Where Nothing is Sacred

My earliest memory of a daytime talk show is late at night. I was about seven years old, and I was in front of the television with my mother and teenage brother. It was getting to be my bedtime. I think it was "Geraldo" that was being transmitted onto the screen of our large stained-wood television with decorative gold knobs. His topic was men who dress like female celebrities. I remember one of them looked and spoke like Cher, with his tongue clinging for dear life to his upper lip. My mom and brother shared the amusement of Geraldo’s studio audience, and made similar comments: “Mr. Cher says he’s not gay? Yeah, sure!” A few minutes into it, my mother began to speak of me like I wasn’t there, a practice I had put up with for long enough. She told my brother, laughing, “Jere has no idea what any of this is all about!” That was the last straw. “Yes, I do!” I barked. I then marched up to my mother and whacked her right in the glasses with my little palm. My brother was aghast as my mother quickly removed her precious tortoise shell frames and examined them. “Did he break them?” my brother asked. I guess my mother noticed one tiny nick where the glass met the frame. It was probably there when she purchased them. “Yup, he broke ‘em.” Then she was literally dragging me upstairs to bed. She was furious. I was never disciplined, and I rarely had anyone get angry at me, so this was jarring. My mother “tucked me in” and seethed in my face, “You will NEVER talk back to me again!” Then she left me alone in the dark. I had never heard that expression “talk back” before. I lay there crying, thinking I had just been warned never again to speak, even if someone asked me a question.
When I was eight, my brother went off to college. Due to our ten-year age difference, we never engaged in any serious brotherly fights. But he would get angry at me, and there was sometimes tension. One grievance I can recall my brother having with me was that I would tease people and test them to see how far I could take them with a joke at their expense. He was right. Enough was never enough. Like most little brothers, I worshipped my big bro, and the memory of his departure for college still puts a lump in my throat. Now that he was grown and gone, my mother told me she was leaving my father, and that I was not allowed to tell anyone at school. For months, I carried that secret around with me. I think that was the last time I was ever able to keep a secret. My mother moved me and our cat Billy into a little red brick house in a township 45 minutes away. I was a latchkey kid.
I was now in Mrs. Musselman’s third grade class at a new Elementary school. One of my classmates was Caitlin Benson. She was the first girl I ever wrote a love letter to. I stuck it in her locker and then avoided eye contact with her for a while. I think it was high school before she ever acknowledged getting my note and that the puppy love had been mutual. Caitlin Benson became the star of our third-grade class when she went up to New York City with her mother and one of the other teachers at our school, Mr. Smith, to appear on the Phil Donahue show. One of Caitlin’s older siblings had been taught by Mr. Smith, who had, for a number of years, decided to include in his fifth grade curriculum a unit on “death and dying.” And Mr. Donahue thought this would be an appropriate topic for his show, so he invited Mr. Smith and Caitlin’s mom to be on the panel.
Phil Donahue gave birth to the daytime talk show. In those days, they looked at serious subject matter, like Mr. Smith and his peculiar lessons. Two years later, incidentally, I would have Mr. Smith for fifth grade, and I must say I would have preferred death and/or dying to having him as a teacher. He was a real son of a bitch.
In fourth and fifth grade, I would go over to my friend Josh Philo’s house after school while my mom finished up at work. One afternoon, we were watching a relatively new talk show hosted by this guy who was married to Connie Chung. The topic had something to do with boxing and/or what a creep Mike Tyson was. And I remember it was expressed by Josh’s parents that this type of television was not appropriate for children, and the channel was ultimately changed. How silly, I thought to myself. My mom lets me watch whatever I want. Poor Josh gets treated like a child.
During these years leading into Junior High, I watched a lot of television, especially in the summer. And I watched the genre of the daytime talk show lose its mind. In a couple of years, there were countless shows like that of Phil Donahue and Connie Chung’s husband, whose name was Maury Povich. Oprah, of course, Montel Williams, Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones, Ricky Lake, and Sally Jesse Raphael.
One day I was watching Sally. Her topic was essentially ‘men are pigs.’ She had a panel of women on who talked about what dirt bags their husbands were. After one woman had sufficiently eviscerated her husband’s image, Sally invited him out to join the panel. Sally's mostly female audience booed loudly as he entered. He walked to the edge of the stage, and his hand moved toward his crotch, which was suddenly blurred, and he made some sort of movement with his hand to the horror of the audience. Then he sat down. It took a while for the audience to quiet down. When they did, Sally spoke slowly into her mike. Her speech got louder and faster as it progressed: “That was the single most disgusting thing anyone has ever done on this show, GET THE HELL OFF MY STAGE!!!” The audience stood in an uproarious ovation. Within one minute, the dog was invited back onto the stage where he was forced to apologize to Sally. Of course she invited him back, I thought. Sally would have to be crazy to keep a character that outrageous off her stage.
Another day I was watching Sally, and the title of the show was some short pithy version of “Shallow Men Who Wish Their Women Looked Like Celebrity Beauties.” A young redneck couple was featured. The young man had a mullet. He was lamenting that his gal did not look like Cindy Crawford, and I can attest to the fact that she did not. As he aired this grievance, she sat beside him sobbing pathetically. Sally and her audience spewed venom at the young mullet. “You are no man,” Sally told him, “if you can’t even console your sweetheart when she’s upset.” “What am I supposed to do Sally?!” he said. Then he turned to his woman and ordered her, “Stop cryin’!- Stop cryin’!” Then back to Sally: “See? It doesn’t help.’” The gimmick of Sally’s show was that the average looking women would then be given a makeover to look like the celebrities that their men were jerking off about in the shower. What a great way for Sally to teach her viewers that looks really don’t matter, by giving people makeovers. When mulletman’s woman came out wearing a red dress and a new Cindy Crawford hairstyle, he just sat there with a dumb smirk. “Well,” said Sally to the mulletman, “What do you think?” “She looks good.” “Why don’t you give her a kiss then.” At this point, mulletman turned to his woman and didn’t so much kiss her as treat the inside of her mouth like an indifferent golden retriever would a bowl of wet Iams after he'd already had lunch. This is probably what happened in front of at least some young children and elderly folk when their preacher said kiss the bride. It was a disgusting sight, but the audience “awwwed” it like he had given her a sweet peck on the forehead.
Occasionally my dad would come pick me up at my mom’s to take me out to Wang's Chinese Restaurant and then to a movie. It was around this time that Jenny Jones did a show of which the topic was “secret crushes.” A man was invited on the show and told someone had a crush on him. Then it was revealed that the person who had a crush on him was a man. Well, little did anyone know or, it goes without saying, care, that the heterosexual man who was the object of the crush was seriously depressed and had considered the fact that someone (a woman, he thought) had a secret crush on him as one thin ray of light in his otherwise hopeless existence. After the show, he took his disappointment out on the gay man by murdering him. Jenny Jones was prosecuted and became a controversial figure. Needless to say, daytime television was going crazier and crazier. Most of Jenny Jones shows had to do with strippers and matchmaking. Shallow Barbies seeking shallow Kens. I remember my dad, a church-goer, Korean War veteran, and crafter of fine artistic woodcuts, remarking, over chow mein, in his proper baritone that the Jenny Jones show was “the worst trash I’ve ever seen.” I still giggle when I think of my humble, conservative, aged father having anything to say about such “trash.” It’s this kind of juxtaposition that has always made me laugh.
As I got older, I mostly watched Montel Williams. He would open so many of his shows by saying something like, “They’re sugar and spice and everything nice... and they’re out on the streets hookering.” This was the topic of Montel’s show often enough to be creepy. I believe Montel did in fact have sexual harassment charges leveled against him by a guest at one point. Yet every show was about “little girls who are out on the streets selling themselves.” He would often shed crocodile tears on his show for the “little girls” and every show would end with him leaning down to a “little girl,” showing off his athletic ass to his fans, and telling her, “We’re gonna get you some help,” as he choked back tears.
Montel would also do shows about dorky men who couldn’t get a date. He would coach them on how to be cool and (what else?) give them makeovers. Montel was apparently a certified psychologist, sociologist, fashion guru and expert on what was cool. He had all the answers.
And then, of course, there was Springer.
Jerry Springer, we would all find out, had been the Mayor of Cincinnati; a liberal Democrat, who had been very open about a politically unfortunate tryst with a prostitute. I used to watch his show when it was a copy of Donahue, inviting serious people onto his stage to talk about serious topics. That is until Ricky Lake emerged as a peddler of outrageousness, and Jerry Springer, being the shrewd man he is, decided he wanted to have a similar type of show. His became less and less serious and more and more boisterous. It wasn’t the first time fights were breaking out on these panels. Geraldo had his nose-broken years before when a race-fueled war broke out on his set. But this sort of thing was happening more frequently on Jerry’s show, and he seemed to have very able bouncers to keep things under control. By the time I was in high school, Springer had evolved into a show that you tuned into expecting to see a fight.
I was never an alpha male. Though I played baseball and tennis for fun, along with an occasional game of touch football which I was good at, I didn’t like watching sports. That's an interest most men acquire from joining their dads at the boob tube, which I wasn't able to do very often. I think Jerry Springer began to fulfill my male desire to see violent action and/or hoot and holler about nothing. I bonded with other young men at school over Jerry Springer. We would bond over the fact that “Jerry was the man!” and his show was, yes, “the best show ever.”
Jerry dominated the genre as I graduated from high school and went off to college in New York City. By that time, his show had become so outrageous that the ongoing debate was whether or not his guests were real. Jerry would introduce a guest and ask them why they were there, and their reply would be, “I’m here to kick some ass, Jerry!” Then Jerry would introduce the person’s enemy as if it was still a serious talk show, and that we were all going to listen soberly to his side of the story. Before Jerry was finished introducing the second guest, he’d run up the stairs to the back of his theatre to get away from the fighting.
As one of my college roommates remarked, what was so funny about Jerry’s show was how little he had to do with it. He was an ex-Mayor and lawyer whose interests were in American politics. His favorite show was probably the McLaughlin Group. Yet here he was the figure head of trash. The extent of his involvement with the show was to introduce guests, move away to safety, and then watch the chaos that ensued with no expression. Best of all, he would get all the credit for it. Every time a fight broke out, the audience would chant, "JER-RY! JER-RY! JER-RY!" as if he was up there throwing punches. The most charming moments on Springer were when he would get amused by what was going on. The humbly restrained coming into contact with trash.
I moved to New York City not only to go to college, but to pursue an acting career. My first major job was an Off-Broadway play called True Love by Charles L. Mee. The New York Post described it as “a mad, updated, Jerry Springer-ized version of Euripides' ‘Hippolytus.’” Needless to say, I was in heaven. The play had all the outrageousness of a talk show - nudity, violence, cursing, yelling, sex talk, transvestites, you name it. There was a bar in the theatre where True Love was performed, and I began drinking every night to calm the excitement of being in such a successful, high profile, and Springer-ized piece of the theatre. By the end of the run, I realized that I could not get through the day without having twelve drinks. There's a word for that. My career, which had taken off like a rocket, crashed and burned like the Challenger.
I had dropped out of college and was now living off my college money, drinking a lot of it. So I had a lot of time on my hands to watch daytime television. It was around this time that I discovered Maury Povich. I remembered Maury from back in the day, but now he had jumped onto the trash bandwagon. He rotated between three topics: Paternity tests, lie-detector tests for accused cheaters, and, similarly to Montel, little girls who were out on the street selling themselves. But Maury mostly did paternity. As my big brother had observed all those years before, enough was never enough for me, and it certainly was never enough for Maury. I mean, EVERY DAY FOR YEARS he invited women on his show who were desperate to find the father of their babies. Maury would pretend to have compassion for these women, and then he would tease them with the results: "When it comes to three-month-old Shaquaim... Anferny... You ARE... NOT the father." The camera would follow the mother as she ran backstage in tears and humiliation, while not-the-father would do a hip-hop jig for an ecstatic crowd.
I was hung over most afternoons when I woke up. Turning on Maury Povich or Jerry Springer made me feel better. I remember one day watching Jerry Springer on my roommate's television while he was at work. This tall skinny black guy got punched in the face and his back hit the stage with a thud. I rolled off the couch with a similar thud as tears of laughter streamed down my cheeks.
I got so hooked to these types of shows that one fine morning I rose and walked down to the Hotel Pennsylvania near Macy's where Maury filmed his show in the "Grand Ballroom" (Springer was far away in Chicago). I waited in line with all the other rejects and degenerates who were as excited about all this as I was. I didn't talk to any of them, but there was something nice about knowing I wasn't alone in the world. After we all got seated in Maury's studio, one of his producers came out and warmed up the audience. "Today, we're all going to have compassion," he said. "Our guests today have been maimed in accidents that almost took their lives." My heart sank. More than one audience member let out a groan of disappointment. We came here for paternity, damnit! Still, sitting in Maury's studio audience was an experience. We gave Maury a five-minute standing ovation for being the wonderful human being he is, and then he welcomed a large black woman to the stage who had been stabbed 70 times by her boyfriend. "How did you get away from him?" Maury asked, incredulous. She was in tears from the traumatic memory and could barely speak: "I kicked him down there." "YOU KICKED HIM RIGHT IN HIS GROIN?" "Yes." Suddenly I was on my feet cheering I knew not what. I looked around, and the rest of the audience had also been raptured to its feet. I saw myself on the screen clapping. Kicking men in the balls had been the theme of so many shows I had seen over the years. It was a holy, holy theme in the daytime religion. After the show, Maury gave us all free pizza, and it was good.
A few years after sitting in Maury's studio audience, I hit a bottom in my drinking life. I just woke up one day and had had enough of being hung over and trying to have some hope for the future, whilst drinking like an animal. It has been three years since my last drink. I do not wake up hung over anymore. Every day, no matter how little sleep I get, I wake up feeling terrific. And when I wake up in a good mood and turn on Jerry Springer, it still puts me in an even better mood.
Today I am a full-time student, and I hope I am tomorrow. I work in retail at an outlet store, and I sing in an Episcopal church choir. In that church every Sunday, I come into contact with what is sacred. I also have the same feeling when I am in a meeting with other people like me who struggle with never having enough. I find this connection with the sacred essential to living a healthy life. It is also essential for me to go where nothing is sacred. That lifts my spirits as well. My life has gotten a little fuller in the last three years. On a day when I don't have to do anything or be anywhere, when I've got a cup of coffee within arms reach, there is no greater feeling than flipping through the channels and coming across a Jerry Springer episode. There is nothing better than hearing the high-pitched chime of boxing bells and hearing the roar of the crowd, as a seventy-year-old man, who is only there because it's making him richer by the minute, runs for cover. Like the incense that wafts through the Episcopal Church as I sing the opening hymn with coffee on my breath, it reminds me that life is good.