NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Diddlie has cleared out her attic since the branch fell on her roof and the ceiling caved in. She offers me a look at what she retrieved from her collection of clippings and old magazines. There’s a carton on the dining table with a stack of old magazines next to it.
“I only take it for the pictures”, feigns Diddlie, as she hands me an open copy of “Shrink Wrap Magazine” from the top of the stack. “Here sit down at the table.” She remains standing and turns over the page picturing a very substantial male member.
“Oh wait, this came last week.” She walks across the room and returns, handing me the latest edition, a lot thinner than the old ones. “You can subscribe to the website but I still like paper.”
She points out Foulton Furey’s article about Armond Macadamia, the financial wizard, on the front page. I have to admit that I have never seen Shrink Wrap Magazine before, or the website.
“Shrink Wrap isn’t on the rack at the drug store or anything. See that!” She points out an article. “Armond is probably one of the richest guys in the world. I mean billions, yet he spends part of every year here in Fauxmont.”
“Which house”?
“Oh you can’t see it from the street. He’s got a double lot and the front yard is full of hollies and cedars. It’s all hidden. Armond has investments all over the place. I heard he’s funding a big building for the business school out at P.U. and he’s way in deep with that secret company.”
“Do you mean Princeton University?”
“No, not that, P.U., Prestige University, where they had the bug incident.”
“Yeah, there’s no ivy growing there. What secret company?”
”Oh Fibernasty or something. You know, Lou sold his business to them.”
“Are you thinking of Fibonacci Corporation?”
“Yeah, Lou calls it ‘the Fib’.”
“Do they fib Diddlie?”
“They do public relations. What do you think?”
“They call it ‘Communications Strategy’ in the PR world.”
“Like war… Yeah right, military terminology … as in an Advertising ‘Campaign’. Tells you something doesn’t it? God! what creeps!”
“You ever met Armond?
“Sure.”
“You seem to know a lot about this secret company!”
“Not really, but word gets around among friends. It isn’t known much outside of here. I think they’re dangerous.”
“Do you?”
“They do a lot of propaganda, undermining governments and that.”
“What governments?”
“I don’t know exactly, but I think they secretly support political parties overseas and influence elections right here. It’s all for the big corporations, so they can go on with their rip-offs.”
“Sounds like CIA stuff.”
“Yeah! What’s the difference? I mean they have contracts and hire people from there all the time and pay them a fortune.”
“How do you know?”
“I know people, hear stuff … and read Shrink Wrap. That’s a great source.”
“But is their stuff true?”
“It’s mainly true, I think.”
“People who leak that kind of information usually have an axe to grind, or they may be deliberately given info as part of an operation.”
“Maybe, maybe not … how can I tell? I just hope the reporter can figure it out. That’s what Lark started it for, to get the inside dope!”
“It is hard to know what to believe.”
“It’s not just governments, the CIA, or the Chinese … there’s secret people doing secret stuff together all over the place to make money.”
“So what’s so secret about the Fib?”
“I mean have you ever heard of them on TV?”
“No, it was all news to me when Lou told me about selling up.”
“I think Rank Majors works there too, but he’ll never tell you anything about
what he does.”
“Has he told you he works there?”
“No, no he wouldn’t do that. Rank’s pretty quiet. I just heard stuff, you know.”
I notice Shrink Wrap’s subtitle printed across the top of the cover in large yellow and orange letters resembling the texture of crinkled plastic-wrap:
“The magazine of sex, investigation, politics and opinion”
“What could be spicier? Here, take this stack.” Seeing my interest is growing, she slides the stack of about thirty issues across the table to my elbow. “Thanks Diddlie.” Turning the magazine over, I read the bottom of the page where it says in bold type:
“We Fight on Both Fronts.”
The back is designed to look like a front cover too, except it is upside-down. Diddlie looks over my shoulder as I sit at her table reading.
“See, it has no back. It’s front to back, the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning.”
One front pictures the female bosom, the other shows off manly ‘pecs’. At the top and bottom of each page they recommend that readers “keep turning things over…” The two ‘fighting fronts’ meet, stapled down the centerfold of the middle page, which features Mars and Venus fighting out their cosmic differences in a tabloid universe. Male and female correspondents write out their complaints against each other, which are printed in red ink on narrow columns down each side of the page while the middle wider column carries investigative reports in blue ink. Shrink Wrap mixes imagery of the male and the female, with short articles on sensational themes. It is where Grant Gazburg the conservative columnist, started his famous byline “Today’s Rushes”.
“We are living the movie of our times” says Grant Gazburg in his byline, “and I am reporting the first take on it.” One of his earliest scoops was to skewer Boris Tarantula’s bogus Dracula story. Foulton Furey writes from the other side, discrediting the greedy and the selfish and refers to Grant’s column as the ‘Bull Rushes from Life’s Swamp’.”
Lost in this backwater of the media maelstrom, one might not know that Grant refers to Furey as ‘Furious the Fool’. Grant’s fame on radio is now so great that poor Fulton is no real competition. Being little known beyond his Shrink Wrap readership, Fulton’s humiliation is that much diminished.
Looking through selections from her magazine collection, I find Boris’s mother, Osiris Tarantula, had predicted his success in an interview for the Herald Tribune, quoted by Shrink Wrap.
This was part of the publicity surrounding his apparent defection from Transilvania. Osiris is quoted as saying ‘Boris will do well in the West. He has inherited the family’s talent for business.’
Osiris left out his true gift for public relations. Mrs. Tarantula reportedly owns boutiques in Paris and Milan.
“New York is my son’s turf” she said when asked if she would be opening in America too. There is no word about Osiris’s earlier defection nor is there anything about Boris’s father. Judging from Diddlies’s archive, Boris’s career has been reported in fragments here and there. Osiris seems to have been in Paris for some time before she appeared with her son at the Paris press conference years ago. Diddlie says she has a picture of Osiris in the crowd at a Dior fashion show well before Boris came on the scene.
Boris’s earlier work was described as ‘little more than welded rust’ by hostile critics in the 90s. While more discerning art lovers find merit in his innovative use of I-beams, re-bars, rust and advertising space.
