‘But the predictions…
‘A free hand, nothing but a free hand. But you’d be surprised how often these guys and gals get stuck for a real whopper.
‘Whopper,’ Johnny repeated, bemused. He was a little surprised to find himself getting angry. His mother had bought inside View for as long as he could remember, all the way back to the days when they had featured pictures of bloody car wrecks, decapitations, and bootlegged execution photos. She had sworn by every word. Presumably the greater part of inside View’s other *,999,999 readers did as well. And here sat this fellow with his dyed gray hair and his fortydollar shoes and his shirt with the store-creases still in it, talking about whoppers.
‘But it all works out,’ Dees was saying. ‘If you ever get stuck, all you have to do is call us collect and we all take it into the pro-shop together and come up with something. We have the right to anthologize your columns in our yearly book, Inside Views of Things to Come. You’re perfectly free to sign any contract you can get with a book publisher, however. All we get is first refusal on the magazine rights, and we hardly ever refuse, I can tell you. And we pay very handsomely. That’s over and above whatever figure we contract for. Gravy on your mashed potatoes, you might say.’ Dees chuckled.
‘And what might that figure be?’ Johnny asked slowly. He was gripping the arms of his rocker. A vein in his right temple pulsed rhythmically.
‘Thirty thousand dollars per year for two years,’ Dees said. ‘And if you prove popular, that figure would become negotiable. Now, all our psychics have some area of expertise. I understand that you’re good with objects.’ Dees’s eyes became half-lidded, dreamy. ‘I see
a regular feature. Twice monthly, maybe – we don’t want to run a good thing into the ground. “John Smith invites inside Viewers to send in personal belongings for psychic examination…” Something like that. We’d make it clear, of course, that they should send in inexpensive stuff because nothing could be returned. But you’d be surprised. Some people are crazy as bedbugs, God love em. You’d be surprised at some of the stuff that would come in, Diamonds, gold coins, wedding rings… and we could attach a rider to the contract specifying that all objects mailed in would become your personal property.
Now Johnny began to see tones of dull red before his eyes. ‘People would send things in and I’d just keep them. That’s what you’re saying.’
‘Sure, I don’t see any problem with that. It’s just a question of keeping the ground rules clear up front. A little extra gravy for those mashed potatoes.’
‘Suppose,’ Johnny said, carefully keeping his voice even and modulated, ‘suppose I got .. .
stuck for a whopper, as you put it … and I just called in and said President Ford was going to be assassinated on September 31, 1976? Not because I felt he was, but because I was stuck?’
‘Well, September only has thirty days, you know,’ Dees said. ‘But otherwise, I think it’s a hole in one. You’re going to be a natural, Johnny. You think big. That’s good. You’d be surprised how many of these people think small. Afraid to put their mouths where their money is’ I suppose. One of our guys – Tim Clark out in Idaho -wrote in two weeks ago and said he’d had a flash that Earl Butz was going to be forced to resign next year. Well pardon my French, but who gives a fuck? Who’s Earl Butz to the American housewife?
But you have good waves, Johnny. You were made for this stuff.’
‘Good waves,’ Johnny muttered.
Dees was looking at him curiously. ‘You feel all right, Johnny? You look a little white.’
Johnny was thinking 6f the lady who had sent the scarf. Probably she read Inside View, too. ‘Let me see if I can summarize this,’ he said. ‘You’d pay me thirty thousand dollars a year for my name…
‘And your picture, don’t forget.
And my picture, for a few ghostwritten columns. Also a feature where I tell people what they want to know about objects they send in. As an extra added attraction, I get to keep the stuff…