Race Branchwood cast his professional eye over the first item and did something he had never done in his radio career. He froze at the mike. But only for six seconds. He took a second hit of the coffee he was destined never to finish.
Clearing his throat, he tried again. "A Mrs. Bernadette O'Rourke was arrested today for-" Race stopped. "This is unbelievable," he said in a stunned whisper. "I mean, ladies and gentlemen, this is an unreal item I have just been handed. Let me-give me a moment here, please."
He tried again. "A Mrs. Bernadette O'Rourke was arrested today for assault and battery of a seventy-eight-year-old woman named Agnes Frug-that's F-R-U-G, like the dance. Now the reason Mrs. O'Rourke was compelled to coldcock the other woman is very simple. It seems that Ms. Frug-the script says Ms. attempted to force Mrs. O'Rourke's five-year-old son Kevin to put on a condom before he could enter the Walter F. Mondale Grammar School. It was Kevin's first day of school. He never got in the door. As a matter of fact, he's now in a foster home. Mrs. O'Rourke is in the county lockup. No, I am not making this up. This is an actual news item and it took place in our fair city."
Race Branchwood took a deep breath. He looked at the wall clock and saw that he was already sixty seconds into the Ninety-Second News spot and he had only read the first squib.
Then he said, "Ah, the hell with it." And with that he became Thrush Limburger forevermore.
"You know what really gets under my skin, ladies and gentlemen? It's the whackjobs. The whackjobs who think five-year-olds have to be indoctrinated in the scare of the month. And the feminasties who put them up to it. And the old toot grannies who get their jollies playing with condoms in public. My friends, if you were to take those old toot grannies and turn their biological clocks back fifty years to when they were twenty, and hand them a rubber, they would have A) slapped you right in the face and B) whistled up the cops. And you, my friend, would be doing hard time on a morals charge.
"So how is it fifty years later those same old ladies are spending their waking hours packaging prophylactics and passing them out to kids too young to even begin to understand what the hell these things are. I'll tell you why. Because before menopause hit them like a ton of bricks and took away the last shred of common sense they may or may not have had, they were terrified at the very thought of a condom. Now they can't get enough of them. And why not? They're out of the game. They can't play anymore. And these dried-up old biddies can't wait to throw these things around like bingo chips."
In the control room, the program director was turning purple. Thrush Limburger-he was Thrush Limburger now even if he didn't know it-never particularly liked the program director, so he ploughed on, hoping to get the man's face to match the particular shade of lavender Thrush happened to be wearing around his own neck that day.
The program director pointed at his watch, at the wall clock, and then at his forehead and pretended to pull the trigger of an imaginary gun, until he realized there was no stopping Thrush Limburger. He buried his head in his arms and Thrush continued on, an unstoppable juggernaut of opinion given voice.
"When are you people going to wake up out there? How many Bernadette O'Rourkes have to be hauled off and stripsearched? And how many Kevin O'Rourkes have to end up wherever some bureaucrat with the child protective services division happens to drop him before people take a stand against these idiots who think they know what's better for our kids than we do? Is everybody asleep, or am I the only one with a functioning brain? Does anyone share my moral outrage at this lunacy?"
"If this goes on, they'll be having these poor little kids simulating safe sex with one another just to satisfy these nutso do-gooders. "
The WAKO station manager thought he heard the booming voice of his most problematic DJ coming through the chrome hairdrier capping his head and snapped his fingers. The hairdresser turned and looked blank.
"Is that Thrush?" he asked.
"Yeah, and he's sure telling it like it is."
"What?" The station manager flung up the hairdrier. He always got his hair done at the ladies salon because they knew how to treat the subtle wave in his hair. He also had a crush on a manicurist named Bruce. He listened with growing horror.
"What gets me, my friends, is that our taxes go to keeping these rainbow-chasers in gear. You know, those so-called free condoms aren't free. Uh-uh. You paid for them. And if you keep turning the other cheek, next year they'll have you paying for people's sex change operations, and then when they find out they're still not happy, you'll be paying for them to change back. And after that, you'll be paying again when they sue the state or the city government for malpractice and loss of quality of life because after they get their dicks sewn back on, they still won't function properly. "
"Oh, my God. The sponsors will kill us," moaned the WAKO station manager, rushing from the salon in curlers.
Thrush Limburger was deep into his second quarter hour of commentary when the plug was pulled on him. The ON AIR sign went out and although he was dimly aware of it, Thrush didn't care. He kept going, a human icebreaker of public opinion.
In the control booth, the station manager and the program director were going nuts. Thrush had locked himself in the sound booth, so they could go as nuts as they cared to. He was going to speak his piece. If they wanted WAKO to be heard, they'd have to put him back on the air. After that, they could fire him all they wanted. Just so long as Thrush Limburger had an opportunity to sit on that idiot station manager during the firing.
Thrush Limburger was off the air all of seven minutes. The switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree. Thrush could tell because they were answering the incoming calls frantically. After three minutes of that, the station manager began pulling out his hair, steel curlers and all.
With a resigned gesture, he flipped the ON AIR switch.
And Thrush Limburger was back on the airwaves.
"For those of you just tuning in," he said without skipping a beat, "we're talking about Mrs. Bernadette O'Rourke, who is now languishing in jail because she thought her five-year-old son deserved to be shielded from some of life's more adult topics. Those of you who want to hear the Cowsills or Abba, or any of that tripe, we don't want you. Go find a station that does."
A groan came through the supposedly soundproof glass.
When he came off his shift, the station manager said, "Limburger, your fat ass is fired!"
"It's Branchwood, you pillow-biter."
As it turned out, they were both wrong.
Thrush Limburger became the hottest on-air radio personality in the Twin Cities. WAKO went all-talk with the next Arbitron book. And the station manager ultimately got a job next door in the hair salon, where his heart lay, anyway.
No one ever heard the name Race Branchwood again. Not even Thrush Limburger, who knew a good thing when he saw it and had his name legally changed to Thrush Limburger.
Within a year, he was all over Minnesota. From there, he self syndicated The Thrush Limburger Show, over his own network, the TTT Network. It stood for Tell the Truth. And he did. About everything.
By the time he had landed on TV, he was a genuine phenomenon, with a best-selling book, The Way the World Is, to his credit and rumors of a bright future in national politics swirling about his close-cropped head.
On the second anniversary of the day he had irrevocably become Thrush Limburger, the former Horace Branchwood was doing a restrospective.
"On the phone with me now is a very special person," he was telling his nationwide audience. "Now a lot of you may not know the name Bernadette O'Rourke, but she is a very special lady. It was her story, ladies and gentlemen, that got me started on my meteoric rise to-shall we say-greatness? How are you, Mrs. O'Rourke?"
"Just grand, Thrush."
"And little Kevin. How old is he now?"
"Seven. And he's now in the second grade in St. Mary's Catholic School, thanks to you."
"Ahem. For those who don't know, it was yours truly who brought the sad plight of Mrs. O'Rourke to national attention, resulting in the dropping of all charges and incidentally through the kindness and generosity of my original listening audience, the tuition that enabled Kevin to be enrolled in St. Mary's to begin with. Now you didn't call just to traipse down memory lane with me, Mrs. O'Rourke. Pray tell, what's on your mind?"
"It's this HELP nonsense, Thrush. It's starting to sound like that AIDS hysteria all over again. And over what? Eating bugs? Who would want to do that, for God's sake?"
"Exactly right. Exactly right. And I've been meaning to address this matter myself. Now for those who don't read your newspapers-and even for those who do-HELP is another one of those viral plagues we hear so much about. You can't get it from breathing other people's air, touching their skin, and being bitten by a wild animal. In fact, if you want to get HELP, you have to do all the biting. Even then you probably won't get it. My friends, the only-and I mean only-way you can contract this dreaded fatal, incurable scourge is to consume in great quantities-eating just one won't do it-a lowly bug. Ingraticus Avalonicus is its scientific name. There are those who claim the Indians called it the thunderbug. It's a tiny thing like a dull brown ladybug and about as appetizing. Certain whackjob environmentalists are proclaiming it to be the solution to famine worldwide. All we gotta do is eat this little critter every day and figure out a way not to die."
"It's madness, Thrush," Mrs. O'Rourke said. "Sheer madness."
"And now they're claiming that the bug doesn't cause HELP. It's the thinning ozone layer. Well, if it's the thinning ozone layer, why is it only bug-eaters are coming down with Human Environmental Liability Paradox? That, my friends, is the true paradox. But it's simple. Just bear with me because here at the Triple-T Network, we always . . . tell the truth."
The retrospective show soon became the HELP show. Everyone called in. Microbiologists. Immunologists. Meteorologists. Epidemiologists. Entomologists. Everybody had a windy answer, but no one agreed with anyone else's answer.
At the end of it, Thrush Limburger had had enough.
"I have just now decided after listening to all sides of this growing noncontroversy, that only my on-site presence can possibly dispel the ridiculous myths that surround HELP, the greatest noncrisis since Swine Flu.
"Tomorrow-and you're hearing it here first-I am going to the Nirvana West headquarters of PAPA, where I will broadcast this show live and reveal . . . the startling truth about HELP."
And in a darkened office not far from the White House, a telephone rang. The handset lifted with a click. And a thin voice said, "Harpoon that whale."
Chapter 5
The in-flight movie was Dances With Wolves, possibly the only thing that could make a Boston to San Francisco airline flight even more interminable than it was necessary to be.
Remo told the stewardess clutching the plastic earphones, "Thanks, but these clouds look real interesting."