Saturday September 19, 2009

Ernie Anastos, Explained

While there might be more reasonable explanations, here’s how I think this happened. The year is 1968. The location: a rundown studio apartment in the Fenway. 25-year-old high school drop out Stan Aeronesi is anxiously waiting for two wise-ass Northeastern students to get the hell out of his apartment. They got their weed. He smoked them out. Now they won’t leave. They just keep going on and on about hippy bullshit—the bourgeoisie and the Man—although as far as Stan can tell, these two kids are the bourgeoisie.

One of them is talking about some stupid play he’s just seen called Paradise Now, and how it changes everything by taking the audience out of their comfort zone, and by now Stan is pretty well far out of his comfort zone and he blurts out, without even thinking about it—as a sort of childish attempt to bring everything around him to a halt—“Keep fucking that chicken!”

Suddenly the kids, who have totally forgotten that Stan is even there, stop talking about Brecht and Artaud, and they look at Stan like he is crazy and (worse) like he is stupid, which Stan has always sort of suspected is true anyway.

“What?” one of them says, giggling. “What did you just say?”

“Keep fucking that chicken,” Stan says slowly, biding time, as the eyes turned on him suddenly make him feel self-conscious and paranoid, as if the kids can now see the fact that he already knows: that they are students, going somewhere—their futures ahead of them—while he is an uneducated low-life, washed-up at 25. In other words, he is overcome by the need to say something smart.

“Want to shake up the Man?” he says, rolling the words out like Dylan. “You can’t do that in a theater. You gotta say ‘Keep fucking that chicken’ on the live nightly news.’”

The kid laughs so hard he chokes, his big pampered face flush with adrenaline.

“How you gonna do that, man?” he says. “That’s stupid.”

In 1971, a clean-shaven young man presents himself for employment at WABC-TV in New York. He has spent several years rehearsing his South Boston accent away and he claims to hold a degree from Northeastern, where he has never attended. He gives as his name an anagram of his former one. He calls himself Ernie Anastos.

Years and decades pass as Aeronesi earns the trust of his employers at WABC, WCBS, WWOR, WCBS again, and finally at WNYW. He spends nights awake struggling with the timing, trying to decide when his taboo-shattering phrase can be released for maximum impact and subversion. No moment seems perfect enough—not even during an interview with Fidel Castro—and for years at a time Aeronesi finds himself hopelessly paralyzed. Sometimes he fears that he has lost himself and his life’s work completely in Anastos—in the million dollar contracts and the hard-earned respect of a great American city—and he laments that he will ever complete his provocative performance.

And then, on Wednesday, it just happened. A mission launched so many years ago out of resentment and striving was completed, effortlessly and flawlessly.

Congratulations, Stan Aeronesi. I hope you get the recognition you deserve.