WLT

The waitress at Charley’s was one who believed in striking up meaningful conversations with customers and after she brought their steaks, they got to hear her thoughts about the criminals running loose in Minneapolis. She thought there were too many and that politicians were in cahoots with them and held back the police from making arrests. She said it was getting so that the streets were too dangerous for a girl to walk, even in broad daylight. She felt that a lack of religious faith was behind this trend. She said, “A person who goes to church on Sunday isn’t going to come around and rob you on Monday.”

“No,” said Roy Jr. “If he is going to do it, he’ll probably do it on Sunday.”

“Well,” she said, “it’s been nice talking to you. Let me know if you care for dessert.”

The moment she sidled away, Frank leaned forward and said, “Mr. Soderbjerg, I have to ask a favor of you. Maria Antonio, who was on the show today, she’s a friend of mine, and she’s a wonderful person. I hope you’re not going to fire her because of that. It wasn’t her fault—”

Roy Jr. stuck up his hand. “Don’t give it another thought. It wasn’t that big a problem.”

“She’s worried that you’ll cancel the show or something.”

“Not a chance. It was an accident. Put it out of your mind.” Then he said, “Which one is your friend?” Frank told him. “Oh,” said Roy Jr. “The one Patsy Konopka is trying to get me to fire.” He laughed. “Poor Patsy doesn’t care for Catholics, I think. She told me your friend is a gold-plated whore. Interesting terminology.”

“Who is Patsy Konopka?”

The older man smiled and looked at the ceiling, as if about to launch into a story, but then he thought better of it and frowned. “She’s our head writer. An old friend of Ray’s. Sits over at the Antwerp and cranks out six shows a day, believe it or not. It certainly isn’t Broadway material but people like it. But she gets sloppy. Can’t keep the characters straight. Dad’s had six different next-door neighbors in the last month.”

Frank thought he would look up this Patsy Konopka and see what he could do to change her mind about Maria—but Roy Jr. was saying, “No, this episode today —I tell you, all the worst things that happen in radio aren’t as bad as you think. The only unforgivable sin is to not show up. Punctuality. The first law of radio: BE THERE. Remember that. The corollary of that law is: a radio man should own two alarm clocks and have a third available. Not many people were ever fired for not being brilliant, but the list of brilliant guys who wound up as shoe salesmen because they came late for the shift is as long as your leg.

“We had a fellow once named Burns L. Strout who overslept one snowy morning and as a result The Early Birds wasn’t there at five a.m., not the theme song, ‘Bugle Call Rag,’ or the cheery voice saying; ‘Morning, early birds! And a beeeeeyoootiful morning it is too!’ The voice that was supposed to say this was in the sack, dead to the world, having been out until three a.m. climbing into a whiskey bottle. Burns had a problem of wanting to be two things at once: a responsible decent person who brings sunshine into the lives of thousands and a crazy man who feels the throb of the midnight tom-toms and goes coursing out into the crowded avenues of the great hairy metropolis to seek the woman of his dreams.

“On this particular night, I believe, he had had to hire a girlfriend, so he was absolutely broke and came home to his slough of an apartment and passed out in a pile of old clothes and woke up late with a hangover that felt like his head had melted and came high-tailing it into the studio at 5:07 with terror in his watery blue eyes and hurled himself into the chair like a sinking ship, a sheaf of weather reports and livestock summaries and news headlines in hand, and he looked at his engineer Itch—the guy you just met—his real name is Mitch but he was always a little late with the microphone, so we called him Itch—a joke he never got, by the way—and Burns hit the chair, landing on his hemorrhoids big as Concord grapes, and his brains sloshed, he moaned and said, ”Jesus, this light is bright. Why in flaming hell can’t I hear the music, you asshole?“ The reason he couldn’t, of course, was that the microphone was on. Itch had put him on the air the moment his butt hit leather.

“Well, as you can imagine, out in radioland, all the friends and neighbors woke up in a flash. There they were, dithering around the kitchen, when suddenly this deep horrible voice three feet away says asshole. It’s like the escaped rapist is sitting by the toaster holding a shotgun on them. Then they heard this awful breathing, and a bout of throat-clearing, like a swamp being drained, big gobs of phlegm rattling—and then he retched, a big dry heave—and you can imagine out in the friends’ and neighbors’ kitchens, where the good folks are fixing breakfast, the sound of a man retching on the radio is pretty darn disgusting.

“Well, Itch leaped out of the chair and waved at Burns that Your microphone is ON! and Burns, who was operating in dim shadows, looked up and said, ‘Oh fuck you.’ The friends and neighbors looked up from their coffee. I happened to have just turned into the parking lot and I made it from the car to the control room in six seconds. Burns saw me the moment he realized what had happened. He didn’t say a word, and neither did I. He got up and went out the door and became a shoe salesman.

“That was six years ago. He’s still down at Thorn McAn, kneeling and smelling the feet, and you’re here in radio, Frank, which is preferable. Just remember the rule: BE THERE. And never curse around a microphone. Never.”

“Did you get a lot of complaints that time?”

“If we’d apologized for it, we’d’ve gotten an avalanche, but without an apology, people couldn’t be sure they had really heard what they thought they heard. It was five a.m. People don’t exactly hear the radio at that hour. It’s more like a warm thing that hums and reminds you of your mother.”

“Did this happen to take place in Studio B?” asked Frank.

“Of course,” said Roy, Jr.

Ray found Patsy at the Antwerp, banging away at the typewriter, her radio blaring, a band playing a polka—he had to pound hard on the door, ten heavy thumps, before she opened it.

“I’m sorry, Ray,” she said. “I heard the show. Cripes, I’m embarrassed as I can be. Come in and have a drink.” Ray sat down in a leather chair and accepted a shot of bourbon. (Who do you keep bourbon around for? he thought.)

“I am burning the candle at both ends trying to keep all these shows and all these small towns going,” she said, “and—do you know how taciturn Midwesterners are? No, you don’t unless you have to write scripts about them. Sometimes these buggers just plain won’t talk. So you got to keep pushing them and poking them and sometimes it gets so hard, writing late at night and you don’t feel like doing anything but going to a movie, and to keep yourself awake, you write a few pages of risque stuff, and then, of course, you yank it out, but these pages in Friendly Neighbor weren’t quite bad enough to catch my eye and I left them in by mistake. I feel dumber than dirt about it, but there you are. Care for another shot?” Yes, he said, another shot would be nice.

“What sort of risque stuff do you write that does catch your eye?”

“A few weeks ago, I was starting to grind out another Hoho”—Hoho was short for Hills of Home—“and I looked down and I was already on page 12. I couldn’t believe it. So I read back, and I’d written ten pages in my sleep! Frieda had murdered Fritz—sunk a hatchet in his head as he sat and mumbled over his fried eggs—and Babs had buried the body and gone out and shanghaied the grocery boy—walked up to him in produce and grabbed his head and put it between her breasts. Then they went in back and made love. Then Fritz walked in and so she shot him this time, the big lug, and stuffed him in the freezer and she and the stock boy hurried off to the dairy section and they humped some more. Then there was a commercial break, and then I woke up.”

“Maybe you ought to take naps. You could come up to the Ogden—borrow my room—it’s nice. On the sixth floor. You can see all downtown from there.”

“You took me up there once, years ago. Remember?”

Ray grinned. “Of course. A man always remembers the girls who said no.”

“You’re a dirty old man, Ray. Funny you should come over here to complain about a script of mine. The dirtiest line in that script was a nursery rhyme compared to your life, Ray.”

Ray smiled. “I have wasted half my life among boring men,” he said, “but I have yet to regret a moment I have ever spent alone with a beautiful woman. All my life people kept telling me I’d be sorry but, hell, I haven’t been, never, not for a moment, except I was sorry that you never would come to New York with me. That’s all. I’m still sorry about that.”

“You’re too late,” she said. “I am spending my nights alone with a beautiful man.”

Ray winced. He shook his head. “I envy him. Don’t tell me who he is or I’m liable to shoot him.” He said that maybe he would like to have another shot of bourbon.

She went to get him one. “You didn’t used to drink so much,” she called from the kitchen.

“I’m scared. I don’t think I’m going to be around a lot longer,” he said.

She stood in the doorway, hands on her hips, studying him.

“No, I try not to look too far down the road because down the road doesn’t look too good. I think I got something. I hurt a lot down in my gut. And I’m scared to go to a doctor.”

She sat on the arm of the chair and put her hand on his cheek and pulled his head against her hip. “Baby,” she said softly, “you have to go to a doctor.”

He looked up, his eyes full of tears. “Before I die, I want to make love to you,” he said. “That’s all the doctor I need. Then I’ll be glad to die. I’ll die with a smile on my lips.”

She shook her head. “Baby, I’ve got to get you to a doctor.”

“Come to bed with me and afterward I’ll do anything you like.”

No, she said. She was sorry. She liked him. But she valued her self-respect and—

“You talk like a fourteen-year-old Methodist,” he said.

She took her hand away from his cheek. She stood up and told him to get the hell out.

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said. She steered him toward the door and opened it for him. She said, “I didn’t mean to be offended. But I am.”

She was listening late that night when Frank came home. He drank two glasses of water, peed, took off his shoes, and put a sheet in his typewriter and pounded away for ten minutes. His typewriter sat on the kitchen table, whose legs sat on a beam, apparently, because his pounding made her silverware rattle.

Dear Daddy, he wrote, I have learned four important things this week. One is the value of Trust. I want people to trust me. It’s the only way for a person to do a job. Trust MUST be won. A man MUST be the same person to everybody, you can’t swing with the breeze. No. 2: The WAY to win trust is to LISTEN and to let people know that you DO listen. The way to do that is: RESPOND exactly to what people actually say. NOT to be smart and make wisecracks. NOT to show off with big words. NEVER be sarcastic. I am determined that I WILL BE a good listener. No. 3: Avoid profanity and smutty talk—it CHEAPENS your company and it KILLS TRUST. No. 4: Be CHEERFUL. SMILE if possible. And I do. I have met a wonderful girl. Love from your loyal son, Frank.