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  She hated the way Virginia looked. Too much like virgin and it sounded a little old. What she needed was something perky, as she thought of it, a name that could place her between twenty-one and twenty-five.

  She ended up with Jeannie. It was close enough to have been a nickname and she could go back to Virginia whenever she needed to sound formal and important. Her own childhood nickname was Ginny. That obviously wouldn’t do.

  “Good evening, New Orleans. I’m Jeannie Maypin with your weekend news.” Perfect, bouncy and not too young or too old. So thought Virginia Susan Maypin. New Orleans did not agree.

  Darker hair, different voice, Virginia for Virginia Susan, Ginny, Sue, Jeannie Maypin wasn’t the New Orleans type. That’s all and the only way to deal with that was to leave town as soon as possible. She did, in less than a year. What wasn’t right for New Orleans, that sultry, persnickety, stiff-nosed city, proved absolutely perfect for her next choice, a gritty new city baking in the sun.

  The hair was now jet-black and cut in a bob. The drawl became a little more west Texas than Carolina. The name underwent another change as well.

  She spent more hours in front of the mirror, more testing, smiling, holding the pose to see how each syllable of each name would work against the next one. How would the face would look as it was being said? What expression would be left after that last sound? It was all so important.

  “Well, my real name is Jean, Jean Ann,” she told news director Jim Brown. “I think I should use it, don’t you? I mean, I think that would be nicer, to use my real name. What do you think?”

  The Ann came from a Name Your Baby book she found in a bookstore. There was no reason to go beyond the a’s once she heard the Ann with Jean and Maypin. It worked and made it, as she told Jim Brown, her real name.

  If there was one thing to be said about Virginia Susan, Ginny, Sue, Jeannie, Jean Ann Maypin it was that she believed devoutly in her own press.

  2

  Tom Carter hated faggots. They were faggots, not gay. He hated that they used that word, a good word and now look at it. He also hated most women, old women especially. He hated cats and birds. He would tolerate a mean dog but he hated the small, simpering breeds as much as he hated puppies of any breed and as much as he hated children. But, he really hated faggots.

  “Artsy-fartsy,” he would sneer every time someone did a story about artists or dancers or actors in the valley.

  “They are all faggots,” he leered at photographer Jason Osner.

  “Along with about ten percent of your newsroom,” Jason said with a smile.

  Carter stared.

  “Yup, ten percent of any population. That means you’ve got about four or five right here in your newsroom.”

  “Who are they?” Carter shouted. “Tell me who they are.”

  Jason laughed. “I don’t know who they are.”

  “Well,” Carter took a deep breath, “I know you’re not one. You’ve got balls. I know that.”

  “You sure?”

  “Shit. I can smell those sissy boys. You ain’t no queer.”

  “No,” Jason agreed with another smile, “but they are everywhere.”

  Carter thought about that. He did have doubts about that artsy-fartsy guy Harold Lewis, the arts reporter whenever there were any arts. Carter wasn’t sure about him being a faggot. Sissy boy, yeah, not a queer. There was a difference.

  Tom Carter also had some strong feelings about niggers, spicks, kikes, Polacks, hunkies, wops, greasers, wetbacks, jungle bunnies, Jew boys, frogs, smelly frogs and they all smelled, limeys, dumb micks, injuns, uncles, chinks, slant eyes, and gooks. That was a good new one.

  To prove to anyone listening that he had such feelings, he would use those words in conversations with people in his newsroom. Morning producer Chuck, that dumb mick, Farrell kept a list of his pronouncements on race, religion and sex.

  “Read it and weep,” he said to Ellen and handed her the sheets.

  “The only good niggers I ever knew,” she read out, “were the ones that looked almost white.” Next to the sentence was a date.

  “Jesus.”

  “Someday it will come in handy,” Chuck said as he put the papers back into his file drawer and locked it.

  One night, as the cameras pulled back, Carter said, “God, I can’t stand to be around those kids.” He waited until he knew the shot was far enough back before speaking. Some of those bastards out there could read lips.

  “What?” Jean Ann smiled and straightened her papers for the benefit of the closing shot.

  “Those cripple kids,” he said about the last story on the Easter Seals drive. “I can’t stand to be around cripples.”

  Carter had nothing to worry about. As the most respected, the ads often claimed, news anchor in the state, he didn’t have to go anywhere or be with anyone unless he so chose. That made him a prized speaker at men’s business and service clubs throughout the city.

  “The Cronkite of the Southwest,” is how the president of one downtown luncheon club introduced him whenever Tom Carter joined them. “And Tom Carter was here first, even before Uncle Walter,” he would add.

  The men laughed at the way he said Uncle Walter, with a sneer and a snort. Then, they roared at his, “And we like Tom Carter even better than Uncle Walter because everybody knows Uncle Walter’s a Democrat and I think we all know where Tom Carter stands even if he doesn’t say so himself.”

  The clapping would be strong, the nodding gleeful. Even the Democrats approved. In this state, the closest thing to a Republican was a Democrat.

  Tom Carter never argued with the description. He was there first, before Cronkite, before television. Tom Carter was the voice of the Southwest back when the Southwest was just desert and sky. It was his voice that brought the news into the living rooms every night, a booming, strong voice that could be trusted.

  He could stretch that s of Thomas across seconds. Thomasss Carter, a radioman, a newsman. He covered the news, as much as there was, from the stone courthouse to the capitol a mile or so down the road. He knew the good old boys who ran the state. He talked like them, looked like them. He was tough and mean and foulmouthed. He told the state exactly what they told him to tell the state.

  In those days, you didn’t have to search out the news. They told you what they wanted said. Who could say whether or not the state was better now with all these reporters and photographers flying around? Not Tom Carter, that’s for sure.

  He too made a change in his name, a slight one, to fit the new world of big boxy cameras that was forced upon him. Thomas, with that long stretched out s, sounded lispy, like a sissy boy. Tom was better, short and tight, the same as his news. He liked to think he talked the way Hemingway wrote. He read a couple of his books. He liked old Papa, a gutsy guy.

  Carter let his hair go gray at the temples, let the streaks move through the brown. He had gray, empty eyes. They gave no warmth, no joy, but when he smiled just right, the corners of his eyes would crinkle as though he was a good, kind man.

  To Carter, smiling right meant a lift of the muscles at the corner of his lips. No full-toothed grin, he never had a need for that. Only a short, lip-curled, eye-crinkled smile with a quick nod to the side and move on. The audience, men and women, loved it. They loved the lift of an eyebrow that showed he knew and they knew the story was stupid or the reporter sounded dumb. That’s what he did so well. He shared the straight scoop with them and they loved it.

  It wasn’t enough. He was still number two in the ratings. Real close. Across the Street, the name he gave them years ago, they had a silver-headed real Uncle Walter, Midwest variety with a couple of decades in the state. Boy, he pulled them in. He also had the head of a javelina mounted and hung on the wall behind his desk.

  To Tom Carter, the white-haired man was the enemy, pure and simple. He seldom acknowledged his existence with even a glance much less a handshake unless forced to in a public setting. If the subject of the javelina came up, he would quip, “Shit,
that’s not the part of a pig I’d have stuffed.”

  His office was a glass square that looked across the newsroom until he lowered the blinds and closed them to brown slits. When they were set at the perfect angle, he could see out but no one could see in.

  He had no family pictures on his desk, no blond wife smiling, no college graduation shots of post-pimpled big-faced boys or straight-haired, mortarboard-headed girls. Divorced was the consensus, divorced a long time ago.

  However, there was one picture on the credenza that lined the wall behind his desk, a picture of an Asian child. Carter could not see it without turning almost a full one hundred and eighty degrees. Everyone sitting across from him, everyone standing anywhere in his office could see the picture.

  “One of those Care kids,” he told visitors. “You know, the ones the blond with the big jugs tells you to rent.”

  Most people would simply stare, thinking they had missed something, misunderstood.

  The picture was carefully kept free of dust by the secretary, Mary, or by the never-ending work of the handyman, Augustino. Carter never thought about the picture until someone mentioned it or he caught them staring at it. The people in his newsroom tagged the kid, Tom’s One Fling Wong.

  Someone gave him the picture at a speech or an award ceremony. Something was said about his support for the children of the state, something about a child of his own. They mentioned letters, something about sending money and him getting letters. All was going to be done in his name. He never read any letters and if replies were sent in his name he didn’t know about them. He certainly never sent any money. None of it mattered anyway. He only kept the picture because he liked that line about the blond with the big knockers.

  He used it on Ellen Peters during her interview. It was his standard interview, questions about sex and marriage and when the babies would come. Nobody called him on it, never. Why should they? They all wanted a job.

  “I guess you think you’re good enough to work here.”

  “I’m good,” she said with a small smile.

  “So says you, missy,” he snickered. “Everybody thinks they’re good enough. I’m telling you this, missy. They ain’t.”

  He waved to the bookcase, the credenza, to the piles of tapes and résumés.

  “See those?”

  She nodded.

  “Those are from one week. I get a hundred people a week applying here. Everybody in this country wants to work here. They want to work for The Best.

  “There’s a man right here,” he thumped the pile of papers in front of him with a thick middle finger, “who’d leave his network job making seventy thousand to come here and we ain’t paying no seventy thousand dollars, missy.”

  He leaned back in his chair and put his arms behind his head. There were no sweat stains on his shirt.

  She nodded again.

  “So?” he demanded, jerking forward, once again straight in his chair.

  Her eyes widened.

  “What do you have to say?”

  “That I would like the job.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll see about that.”

  He didn’t like her. Right from the beginning he marked Ellen Peters as an uptight, smart-mouthed bitch. Right from the beginning he knew she was going to be trouble.

  As she walked to the door, he called out, “You got good legs. I’ll say that.”

  “Like Lincoln said, as long as they reach the ground.”

  He didn’t bother with a comeback.

  The way he figured it, the way she figured it, she’d be damn lucky to get the job.

  3

  They were all damn lucky to get their jobs. Carter wasn’t lying when he said there were a hundred people a week applying for work at the station. Okay, maybe it was only twenty or thirty, and maybe some of them were repeaters, the ones who wouldn’t stop trying. But, add the phone calls from around the country, the feelers, the friend asking a friend, and Carter’s figure was low. Hundreds of people a week were trying to get a job in his newsroom or talking about it. It was the same at every other station in the city and in the state and in the country.

  Television news had replaced Hollywood as the golden road to fame and fortune. Parents swelled with pride when a new reporter was born. The opposite sex fluttered with excitement, the same sex stewed with jealousy. Hollywood agents now advised new clients to try television news. The work was steady and if they made it to the big time, to that anchor seat, the agent’s cut was nothing to sniff at. Rumor had it William Morris was taking on news reporters as clients. At The Best reporters were now making shadowy calls to talent agents on the East Coast who specialized in television news.

  “Damn lucky,” Carter would tell them as a group or individually. “Damn lucky.”

  It wasn’t the money that drew them. There wasn’t any, not really. If Carter had a hundred tapes on his desk and piled on his shelves, he could pay whatever he pleased and they took it with a nod of relief and appreciation. This was usually their second or third stop on the way to the real glory hole. Nobody, nobody good, planned to stay. Two years was about the limit. More than that and you were in trouble unless you were an unattractive street reporter, male, with two kids and a wife who stayed at home or held a low-paying, part-time job. If you were, you kept thinking this was the place to settle down because the choice had finally been taken away from you.

  At the beginning it was the ego, the excitement of being there with the cops or the politicians. It was the thrill of being almost as important as the people who moved and shook the city, the people who made news. Eventually, with the help of consultants, came the realization that you too were important. You might even be more important than the stories you covered. After all, you were the one deciding who was going to be on and for how long and most of the time you were on camera more than anyone else in the story.

  You did stand-ups. You stood in front of the camera and talked. You added some information or repeated, in slightly different words, what the person you interviewed said only seconds before.

  You closed the story with “Some things will never change,” or “Things will never be the same here again,” or “How this will all end remains to be seen.” You said your name and the station’s call letters or the consultant-designed sign-off and the last face they saw before the anchor’s was yours.

  “Reporter involvement,” news director Jim Brown insisted. “That’s what they want, reporter involvement.”

  That meant shots of the reporter walking in the field, down the road, talking to people, driving a car, riding a horse, holding a dying man’s hand. It meant, and no one made any bones about it, the reporter was as much a part of the story as the person or event he was sent to cover. That’s what they wanted, the management boys and their consultants Back East. That’s what they told Jim Brown and that’s what he told his newsroom.

  To the reporters, it meant more work, yes. It also meant more airtime. Out of a minute-thirty story they would take at least thirty seconds of it either talking to the camera or doing those walking, driving, handholding shots.

  It all depended on looks, looks the audience liked. For the most part, that meant reporters who were solid American, non-threatening, happy and attractive. It meant someone like Frank Kowalski had a problem.

  *

  More than anything, Frank Kowalski wanted to be an anchor. He wanted that one moment when all the cameras moved, froze, a hand sliced the air in front on him, and he could say, “Good evening. I’m Frank Kowalski and this is the news.”

  He never got close. He did get to give a few, “Thanks, Tom,” or “Yes, Jean Ann.” That was it.

  “Workhorse reporter,” Ellen Peters described him to Debbie Hanson. “You know, day in and day out, covering the stories. Every newsroom has to have one. A good, average reporter. Consistent.”

  He was balding with small dark eyes. He was of average height and had a strong, square jaw but the face was also small and the forehead’s only height came from the l
oss of hair. And, his shoulders were too narrow.

  He did win awards, at least one spot-news award a year. He figured it as the law of averages. He did two or three stories a day, five days a week. He had to win at least one award a year.

  He made twenty-two thousand dollars. Across the Street he might get twenty-five or twenty-six but nobody was making him any offers. He wasn’t about to call. He wanted anchoring. At The Best, he had a chance. Across the Street he had jack shit even if they were interested, and they weren’t. Like Carter said, reporters were a dime a dozen.

  He adjusted his tie. It was wide, bright blue with big pink flamingos. He liked to make the guys laugh and to give Carter a reason to swear and shout that they all needed to “dress like professionals.” He kept a dark tie in his desk for the times, the few times, he went on-set with that prick Carter and Jean Ann.

  Jean Ann was okay. A bit of a bimbo, that was true, but most bimbos were blond. Look at Paige Allen. Now, there was a bimbo with great tits. He gave his crotch a pat, then a scratch. He wondered about her bush. It couldn’t be blond. Paige was a bleached blond. Nevertheless, he wondered about blond pussy.

  God, he wanted to be an anchor. He worked his way through college in Scranton, PA, busing tables, working fast-food kitchens, delivering pizza. He copped a few hours every weekend doing college radio and damn near sucked dick to rip the wires and write copy at the local TV station for minimum wage. They agreed and damn lucky, damn lucky, they told him.

  Damn lucky in Wilkes-Barre, damn lucky in Ohio. Definitely damn lucky in Missouri with that Polack name and now, finally, damn lucky here.

  Tom Carter saw him in Missouri, one stupid report on some two-bit fire. He really beefed it up that night, wearing his yellow fireman’s jacket, holding the puppy they carried from the tenement.

  “This little fellow made it,” he said as the puppy tried to lick his face. “He was the lucky one.”

  Two people died in the fire, another was rushed screaming to the county burn unit. Three days before Christmas and thirty people were out in the street. The phones at the station rang all night with people who wanted to take the puppy.