“Malachi attended the Beach Buoys’ show with no more than a polite pretence of curiosity. Ten minutes after its start he knew he’d found fit executants for his project. Their first skit was a reenactment of the original moon walk, accompanied by a deconstructed ‘Penny Lane,’ with saxophonic riffs on its charming tune and fragments of its lyrics (as Neil Armstrong sets foot on lunar soil, he sings, ‘And the fireman rushes in’). Any remaining reservation on Malachi’s part vanished when the two astronauts walked into the barber shop as if still moving in a weightless world, a sight both funny and beautiful. At the end of the performance he quickly joined the disbanding troupe: he told them he was so elated by their work that he was inviting them then and there to dinner at a modest but excellent Cuban restaurant in Coral Gables — ‘superb roast suckling pig, beer, wine, and booze on demand’ — where not only would their talents be celebrated but where he planned to make them a proposal they couldn’t refuse. He gave them the address of the restaurant, which he called from a nearby phone booth with a request for the imminent arrival of a party of twenty, and be sure to put enough lechonas for that number in your capacious ovens.
“Actors seldom refuse a free meal. Malachi had made a favorable impression on most of them, even if some assumed he was some kind of nut. The obviously reputable friends who’d brought Malachi to South Beach (and whom he’d also invited to dinner) vouched for his honesty, his shrewdness, and his bank accounts. When everyone had arrived at Las Delicias de España and had had time for a drink or two, Malachi stood up and asked for their attention. He presented his promotional plans succinctly and confidently: a routine TV ad for Ford cars and Malachi’s Ford Plaza would be interrupted by an unannounced serial, and the serial itself fragmented according to strict application of time slots. With unconcealed pleasure, he expounded his theory of syntactic fracture as a new way of getting viewers involved in a plot, or not even a plot, in a scene, a situation, a character. The Buoys loved these ideas and immediately started thinking up ways to use them. But one of them spotted a problem: ‘If it’s a serial you’re planning, there has to be a story. We’re not good at telling stories, we’re better at sending them up.’ Malachi replied, ‘I wouldn’t think of giving you a story to tell. You make up your own story, or your non-story, or whatever you feel like doing.’ He’d define a subject for them, no more than that. Its tentative title was Medical Warfare in Metro-Dade County. He’d also supply material to work with, that is, three characters. A white doctor, Sean ‘Speedster’ Cotton. A black doctor, Johnson ‘Hands On’ Johnson. A Cuban nurse, Coralina ‘Cora! Lina!’ Abreu, who was in fact a prestigious nurse practitioner, a sexy, savvy freelancer who worked with many doctors, including Speedster and Hands On. (Both of them were after her, but so far neither had made out.) Speedster had his office on Anastasia Avenue in Coral Gables, a block or two from the legendary Biltmore hotel; Hands On worked out of a public clinic in Little Haiti. Speedster drove a stick-shift Mustang, Hands On a F150 Ford pickup (these are the only references in the serial to Malachi’s business). Coralina owned a Camry, but only as backup — she had a waiting list of admirers who’d drive wherever she wanted at any time of day or night. Malachi concluded, ‘Those are your parameters. What you do with them is up to you.’
“One performer brought up ‘a sordid detail: money.’ Malachi promptly offered $1,000 a week (worth something like $5,000 these days). That made the Buoys happy: so far they’d been trying out chic variations of passing the hat; it was a comforting windfall to have a regular stipend for doing what they liked for exactly six minutes and fifteen seconds. They all agreed to Malachi’s terms; he said he’d have contracts for them by noon the next day. When could they start? ‘Yesterday!’ So they were in from the beginning, which was two days later, on Sunday evening.
“They did their stuff with gusto; they started innovating immediately. They invented a third possibility for the tantalizing, undecided ending of an episode or incident. Remember the example I gave you a while back? ‘Dr. Sean now gambles on sex (good) or death (bad). The Buoys would propose ‘places his left pinkie in his right nostril’ or ‘places ten dollars on Piffle in the third at Hialeah’ — that is, neither good nor bad, just undramatic and off the wall.
“So Malachi’s clever insight and his choice of interpreters got the job done. After three weeks, the hook had plainly set. A steady stream — a steadily increasing stream — of curious fans invaded Malachi’s Ford Plaza. His lead actors became objects of street recognition; even the Beach Buoys’ beach performances drew bigger audiences once the word had gotten out about their second venue. Malachi managed to always have one or two of them wandering around his showrooms. But Malachi himself soon became the star attraction: as its episodes accumulated, so did the questions about the serial, and he was the only one who could answer them; and if his answers were ‘wrong,’ that made for even more questions.
