In The Middle of Middle America Read online

  When he finally lifted his heavy frame out of the limousine, he stood next to Sarah-Jane on the sidewalk and followed her line of vision to the very top of the sixty-story building standing proud in front of them. The sign above the revolving doors glowed an orange logo well-known to the entire population of America. CSN. The third most popular news network in the country. In fact, it had just been confirmed as the fastest growing news network in the country the month Sarah-Jane Zdanski signed a lucrative contract with them. In the first quarter of 1997, CSN found itself in sixth-place in the daily overall ratings. But by the time Sarah-Jane arrived — in the final quarter of 1997 — the network was rapidly closing in on top dogs CNN and FOX, who had held on to numbers one and two for almost two decades.

  Sarah-Jane hooked her arm inside Phil’s and pulled him tight against her as they glared at the famous logo.

  “Ready, buddy?” she asked.

  Phil nodded, and then they both — as if they were in a three-legged race — entered the revolving doors together, hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder.

  “Ah, Miss Zdanski,” a pockmarked face young man said, racing toward them as soon they entered the marbled lobby. “I was told you’d be here just after two p.m. Did you ah… did you manage to see the billboard in Times Square?”

  Sarah-Jane stopped and squinted, trying desperately to not stare at the pockmarks splashed across the young man’s cheeks.

  “And you are...?”

  “Thomas. Thomas Ferrie. I’m an assistant researcher on your show. I was introduced to you last week when you came in for a meeting.”

  “Oh,” Sarah-Jane said, offering a grimaced smile. “Sorry. I met so many new faces and heard so many new names last week that―”

  “It’s understandable,” Thomas said, nodding his head.

  “Tell me, Thomas,” Sarah-Jane said. “Have you seen the billboard in Times Square?”

  “Not in Times Square itself,” Thomas said. “Not yet, anyway. But I did see the artwork before it was approved.”

  “And let me ask you this, Thomas. Do you think I should be smiling on that billboard?”

  “Pfft… I think you look amazing on it,” Thomas said, sounding, to Sarah-Jane, annoyingly diplomatic.

  “Just doesn’t feel right for me to be smiling. Not today,” Sarah-Jane said. Thomas didn’t offer any further opinion on the subject, and instead lead both Sarah-Jane and Phil to the large gold-painted elevator double doors at the back end of the lobby, where he held the key card hanging from his neck against a sensor.

  The mirror in the elevator was so large that it reflected all three of them head-to-toe as they entered. Thomas pressed at the number 55 on the large silver panel screwed into a marble wall, and after an initial clunk and a stuttering vibration, the elevator began to rise with a purr.

  The walls that greeted them when the elevator doors finally slid back open were wallpapered with the orange CSN logo, and as they walked along the hallways — hallways that seemed to get darker and narrower the further they walked — Sarah-Jane took in the portraits of the well-known faces who had fronted the network over the years. Jared Astley. Monica Sleight. Jon Burrows. Matt Lauer. Matt had left CSN three years prior to take up the much-coveted position at The Today Show on rival network NBC, but was still considered somewhat a legend around these dark hallways, despite persistent whispers from some quarters. Sarah-Jane drummed her long fingernails against Matt’s portrait as she passed it. Phil knew why. Matt Lauer was Sarah-Jane Zdanski’s celebrity crush. It wasn’t just his chiseled jawline or his narrow, smoldering eyes that took her fancy. It was the ease in which he presented. Talent was what turned Sarah-Jane Zdanski on.

  “The studio is all set up, Miss Zdanksi,” Thomas said as he continued to lead Sarah-Jane and Phil, who was still carrying his boss’s purse under his arm, through the maze of dark hallways.

  “Can we see it?” Sarah-Jane asked.

  “Sure.”

  Thomas spun on his heels, then led them back through the hallways they had just walked down, past the portraits of legendary CSN anchors and to the other side of the golden double doors of the elevator before eventually coming to a stop behind a large black curtain.

  “Just through there,” he said. “I’m gonna go find Howie Laine and let him know you’re here.”

  Sarah-Jane winked at Thomas, then she reached for the curtain and pulled it across.

  Even though she had seen the set almost finished when she called by for a production meeting the week prior, she still gasped.

  “I love it,” she said. Then she slapped her hands to her face again and screeched into them.

  Phil produced one of his throat chuckles, but in truth he wasn’t bowled over by the set. In fact, he felt somewhat let down by it. Though he wouldn’t say as much to Sarah-Jane. His assumptions had led him to believe that the major networks such as CSN or FOX or CNN or MSNBC would produce sets that looked as if they belonged on a Broadway stage. It was a disappointment for him to realize they were no bigger than the tiny, dank studios he had worked on at his local PBS network back in Kansas—the studio in which he first met and fell in love with Sarah-Jane Zdanski. News sets, to him, always looked like a well-lit desk and backdrop that seemed out of place among the mess either side of them.

  The set, as was always the case, was perfectly lit and the name Zdanski blinked at them from a light-blue neon sign on the dark back wall. But for Phil, the neon sign aside, this easily could’ve been one of many small PBS studios he had been so familiar with. It smelled of the same wood-chipping scent as the PBS studios — as if all sets shared an open workspace with a carpentry firm. And it was surrounded by dark shadows on either side of the light, which could easily be mistaken for a trash area for large opened cardboard boxes, sheets of plastic wrapping and a gaggle of employees who didn’t quite look like they were doing much. In front of Phil and Sarah-Jane, as they stood in the shadows of the perfectly lit studio, spread a web of thick cables that raced off in all manner of directions along the dark, dusty floor.

  “You love it?” Sarah-Jane asked, bumping her hip off Phil’s.

  Phil bumped hers back. And then she placed both of her hands to her face so she could squeal into them again.

  While she glided across the web of cables toward the stage, Phil tripped and stumbled his way behind her. And as she stepped up onto the stage, the men responsible for the constant smell of fresh wood chippings in the shadows to one side immediately paused their chatter and began to stare. Phil took them in as they squinted at his boss, and when one of them noticed him eyeballing them, he whispered something to his colleagues and then they all got back to scratching the backs of their necks while chatting about nothing much at all.

  Sarah-Jane stood, grinning, under the neon sign that displayed her family name and then took her camera out of her pocket.

  “Here, Phil,“ she said, “take another one for the scrapbook.”

  Phil, as all good puppy dogs do, obeyed his mistress without hesitation and took the camera from Sarah-Jane, wound it, then peered through the square lens to snap his boss making a peace sign in front of her own name.

  “Another one to send back to your Ma and Pa in Kansas,” Phil said, handing the camera back to her.

  Sarah-Jane squinted at her sidekick then shrugged her shoulders before sitting in her brand new leather chair. She got to choose this one from a shortlist of three. For some reason, that decision was in the contract she had signed weeks prior without it ever popping up in conversation. She didn’t know until she saw a tag hanging from the chair last week when she stopped by to see the set for the very first time that it had arrived at a cost of eleven thousand dollars.

  “Sure don’t feel like an eleven K chair,” she said, bouncing her back off it as she sought the level of comfort she assumed eleven thousand dollars should bring.

  Somebody coughed lightly behind Phil and when he shuffled his bulky frame around, moving as slowly as he always does, he saw one of the workmen who had be
en ogling his boss moments prior.

  “I just wanted to say best of luck for your interviews tonight, Sarah-Jane,” the man said.

  Phil growled softly in the back of his throat as Sarah-Jane rose from her expensive leather chair to make her way toward the man.

  “Thank you. Do you work here?” she said, placing her hand inside his.

  “Sometimes. I’m just a tradesman, so when they need new studios built, we get called in.”

  “Well, thank you for helping build my new studio.”

  The tradesman fawned and laughed, unable to hide how unbelievably attractive he found the woman whose hand he was still holding was. She looked attractive in the teaser ads he had seen over the past couple of weeks, but up this close, inches from him, she was a knockout. As his eyes locked into Sarah-Jane’s, the curtain over his shoulder swept open and in walked a tall, skinny man dressed in an overly loud patterned shirt.

  Howie Laine came across more camp than any man Sarah-Jane had ever encountered back home in Kansas, yet he wasn’t gay, even if most of those he had worked with over the years assumed he was. He was actually married to a sexually satisfied woman who got it at least five times a week. On occasions five times a night, although those days seemed as if they were in the past. Howie wore a loud shirt most days, as well John Lennon-esqe round glasses that were so thin they seemed rather redundant perched on the narrow bridge of his long skinny nose.

  He embraced Sarah-Jane with an elaborate hug, as if they were long-separated best friends and not two new associates who had only met each other for the first time one week ago, then dismissed the handsome tradesman with a sweep of his hand.

  “You guys should’ve been finished three days ago. Watcha’ll still doing here?”

  “We are all done,” the tradesman said, “we’re just clearing out now.”

  Then the tradesman slumped off, back into the shadows of the studio to where his colleagues were waiting for him in a huddle.

  “Bullshit,” Howie whispered to Sarah-Jane, “those guys were just hanging around to see you.”

  “Phil,” Sarah-Jane said, “meet Howie Laine—he’s the exec producer of our show.”

  “Ah, you must be Philip Meredith. You have a producer credit on the show, right? We haven’t yet met. Pleasure to meet you.” Phil shook Howie’s hand, but offered no words. “Anyway,” Howie said, turning back to Sarah-Jane, “this is so exciting. I can’t wait for tonight.” He threw his cuff away from his watch with a flamboyant flick of his left wrist. “Just over four hours till we’re live. Whaddya think of the finished studio?”

  “I love it,” Sarah-Jane replied.

  “Yeah,” Howie said, nodding, “to me, they all look the same. Anyway…,” he motioned to the stage, where Sarah-Jane’s eleven thousand dollar chair was glowing under a strong light alongside a row of cheaper chairs that ran away from hers but along a narrow desk that looked a little like a sausage in how it curved. It was from this sausage-shaped desk that Sarah-Jane would question her first guests later that night.

  She sat in her expensive chair, and while Howie sat in the cheap one next to hers, Phil took up a standing position among the web of cables in the shadows, with his arms folded and his boss’s purse resting between his New Balance trainers.

  “You haven’t heard the projected audience number for tonight, have you?” Howie said, tapping his fingers together repeatedly to produce a silent applause.

  Sarah-Jane’s lips stretched into a beautiful smile.

  “No. Is it big? Are we expecting a big audience?”

  Howie formed a steeple by pressing his fingers together and then lifted it to his chin.

  “Oh, I shouldn’t say. I shouldn’t create any anxiety for you ahead of going live.”

  Sarah-Jane sat forward in her chair.

  “Is it bigger than the usual seven p.m. audience?”

  Howie slapped his hands back down to his knees.

  “Oh yeah. Higher than our usual seven p.m. Sarah-Jane,” he said, “it’s higher than any audience number we’ve ever had at CNS.”

  “What? Get the hell outta here,” she said.

  “I’m serious. All the projections point to this show being the most-watched show in CSN history. In fact, it’s likely to be the second-most watched show across the whole nation this year… apart from the Super Bowl, of course.”

  “And what about… what about the viewing figures for, like, Princess Diana’s funeral?” Sarah-Jane said, shaking her head and squinting in disbelief.

  “Well, that was news for everybody wasn’t it?” Howie said. “Every news channel had that story, so the audience was split. But this... this is exclusive content... and America is hungry for it. America is hungry for you.”

  Sarah-Jane slapped her hands to her face, but she didn’t squeal into them this time. Instead she just subtly shook her hair and soaked in her reality.

  “But you’re not gonna tell me the figure?”

  Howie winked, shook his head, then tapped her on the knee — a move that made Phil subtly growl — before he reached to the back pocket of his jeans from where he produced a tiny, but ragged, notepad.

  “I won’t tell you the figure, because I was told not to. But I know Walter Fellowes is particularly excited and I ain’t ever heard of him being excited before. He called down to my office earlier today. Says he wants to have dinner with you.”

  “Today?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Where?”

  “Up in his office. It’s only five more floors up.”

  “Oh,” Sarah-Jane said.

  “And he wants you in wardrobe before dinner.”

  “Before dinner?” Sarah-Jane said, her eyebrows narrowing. “But that’ll be hours before we go live.”

  Howie shrugged his shoulders, then licked his thumb so he could flick through the pages of his notebook.

  “He’s Walter Fellowes,” he said. “Anyway, what else was it I had to tell you?” He whistled as he continued to flick through the pages while Sarah-Jane took the time to glance at Phil. He was still peering at them from the shadows, his boss’s purse resting by his feet. “Oh, yeah. We’ve got the next three shows booked. You hear?”

  “Nope,” Sarah-Jane said, snorting out a laugh.

  “Next week, we’ve got a panel that consists of William Cohen—he’s Bill Clinton’s defense secretary. Newt Gingrich is also confirmed. And we are waiting to hear back from Al Gore’s representatives... but all the signs are good. That’ll be an incredible second show to follow this one.”

  “Hmm... hmm,” Sarah-Jane said, nodding. She already knew the second show would focus on the political trial of Ramzi Yousef who had been suspected of bombing the World Trade Center some four years prior, in the spring of 1993. It was just a matter of who the researchers could assemble as the best panel of guests to discuss such a topic.

  “And then, on show number three, you’re gonna be interviewing…” Howie raised his eyebrows and then mirrored Sarah-Jane by swinging left to right in his chair.

  “Go on…” Sarah-Jane said.

  “Six of the cast of ER”

  Sarah-Jane gasped.

  “Including Clooney?”

  Howie sucked on his own lips, then popped them open while nodding his head.

  “Including Clooney.”

  “Holy shit!” Sarah-Jane said. “I love him.”

  “Meh… he’s just another John Stamos. But ER is the biggest show in America right now, so it’s quite the coup.”

  Sarah-Jane placed both hands over her face and squealed as loudly as she could into them.

  “Hear that, Phil?” she shouted into the darkness. “I’m gonna be interviewing George Clooney.”

  Phil shuffled his heavy frame slowly onto the stage, making a heavy clunk, then nodded his head once at his boss.

  “Do you not speak, Phil?” Howie asked.

  Sarah-Jane discreetly reached under the desk to touch Howie’s knee, and when he glanced at her, she subtly shook her head. I
t was becoming abundantly clear to Howie that questions to Phil weren’t going to be answered.

  “Anywhooo,” Howie said, standing his streaky figure upright under the glare of the studio lights, “we gotta nail this first show. You ready to go through the notes on each of tonight’s guests?”

  Sarah-Jane swiveled back in her chair so that her notes were staring up at her.

  “You betcha!” she said.

  BRODY EDWARDS

  Stevie squints over his shoulder at her, then shakes his head.

  “Nah-huh, dude. She may be fresh meat, but she ain’t hot meat. I wouldn’t touch her with your cock, bro.”

  I shrug.

  “Me neither, dude. Do any guys like chicks with red hair?”

  He turns around, his face all scrunched up.

  “Dunno, dude. What about Ginger Spice?”

  “Oh yeah.” I say. “Great jugs.”

  We’ve been back in school sitting beside each other in every class — because we purposely chose all the same classes as each other — dismissing all the chicks we can think of from school that we don’t wanna have sex with because they’re just not hot enough for us. Stevie and me don’t just talk about sex. We do it, too. Three different chicks I’ve had sex with — Lily Newhart, Jessica Downes and a girl from Esbon called Claire whose last name we never found out. Stevie’s had sex with her too. All she wanted was Stevie’s Walkman. If he gave it to her, she said she’d both let us do it with her. So we did. Separately, of course. She was sixteen, too. A year older than us. It was so awesome to do it with someone who knew what they were doing. In fact, that is really the only time I’ve ever done it for real. When I was with Lily and Jessica, none of us knew what we were doing and I’m not quite sure if anything went in anywhere. But we did try. So I count it as sex... I guess.