On his first delirious night at the controls, he opened his program with a 45 rpm recording of a Portuguese orchestra doing their country’s national anthem, after which they played the American national anthem, managing to make them both sound exactly the same. Next Smith read the intro to his show from a little yellow card he held before his face with a trembling hand, but his mike was still switched to Off. When he was done reading he turned it to On and desperately asked English a few incomprehensible questions that went out over the air.
While Smith read his introduction to each song from one of his yellow cards, pushed the button that set it spinning, and then cued up the next record on the other turntable with the sweating vertigo of a person under fire, one of the newsmen — for English’s money there were too many newspeople around the place — taped a phone interview in the hall closet with a Vietnam veteran about Agent Orange. Acoustically the closet was the only place, because the phone company had refused to wire the production studio as long as the station was in arrears. “And why did they do that!” the newsman was saying. He felt he had to shout. “What was it exactly that they told you!” Smith liked to keep the speakers in the studio turned up high. The music of his homeland carried him away. He was moved to tears by a ballad, a typical one of tootly violins and a passion-wrung male voice begging violently in Portuguese, except when every now and then it sobbed in English, “Hoppy birthday — to you — my dolling …” “It sounds like you were getting the runaround here, am I right?” the newsman cried. Smith looked at his watch, at the wall clock, at the digital clock. He was getting alarmed. The timing on his play list must not have been working out. Time was his conqueror. When the song was done he talked in a choked, halting fashion to the audience, holding no yellow cards now, clutching the microphone by its neck. English sensed he was confessing his incompetence and apologizing for his whole life.
Before too long, the interview in the closet was over. Berryman, the reporter, was leaning against the glass window of the announcer’s studio looking drained of blood. English motioned to him to come on into the studio, though there was hardly any room, if only to stop him breathing on the glass like a kid who needed a nickel. Berryman was tall and pale, with the look, to English’s eye, of a real juicer, just the kind of washout you’d expect to locate in one of the closets around here. Everyone at WPRD was either just starting out in the radio business or completely finished. There was nobody in between. “I just got fired,” Berryman said.
“Bullshit.”
“No. No. Ray Sands was just in here, and he fired me.”
“You must’ve misheard him. He must’ve not recognized you and he must’ve said, ‘You’re hired.’”
Smith turned and asked a question, but now he couldn’t say anything intelligible because his bald head was tuned to Portuguese. He might have been requesting permission to explode the station. English nodded and smiled, rather than make him feel misunderstood.
“What’d he fire you for?” English asked Berryman.
“He was standing in the fucking hallway,” the reporter said. “He was waiting for me when I came out of the fucking closet. He said the fucking interview was hogwash. He pronounced my fucking fate.”
“Hogwash? What has he got against hogwash? I mean, hey”—English pointed at the day’s small stack of Special Programs tapes—“Baba Ram Dass. Check this out, Berryman—‘The Nicest People on Cape Cod.’ And anyway, when did Sands even get a chance to hear the tape?”
“He didn’t hear this tape,” Berryman said. “This is part two. He heard part one. He heard it last week, on the air.” Berryman held out the tape, a cassette. “This is part two. He doesn’t want to hear part two.”
Smith, trying to get one record stopped and another started, now developed the notion that he was being asked to play this tape. “No, no, no. I’m play music en rahdio — very”—he went through a bunch of gestures that got nothing across, picked up his play list, and ran his finger down along the titles—“I’m make diss, to will be — very nice.”
“I don’t believe anybody ever got fired before at WPRD,” English told Berryman.
“He said the whole report was hogwash. I mean, as if he actually gives two shits.”
English was hardly paying this chat any mind — mainly he kept his eye on Smith, communicating wordlessly with the new arrival through nods of the head and the way he held his body, letting Smith know he was still there, still helping. And yet what passed between him and Berryman turned out to be important. Things were coming swiftly into his mind along various paths, like spears. But — Fired, tough luck for the unlucky, was all he thought at the time. “Well, Berryman, I’ll buy you a drink,” he told the ex-reporter.
“I happen to be drunk already,” Berryman said, “but something like that might be arranged.”
“Right when this shift is over. How about a cup of coffee?”
“Fuck you,” Berryman said. “Hogwash.”
They were sitting in a basement place on the East End, Berryman’s idea of a bar. English preferred a spot about a half block away that had brighter lights and a little chromium. But tonight it was Berryman’s party.
Smith was with them and seemed to grasp that he and English were consoling Berryman for the negligible loss of his job. Smith’s face was expressive. English had never seen anybody before who actually “furrowed” his brow. Smith pushed his lips toward the rim of his glass like the bell of a honeysuckle, and what he did was, he quaffed.
“So tell me about this tape,” English said, he hoped sympathetically, to Berryman.
“But the point of it is that there’s nothing to tell, English. ’Nam vets, Agent Orange, it’s last year’s stuff. But a phone interview has a certain immediacy, so you do a phone interview. What does Sands want, a big scoop? We can’t even make a long-distance call, man, because his credit’s trashed.”
English was ready to get going. It was a bar with dim lights and a faint stink, where the big mistake was a rug that harbored the damp. The customers drank resolutely. It wasn’t eleven yet, but he saw men and women already forming tender alliances of the kind that had to be hurried through before they rotted — his kind, as a matter of fact. After a while he couldn’t stop himself. “Let me tell you about this woman I got the hots for.” “Are you buying?” Berryman said.
“Who’s been buying so far?”
“Mr. English. One of the gainfully employed.”
“Smith.” English waggled his empty glass.
Smith caught the bartender’s eye with a raised finger, then stirred the finger around among the three of them.
“Her name is Leanna Sousa,” English said. “Leanna Sousa, Leanna Sousa, Leanna Sousa.” He’d never been able to drink — two was his limit, maybe one.
“I didn’t get the young lady’s name,” Berryman said.
“Leanna Sousa?” Smith said. “Sousa?”
“Right. Yeah. Sousa — Portuguese.”
“Diss a lady that she have one hotel? Sousa Hotel?”
“We didn’t get around to what she owns.”
“You guys are so close. You go so deep,” Berryman said.
“It wasn’t that kind of conversation.”