"Corpus Domini nostri—" Bobby Price whispered to the soft target below as he applied the requisite three and a quarter pounds of pressure to his favorite squeeze.
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7
Victor Trask was feeling semi-shitty. He'd woken up with a terrible, pounding hangover and since he didn't drink that was not a propitious beginning to the day. Neither did it auger well that he cut himself while trying to shave his face, the right side of which was pockmarked with old acne scars. He knew that others, women particularly, found his face appealing—women used words like "character" and "interesting-looking" when describing him—but he thought he was ugly as sin, with a face like the landscape of the moon. Actually he wasn't half bad-looking. His features were sufficiently chiseled and decently proportioned to give him a craggy profile, and he'd been blessed with a tight cap of hair that never seemed to be in need of a comb. Trask, true to his inner character, tended to see only the worst. He saw the salt and pepper in his prematurely graying hair, the residual complexion of a zit-ridden childhood, and a bulbous "clown nose." Pulling clothes on he briefly examined himself in the door mirror and saw a thirty-six-year-old guy with a body the color of a dead bluegill. Make that carp. He had to get out in the sun one of these days.
He hated the sun. It was so…sunny. He was a night guy and had nocturnal inner rhythms. It was three in the afternoon, which was like seven A.M. to him, and he had a half an hour of Kansas City traffic to negotiate before he was safely ensconced in the KCM building. The kids were out, which probably meant the traffic would be even worse, if that was possible. He put three Tylenols in his mouth and drank a swallow of tepid water from the tap. Breakfast. He wanted coffee but he would be half an hour late as it was.
He'd been a news announcer and writer for Z-60 for two years—his tenth and eleventh year in the business—when Chase Kincaid, KCM's program director, and also national P.D. of the Karrash chain, had brought him in to work for a guy who was then managing editor of their Kansas City news department. He did three on-air casts a night, good bucks, and no hassles. It had been like the early days at WNEW in New York, where a buddy of his had done the nine-to-midnight radio news. Three casts a night, and you split, the guy told him. "I work fifteen minutes every three hours, sleep all day, and at nine I go down to the Village and hunt for virgins." He was kidding but once it had been almost that big a skate.
D. Andrew Karrash had been a wrestling promoter, of all things, and had made his fortune back in the early days of television. He'd retained the rights to the early grudge matches between the vintage mat stars and the "freak shows" like tag teams and battles royal. When MacLendon and Turner and other broadcast pioneers such as Storz were experimenting with formats in the early days of all-news radio and TV, Karrash was recycling his old Gorgeous George kinescopes to "U"s, independent UHF channels, and other small and medium market properties who were seeing numbers in trash sports.
Karrash's chain ended up with three major market stations, of which KCM was the flagship. When Andy Karrash became ill and retired, less than a year after Trask moved to nighttime news at KCM, there'd been a tremendous shakeup. First, KCM had gone all-talk, under the national ownership of Rogers Communications, a New York—based publishing house expanding into broadcasting. The absentee owners had so far kept Chase Kincaid as local program director, but nearly everything else had changed.
A big-time TV and radio anchor had been imported to helm the news department, and Trask's easygoing boss had been axed. The new managing editor, Adam David, from Pittsburgh, was a top-notch air talent and writer/producer, but about as laid-back as sulfuric acid. To say that Adam David took himself, and the news, seriously, was like saying that "the universe is rather a large place."
All-talk could be a mind-bending concept. At KCM, it was an often uneasy melding of entertainment and hard news, and the two sides of the coin were not necessarily comfortable bedfellows. Louie "Captain Kidd" Kidder, a venerable Midwestern radio and television old-timer, had been brought in to set the tone of the station. In a market that ranged from "more music/oldies" to hard rockin' country formats to zany morning men, Louie Kidder's homespun, gentle wit and thoughtful insights were a welcome breath of radio air. From nine A.M. to three P.M., KCM's airwaves were filled with a basic news and "human interest" mix, some of which involved feeds and special packages such as business and financial/investment news, sports, weather, and various remotes. At three the talk turned to telephone call-ins. The three-to-six and six-to-nine shifts were helmed by men and women who were adept at eliciting the greatest amount of heat, if not light, from the topical subjects of the moment. The midnight phone show starred popular Kim Streeter, who was thought to have one of the three or four sexiest voices of any woman on major market radio. She sounded like the most beautiful, sweetest angel who ever drew a breath. In fact, Kim Streeter was beautiful in the face, and had an angelic personality to go with it, but she outweighed Vic Trask by ten or twenty pounds. This eclectic hodgepodge appeared to be working, if the ratings and word-of-mouth were barometers. Into this stew was stirred the legendary Sean Flynn and company.
Flynn had once been a king of talk, working almost as much as Larry King, with a profile the equal of King's or Tom Snyder's, having made his bones in the competitive Chicago market. Rogers Communications had brought him in from a night gig in some southern armpit of a market, and told him—in effect—do or die. It was his last shot to regain his crown and he came at it with a vengeance; a bright guy who'd fallen down the well of alcohol abuse, he hit the air boldly, with such a cutting-edge intelligence and sense of awareness that he made the nine-to-midnight gig his own overnight. The numbers were astonishing. He nailed the position with his first killer sweep book, a ratings response that two competitive stations sued over, forcing the survey companies to recount. The second count was even higher for Flynn. The guy owned Kansas City at night!
Within twenty-four hours of the announcement of the resurveyed numbers, Sean Flynn, forty-four-year-old has been alky, and two Jewish attorneys from Krelberg, Boda, and Kamen—whom Flynn referred to over and over as Nafka, Kafka, and Putz—with a set of contractual demands unprecedented in the mid-echelon annals of KC broadcasting: astronomical money; a stepladder clause linked to the ratings books; grandfathering out the exhaust pipe; a pay-to play page that made the guys from Rogers wince every time they thought about it, and demands for a producer-writer staff, for God's sake, began a three-day haggling session that ended up with Sean Flynn owning the store.
Flynn took Trask off the air and gave him a title—senior researcher—and they hired a producer from Memphis, a bird by the name of Babaloo Metzger, who had a rep for big numbers and a tough-as-nails shop, and Metzger brought in his own researcher from the Tennessee station, a woman named Barb Rose. Bookings were to be handled by Kincaid, various newsroom personnel, and Flynn had his own private secretary/receptionist/booker/handler/woman-of-the-night named Jerri Laymon. Sean Flynn's "America Tonight" became Sean Flynn's "Inside America," with important guests, open phones, in-depth interviews, and preproduced pieces, and the ratings went all the way through the roof.