The ‘Silent’ Minority : Ferrigno’s Latest O.C.-Set Novel Taps a ‘90s Subculture--’Phone Prank Society’

It is the quirky subcultures and out-there personalities of Southern California that have long ignited Robert Ferrigno’s writing. Steroid-pumped bodybuilders. Ferrari owners. Auto repo men. Surf bums. Women who compete in bar bikini contests. Paramilitary weekend warriors.

“I was always interested in subcultures--high or low, it didn’t matter,” says Ferrigno, 49, who in the 1980s was an Orange County newspaper feature writer.

As a novelist in the 1990s, Ferrigno continues to mine the denizens of the Southern California landscape, taking reality and, as he says, “amping” it up. Think of Boyd and Lloyd, the twin air-brained bodybuilders who work out to the strains of Wagner in “The Horse Latitudes,” his 1990 debut novel. Or the hit man in “Dead Man’s Dance” who hopes to earn enough money to open a beauty salon.

In “Dead Silent” (Putnam; $24.95), Ferrigno’s fourth noir crime thriller set primarily in the deceptively sunny environs of Orange County, he taps into the little-known world of people who make and circulate audiotapes of crank phone calls, off-camera remarks from talk shows picked up off satellite feeds and candid Hollywood outtakes.

For them, it’s all for laughs.

But in “Dead Silent” a taped phone call has tragic consequences.

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The novel opens with record producer Nick Carbonne and his entertainment attorney wife, Sharon, lying in bed in their south Orange County home listening to the rhythmic rocking of the bed in the guest bedroom below. That would be their house guests, Nick’s former rock bandmate Perry and Perry’s sexy girlfriend, Alison, an aspiring actress.

Nick and Sharon can’t help listening to the seductive activity on the floor below, two unseeing voyeurs in the night.

But then they hear what sounds like Alison talking on the telephone. She’s speaking in a high-pitched, girlish voice. Curious, Sharon carefully picks up their bedside phone, laying it on the pillow between her and Nick. On the downstairs phone, Alison is talking to a man--a stranger--about her being a high school cheerleader, about her boyfriend on the football team, about sex. . . .

By the end of the next day, the chemistry between Nick and the seductive Alison has begun to ignite--and they have survived an accident in which Nick’s Porsche overturns on a flooded road as they drive home from a record-release party in Los Angeles. Returning to his house, Nick and Alison encounter a shocking scene: Perry has been shot to death, his naked body floating in the backyard hot tub; the nude body of Nick’s wife, who was apparently mistaken for Alison, is nearby.

Perry and Alison, it turns out, had been making and selling dirty phone calls that Alison placed to strangers. The night before, they had inadvertently taped the murder of one of their regular clients.

It’s easy to see why the novel’s opening three chapters--only 40 manuscript pages--were enough to pique the interest of Hollywood long before Ferrigno finished writing the book. Last summer, Fox 2000, a division of 20th Century Fox, paid Ferrigno a high six-figure advance for an option on the movie rights to “Dead Silent.”

“Dead Silent” the novel hits bookstores this week.

In a review in the September issue of Playboy, critic Digby Diehl says Ferrigno’s fourth outing demonstrates “that he is still a fine stylist who writes about sex and violence as well as anybody.” Reviewers of his previous novels have noted Ferrigno’s flair for writing about sex and violence. But don’t get the wrong idea.

“I read other thrillers where the violence seems to me infinitely more explicit,” Ferrigno says. As for the sex in his novels: “I always think that I write romantic thrillers because there is a love story at the center of the book.”

And, always, there’s Ferrigno’s take on different segments of Southern California’s subcultures.

This time out, he not only serves up what he calls the “postmodern phone prank society,” but a drug-dealing motorcycle gang and “the Hollywood hustle, which is what Alison is involved in; and Nick, who is basically a washed-up rock star doing the best he can.”

Speaking by phone from his home in Kirkland, Wash., where he, his wife, Jody, and their three children have lived since moving from Long Beach in 1991, Ferrigno says that, to him, Southern California is more a collection of subcultures than a single culture.

“In Seattle basically there is one dominant culture. But what I loved about Southern California is no matter what your belief structure was--whatever you enjoyed doing--you could find somebody to do it with: Whether you breed Doberman and collie mixes and dress them in Hawaiian shirts, you can find people to do just that--and rent a hall and have a performance every month.”

The idea for writing a novel dealing with the underground audiotape circuit came to Ferrigno after attending a Hollywood party at the home of a friend. The friend, a television comedy writer, put on a tape he had received of a phone prank, saying, “I’ve got something you’ll get a kick out of.”

The tape is called “New Saigon.”

On the tape, a pleasant, soft-spoken man with a Vietnamese accent calls up Garden Grove residents to say he would like them to sign a petition to change the name of Garden Grove to New Saigon.

Predictably, the request touches a raw nerve.

“Bull. . . !” one older-sounding man lashes out. “You people come here to our country and right away you want to change things?”

“Well,” explains the Vietnamese caller, “it’s tradition.”

“Tradition, my [expletive]!” says the man. “You people are foreigners here. You want to change things and call it New Saigon?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’re full of [expletive].”

Ferrigno says he did indeed get a kick out of listening to the tape. His friend said that “New Saigon” had been “making the rounds.”

“I said, What do you mean, ‘the rounds?’ ” recalls Ferrigno. “He said there are a bunch of people in the industry--people who write and work in TV studios--who are basically passing around videotapes or audiotapes of either phone pranks or outtakes from television shows--things that you can catch with a satellite dish that don’t make it over the cable--basically industry bloopers that are inappropriate for the prime time shows that specialize in bloopers.”

Since then, Ferrigno has listened to nearly two dozen different tape recordings of phone pranks and celebrity outtakes.

There’s the star of radio’s “Top 10 Countdown,” Casey Kasem, ranting to his crew about the inappropriateness of having an “up-tempo” record played as a lead-in to his reading a letter from a listener asking for a song dedication to his dead pet dog. And there’s the late Orson Welles taking offense at being questioned about his line reading on a commercial for hamburger meat: “I take directions from one person under protest, but from two I don’t sit still. Who the hell are you anyway?”

Ferrigno says he became “hooked on the idea that you’ve got creative, talented people using technology to snoop into other people’s lives.”

The appeal of listening to the celebrity tapes is obvious: People always like to see celebrities caught with their pants down, he says. But the prank phone calls exhibit something darker.

Gone are the phone prank days of merely calling someone up in the middle of the night to say, “Your refrigerator is running, you’d better catch it,” Ferrigno says.

The “postmodern phone pranks,” he says, tap into economic insecurity, racial and ethic fears--”those dark reservoirs of emotion. That’s what, to me, was compelling about them: what it spoke about us as a country.”

At a certain level, Ferrigno says, “in all these phone pranks there is a certain arrogance: ‘I’m going to torque your mind around.’ And while I appreciate the arrogance--and certainly I’m as guilty of arrogance as anyone else--it’s always interesting to see the high and the mighty take a tumble, and that’s what this book begins with.”

With the notable exception of the Jerky Boys--two New Yorkers whose two albums of prank phone calls have sold more than a million copies--Ferrigno says taped phone pranks are not a big moneymaker.

“I think people who are into this kind of like keeping it that way,” he says. “Once you attract a lot of money to it, then the temptation would be to do phony stuff. So this kind of keeps it pure.”

Ferrigno believes the prank phone-call tapes point up the vulnerability of all of us to having our privacy invaded: Anyone who buys a police scanner can pick up intimate conversations taking place over cell and portable telephones, Ferrigno says. He even picks up portable phone conversations in his neighborhood over the monitor in his baby’s room.

“I’m actually less of a patsy on the phone after listening to these tapes,” he says.

Although he finds listening to the tapes “intriguing, fascinating and often very funny,” he concedes that “it is certainly a guilty pleasure.” Some of the tapes he’s heard, he says, have made him feel uncomfortable for the person being called.

“I don’t want to glorify this,” he says. “I’m certainly part of the problem if you want to think of it in a larger sense.”

But as a novelist, he says, he began wondering: What happens if this privacy invasion comes back on the person making the call?

“I love that intersection of that moment of realization that the person doing the prank suddenly realizes the prank is on them--with deadly consequences because I always like to amp things up.”

The Ferrignos, who moved to Washington following his first novel’s success, are enjoying life in their new hometown. For Ferrigno, it was a homecoming of sorts.

A south Florida native who earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a master’s in creative writing, he moved to Seattle in the early ‘70s. He began his journalism career there after a brief stint teaching English and literature at community colleges.

Ferrigno returns to Southern California several times a year to visit--and for inspiration.

Seattle may be a great place to raise a family, but he finds it lacking as a setting for the kind of novels he writes.

As he recalls admitting to an audience at the Seattle Book Fair when asked why he doesn’t set his novels in Seattle:

“It’s just not interesting to me in the way that Southern California is. I think the people and the landscape is much more muted--polite and nice and friendly--in Seattle. Southern California is much more frantic and kinetic and diverse and richer in terms of fictional elements.”

And then, in what Ferrigno says could only happen in Seattle, “the belligerent follow-up question was, ‘Why do you live here if you don’t want to write about it?’

“Digging myself in deeper, I said, ‘Seattle is a great place for a writer to live because usually it’s so awful outside you’d rather be at your desk. In Southern California I lived two blocks from the beach and could hear the waves from my office and had a hard time sitting down when I could be in the water.”

That comment, he says, “was greeted by a vast silence from the crowd.”

Ferrigno will sign copies of “Dead Silent” at 2 p.m. Aug. 17 at Book Carnival, 348 S. Tustin Ave., Orange.