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Babe Ruth's Piano 2
Continued from two weeks ago...
Well, none of them really liked the man. Sorry, The Man. He insisted on being called that.
The Man stepped into the room with big clunky knocks. For The Man's first entrance, when they'd all first been gathered, he had come in wearing significantly louder shoes. He probably was a little bit toned down this evening because he'd removed the big shiny wooden soles from his last pair of shoes, after he nearly wound up in the gigantic fireplace which would have dominated the room had it not been for the massive table with the endless feast. Wooden shoes on a wooden floor may have sounded nice, but they were damn slippery.
His greasy little black locks of hair, which Lansing would have put good money on being unshakeable, and perhaps undentable, well, they turned out not to be so unshakeable, after all, as he skated across the floor, his face and arms going into a kind of conscious rigor-mortis. They didn't shake much, but they made Lansing glad he hadn't put any money down. Not that he had had the opportunity.
Here's what happened, going back to two nights ago: Lansing had stepped out of a reasonably nice restaurant... all right, here we go. Sorry, no vagaries. Well, no vagueness, anyway. He had stepped out of the Cheesecake Factory, down in Santa Monica, where he'd had dinner on his own. Outside, as he was trying to get to his car, Lansing was accosted by a couple of guys. One of the guys had a television camera, the other guy didn't, but nor was he the type you'd expect to see in front of the camera.
Not that Lansing was any judge of who was or was not suited to a particular role around a set of television production equipment. He was, by trade, a bookseller. And he was only in and around Los Angeles on a little vacation, not because Los Angeles was a hotbed of bookselling activity. Hell, he figured they didn't even bother to teach reading in Los Angeles these days, unless it came in a sort of centered, Courier-type with bold callouts for the characters names format. Maybe that's why he came. Or maybe it was the cheap tickets from Providence. He got from the East Coast to the West Coast, with a couple connections, for a reasonable fare, which doesn't necessarily make you a television exec.
However, no one would mistake the second man, without the camera, as the on-camera talent.
It turned out that he was the arm-turner.
Not literally, thankfully.
They were, as they explained to Lansing, in the employ of certain people who were running a certain show on television, and they were recruiting the talent. Lansing. And a few others.
He may have heard of the show, they told him. He hadn't, as it turned out, but the two were non-plussed. There were a lot of shows competing for market and mind share these days, so they were used to the blank responses.
They explained that they had followed him off the plane, as their employers had paid for the records of the inbound flights to LAX under the newly revised Patriot Act, which had a few loopholes. They didn't elaborate much on what they meant by that. They had followed him from the airport, to his hotel (it was pink, and he was completely blanking on the name, try as he might to recall it), and then followed him to the Cheesecake Factory, where they sat outside, by his car, and followed it up to the awning when the valet fetched it for him.
Based on his profile, a shocking amount of which had been gathered from his online reservation (through CheapTickets.com), the producers of the show had chosen him, and in the storyboards it looked like he was the early favourite. By the look in the guy's eye, he was pretty sure everyone got told that.
So they offered him the chance to be on this show, to be called Babe Ruth's Piano 2. He would get room, board, a small weekly allowance that paled in comparison to his surprisingly lucrative bookseller gig, and, of course, the chance to be on television. He had a few comments on two of the assumptions in those benefits. First off, if one were a bookseller, one wouldn't necessarily be surprised by the amount of money he got from doing it. Secondly, the men, as most Californians Lansing had ever met, assumed that people were genetically designed to harbour, in their deepest desires, a burning ambition to be on television. Still. Lansing wasn't so sure.
Still, what else was he going to be doing for the next few weeks? Not much.
And now he was looking down the double-barrel smile of The Man, who shone in the lights arrayed around the frieze of the room.
"Gentlemen... this evening... we begin."
to be continued...
disclaimer:
Happy Valentine's Day out there, all you.
Have a good one, don't drive drunk, no cutthroat tactics when you're playing checkers this year.
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