Chapter 1

Begin at the beginning? How pedestrian. In this story, it may be best if we begin at the ending.

Or, to be precise, about 22 minutes before the ending came for the story, for the careers of Larry King and several CNN technicians, and for the swagger in the walk of a million men.

Talkmeister Larry was hosting another of his hard-hitting, newsy group interviews. This one was with past participants from various so-called reality-based shows -- both classics like "Survivor" and newer ones such as "Poke in the Eye with a Sharp Stick."

Specifically, Larry had assembled couples who met on the shows and stayed together afterward. As evidence of the wide gap between King and such purveyors of schlock-talk as Jerry Springer, not one panel member had visibly missing teeth.

Such dental integrity and vocabularies rife with words of two and even more syllables did not, however, preclude controversy among the guests. Insults, not chairs, were hurled.

The culminating incident began when Chuck, a "Survivor" survivor, teasingly suggested that eating raw locust larvae was a less frightening prospect than spending a day, let alone a life, with one of the other panel members -- to be specific, Des.

"She's a frigid bitch," Chuck said, catching the show's assistant director in charge of beeps napping.

"Yeah," said Tony, the "Fear Factor" legend. "Man may have the balls to take her on, but he ain't gonna have none when she's done with him. Right, Pete? There's nuttin' in your nutsack now?"

The director's leaping stab of the blooper button rendered much of the comment inaudible, but that prevented him from noticing that the wide shot he'd last chosen gave the home audience a clear view of Tony cupping his genitals as he pointed at Pete, Des's partner.

Order and tight shots were returned in time for Pete's soft-voiced response. Thus the screen was filled with his craggy features and salt-and-pepper hair as he said, "I'm afraid you bungee-jumped one too many times, Tony. You've confused Des with the scrawny hag you're squiring."

Chuck grabbed Tony to keep him from slugging Pete, so it was Charlotte herself, the hag in question, who responded. "Shove it up your ass," she said with the gentility that had marked her progress through the elimination rounds of "Fear Factor." "Everyone knows yer woman's a goddam bitch. For crap's sake, she showed her claws all over national TV!"

Larry tried to regain control, asking a cheerful question about Tony and Charlotte's recent anniversary. It was no use. As Charlotte wiped the spittle from a face whose sunburn no pancake could adequately disguise, Chuck re-entered the fray. His boyish good looks beamed out at an international audience as he said, "Let's be reasonable here. There's no need to be insulting or resort to violence. We're all adults here. But, Pete, you have to admit. The whole world knows. She is a frigid bitch."

The camera briefly swung to a gaping Larry King before returning to Pete. He was smiling tightly. "Are you sure of that? I would hazard to guess that Des is far more accommodating than the other women here tonight."

Tony's thick, black eyebrows lowered like thunderclouds. "Bullshit," he said in rebuttal.

Pete rubbed a hand on his chin. "Would you put money on that? Say, $1,000?"

"Damn right," Tony muttered.

"Count me in," Chuck said. "But what exactly are we betting on?" He put a protective arm around his life partner, Teresa. "What do we do, have sex?"

"Exactly." Pete nodded. "Right here, right now. Tell Teresa to do you."

Chuck shook his head and laughed. "You're crazy. First of all, I wouldn't tell her to do anything. She --"

Teresa herself interrupted. "He isn't the boss of me. I do what I want, when I want. And you're sick."

Pete cocked his head. "Money's on the line, Chuck. And pride. You can't even get a kiss, can you. You don't even dare try for a hand job."

"How about it, honey?" Chuck put on a puppy-dog face as he reached out. "You'd --"

"Get your paws off me!" She slapped him away. "You're as sick as he is!"

As Larry frantically waved at the control room, Pete turned to Tony and challenged him.

Charlotte intercepted the suggestion. "Don't even go there," she said. "Whaddya think, I'm some kinda whore? That's all behind, buddy. "

"I see." Pete sighed. "Easiest $2,000 I ever made." He turned to the silver-haired woman at his side. "Des?"

She slid from the stool gracefully and unzipped him with impeccably manicured hands. Kneeling before him, her shiny bob was perfectly framed by his thighs on the world's television screens.

The control booth was never so misnamed. Fingers were poking buttons everywhere, and the fingers that weren't poking were pointing. Blame was being exchanged like gifts on Christmas morning. What no one there realized was that an errant finger early on had transferred command of the transmission to the back-up booth upstairs. Theoretically the technicians there should have noticed, but like the rest of the world they were just staring at the screen.

Pete had swiveled, Des had followed, and the home audience got a perfect side view of a mid-sized but quite engorged penis sliding in and out of ruby lips.

The director was screaming into the camera operator's headset to pan away, but the disaster heightened with the inexorable speed of a train wreck. Stunned by what he was seeing in the monitor, the cameraman zoomed in, in, in. Across six continents -- reception was very fuzzy in Antarctica that day -- screens were completely filled by a thick rod pulsing with blood vessels, getting redder and redder as it picked up lipstick on its way in and out of Des's tightly pursed mouth.

It had a hypnotic attraction. In living rooms, dorm lounges, bars, and electronics show rooms; in Pittsburgh, Peking, Paris and Pemba off the coast of Africa; to men, women, children and a startlingly large number of dogs, the pulsing image flickered. No one could look away. Quite the contrary. They drew closer and closer to the screen.

In Ottumwa, Iowa, an old man confined to a wheelchair craned his neck so far forward that he tumbled to the floor. He just shook it off and crawled toward his Sony.

In Rome, a convent's worth of nuns in old-style habits banged wimples as they crowded around their set.

In a suburb of Tokyo, a 12-year-old boy assigned to watch CNN for his English class vowed to never skip his homework, never ever. And then he threw aside his Pokemon and pressed his nose to the TV.

In thousands of cities, millions and millions of homes, Pete's grunts and groans and a cacophony of slurps echoed. Only in the control room in Atlanta could no one hear it, not over the shouts of technicians.

On the set, the other panelists were frozen statues. The only movement by Larry was the heaving of his chest. (The bypass operation the next day was successful.)

All of that was invisible to the viewers. As the electric blue glow bathed their faces, all they saw was a penis driving in, pulling out, driving in, pulling out...

The first splash of cum erupted into the global village. Viewers recoiled in shock. On the big screen of Kickers Sports Bar in Paterson, N.J., it looked as if Des would surely drown under the ocean of gooey white fluid that was gushing from Pete's howitzer. Millions of women looked from the screen to their husbands' laps. Millions of husbands curled up into fetal positions and knew their sex lives would never be the same.

And that's where the story ends. Or nearly so.

The guy who came up with the idea called it "A Sustained Experiment in Biospatial Modes and Interaction in a Non-Opaque Environment," but then three years of grad school sociology classes will do that to even the nicest person.

The company that bought the rights pitched the concept as "Peeping Tom," but that was only used for the British version, because a country that can sustain so many Murdoch papers clearly has no shame left.

When it debuted on ABC, they called it "The Fish Tank." This was considered quite witty at the network that brought us "The Chair."

The TV critic from USA Today dubbed it "Sur-voyeur." But focus groups said Americans who like colorful graphics do not know what "voyeur" means, so his editor electronically blue-penciled it. Still, that sums up the show most succinctly.

The account that follows will be unfamiliar only to the distressingly few who were not among the largest weekly audience in the history of television. However, as those who were in the audience lost, by scientifically accurate measure, an average of six points off their IQ with every episode they saw, the likelihood that they remain capable of reading, let alone Internet use, is quite slim, so the narrative will proceed on the assumption that its readers are beginning with blank slates.

To begin, the rules: Six men and six women were chosen through a rigorous series of mental and physical tests that largely determined which applicants were so desperate for fame that they would put up with a rigorous series of sadistic tests. Coincidentally enough, the group of 12 that resulted from each season's testing always contained the minimum daily requirement of minorities, a representative sampling of two people over the age of 45, and at least one young woman who consistently underestimated the size of her breasts when buying apparel.