Man and Boy Read Online Free Page B

real people with real lives and real stories—stories, not anecdotes. They offered us great television at rock-bottom prices. We offered them therapy, a chance to get it all off their chest, an opportunity to let it all just gush out over a million carpets.
    Of course if Jack Nicholson had suddenly called up begging to appear on the show then we would have immediately called a security guard to escort all the real people from the building. But somehow Jack never did. There were just not enough celebrities to go ’round these days.
    So we revered real people, real people who felt passionate about something, real people with a story to tell, real people with no career to protect. And someone up a tree with police dogs snapping at his unwashed bollocks sounded about as real as it gets.
    “How do you know him?” I asked her.
    “I used to go out with him,” she said. Marty and I exchanged a glance. We were impressed. So this Siobhan was a real person too.
    “It didn’t work out,” she said. “It’s difficult when one of you is up a tree for so much of the time. But we managed to stay close and I admire him—he really believes in what he’s doing. The way he sees it, the life-support systems of the planet are nearing exhaustion and all the politicians ever do is pay lip service to ecological issues. He thinks that when man enters the land, he should leave only footprints and take only memories.”
    “Fucking brilliant,” Marty said. “Who’s his agent?”
    ***
    I was up in the gallery watching a dozen screens showing five different shots of Marty interviewing a man who could inflate a condom with it pulled down over the top half of his head—he was actually pretty good—when I felt someone by my side.
    It was Siobhan, smiling like a kid on her first day at a new school who has suddenly realized that she is going to be okay.
    In the darkness of the gallery, her face was lit by the monitors on the wall. They are TV sets, that’s all, but we call them monitors. They provide the director with a choice of shots for transmission. Monitors don’t show only the image that is going out, but all the images that could be. Siobhan smiled up at them. She had a beautiful smile.
    “I thought that this Cliff didn’t do interviews,” I said. “Not since he was stitched up by that Sunday paper who said he was just in it for the glory and the hippy chicks.” Then I remembered she had gone out with him. “No offense meant.”
    “None taken,” she said. “That’s true, but he might do this one.”
    “Why? Because of you?”
    “No,” she laughed. “Because he likes Marty. He doesn’t consider him part of the media establishment.”
    I looked at Marty on the monitor, almost gagging with laughter as the condom exploded on the guy’s head. If anyone was part of the media establishment, it was Marty. He would have considered it a compliment.
    “And most of all,” said Siobhan, “because we’re live.”
    It was true that we were practically the last live show on TV. By now, most shows were what they called “as live”—meaning they faked the excitement of live television while always having the safety net of recording. Phony as hell.
    But The Marty Mann Show was the real thing. When you watched that guy with a condom on his head, it was actually being inflated at that very moment.
    “The way these eco-warriors see it,” Siobhan said, “the only place in the media where there’s no censorship is live television. Can I ask you something?”
    “Go ahead.”
    “Is that your MGF down in the parking lot? The red one?”
    Here it comes, I thought. The lecture about what cars do to the muck in the air and the hole in the sky. Sometimes I despair for the young people of today. All they ever think about is the future of the planet.
    “Yeah, that’s mine,” I said.
    “Nice car,” she said.
    ***
    They were all asleep by the time I got home. I brushed my teeth and undressed in the darkness, listening to my wife softly