Limo by Dan Jenkins

Author:Dan Jenkins [Jenkins, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TCU Press
Published: 2013-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

20.

A DAY LATER I CAUGHT UP with Hank Judson, America’s most believable anchorman, at his hang-out bar a few minutes after the network news left the air. Hank went to the same bar near the office five nights a week, unless he was out of town to interview a world leader.

Hank always stood at the corner of the bar with his right shoulder against the wall. He would drink four or five martinis, straight-up, in about an hour, and play the match game with the boys, before a limo driver came in to deliver Hank to his apartment at the United Nations Plaza. CBC sent Hank a limo from a rental service, so the driver often was a stranger in uniform who would enter the bar and loudly say, “Mr. Judson?”

“With you in a moment, my friend,” Hank Judson would say. Then he would turn to the bartender and say, “Chico, seeing as it is National Daffodil Day, I had best have a grand final.”

Usually Hank Judson left the bar after the grand final martini. Sometimes he would have a grand-grand final, and then an el último, and then a “sleep-through.” Three or four times a year, Hank would drink several “sleep-throughs,” move on to a few “territorial imperatives,” and wind up “on the beach,” as he put it.

I said hello to the guys around the bar and they made room for me in Hank’s corner.

“Ho, Mallory!” Hank said. “Chico, dear chap, could I buy my friend Mallory a drink?”

We drank and played the match game with the guys at the bar for an hour or so. In the match game each player conceals in his fist anywhere from none to three matches. The object is to guess the total number of matches. Hank Judson had learned the match game when he was a radio correspondent for CBC in London twenty-five years ago. Chase Morgan, our vice president for News, estimated that learning the match game had cost Hank Judson close to a hundred thousand dollars.

Hank did his grand-grand final and his el último and his first “sleep-through” and was about eighty dollars winner in the matches when the game broke up. The rent-a-limo driver in uniform leaned against the wall by the check stand. Hank and I got private and I told him what I wanted him to do on “Just Up the Street.”

He studied a bowl of cheese crackers on the bar as he listened. When I had finished, Hank tinked his glass with a fingernail so Chico would set up a second “sleep-through.”

“This is a little out of line, Mallory,” Hank Judson said.

“You can make this show work for us, Hank,” I said.

“I mean it is out of line to approach me about it in a saloon. You’re talking an air-time thing. You’re not asking me for a personal favor, like having lunch with your father-in-law from Houston. You’re asking me to work live on camera for three hours in a show that could hurt my image. I’ve heard about this blasted thing around the shop.

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