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and fat, grotesque cat.
    Mr. Pink Nose had become quite the tasteless phenomenon after Andy suggested the hateful creature be given an opportunity to take a leak on someone in each week’s episode. As the laugh track shrieked, the editors would cut to a close-up of Mr. Pink Nose’s furry face. Then, as the sound of feline urine trickled hilariously, Mr. Pink Nose would make his trademark hiss.
    America was in love.
    But there was more. The character of Cleo’s grand-daughter,Poppy-Sue, was especially odious and the producers had attempted to recruit her endlessly overused line of dialogue, “I’ve never seen a butt with legs,” into mainstream vernacular. T-shirts, pull-string dolls, posters of people with butts where their heads would normally be. This was whoring at an epic level, and by any decent measure, a total nightmare.
    To say the show was widely despised would be putting you up for a Humanitas. It sucked. The lines were indescribably unfunny. The plots embarrassing. The actors couldn’t’ve gotten work in claymation. The theme song, as rendered by accordion, snare drum and strip-show cymbal plus some unnerving guy from a beer hall singing, was twenty-five seconds of sheer agony.
    OH CLEO, WHY DO YOU LAUGH SO MUCH?
    (BOOM, SPLASH)
    OH CLEO, IT’S YOU WHO BRINGS US SUCH
    (SPLASH)
    JOY! SUCH (SPLASH) JOY!!
    (SPLASH, SPLASH, BOOM)
    OH, CLEO, YOU MUST HAVE DROPPED
    FROM A CLOUD
    OF GOLD (BOOM, BOOM, BOOM).
    ONE DAY WITH YOU (SPLASH, SPLASH)
    AND THE WORLD
    WOULD NEVER GET (SPLASH, BOOM, SPLASH)
    OOOOOLLLLLDDDD!
    How could Andy live with himself? Creating that kind of Alzheimer drivel; airing it every week.
    And he was rich!
    “Cleo” was a prospering corporation. It wasn’t a show. It was U.S. Steel with sets and punch lines.
    And this twenty-five-year-old Flintstone vitamin was behind the whole thing. He’d been on the covers of
Vanity Fair
and
Newsweek
And the network loved him like they loved few persons or things in the universe. He had brought great riches to their barren souls. He had brought a smile to their disheartened faces. And last but not least, he’d helped them gross an extra eighty million in fiscal ’92.
    And he could barely write his name.
    They’d yanked him out of MGM when he was a reader for a big Italian producer and given him a shot because he’d discovered some good properties for the Italian guy and made several purely accidental moves that resulted in mushroom profits for Metro during an otherwise bad year.
    So, they give him an office and he picks a couple more properties that switch swill to box office and it’s another promotion. This time right into the sagging TV division. Then, he hits a homerun with lips. Movie of the Week. Three nuns out in the desert with an escaped-conrapist-psycho: “Sisters and Brother.”
    Bad doesn’t cover it.
    Reviewers are in pale stupors they hate it so much. Even the Catholic Church decries it. The Pope was rumored to have switched over to “Who’s the Boss?” Cardinals are calling the dreckish extravaganza “an abuse of human values as well as fundamental tenets.” Angry telegrams are beyond earth math. Hallmark doesn’t make cards for this level of outrage.
    And the goddamn show
cleans
up.
    Forty-two share. Even though he couldn’t figure out how to work a book of matches, Andy had invented fire.
    “So, what do you have for me?” Andy gestured in fast little circles with his right hand, its nails chewed to gross nubs. “I haven’t seen you for a while. Geez, you do some episodes for Bochco and all of a sudden I can’t get a call once in awhile?”
    Andy stared, nodding with amusement. Alan nodded back, smiling. Andy’s minions, lined on the couch, nodded equal amusement; intestinally blocked Kewpies. They were there to round out the meeting and served no identifiable purpose; full grown people, living complex lives in L.A., sitting pleasantly in this room, exuding nothingness for a living.
    “I’ve got something in mind for