89: Forward

I'd had a lot of respect for Gamma House ever since Dawn and Cathy introduced us to their sisters four years ago. The fact that TK, Addison, and Amber had all continued with the sorority and become members after the shooting, brought us closer. We always made a donation to their fundraisers for Riley Children's Hospital in Indianapolis, rapidly becoming the top children's transplant hospital in the country.

But all the sororities and fraternities on campus were supporters of various charities and causes. It brought the members together with a common cause. We had a closer connection with Gamma because of the current members, but in the wake of the shooting, George and Rich had both pledged Lambda. The triplets were sister alumnae of Theta House. Renee and Sora had both been members of Kappa. Theta had recently re-evaluated their 'cause' and had adopted St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis where a sister chapter at the University of Memphis was trying to raise awareness of juvenile cancer.

Like many well-intentioned drives, this one started a little short-sighted. The sororities decided that they should donate their hair to make wigs for all the poor bald girls being treated for cancer. That appealed to everyone's vanity as well as supporting the children. It didn't do much for the actual work of the hospital, and in the long run it didn't help the children. It takes longer to make a wig than most children are in care at the hospital. And children grow. What fit one when it was measured might not fit when it was delivered. I'd listened to the triplets start enthusiastically and then roll their eyes with the impossibility of the task.

Ultimately, the ladies decided to sell their hair and donate the proceeds to the hospital. That was what Whitney had told us to do with her hair. When we got back to the ranch, Debbie took charge of the locks Whitney's mother had sheared and added them to the sorority's donation. As much as I loved Whitney's hair, I wasn't going to make a shrine of it. She wasn't dead and even if she had been, there were better things to do with her hair.

Coach Hancock accepted our invitation to dinner out at the ranch and we did a little tour as we caught up with everyone. We stopped by Casa del Sol and talked to Lionel and a very pregnant Sugar. Leon was running all over and seemed to have a ball in his hands at all times.

"Are you planning to raise a whole team?" Coach asked.

"As long as he'll keep loving me and his kids, I'll keep popping them out," Sugar said happily. "We had to try for two years before we got the first one to take. Then this one took on the first try. Apparently blowjobs won't get you pregnant!" Coach turned a little red, but joined in the laughter.

"So, are you going pro?" he asked Lionel. "I was disappointed that Lamar didn't stick with the Pacers."

"Well, I've been told that I should attend the draft in Indy on the 29th, and not just sit home by the phone," Lionel said. "If I get an offer, I'm taking it. I don't have aspirations of becoming a lawyer like Lamar."

"You're going to make a great engineer when you've finished playing ball," Sugar beamed.

I started laughing. There was just something insanely funny to me about Lionel Trane the Engineer. Choo choo!

"If I had a gi with me, I'd offer to spar with you, Brian. Whitney tells me I could learn something," Coach said when we looked into the silo.

"I doubt that," I said. "I still train mostly as a meditative act. Though Whitney beat my ass on Monday. Still, we are not a formal dojo and only a couple people ever wear gis in here. Mostly, we do forms and spar naked. I'm willing if you'd like." Coach raised an eyebrow and wrinkled his nose at me. Then he started removing his uniform and carefully folding it.

"I have a change of clothes in the car," he said.

We only dropped to skivvies out of respect for Judy and Adam, who showed up at the door while we were undressing.

"Masters, may we watch and learn?" Adam said formally. Coach turned and bowed to him. Judy held Coach's neatly folded uniform as we squared off.

Crap! He's big. Coach was a foot taller than me and probably outweighed me by eighty pounds. We bowed and that was all I had time for. I was not about to let Coach hit me if I could avoid it. He was just too big. On the other hand, he was the one who taught me to flow like water and he flowed right along with me. Wherever I moved, he was there, too. I was successfully avoiding his blows, but I couldn't get off defense.

Then my perception of the world seemed to change. I began to see the difference between when he was actually striking with force and where he was striking as a feint to set up another move. And when I saw the feint, I became a rock before it. His feints were less than half force blows intended to move me away from them. When I moved into them instead, he was jarred and his full force blow found nothing where he thought I would move. I slipped beneath him and tapped him three times on his back before I backed away. He spun to face me and his eyes narrowed as he nodded.

Coach was good. I'd finally sparred with Amy the last time she'd been at the ranch and I could identify similarities in their training. Both were aggressive, even though controlled. They carried the battle to their opponents, keeping them moving away and anticipating their moves. They also expected their opponents to fall back before their onslaught. When I stepped in front of Coach's feints to cut them short, it was taking the battle back to him and he began to fall back.

It simply isn't possible to give a blow-by-blow description of sparring. In the first place, I'm not individually aware of the moves. I just move. But each time I had the advantage, I tapped Coach in the same three locations on his back. That's not to say he didn't land a few blows himself. My bruises from Monday hadn't entirely faded and I was going to have a new set today. After about twenty minutes, we stepped apart and by mutual agreement bowed to each other.

"Thank you for the lesson, master," Coach intoned. Shit! It's just not possible to adapt to that kind of a reversal in roles.

"Thank you. I have learned a great deal today, Coach," I said.

Judy ran to Coach's car with his uniform and brought his duffel bag with a change of clothes to the outdoor showers. She took an appreciative look at both our naked bodies in the shower and then politely left. It's funny that taking a shower outdoors had none of the awkwardness of stripping to do naked combat. Teams showered together all the time. Coach noticed Judy's appraisal and chuckled.

"That one was a fireball in school," he said. "I once found the Carson twins out behind the football stadium picking up boards from the construction site and pounding on them at random. The school was doing some construction and repair to the stands and score booth. I asked them what they were doing and they said they were looking to see if there were more trick boards like Judy had broken. They pointed to a couple boards that were splintered on the ground. There was no trick about it. I finally had to break a board myself before they would believe that a person could do that without some kind of trick."

I laughed, but realized how close both Judy and Lexi had come to having their reputations trashed by the boys.

"She's studying criminal justice," I said. "I worry that she'll follow Whitney into the Marines, but she's so little."

"She's within the height restrictions by an inch for women," Coach said. "But there are probably not a dozen women in the Marines who are under five feet. Whitney was nearly rejected because she is at the maximum height for women. She's probably the tallest woman in the Marines right now." Coach dressed and we walked up to the big house. I didn't bother to dress until I got there. It was almost dinner time.

The casa dressed in house gis for dinner and we had a great time talking with Coach Hancock and being reassured that Whitney would be okay.

Rose and I flew to LA on the fifth and spent the next five days at the cable TV trade show called The National Show. I guess I'm just a hick. Doug used to say he was former FBI—Farm Boy of Indiana. I liked that phrase and planned to use it sometime. Even though farming was behind us by the time I was growing up, I felt like I was a total rube in LA.

Jennifer had done her research and worked with Donna to develop different pitches for Rose and me to use when we talked to potential distributors. There was kind of a four-tier approach in the industry. At the top were the cable companies. They owned the lines and if you wanted a show to air on Cable TV, it ultimately had to be listed and carried by one of those dozen or so companies. It wasn't at all like broadcast television. For broadcast, you needed an FCC license for a certain frequency and a tower. The only ones who had FCC licenses in this industry were the ones who owned airwaves.

The second tier were networks and their channels. Back in the broadcast space, the network was a kind of franchise that provided national programming and advertising for independently owned local television stations. In cable, a network was an owner of channels. One group had six different movie channels that played different kinds of content around the clock. One only played westerns. One was only new releases. One was strictly sci-fi. The company that owned Lifelong Women's Network had six other channels, including, to my surprise, a soft porn channel. We learned the difference there, too. Soft porn meant there was a lot of kissing and moaning with exposed tits. Hard porn—yes there were entire networks of channels that provided hard porn—focused on dicks. I just didn't understand that. The programming was obviously meant for men, but most of what they showed were dicks in mouths, pussies, and asses and coming all over. We heard one promoter actually calling the spewing of come on a woman the 'money shot.' It gave me a new perspective. Why the hell were guys so interested in watching other guys come?

The third tier were the channels themselves. Whether it was part of a network or not was irrelevant. There were over three hundred channels represented at the show, not including the porn channels that were in a separate area of the show. When you look at a cable directory, you see channels. What I didn't realize was that you don't see all of them. I think our cable directory in Indiana had maybe fifty channels, which seemed like forty-eight too many. That's when I learned that every cable company (top tier) doesn't carry every channel. And even those it carries aren't available in every market. Part of the cable franchise that was awarded by a city or community included local programming. The city set how many stations had to be provided. They might want a city council channel that would broadcast all the meetings of the city council and their various committees. A hotel chain might want the local broadcast channels, a movie channel, a few porn channels, and a channel dedicated to hotel services that repeated the same content every half hour.

At the bottom of the pile were the program providers. That's us. We produce a daily show and send it to our syndicate. But little independent producers aren't the only program providers. Organizations like the NFL provide programming. Movie producers like MGM and Paramount provide programming. Even national broadcast networks like CBS and NBC provide programming in the form of reruns of popular shows. We were the bottom of the bottom layer, but without content providers, none of the rest of the system would exist.

There were opportunities to pitch our wares. We had content and we needed distribution. We went from booth to booth at the expo trying to find a programming executive to pitch our shows to. The fact that we had two successful shows got us a few ears. Most were piranhas. They wanted content, but they wanted it for next to nothing.

There were also sessions that I'd booked a slot in where we had five minutes to pitch our content to a roomful of programming execs. We handed out our portfolio, showed a quick clip of Elaine, and gave a pitch for new shows coming from Hearthstone Entertainment this fall. None of the new shows actually were real. They were all concepts that we could develop if someone showed a real interest. Program directors are as sleazy as any Hollywood producer. What they were primarily interested in was getting Rose alone 'to make a deal.' We even had a porn channel approach us about doing a quick video in their private studio 'upstairs.' They were willing to pay me $200 and Rose $600. To have sex. On camera. To broadcast!

One of the side benefits of the program exec pitches, though, was that there were also potential sponsors attending the sessions. Sponsors looked for programming that was an appropriate vehicle for their advertising. These guys hired people like Donna to define exactly who could and should buy their products. You didn't put tampon ads in the middle of a football game. We got a lot of business cards from companies looking for shows to advertise on.

By Thursday, we were exhausted. All week alone with Rose and we'd only made love once.

"I'm not going back to that place tomorrow," Rose told me finally. "It's going to take me a week of showers to get clean again. Why are we even in this business?"

I pulled Rose into my arms and kissed her softly. I'd have suggested we just order room service and stay where we were, but the only hotel we could get didn't have such luxuries. I was actually thankful that we had clean sheets and towels. Rose hugged me tightly.

"No parties tonight. No bars. In fact, we need to go someplace completely different and away from this convention center. LA's got a huge Chinese population. Let's find a good Chinese restaurant and hide from everyone else."

We talked to the concierge at the hotel and he understood what we wanted. He told us the best, of course, was in Chinatown and we could get there by cab. He gave us the name and address and called a cab. Half an hour and $40 later we were at a dim sum house in Chinatown. And it was good! And the service was attentive. And it ended up being a little more expensive than we expected because they kept bringing around little dishes of food and baskets that had been steamed and we just kept selecting things and eating them. Then they charged by the basket or plate. Sure that plate of wontons was only $2.50. But that was only one of about fifteen plates we had on the table by the time we'd finished. Fortunately, I had cash with me and we paid for the meal. If we'd had anything other than tea to drink, I'd have ended up washing dishes.

"I have to tell you about what happened to my girlfriend Rose and me," I said after we'd showered and crawled into bed.

"Hmm?" She turned to look at me with an eyebrow raised. It slowly dawned on her what I'd just started and her smile cut through all the gloom of the week. "Tell me about it," she whispered.

I won't go into how we got lost. Just that we were. There was pavement and street names that sounded familiar, but we didn't quite recognize them. Huge buildings towered around us. But it was a jungle. We could hear the sounds of predators everywhere we turned. The two of us were alone and frightened. I clutched her hand to reassure her and was reassured.

"Don't worry," she whispered to me. "We'll find our way home."

We huddled together in the night, scarcely sleeping for listening to the night sounds.

In the pre-dawn light, we heard a voice.

"You two are just what I need." We looked up into the eyes of a squat little toad of a man whose beady eyes were scanning up and down our bodies. "Come with me. I'll get you food and a shower. You'll have a place to be together. And you'll get money. All you have to do is be yourselves."