Kill the Mic

Everybody Shut Up. · Ep. 402 · Wed
10:00 Cold open · 10:09 Gong: HOA birdbath ban · 10:24 Hot Topic from the Wall
Sponsor QM-402 QuietMouth holdover · Vote: EP channel on the speakers · Guest: Ruthie Cole

DOUG

Doug Fairley ate breakfast in his car with the engine off, in the far corner of the Dayspan lot, facing the loading dock.

It was an egg sandwich from the gas station on Broad Street, the kind that came in a paper sleeve with a sticker on it that said HOT, and it had stopped being hot somewhere around the second light. He ate it anyway. The rental he'd taken off Livingston Avenue came furnished, and everything in it smelled like the last tenant's vanilla candles, including, by now, his good shirt. The car only smelled like gas-station coffee. He'd started eating in it the first morning and it was already a habit.

His phone was face-down on the passenger seat. He turned it over.

Somebody had cut the two seconds of him in the Glass window into a loop. It played over and over with music under it: him behind the glass, his hand coming up off the board an inch. Under it, in yellow letters, WINDOW GUY DAY 2?? It had eleven thousand views. He watched it once all the way through. By the end he was rubbing the back of his neck, the way he did when he'd been caught at something. He turned the phone back over.

There was a text under it from a number he'd saved yesterday as LINDA (6).

GOOD NUMBERS ON THE STOOL. DO MORE. BUT MAKE FAIRLY LOOK SENOIR.

He read it twice. As far as he could tell, it meant keep doing the bit with Jen, but look like the boss while you do it, and he had no idea how a person did both. He folded the sandwich sleeve into a square, put it in the cup holder with the one from yesterday, and went in through the dock.

---

The production meeting happened in what had been the furniture store's credit office, a narrow room behind the showroom with a long laminate table and a window onto the parking lot. Somebody had taped a sheet of paper over the old sign on the door, but you could still read EASY TERMS through it if the hall light was on.

Lou was already there. She was sitting on the table, not at it, with her ball cap on backward and a stack of printouts in her lap, and she was putting stickers on them without looking: a yellow dot here, a green one there, a pink one on the last page of every copy.

"Morning," Doug said.

"Rundown," Lou said, and held one out to him.

The rundown was the show on paper. Every segment, in order, with how long it was supposed to run and who was in it and what had to be on the screen behind them. Doug had read four hundred of them at his last job. This one had colored dots down the margin.

"Okay," he said, sitting down. "Walk me through the stickers."

Lou didn't look up. "Yellow's sponsor. Green's vote. Pink's no."

He waited. She didn't add anything. Across the table, Kyle was eating cereal out of a mug with a spoon he'd clearly borrowed from the break room, phone in one hand, and he gave Doug a small helpless look over the mug that meant that's the whole system, I've asked.

"What's pink on page six?" Doug said.

"Marcy's prop," Lou said.

"What's the prop?"

"Doesn't matter," Lou said. "It's pink."

Denny came in with two coffees, didn't give either one to anybody, and sat down at the end of the table. Marcy came in behind him in a gray blazer with the price tag still hanging from the sleeve, which she bit off in the doorway and dropped in her pocket. Then Brandon, the QuietMouth kid, in the same polo as yesterday or one exactly like it, holding a tin of lozenges in both hands like it was warm.

Jen came in last. She had her hair still wet at the ends and a paper cup from Stauf's in Grandview, and she said "Morning" to the room in general and took the chair by the window, two down from him. She didn't look at him any longer than she looked at anybody else. He noticed that, and noticed himself noticing, and looked at the rundown.

Lou slid the cold-open card across the table to her. It was an index card with JEN, OPEN, 45 SEC written on it in Lou's square capitals. Doug had written something in pencil in the margin last night, 45 is fine if it's good, and he watched Jen read it. She didn't say anything about it. She didn't erase it either. She put the card in her blazer pocket.

"Vote," Lou said.

Kyle put down the mug. "Okay. So the Wall's been going all night." He scrolled. "The ask with the most posts behind it is, um. They want to hear what you say in her ear."

Doug looked up. "What I say."

"In Jen's ear. On the air." Kyle turned his phone around, as if it would help. It was a wall of yellow handles and white posts, and Doug could pick out WHAT DOES WINDOW GUY SAY TO HER about every fourth line. "During a segment. Your channel goes on the studio speakers, so the room hears it, and it goes out on the broadcast. Whatever you'd normally just say to her."

"It's ninety seconds," Denny said. "Hot Topic. You produce her through it like normal. They just get to listen."

"And I can say no."

"Sixty percent," Lou said, and put a green dot on the vote line of somebody's rundown with her thumb.

There was a speakerphone in the middle of the table, the old gray office kind with a red light. Doug hadn't noticed it was on until it spoke.

"Standards would like it noted," said a woman's voice, dry and very clear, "that the producer channel has never been cleared for broadcast. It doesn't go through the delay. If he says something he shouldn't, it goes out live, and I find out about it from my mother."

"Then he won't say something he shouldn't," Lou said.

"Louise," the speakerphone said. "Please."

"Sarah's in Standards," Jen said to Doug, across the two chairs, quietly enough that it was just to him. "She runs the delay. She's the only one who calls Lou that."

"How many people are in Standards?"

"Two. Sarah and a man named Phil who's been on vacation since June."

"I heard that," Sarah said. "He's coming back."

Lou slid off the table. "Then it's on the list. Denny pitches it after the Gong, the Wall votes, and if it carries, Fairley talks into his headset for ninety seconds like a professional." She looked at Doug for the first time that morning. Her eyes were very dark under the cap brim. "You're a professional."

"I've been told."

"Good." She tapped the pink dot on page six. "Marcy. No."

"You don't even know what it is," Marcy said.

"It's pink," Lou said, and went out.

---

JEN

At two minutes to air, Jen stood on her mark by Camera 1 and listened to Glass in her ear.

The director was calling camera positions. Kyle was on the phone with Ruthie Cole's daughter, who was in the parking lot because her mother wouldn't get out of the car until someone confirmed the birdbath photo was on the screen. Lou was counting. And under all of it Doug was going down the rundown line by line, out loud, in that level voice, asking the graphics operator to read him every name that would go on the bottom of the screen today, all of them, spelled out letter by letter. Graphics read them. It took a while. Nobody in Glass said anything about it.

Jen pressed the earpiece with a fingertip while she smiled at the front row.

"Thirty," Lou said.

The red light on Camera 1 came on.

"Everybody shut up," Jen said, and two hundred people didn't, and the band hit its wrong chord, and Lou dropped her hand.

"One True Thing," Jen said. She'd decided what it was in the shower. "I deleted a dating app last night. I hadn't opened it in a year. It sent me a notification asking if I'd like to keep my new relationship private." She let the room laugh at that, because they would. "I'm not in a new relationship. I'd like that on the record. But I've worked here eleven years, and if you have to ask, the answer is already a segment."

They laughed again. The Wall did more than that. It filled with yellow, the handles coming up faster than she could read them, and every third post had the same two words in it. Camera 3 swung up without being told and found the Glass window, and there he was, behind the glass, with a pen in his mouth. He took it out.

The strip of text along the bottom of the screen put up a name.

WINDOW GUY (DOUG FAIRLY, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER)

It took about four seconds. Then a handle Jen knew very well posted, vol 5 p 1: FAIRLY.

In her ear, very calmly, Doug said, "Graphics."

"I fixed it," graphics said. "I fixed it! It's fixed in the system. That was the old one."

"It's fine," Doug said. "It's fine. Lou, how long?"

"You're fine," Lou said. "Go."

But the Wall had already done something with it. Somebody posted jen k fairly, all lowercase, and somebody else posted it back with a hashtag, and in about the time it took Jen to throw to Denny it was the only thing on the left side of the screen. #JenKFairly. #JenKFairly. #JENKFAIRLY.

Jen turned and said, "Denny," with her best face on, and Camera 2 went up the aisle to find him, and she didn't have to look at any of it for six minutes.

---

Up the aisle, Denny had the handheld mic and the spotlight. "Gong time," he said. "No hot takes today. Today we've got a real fight. This woman is at war with her homeowners' association, and she drove in from Hilliard to tell you about it. She makes her case. If you've heard enough, you know what to yell. Folks, Ruthie Cole."

Ruthie Cole was seventy-one and five feet tall, and she came down the aisle in a quilted vest and orthopedic shoes like she was walking into a zoning meeting she'd already won. Denny met her at the bottom of the steps and walked her to the guest chair at the end of the desk, and she sat in it with her purse in her lap and both hands on the clasp.

Behind her, the Wall put up the photo. It was a concrete birdbath in a front yard, painted gray, shaped like a cat curled up asleep with its tail around its feet. Water sat in a shallow bowl in its side. A robin was standing in the water.

"Ruthie," Denny said, "tell the people what happened."

"The homeowners' association of Oakridge Commons sent me a letter," Ruthie said into the mic, "telling me I had erected a statue without a variance."

"And had you?"

"That," Ruthie said, "is not a statue. That is infrastructure. It holds water. Birds drink the water. My late husband poured it himself in 1994, and the association didn't exist until 2003, and I told them that, and they sent me a second letter, certified, and I had to drive to the post office to sign for it, and I'm seventy-one."

The room loved her immediately. The Wall loved her more. RUTHIE FOR PRESIDENT, the robin is her lawyer, protect this woman.

"What does the second letter say?" Denny said.

Ruthie unclasped the purse, took out a folded letter, unfolded it, put on a pair of reading glasses that hung around her neck on a beaded chain, and read it out loud.

"Dear Mrs. Cole. It has come to the attention of the Board that the structure in your front setback exceeds the eighteen-inch height allowance for decorative features." She looked up. "It's nineteen inches. It's a cat. Cats are nineteen inches." Back to the letter. "The Board has previously advised you," and so on. Denny started to say something twice, and both times she raised a hand without looking at him, and both times he stopped. "This letter is signed by the Board president, Gary Witt, of 1140 Oak…"

"Kill it," Lou said in Jen's ear.

Ruthie's mic went dead. She kept reading for a line with no sound, her mouth moving, the letter up close to her glasses, and then she noticed the room laughing and looked up.

"Did they cut me off?"

"Just the address, Ruthie," Denny said.

"He knows where I live," Ruthie said, into a mic that was on again. She found her place. "The Board regrets that it has no alternative." She took off the glasses and looked out at the audience.

"They suspended my pool privileges," she said. "I don't swim. I want to be very clear. I have never been in that pool. It's the principle."

"Gong her!" somebody yelled from Row C, but hardly anybody joined in, and the meter on the Wall barely moved, and Denny looked over at Lou, and Lou looked at Ruthie for a second and then shook her head, once, and Denny lowered the mallet.

"Thank you," Ruthie said to Lou, with dignity.

Jen came down the desk to do the wrap. That was her job in the Gong segment, three or four lines at the end to take it out, and she sat on the edge of the desk next to Ruthie's chair with her cards, and the Wall got louder the second she was in the shot. #JenKFairly, scrolling up and up.

"Ruthie," Jen said, "what happens next?"

"I appeal," Ruthie said. "And I want to ask you something, since I'm here."

Jen smiled at her. "Go ahead."

Ruthie turned in her chair, up toward the back of the room, where the Glass window was. She looked at it the way she'd looked at the audience, over the top of where her glasses would have been.

"How long have you two been together?"

Somebody in the third row said "Oh, no," out loud, delighted.

"That stool was all over my neighborhood Facebook last night," Ruthie said. "My neighbor Carol says you're a couple. Carol is wrong about everything else. So I wanted a second source."

Jen kept the smile on. She could feel exactly how much of it there was, the way you can feel your tongue in your mouth when you think about it. In her ear, Glass had gone quiet. Not the director, not Kyle. Nobody.

"We're coworkers, Ruthie," Jen said. "He sits where the Wall tells him to."

Ruthie considered this.

"That's what Carol said about her tennis instructor," she said, and the room came apart, and Ruthie looked pleased and patted Jen's knee and said, to Lou, "Gong me twice if I'm wrong."

Lou kept her arms folded, and Denny got Ruthie up out of the chair and walked her back up the aisle with one hand under her elbow, and she waved at the Wall on her way past it like it was a grandchild.

In Jen's ear, Doug said, "Jen, you've got ninety to the vote. Denny pitches it. Camera two's going to find him at the top of the aisle." Nothing in his voice at all. Then, like he was reading it off the page: "She was good."

"She was great," said Kyle, from somewhere.

Jen touched her earpiece and smiled at Camera 1 and didn't say anything, because she was on.

---

Denny pitched it at the top of the aisle with the handheld mic and one hand pointing back at Glass.

"Shouldn't Vote," he said. "You've seen him in the window. You've seen him on the stool. Every day, all day, Window Guy is talking in Jen's ear, and none of us get to hear it." He turned slowly to face the Wall. It was already filling. "Should we put Window Guy's channel on the speakers for Hot Topic? Ninety seconds. Everything he says to her, we hear. Phones out. Studio and home. Sixty and it's binding."

The Wall split down the middle.

Jen watched it from the desk. It wasn't close. The YES side filled like water running into a glass, yellow handles stacking on yellow handles, and the NO side had maybe two dozen, one of them @VolumeFour, which surprised her. Then the NO from @VolumeFour vanished, and a YES from @VolumeFour came up in its place. Her mother had changed her vote.

"Sixty-eight," Lou said into the floor mic.

Up in Glass, Doug took his headset off and looked at it in his hands for a second, then put it back on.

"Ten seconds to commercial," Lou said in Jen's ear. "Then we're live with it after the break. Sound's patching him through now. When the red light comes on, everything he says is in the room."

---

During the break there was a click in Jen's earpiece, and a short hum, and then a sound she'd never heard in eleven years: her own earpiece coming out of the ceiling. The studio speakers were up in the old showroom's light grid, and somebody in sound said "check, check" into Doug's channel and it came out over two hundred heads, a little late and a little too loud, and the whole audience looked up at the ceiling at once.

"Okay," Doug said. Over the speakers. The room laughed just at that, at hearing him, and she watched the back of the room, and saw him up behind the glass hear the laugh come back to him. "Okay. We're not live yet. Hi."

"HI WINDOW GUY," the room yelled.

Renee was at Jen's face with the powder puff. Jen let her. Marcy had come down the desk and was sitting next to her, a sleeve of saltines under the desk, eating one with great concentration.

"How are you going to play it?" Marcy said.

"I'm going to play it like a segment."

"Okay," Marcy said. "I'm going to sit here and watch you do that."

Lou came and stood just off Camera 1, clipboard under her arm, and counted Jen in on her fingers, and closed her fist.

"Hot Topic," Jen said to Camera 1. "From the Wall. This is from @mira_b, and she says she's been seeing a guy for three months, and he's great, and he's asked her to keep it off social media for now. He says he's private. Is that a red flag, or is that just a grown man?"

The Wall started up. Jen turned to the desk.

"Marcy first," Doug said, over the speakers. Two hundred people heard it. "She's got a story. You can see it on her face."

The room laughed. Marcy put her hand flat on her chest. "I do not."

"You do," Jen said. "He's right. You've got the face."

"Okay, I do." Marcy leaned into her mic. "Two years ago. Three months. Same deal, he's private. Turns out he was very private. Turns out he was private with two other women in Dublin. Ohio, not Ireland, I want to be clear, it's twenty minutes away, he wasn't even trying."

"Forty seconds," Doug said, and the room laughed at that too, because they'd never heard anybody count before, and Jen saw Lou, off camera, close her eyes for a second.

"So red flag," Jen said.

"Every flag," Marcy said. "All the flags. A parade."

The Wall agreed. The Wall also wanted something else, and Jen could see it, because it was right there behind Marcy's head in yellow and white, a hundred posts saying the same thing in a hundred ways. ASK HIM. ask window guy. ask him if HE'D go public.

In her ear, and in everybody's, Doug said, "Twenty. Take it to the Wall and out."

She should have. She had the line ready. She knew how to do it, she'd done it four thousand times, read one post off the Wall, laugh, throw to commercial.

Instead she looked up at the window.

"Window Guy," she said. "The people want to know. Off socials, yes or no?"

The speakers gave out only the hum of the open channel, a soft wide sound like a room with a fan running. She'd never heard that before either. Two hundred people held still and looked at the ceiling.

"I don't have socials," Doug said.

The Wall went off. HE DOESN'T HAVE SOCIALS, of course he doesn't, taxes guy, i KNEW it.

"You don't have anything?" Jen said.

"I have a car," he said. "I eat breakfast in it."

She almost laughed. She pressed her tongue into her cheek and held it there and didn't give it to him. In the window, he'd put one hand flat on the board in front of him, and she saw him look down at it, and she knew he was working out how to get them to the break. Then his voice came down out of the ceiling again, not any louder, a little closer to the mic, like he'd forgotten for a second that it went anywhere but her ear.

"Your collar's folded under on the left."

She put her hand up to it before she thought. It was. The left point of her blouse collar had turned under the blazer lapel. She fixed it, on camera, flattening it with two fingers. Somebody in the back laughed, not sure yet what at, and a few people in the front said aww.

"Ten," Lou said, and nobody heard it except Jen, because Lou's channel wasn't on the speakers. Lou had a face on her like she'd bitten something.

"Mira," Jen said to Camera 1, "he's not private, he's hiding. Red flag. We'll be right back."

The red light went off. The band came in.

---

There was a click, and the hum went out of the ceiling, and her earpiece was only her earpiece again.

The room didn't stop talking. Jen sat at the desk and looked at her cards and didn't read them. Over the top of them she could see the Wall. It had gone back to #JenKFairly, and here and there, scrolling up through it, somebody had posted collar??

"Well," Marcy said, and ate a saltine.

In Jen's ear, Lou said, "Fairley."

"I know."

"You don't. Her collar was folded and you told her. That's the job. You'd have said it if nobody was listening." Lou let that sit for a second. "They're going to make it into something anyway. I'm telling you so you know what's coming."

"I know," Doug said. His voice was very even. "Who's closing the hour? It's open on the sheet."

"Jen closes," Jen said, into her lapel mic, at the exact moment he said, "Jen's closing."

They both stopped.

There was a second on the channel where nobody said anything. She could hear the director breathing and Kyle's chair creak. She looked up at the window and he was already looking down at the desk, at her, and then he looked at the rundown.

"Okay," Lou said, in a voice that didn't give anything away. "Jen closes. Ninety to air."

---

They did the rest of the show. There was a QuietMouth spot at the end of the second block, the holdover from yesterday, and Brandon had a single card for it that said in large block letters DO NOT MENTION THE STOOL, and so Jen didn't. She held up the tin and read the line and looked very carefully at Camera 2 and not at the stool. It sat where it always sat, stage left by Earl. The more carefully she didn't look at it the louder the room got, until somebody in the back yelled "THE STOOL" and the Wall rained cartoon lozenges, and Brandon at the edge of the set put his face in his hands.

She closed the hour. Lou spun one finger at her from the edge of the floor, and she said, "That's our show. We meant to say that," and the band played everybody out.

In her ear, under the music, Doug said, "Clear. Thanks, everybody."

---

The loading dock faced west, and by one o'clock there was sun on it, and the old SOFAS letters over the door threw a shadow you could almost read on the concrete.

Jen came out to get some air and found Kyle there, sitting on an overturned milk crate, typing on his phone with both thumbs and frowning at it. Doug was standing next to him, reading over his shoulder.

"Linda," Kyle said, when he saw Jen, by way of hello, and held up the phone.

MAKE THE CHEMISTRY LOOK PRODUCED. NOT REAL. PRODUCED. CALL ME.

"She's been calling," Kyle said. "I've been texting her back so she stops calling. I drafted a thing." He turned the phone so Doug could see. "Just so she has something. You can change it."

Jen leaned in. Kyle had written: Per Jen K, the collar bit was planned with Doug in advance. Totally produced. Will keep it light.

It was such a normal sentence. She'd read a hundred like it. She'd found out about most of them later.

Doug took the phone out of Kyle's hand. He held it at the angle people over forty hold their phones, a little far away, and he put his thumb on the screen and held down the delete key, and Jen watched Per Jen K go backward out of the sentence one letter at a time. Then the rest of it. Then he typed with one thumb, slowly.

The Wall voted, 68 percent. Nothing was planned. Won't happen again.

He looked at it. Then he deleted the last sentence too, and sent it, and gave Kyle back his phone.

"She's going to call," Kyle said.

"I'll take the call."

Kyle looked at the phone, and at Doug, and then up at Jen, and seemed to decide that he would rather be anywhere else. "I'm going to go see if the printer's working," he said, and got up and went back inside with the milk crate, for some reason, under his arm.

Jen leaned her shoulder against the warm cinder block next to the door.

"You deleted won't happen again," she said.

Doug put his hands in his pockets. He was looking out at the lot, where his car was parked by itself in the far corner, facing them.

"Your collar's going to fold again sometime," he said. "When it does, I'm going to tell you. I'm not promising Linda I'll stop."

She looked at him. He kept his eyes on the lot. A truck went by out on the road, and the dock door rattled in its track behind them, and she could hear, faintly, Kyle inside saying sorry, sorry to something.

"For the record," Jen said, "I didn't plan it either."

"I know." He was quiet for a second. "You looked up."

"You said collar."

"You looked up first," he said.

She didn't have anything to say to that, because it was true. She stood there with her shoulder on the cinder block and her arms crossed, and he stood there with his hands in his pockets, and neither of them went inside. The sun moved about an inch on the dock.

"Ruthie Cole's daughter called the booking line," he said eventually. "Ruthie wants to know if she can come back when she wins the appeal."

"Tell her yes."

"I already did."

Jen pushed off the wall. "I'm going home," she said. "Don't let Linda rewrite the close."

"I won't," he said.

She walked across the lot to her car. It was parked six spaces from his, which she hadn't planned either. She got in and put her bag on the passenger seat and her keys in the ignition, and then she sat there for a minute without starting it.

Then she reached up, without deciding to, and touched the left point of her collar, and it was lying flat.