“If we do that, we’ll need some glue to hold it together. So our on-the-scene guys can have a continuity, you know, a transition from one town to another. Not mad leaps around America every few minutes,” Nathanson said.

  By the end of that sentence, Nathanson had figured out what I had in mind. He hooked a forefinger in the collar of his turtleneck and looked at me in a way that said: Oh, Mallory, is nothing sacred.

  Nathanson scratched a kitchen match into flame and chewed on a cigarette waiting for me to say it. When I didn’t say it, Nathanson said it.

  “Hank Judson,” he said.

  “Great idea, Jack,” I said enthusiastically.

  “Thanks,” Nathanson said.

  Stanley said, “As your President, I’m going to order somebody else in the company besides me to tell Hank Judson he is anchoring ‘Just Up the Street.’”

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  “You guys heard that,” Stanley said.

  Hank Judson was the anchorman of our seven o'clock news.

  There were flaws in the operation of CBC News, but in the public eye Hank Judson was the perfect American young grandfather. Honest, kind, patient, stern when necessary. The public didn’t know or care that Hank Judson was the kind of reporter who if you assigned him a camera crew and told him to cover a buzzard fuck would come back with a scoop about finding the bones of poor dead animals in the desert, and there would be buzzard wings pounding the sand in the background of the film.

  But Hank Judson could make you listen to his tale of the poor dead bones, and he might make you feel sad for them. Hank Judson looked like a man who went camping in the forest with his family and could be counted on to have coffee brewing in a pot on coals scraped from a cozy fire, while freshly caught trout wrapped in leaves baked in a pit of hot stones, and the kids and wife smiled fondly as Hank sat on a log playing his guitar and sharing his wisdom about past dwellers on the land and the maps of the stars in the sky.

  Hank Judson was in his middle fifties, wore tweeds, and kept his hair tidy.

  We paid him $250,000 a year for being believable.

  “Jack’s got a great idea,” I said.

  “Hank’s specials for the last few years have been interviews with world leaders,” Nathanson said. “He may not go for this.”

  “I’ll talk to Hank,” I said. “Let’s move to other problems.” I mentioned the four homes needed to be in the same time zone. Eastern. I didn’t want to come on the air at eight o’clock and throw it to a city where it’s an hour earlier and the guy’s not home from work yet. Research, I said, had been told to come up with families in Tampa, Akron, Rochester, and Washington, DC. All on the same time, but a fair cross-section of the country in terms of regions, accents, and interests.

  “Right,” Nathanson said. “We need everybody at home. Might help if some were cooking dinner, some were eating, and some had finished.”

  “Our subjects won’t all be the same, either,” I said. “Like everybody’s not going to be upper-middle-income, and everybody’s not going to be on welfare, and everybody’s not going to be sick.”

  “Sick wouldn’t be bad, Frank,” said Stanley. “A lot of coughing and fever. A little retching. Ready Camera Two on the cough. Take Two.”

  Stanley was staring up at the ceiling with his hands clasped behind his bald head.

  “Know what the little Wasp thinks?” he said. “I think we’re going right in the old septic tank in the ratings. Nielsen’s gonna put a fucking zero up so big you could stick Nova Scotia in it.”

  That, I said, despite all of the creative ingenuity at our command, was a very real possibility.

  10.

  TO COOPER, if you stood in Texas and looked north, California was the Left Coast and New York was the Right Coast. Cooper was preparing to fly out to the Left Coast a day ahead of me.

  He said he had a friend who was opening as a singer at some joint in LA, and he wanted to catch the act the first night. I asked if it had anything to do with talent scouting for the opening of his own Country & Western nightclub, where carpenters, plumbers, and city inspectors had already made off with most of the capital Cooper had raised.

  “Naw, this is just an old friend I’d like to see,” Cooper said.

  I asked if the old friend might be Cody Huber, a rock star in the late sixties. I had read in the trades that at the age of thirty-two, Cody Huber was about to make his second or third comeback somewhere in Orange County.

  “Hell, I ain’t seen Cody since he lost his hair. I guess I ought to look him up, but I owe him too much money, and right now he might need it.”

  Cooper used to hang out with Cody Huber. Cooper had appeared in Cody Huber’s dressing room in San Antonio while Huber’s band was touring. Cooper and Huber had got into a conversation about horses, the way I heard it, and pretty soon they were in Houston, and before long Cooper was living at Cody Huber’s big house outside of Denver.

  When Cody Huber showed up for a concert in Philadelphia, Cooper was in charge of security. Marcie and the kids and I had been in Philadelphia for about six months by then. I was head of News for WCAU-TV. Marcie was talking about getting a master’s at the University of Pennsylvania.

  A year or more might go between meetings with Cooper, but I generally knew where he was, and when I saw him again it was like we were carrying on in the same place we had left off, except Cooper was drifting into his profession and I was running at mine.

  Cooper brought Cody Huber to our apartment as soon as the charter jet reached Philadelphia. Huber traveled with an entourage of sixty. While the rest of them were checking into the Marriott, Cooper and Cody Huber slipped off.

  Marcie hated Cody Huber’s music. As a music student and a singer herself, she said what the Huber band played was on the level of whacking garbage cans together. I hadn’t paid attention to Cody Huber’s music, but I had seen him on the news and in print.

  In our apartment, Cody Huber was shy and quiet, twenty-two, wearing a white three-piece suit and burgundy necktie, and glasses with tortoise-shell frames. His notoriously long hair was bound into a neat pigtail held by a gold clip.

  Cooper and I fell into old-timey talk about the hamburger stand where we used to gather in high school. It was a drive-in, and even in those days the parking lot would be two or three deep with cars on evenings and weekends. You could visit from car to car. Or you could sit in one car and get visited.

  Cooper had a 1938 white Ford coupe with no doors. The right front fender was mangled from a collision with a cow, but Cooper had repaired the right front headlight. Cooper usually had a date when he showed up at the drive-in, which we called the Dick Dock. Since he drove a coupe, people would lean on the fenders or put a foot on the running board when they visited with Cooper and his date. I was one of the few whom Cooper allowed to make it a threesome in the car seat.

  There were three of us in the coupe—Cooper and Clydene Jernigan and me—the night the crowd around Cooper’s car suddenly scattered, and we found ourselves looking at twenty guys from Woodrow Wilson High School. They were wearing Levis and T-shirts and tight kid-leather gloves. It was plain that they were walking straight toward Cooper’s car. In the lead was Booger Red McAfee, who was an all-district end and also a starter on the basketball team.

  At that point we still didn’t know if the guys from Woodrow Wilson had come for a general gang fight, or if maybe one or two of them were looking for one or two of us in particular and had brought along a band of bodyguards so they wouldn’t be mobbed. Our school, Sunset, was Woodrow Wilson’s chief rival in things like football and girls and ass-kicking.

  So, many years later, while Cooper and I were remembering this incident, laughing and drinking in the apartment in Philadelphia, I realized Marcie was lecturing Cody Huber about music.

  “. . . ‘The Marriage of Figaro,’” I heard Marcie say.

  “Cool, Mrs. Mallory. I really dig Mozart,” Cody Huber said.

  “Really?” Marcie said.

  “In Act Three, the duet between the Count and Susanna, that lays me out, man,” Cody Huber said. He leaned forward excitedly, looking at Marcie. “When I was at Juilliard, I could sing that whole opera. I mean every part. Not good, of course. I was on a piano scholarship.”

  “You had a piano scholarship at Juilliard?” Marcie repeated.

  The implications of that piece of information collided inside Marcie’s head, and she would have lit the wrong end of her cigarette if Cody Huber had not turned it around for her.

  “Just for two years. I was too much of a kid to appreciate what I really had,” Cody Huber said. “When I was eighteen, I dropped out and started playing rock and roll. That was four years ago. I wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed at Juilliard.”

  I heard that much of the conversation while Cooper was in the bathroom. When he came back, he was laughing about how Booger Red McAfee had walked straight to the white Ford coupe at the Dick Dock that night and had said, “Cooper, my ass is a watermelon patch. If you want some, wade right in.”

  “I don’t recall having no argument with you,” Cooper had said.

  Once Booger Red McAfee had stepped forward, everybody understood the purpose of the Woodrow Wilson foray onto Sunset territory.

  Cooper had knocked out Punk McAfee, Booger Red’s younger brother, in the finals of the high school welterweight division of the Golden Gloves at the Sportatorium three nights earlier. On opening night, I had lost in the high school middleweight division to a guy with a Cherokee haircut. I fought in the Gloves because I was expected to, seeing as how I was a football player with a wise mouth, but I had never really cared for boxing. After I got my loss out of the way, I watched Cooper win five straight fights by knockouts to arrive in the finals against Punk McAfee. Cooper was a skinny kid with such elaborate ducktails and a pompadour that it was always a surprise how hard he punched. Punk McAfee, a year younger, won all his fights by knockouts, too—some opponents falling at the first opportunity from the pure terror of being in the ring with one of the McAfee brothers.

  Ten minutes before their fight in the finals, Cooper and Punk McAfee were sitting close together on folding chairs in the back of the Sportatorium where the fighters waited.

  Soon as Cooper knew Punk McAfee was looking at him, Cooper stuck his right glove up against his own right nostril and blew hard and a small garter snake flew out of his left nostril in a spray of snot. Or at least it appeared to. Punk McAfee stared at the garter snake as it squirmed under the folding chairs that clattered and crashed while fighters tried to stomp the snake.

  Cooper said, “What the hell was that? You see that thing sail out of my nose, Punk?”

  “I didn’t see nothing,” Punk said.

  “That old mama snake must of had babies,” Cooper said.

  “You didn’t have no snake in your nose,” Punk said.

  Cooper gagged and spat out a small frog.

  “I guess the mama snake ain’t hungry,” Cooper said.

  “Goddam a guy that would put a frog in his mouth,” Punk said.

  If there was one thing Punk McAfee was afraid of, it was crazy people. He had learned that fear growing up in a family that included homicidal maniacs. Punk was bullet-headed and built like a very young Marciano and was three inches shorter than Cooper. Punk liked to charge across the ring and knock people down without thinking about anything else.

  Some say it was the snake and frog that caused Punk to be cautious that night. Others say that Punk had watched Cooper’s left hook and was wary of it. The result was that Cooper danced and avoided Punk’s tentative rushes. Then Cooper hit Punk three left hooks in the face, Punk’s head banged against a ring post and scraped the top rope, and Cooper won a first-round TKO and accepted the trophy while Punk was wobbling off to get twenty-three stitches in his right eyebrow.

  So Booger Red McAfee came over to the white Ford coupe at the Dick Dock and said, “You and me the same age, Cooper. It ain’t like you’re picking on a little kid this time.”

  “I thought they handled those Golden Gloves deals on the basis of how much you weigh, not how old you are,” Cooper said.

  “Get out of that car, you chickenshit,” Booger Red replied.

  Cooper got out of the car and Booger Red McAfee blacked both of Cooper’s eyes, knocked out a front tooth, broke his nose, cracked a rib, and left Cooper sitting against the back wall of the Dick Dock.

  The first thing Cooper said through bleeding lips as Booger Red McAfee and the Woodrow Wilson guys walked back toward their cars was to his date.

  “Clydene, hon, let’s skip the kissing tonight and get right to the juicy,” is what Cooper said.

  Cooper and I were laughing about that in the apartment in Philadelphia when we both heard Marcie say, “Count Almaviva sings”:

  But why, why make me suffer,

  longing for your reply?

  But why, but why?

  Will you not tell me why?

  Marcie sang it in English. Cody Huber said, “I remember . . . Susanna sang”:

  In time we women grant you

  What we at first deny.

  Still doing the Count’s part, Marcie sang:

  Then we shall meet this evening?

  And Cody Huber sang:

  You have my word,

  I will not fail my word.

  Marcie sang:

  The sweet promise you gave me

  Raises my hope so high.

  Cody Huber sang:

  All those who know what love is

  Forgive me for this lie.

  While Marcie and Cody Huber were singing “The Marriage of Figaro,” with Marcie as the Count and Huber as Susanna the maid, I was thinking about the end of the story about Cooper and the McAfee brothers.

  When he recovered from the beating Booger Red McAfee gave him, D. Wayne drove his white Ford coupe over to the Woodrow Wilson tribal drive-in without mentioning it to anyone, and knocked Punk McAfee out. Then Cooper walked through the crowd, picked up Clydene, and went back to the Dick Dock and still didn’t mention what he had done.

  After the news got out, it was agreed at Sunset and Woodrow Wilson that never in memory had there been such a display of courage. Booger Red McAfee put out the word that anybody who harmed Cooper would have to fight the entire McAfee family.

  That night in Philadelphia, Marcie and I had gone to the Cody Huber concert and watched from backstage while Cooper moved around the auditorium checking on the security.

  Cody Huber’s hair was unclipped and swung at the hips of his tight red velvet pants.

  Thousands of young girls clawed for the stage. When the Huber band hit what they called their “clit licks” on their electric instruments, the crowd shrieked and screamed and Marcie danced in the wings.

  D. Wayne never told me exactly whom he was going to see in LA. So I figured it was unimportant, or maybe too important.

  11.

  THE MORNING AFTER Cooper took off for the Left Coast, Arleene rescued me from yet another production meeting on “Just Up the Street” in time to make United Flight 5 from JFK to Los Angeles.

  Around the CBC building in Gotham there was rising panic among everyone who had anything to do with “Just Up the Street.” But with the taping of the Peggy Hanley special only hours away, and with the affiliates already gathering, for me to have worried about “Just Up the Street” right then would have been like brooding over the possibility of a nuclear holocaust and ignoring four muggers who were following me home.

  United Flight 5 took off at noon. I went upstairs to the first-class lounge of the 747. I carried a couple of movie scripts under my arm. There is no better way of arousing the curiosity and affection of an airline stewardess than for her to see magical words like Paramount or MGM on a script cover. Sometimes I also read the scripts.

  I heard a robot voice say, “Frank, what a pleasure. Sit down and have a drink with me.”

  The voice came out of one of those metal throat boxes. It sounded like a telephone connection in England.

  I said, “Hello, Bobby.”

  Bobby Maitlow rearranged the white silk scarf around his neck. Bobby’d had his larynx operated on a year or so earlier. Considering all the throats Bobby had cut in his life one way or another, many people thought the operation was a form of justice.

  Maitlow was a person you didn’t want to know too much about unless you were the Mafia historian for the New York Times. The main thing I knew about him was that he owned, on the surface, thirty percent of the stock of the Wilcox Picture Corporation. Much of the Wilcox product was aimed at drive-ins, but occasionally a good film would somehow get made. Maitlow also had interests in trucking, hotels, liquor distribution, and natural gas. Probably by now he had moved in on throat-box manufacturing.

  I sat down across the table from him and asked for black coffee. The stewardess flicked her eyes at the script covers.

  “Just coffee? Frank Mallory on coffee, hey, this ain’t the guy I know,” Maitlow said through his throat box.

  “Got a long night ahead of me,” I said.

  “Business or pleasure?”

  “Both, I hope,” I said.

  The stewardess brought the coffee and said, “Mr. Mallory, I’m Polly . . . a friend of Janie’s? She had you on this flight two weeks ago? Sure I can’t get you one of those five-olive martinis she said you liked so much?”

  I said, “Polly, you ought to be in pictures.”

  It doesn’t matter how often people are told they ought to be in pictures, they always believe it.

  Maitlow laughed. A horrible sound. Maitlow was pale, with bluish cheeks and slick black hair. He had lost fifty pounds since the operation, and he had a new wardrobe of Savile Row suits.

  “Treat this guy right, honey. Give him six olives,” Maitlow said.

  “Bobby, if you think I ought to have a martini, I probably ought to have a martini,” I said.

  Polly went to fetch the drink. Maitlow said, “I see what your pleasure’s gonna be. What’s your business?”