Would Edward R. Murrow have used a wimpy word processor?
Hell no.
O'Sullivan saw the word processor as just one more symbol of journalism's decline.
In journalism school now (or TV school as the kids these days called it) the professors spent as much time on 'presentation', (i.e., how to put on makeup and hair spray) as they did on writing news stories.
And it showed in the kind of writing you saw on local TV. Badly structured pieces that didn't answer half the questions they raised, sometimes including-incredibly enough-the basics of the story itself.
But the makeup looked good.
And the King Kong hair spray was working hard.
So to hell with journalism.
O'Sullivan was thinking all these uncharitable thoughts because Dashing David Starrett had just handed in another totally incomprehensible tale about alleged corruption in city hall.
Not until halfway into the story did Starrett's copy tell you which city council members were allegedly involved. Not until three fourths of the way in did the copy tell you what the specific charges were. And three times in a page and a half of copy Starrett seriously violated not only the letter but the spirit of the English language.
Unfortunately for O'Sullivan, who usually ended up rewriting Dashing David's stuff, the kid was the darling of the news consultants. He booked well in focus groups because-as one grandmotherly woman supposedly told the consultant-he 'has dreamy eyes.'
Though he was not yet quite twenty-five, Dashing David would most likely get a network job within the next few years.
He had the 'presentation' part down and there was always an O'Sullivan type somewhere to do the rewriting for him.
O'Sullivan wondered if Edward R. Murrow had had dreamy eyes.
Somehow O'Sullivan couldn't imagine that.
He took a break at a quarter to five.
The news would be on the air in another hour and fifteen minutes so he stood in his doorway watching the craziness.
Reporters literally tripped over each other as they stumbled toward deadlines rewriting, reediting, repolishing. There was, predictably, a flare up of egos and tempers in front of one of the small editing rooms. With nine reporters and only three rooms, the video machines needed to complete a story were at a premium. A few times punches had even been exchanged.
As he stood there, feeling properly paternal about this whole resplendent process of TV journalism, O'Sullivan started wondering about Chris again.
Had she been joking about a 'murder' tip?
Where the hell was she now?
He went back to his desk and dialled her home number.
Eight rings and no answer.
He started wondering again about the tip she claimed to have got.
If the story was true, it might just save her job as a reporter. How could even the craven consultants deny her usefulness to the staff when she unearthed the exclusive tales of butchery and slaughter so desired by the public?
He went back to his doorway and looked at his staff of kamikaze reporters.
He had to admit that even though they all used word processors, a few of them actually had the makings of good journalists. A few of them had got into the job not because of the glamour, but because they understood-corny as it sounded-the vital role journalism played in a democracy.
Holland was like that. A serious reporter.
Maybe that was why he liked her so much (and a hell of a lot more than he'd ever let on to her, being of the generation of men who believed that women could guess your true feelings through intuition or some goddamned thing like that).
So where the hell was Holland anyway?
For the first time he had the thought that maybe if the murder call was the real thing, Holland might be in a little trouble.
And that didn't make O'Sullivan feel good at all.
Even if he didn't tell her how much he cared about her (after a few brewskis, he sometimes even admitted to himself that he might even l-o-v-e her), he worried about her sometimes.
Sometimes he worried about her a lot.
6
Every mental hospital had somebody like Gus living within its walls. He'd been at Hastings House so long-some said ever since Dwight Eisenhower had been elected president-that he didn't even have a last name anymore. He was just Gus.
At this point in his life, he was round, fish belly white, balding, and just as strange as he'd been the day his mother had first brought him here after Gus had complained too many times about the small green Martian man who kept trying to poison him. Every time the staff recommended that Gus be granted a few days at home, he would invariably do something that would make them rescind the order. One time it was sneaking into old Mrs. Grummond's room and taking a dump under her pillow because she hadn't wanted to watch Superman in the TV room. Another time it was dressing up in Katie Dowd's slinkiest nightgown and strolling into the games room, lipstick like a rash on his mouth, and a red paper rose stuck behind his ear. Perhaps his most memorable moment at Hastings came one September day when the state inspectors arrived to check out rumours of abuse they'd heard about Hastings. Just as they reached the third floor, they heard horrifying screams coming from the opposite end of the hall. Along with Dr. Bellamy himself, the inspectors ran to the source of the screams, out of breath and frightened that something terrible was going on. What they found was that Gus had commandeered the nurse's station loudspeaker microphone and was filling all the speakers with his great imitation of a guy being strangled to death, a trick he'd picked up from an episode on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. By this time, Hastings was a literal zoo-a human zoo-patients so horrified by the screams that they were crying and screaming themselves, and huddling in corners, and running up and down the hall, and fighting with staff nearly everywhere.
Gus later explained that he was just trying to have a little fun and was sorry that some of the patients had got so scared and that some of the staff had suffered injuries trying to calm down some of the more violent patients. But, hey, if you couldn't have a little fun in a mental hospital, where the hell could you have fun?
Following this last incident, Gus was made PRN, short for the Latin phrase pro re nata, which means 'as needed'-Gus's personal doctor had given the nurses at Hastings permission to shoot Gus up with 100 mg of Thorazine anytime they felt he needed it. As when Gus went fruitcakes on them three or four times a week, peeing in glasses of orange juice and then drinking them down, finding rats in the closets and killing them and then putting them in other patients' drawers so the vermin would turn green and fester with maggots-which meant that the nurses were damn tootin' going to keep Gus shot up every chance they got. He was just too much hassle to deal with otherwise.
While Gus sometimes suffered tardive dyskinesia, an involuntary movement disorder suffered by many patients who had been overtreated with drugs, the nurses nonetheless kept him zoned out most of the time. He wasn't violent enough to tie down to a bed in one of the isolation rooms, but he was sure as hell violent enough to keep pacified with a needle.
When Gus was all medicated up, he walked around a lot. He didn't harm anybody, he just walked. You'd see him in the TV room and in the game room and in the visitors' room and in the hallways. Just shuffling along in his shabby pyjamas and his even shabbier robe and his flapping K-Mart house slippers. Gone was the Gus of shitting-under-people's-pillows and getting-all-dressed-up-in-drag and peeing-in-orange-juice-glasses. All that remained was this shambling, dead-eyed, slack-jawed zombie. He got so bad at these times that he had to be showered with the most helpless patients-gang showered, as they called it, hosed off like a circus animal or a car, just a row of cowering naked people like concentration camp prisoners about to be shot and thrown into a mass grave.