Alan Sincic

         Johnny Carson is struggling to get up from his desk. It is the end of the show. They are hosing down the TV cameras and Ed is already back in the dressing room with a toasted cream cheese sandwich in his mouth and a chorus girl on his lap. Doc and the band are in the alley out back and loading their instruments onto the old Greyhound bus that used to carry them out through the great Midwestern vaudeville circuit of the 1930s but is wheel-less now, up on blocks, birds nesting in the undercarriage and a bum asleep in the aisle but still an elegant and serviceable coat room for the Tonight Show orchestra. An NBC page in a bright red coat is leading the studio audience back out through the immense maze of wiring and electrical generating equipment and grid-like television receiving antennae that is the NBC Studio in Burbank, CA. He looks like a tomato disappearing into a gigantic salad.

         As the klieg lights fade, Johnny takes the tag-end of the seat belt between his teeth and gives it yank. How humorous that on this, the last night of a long and productive television career, he should unable to extricate himself from the studio furniture. "These crazy kids today and their gas-powered, quadraphonic, fuel-injected cucking stools" he expostulates quietly to himself, "no wonder I've got a crick in the back of the neck." Like a pilot bracing himself for an ejection at 2,000 feet, he sinks down between the armrests, curls up into a ball, plants his feet against the desk and -- with a long smooth kick developed over the years as a member of the Flying Wallendas, an internationally renowned family of aerialists and acrobatical engineers -- propels himself backward into that star-speckled midnight pan of the LA county skyline which is the backdrop for the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Johnny Carson is struggling to get up from his desk.

         Now It Can Be Told:  In the top left-hand drawer of Johnny's desk is pair of binoculars and a half-eaten tin of McVitty's shortbread biscuits. In the bottom left-hand drawer is a flashlight, an apple, and a 357 magnum with a smooth-bore tip and a semi-automatic double bolt action reservoir stock. Every night before the show Johnny counts the objects in his desk to be sure that nothing has been taken and that, of the items requiring replenishment, replenishments are available, fresh, and of the very highest quality.

         The next morning, in a pre-dawn assault coordinated via satellite from their command post high up among the headwaters of the Amazon, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers welding team bivouacs at the front gate of the studio to flush out the stragglers, strike the set, seal the doors, wire the explosives, trim the lawn, spread the blanket, brew the coffee, fetch the danish and then, in their jungle-green armor electrically-powered all-terrain vehicles, slip quietly away into the misty ante meridian.

         A pin drops. A cricket pauses. A pair of Tonight Show secretaries emerge from a nearby underground bunker. Duffel bags in tow, pajama bottoms screwed down into the back pockets of their khaki hiking shorts, Tupperware canteens full of paper clips and lipstick and scraps of crusty rouge rattling like tambourines against their wobbly hips, they trudge out barefoot across the damp grass of the Tonight Show compound to deposit, at the extreme northwest corner of the flame-resistant camouflage picnic tarpaulin, amid an ambuscade of cinnamon buns and cherry-glazed baklava, as per Johnny's request and in a gesture of their love for him, two sixteen-ounce bowls of potato salad.

         Shhhhoopp. The two stenos snap into focus between the cross-hairs of Johnny's heat-seeking photo-voltaic night vision scope. Launch time T-minus two hours twenty-three minutes. Johnny (who has been up all night scrawling thank-you notes and packing sack lunches for departing cast and crew), powers down the electronic range-finder as they draw near. They are of the old school, these ladies, these dusky old blooms, and the stains of typewriter ink and Dentu-Creme still cling to their gardenia-scented fingers. They pause in the darkness beneath the Tonight Show birdhouse and aviary nesting ground, their fists clasped tightly round the hand-crank of an old-fashioned mimeograph machine, their ribs rising and falling in the silence like a pair of broken accordions. Never again will they scamper out between segments to pluck the lint from Johnny's lapel, or crouch behind his ear with a tic-tac and a moist towelette, or crawl out under fire and across his bony ankles with a replacement spittoon and a red chamois cloth. Never again will they mop his brow, or clip his nails, or clasp him to their bosom as the credits unroll. Nature takes its course. Time marches on. Never again will they darn his socks, dust his cookies, plaster the fringe of his fizz-white hair with a stroke of their manicured fingers, nay, nevermore pound his laundry against the rocks, or march with him into the Banyan grove to harvest the fruit of the rare wiki-wiki, or dance with him the ceremonial dance of the savage ee-woo-gigi. Sic transit gloria mundi.

         0550: Mimeo broken down into constituent parts. Mimeo buried in shallow grave. T-minus 1 hour 27 minutes. The secretaries wrap their foot-high bouffants in a pair of orange polyester day-glo scarves and burrow their way into a nearby haystack to await the dawn.

         Now It Can Be Told:  It has always been a point of honor for Johnny not to accept any compensation for the work he does on behalf of the viewing public. In his view it is a question of integrity. You do not invite a guest into your home and then insist upon payment for entertaining them. This is not hospitality. This is not friendship. Call it what you will (and various are the weasel words -- donation, honorarium, "salary" -- offered up by those who would betray the trust of their listeners in this manner), the simple fact remains that, for Johnny at least, the bond of love between himself and his viewers is not for sale at any price.

         0700. Ed is loading up the Winnebago now. A sack lunch in the glove compartment, a box of after-dinner mints in the door sleeve and, on the luggage rack topside, a crate of candied hams to distribute across the American subcontinent. Someone once said -- and Johnny has always agreed -- that love finds its most genuine expression in little acts of gratitude. On the bottom shelf of the portable gas-powered refrigerator rests a set of hand-carved chocolate duck whistles engineered especially for children by a crack regiment of NBC confectioneries, pediatricians, and wildlife experts. The tiny kitchen sink overflows with fresh mangos; the pantry blooms with industrial strength bags of toasted cheese puffs; behind the radar-deflecting magnesium-alloy door of the medicine chest, sixteen finger-sized Band-Aids lie unblemished in their glossy white cocoons.

         0710. NBC Studios, Burbank, California, home of the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, shoots suddenly skyward in a golden blossom of flame. Ka-boom.

         0720. Buenos suerte, Senora Carsona, vaya con Dios en sus nueva vidas! Out beyond the parking lot and across the Toastum crumbs and baco-bits and gutted tangelo frijoles of their farewell breakfast together, Johnny and the gang gather round the bonfire crawling up the left-field bleachers of the Tonight Show softball diamond, roasting marshmallows and feeding platter-sized spools of videotape into the acrid flames. Freddy De Cordova, decked out in a chef's hat and wielding the splintered arm of a number seven boom mike like a gigantic cast-iron cocktail toothpick, harpoons the butt end of a breakfast ham and shovels it into the fire. The key grip and his cronies slouch around the perimeter of the festivities, plucking at the creases in their saggy jeans and idly flicking lit matches into the Texas-style coleslaw. To each his own. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. De gustibus non est disputandem.

         Now It Can Be Told:  As a half-breed Indian and direct descendant of famous frontier scout Christopher "Kit" Carson, Johnny prefers the rustle of the woodland bough to the shooga-shooga of the Powervac 650 Dog-and-Carpet Cleaner, the howl of the lonesome coyote to the brrippp of the velcro hairweave, the crackle of the venison cutlet to the smoosh of the Yoplait Lo-cal Fat-free Cup-O-Yogurt. Zoo night tonight. Nick Perkins of the Cincinnati Botanical Gardens nudges Sniffy the albino rabbit onto his shoulders and waves good-bye to the crowd. Johnny leans over to whisper something into Nick's ear. Klink-klink. A jar of Adolf's Meat Tenderizer rolls out from Johnny's pant leg and disappears under the desk. Johnny's firm but delicate fingers grip the handle of the tomahawk hidden in the folds of his vest. Doc plays a trumpet solo version of The Girl From Ipanema. Ed drives his shoulder up under the hand crank to jar the credits loose. The cameras roll. The credits scroll. Sniffy the albino rabbit waves good-bye to the crowd.

         6:17am. Cast adjourns to transport staging area. Speech. Applause. Hydraulic crane wheeled into position. The crowd falls back as the crane's 6000 cc diesel engine roars to life. A tremor runs up the leg of Ed's silk pajamas. Go Johnny go. Immaculate in his powder-blue, 100% combed cotton European-tailored suit and accessorized by a pair of Mighty Boy calfskin leather work gloves (Alaskan Oil Pipeline Roustabout and freelance government trapper, circa 1972) Johnny waves down at them from the cockpit window. A cheer goes up as the Tonight Show couch, bowed at the shoulders, frayed at the seams, scored by the imprint of a million famous buttocks over the years, rises up in a dangle at the end of its tether fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty feet above their heads. From out of its bowels spill the trimmings of a half-century under the lights: pocket change, breath mints, ticket stubs, candy. A packet of Sweet n' Low. A pair of women's size 26E black lace g-string panties. A yo-yo, a bandoleer, and a fifth of whiskey. The ignition key to a brand-new 1956 Chevrolet Toronado. A mechanical pencil with the name "Ricardo" etched along the shaft. A button. A cufflink. Forty-seven lightly-salted oven-roasted sunflower seeds driven rivet-like into a half-eaten leg of mutton. An autographed, laminated, wallet-sized photo of General Charles De Gaul circa 1943.  Unidentified kidney-stone shaped pellet-like organic material (1.7 ounces). A lug nut. A set of rosary beads. A pair of salmon and cheddar dog biscuits fused into an igneous crescent of edible ligature round the perimeter of a single glass eye.

         Now It Can Be Told:  Contrary to popular belief, Johnny Carson does not surround himself with assistants, retainers, lieutenants, henchmen, bodyguards, vassals, courtesans, bondsmen or grooms. Johnny's people (as they are somewhat smirkingly called by a small coterie of press hounds and cultural elites unable — or unwilling -- to entertain the notion of a purely personal loyalty) serve him out of an old-fashioned sense of conviction that, in the words of Miguel, his housekeeper, lawn boy, dog-trainer and personal chef over the last twenty-seven and a half years, "It's the right thing to do".

         6:23am. Stage two. Staff and families buffed, briefed, tagged, flagged, shaved, showered and hoisted onto vehicles for transport. As the squadron of fifteen yellow school buses rumbles slowly northward into the morning haze, Johnny whips out his 357 Magnum and squeezes off a dozen shots skyward in a hearty good-bye this clan of kindred spirits, this infusion of blood into the ailing body politic, this hardy band of individualists wending their way upward into the rugged foothills of the Canadian wilderness where they might practice their beliefs free from the encroachments of a thoughtless civilization and unhindered by the statutory whimsy of state and local authorities.

         Now It Can Be Told:  Orphaned at birth in a tragic sledding accident and raised by wolves in the tundric wastelands of Kamchatka, Eddie ("Wild Boy") McMann is finally hunted down and captured during one of Sir G.H. Wilkin's expeditions to Urkutsk in the early 1920's. A mere six years later, following a nine-month internship at the Philadelphia Museum of Natural History, a degree in pharmacology from the University of Illinois, a shave, a haircut, and a warm sponge bath in the greenroom five minutes before airtime, Ed steps up to the microphone of the Tonight Show for the very first time in a long and productive career. Dateline: April 5, 1929.

         T-minus twenty and counting. The compound lies deserted, the parking lot empty, the bonfire a crust of black embers. Particle by particle, pixel by pixel, like a spray of millet seeds blown out across a busted millstone, like a sheaf of multiple independently targeted warheads splintered out across a continental shelf, the Tonight Show disintegrates into the surrounding landscape.

         Ed and Johnny clamor up onto the roof of the Winnebago. They are lashing down the barbecue grill and the set of folding lawn chairs when Ed suddenly stops, sniffs the air, cocks his head up the slope of the valley. Johnny molds his hands into a pair of flesh-colored binoculars and sights down the length of Eddie's quivering arm. Far off in the distance, tiny now as the dots at the end of this sentence, Doc and the band pause at the crest of a snow-covered mountain pass. Dot. Dot-dot-dash. The semaphore glint of Doc's iridium blended fiber carbon and platinum alloy tie-tack blinks on, then off, then on again:

         "Aloha... John-boy. Good ...luck and ... farewell."

         "Adios," whispers Johnny to no one in particular, whispers Johnny to the wind. "Adios, compadre."

         Slurp-slurp, slurp-slurp.  Ed licks a dewdrop from the toe of Johnny's Oxford Wing tips.

         "And you too, old boy," murmurs Johnny as he bends down to give Ed a little scratch behind the ears. "I'm going to miss you most of all."

         It has been said (many wild and exaggerated things have been said over the years, and in the lurid manner of the trade publications and the soap digests with their doctored photographs and their so-called inside sources) that Johnny "already has a wife and a family of his own." No doubt there is a certain type of person who would draw pleasure from such a characterization. Public figures have always been hounded by sensationalistic gossip and by the half-truth of capricious innuendo. Johnny is no exception, and the dignity of his silence in the face these stories tells you more about his character than a thousand whispered barbs.

         The Winnebago burbles.  The gravel crackles in the fat of the tread.  At precisely 6:47am Pacific Time, as the white clouds climb the bright blue sky and the warm Burbankian earth rolls belly-upwards into a new day, out goes Johnny, not to the malls or the trade shows or the thirty-story international sports stadium with the glass elevators and the titanium alloy warning track, not to the Interstate and to the turnpikes and to the white water rapids of the triborough parkway ejection ramp, but to the small-town haberdashery and the neighborhood bodega, to the back-lot flea market and the corner bakery, the two-laner and the black-top, the cobbled back alley and the rusty clay culvert, the cul-de-sac and the gravel track and the gay enfilade through the rib-thumping corn.

         Good-bye Johnny. As the motor home shrinks into a ball of red dust, Ed trots down the dirt road after it, his tongue a red flag flapping left and right, his head sagging, a whimper escaping his lips as the red rubber deck shoes squeak to a halt. A pork chop dangles from the spike on the buckle of his viridian blue Bermuda shorts. Already the memory of Johnny is beginning to fade. Ed sniffs the air. Off in the underbrush a gray squirrel scampers for cover. Ed shoots out after it and disappears. Now and only now, and for the first time in nearly sixty years of continuous live performances, Johnny finds himself alone.

         Now It Can Be Told:  Actually, in real life, Johnny Carson is very very short, almost a midget, about half the size of a normal person. He looks as big as he does because of the camera angles and because of the specially constructed midget-sized furniture that can only be found at the NBC studios in Burbank, California. He just looks bigger because he is on television. Everything is bigger on television.

         Evening, Day One. Alone. Snug and alone and at rest. As the stars rise up above the campground, slot 73 down among the aspens a quarter mile from the restroom with its potable water spigot, Johnny nudges the aluminum foil skirt around the Coleman lantern and leans into the map of the seven Midwestern states. With his face floating like a giant white zeppelin above the tiny roads and streams and hamlets sprinkled out across the green Formica table that collapses at will into a Winnebago-style bedroom ensemble, Johnny plots out the route he will take in the morning. Go Johnny, go-go-go. Although the fine-tip pen he uses is an Electroglide 4000, a top of the line navigational marker developed by the Navy in the early seventies as an adjunct to their North Atlantic submarine reconnaissance program, and although Johnny wields it with a skill reminiscent of his many years as guest conductor of the London Philharmonic orchestra (cf. especially Vivaldi's Concerto no. 6 in C Major, RV 180, Il Piacere, 1953), the search extends beyond the bounds of mere scientific inquiry. It is based on a feeling, Johnny's feeling at that moment about where he should go and about what he should be doing when he gets there. Tomorrow: Melbeta, Nebraska. Johnny steers the tip of the pen along state road 71 past Bushnell and Kimball and Redington and -- clicketty-clacketty – over tiny Pumpkin Creek, then slices up under the shadow of Hogback Mountain, squiggles down the Platte River, tumbles bumpetty-bumpetty eastward round the bend to behold and anon, and verily and of a surety, the tiny burg of Melbeta, Nebraska. Johnny's feeling is that -- for tomorrow at least -- Melbeta is where he is going to be needed.

         7/22/95 11:30pm. It is very painful for the American people to turn to the Johnny Carson Show and find, for the first time in their lives -- nothing. Nothing, that is, but snow, gray and white-speckled stuff percolating out across the screen from the beer-stained Bakelite knobs on the bottom to the day-old bowl of chicken gumbo in a wobble up top. The American people dig the morning paper out from under the dog's dish and turn to the weather report. Has it been snowing in Burbank? Ed and Doc and Johnny -- are they back there behind the drifts somewhere bundled up in parkas and llama-skin ski masks, crouched like Sir Edmund Hillary and his faithful sherpa Tenzing to a flickering can of sterno and nibbling pemmican and chanting Rudyard Kipling and chunking shards of defective signal flares into the rumbling scree? Johnny? Johnny? Do you hear us, Johnny? The American People pull their blankets over their shoulders, button up the stitches on their caftans and their muftis and their goose-down polyurethane parkas, settle down into the snow and wait.

         Now It Can Be Told:  Contrary to popular belief (and in spite of his numerous relationships with women in all walks of life) Johnny is, in fact, and remains to this day, a virgin. A full-bodied red-blooded heterosexual with normal, healthy appetites ("all boy" in the words of Sound Bend, Indiana Junior High School 6th Period Physical Education teacher, Floyd B. Bennett), Johnny has nevertheless, and at a great personal cost to himself, decided to quell that old hormonal moan, to gird up those well-proportioned loins in the service of a higher calling, to reign back in that part of himself which rightfully belongs, in the broadest sense of the word, to the American people as a whole.

         Breakfast at the campground: fried kippers, malted flatbread in dandelion oil, boiled mead in a hefty oaken stein. Although he would deny it if you asked him, Johnny has -- as a silver medalist in the pole vault at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics -- always been partial to Finnish breakfast delicacies, often incorporating them into his own uniquely American New Orleans Cajun-syle remoulade sauces with a smattering of chick-peas and a garnish of stir-fried Caribou fritters.

         7/23/95 11:20am. Melbeta, Nebraska. No ignoring the call of nature. Sunoco Station manager William T. Ethelready hauls himself out of the grease-pit and waddles off to the men's room at the back of the garage. At the door he stops, right hand outstretched in a gesture of stunned recognition. He is holding a doorknob. The hole in the door has been replaced by a doorknob! He wipes his hand across his shirt-tail and falls back a step. And the door! There must be some mistake. What has become of the flaking pea-green finish, the dent of the tire-iron, the cloud of stale urine rising up from the moldy brick threshold? And what is this new smell, smell of Lysol and lemon, and sawdust and lacquer, and clover and mortar and sod? And this! This brass door-knocker, and this mail-slot, and this polished silver placard reading, in Old English script, "Hombres"?

         Scrick, scrick. WT's boots stick to the blue floor, refurbished and freshly-painted and luminous blue the exact timbre and intensity of Gauguin's turn-of-the-century masterpiece, "Woman With Mango."  He nibbles the grit from the rim of his thumbnail. He turns once, twice, three times around. The graffiti has been whitewashed from the walls and transcribed (at a scale of 1:5) onto a crisp new sheet of 100% cotton bond paper. The sheet of paper hangs by a white ribbon from the bright silver knob of the (refurbished and fully stocked) toilet paper dispenser. Even the breasts of the woman on the condom machine have been cosmetically altered into a parabola of more pliable and lifelike dimensions.

         "O Sweet Mystery of Life," whispers WT with a flamenco-style shimmy of the hips. Stretched across the toilet seat is a paper ribbon reading Sanitized For Your Protection.  On an oaken table alongside it sits a pair of scissors, a bowl of complimentary breath mints, an unsharpened number two pencil and, rising up in a tower from the white-tiled floor, an eleven-volume set of Will and Ariel Durant's The Story Of Civilization.

         11:25am.  Ribbon-cutting ceremony.

         11:26am. The seating of the guests.

         11:28am. Volume One. Chapter One. The Conditions of Civilization. "Civilization begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of..."

         Now It Can Be Told:  Dateline February 22, 1968. Johnny comes back at dawn to sit at his desk and to watch the sunrise on the down-stage monitor. This is his favorite time to be at his desk. He finds it easier to do his job when everybody's not out there looking at him. His job is to watch the sun as it rises. Sometimes Ed McMann is there to watch it with him. They break for a commercial and Johnny heads outside to take a look at the sun in person. He has an obligation, he is trying to keep up with his tan. While Johnny is out in the parking lot, Ed slides over behind the desk and takes Johnny's pencil between his fingers, taps the top of the desk with the head of the eraser, cups his hands and blows into the microphone like a man blowing into a fire. Go, Ed, go! The sun shines out across the darkened studio, out through the fifteen color monitors and out across the slowly floating face of Ed McMann, the orbiting face of Eddie McMann, the planet McMann, the free-falling, dawn-crawling, knuckle-balling dog-star of the southern night sky....

         7/24/95 4:13pm. The bus from Melbeta to Arden is late. The passengers sit on folding chairs in the Trailways station, fanning themselves with back copies of the Melbeta Star and Ledger and counting the legs of an insect crawling up the face of a busted vending machine when suddenly, Johnny Carson appears. He carries a Tupperware salad cozy laden with ham and cheese finger sandwiches that he has cut into tiny squares and rectangles (no crust) and skewered with red plastic toothpicks in the shape of a pirate sword. The passengers greet him cheerfully, inquire as to his health, entreat him to sign various portions of their exposed flesh with the tip of his Electroglide 4000, but Johnny — although pleasant enough in his Mylar hairnet and hygienic plastic gloves -- brushes them gently aside. It is as if he does not want to be noticed. He blushes as he passes out the sandwiches, the napkins, the jumbo Dixie Cups brimming with Tang and girded with photogravure likenesses of the Mercury Seven Astronauts.

         He says that he would like to do more for them but that -- and surely they can understand from their own bitter experience of life -- his resources are limited. He asks them to remain flexible. He apologizes for not being taller. He breaks the seal on his portable vacu-packed bread and fruit caddie to reveal an attractive array of fresh-cut pineapple slices hand-carved into an exact replica of the state of Nebraska. They are his babies, these Melbetians. Eich Ben Ein Nebraskaner. He promises that when the time comes and the moment is right and the future unfolds that they, their children, yea and even their children's children unto the fourth generation will not regret the faith in him that they have shown this day. The bus arrives. The children run to Johnny to receive their free balloons. A good time is had by all. 

         7/28/95 11:30pm. Everywhere they turn now the weather is the same. Snow, a warm snow, a square steady snow like lint or like confetti or like the Lotto slips in the glass box tumbling and rumbling on the slow-motion Lotto spit. Families -- sometimes families who have been far apart from one another banged up in love and having hurt and been hurt petulant or sorrowful now finally it comes to an end, now finally they track their own footprints back to the old doorstep, trailer park, houseboat, teepee to gather around together, gather round the old GE, Zenith, Westinghouse, black-and-white Philco from their childhood days. They pull their chairs up close. They huddle together, like in the early days of TV, when people wore suits and ties when they watched and the screen was the size of a cheese danish and your body a part of the receiving apparatus you had to try to tilt in the right direction, to try to tilt with the tilt of the antenna. The American people warm their hands against the glow of the screen. They chat together among themselves. Sometimes they break out a coat hanger and roast marshmallows over the electronical components at the back of the set. Sometimes they pick up a guitar or a harmonica and sing along together the theme song of the Tonight Show along with other Appalachian folk favorites such as The Wabash Cannonball, John Henry and On Top of Old Smoky.

         Now It Can Be Told:  From their emergence at the turn of the century as a South Bend, Indiana puppet theater ensemble through their first radio appearance at the height of the depression as a make-work project inaugurated by Franklin D. Roosevelt and administered under the auspices of the Tennessee Valley authority, Johnny and his people have always managed to uphold, in their dealings with small fry peddler and industry giant alike, the highest traditions of the honor system. Semper Fi! Let the other shows drown themselves in a fool's gold of endorsement largess. Buoyed up by the frontier values of personal initiative, fair play, phrenology, crop rotation, colonic irrigation and free-lance animal husbandry, and impressed by the high quality, durability, and ingenious design of American manufactured goods, Johnny's boys have always insisted on being paid, not with money, but with the products themselves. Tinkle-tinkle. A girl's 26-inch Schwinn Road Master bicycle (white straw basket, red plastic streamers, pea-sized silver bell) glides up to the back door of the studio. Knock, knock. Come in. It is Mrs. Del Monte of the Del Monte Canned Corn family with a basket of Del Monte Canned Corn. She canned it herself, last winter, in the shed behind her house. Here, Doc. Here is a spoon. Here is a napkin. Would you like to try a little taste?

         August 17th, 6pm. In a waterside restaurant overlooking the Chesapeake Bay 20 miles south of Norfolk along old state road A1A, Bert and Ellen Lampstein lean out across their gravied brisket with fresh-cut snowpeas and home style mashed potatoes to watch a Vietnamese fishing trawler some hundred yards distant seize up against a sand bar, wheel and tangle in its own muddy net, churn forward a yard or two and then, like a potted lobster impaled upon a sauté fork, shudder to a stop. The mast quivers in the wind. The small brown men clamor and shout as they rush to seize the starboard tackle.

         "Bert," says Ellen as she butters her poppy seed bun with the dairy-fresh creamery butter, "It's going to tip, it's going to tip. Don't you think that we should – ”

         Just when it appears that all will be lost, out pops the head of Johnny Carson, out from the bubbling gumbo of fish and slime-encrusted flotsam, his white hair bristling, his tan intact. Bobbing up and down in the tidal rip, almost indistinguishable at this distance from the buoy markers that steer the channel in line to the sea, Johnny bares his fully-occluded and periodontally sound, naturally white and 98% cavity-free, sweet-smelling and-yet-at-the-same-time masculine teeth, chews through the net, frees the boat and then, as suddenly as he came, disappears back under the water.

         11:30pm the 27th. The changes are subtle at first. Although the American People cannot see him, rumor has it that, night after night at a half-past the hour, Johnny has turned to watching them, they themselves, the American People -- that snow is merely the residual by-product of an advanced new interactive technological breakthrough whereby Johnny reaches out to millions of homes heretofore sheltered from his view. At any moment the veil will part, the screen turn window and out will pop Johnny. You are the one I have been waiting for, he will say -- you in the red bathrobe draped across the easy-boy, a tub of buttered popcorn sliding down your navel; you in the battered overalls bent above a cup 'a java in the railway switch-back shack; you with the breasts in the bath as buoyant as a plum, and smooth of the skin, and tender of the heart — it is you my pal, my chum, my child who I have been watching and over whom I have been watching, oh you lint-speck of all lint-specks on the great sweater of life, oh you lovely chunk of tenderloin sliced out from the thundering herd, oh you of the bathrobe and the java and the breasts and the snow, you and you alone.

         11:30pm the 28th. And so the word spreads. The snow falls. The American people become more conscious of the impression they are making. Sales of four-piece silk pajama suit ensembles (shirt plus pants plus vest plus tie) soar. Men shave by starlight. Woman set their hair. Octogenarian employees of the Missouri Freshwater Fish and Game Commission re-insert their ivory-tinted form-fitting acrylic polymer choppers as the witching hour approaches.

         August 29th, 4am, St. Louis, Missouri. After nearly thirty-six hours of continuous negotiation between Tsunami Fisheries International Incorporated Ltd. and Dock workers Union Local #502, the talks are at a breaking point. The chief negotiator tears teeth-first (wires in a crackle like a set of electric whiskers) into the guts of a portable phone. A quarter ton of pickled smelt oozes out from under a busted slide projector. Union goons scuffle with Portuguese immigrant janitorial staff re: the placement of ashtrays. Chocolates flounder, flowers fail, bike messengers trade small arms fire down abandoned ventilator shafts. At the present time the agreement does not appear to. A plumpish steno lies pinned beneath an up-ended Xerox machine, the flit-flit strobe gently toasting her cheeks, the ka-chunka ka-chunkasheet feeder slowly basting her with subpoenas. Cigars smoke, knuckles crack, paper clips curl into shrapnel. The agreement at the present time does not. Chased by burley turbaned loin-clothed ax-wielding paralegal assistants, a pride of wild oxen trot down corridors choked with documents twenty, thirty, forty hands high. The talks are at a —

         In steps Johnny through the 17th floor window with a single white sheet of manila paper, a purple felt-tip marker, and a basket of fresh fruit. He shoulders his way through a boulder field of sweaty brows to the smoldering dais where, with a tip of his hat (pre-Yalta Harry Truman derby circa 1943) to all present, he scales a crate of powdered imported industrial non-dairy coffee creamer to speak. Aided by an Urdu-speaking hand puppet and a command of international finance un-matched among the jongleurs of Provence from whence he is descended, Johnny, having summarized the opposing positions in chanson de geste form and resolved their apparent contradictions via contrapuntal half-rhymes and the cleverly interwoven harmonies of a group chorale, concludes with an amusing but nevertheless insightful anecdote about a hunting dog, a widow, a traveling salesmen and a cake of soap which, with its own inimitable down-home country boy commonsensical-yet-all-too-often-overlooked logic, seems to put the whole matter into a new perspective. Everybody has a good laugh. The jobs are saved! The company survives!

         9/3 3:17pm. Johnny uses a set of hand-crafted miniature tools to repair a tiny Shriner's car at a Missoula, Montana Labor Day parade.

         9/4 5:20pm. Henry T. Barlow, Jr., ex-plumber and life-long bachelor, day laborer/night wanderer/dog-petter, welfare veteran and man-about-town, bearer of the cowlick/lover of the corn chip/chewer of the toothpick and the bar pretzel and the sad bum's tale, kinless, friendless, penniless, breathless, lies alone in his municipally-owned faux granite coffin and waits for the digging to stop. The digging stops. There's a knock-knock-knocking on the roof of the darkness and then a voice, in a whisper now and familiar and tickling the dead drums of the Barlovian ear. "Omni pacificus," whispers Johnny. "Omni pacificus te Deum."

         Now It Can Be Told:  Sometimes Johnny's on-stage at his desk and he's not wearing any shoes, he is going barefoot. This is a private little joke of his own. Nobody knows what he is wearing underneath that desk of his. He digs his toes into the carpet and he smiles.

         A bank of stars rise up above the Rockies. Summer ripens into fall. The continents drift another millimeter closer. In the darkness of the nation's Frigidaires 6.57 million 16 ounce cartons of milk sail noiselessly onwards into the expiration date of October 18th. 2.1 million unborns perform a one and a half forward twist in the tucked position, slip another centimeter downwards and then gently, in an undulating forward roll, clench their fists, squint their eyes, flex their toes, make ready. Dogs bark. Cows moo. Strange hair sprouts from the unwrinkled skin of fourteen-year-old girls in Amesville, Iowa.

         Omni Pacificus Te Deum. The world cranks onward another quarter turn. In thousands of rural farmhouses across the great Midwestern prairie, as the moon crawls slowly up the mossy-backed horizon, small children leave treats out on the kitchen table in anticipation of Johnny's arrival -- a pair of number two pencils, unsharpened, and with crisp new erasers; a clutch of Marlboro extra-light filter-tip cigarettes; a ceramic coffee mug emblazoned with peacocks and filled with two fingers of scotch. Sometimes in the morning they find a dinner coupon for two at the lovely Santa Del Mar restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. Sometimes they find the spiked footprints of a pair of number nine double-D golf shoes. Sometimes they even find a dent in the sofa and the fabric -- embossed now with the curves of Johnny's diminutive albeit athletically sculpted cheek muscles -- still warm to the touch.

         Small changes, slight shifts in the continuum of time and space: a new taste in the mouth, a new scent in the air, a change manifested not in any single event itself, but in that medium through which all events transpire -- the page upon which the words descend, the silence within which the music plays -- not the fish but the ocean, not the birds but the sky, not the player (with his molded polyurethane shin guards and cotton polyester blend sweatband and number 32 Mt. Holybrooke Lacrosse Marauding Tigers insignia), but the field of play itself. The grass shoots. The manure ripens. Multitudinous colonies of insects emerge to mate in the immaculate air.

         Go Johnny go. Farmers stumble out of bed before dawn to find their cows already milked.  Mexicans wade the Rio to find a canteen of cherry Koolade, a box of Ritz crackers, and a pair of individually wrapped moist towelettes stuffed inside a "Mod Squad" lunch box and stashed beneath the shade of a sun-baked rock outcropping five hundred feet inside the Texas border. A Connecticut insurance adjuster opens his breakfast issue of the Manchester Guardian to find the two most difficult crossword questions (26 down pellagra and 14 across skink) already penciled in.

         No doubt there are those (and they know who they are) plotting to call a halt to these proceedings. Ad astra per aspera! They might as well catapult the rain back up into the sky, or scrub the spots from the sun, or slap-shot the quark back down into its subatomic box. It is a breakout, yes, it is a contagion, yes and even here, at the offices of this magazine, a prestigious and literary-minded periodical with a circulation in the millions and a nationwide reputation for probity and circumspection, we have been unable to escape these gentle tremors, these intimations of change, these harbingers of a new world.

         Here the staples in the spine, hand-crafted by traditional Bolivian tinsmiths from the snippings of Johnny's old cigar bands, here the glossy paper buffed by squads of corn-fed eagle scouts to the precise sheen (4.2 lumens) of Johnny's capacious-but-aerodynamically-sound brow, here the new typeface (Helvetica 8.37 point sans serif bold) lower case letter "j" of which calibrated to within a .0001 micron margin of error and reproduced at a scale of 1:125 replicates the precise curve of Johnny's firm Midwestern jawline.

         New editor, new cover, new shade of white at the margins and, in the spaces between the lines, the white of the snow, the early winter snow through which Johnny marches on his way to our door. And who is to say that this is not an influence for the better? And perhaps it is time we were touched, held, fondled by unfamiliar hands, prodded into wakefulness.

         Certainly (and of all people) you can appreciate the pressure of time, you who are reading this and, tired from the many decisions pressed down upon you by life, look up from the page to find a hand on your shoulder. It is your wife. She leans down to whisper in your ear, scent of sandalwood and balsam in a swirl around her. She has been speaking with Johnny and he has been explaining to her about the strange mood that has overcome you of late -- the unopened mail, the maps of the Midwestern states, the burgeoning collection of canned hams. Her long hair flares out to one side like the blast of a shotgun, like a wave in the act of breaking. Her lips are smeared, her voice low and cool. You have been arguing a lot lately and there is a distance between you. She explains that Johnny Carson has come to her and has laid his body down so as to bridge the distance, to bridge the troubled waters between you.

         She pries these pages from your fingers, pulls you to your feet, leads you through the piles of Screen Confessionsand True Secrets and Hollywood Confidential into the darkness of the living room. A torch flares up and for a moment you are forced to shield your eyes. The furniture has been pushed, yes, bulldozed back against the wall, the rug whirled back and crumpled in the corner, the walls stripped clean.

         A quick glance tells you all you need to know. Johnny has been demonstrating for her, via large chalk drawings across the black linoleum, the structural imperfections and architectural infelicities that crept in during the construction of this home you share together. Displaying the draftsmanship, engineering skills, and mathematical proclivities which served him so well during his chairmanship of the International Symposium on Single-Family Dwellings in Lausagne, Switzerland (1953), Johnny has illustrated the changes that must be made in your humble Chateau de le petit homme, lavishly bordering these ad-hoc and spontaneous blueprints with a series of murals reminiscent of the sidewalk chalk artists of Europe, a community of which Johnny, as a decorated war veteran and circus roustabout touring the south of France during the post-war era, was a member.

         Scattered across the floor are various articles of your wife's clothing -- a torn silk blouse, a latch from a shoe, mother of pearl buttons sprung from her dress like rivets. You look around for some sign of Johnny. You have questions that you would like to ask him, questions about his interesting life, likes and dislikes, and humorous personal anecdotes with which you might, at some future date, regale your friends and loved ones.

         You crawl across a pile of old baby clothes and bowling trophies to peer out the broken front window. The sirens sing out through the far away streets, the wind singes in through the jagged glass, the stars beat down upon you but Johnny, Johnny he is nowhere to be found. You feel a tug, a tug close at hand. You feel a warmth against your leg, up the inside of your thigh, urgent and probing and strangely familiar. It is your wife. She is (and this is the first time you have noticed it) completely naked. Flanks smeared with orange and purple chalk-dust, limbs glistening with sweat, she screws herself down onto your lap like some kind of clamping device, like some kind of warm-blooded musical instrument.

         She tells you that here is the passion that has been lacking in your marriage, the sense of adventure, unfettered lust which you (the both of you) had been secretly hoping for all of these years. You crane your neck to glance up over her shoulder. You scan the walls. You scan the floor. With a sly movement of her long fingers down the back of your neck and a sweep of her tongue along the rim of your ear, she expresses a renewed interest in you, in your body, in your career and in the future the two of you will share together, vigorous interest, rhythmic interest, interest which has been stimulated by her recent encounter with Johnny.

         You are surprised at the knot of jealousy tightening within you, the feeling that –

         And then you see it. Over in the far corner behind the splintered remains of your grandmother's armoire, over where your firstborn lay on her return from the hospital, where Sparky chewed the hole in the brand new carpet, where you laid en flagrante with the brand new baby-sitter, where the roof leaked, where the turtle died, where the TV sat before you threw it out the window: a light blue sport-coat draped neatly over the blade of an upturned rocker. You push your wife's breast to one side so as to get a better look. You try to inch yourself a little closer. Tucked just beside the right lapel, hand-stitched in a silver thread, monogrammed in the tiniest of calligraphic type, detectable only in the glint of the wavering torch? The initials "J.C."

         "Tempis fugit," you whisper to yourself, "vita brevis, tempis fugit."

         You do not notice the first flakes of snow drifting in through the glass. You do not notice the end of the story rising up to meet you. The coat is what you notice. The blazer. The coat.

         Siren calling in through the window, wife still clinging to your thighs, clock still booming in your ears, you half-walk, half-drag yourself across the wreckage of the living room to see if it will fit.