"Smoke"
The First Season
Mort awoke in a fevered sweat and listened for applause,
but heard only the soft wet breathing of the air
conditioner. So there it was, "Smoke" in his dreams again.
Always like that: the minor-key version of the "Thinking
Song" unwinds to its last note, dum-dum-dah, the mind is
empty, Ned says, "So what's it going to be, Mort?" and the
answer comes, it just comes, God knows where it comes from,
but there it is again: "Is it the Battle of Bull Run, Ned?"
Ned's face is blank for a terrible wonderful second, he
frowns just a hair -- not so that anyone could see it on TV,
but up close Mort sees it and is stricken with fear -- and
then suddenly Ned erupts, "Mort-that's-absolutely-correct!"
and the money bags fall, and the funny version of the
"Thinking Song" strikes up, and Ned puts the golden nightcap
on Mort's head, and the audience is delirious, they're
chanting "Mort Mort Mort . . . " and it's real again:
winning on "Smoke."
Winning and winning and winning, winning forever,
Champion forever, undefeated King of "Smoke."
In the gloom Mort groped for his watch. 5:55 again. He
always awoke just before his wife called, awoke in time to
steel himself, to remind himself of his new life as
Champion. "This is my dream come true," he would say, just
like yesterday, just like every day. He stumbled out of bed
and stood at the window in his pajamas, squinting through
the venetian blinds, at the neon sign across the parking
lot. Some local boys had made a ritual of smashing the M's
with rocks; it was just about light enough now for "The Tru
peter's Ar s otor Hotel" to materialize into "The
Trumpeter's Arms Motor Hotel."
The phone rang, and he let it ring a few times before
picking it up.
"Ingrid," he said to his wife.
"Marion," replied the voice, so familiar and so strange,
a voice from some other time and place . . . from, well,
from Teaneck, New Jersey. "Marion, you know I love you," she
was saying again. "So do the kids. I know you love us too.
It's time to quit now, Marion. The tomatoes are in -- I had
to have a kid do it this year -- you know my back. Come on,
quit while you're ahead, you have enough now, you're the
Champion, don't wait until you lose."
"Don't say that, Ingrid. You're gonna jinx me. I'm sorry
about the tomatoes but I'm not gonna lose today, I know
that, I had the dream again, you know, with the 'Thinking
Song,' dum-dum-dah. I always win when I have that dream, I
always --"
"Four and a half months," she said in a square-shouldered
voice. "You said that after four months you'd quit for sure
-- and before that it was three months and before that six
weeks and --"
"I said I'd decide whether I'm gonna quit, not just
oh-I'm-gonna quit, not --"
"So decide!" Ingrid burst out, all at once sobbing harder
than she had the day before, harder even than she'd sobbed
that night on their way home from the PTA meeting. "Decide!
Marion!"
"I am deciding!" said Mort. "I'm thinking about it all
the time, but you keep . . . you keep confusing me! Stop
calling me . . . stop calling me that."
"What?"
"You know. Marion. I told you to stop calling me Marion,
it messes up my concen --"
"But you are Marion, you -- " Ingrid inhaled a sob and it
erupted as a wet rheumatic snort. "You! Y--"
She snarfed again and then Mort was jolted by a terrible
squealing and a series of sharp reports on the phone,
crackling like rifle fire.
"Ingrid!? Are you . . . what's . . .?! There was a long
anxious pause, and then "Marion -- Mort -- whatever," she
said, suddenly composed. "It's OK, the dog came in and I
didn't see him and I stepped on him and I dropped the
phone."
"What . . .dog?"
"What dog do you think? Trippy."
"Trippy? But you said Trippy was . . . was dead. You said
--"
"Well he got better -- I mean, I thought he was, but he
got better," said Ingrid. "But anyway. You have to decide.
Today. Now."
"I can't stand this pressure, I can't --"
The voice cut him off. "Marion, honey, this has really
got to stop. We have enough now. We don't need another
snowmobile, or any more money, not this kind of money, it's
not even real to you anyway. I don't know what's real to you
anymore. You know that I hate it when they call you that,
that name --"
"What, it's Mort, Mortimer Best, is that so bad? It's
kind of fun and anyway it's lucky, I can't change it now.
Like I told you a million times. It's just a TV name, so
what? Hey, I'm the Champ. C'mon, I'm still on vacation. How
many times do we have to go through this? This is my dream
come true. . . . Honey. . . ."
The awful pause was abruptly ended by a fierce pounding
on the door. "Hey, there's Burt with my ride, I gotta go.
We'll talk tomorrow. Love you."
Mort threw on his clothes, still thinking, Champion.
Champion for Life.
He was no longer frightened when Burt, the Assistant
Director, ferried him back and forth each day from the motel
to the studio, the whole sphere of his life here . . . Burt,
who had begun his television career as a stunt driver on The
Untouchables and still drove his battered Chevy like that.
Mort had gradually learned to contain his gasps and not to
clutch at the back of the driver's seat, which drove Burt
crazy. Burt usually said nothing for the entire journey --
unless it took longer than the 23 minutes he allotted for
it, which would make him erupt with curses and threats. This
was Mort's entire experience of the L.A. freeway and it was
enough to convince him that he'd be insane to chance it on
his own, despite the three or four cars he'd supposedly won
so far.
"Smoke" was telecast five times a week from a vast
decrepit warehouse in a forbidding industrial district of
Torrance, California -- a place less like
Hollywood than like the parts of New Jersey he was on
vacation from. ("Look, it's independently produced," Mort
had explained to Ingrid as a reason for "Smoke's" not
emanating from a fancy Hollywood network studio.) He didn't
care any more, not when he was winning.
As usual, Mort made his way through the back door and
into a maze of narrow passages, past piles of lumber and
crudely bricked-up doorways, into rooms that were rabbit
warrens of plywood partitions, over great coils of
electrical cables and scrap plastic duct. He was on his way
to Make-up, past Mr. Mellon's office, past the bitterly cold
air-conditioned Testing Room where he had first become a
Contestant so very long ago. Everywhere there was a fierce
racket of pounding hammers and screaming drills and whining
power saws. It always seemed strange, as he edged and
clambered and stumbled along, that he never saw any workmen
at all, only the detritus of their work, and he heard no
voices, only the clamor of their tools. "Smoke" was still a
new show, still evolving around the sun-like constant of
Mortimer's victories.
The sound stage was a large, dank space that had once
been slightly more than half of a basketball court, cut
diagonally with a wall made up of dirty plywood panels on
which were fastened random hunks of fibrous ceiling
material, all covered with years' accumulation of dust and
cobwebs. (Mort asked about this wall once and Burt grumbled,
not looking at him, "Deadens the sound.") The set itself was
also made of plywood, with all the visible surfaces painted
bright primary colors while the unseen and unpainted sides
of the contestants' and even the host's lecterns still
showed traces of concrete from when these panels had been
used as construction forms. The audience sat invisible in
the dark on bleachers at an oblique angle to the set, and
between the bleachers and the set there was a swarm of
cables, cameras, and lighting equipment. In all his time on
the show, Mort never learned the names of the technicians
who roamed the set with clipboards and earphones. Once he
tried to greet one of them with a friendly hello; Burt
hissed, "He can't even hear you," gesturing angrily at his
ears.
Mort let all this pass in his daily excitement. There was
fever a-building; he could feel it. The sound of the
audience filing in, the hurried instructions from Randy, the
Director, as Mort sat in a barber chair being made up,
alongside that day's two new Challengers, who were usually
thrilled just to be there at all . . . it was magic, he
loved it all.
And then: showtime. Mort took his place, the Champion's
place. The lights bore down on him, hot and pure and sweet.
Burt whipped the audience like an arsonist invoking the god
of fire, and Mr. Mellon's taped basso intoned the opening,
which by now Mort could recite almost as a mantra: "Welcome
to Smoke, the ever-so-conscious game of the Unconscious
Mind, the Royal Road to the Land of Dreams, where your
dreams of Fun and Prizes all come true, and now here's our
Host . . . Ned Henderson!"
"Smoke" was fundamentally simple, basically a
question-&-answer game with a free-association twist. A
"cloud" of categories -- Jazz Musicians,
Leguminous Vegetables, Toys of Other Lands, Famous
Secrets -- would appear at the start of each
round, and one by one clues would appear under each
category, all but one, which would light up with dancing
question marks, and that contained the Secret Word to be
discerned by the contestants, or as everyone incorrectly put
it, the "question" to be answered. The clues would
collectively indicate the Secret Word in some arcane way.
"Bix Beiderbeck," "Red Lentils," "Chanukah Dreidel," and
similar clues would light up one by one as the players
struggled to find a common denominator in the category
Spanish Explorers. Players each had five seconds to blurt
out a guess -- "Cortez!" "Magellan!" -- before the Big Buzz
sounded, ending that player's turn. Meanwhile, the
insidiously catchy "Thinking Song" played over and over,
question marks whirled and jigged, and Ned winkingly
cautioned the audience not to shout out wrong answers, which
they did anyway with all the more gusto. The tension would
build almost unbearably until someone would finally hit upon
the correct response, "Hernando de Soto," upon which a prize
would appear at the feet of the winning Contestant.
It so happened that part of the daily format on "Smoke"
was a short interview with each of the Contestants, normally
an innocuous and insipid question followed by an innocuous
and insipid answer. "So, Bob, I understand you've done a
little skydiving in your time." (Scattered whoops from the
audience followed by muted titters.) "Well that's right Ned
I mean well really just once I took this well it was like a
course you know and . . . ." A painful pause, barely rescued
by beaming Ned: "Well, that's just great, Bob, and now let's
go on to our returning Champion, Mort, who has amassed,
well, let's just say a tidy sum, a very tidy sum indeed, hey
hey hey."
The obvious, outward public facts about Mort's life were
exhausted after only a few days of questioning. From
Teaneck, New Jersey. Originally from Scranton. Yes, married.
Ingrid. Two kids. Teddy and Jennifer. Yes, shower curtains,
we make shower curtains and other bathroom products. Well,
actually it's an Associate's Degree, Ned.
The questions regarding Ingrid grew fewer and fewer, much
to Mort's relief. What more was there to say about Ingrid
anyway? What more was there to say to Ingrid? For the first
several months Mort and Ingrid conversed daily on the phone,
and Mort learned of one missed one family milestone after
another: his son's first basketball game (his team lost),
the baby's first tottering steps (she fell), the first
deliveries of Mort's prizes to Teaneck (they were broken).
After a few weeks the questions grew more probing . . .
insinuating, even. "So, Mort, any truth to the rumor that
you continued, well you know, even after you were married .
. . ?" Ned gestured obscenely, and the wild hoops and
hollers from the audience terrified Mort at first, as he
tried to stammer out a lie or an evasion. "I don't see how
you can . . . I mean, no, no, I don't even know what you're
talking about, I . . . no." It was not during this period
that Mort became a folk hero, with fans and detractors, and
the mail began pouring in, and the ratings soared, and Mort
became very, very happy. No, all that came a bit later. No
one remembers the merciless humiliations visited on Mort. No
one remembers the pain he was made to suffer under the lash
of Ned's interrogations. No one remembers!
Then one day, as the questioning crept towards him, and
the audience began to laugh and chant pro- and anti-Mort
slogans at Burt's instigation (Mort-Mort-don't-retort,
Mort-Mort-don't-retort. . . . ) (Whatcha-gonna-say-today,
Whatcha-gonna-say-today. . . .), just as Ned's face was
forming an inquisitive leer, Mort began to weep, and as his
tears sparkled in the glaring TV spotlights, a hush fell
over the mob -- the sound of one hand
clapping! -- and then two hands, and then a
cloudburst of wild applause and cheering. Mort became a hero
that day, a game-show immortal; there was no going back.
As Mort's real life -- his old Teaneckian life
as Marion W. Clay -- had been gradually drained of
information, he became a walking, breathing fictional
character, the way that living wood slowly, gradually
becomes petrified wood. Henceforth Ned's questions to Mort
concerned his fine deeds, his exploits of wit and daring,
his fine-honed intellect. He blushed and denied having saved
nineteen "special" children from a bus that had plunged into
icy waters; he grinned and chuckled, "No, no!" when Ned
cajoled him about his chess championship, or his webbed
toes. The more he denied the more he was adored for his
modesty and the subtlety of his wit. And each day his legend
grew -- why couldn't Ingrid understand
that? -- and all the top TV script guys vied for
the honor of submitting the next day's question.
The real breakthrough for "Smoke" came a few months after
its inception, when Mr. Mellon convinced canny syndicators
to move the show from its late-morning time slot clear
across the clock to midnight. A new ad campaign struck just
the right note. Once every hour a lovely model wearing
little more than a golden nightcap and a very loose
midnight-blue "Smoke"-ing jacket cooed, "Tonight. Midnight.
Wouldn't you like to come and dream with me?" Although the
show was still taped in the middle of the day, it began to
draw a new kind of crowd, younger and rowdier and hipper,
the kind of people who fed on "Smoke's" inside humor exactly
because there was no getting the jokes.
The game was fast becoming ritualized, and in that first
year of "Smoke's" run the show's popularity grew with each
elaboration of the rites. The audience sang along with the
"Thinking Song," and stamped their feet twice after the
final note -- always twice, never one time or three times.
The same category, Fruits of the Orient, always seemed to
come up "randomly" for Mort, to wild, rapturous applause.
When losing Contestants were escorted off the stage just
before the Grand Prize Round, the audience would chant:
"Fair-and-square, fair-and-square, fair-and-square . . ."
and Mort would once again be arrayed in the Champion's
midnight-blue "Smoke"-ing jacket and golden nightcap.
At first the Grand Prize was different each
time -- a car or a boat or a giant sack with a big
dollar sign on it -- but more and more regularly
the Grand Prize was The Rest of the Secrets, a rough,
heavy-looking box, supposedly iron, really plastic, covered
with chains and padlocks, and large enough to hold a
person -- in fact, it did hold a person, a child,
whose little legs protruded through holes in the bottom so
the box could tapdance onto the stage while the audience
whistled (always whistled, never sang) "Some Enchanted
Evening." Mort kept winning The Rest of the Secrets (and
wagering it away, and winning it again only to lose it
again); once a week Ned would offer Mort the chance finally
to open the box, but just at the moment of revelation the
"Thinking Song" would strike up again, signaling the end of
the show. Maybe next time . . . there seemed to be no end of
next times in those days.
Later, after autographs and fan mail, Burt shook his keys
and pointed mutely at the door. Back to The Trumpeter's
Arms, back to a barely warm meal served in small foam
containers, back to the bed with its extra pillow and its
Magic Fingers and its dreams that just kept coming true.
The Second Season
Evelyn W. Marcus was chosen as a "Smoke" Contestant at
the same time as Mort -- that is, on the very
first day the show was telecast. She had lost, well, fair
and square, fair and square, but on the first day of
"Smoke's" second year Mr. Mellon and Randy had the idea of
bringing her back as a regular Challenger for Mort's
crown -- that is, for the golden nightcap. At
first, of course, Mort couldn't have cared less; he'd beaten
her once, he'd beat her again . . . and again and again, if
that's what it took.
This was not exactly the same mousy little Evelyn Mort
had beaten so handily a year before. Now she was Renate du
Lac, the Lady in the Green Dress, and she took up residence
in the room next to his in The Trumpeter's Arms, and
accompanied him every day to and from the studio. Her
rustling silks became part of the pre-game music Mort faced
each day. Mort no longer felt quite so lordly in his make-up
chair, not with Renate just a few feet away, Renate with her
very own hairdresser and manicurist. She'd had plenty of
coaching in that hiatus, anyone could see that. Her voice
was now a sinuous purr, her words erudite and her syntax
impeccable. Her lips seemed fuller than before, and Mort
couldn't stop himself from noticing the new perfection of
her figure.
She was cast as Mort's foil; that is, she was sly and
dark whereas he was guileless and open. She would be the
well-bred intellectual; he the K-Mart Everyman. Both had
their partisans. Generally the bulk of the fan mail still
favored the Mortian dynasty, but occasionally, maybe once
every ten days or so, Renate carried home the heavier mail
sack. It was during this time, too, that Mort began to
receive those unsettling anonymous hate letters, with the
message "one day She will win" arranged in letters cut from
newspapers. All right then, thought Mort, I'm still the
Champion, let no one forget that.
Ned too began to develop a following of his own, to
cultivate a certain persona, less the snide-yet-oleaginous
emcee type, more the reserved, professorial, even faintly
melancholy type. He took to wearing outsized spectacles
(just windowpanes; his eyes were fine) and tweed jackets
with leather elbow patches. Ned became a kind of philosophe
for the tabloid set, and in fact managed to land a weekly
column in USA Today where he aired his homespun views
beneath headlines like "Why All the Fuss?" and "What Makes
Me So Sad." Newsweek once gave him two and a half pages to
enlarge upon the state of "Games and Play in Today's
America." Naturally enough there were numerous references to
his colleagues on "Smoke" and in this very same issue, it
turned out, there was a highly favorable review of "Smoke"
with special distinction given to both Mr. Mellon, "the
genius behind the dream" and to Mort himself, hailed as
"America's finest dreaming mind."
This was the pinnacle of "Smoke's" success. Given the
enormous splash the show made during that period, it was
inevitable, then, that the waters would grow dark with
circling sharks.
Yea, the media buildeth up, and the media dasheth down.
The question Is "Smoke" a fix? became a hot topic. There
wasn't much real evidence beyond the murmured accusations of
a few disgruntled former employees, but the case of "Smoke"
became a national bellwether for a short time. Commentators
like George F. Will grumbled in print about the rising tide
of sham in our national life; comics found the allegations
about "Smoke" to be an almost inexhaustible source of
material. What particularly galvanized public attention was
the figure of Mort himself, Mort and his uncanny knack of
summoning up the answers to increasingly arcane and bizarre
questions, usually at some critical moment in the show when
it looked as though Renate would finally unseat him. As the
"Thinking Song" wound mercilessly down to its final note,
Mort's face would run bloodless through all the stages of
terror and despair, and an excruciating instant before the
Big Buzz he would blurt out "Fresno, California!" or "1623!"
or "Coelacanths!" and the audience would burst into ecstatic
applause, delirious with the joy of Mort's having delivered
the goods once again.
Mort quite inadvertently brought much of the speculation
on himself with a couple of chance remarks that were
featured on all the network news shows. One was Mort's first
sally of completely unscripted wit, which caught the
Director and cameramen entirely off-guard and spoiled the
lead-in to a commercial, and which met with a furious
response from Randy after the show. Just a few days later he
was in hot water again with his correct
response -- "Nassau, the House of
Orange!" -- to a question for which even Mr.
Mellon had anticipated a wrong answer; what pissed them off,
as much as his temerity to ad lib, was his prefacing his
answer, "Oh! I know this one!"
"That was risky, Mort. Very dumb and risky," Burt
growled, as Mort was getting out that evening at the motel.
But still: was "Smoke" a fix? As with all interesting
questions, the answer is: yes and no. In the beginning the
show was absolutely committed to irreproachable honesty, and
Mort's first few triumphs were real enough. Later, though,
the question-setters were "invited" by the Director to
examine Mort's file, to learn his background and hobbies,
and to find therein a rich source of question material. Aha,
so Mort had once been given to long rambles in the woods to
collect mushrooms. No wonder, then, that the category Fungus
Among Us came up so often.
Mort knew nothing of this; his conscience was clear. He
could rest peacefully each night in The Trumpeter's Arms,
dreaming an infinity of victories, and in time he could
dream well into the morning light, because the calls from
Teaneck had long since stopped disturbing him. (It was only
much later, near the end, that books and magazines would
appear mysteriously on the little nightstand beside Mort's
bed each morning, with bookmarks inserted here and there,
showing the way to highlighted passages. . . . But that's
getting ahead of the story.)
At the height of the show's fame, a "reporter" appeared
at Mort's door at 6:30 am one day, with a photographer
looming behind him. When Mort answered their knock they
burst in, the reporter shouting, "Is it true that the door
between your room and Miss du Lac's is unlocked?" as the
photographer snapped pictures of a sleepy, bewildered
Mortimer in his faded pajamas and of the door (or "gateway
of love" as it appeared in the next issue of the National
Enquirer). The reporter tried the knob; it turned easily.
Finding the door sticky, he threw his shoulder against it
twice before it sprang open, to reveal
Renate -- Renate powdered and coifed, Renate
attired in a shimmering green satin negligée, Renate
caught dabbing perfume into her cleavage. "Oh!" she cried.
As the photographer snapped away, the reporter stood in
the doorway grinning demonically and breathing hard from his
exertions. He drew a pocket tape-recorder from his pants and
thrust it at Renate. "Miss du Lac! Any truth to the rumors
that you've secretly married Mr. Best? That you're expecting
Mr. Best's love-child?"
She blushed demurely and with a shy girlish smile
murmured, "No comment" in a low, breathy voice that Mort had
never heard before.
The Final Season
By the time of the show's second anniversary, everything
was coming unglued. The tabloids and even the legitimate
press were full of gleeful tattlings about Mort and Renate,
Ned lost his stature as pundit, and articles began to appear
with titles like "As the Dream Goes Sour." There was a new
meanness in the audiences that showed up in Torrance, a
meanness that seemed to give the show a nasty smell.
Mr. Mellon responded to the subsequent plummet in
"Smoke's" ratings with lots of frantic tinkering that only
made a bad job worse. Randy began to drink heavily and would
sometimes give himself over to fits of sobbing, blubbering
to anyone who would listen, "Mellon's lost it. Lost it!"
Mr. Mellon's first big gamble was to recast the show as
"Smoke Deluxe." During this short-lived phase, there would
be no more of the childish, harmless little
tortures -- a dousing of water, a pie in the
face -- meted out to contestants who gave wrong
answers; all that was eschewed as undignified. Ned and even
Mort had to wear tuxedoes, Renate a tiara and a lorgnette.
There were more categories like 18th-Century Opera and fewer
like Wrestling Greats.
Most significant of all, the program experimented with
celebrity contestants in the place of the poor anonymous
lambs who were always sacrificed to Mort and Renate. Sure
enough, there was a brief surge in the ratings, but soon it
became apparent that the chemistry of the show had been
altered for the worse. Mortimer and Renate and even Ned
seemed to lose their special shine when juxtaposed with such
luminaries as Dr Joyce Brothers, Tony Orlando, and Charro.
By then, of course, Mortimer and Renate were celebrities in
their own right, but it was different with
them -- the world of their fame was tightly
contained within the format of the show, and it was jarring
to see "real" celebrities alongside them. One of the photos
in a Time magazine exposé showed Don Knotts
gesticulating maniacally while Mort stood nearby with an
oddly sad, troubled expression. The caption said it all:
"What's wrong with this picture?"
The ratings recovered only briefly before resuming their
inexorable descent, and then when the end was in sight Mr.
Mellon saw fit to reshuffle the deck yet again, and "Smoke
Classic" brought back the pies and pratfalls. By then,
though, it was too late, and there remained one final
desperate gambit to be tried: Mort would have to lose.
In order to maximize the splash this would make, Mr.
Mellon and Randy began a whispering campaign for the benefit
of the press to the effect that Mort was vulnerable, that he
was not a shill as nearly everyone now believed, that the
standards of Challengers were forever improving, and that
Renate had learned about "smart drugs" and was looking
particularly sharp lately, etc. There was even a date being
bandied about for Mort's possible demise: November 11, right
at the height of Sweeps Week. When he heard this, he felt a
slight pang: that was the anniversary of Marion and Ingrid's
wedding, so very long ago, so very far away in New Jersey.
On the morning of Friday, November 2nd, Mort climbed
wearily into the Chevy. Renate was late. Again. Mort hadn't
slept well himself, and he hadn't dreamed in weeks. Burt
broke his morning silence for the first time in over two
years. He twisted his attention toward the back seat and
croaked: "You're history, pal. They're writing you out. I
saw."
"Saw what? Who?"
"Doesn't matter. I know."
"What do you know? How do you know?" Mort asked in alarm.
"I like knowin stuff. Really knowin stuff." That "really"
was a dig, Mort knew. Just then Renate, looking shopworn and
flyblown, emerged from her room. Burt would say no more.
The following Monday, the 5th of November, Burt never
turned up at all. Renate, Mort learned from the desk clerk,
had checked out of The Trumpeter's Arms on Saturday, leaving
no forwarding address. A strange mood settled over Mort, one
he had never quite experienced before, compounded of
sleeplessness, enormous relief, and barely suppressed panic.
With the last of the money in his wallet he paid a taxi
driver to take him to the studio, and was not surprised to
find the door locked and a crudely hand-lettered sign taped
to it: "Canselled."
Mort spent the better part of the afternoon circling the
building, searching for an entrance. He heard muffled shouts
inside -- somebody must have found a way in. At
last he found a three-foot length of pipe and was able to
pry open a flimsy freight door. He slipped inside, and
waited a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the gloom.
Everything was different. The labyrinth of plywood corridors
was gone, dismantled into more or less neat stacks. Mr.
Mellon's office was empty. The photos were gone, the big
desk was gone. Mort hurried to the sound stage. There were
no cameras, no cables, no sets. Nothing -- just some young
men playing basketball on the court where a diagonal line of
grime was all that was left of the acoustic wall.
"Can I watch?" Mort called out to the men, and when they
ignored him he climbed to the top row of the bleachers and
took a seat. As he watched the game progress below, he found
himself softly whistling "The Thinking Song."
© Michael Fleming
Covelo, California
June 1996
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