The Man Who Cancelled Himself Read Online Free

Leo’s the toughest son of a bitch in the business.” Katrina looked away uncomfortably at this mention of her former boss. I wondered about that, too. “First time she came in the control booth I swear it got ten degrees warmer in there.”
    “Pinky …”
    He grinned at her. “I mean it. I felt her there. Like some kind of animal thing. I stared at her, and she stared at me, and wham, we were gone. Went straight in my dressing room and fucked our brains out.”
    “Pinky!”
    “Well, we did!” he boasted.
    “And how’s the show shaping up for this season?” I asked.
    “We’re shifting in a slightly different creative direction,” Katrina replied delicately, in her Kewpie-doll voice. “There’s been some give-and-take between us and God, in terms of Lyle coming back and everything.”
    He nodded. “Yeah, you’ll find this interesting, Hoagy. Being a serious person.”
    “You must have me confused with someone else.”
    “Believe it or not,” said Lyle, puffing up proudly, “I’ve talked the network into letting me do more issue-oriented episodes this season. Hey, we’re America’s living room. It’s time for us to deal with what America’s dealing with—teen suicide, drug addiction, AIDS.”
    Quite some shift indeed for a man whose chief claim to comic fame was that he knew 126 different ways to say the word snot.
    “We’re looking for more of a reality context,” Katrina added. “We’re also looking more for irony—comedically speaking, of course.”
    “Of course,” I said.
    “It’s a national shame, Hoagy,” he went on. “Kids are now our principal underclass in America. Twenty percent of ’em live in poverty. Six million will go to bed hungry tonight. Sixteen million have no medical coverage of any kind. I tell ya, that’s criminal.”
    I nodded, wondering how it is that show-biz figures can get so worked up about social injustice, yet not have a problem with flushing $10 million down the toilet on an obscene house. Somebody ought to write a book about that someday. Not me, but somebody.
    “Those kids are my kids,” Lyle declared. “The ones who used to look up to me.”
    “They still do, Pinky.”
    He waved her off. “Nah, nan. I let ’em down. I know that. So now, I got a responsibility to do good by ’em. From now on, Uncle Chubby is gonna make a difference.”
    “Very admirable, Lyle,” I said. “And what are you giving up?”
    His blue eyes penetrated mine, sizing me up. Or trying. “Giving up?”
    “Katrina mentioned there was some give-and-take. What’s the give?”
    He pressed his lips together and made a short, popping noise which sounded more like flatulence than anything else. “No big deal. We agreed to add a regular love interest for Chubby’s sister, Deirdre.”
    “The testing results showed that our audience would like to see her in a regular relationship,” Katrina explained. “Possibly but not necessarily leading to marriage.”
    “At first, I told God no fucking way,” Lyle confessed. “It’s my show. I make the creative decisions, not you and certainly not the damned audience. But the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. We can have a lot of fun watching the romance unfold. Really opens up a lotta new possibilities. Chad Roe’s gonna play him. Know him?”
    “I don’t believe we’ve met,” I said, which wasn’t exactly true. Merilee did Streetcar with him a few years back at the Long Wharf. Chad was one of those aging TV pretty boys who was still trying to prove himself as a serious actor. Mostly, he was a serious clod. “I don’t recall him doing a lot of comedy.”
    “He hasn’t,” Lyle confirmed. “But God loves him. Or rather his Q-score. He went through the roof in that Judith Krantz miniseries he did with Jackie Smith last season. So I’m working with him. Hasn’t been easy so far. Y’know how it is—we’ve got a certain format that works, and Chad’s an outsider. But we’ll get there. He’s a helluva nice