Chump Change (26 page)

“Don’t you want to tell me your side of the story?”

“I don’t really have one,” I said. “I read the wire story wrong. I can’t explain how it happened, it was a sort of dyslexic episode.”

He paused, as if weighing the options of various things to say.

“There’s no doubt you’re a talented writer, Dave,” he said. “Perhaps one of the best. But you have to be accurate, you have to be reliable, the people you work with have to be able to depend on you. This corporation prides itself on its accuracy, on being the broadcaster of record for many people.”

He said a few more things, then let me go. Outside his office door, I breathed a sigh of relief. That could’ve been worse. He’d taken it easy on me, been really gentle, on the whole. I felt a tremendous kinship with this man.

Don’t worry, chief, I thought, I’ll make you proud. You took a chance giving me a chance and I won’t let you down. You can count on me. I won’t fuck up again.

Then I fucked up again.

Actually, it wasn’t really a fuckup. Technically I was in the right. But I got involved in a huge, public fight with one of the anchors, which in television news pretty much means: you fucked up. A writer getting into an argument with an anchor is kind of like a bug getting into an argument with an elephant. “Hey, this is
my
seat!” the bug yells at the elephant. “I was here first, I bought the seat for a hundred bucks, here’s the bill of sale, and —”

SQUI-I-I-I-ISH!

I was working on the
Noonday News
, anchored by Colin Kelly. Colin Kelly was a tough buzzard from the old school. He had a cheap, creased, opera-villain face and he screwed it into one of three expressions when he read the news: 1) poker face for run-of-the-mill stories; 2) ultra-grave expression for particularly tragic stories, as if to say to all the
Noonday News
buffs out there: “I, Colin Kelly, was
personally
affected by that story”; 3) and a full-on leer for light, kicker-type items. “Leer” is the only word for it, all the unfamiliar muscles and pulleys turned up the corners of his mouth and he bared his false-looking teeth (like the grille of a ’60s roadster). But I don’t think you could call the result a smile.

Just for some background, I’d like to say a few words about my hangover on this particular occasion, one of the “emotional
rollercoaster” variety. Have you ever had one of those? The slightest provocation can send you spiralling into the blackest pit of despair, or set you soaring on gossamer wings to the sunniest heights of giddiness and self-satisfaction. These types of hangovers are the closest I, as a man, will ever get to having PMS (I hope).

The
Noonday News
taped at 11:00, 1:00, 2:00, and 3:00, to air live at noon in various parts of the country. All I had to do for the 11:00 show was write a “copy” story (no pictures) about the annual inflation rate, and “wrap” it together with a story about the consumer price index.

The annual inflation rate is sort of a tricky concept. I’m sorry to have to go into the boring details about it here, but it’s important to the story. The annual inflation rate compares prices from one year to the next, on a given month. So if prices, say, are up 5 percent this December from last December, the annual inflation rate is five percent. The tricky thing about it is this: the annual inflation can go up even if prices went down that particular month. That was the case here. It was April, stats were just coming out for March. Prices were down, but the annual inflation rate was up.

Attempting to explain all this in the simplest possible terms, I wrote the story and sent it to the producer. He looked it over, then printed it up. Colin Kelly was hanging around the news-pit, one cheek of his ample ass on the producer’s desk, flipping through the scripts before the first newscast. Suddenly, he flared.

“WHAT THE HELL IS THIS? WHO WROTE THIS ?”

He had one of those stentorian, Shakespearean-actor,
basso profundo
voices, that carried across a room like a foghorn. Everyone in the vicinity looked up. My instincts — always quick to detect early-warning signs of disaster, failure, public shame —
told me immediately that Colin Kelly was referring to an item I’d written. This premonition was quickly confirmed: Colin asked the producer something I didn’t catch, waving the offending copy under his nose, stabbing it with his finger. They both looked in my direction, then Colin came storming towards my desk, like a locomotive at full tilt, leaking steam. With a contemptuous gesture, he tossed the script on my desk.

“DON’T YOU WRITERS EVER READ THE SHIT YOU WRITE? CAN YOU TELL ME WHAT THIS SAYS?”

“Yes, it…”

“IT SAYS PRICES WENT DOWN, BUT THE INFLATION RATE WAS UP.” He looked around, addressing everyone now, playing to the room. “DOES THAT MAKE ANY SENSE TO YOU?”

He paused for effect. A couple of people at nearby desks tittered nervously. Thinking, no doubt, that I had fucked up again. In the silence that followed, there were throats clearing, chairs scraping on the floor (no doubt as my colleagues adjusted their positions to get a better view). I stared at Colin, thinking, Lord, please make this be over soon. My face was crimson. His was covered in pancake makeup and powder. When I spoke, my voice was thin and constricted, and small, so small.

“Colin, what I think you don’t understand is…”

“NO, MY BOY. YOU’RE THE ONE WHO DOESN’T UNDERSTAND.” He gave me a close-up of his face, but still spoke at top volume. “THINK ABOUT IT. IF PRICES GO DOWN, WE’RE IN A STATE OF DEFLATION, RIGHT?”

“Well, not…”

“NEXT TIME, CHECK YOUR FACTS BEFORE YOU TURN SOMETHING IN, MY FINE YOUNG FRIEND.”

With that, he marched off to Makeup for a touch-up. People turned back to their work. I sat, stung, at my desk. What
irked me most of all was that he couldn’t have taken the time to read the whole story, because I’d included a paragraph explaining this apparent incongruity in the simplest terms. After Colin left the room, I explained all this to the producer, Hans Kohl. He looked over the story, had me rewrite it according to his instructions, and it was printed again.

The show went to air, but the spot where my story was supposed to be went by and nothing happened. Colin read the story before and the story after, but not mine. It came as much of a surprise to Hans Kohl as it did to me. He got on the phone to the studio.

“What happened to the story about the annual inflation rate?”

Hans listened to the answer, nodded, then hung up.

“Colin refused to read it,” he said with a shrug.

After every newscast, Colin went outside for a smoke with Delia Flack, his favourite Cyrano. I caught up to him on the way into the elevator.

“Colin, can I talk to you?”

He said nothing, looked away from me as he stepped into the elevator. He shook his head and made a motion of erasure with the flat of his palm, as if trying to wipe me (like a pesky bug) off the windshield of his day. Forget it, pal. If nothing else, I’m a persistent little roach. I slipped in just as the doors were closing. The elevator sucked us downwards. We rode in silence for a couple of moments, then I spoke up, trying to be as polite as possible.

“Colin, I just want to explain about that story…”

“ARE YOU GOING TO TRY TO DEFEND THAT STORY OF YOURS? ARE YOU?”

His town-crier voice was startling in the silence of the elevator’s acoustical chamber. Everyone else stiffened and stared
stonily on at the digital display of the floors flashing past or at their shoes.

“Well, I just wanted to say…”

“HERE’S A WRITER,” he began. Ostensibly he was speaking to Delia Flack, but his glance swept around at all the faces in the elevator. Down, down we went. “HERE’S A WRITER WHO SAYS WHEN PRICES GO DOWN, INFLATION CAN STILL GO UP. AND HE EXPECTS ME TO READ THAT OVER THE AIR!”

We arrived on the bottom floor. Colin marched out of the elevator, with Delia Flack tagging along at his side. For a moment, I was wrong-footed, I didn’t know how to cope with Colin Kelly’s unique brand of boorishness. Finally, I decided to give it one last heroic shot. I caught up with him as he was going through the doors into the Cosmodemonic parking lot.

“Colin, can I just say something?”

It was a warm day, lunchtime, there were about 30 people standing around outside the doors, smoking. Colin turned on me with savage fury.

“STOP FOLLOWING ME! WHY ARE YOU CHASING AFTER ME, TRYING TO DEFEND THAT IDIOTIC STORY?”

“Colin, I…”

“I DON’T BELIEVE THIS! IF YOU’RE GOING TO CONTINUE TO DEFEND THAT STORY, MY INTEREST IN YOU AS A WRITER IS TERMINATED! TERMINATED!”

I stood there stunned. I opened my mouth, and shut it again. All the smokers stared at me, silent but still smoking, like cattle chewing cud. Now might be a good time to cut my losses, I thought. I turned around and went back into the building, with Colin Kelly’s cries of TERMINATED! TERMINATED! still ringing in my ears.

Upstairs, I asked Hans if I could see him alone.

“Sure,” he said. “Why don’t we go into my office?”

Once we were in his office, he shut the door and sat down. I paced back and forth in front of his desk.

“Why are writers treated like such shit in this business?” I began. “I hate it, I hate it. I can’t believe a guy like Colin Kelly can walk all over me like that and get away with it. He yelled at me in front of everybody in the newsroom, then he humiliated me in front of all the smokers downstairs. The worst thing of all is, he’s wrong, Hans, he’s so wrong.”

I became so carried away with my own rhetoric, I suddenly burst into tears. As I say, it was an emotional rollercoaster hangover, otherwise obviously you’d never catch me mounting a display of this nature in a work environment.

Hans handed me a tissue from a box on top of his desk.

“Don’t take it so personally, Dave,” he said. “Colin does that all the time. I can’t tell you how many E.A.s he’s brought to tears in the newsroom. He’s bitter. He thinks he should be sitting in Peter Rockwell’s chair.”

“What?” I asked, dabbing hot tears from my eyes. “He thinks he should anchor the flagship?”

“Yeah, he’s bitter he’s been passed over all these years. He doesn’t think he belongs on the
Noonday News.”

I blew my nose, wiped the tears out of my eyes.

“Well, he shouldn’t take it out on other people. He has no right. You know what? I’m not going to let him get away with it.”

“What are you going to do?” Hans asked, interested.

“I don’t know. I think I need to cool off a bit. Take a walk. You think I could take a break? You won’t miss me for the next newscast?”

“Take as long as you want,” Hans said.

I took a walk around the block. It was a breathtakingly beautiful day, warm, a gentle breeze carrying the promise of
summer in the air. It didn’t suit my mood. I wanted thunder and lightning, huge brooding clouds. Perhaps, though, fate had a subtler plan in mind, to give me a taste of what I was missing sitting in that office all day, blinds drawn, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, trapped like a rat, performing tasks I only dimly understood for my biweekly pay-pellets.

Come on out and play, Dave, the beautiful day seemed to say to me. Why do you sit cooped up in that office all day? You insult God by sitting in there all day. He or She went to all that trouble to create such a masterpiece of a day, and you ignore it? Sometimes as I hit the streets on a beautiful day, I look up and think, Thank you, God. And whenever I do that I always feel a shudder of pleasure I interpret to mean: You’re welcome.

I smoked and fumed, muttering to myself as I walked along. Suddenly a thought struck me: I quit. Who needs it? Being shat upon and screamed at by boorish news anchors. I’m too good for that. I can get another job.

Yeah, but first I’d wring an apology out of that old villain Colin, even if it killed both of us. That bastard had no right treating me like a piece of shit. With renewed vigour, I turned my steps back to the Cosmodemonic complex, flashed my Cosmolaminated I.D. at the security kiosk, and rode the elevator back up to the newsroom.

“What did you decide?” Hans asked as I strode back in. I think he sensed the dark thoughts scudding through my mind.

“I’m going to demand an apology from Colin.”

Hans laughed, a short, mirthless bark.

“That’ll be the day. Colin hasn’t apologized to anyone in 30 years.”

“Well, I have to give it a try.”

“Do me one favour.”

“What?”

“If you’re going to do it, at least wait until after the last newscast, at three.”

“Fair enough.”

After the 3:00 newscast, Colin darted into the bathroom. I sensed my chance, and slipped in after him. He was at the sink, taking off his makeup with a cotton swab and some witch hazel. I stood behind him, looking at him in the mirror.

“What do you want?” he asked, his voice lower now that we were alone and there was no audience.

“I think you owe me an apology—”

“You think I was too hard on you, is that it? Listen to me, my fine young friend. You don’t know what a hard time is. I’ve been chewed out by the best in the business, before you were even born. This was nothing.”

“Be that as it may, Colin —”

“You want to be treated with kid gloves? Go into another business! This is the wrong business for you!”

Don’t I know it, I thought.

“That doesn’t change the fact that you had no right to chew me out in front of all those people.”

“And you go whining to the producer. At least if I have something to say, I say it to your face, not behind your back!”

That took me aback, partially because he had a point, partly because I wondered how much Hans had told him. Did he know I burst into tears? Did everyone know?

“Yeah, well, that doesn’t change the fact you humiliated me in front of my colleagues.”

He finished taking off his makeup. The whole conversation had taken place through the medium of the mirror. Now he turned to face me, a sickly grin on his face. Just then, someone came through the bathroom doors.

“LISTEN TO YOURSELF!” he said, turning the volume up again. “FOR ONCE, JUST… LISTEN TO YOURSELF!”

With that, he stalked out of the bathroom, the door flapping behind him.

Well, that tears it, I thought. I stormed over to Frizell’s office. He was in and alone. I knocked.

“Come in, David,” he said.

I sat down. I had resolved to quit, finally and for sure. A few words to this man, and I’d be free. It’s funny what clichés come to you in moments of extreme stress. I won’t take their shit, I thought, on the way into his office. You won’t have David Henry to kick around any more.

In Frizell’s office, though, I softened. I paced up and down in front of his desk, adrenalin pumping through my veins.

“I don’t quite know how to say what I want to say.”

“Take your time, Dave,” he said. “Just let it out.”

I told him the story of Colin Kelly and the annual inflation rate. He listened patiently.

“But it’s not just this particular incident,” I said finally. “It’s more general. I feel out of place here. I don’t know how else to say it but ‘Though I walk amongst these people, I am not of them.’”