"Those high-priced designers work according to ancient laws," she told him. "They all work more or less together—though they don't plan it that way. I've decided that trite ideas are born simultaneously in mediocre minds. A fashion designer or a television writer or a studio executive cannot really be said to possess a mind at all. They're hive mentalities; they eat the sewage that floats on the surface of the mass culture, digest it, and then get creative diarrhea—all at once. The turds look and smell exactly alike, and we call them this year's fashions, hit shows, books, and movies.
The key to dressing is to look at what everyone else is wearing then avoid it. Find a creative person who had never thought of designing clothes, and ask her to come up with something."
"You don't look like that on television," he pointed out.
"Ah, my dear. That's my job. A Celebrity must be homogenized with the culture that believes she is a Celebrity. I couldn't even get on the television dressed like I am now; the Taste Arbiter would consult its trendex and throw up its hands and have a screaming snit. But take note; the way I'm dressed now is the way everyone will be dressed in about a month."
"Do you like that?"
"Better than I like getting into costume for a guest spot on the Who's Hot, Who's Shit? show. This way the designers are watching me instead of the other way around." She laughed, and nudged him with her elbow. "Remember drop-seat pajamas, about a year and a half ago? That was mine. I wanted to see how far they'd go. They ate it up. Didn't you think that was funny?"
Cooper did recall thinking they were funny when they first came around. But then, somehow, they looked sexy. Soon a girl looked frumpy without that rectangle of flannel flapping against the backs of her thighs. Later, another change had happened, the day he realized the outfits were oldfashioned.
"Remember tail-fins on shoes? That was mine too."
One night she took him through part of her library of old tapes.
After her constant attacks on television, he was not prepared for her fondness, her genuine love, for the buried antiques of the medium.
"Television is the mother that eats its young," she said, culling through a case of thumbnail-sized cassettes. "A television show is senile about two seconds after the phosphor dots stop glowing. It's dead after one re-run, and it doesn't go to heaven." She came back to the couch with her selection and dumped them on the table beside the ancient video device.
"My library is hit-and-miss," she said. "But it's one of the best there is. In the real early days they didn't even save the shows. They made some films, lost most of those, then went to tape and erased most of them after a few years in the vault. Shows you how valuable the product was, in their own estimation. Here, take a look at this."
What she now showed him lacked not only depth, but color as well. It took him a few minutes to reliably perceive the picture, it was so foreign to him. It flickered, jumped, it was all shades of gray, and the sound was tinny. But in ten minutes he was hypnotized.
"This is called Faraway Hill," she said. "It was the first net soap. It came on Wednesday nights at
2100, on the DuMont Net, and it ran for twelve weeks. This is, so far as I know, the only existing episode, and it didn't surface until 1990."
She took him back, turning the tiny glass screen into a time machine. They sampled Toast of the Town, One Man's Family, My Friend Irma, December Bride, Pete and Gladys, Petticoat Junction, Ball Four, Hunky & Dora, Black Vet, Kunklowitz, Kojak, and Koonz. She showed him wonderfully inventive game shows, serials that made him deeply involved after only one episode, adventures so civilized and restrained he could barely believe they were on television. Then she went on to the Golden Age of the Sitcom for Gilligan's Island and Family Affair.
"What I can't get over," he said, "is how good it is. It's so much better than what we see today. And they did it all with no sex and practically no violence."
"No nudity, even," she said. "There was no frontal nudity on network TV until Koonz. Next season, every show had it, naturally. There was no actual intercourse until much later, in Kiss My Ass." She looked away from him, but not before he caught a hint of sadness in her eyes. He asked her what was wrong.
"I don't know, Q.M. I mean... I don't know exactly. Part of it is knowing that most of these shows were panned by the critics when they came out. And I've showed you some flops, but mostly these were hits. And I can't tell the difference. They all look good. I mean, none of them have people you'd expect to meet in real life, but they're all recognizably human, they act more or less like humans act.
You can care for the characters in the dramas, and the comedies are witty."
"So those critics just had their heads up their asses."
She sighed. "No. What I fear is that it's us. If you're brought up eating shit, rotten soyaloid tastes great. I really do think that's what's happened. It's possible to do the moral equivalent of the anatomical impossibility you just mentioned. I know, because I'm one of the contortionists who does it. What frightens me is that I've been kidding myself all along, that I'm stuck in that position. That none of us can unbend our spines any longer."
She had other tapes.
It was not until their second week together that she brought them out, rather shyly, he thought. Her mother had been a fanatic home vidmaker; she had documented Megan's life in fine detail.
What he saw was a picture of lower-upper-class life, not too different in its broad outlines from his own upper-middle milieu. Cooper's family had never had any financial troubles. Galloway's were not fabulously wealthy, though they brought in twenty times the income of Cooper's. The house that appeared in the background shots was much larger than the one Cooper had grown up in. Where his family had biked, hers had private automobiles. There was a woman in the early tapes that Megan identified as her nurse; he did not see any other servants. But the only thing he saw that really impressed him was a sequence of her receiving a pony for her tenth birthday. Now, there was class.
Little Megan Galloway, pre-sidekick, emerged as a precocious child, perhaps a trifle spoiled. It was easy to see where at least part of her composure before the Transer came from; her mother had been everywhere, aiming her vidicam. Her life was cinema verite, with Megan either totally ignoring the camera or playing to it expertly, as her mood dictated. There were scenes of her reading fluently in three languages at the age of seven, others showing her hamming it up in amateur theatricals staged in the back yard.
"Are you sure you want to see more?" she asked, for the third or fourth time.
"I tell you, I'm fascinated. I forgot to ask you where all this is happening. California, isn't it?"
"No, I grew up in La Barrio Cercada, Veintiuno, one of the sovereign enclaves the congloms carved out of Mexico for exec families. Dual United States and GWA citizenship. I never saw a real Mexican the whole time I lived there. I just thought I ought to ask you," she went on, diffidently.
"Home vids can be deadly boring."
"Only if you don't care about the subject. Show me more."
Somewhere during the next hour of tapes, control of the camera was wrested from Megan's mother and came to reside primarily with Megan herself and with her friends. They were as camera-crazy as her mother had been, but not quite so restrained in subject matter. The children used their vidicams as virtually every owner had used them since the invention of the device: they made dirty tapes. The things they did could usually better be described as horseplay than as sex, and they generally stopped short of actual intercourse, at least while the tape was rolling.
"My god," Megan sighed, rolling her eyes. "I must have a million kilometers of this sort of kiddieporn.
You'd think we invented it."
He observed that she and her crowd were naked a lot more than he and his friends had been. The students at his school had undressed at the beach, to participate in athletics, and to celebrate special days like Vernal Equinox and The Last Day of School. Megan's friends did not seem to dress at all.