Amping Up the Stakes on a Subculture

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.

“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 features 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, 1996), 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.

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 on a flooded road as they drive home from a record-release party in Los Angeles. Returning to the 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 is now in bookstores.

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 that particular flair, 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.”

Ferrigno, who moved in 1991 from Long Beach to Kirkland, Wash., with his wife, Jody, and their three children, returns to Southern California several times a year to visit--and for inspiration.

The idea for writing a novel dealing with the underground audiotape circuit came to Ferrigno after he attended 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 tape recordings of phone pranks and celebrity outtakes.

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 ethnic 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.

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.

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.”