"Last Jerry Fagin Show by John Morressy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morressy John)

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As I should have anticipated, Jerry was playing with his audience. After the solemn buildup, the show opened with a young comic. Billy appealed for a big hand for the kid in his first TV appearance, and the poor jerk-his name was Frankie Mars, for God's sake-came on an did a monologue about aliens landing in Brooklyn. It was the thirty-first one I'd heard since Twelve's arrival. There were alien-andPuerto Rican jokes, alien-and-cop jokes, Jewish mother-and-alien jokes. I found it all very cozy and familiar. I had stolen a lot of those very same gags for my early sketches.
The comic died, and he was followed by a singer who did a new number written in honor of Twelve. The only lines I can remember are "The whole room rocks, and I shake in my socks, when you jiggle your eyes and wink your weiox." The rest was a lot worse.
The singer gave it all she had, but she went down like the Titanic, same as Frankie Mars. Scattered applause from three relatives in the studio audience, silence from everybody else. The entire home audience was either in the bathroom or at the refrigerator. Comics and singers they could get anytime. What they wanted was Jerry and his guest.
That was a distinct Jerry Fagin touch. Subtle and deadly. I could picture him setting it up: the Uncle Jerry smile and "This will be the biggest audience in history, and I'm going to give some new talent a chance." And it's not until they're on camera that the new talent realize that they couldn't hold this audience if

they stripped naked and sacrifice themselves to a trash compactor. I wondered why Jerry had picked this particular comic and this particular singer to destroy. Probably an interesting story there if I could dig it out. I drank to their memory.
Jerry sauntered on camera, white-tie and all, and was greeted with five solid minutes of uproar. He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking humble and saintly, and when the noise died down, he made a little speech in which he used the words honor nine times and privilege eight. Grateful came up eleven times in just over a minute.
Then Twelve appeared at last. I turned the welcoming ovation low and took a good look. He moved smoothly for something as lopsided as he appeared to be. The lumpy, grayishbrown plastic sack that covered his pale body didn't help his looks much. He looked like something that stepped off the cover of a cereal box, and those wacky, wandering, off-center features were halfway between a nightmare monster and an idiot mask.
I turned up the sound. The people in the audience were still applauding wildly, and Jerry let them go on. But when someone whistled. Jerry held up his hands for quiet. Twelve's eyes and nose moved around a little and then were still.
"Our guest has requested one courtesy," Jerry said. "Whistling sets up a painful feedback in his communication apparatus; so I must insist that no one whistle during the show."
a
"Thank you, Mr. Jerry Fagin," said Twelve. His voice rolled out in a deep, gluey flow, like gravel being tumbled around in syrup.
"Thank you for consenting to appear on our show, Mr. Ambassador. It's a great honor." Jerry said.
Once Jerry got started thanking he couldn't stop himself. He thanked the President, Congress, the armed forces, the American people, the audience, the network, his friends, his sponsors-individually, by name-his parents, and his current wife, then went on to thank the rulers of Twelve's planet, the spaceship industry there, and everyone else-right down to Newton, Galileo, and Einstein-who might possibly have had a bearing on Twelve's appearance here. The only name he didn't drop was God's. Maybe he should have thrown that in.
Finally, after all the preliminaries and all the back-patting, Twelve got his chance to speak. This was the big moment, the message to humankind from outer space, the voice from the stars. Everyone listened in absolute silence.
And Twelve was boring as hell.
It's ridiculous to think that someone who has actually crossed interstellar space with word from another world could be dull, but that's what Twelve was. He may have been dynamite on his own world, but on Earth he was a dud. It wasn't entirely his fault. In his monitoring he had picked up every cliche in the English language, and he was using all of them. That burbly voice didn't help, either.

By the time Twelve had assured everyone that he looked upon his mission as a great and historic challenge, that he came in hopes of establishing a lasting friendship between our two great peoples, that a new era in the history of the galaxy was dawning and he was proud and humbled to be given the chance to serve and so on and so on-it sounded as if he had memorized every campaign handout of the past forty years-Jerry could smell trouble. The studio audience was fidgeting noisily. People were coughing and shuffling their feet.
I caught the quick flickering of the eyes, the giveaway that Jerry was getting edgy. I could almost hear his brain going. Here was Jerry on the biggest night of his career, the biggest night in television history, and his guest was bombing. He could picture that audience of a hundred ninety-two million American viewers scratching their bellies and saying. "Hey, Honey, what do you say we switch over to the naked dancers on Channel 8?"
So Jerry made his move. If Twelve couldn't carry his weight as a guest, he'd just have to pay his passage any way he could.

Twelve was gurgling on, ending a long speech about interplanetary solidarity. I returned my attention to him. ". . . With shared hope for the future and with a deep and abiding faith in the basic decency and fundamental goodwill of the fine people of Earth that encourages me to predict a new age of brotherhood and justice in which races will ask not what the galaxy will do
for their planet but rather what their planet can do for the galaxy," he said.
There was polite applause. Twelve looked pleased, but he wasn't in the business. The applause was the kind that sounds in every performer's ears like a death rattle.
"Gee, that's just the way my daddy used to put it," Jerry said, turning to the audience.
That drew the first laugh of the evening. Everyone recognized the tag line of one of Jerry's oldest characters, Dummy Lummox the Clumsy Cop. It gave the audience something safe and familiar to deal with. They knew how to react now.
"But in a higher sense, this night represents only the beginning of what I venture to call the Galactic Age," Twelve went on, "for there is much to be done before we march together with arms linked in friendship and trust to meet the challenge of the future."
"That sounds mighty good, but we do it different back home," Jerry said.
The audience caught that one, too, and gladdened my heart. It was the tag line of my very own character, Elmo Klunk the Shitkicker Aboard. Elmo was one of Jerry's dependables, sure to make an appearance at least once very two weeks. The audience loosened up and laughed a bit louder, and longer.
I poured another drink, a bigger one, and edged forward on my chair. It isn't every night that you get to see an alien visitor turned into a stooge.
"We're honored by your tribute, Mr.

Ambassador," Jerry said, "but I'm sure you understand our audience's curiosity about your planet and its customs. For instance, I'm told that you have no comedy on your world."
"It is correct, we have no comedy."
Jerry nodded sympathetically. "I've run into the same problem. You must need new writers."
I felt that one right between the shoulders. Welcome to Pearl Harbor, this is your host. Jerry Fagin. If my glass hadn't been nearly full. I would have thrown it at the screen.
Twelve, after a pause, burbled, "It is correct, we have no writers."
"I'll let you have mine. You still won't have any comedy, but you'll be getting a great bowling team."
Again Twelve paused amid the laughter to evaluate Jerry's line and said, "I know this bowling that is the work of your Saturdays in the regressing hailumes. We have no bowling."
"No comedy, no writers, no bowling. Tell me, Mr. Ambassador, what do your people do for entertainment?"
"It is correct, we have no entertainment. I do not grasp the concept."
"It's simple. Entertainment is what you do when you're not working."
Twelve was silent for a longer time. Clearly he was having trouble with Jerry's lines, which weren't saying what they appeared to be saying. The audience tittered with anticipation. Finally, in a gurgle that already sounded to me to be a bit defensive. Twelve said, "When we are not
working, we sleep."

"Like all those people who used to watch the other networks. I see. But seriously, Mr. Ambassador . . ." And Jerry went on, a little faster now, confident, feeling the audience with him. They were laughing in the right places, waiting for the lines they knew he was going to feed his stooge from outer space.

Jerry jumped from topic to topic, always balancing the serious question with the quick punch line or asking a dumb question and then going statesmanlike, until the audience was helpless and Twelve didn't know what the hell was going on. Those syrupy responses came slower and slower. Each pause was longer than the one before. Finally, when Jerry got on the subject of reproduction, Twelve gave up completely and sat very still. Except for his eyes and nose and mouth. They were crawling around his face like flies trapped in vanilla pudding.