8

I must have wandered around this place for a while. It appears, in fact, as though I’ve been outside, too; somewhere damp and unkind, like the waterfront of Lyndon McDonald, where autumn is currently insinuating itself with nasty licking stealth. I’m standing clammily inside my club suit—my one concession, at Velez’s strenuous insistence, to the stylishness that celebrities like us are supposed to vanguard. Certain things are clear: a number of hours have passed since our ceremonious arrival here at Chez Smokemachine; the crowd in here would now outpopulate many midwestern townships; the sunken dance floor looks, from my remote vantage, like a National Geographic film on the wondrous world of fly larvae.

Directly across the premises, from my elevation to theirs, I can observe the goings-on at the court of my partner Velez. A minor forest of champagne bottles has sprouted from the table, all emerald-glowing under the crossfire of spotlights. I can tell you from here that Velez is feeling like Vito Corleone at his daughter’s wedding—sitting in ebullient cynosure, ringed by his lawyer-henchmen, decorated by Ms. Elite and, yes, by Sally Wallach too, giving an occasional condescending Windsor Wave to the processionaires below his table. Radiating the aura of his celebrity. Being the entire reason for this occasion.

For my part, I suppose I’ve been circling indecisively. Since I am known only in my capacity as Velez’s appendage, I have my anonymity out here on the fringe. I’m sure the place is crawling with WRTR people but I’d recognize few of them, avoiding, as I make it a rule to, anyone connected with sales. This is really their night, their chance to drag time-buyers up the promenade to Velez’s table for a few of the comradely insults and a moment in the glow. Roberto Velez has this uncanny talent for making each one of these advertiser-children feel like his existence is Velez’s lifeblood—all without actually saying a single civil word to any of them. To our own sales maggots, Velez is appropriately unsparing in his contempt; I’ll have to give him that.

Ms. Elite and Sally Wallach are the glorious adornments in this star-tableau of Velez’s. Sally, game and enervated, seems to be playing the unofficial hostess to Velez’s table, holding up the small talk with the parade of WRTR advertisers when Velez chooses to ignore them, pouring champagne, waving cocktail semaphores at the table-of-honor’s squad of stewards. Ms. Elite, meanwhile, stands behind Velez, swiveling from one sultry pose to the next, serenely surveying the middle-distance flurry, occasionally resting a hand on Velez’s shoulder—attending Velez for the world to see.

Are you in the mood to go back in time, or forward, my friends? Actually, it doesn’t make any difference because whether we go around or we come around, we’re doomed to end up right back here at Arielle’s promotion party—the timeless, inescapable black hole of big-time radio. We can indulge the illusion of freedom for a while if you want but sooner or later if we don’t die first we’re going to be sucked, brain first, right back into this masquerade ball with the kind lights to conceal that other illusion—you know. What I’m melodramatically sneaking up on is this creepy bottomless feeling that only hours ago were manhood and radio thrust upon me, and I was not, believe me, ready for the radio part.

Ellen Larkin was a one-woman radio marathon. During the first fateful day of my novitiate, Ellen had hosted and engineered a remote broadcast from outside the campus’s main dining hall, from where she plotted to rally the lunching hordes to the following dusk’s antiwar tub-thump on the campus green. Ours was not exactly a provincial studentry, but in the daily absence of what folks used to call coeds, a personal appearance by the likes of Ellen Larkin was big news; a hand-presented invitation to link arms with Ellen Larkin in her march toward peace was likely to be turned down by few.

After four or five hours of this, she had bundled her gear up to the organizing committee meeting where preoccupied ringleaders delivered her into my volunteering hands. And no sooner had we replugged this and that into their proper sockets than Ellen Larkin sailed once again out onto the airwaves, a shade late of her customary evening slot. I, invited to stay, sought justification for my presence.

It was over the low desk where a worn, snubby microphone seemed to sprout up from under a mulch of announcements, commercial copy, cassettes and music notes that I left her standing; there was a chair, but, as I would learn before long, this was much too early in the program for Ellen Larkin to consider sitting down. There was no separating her physical and mental output. She paced and pranced through a show; she danced and rocked her turbulent red hair to the tunes and she stroked that little gray microphone like she had to coax its arthritic compliance. At the door I watched her fingers play with the microphone, one moment throttling it like a miscreant little neck and the next minute caressing it like—ah, you know. But mine, I yearned, mine!

I handled my first career radio assignment promisingly. Her pastrami was moist and pungent, heaped between thick sturdy slabs of seeded rye scumbled deftly by my own hand with deli mustard; her coffee was rich, aromatic, issuing forth beckoning curlicues of steam. If you want to be in radio, this is where you start. I felt competent; I sensed, in fact, that professionalism was not beyond my grasp.

For my reward, Ellen Larkin gave me a tour of her electronics. I studied hard and asked questions when I didn’t understand, and sometimes even when I did. I volunteered to flip switches and feed cassettes when she found herself full-handed. I may even have straightened things up a little. As for Ellen Larkin, she forgot for long periodic stretches that I was present, and gave the same glazed-eye start when she’d go to a record and then turn to rediscover me.

A few dozen times I looked at my watch, affecting pressing demands on my own time. If she noticed … never mind. She didn’t.

We cruised undisturbed through hours one and two of the Ellen Larkin Show, she deliciously focused on the rabid bounces between the music and the outpourings of her own personality, I puppily attentive and trivially helpful. The one interruption to our privacy came in the person of a muscular, mustachioed girl who palmed a plastic bag into Ellen’s hand and retreated into the night without a word. To watch Ellen Larkin roll a joint one-handed while flailing the electronics to her will with the other was to witness the epitome of broadcast professionalism.

Her hair called to mind farming, somehow. Not that I’ve ever been on or near a farm, but you contemplate a windblown presence, utterly at home in the plainness and wonder of the outdoors, inattentive to the false adornments of civility, rejecting postmodernism’s venal entanglements, blissfully unpretentious in the bosom of the communal ideal, and pretty soon you long for the aroma of sun-dried cow flop on boots of your own.

Most intoxicating of all was her dominion over her anonymous congregation, out there, living the large and small details of their nights, orchestrating a thousand dances in the dark. She absolutely knew that they’d be waiting, at the end of the tune, waiting for her to come for them with her sincere prepossessing intimacy; there when they needed it, rewarding and undemanding and, I couldn’t help thinking from here at the giving end, grandly promiscuous. Ellen Larkin, I suddenly understood, was putting out for every single one of them out there. I allowed myself to wallow in the blinking darkness of the studio, to watch the swayback maestra stroke the presences in the night that she knew were out there dwelling in her voice, to soak in the vapors of what, at this point in the evening, seemed to me some kind of ephemeral, perpetually consummating gang bang.

But what did Jane Fonda have to do with all this, you—especially those of you too young to remember—might well be wondering.

It was into hour three of the Ellen Larkin Show, after dozens of exhortations on Ellen’s part for a rousing turnout next evening against the Vietnam deal, accompanied by dozens of the current antiwar anthems, and Ellen was beginning to show signs of boredom with her company—me. Of course she had to answer her steady trickle of phone calls; putting listeners on the air was part of her show. But when she began making seemingly pointless calls of her own, I looked for an honorable escape.

Then Jane Fonda stepped in and, in retrospect, made my one and only career decision for me.

Shuffling irresolutely toward the door, as I remember it, I was waiting for Ellen to hit her next record so I could make my cool goodbye, when suddenly the telephone lines—all three of them—went crazy. Caught on-air, Ellen waved me to a phone. It was thus that I became the unwitting recipient of the first of half a night’s calls from assorted wired, hysterical members of the absolutely official antiwar organizing committee.

I cannot help wondering, if you’ll pardon a momentary digression, who the suits are who’ve just ascended to Velez’s table—our table, except that I haven’t been up there yet to display my territorial rights. Two gray eminences with matronly spouses as I make it out from here, where I find myself shoulder-to-shoulder with a pair of plunging necklines drinking champagne and weighing the evening’s odds, pointedly oblivious to me. One, I have discreetly overheard, wouldn’t mind fucking Velez; the other professes such profound indifference that I know her knees would rattle a Richter scale at the outsidemost opportunity. I’ve done my share of floor-working for Velez in similar situations in the days before we became media giants, panning the stream for the shiniest nuggets of an evening, presenting my anonymous self as the one and only fast track to Velez. Watching the instant eye-commerce between the two ladies in the crosshairs: which of us is for Velez himself? For me it remained to be a not-too-dispiriting consolation prize once Velez crowned the winner.

About these unidentified suits one thing is clear: Sally Wallach knows one of them intimately. Perhaps parentally is a better word, for I suspect I’ve just set eyes on Sally Wallach’s pop, Boss Wallach, E. P. Wallach to be absolutely precise, for the very first time.

Dad Wallach, I may have mentioned, owns a very substantial chunk of the company that is about to unload WRTR-FM, the Thunder, on a billionaire British pustule of international disrepute. Over the years we’ve met plenty of suits, Velez and I, but we’ve never met Himself before that I can remember. E. P. Wallach is a fairly low-profile kind of guy in this latter-day culture of sexy executives. But he’s reputed to have as handsome a collection of amputated penises as any of the Fortune cover-boys. And from loins of his own has issued forth Sally Wallach, who is neither spoiled, obnoxious, affectatious, overbearing, jaded, effete, nor stupid—in spite of all her childhood advantages.

The necklines and I observe the goings-on across the room above us. Warmth is being exchanged between my partner Roberto Velez and the sire of my date, E. P. Wallach. To the uninitiated, like these two percolating necklines next to me, it must appear that Velez and Pop Wallach are fishing buddies at the very least. Velez is on his feet. Sally rests a hand momentarily on Velez’s sleeve but her important arm is crooked under E. P.’s. I wait for her to look around for me. I realize that it’s been long enough since I’ve even been within waving distance of the table that Sally may be assuming I’ve left. I also realize that it’s just this happenstance, this calling of me to account by some dour grownup for my intentions toward this young Wallach girl, that has kept me away from the table, hovering, skulking.

My paralysis is presently invaded by Hendy Markowitz. Hendy is dressed Japanese, which tonight I do not hold against him. My loathing for Hendy, it would seem, is relative to the proximate alternatives. Hendy may have spotted me first, but it’s the electromagnetic field surrounding these necklines that has drawn him nigh.

“Dennis,” he says to the two, assuming we are a momentary trio. “Great party.”

The name Dennis doesn’t register with the necklines; why should it? On the air, my partner Velez either refers to me by my last name only—“Here’s Oldham with the news and stuff …”—or else by one of the manservant nicknames he plasters me with, like the current “Coolie.” My whole name gets used on the air about three times a month, I’d guess. So when Hendy Markowitz clambers up into the wedge created by the two necklines and says, “Great party, huh Dennis?” these girls do not care.

But it’s late, and I think it’s time to make my way, finally, to the Velez table, so I say, “Hendy Markowitz! Listen to you all the time, babe! Hey …” Now the necklines sense celebrity in their midst—they’ve heard of Hendy, even though they’ve probably never exactly heard Hendy. Markowitz, meanwhile, senses trouble, but waits to see what will happen next.

What happens next is that I say to the necklines, “Hey, you know who this is?” And they say, “Sure!” And I say to Hendy, “Y’know, I always wondered: How do you manage to wake up so goddamn early?” And Hendy Markowitz grins nervously because he thinks he’s about to be knifed in the kidney but I haven’t got anything of the kind in mind. Instead, I say to Hendy and the necklines, “You won’t believe … this is supposed to be a hip radio party, right? So I’m talking to a couple babes before, right? And they think Velez is a smokin’ property, y’know, wouldn’t mind puttin’ the old—well, y’know.” I look wide-eyed from Neckline One to Hendy Markowitz to Neckline Two. “God,” I say, shaking my head, “I thought everybody knew about Velez and babes by now.” And I shake Hendy Markowitz’s hand and leave him to make of the situation what he can.

It couldn’t have been that long, this diversion with Hendy, but now as I climb the steps to Velez’s table I see Velez, a platoon of Velez’s lawyers and other assorted quasi-official sycophants, and Ms. Elite, but no suits, no wives of suits, and no Sally. I slide in next to Velez, who looks restless.

“Where you been?” asks my partner.

“I’m allergic to lawyers,” I say, not loud enough to give offense.

“You’re supposed to be helping me give handjobs to our sponsors tonight, remember?” says Velez.

“Where’s Sally?” I ask.

“Where’s Sally?” Roberto Velez repeats. “Where’s Sally?” he asks Ms. Elite, who now hunkers down by his shoulder. “Hey, Coolie, it wasn’t my turn to watch her. It was your turn to watch her.”

And Ms. Elite tells me, “She really does like you, Dennis,” in a way that makes it unnecessary for her to finish the thought: “So why are you acting like such a bumbling asshole?”

But Velez winces at this, just like I do, and I know I’ll get some commiseration from him when we’re out of earshot. He knows. How could Ms. Elite appreciate such ambiguous circumstances? Christ, she’s a teenager herself! She probably doesn’t see any difference between her situation with Velez and mine with Sally Wallach. But Velez does and I do and maybe even Sally Wallach does.

I scan the scene from the battlements for a minute. “So,” I say to Velez, “where’s Sally?”

“Went out to breakfast with her Dad. You see Old Man Wallach?” Yeah, I nod. “I begged him not to sell,” says Velez.

“Yeah?”

“Nah,” says Velez. “I don’t give a shit. Time for us to get out of this business, Coolie. Leave it for the hyenas. Leave it for the rabid dogs to eat Hendy and Arielle and the rest. There’s just us and them, Coolie. The quick and the dead.”

He says this with such weary conviction that Ms. Elite rocks backward, stunned. Could this be it? she must be thinking. Could I be in on the final chapter? Of course, this is the very first time Ms. Elite has heard such talk from Roberto Velez. It is definitely not the first time for me.

Ellen Larkin’s first concern was to determine whether someone on the official antiwar organizing committee was full of malicious, cynical, manipulative shit, or if Jane Fonda had actually agreed to come and speak at the next day’s rally. Her instincts, I remember thinking with admiration, were suspicious: somebody has decided that the only way to rouse the snoozing masses was to promise them Jane Fonda.

I suppose I’m assuming you know who Jane Fonda is; let me fill you in if you don’t. Jane Fonda is a video fitness guru and the wife of a media mogul like the putative new owner of WRTR, the Thunder. But back in the Ellen Larkin era of our immediate recollection, Jane was a Hollywood star of many lumens. Jane had attached herself fiercely to the Vietnam War as the latest cause in a career of political crusading, and had recently paid a sympathetic and vastly publicized visit to North Vietnam, to predictably mixed reviews on the home front. I personally have never doubted either her sincerity or its transience. But in those heady days Jane Fonda was the undisputed gossamer glow on the celebrity antiwar road show, and, according to some on the official antiwar organizing committee, she was about to descend into our dismally apathetic midst.

As I mentioned, Ellen Larkin had her initial doubts. She’d been in on enough official organizing committee meetings, and had shared intimacy with who knew how many of its members, to be wary of such an unlikely thunderbolt. But circumstantial evidence lent credence: Jane Fonda would, in fact, be appearing at Columbia University tomorrow at 11:00 a.m.—cannily timed for the news at 6:00 p.m.—so said the New York Daily News. And Columbia was only ninety minutes—though several intellectual light years—removed from our own hallowed halls. So we had a clue at least that Jane Fonda would be in our time zone tomorrow.

Beyond that, it was the word of the organizing committee’s politburo against—what? Against all odds, and nothing more. Maybe, Ellen Larkin decided after a contentious half hour, Jane Fonda would indeed show up. Wanting to believe is the most important thing.

Before my eyes, there blossomed in Ellen Larkin an arousal that exceeded my wildest imaginings. Droplets of passion sprung to her surfaces. Possibilities raced their way through Ellen’s brain. How to make this happen? I heard her thinking. What to do first? What to say to Jane Fonda’s face?

Well, I knew what to do first: get the music—“y’say y’want a revoloootion?”—off the deck and tell everybody that Jane Fonda was coming!

“Yes, yes, yes, yes …” I can still hear my Ellen chanting, half to me, half to herself, fingers and hair swirling around and above the junky console, full, earnest mouth buzzing the microphone like a bee on the prowl, trying to frame just the right first words to spring on the drowsy remnants of her scraggly audience.

“Okay—” is how she began. “I’ve just got … word has just come in … that tomorrow’s rally will have an additional guest speaker—Jane Goddamn Fonda!”

Yes, that’s how Ellen Larkin broke the news. Jane Goddamn Fonda.

There followed more of this, a jumble of enthusiastic fragments that, if followed carefully, added up to an ironclad guarantee that Jane Fonda would be here, in the flesh, next evening, disbursing glamorous agitprop to all comers and at no charge.

After ten minutes of all but commanding listeners to wake up everyone immediately—it was after midnight by now—and spread the word, Ellen Larkin ran out of breath. “… Be right back—” she gasped, and stabbed a tape into motion. She slumped into her chair for a motionless moment and then bolted up, facing me. “Fuck!” she announced, “nobody’s gonna hear this now! We have to do something. Take action!” Ah, yes. Take action. The absolutely official organizing committee’s prime tenet. Doesn’t matter what action; just take some. But what was to follow would change everything.

Ellen Larkin decided that taking to the streets was the thing.

“You got a car?” Ellen asked, and as she asked this her fingers closed around my forearms and I felt something approaching religious zeal course through those freckly fingers.

“Yes. Sure!” I said.

“Okay. Okay. Go get it,” Ellen said. Did I ask, What for? Did I wonder for a split second if I was about to sacrifice my Plymouth to the official organizing committee, all of whose members except one I despised? Did I question Jane Fonda’s politics, or Ellen Larkin’s? Ho ho.

Downstairs, I and my Plymouth idled, but not for long. The muscular girl who hours before had delivered Ellen Larkin’s dope rapped her hairy knuckles on my window and said, “Hey, you Ellen’s friend?”

Yeah, I thought. I’m Ellen’s friend.

“Go upstairs,” I was ordered. “Leave the car running.”

In the broadcast booth, Ellen Larkin was pulling on her airman’s coat and leaning into the microphone with renewed entreaty. “Tomorrow. The Green. If you care. If you know what’s right. If you want to show how you feel. If you want to stand up to the White House. Be there. Now,” she said, and pulled me down into her seat, “I’m hitting the street. We’ll be cruising the campus all night. You’ll hear us. Come out. Tell everyone. Tomorrow—Jane Fonda. Tom Hayden. Dick Gregory. You. Me.” Behind me, some commotion; the equipment I’d hoisted up here for Ellen Larkin just hours before was being hauled right back out again. Ellen ignored my questioning look.

“Meanwhile, we’ll be right here on WRSU all goddamn night, bringing you news as it happens about Jane, Tom, Dick—” I thought, Jane, Tom, Dick? That was quick. But then Ellen said, “—and plenty of rock, the best, from WRSU, with my friend …” and she whispered, “What’s your name again?” So I said, into the mike, “Dennis Oldham.” On her way out she kissed me—probably, I thought, as an apology for forgetting my name, but I didn’t care. My upper lip was wet from her.

Music played. In between, I spoke. I watched the bouncing needle and tried not to trip it into the red zone too often. My rap was a parrot of what I’d listened to Ellen do for the last three-and-a-half hours: “Tomorrow. The Green. If you care. Six o’clock. If you have a watch.”

Yes, dumb. Fumbling. Dopey. But here I was, on the radio.

And, I presently found out, some people actually were listening. Because they started to call. Most wanted to know if this Jane Fonda bullshit was for real. Time and again I staked my professional reputation on her appearance. Some people didn’t care about the war, but wanted to talk about Jane Fonda, who back then was widely considered to be—with apologies to all concerned movements—the most coldblooded babe on the face of the earth. Some didn’t care about Jane Fonda or the war; they just wanted me to play their favorite tune. I caught on; pretty soon I was even entertaining callers live on the air.

And where was Ellen Larkin? Well, she was motorcading through campus, town, and suburbia, leading the chase in my Plymouth, with its newly rigged megawatts of loudspeaker power. WRSU had been spray-painted in a shaky hand along both the Plymouth’s rusty green flanks, and its hood stood adorned with scrawled “Out Now!” placards. I wouldn’t find this out until later, of course, but even as I sat in her own broadcast studio, alone with her mike and her callers and her tapes and her quiet blinking lights and her night solitude, I felt the eeriest connection to her—sexual, without a doubt, but more. I had thrust upon me a battlefield commission in Ellen’s underground society. I knew something that she and not many others knew. I knew about talking out into the faceless night, and feeling it listen. Okay.