her mother and smiled.

  “Mom, where are we going on our vacation this summer?” Roxie said.

  “I’d like to visit Samoa,” Mrs. Getz said.

  “Samoa! You think money grows in a cabbage patch?” Ralph Getz said. “Who the hell put Samoa in your mind?”

  “One of the TV men told me about it. He said it would be just our kind of place,” Ann Getz said.

  “Yours and his, or yours and mine?” Ralph said.

  “Why, yours and mine, I think,” Ann said.

  “What would I do in Samoa?” Ralph said.

  Ann Getz squinted, thinking hard.

  “I don’t know what you would do in Samoa, Ralph,” she said. “Maybe he did mean him and me.”

  And Nathanson moved “Just Up the Street” to the Georgetown area of Washington, DC.

  Tom Parsons, the Georgetown commentator, stood on a cobbled street in front of a narrow, three-story townhouse.

  “. . . and here in historic Georgetown, the Skidmores’ four children . . . all under the age of six . . . are snugly in their beds . . . while Bob and Dorothea Skidmore await the arrival of their dinner guests. . . .”

  Parsons dropped his eyes quickly to the card in his hand, looked up and said, “. . . dinner guests, urn . . .”

  Parsons glanced at the card again. “. . . dinner guests, ah, ah, . . . Dorothea’s amusing sister and brother-in-law who own a chain of car washes . . .”

  Parsons started laughing on America’s TV screens.

  Nathanson cut to the inside of the townhouse.

  “I don’t remember that bit from the bio,” Nathanson said into the headset to the remote director in Georgetown. “Oh, you just learned it? Believe me, you guys had better get serious.”

  I had been stepping up and down between the first and second rows of leather chairs. I noted Sally, Cindy, and Cooper looking at me from the doorway to the VIP room. I walked over to them.

  “Not bad so far, huh?” I said.

  They said it was interesting.

  As a one-word critical expression, “interesting” is death.

  On the Line Screen, Dorothea Skidmore walked across the room with her chin raised, her shoulders thrust back and her arms at her sides with palms out. She wore a white silk gown and pearls and a fifty-dollar coiffure.

  “I do hope Gladys and Phil like the Chablis I picked out today,” Dorothea said.

  “Oh, I’m sure they will. Phil can drink anything, the old soak,” Bob Skidmore said with a smile. “Darling, don’t be cross. It was only a joke.”

  I knew from the bios that Skidmore was a thirty-seven-year-old lawyer on the Washington staff of an oil company that had its headquarters in Houston. Skidmore’s wife, Dorothea, five years younger, did in fact aspire to replace the Iranian ambassador as the city’s leading party giver.

  I bent over and whispered to Nathanson. I said for him to have Parsons give out basic Skidmore information in a voice over, in case anybody had missed it at first, like I evidently had.

  Dorothea smiled and kissed Bob lightly on the lips. She turned to the camera and let her gaze drift on over the lens as if she hadn’t noticed any camera but was listening at the window for the arrival of Gladys and Phil.

  “Mmmmmmm. Just right,” Bob Skidmore said, lifting a bottle of wine out of a bucket of ice.

  “Darling, don’t take the wine out yet,” Dorothea said.

  “I was only feeling it,” Bob said.

  “When you take it out of the bucket too soon, it interferes with the chilling process,” Dorothea said.

  “I should have known. Sorry, love,” Bob said.

  “That’s all right, darling,” Dorothea said gaily. “How was the golf at Burning Tree today?”

  “Two over par. Not bad, not good,” Bob said. “On the sixteenth I hit what I thought was a super shot, but I must have caught it a tiny bit thin, because . . .”

  Stanley pushed through from the VIP room and said, “That’s it. The little greenies are just about gone. It’s reds and blues and yellows from here on, guys. In a few more minutes, there’s a real chance we’ll be actually feeding a show to a hundred and eighty stations that nobody in the fucking world is watching except the Big Guy.”

  Nathanson checked with the Franklin Lincoln Perry location in Akron and decided to go there, after first letting America see Hank Judson relaxed and smiling in his simulated study, and hear Hank say, “. . . to our friends in Ohio . . .”

  This time Akron commentator Rod DeRoache did the intro quickly, like he was trying to hold his breath, and Nathanson cut to the inside of the house.

  The house was filling with people. They were coming in the back door. Two guys wore softball uniforms with LEROY'S AUTO PARTS on the back. The crowd was mostly black. Our mini-cam guy got jostled into view on the air and ducked out of sight again.

  “Naw, it ain’t plugged into no socket,” Franklin Lincoln Perry said on the air to a friend. “Just sticken this hunk of a thing in my pocket and this wire comes up under my shirt and this little microphone they got taped under my collar.”

  Perry unbuttoned his shirt to show America how a battery pack works.

  “You want to say something anybody?” Perry said, pointing to the mike.

  “Hey, is we on the TV?” asked a man with his hat brim turned up. “Where you TV set, Franklin, so I can see?”

  It had been my idea to remove all TV sets from the four “Just Up the Street” homes. Certain critics later picked on this as dishonest, because three of the four families on our show would probably have been watching TV on an ordinary Wednesday night. But if we left the TV sets in the houses, all four of our families would have been watching themselves.

  And you could have said removing the TV sets was an honest attempt to see if four American families “Just Up the Street” could go through a Wednesday night being watched instead of watching.

  You could call it real life if you ignored the trucks, lights, generators, cables, cops, and crowds out in the yards of these four American homes.

  If the four families would forget the concealed cameras inside the house, and the mini-cam guy creeping behind the furniture, and the mikes and battery packs, it was just about like real life. Except for no TV to look at.

  “They taken away my TV,” Franklin Lincoln Perry said.

  “That must of been it in that truck out in the driveway. I’ll go get it back,” the man in the hat said.

  Nathanson said into the headset, “Hear that, Jug? Got a cop handy? And can you plug that leak at the back door?”

  Inside the house Pearl Perry looked at the dishes on her dining table.

  “Hey, look at this, we got plenty of fried okra,” she said to the people pouring into the house.

  Nathanson read my mind and had Rod DeRoache, the commentator, lay in more biography: Franklin Lincoln Perry, forty-six, was born in Georgia, fought in Korea, was a union official and a foreman at Goodyear. Pearl’s occupation was elementary schoolteacher.

  “I tell you this, man. You don’t look at me like I was no bug, man. You dig? I see you lookin’ at me, I stick beans in your eye, man,” a guy in a Softball uniform said straight into the live camera.

  Nathanson tried to switch to our fourth location—Tampa.

  Line trouble caused Jack to delay the move to Tampa. Hank Judson filled with background on the Florida West Coast.

  The picture was still not perfect on the Preview Screen. But the Big Guy himself had phoned the control room to ask when he could see Tampa.

  Tampa was the home of Angie Rocco, the plumber.

  Also Angie’s wife Carmen and fat son Mario.

  It was a whitewashed house built of concrete blocks. The house had a screened-in swimming pool and a boat in the driveway. The boat was a twenty-eight-foot cabin cruiser.

  Lewis, the Tampa commentator, did a quick bio on the Roccos: Angie had worked his way up through the plumbing ranks to become a specialist you called for tough jobs.

  Angie was a brain surgeon when it came to crawl-under jobs and elbow-bend pipes.

  “To his fellow plumbers,” the commentator said, “he’s known as King of the Hard Reach.”

  Then Lewis looked at his bio card again and said, “. . . Angie Rocco calls his boat Eduardo. Most ships, or boats, if you will, are named after women. But Angie Rocco named his boat, he said, after a friend’s pizza that doesn’t go down so easy.”

  A feeble smile strained on the face of the commentator.

  On the Preview Screen was a picture of Angie Rocco in his living room, cleaning and oiling a 16/0 fishing reel on the coffee table.

  Mario Rocco was eating ice cream out of a mixing bowl and reading Penthouse magazine.

  Carmen Rocco was nowhere to be seen on any of the monitors.

  “Nothing . . . it’s nothing,” Jack Nathanson said.

  “Stick with it for a minute, Jack,” I said.

  “Stick with what? It’s nothing,” Jack said.

  On the monitor for the camera covering the front yard, we saw a Chevrolet park at the curb. A man got out, showed a cop some sort of ID, walked across the lawn and rang the bell.

  Jack told his technical director to punch up the Air Screen as Angie Rocco wiped Three-in-One oil on his khaki pants.

  “If you got trouble in your pipes, come back Monday,” Angie said, looking through the screen door on CBC-TV.

  Carmen Rocco backed into the room from a closet where—research turned up this item—she hid a plastic bag of Snickers candy bars.

  According to research, Carmen weighed 265.

  “What’s the guy at the door?” Carmen said.

  “He’s a guy that’s got to come back Monday,” Angie said.

  “Mr. Rocco, my name is Kaplan. I’m here about your income tax,” the man at the door said.

  “You said what?” Angie said.

  “Sorry to come so late, but we have to work all hours keeping up. I guess you understand that in your business,” Kaplan said.

  “What about my income tax?” Angie Rocco said.

  “I won’t know for sure until I see the records, will I?” Kaplan said.

  Stunned, Rocco backed away from the door.

  “Get tight on Rocco’s face,” Nathanson said into the headset.

  “Look at old Angie, he’s about to pass a kidney stone,” Cooper laughed in the control room.

  There were a few other laughs in the control room.

  Stanley yelled from around the corner of the VIP room, “Wops and Jews, how can you root?”

  “Get outta here! Go away from this house!” Angie shouted at Kaplan live, on television.

  “Angie, if the man wants to see our tax records, we got to show ’em. He’s the government,” Carmen said.

  “Don’t be alarmed. Think of me as your accountant,” Kaplan said.

  Carmen Rocco opened the door for Kaplan, who came in, put his briefcase on a table and rubbed his hands together.