11 
Ladies of the hour —
“It’s the ‘Ricky Remsleep Show’! Starring that underground favorite, RICKY REMSLEEP! Co-author of the new Topside musical Kingdom Come, with music by George Gershwin. Ricky’s special guest, Scheherazade Ginsberg. Now, here’s Ricky, so let’s GET IT ON!”
Yay! Crazy! Do it!
Amid the raucous welcome of his audience, Ricky Remsleep stepped out of the studio wings, denimed and leathered, guitar slung at the ready. The studio was packed as usual with his tireless following, lower children who had overdosed no later than 1970, anachronistic as a reunion of Confederate veterans. Ricky knew his people and his time. The guitar was an old twelve-string. We came first with the truth, his alienated defiance told the camera. Dig it or fuck off. Ricky banged out a chord on the twelve string. “Whatta you got, Brown Shoes?”
“WHATTA YOU GOT?” his groupies bellowed back.
“BROWN SHOES!”
Their ragged chorus behind him, Ricky hit another chord and belted his trademark tagline. “WHATEVER YOU GOT, WE’LL FIGHT IT WHILE WE CAN!”
He moved to a tall stool, fingering the guitar as the applause subsided.
“Okay, outa sight. I’m with my own people.” He picked out a seventh and diminish. “You’ve all had your minds bent with this Candor jazz. Just want to mention my famous collaborator, a cat by the name of Kaufman, George S. Case you children don’t remember, he’s from the time when we all did corn flakes in the morning. Real B.C. Well, we’re getting our show on, but there’s a language problem, and I’ve been giving old George some hands-on training in relevance.”
He rippled out a few soft chords.
“Got a real down girl coming out now. Maybe some of you heads remember her from our own time of peace and love. Let’s lay a welcome and good vibes on – Scheherazade Ginsberg!”
The polite applause surged to enthusiasm as his guest bounced out of the wings to her camera marks. Scheherazade’s sense of costume was equal to the occasion: hair a startling burnt umber, braided and held with Apache beads, full buckskins decorated with Thunderbird motifs. She wore soft calf-length boots and an elaborate belt of Mexican silver around her thin waist, both hands aloft in the V-sign of peace and love, smiling with that half-innocent, half-sardonic manner perfected by Joan Baez that said to a whole generation: We are refugees from our own culture.
“Let’s do our thing!” she sang out.
“Right on,” said Ricky.
“And if nothing else is beautiful or real, we are.”
“Tell it like it is” Ricky motioned her to the guest stool. “You people, maybe some of you got straight enough to catch the Candor trial on the tube. Don’t put it down too far because Scheherazade has something to say.”
Perched on her stool, one booted foot hiked on a rung, Scheherazade pointed to the studio audience, collaring them verbally from the start. “Listen. I know Lance Candor. I was there demonstrating when they took him in. He’s a man with a soul and a mission. Let’s do it, then, Let’s get out and be counted for Lance.”
Watching the program with a concentrated Joshua Speed, Coyul had to laugh in spite of himself. “I’ve always thought of Ms, Ginsberg as an unguided missile.”
Speed kept his eyes on the screen. “Candor’s been bundling her.”
“Bundling?”
“She’s been coming to dinner and staying for breakfast.”
“Been snooping, Josh?”
“Oh... courtesy of the night desk clerk at the Hilton Hereafter. Fellow named Bixby. I got him off a death sentence once. He’s always been grateful.”
“Useful.”
“Not half as useful as she might be.”
“I wouldn’t trust her to be a coherent witness.”
“Maybe not,” Speed mused over folded hands. “But the very hell of a hole card. You saw what Helm did yesterday with the audience. He’s beginning to control them.” His deepset eyes flicked up to Coyul. “Ever see a lynch mob work themselves up into a real Christian mood?”
“Hey, man.” A bearded and bellied youth in a dirty T-shirt and denim vest rose to rebut Scheherazade. “Don’t put us on. This Candor dude is white bread from the Bible Belt. We ain’t a bunch of fuckin’ Fundys.”
“Get straight, man,” Scheherazade went back at him. “Ricky remembers the Movement better than you do. There was peace and love, yeah, and down with Dow Chemical and all that, but some of you got into Jesus, too. Remember? Fuckin-A you do. Lance is a fighter for a cause. You gonna turn off on him because he ain’t Abby Holman? Fuck you, man.”
She bounded of the stool and spiked on her camera marks again,
“Look,” Scheherazade gave it to them straight. “Lance is a Fundy, sure. A Christian Reconstructionist. But he’s counter-culture like us. Don’t let the squares cop all the tube time. Stand up and be counted for a revolutionary. Gonna be some changes. Yeah!”
She jabbed a finger at a soulful young girl in a flowing red moo-moo who had risen, weaving a little. “What’s your story, girl?”
The girl spoke in a foggy lisp. She seemed to have trouble focusing her eyes. “I just wondered, like I’m very heavily into astrology —”
“No shit?” Scheherazade forgot all else at mention of the sacred. “Me too. I live by it.”
“Too much,” the girl enthused in a sibilant rush. “What’s your sign?”
“Triple Scorpio.”
“Oh, what a conjunction! Like 2001.”
“Speaking of that.” Ricky made a bid to get his audience back, “I was rapping with George Gershwin the other day —”
“Talk about history,” Scheherazade jeered. “He was back before the Stones even.”
Another girl bobbed up from the front row, spaced out and all of sixteen. “Let’s do the I Ching!”
“Crazy!” For Scheherazade, Ricky, the show and causes were forgotten. “Uranus is in my sign and I got a feeling the changes are gonna be like awesome.”
Sharing diet cola and doughnuts in bed (she had warned him often on the dangers of coffee), Lance and Scheherazade turned on the TV the moment they woke up, the way a smoker would reach for his first cigarette as a matter of course. They reran her guest segment three times before idly switching channels, coming in on a florid commercial.
“Sherry? Look at this.”
An illustrated book cover zoomed out of the distance straight at Lance.
THE HERO’S LADY
by Letti Candor
The commercial had nothing if not production values – urgent, breathless, overshot and scored for several massed symphony orchestras. They might have been advertising perfume. Lance felt sick.
“Sherry, look.”
She did. “Jesus shit.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“No wonder she never had time to visit you.”
“Sherry, I swear to God I didn’t know anything about this.” She found his crotch under the covers and patted it. “I know, lover.”
On Earth the commercial would have cost millions: an idyllic scene of a boy and girl running in slow motion through a green field.
MALE VOICE-OVER: They came from the American Heartland with a dream, a faith... and a date with destiny.
QUICK CUT TO —
A man aiming a pistol at the President. ACTOR LANCE diving between them. ACTRESS LETTI SCREAMING PHOTOGENICALLY, CUT TO —
ACTRESS LETTI (with an accent never farther south than Staten Island) in tearful close-up, tortured but defiant: “My husband died a hero! If the state of Kansas won’t admit that because of his faith, God will.”
— as the shot cut in a triumphant welter of strings to a simple but dignified funeral, then ACTOR LANCE running toward ACTRESS LETTI over a field of pink clouds.
VOICE-OVER: A love story that has lasted beyond death, (DISSOLVE TO BOOK JACKET) The Hero’s Lady by Letti Candor. Her own story, available now from Burning Bush Books.
FEMALE VOICE-OVER: Reading it is an act of love.
“So’s a vibrator,” Scheherazade razzberried through a mouthful of doughnut. “And it’s more fun.”
Lance stared at the screen, confused and hurt. “So that’s where she’s been.”
“Come on, who cares? I went on the tube for you too, didn’t I?”
“Writing a book” Something like informed disgust adulterated Lance’s innocent mien. “Letti couldn’t write a check.”
“It’s cool, okay?”
“This makes me feel —”
“I’m here.” Scheherazade slid her hand under the covers again to stroke his thigh and adjacent attractions. “I’m here, baby.”
Lance moaned and buried his face in her breasts. He felt lost in a quicksand swamp of Helm, Speed and duplicity that now included Letti. The world was sinking under him. “Running across pink clouds...”
“That part was kind of nice,” Scheherazade remembered wistfully, slithering out of her pajama top. “I mean, if we could do that sometime without being square, you know?”
“Reaffirm me,” he gasped, clutching at her. “Validate me, Right now.”
Through an endless series of commercials, Scheherazade validated the bejeezus out of him.
“It’s the ‘Georgia Grieves Show’!”
Applause, The cameras panned over the studio audience full of older women in hats and a sprinkling of captive husbands. Timing herself expertly into the ovation, Georgia Grieves, soignée and tailored, strode out to face the studio audience, lifted her arms in greeting, then took a seat on the small podium as the camera cut to —
“Georgia’s special guest – Letti Candor!”
In the guest chair, Letti smiled directly into the camera.
“And Mrs, Candor is here today to tell us about her new book.”
Letti held The Hero’s Lady upside down as Grieves named the title.
“Which will be on the stands in about five minutes; isn’t that right, Letti?”
Letti giggled. Her makeup wrinkled slightly, “That’s right, Georgia.”
Grieves removed her glasses, habitual when she wanted to get down to it just between girls. “You’ve written an absolutely riveting book, Letti. I absolutely couldn’t put it down.”
To be accurate, she couldn’t pick it up. A production assistant skimmed the volume and wrote a short synopsis which Grieves studied for five minutes before air time. “Did you write it with anyone?”
“Well, I did have a li’l help on things like English and spelling and how to put down mah ideas,” Letti allowed demurely. “It was all just comin’ out so fast.”
“Ye gods and small fishes.” Dottie Parker turned off her TV in disgust and swore with a facility undimmed by death. She poured her first scotch of the afternoon, her eighth for the day. “Jus’ comin’ out so fay-ast. Horseshit. Which is spelled with an e, madam.”
Dottie finished most of the scotch in one practiced pull. “Oh dear, that does soften the pain. How are the mighty fallen,” she mourned to her poodles, “and how the appalling become mighty.”
She was sorry she had agreed to ghost the miserable book, except she had to cure her writer’s block some way. Beyond that she had always been, dead or alive, a world-class masochist.
Back at celebrity, Letti was telling Georgia Grieves and the cosmos at large of her husband’s ordeal. Joshua Speed, she asserted, must have been a carpetbagger while he lived; she knew the look and the breed. Letti became noticeably more “Southrun” as she progressed. She spoke of her idyllic life with Lance, the joy they found in life and the Hereafter, of their faith. She struggled with and then surrendered to copious tears, blotting deftly with tissues, then went under again in a fresh convulsion. Disinterested watchers like Coyul were amazed at her flow of tears and how little damage such monsoons had on Letti’s mascara. Her diction might falter but her makeup was from the Alamo.
“When... when ah think of what that awful Speed will try to do to mah husband on the stand. Why he don’t even go to church, I hear. Just a trashy, awful man in the employ of the Devil.”
Passing fresh tissue, Georgia observed with left-handed admiration, “It’s wonderful how your makeup doesn’t even run.”
Letti gulped, gasped and blotted. “Ah use Ever After.” She showed most of her upper plate in a plucky smile broadened by her confidential agreement with Ever After to do their next produced commercial – which, she was assured, would be as major as the one for her book. Her nice Reverend Strutley had an interest in her and also Ever After.
“We’ll be right back – after this.”
CUT TO SPOT COMMERCIAL: Ever After, the post-life pancake that keeps you looking almost alive in his eyes.
“That woman is connected to Great Salt Lake,” Coyul marveled over his sushi. “I haven’t seen that many tears since the Republicans lost to Roosevelt.”
“For all her agony, she made sure the book stayed on camera.” Purji’s normal expression, that of a slightly erotic angel, was now rather curdled. “Lord, Someday my wonderful Keljians will come to this and call it civilization. Don’t you get discouraged?”
“Tell me about it.” Coyul pointed with his chopsticks, “More hamachi, dear?”