My first glimpse of Chicago was through the smoked windows of a black stretch limousine. It’s one of the many that zigzag between O’Hare and the NBC Tower, depositing guests such as myself at the nexus of talk show controversy. I’d never seen the Jerry Springer Show prior to that wintry February day, and my first glimpse of the man himself was under the bright lights of his stage when action rolled and Jerry asked me, “So, Salem, what’s going on?”
Jerry turned to a redhead in the audience and asked, “Aren’t you nervous?”
She scrambled one together, throwing out my name as her lesbian friend and Fernando as her red-hot Latino lover. She was confused. She needed to make a decision. “It’s kind of an emergency!” she squealed, leaving her number, hanging up.
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I came home sick from work to a bevy of messages from the notorious redhead. A self-employed general contractor, I enjoy a somewhat schizophrenic lifestyle as blue-collar rogue-meets-writer. The weekend prior I’d shared the stage of our new world-class symphony hall with Seattle mayor Paul Schell and various city council members, and delivered a poem to a captive audience of 500. The poem was about one of our skyscrapers known as the black box. It was in the black box, working swing shift with a foreman, that I’d first heard about Jerry Springer. Night after night my foreman informed me with glee about the absurd and outrageous people he witnessed on the TV show. Little did I know I myself was primo freak-show fodder.
Well, there was no sex to speak of. But there were rumors. I improvised. The essential formula for love geometry Springer-style became clear to me. State your name, whose ass you want to kick, then start kicking. If you can’t be that clear, that’s OK too. Just curse and kick.
“You can’t wear jeans and T-shirts. Don’t worry, we’ll dress you.”
No one chided us or derided us. It was pop culture, for crying out loud. Nothing more. Nothing less.
