“Some viewers were puzzled enough to take up Malachi’s offer — not many, not right away; but after a few weeks their number passed the hundred mark.
“Malachi had intuitively identified a basic, hard-wired impulse: the desire to resolve the irresolute, to conclude the incomplete, to have the crooked made straight; and (surprise, surprise!) he had located in syntax a nexus of this desire as strong as that in melodrama. Malachi knew that where love is not yet fulfilled or disaster looms, a situation can be left dangling at the end of an episode as yet undecided. Logically the worst must happen; but there rises in the viewer an insidious hope that the story will challenge improbability and outwit it. Near the end of the episode that was shown, when a man leans forward into the shadows, a narrative voice-over asks, ‘Will he place his lips on Mary Ann’s expectant mouth? or will he place his foot on the next step of the stairway?’ where we have seen that a gunman awaits him and where his curiosity is irresistibly drawing him. The voice continues: ‘Dr. Sean now places — ’ but the film breaks off here. It cuts back to the Ford commercial, where of course there is no hint as to how the sentence will be completed.
“This generated instant, intense frustration. Malachi had discovered that the need to have the sentence completed, no matter how, was as strong as the resolution of psychological suspense. He proved this later, when the serial was in full production: his interruptions then concerned not only questions of love and death but ones like: which ingredient made a gumbo great? or had there been collusion in the choice of hymns and canticles in the services celebrated in Greater Miami that very Sunday? or, the following March, on a special broadcast twenty minutes before the start of the race, who would win the Widener Handicap at Hialeah? ‘Why,’ a sultry black lady confided after a three-minute-and-six-second tour of Malachi’s Ford Plaza, ‘Good Counsel, from Darby Dan Farm, Angel Cordero up.’ (It helped that the prediction turned out to be right — the winner’s odds were significantly shortened, but the canny forecast brought a large contingent of newcomers to Malachi’s doors.)
“For the opening episode Malachi had had to work with material and technical help that was readily available: one of the low-grade serials that had come into his possession along with the TV channel, and a sound engineer who added a minimal voice-over track to the sound mix that coordinated the images on the screen with Malachi’s needs. Malachi himself supplied the voice: his still-prominent North European accent lent a suitably foreboding tint to his speech.
“Malachi paid careful attention to the diverse elements of his neighborhood, and as his success increased, extended it further and further afield. He was partial to the young — he remembered what it was like to be one of them. He grew his blond hair shoulder-length, until at a judicious moment, he switched to a shaved skull. He sported jeans (tailor-made), Nehru shirts (ditto), and solid black cowboy boots. He liked giving tips on good buys to people his age and if necessary helping them find out ways to meet the price of the cars. He didn’t neglect the elderly, who unfailingly reminded him of his dead parents. He knew that many of them were early risers, so he convinced a crazy Hong-Kong-born Chinese-American called Adelaide Lin to lead a tai chi class on the beach twice a week. They loved him for that. He arranged a special rate at Las Delicias de España, the good eatery next door, and sent many of his Cuban visitors there. (In exchange, he requested the use of the restaurant’s space for filming occasional scenes of his serial.) He helped finance a Black-Hispanic semipro football team.
“And so it went, with more and more people of all ages and colors crowding into Malachi’s concession. Some came for its conviviality. ‘Coral Gables Ford’ had become ‘Malachi’s Ford Plaza’ after he had purchased an adjoining parking lot. But behind Malachi’s secondary ploys lay the essential hook of the fractured serial; and to make that work, to have his clever insight become the irresistible lure that would pull in live bodies, Malachi needed efficient interpreters. (In Antwerp he had hired the best seamstresses in the city to ensure his success in the rag trade.) And here, as he was the first to admit, Malachi was abetted by rare luck.
“One evening during the week that followed the screening of The Medical Wars of Metro-Dade County, episode 1, some business friends took him to see a show that many of the local glitterati were touting. You must remember that in the early seventies South Beach showed no inkling of its present glamour. There were perhaps two small hotels, surrounded by boarding houses and modest dwellings to which refugees (mostly Jewish) had been guided by their American brethren. There was the beach, however, easily accessible from all parts of the city; and that pleasant setting had been chosen by a company of improvisational performance artists to put on an ‘entertainment’ every evening at sunset hour. They called themselves The Beach Buoys — a facile name, I suppose, but nothing else about them could be called facile. They were true pros, about twelve regulars — five women and seven men, of which three were gay, three bi, four straight, two undecided; sometimes there would be one or two performers more or less if friends were passing through or regulars went off on temporary gigs. Three of them were veterans of The Second City, most had worked in legitimate theater, in film or on TV, most of them could sing if asked or at least pretend to,
