Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

“And you expect me to say what, exactly?”

“I expect you to say yes,” Don said. “I can’t believe that what you are doing in DC is enough. Being a pundit. Smoothing over a message that someone else has already shaped.”

“I look at it as trying to correct the record.”

Don tapped the folder. “What’s in here is an opportunity to be the record. The first draft of history and all that. Unless you’re going to tell me that you’re satisfied being a hired gun.”

Richard figured he’d play the scene out, no matter how preposterous it sounded. “I’m a hired gun who gets to speak, for roughly four minutes a week, to about three point four million people per quarter hour. But just for entertainment value, let’s say I’m actually interested. I’m interested despite the fact that the job is in the farthest reaches of Transylvania. Despite the fact that, outside of college, I’ve never lived beyond a radius of about seven miles from this very bar stool. Or despite the fact that I’ve never done the news. I didn’t even work for my high school paper. Other than that, I’m a logical choice.”

“I’m not going to shit you. You’re a long shot. Most likely you’re going to fail, and you’re going to do so in spectacular fashion. But if you do fail, you’re not going to fail alone. If you fail, it’s because I’ve failed you. You come up to Scranton and spend four weeks shadowing Jack; you’ll watch Action News at Six, and then you’ll do it again, live to tape, at seven o’clock. Just for us to critique. After the four weeks are up, we’ll send our co-anchor on a little assignment, and you can anchor side by side with Jack for a week. We’ll take some publicity photos, get you fitted for a wardrobe, have you do some local promotion work. We’ll get you an official anchorman’s haircut,” Don said, laughing, showing his brightest smile. “So what say I run this by your agent?”

“I don’t have an agent. I get a phone call. I take a cab to a news bureau and unwrap my IFB and appear for union scale, sometimes more, and I rarely if ever negotiate. A few weeks later I get a check in the mail. Once every couple of weeks, I give a speech to the annual meeting of the National Association of this or that. They have a breakfast where I inhale a Danish and nod gravely at the idiotic opinions of Earl from Milwaukee, who owns the largest feed store in all of whatever county. I pick the most obvious thing that he says, and when no one is looking, I jot it down on a napkin, and then, when I get up on the podium, I applaud his political skills and tell him he should be the one on Crossfire, and the other guys at the head table slap him on the back. I congratulate them for being dedicated enough to fly down to Washington and for being smart enough to hire me to talk to them. And then, because I’m on television, I stand there and repeat the exact same things that were in that morning’s Washington Post, and somehow, the mere act of repeating it makes it true, and for those two hours I pocket a check for ten thousand dollars.”

“You’re what passes for conventional wisdom.” Don laughed.

“In other words, I’m already a newsman.”

Don slid the folder over to Richard and excused himself. “You can think it over for as long as you want. At least as long as it takes for me to piss.”

Richard mulled the offer. Mulled. He thought the unfamiliar word. Serious decisions required more than mulling, didn’t they? You don’t change your life because you’ve had two Bloody Marys and decided that the best strategy for the New Year is to look opportunity in the eye and say, What the fuck. Or do you? This is probably what it felt like to go to the crossroads and be offered a deal with the devil. The devil probably borrowed Don’s black suit for these sorts of things. Still, in nearly every facet of conversation, Don Keene had been right. It wasn’t enough, being on television for one o’clock here, two-thirty elsewhere. His mind flashed on a memory, the women who’d worked for Lew wandering, stunned, through the MacMurray kitchen after the funeral. Lew’s whole office had that feel, of teamwork, of family, and Richard got exactly none of that feeling from what he was doing now. He needed courage, and if he found some after two drinks, what the fuck? Some spontaneity could do him good. A tandem jump from eight thousand feet above the Mojave? Sure, why not, what the fuck. A long weekend in Tulum filled with margaritas and naked tanning with a woman you’d met the evening before? What the fuck. Try that Japanese soup that might kill you? What the fuck. Buy a house he’d seen only pictures of? What the fuck? That lack of spontaneity had always been an issue in the previous regime, his first wife and her ridiculous calculations and her research at the library—a Saturday afternoon wasted as she pored over magazines, seven months of back issues of Consumer Reports —all to buy a $40 blender. He billed his time at $380 an hour, and once he’d had enough, he finally told her that he might have to charge the same rate if she was going to make everything such a goddamn ordeal, and it had been a dick thing to say (her words), and he knew she was right.

Surely it was ego to think he could slide right into the anchor chair and make jokes about the hapless Phillies and then be serious about two dead, four wounded, in a shoot-out at a Wilkes-Barre branch of some monolithic national bank. Why would he even think he could do this job? The Greeks knew this feeling for what it was. Hubris. Richard supposed it couldn’t actually be hubris if he was aware of it, but that didn’t mean he was going to turn the job down. He would have to be vigilant for any omen that augured his failure. That’s what hubris really meant, after all: “failure.” Hubris meant flying too close to the sun on his handmade wax wings, hubris meant saying the ship was unsinkable, it meant building a plane the size of an ocean liner only to watch it rise a mere eight feet before falling, as did Icarus, into the sea. The time felt right for that kind of leap. He could picture the handful of reporters and assignment editors he knew shaking their heads at the word Scranton. Still, what did Washington have to offer him now? Subpoenas and bureaucrats. There was nothing left to tether him here. Washington was over.

FOR TWO years now, Sherri Ashburton had worked at the Canyon Room Tavern and Grill, four nights a week, either as a bartender or as a cocktail waitress. If Ash was around, she played it straight, wore a modestly short skirt and hose with black seams running up the back. When things were tight and her husband wasn’t behind the bar, she switched out the hose for thigh-highs and kept some bills for change in the elastic around her right thigh. Her tips went up by twenty or thirty bucks.

Her preshift duties included cutting four dozen limes and four dozen lemons, refilling the maraschino cherries in the service trays, and pestering a busboy to deliver ten five-gallon buckets of ice for the drop-in coolers of bottled beer. Never once had the ice been in the cooler when she punched in, and never once had someone fetched it without complaint. The bar manager stayed focused on the larger things, like the bottom line. He’d bought these syrupy premade mixes for the fancier cocktails and had the soda gun switched from name-brand sodas to generics. The tonic water tasted more like rust than quinine, and that meant Sherri constantly had to buy back drinks, and buying back drinks meant she got the same three-dollar tip for pouring the same drink twice, no matter how weak or strong she poured or how many buttons of her Stay-Prest uniform blouse she left “accidentally” undone.