Today I'm sharing chapter eleven of "Thawing A.C. Nielsen"! I hope you'll read it. I'm trying to share a chapter a day, although at some point I will have to take them all down as the book starts to go to press.
I am wondering if any of you would consider reviewing the book. It will be released on Amazon/Kindle on October 18th. I need reviews posted to amazon on the release day, if possible. You get a FREE pdf, word.doc or .mobi (Kindle ebook file) copy and plenty of time between now and mid-October to read it. Let me know, friends!
Chapter Eleven places us back in "current times" for the book (May, 2013 at this point). Here Kate is introduced to a crazy bunch of characters "looking after" A.C. Nielsen while he is in cryostorage. She also learns about Gloria Dunham's bizarre activities, many of which are copies of goofy things that her old friend Howard Hughes did late in his life (this took a lot of research,and all the Hughes stuff here is true). You'll also see Fred McMurray alluded to (My Three Sons sitcom, but also Hollywood good stuff like The Caine Mutiny). A major character is intro'd in this chapter, but you wouldn't exactly guess yet how important this fellow becomes later.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
May, 2013
“Kate, do you have a few minutes? I’d like to introduce you to a few people this morning,” Mike said over the intercom.
“Sure, give me a sec. I’ll come on over.” Kate closed her laptop, stood up, and strolled over to the mirror in her office. Yeah, looking good in this fancy monogrammed lab coat. Wonder how you get a job as a healthcare clothing model. Yeah, I’m totes the girl for that. Unless I spill food on it, then I’m a dead ringer for Tina Fey in 30 Rock. And who doesn’t want Liz Lemon to be head of research for their frozen zillionaire Grandpa?
“Okay, I’m here,” Kate announced as she arrived at Mike’s office.
“Good. We’re going to stroll down to the end of the C wing. That’s where the more modern pods are, where the patients who have the best chance of revival are in storage. There’s one more room down there that you haven’t entered yet, I believe.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed it. Sometimes there are people hanging around there, so I haven’t gotten too close. Some kind of special room? Or are those security people? Though they sure don’t look like security.”
“I’ll explain when we get there. It will be an unusual experience for you. I think I can say that with confidence.” They headed to where the C wing spun off the hub onto its own path and walked down the long passageway where the more modern pods aligned along the walls to their left and right.
“Here it is. Notice the name on the brass plaque?” Mike asked.
“‘The A.C. Nielsen Apartment’—huh? An apartment? Like somebody lives in there all the way down this wing? Isn’t A.C. Nielsen that TV ratings company from back in the day?”
“Yes. And actually, the company still exists right here in northern Illinois. It’s based in Schaumburg, near Woodfield Mall and the Legoland. Mr. Nielsen is in the apartment. Let’s go ahead and knock.” Mike rapped on the door three times, paused, then knocked two more times. The door swung open a few seconds later.
“Hello, Mr. Burgess. How you doin’ today?” a friendly African-American gentleman of about forty or so inquired. He had closely cropped gray hair and was dressed quite nattily, sporting a bright green bow tie and brown tailored suit, with a green vest that matched the tie. He looked like a young version of Morgan Freeman.
“Very well, DePaun. Doing very well,” Mike answered. “And you? I see we have a crowd in here today.”
“That we do. We’re about to watch Leave It to Beaver. Bennie thinks he’s got the dialog down for this whole episode, but Miles the naysayer, of course, says otherwise. There’s fifty dollars riding on whether Bennie can nail it. So come in, Mr. Burgess. Come on in, miss.”
“Thank you, DePaun,” Mike said. “Fellas, you’re going to have to turn the TV down. I brought someone important in to meet you. DePaun, you know you don’t have to hang here all the time. When your shift is over you can go home, or go feed the birds in the park, or whatever else you want to do. Anyway, I have someone here I want you to meet. DePaun, this is Miss Katherine Pearson, our new head of research. She’s a smart one—graduated from Northwestern summa cum laude. Bachelor’s and master’s degrees in microbiology.”
“Glad to make your acquaintance, Miss Pearson,” DePaun said as he reached out to shake Kate’s hand.
“A pleasure, I am sure,” Kate responded.
“And here, coming your way is Bennie,” Mike said. “Never missed a day of work—not a single day.”
Bennie smiled and shook Kate’s hand. He looked to be Filipino. A big man with an even bigger smile. She guessed he was about six feet tall and three hundred pounds or so.
“And this,” Mike added, “is Miles. He’s our resident brainiac. Knows more about anything and everything than you would ever care or dare to stuff into your own brain. Also quite the dresser, eh, Miles?” Miles looked to be in his early to mid-thirties, Caucasian, dressed very slacker in a faded Hanson MMMBop T-shirt, severely wrinkled khaki shorts, and dirty orange Crocs. Greasy hair and an underachieving goatee completed the look. He was the sartorial opposite of DePaun. Please, Lord, Kate thought, let the T-shirt be a satirical comment on the state of the pop music business.
Miles stepped forward and shook Kate’s hand. “Glad to meet you, Miss Pearson,” he said, barely making eye contact.
“Oh, please, you can call me Kate. Katherine or Miss Pearson I can do without.”
“Katherine, huh?” Miles said. “But you should call yourself Kat, not Kate. Kat like in The Hunger Games, you know. Kat—Katniss Everdeen. That would be epically cool.”
“Hmm, well I don’t know about that. Why would I want to be like some pop figure in a big-budget movie or in a book read by sixteen-year-olds? I’d rather just be myself,” Kate said. Mike nodded in approval.
“Well, suit yourself,” Miles said with disdain. “You’ve got a chance at an awesome nickname and you don’t take it? Weird.”
Kate tried to hide a smirk. “And your name? Miles? Got a last name to go with it?”
“He won’t tell us his last name. Must be pretty bad. Maybe it’s Miles Hitler,” Benny teased.
“My full name is none of your business!”
“Yeah, tell us your whole name, man. We’ve been waiting,” DePaun said, “come on.”
“I’ll bet payroll knows his full name,” Kate ventured, grinning slyly.
“Nope, Kate,” answered Mike Burgess. “He’s a volunteer—working for free here.”
“Well, now I am even more impressed with Miles, the man with, apparently, just one name—like Bono or Madonna, huh?” Kate let a hint of sarcasm slip out just to see if anyone might notice.
Miles cracked his knuckles over and over, then said, “You know, I have a better idea for you if you don’t want to be Kat from The Hunger Games. How about Kat, the main character from Gravity Rush? You play it?”
“Um, no.” Kate wondered if this Miles fellow expected her to revert back to life in high school, or, shudder, junior high. Didn’t he realize that most girls-slash-women just weren’t into video games?
“Seriously? It’s an awesome video game for PS3. You get to control gravity, battle the Nevi monsters, and you also have a rockin’ black cat, too. If I were a girl I would definitely dig having the name Kat.”
“I’m just happy she doesn’t have red eyes like Kat in Gravity Rush,” Bennie exclaimed. “Those red eyes are really creepy, you know.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Miles looked away, shuffling his feet.
“Well, gentlemen, I’m quite happy to make your acquaintance, but I think I will pass on the name Kat for now. I’m happy with Kate or Katherine. And besides, I have no time for movies and video games. There’s this thing called work I do.” Once again, Mike nodded his approval and grinned. Kate was taking down the nerds in the room, especially Miles.
“What about you, DePaun?” Kate asked, sensing he, at least, wasn’t a tool like Miles. “What’s your nickname?”
“I don’t have a nickname, but I guess sometimes it could be ‘Hey you,’” he said with a laugh.
“So, Kate,” Mike said, “now that you’ve met this motley crew, what do you think of this ‘apartment’ as we call it? Look around for yourself.”
Kate wandered about while the men turned their attention back to the TV. First, she noticed some photos on the wall—a shot of a middle-aged man with wire-rimmed glasses wearing a classic black suit shaking hands with John F. Kennedy while a beautiful blonde woman looked on. There were beautifully framed photos of the man with other presidents as well: Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and several more photos of the same man posing with old-school entertainment people—Bob Hope, Dean Martin, Lucille Ball, Red Skelton, Dan Rowan and Dick Martin of Laugh-In fame, and a young Alan Alda in his M*A*S*H* getup. It looked like this fellow knew everyone. Kate circled back to the old Magnavox console TV the men were watching. Who knew how old that thing was, but the picture was great. Somebody must have access to a big-ass supply of vacuum tubes, she thought. Miles, Bennie, and DePaun seemed obsessed with old sitcom reruns. They had given up on their bet for the day since Mike’s interruption to introduce Kate had spilled past the beginning of Leave It to Beaver. By now, Eddie Haskell had already invaded the Cleaver’s kitchen and was fully engaged in small talk with Mrs. Cleaver, munching away all the cookies she had made, much to the Beaver’s chagrin. The caffeinated laugh track urged viewers to chuckle or guffaw about every three seconds.
Kate noticed that now and then Miles would feed the other two some trivia about the show. Obviously this guy was totally OCD. They were watching WFN Platinum, according to a little promo icon in the corner of the screen that Kate noticed. She had never heard of this so-called platinum version of good old WFN, the iconic, locally owned Chicago station. In the 90s they had followed the lead of Ted Turner’s WTBS, shedding some of their conservative, local ways and becoming a superstation.
“What’s WFN Platinum, DePaun?” Kate asked.
“It’s all the great old vintage TV shows 24/7, mostly sitcoms. Platinum means no commercials, no news. Just show after show. You know, like Three’s Company, The Dick van Dyke Show, I Love Lucy, F Troop, that kinda stuff. For dramas they got The FBI, Mannix, Wild West, Cannon, Mission: Impossible, Bonanza, that there Western with Barbara Stanwyck—I forget what it’s called.”
“The Big Valley,” Bennie yelled out.
“Right, good show,” said Miles. “It’s basically the epic stuff from about 1965 through about 1985. It was designed to fit our purposes
perfectly. And they air the original—none of the episodes are shortened or sped
up like how a lot of stations today butcher a show to cram in tons of
commercials.”
“Fit your purposes? What’s that mean?” said Kate.
“Excuse me, Kate, but have you not noticed there’s a cryopod along the wall? Honestly, I thought you’d ask about that first,” Mike asked, looking perplexed.
“Well, of course I noticed it. It’s the 800-pound gorilla here. And let me deduce that the gorilla’s name must be Mr. A.C. Nielsen. He’s a favored client obviously, and that’s him in all the photos and inside the pod as well, correct, Dr. Watson? And are these three babysitters or something?”
“See, I told you she was smart, DePaun!” Mike boasted. “You nailed it, Kate.”
“But why?” Kate asked. “Why the TV and the babysitters and all the memorabilia? The photos and plaques, the old fake-walnut paneling on the walls, the Barcalounger like my grandparents used to have? Oh, wait, what’s that on top of the TV?” Kate walked back to the TV and examined a small black box on top of the Magnavox.
“You like it?” Miles asked. “It’s an original Nielsen Company black box from the 1950s. The machine that made the company famous… and richer than God. Look close and check it out. Pretty cool, huh?”
“I feel like I’m stuck in maybe 1975 or 1980,” Kate ventured. “Oh wait, I get it, this is some kind of weird shrine to Nielsen. Right? Is that the deal?”
“Yes, that’s pretty much it,” Mike answered.
“But why? He’s there in that cryopod, right? He doesn’t know you’ve got all this vintage furniture and cheap paneling and TV stuff going on. And why does he need babysitters? Hello, he’s not exactly conscious. Why the heck are you doing this?” Kate pleaded.
“It’s all about Gloria Dunham, the part-owner of ExitStrategy, who you met when we hired you,” Mike explained. “She’s the one who finances this apartment, and honestly, she bankrolls a lot of our recent research that you’re in charge of now. In case you didn’t figure it out, she was vetting you just as much as Franklin and I were. Anyway, she was a dear friend of Mr. Nielsen and credited, whether it was true or not, his company with the success of her acting career. She loved him dearly. And, just so you know, it was a purely platonic relationship. There were times in her life when Gloria was a very troubled person, and often her behavior frustrated people to the point that they would write her off, whether it was professionally or personally. Being able to talk to Nielsen in person or over the phone helped her out, kept her closer to being psychologically whole. He was a bit of a father figure to her, even though he was only a few years older. I think you could venture a guess that she had father issues—maybe she was abused as a child. I don’t think anyone really knows but her. But if that was true it would explain a lot of her erratic behavior over the years.”
“‘Erratic’? Yeah, that and a few other choice adjectives,” Miles interjected, elbowing Bennie in the ribs.
“Anyway, Kate,” Mike continued, “Gloria’s career kind of sputtered about 1960. Radio shows were disappearing and she was getting older. Like a lot of film actresses of her generation, she did some TV series and guest spots on various TV shows. Older audiences still loved her, but she wasn’t gaining any young, new fans. About 1963 she got married to Frank McMurtry, her costar on what you could call a family values sitcom, The Front Porch Swing. You know him?”
“Maybe. I think I’ve seen him in a few movies, maybe The Caine Mutiny?”
“Yeah, he was in that, you’re right,” Mike agreed. “He went from being a Hollywood film noir bad guy to playing boilerplate likable dad parts on TV—kind of an odd transformation, but he made it work. He constantly pinched his pennies and invested his income in California properties. Plots of land scattered all over around LA and Orange County, large tracts of land in San Diego North County, also some beautiful properties up in Santa Barbara. He was worth three or four hundred million when he passed away. When Gloria went totally schizophrenic and he couldn’t handle any of it, McMurtry divorced her pronto. He just threw oodles of money at her to hasten the divorce. So now we’re around 1967, she’s in her forties and has gobs of money. More money than you will make in your entire lifetime.”
Kate shook her head. “Wow. So, really, what’s with this room?”
“It’s simple,” Mike explained as he straightened one of the photos on the wall. “Gloria was a partner with Franklin and me from the beginning. We have a lot of entertainment types here as patients and a few others who have small investments in the company. Gloria loved Mr. Nielsen so much that she paid the tab for him to be here. After he passed away she insisted that we create this apartment and make it like a comfy home, so that when he comes back he’ll feel welcomed. He’ll see all the photos, the memorabilia, the Magnavox or an RCA 1970s television, and so on. That’s how it started. It wasn’t until about five years ago that she got all obsessed about him waking up and nobody being here to greet him.”
“Whoa, wait!” Kate said. “Nobody here to greet him?”
“She actually thinks he could wake up, unfreeze himself, open the cryopod from the inside, step out, and ask one of us for a Swanson Salisbury Steak TV dinner,” Miles said. “We have explained a billion times that he can’t revive himself from inside the pod, but she’s convinced we’re lying.”
“Wow! Just wow!”
“She became so obsessed about this issue that she decided to foot the bill to hire caretakers here 24/7,” Mike said. “Find some pleasant folks to welcome A.C. back to life. You said that the room makes you feel like everything here gives you the vibe of 1975 or 1980, right? That means we’ve been successful. Not only does she want caretakers to greet Mr. Nielsen, but she also wants the apartment to be a sanctuary or a cushion from the shock of waking up in 2013, like if it happened now, or 2050, or whenever. We would ease him psychologically from a time he knows, like the 1970s or 1980s, to the world of the actual year he comes back.”
“But you and Dr. Saltieri already have that in your process,” Kate ventured. “I liked when I read that in the company handbook. It shows you care about these people here. ‘Psychological mentoring’ I think Dr. Saltieri called it. Easing patients into the present, right? Doesn’t Miss Dunham know about that?”
“She just wants things her way, as you can see. She has the money and Franklin and I don’t really have a problem with it. It’s all a bit amusing to Franklin and me in its audacity or idiocy, or whatever you want to call it!”
“And seriously, she really does think he will just wake himself up and crawl out of the pod,” Miles interjected.
“Check out the TV, Kate,” Mike continued. “At first there was simply a set in the room that Nielsen would notice when he ‘woke up,’ with the old Nielsen box on top. But when she decided that she absolutely had to have caretakers she wanted them all watching the TV 24/7 and ready for Mr. Nielsen to wake up, sit down, and join them watching Sonny and Cher or whatever. That’s what these guys are doing here. And they’re forbidden to watch anything but WFN Platinum. You’ll find that there is nothing in the apartment that will tip off that it’s the year 2013. Everything in here is vintage. The caretakers can’t bring an iPod or a laptop or cell phone in here, per Gloria’s rules.”
Kate still couldn’t believe her ears. This was crazy.
“Oh, there’s more,” said Miles, the only attendant interested in helping Kate understand the whole bizarre situation, since DePaun and Bennie were arguing about some trivia regarding Petticoat Junction, which had just started. “Ever hear of Howard Hughes?”
“Of course. Everyone knows who Howard Hughes was,” Kate answered.
“Yeah, but how much do you yourself know about him?”
“Most of the stuff, I guess. Are we on Jeopardy or something?”
“Miles, settle an argument,” DePaun yelled, “who was sleeping with Nat King Cole right before he died? Which sister from Petticoat Junction was it?”
“Easy. It was Billie Jo, the second Billie Jo, who was played by Gunilla Hutton. She was on Hee Haw, too.”
“See, I told you so.” DePaun punched Bennie’s arm. “You owe me ten bucks.”
“Damn, I thought it was Meredith Baxter,” Bennie said. “Listen, I gotta pay you tomorrow. I got no money on me today.” They both laughed and launched into the Petticoat Junction theme song, battling to see who could do the best steam locomotive engine imitation at the end.
“Guys, hold it down,” Mike yelled. “We’re trying to explain to Miss Pearson why the apartment is here.”
“Ha, you gotta call her Miss Pearson, but she says we can call her Kate. Guess you don’t rate so much, Mr. Burgess,” DePaun said with glee as he walked over to the fridge to grab a Dr Pepper.
Miles rolled his eyes at his coworkers’ shenanigans, then cleared his throat. “All right, so Howard Hughes decided to move to Las Vegas. He buys a hotel and lives in the penthouse, and by the way, this is before his schizophrenia and drug abuse kick in hard. So Hughes is becoming more and more reclusive up in his penthouse and gets pissed that there are no all-night TV stations in Las Vegas. All he wants to do is watch movies and TV shows day and night; he’s got insomnia issues. So what does he do? He frigging buys a crap little Las Vegas TV station, KLAS-TV, in 1968 and then instructs them to go 24/7 playing mostly old movies that he loves, or rebroadcasts of his favorite TV shows like Ben Gazzara in Run for Your Life, or Hawaiian Eye with Robert Conrad.”
“Okay, keep going. This is actually getting fascinating in an epically weird kind of way,” Kate admitted.
“So, the station programmer proposes three or four days’ worth of programming at a time to Hughes for his approval. But Hughes sometimes even calls the station up at like four a.m. and tells them he fell asleep and woke back up. ‘Rewind the show back a half hour and start it back up so I can catch up,’ he tells them. And they do. Why? ’Cause he’s their boss. Crazy, right?”
“And somehow this connects back to us how?” Kate asked, confused but also amazed at Miles’ steel-trap mind for minutia.
“Here’s how it connects. Money, Kate, money. Hughes had gobs of it and so does Gloria. So it’s like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, man, except now it’s Six Degrees of Gloria Dunham. Or whatever. Gloria did two pictures for Hughes when he owned RKO. The films both sucked, but who cares now? The point is that she knew Howard pretty well and they stayed in touch. After A.C. Nielsen, Howard Hughes was her second lifeline, not that it did her much good, since he was a hundred times crazier than her. Anyway, Gloria knew all the details about Howard and his Vegas TV station. When she decided to drop a ridiculous amount of money and sponsor Mr. Nielsen’s little hotel stay here at ExitStrategy she was just borrowing from Howard’s playbook. Wait—Mike, is it okay if she knows all this inside stuff?”
“Absolutely, Miles. You’re on a roll, obviously. No reason to stop now!”
Miles cracked his knuckles loudly. Kate realized he did it all the time. She was right about his OCD tendencies. “Okay,” he continued, now that he’d reduced his stress load, “so Gloria is messed up, not bizarro-world like Hughes but still pretty weird, narcissistic, a bit schizoid, that kind of stuff. Her whole history in Hollywood spells it out, as much as she tried to hide it. She treated her first husband like crap. I’ve read he was a nice guy, a great trumpet player, very talented and handsome. They had a messy divorce. All along she was obsessed with Nielsen even though he was just a nice guy businessman. He never asked for any of this. Even with his company’s success he never had a ton of money himself, he’d just roll his money back into the company’s future. But she had the dough to support his cryo, bankroll the creation of this goofy apartment, and then later hire us to attend it 24/7 and… wait for it, as they say…”
“What, what!” Kate pleaded, totally sucked into the story.
“She went to WFN here in Chicago and tried to convince them, a la Howard Hughes, to sell their station to her, which of course, as a major corporation they would never do. But they did take oodles of her money and agreed to create WFN Platinum. Kate, think about it, in reality WFN Platinum exists for one viewer, a person who still hasn’t even seen a single show. It wasn’t meant for the regular schlub out there, flipping absentmindedly through crap station after crap station with his remote.” Crack went the knuckles again. “It was created by crazy Gloria solely for A.C., so that when he wakes up he can stumble out of the pod, scratch his ass, see one of us in the room and say hi, watch M*A*S*H* on whatever vintage Magnavox or RCA or whatever old set Brown’s TV in LaGrange can supply us with and he’ll be a happy camper in the epic Barcalounger. He’ll ask us for a Hamm’s beer and some Jay’s Potato Chips and he’ll think it’s still like 1985 or so, and he won’t freak out that it’s really the twenty-first century. That’s what Gloria created here. It’s like a freakazoid episode of The Twilight Zone, huh? And, by the way, did you see the tennis court outside? Nobody here plays tennis. But Nielsen did, so that’s why it’s there. Insane, huh?”
“Yes, seemingly insane,” Mike interjected. “But she’s in total control of her senses even now in her nineties. Sure, she’s stubborn, wily, conniving, evil, and a whole lot more. But be warned—she’s still a consummate actress. She can pull off anything she wants in any situation. Franklin and I continue pleasing her, and of course continue accepting all her many dollars. We let her get her way, at least on the surface, even if we know we can circumvent her. We let her think she’s in charge. Remember I told you about this, Kate? It’s complicated but manageable, that’s how Franklin and I look at it. And look at this—you can play tennis here now, how’s that for a perk?”
“Ah yes, the tennis court. Now it makes sense that it’s here.” Kate laughed.
“Yup. So, Kate, that’s the backstory on Gloria, A.C., WFN Platinum, DePaun, Bennie, and me—all the crazy shit,” Miles bragged, running his fingers through his greasy hair, trying to fluff it up, but failing. “Things are pretty strange around here. Like Mike said, he and Franklin play this weird game with her. They actually enjoy it, I think. I guess they like the challenge of seeing how much money they can pry from her bony fingers even when she’s plotting against them and the rest of the world. Am I right, Mike?”
“Well, that would be a ‘no comment,’ Miles, especially in front of a new employee. But unofficially, yes, you might be onto something there. Why do you have to be so damn smart all the time?”
“So if Gloria’s The Brain, who’s Pinky?” Kate asked.
Miles smiled at Kate’s reference. “Probably that lawyer of hers. He’s not buck-toothed, but he’s weird. He’s maybe thirty-five, but he acts like he’s sixty. Of course, that’s why she likes him. Anyway, sorry for the ‘Kat’ thing earlier. I’m not always that nerdy or difficult.”
“Hmm, after hearing all this strange stuff are you still going to stick around and work here, Kate?” Mike asked, feigning concern.
“Yup, no doubt,” Kate bubbled. “You might have thought I’m a regular girl, but… wait for it—I actually like weird!”
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