Loudmouth: Tales (and Fantasies) of Sports, Sex, and Salvation from Behind the Microphone

by Craig Carton

  David told me that the signal from Buffalo made a straight shot to Cleveland during the day, and he had become a big fan of my weekend marathon solo shows. It just went to show, every time you went on the air, you had no idea who might be listening. If you ever showed up unprepared, you never knew what future opportunity you might be blowing.

  David told me that he wanted me to come to Cleveland to interview to become their new permanent nighttime host. Shocked and excited, and surprisingly aroused, I almost shouted out loud like I was starring in a bad porn film with Nina Hartley. I took the day off from work and drove my Buick to Cleveland. They had made a reservation for me in a downtown hotel, and I was told to be in the lobby bar at 6 p.m. to meet David and other executives from the radio station.

  When I walked in there, only three people were at the bar. Two of them were dressed as if they came right from an IBM meeting: dark suits, white shirts with tons of starch, and an uneasy look about them. And then there was David George. He had stubby fingers, wore a suit a full size too big, and had lousy shoes on, but he was warm and welcoming. He said with his smoker’s cough, “There’s my guy, Craig Carton. Great to meet you.”

  He introduced me to his colleagues: David Popovich, who was the operations manager, and Roger Turner, the grand poobah and general manager. David was engaging, but Roger, who had to be in his late fifties or early sixties, was standoffish. We ordered drinks. I didn’t know that I was about to go on an eight-hour interview, the longest of my life.

  They dove in with basic background questions, and then the GM, who made little eye contact and seemed disinterested, asked, “What is your radio philosophy?” Hmmm . . . . I had been in radio for five months, and I had no philosophy about radio, but I did know how to bullshit. I had sized him up as soon as I walked in the room as an older conservative who demanded respect. I gave it a shot.

  “My philosophy is to respect the audience and relate to them, so that whenever they turn on your great radio station, they feel like they are listening to a friend.” Such bullshit, but I figured he would eat it up. He didn’t respond, and uncomfortably I waited until one of the two Davids jumped in with their next question.

  We had spent about forty-five minutes and three cocktails in the hotel lobby bar when Roger got up and said, “You boys are going to dinner, right?” They nodded, and he said, “Not me. Nice meeting you, Craig. Have a good night,” and he was gone. The three of us finished our drinks, got into a waiting car, and drove to an Italian restaurant.

  Over the course of the next two hours, we finished off three bottles of red wine and engaged in some mindless banter. I was more than buzzed, as were they, and our conversation had gotten louder and louder, and less and less formal. At some point during dessert, David George said, “We ought to show him the station; it’s right around the corner.” The three of us stumbled out of the restaurant and walked two blocks to the station, which sat at the top of a high-rise building in downtown Cleveland, overlooking the Flats.

  As the elevator door opened onto the floor, they remembered that the guy I would be replacing was on the air at this exact time. Radio guys don’t give a fuck how they treat employees, especially once they have given up on them. The rub here was that the guy I was replacing wasn’t being fired. He was being reassigned to be my update guy, which was a comeuppance. He had been on the air in that market for twenty years, was well liked, and was a nice guy. Problem was, he was boring, and nobody was listening to his show.

  The two Davids didn’t want him to see me, but in the event he did, they concocted a story that I was a nephew just in town who wanted to see the station. They couldn’t be that dumb, but they were. It never occurred to them what would happen if they told that story and thirty days later, I was back to host the show.

  The guy never saw me, and we got in and out without being noticed by anyone. The station was impressive and had all the trimmings, in direct contrast with Buffalo. We left the building and hit a pool hall, and we had a few shots and more drinks. I was flat-out trashed. They were, too. They suggested hitting a strip club next.

  I was drunk, but I was alert enough to know that. I was trying my hardest not to do anything stupid. These guys either didn’t get out much, or they knew how to convince someone to come to work for them. There is nothing more awkward than getting a lap dance while a guy almost old enough to be your dad pays for it and sits next to you watching it. Yet that’s what happened. A few lap dances, more shots, and after what turned out to be eight hours, they declared the night over and drove me back to my hotel.

  On the way, I summoned up the courage to ask the guys about salary and length of contract. When I did, Dave Popovich, who was sitting shotgun, turned around and deadpanned me eyeball-to-eyeball. “Nice meeting you. The night is over; goodbye,” he said. Wow, my spirits sank. I figured if they didn’t want me, they would have dumped me after dinner. I said, “Don’t you think we should have a quick chat about the ballpark you’re in for this job?” and again he gave me steely eyes and said, “Good night.” I went to bed miserable. Not only had I had to watch a forty-year-old guy get a lap dance, but I might have gotten shot down for the job.

  My hotel phone rang early the next morning. It was David George. He said it was great to meet me, and they had decided after their morning meeting that I was their guy. They were going to FedEx me an offer. I asked him what the offer was. He refused to tell me, other than it would be FedExed over. Strange, for sure. Two days later, the offer came to my roach-infested retirement-home studio apartment. They had offered me a three-year deal with base salaries of $30,000, $31,000, and $32,000. Nothing to negotiate. I signed on the dotted line. I had just tripled my salary in less than a year.

  In the year I spent in Cleveland, David George quit to run a newspaper stand outside a popular mall. Jay Clark, a well-thought-of programmer from New York City, replaced him. Imagine leaving an executive-level job in radio to sell twenty-five-cent newspapers outdoors, seven days a week. Radio seems glamorous, but for most people not only is it not glamorous, it means a low-paying, insecure professional life. Yet it is so addicting that most people stay—or they have no other skills, so they’re unhireable anywhere else.

  Jay and I got along right away. He seemed to like me. He invited me over to his apartment to eat dinner with his son several times, which is why I was so shocked at what happened in March 1993.

  I had already been on the receiving end of several performance-related memos from Roger Turner, the GM. Roger spent forty-five minutes with me the night of my interview, and he had me into his office on the first day of work. From that point to this one, I never saw the man, not a single time. Roger was a pussy, afraid of looking another guy in the face. He feared real conversation. I grew up without much real face-to-face contact with my dad, but that Roger communicated with me by memos was new.

  The Indians were still a bad team when I first got to Cleveland. I took them to task almost every night—not the players specifically, but the ownership. One night Roger was at a black-tie event with Dick Jacobs, the team’s owner, and he received an earful from Jacobs about “the new punk kid” on his radio station who was calling him names. I called him “Arthur,” a reference to the movie character played by Dudley Moore. My point was that Jacobs was an incompetent owner. That point was heard loud and clear.

  I had become close with some of the young players on the Indians. I was twenty-two years old and had been in radio for all of seven months. At the time, WWWE Radio was a conservative talk station with a syndicated Rush Limbaugh as its main attraction. I arrived as a loudmouthed kid from New York who didn’t hide the fact that he thought Cleveland sports was a joke, and I was right. The only winning team they had was the Cavaliers, which could never get past Michael Jordan and the Bulls. The Browns were being led by a young, unproven head coach named Bill Belichick and had no chance of winning with Todd Philcox as the replacement quarterback for Bernie Kosar.

  Then came the Indians, the true joke of Cleveland.
By the time I arrived, however, there was a change brewing. The Indians traded Joe Carter for two no-name players who turned out to be Carlos Baerga and Sandy Alomar. Later the organization was selected as Organization of the Year by Baseball America. While the Indians were going to be a team on the rise, the rest of the Cleveland sports scene was much more complicated. The Cavaliers were a perennial playoff team, and if not for Jordan, they most certainly would have gone to an NBA Final. They were loaded with Brad Daugherty, Mark Price, Craig Ehlo, and many more. The town wasn’t as rabid about the Cavs as they were the Browns, but this team was perfect for blue-collar Cleveland as they were led by a hardworking, overachieving white point guard in Price. He was religious. He never went out socially, never showboated, couldn’t dunk, and he was slow. But boy, could he play—and play like an all-star, which he was.

  Cleveland sports fans hated Jordan because he always stood in their way of playoff success. I decided one day to take advantage of that hatred. I announced on-air that I would give all listeners a chance at a free shot at Jordan. I bought a life-sized cardboard cutout of MJ and tied it to a parking lot pole. I invited fans to throw their choice of rocks, apples, and other assorted fruits at the cutout. Fans waited in line for an hour to get their shot.

  Cleveland was and will always be a Browns football town. Coach Bill Belichick would go on to win three Super Bowls with the Patriots and appear in two more, both losses to the New York Giants. Many consider him the best coach of his generation, and rightfully so. In Cleveland he is known as the guy who benched local legend Bernie Kosar for unknown Todd Philcox. He also had a losing record while there.

  I had season tickets in the Dawg Pound, the most raucous seats in the entire Municipal Stadium; end-zone seats with the most ardent of Browns fans. In addition to attending the games, I also became close with Bill. So close that one day when we were talking with each other, he asked me if I had any interest in working for an NFL team. The thought had never occurred to me, but he explained how he would be willing to tutor me. He knew I wasn’t thrilled about my general manager at the radio station, and he offered me the job of unpaid intern with the promise of earning a small salary.

  I was only making $30,000, so leaving radio for a low-paying job wouldn’t change much for me. I told Bill I would think about it. He gave me a weekend to decide. When I turned the job down to pursue radio and give it everything I could, as I explained to him, he wound up finding someone else to take it. The man who ultimately took the job was a guy named Eric Mangini. Fifteen years later he became the New York Jets head coach, and then the Browns head coach. He now works for ESPN. Of course, my thought was, I could have been the New York Jets head coach!

  During the spring of 1992, I became friends with Charles Nagy, who was becoming the ace of the Cleveland Indians staff, as well as a number of other players on the team. We weren’t friends in the sense that we all had each other’s phone numbers, but we worked out in the same gym, partied at the same clubs, and knew each other. One player once came to my rescue at a sports bar when Sandy Alomar came after me to protest some things I had said about him on my radio show.

  One day the Indians had an afternoon at home, and I was off that night, so I figured I’d grab some beers and take in a ball game at Cleveland’s old Municipal Stadium. Armed with a press pass, I thought I’d hit the dugout before the game and say hello to some of the guys. When I got there, the guys started egging each other on to “Show him! Show him!” I had no idea what they were talking about. I just hoped that I was not about to be on the receiving end of some sort of medieval sexual initiation.

  Once I was assured that I was safe, I relented and asked what they wanted me to see. Like a bunch of giggling schoolgirls, they all followed as one of the players led me into the trainer’s room. After one final warning to me about not revealing on my show what I was about to see, I opened the door to what was the inner sanctum of any locker room, and heard a constant banging.

  Bang bang bang bang!

  About fifteen feet in front of me there was a player sitting on one of those old swivel stools you’d see in a doctor’s office. He had a practice jersey on as well as his stirrup socks, and his pants were around his ankles. It was a fellow player, and the guys behind me tried to stifle their laughs as I peered closer so that I could see what the deal was . . .

  The deal was both frightening and amazing. The player was one of the young stars on the team, and part of the Indians’ future success. But on this day, a few hours before game time, he sat in that swivel chair with his back to the door. He had his cock in the palm of his hand, and he was holding it and slamming it as hard as he could against the stool. Bang, bang, bang! He didn’t stop.

  I wondered if he had a rhythm to the banging, or if he did it for a certain number of times or seconds, but the guys just told me he did it until he felt “right.” I was dumbfounded, yet couldn’t turn away from the sight of a grown man slamming his dick as hard as he could against anything, let alone a stool. When I finally turned around, the guys broke into uproarious laughter that didn’t stop until we left the clubhouse. To his credit, the player never flinched, never acknowledged my presence, and—coincidentally or not—went on to have a great year.

  That visit may have been my first introduction to locker room antics, but over the course of the next twenty years, I became privy to some good ones. The locker room can be an intimidating place. No, I’m not just talking about walking into a professional locker room where guys are hung like mules. Sometimes you can mistake a dude’s cock for a jump rope. I once saw three kids playing double Dutch with an NFL star’s junk. Okay, that’s a lie, but they could have. It was enormous and impressive, and I stared at it for far too long.

  For most of us, the first locker room experience you have is with your father at a country club, YMCA, or other gym. There is nothing more frightening than the first time you see your own father and six of his buddies sporting full frontal, going for a steam. It’s life-altering. Shriveled-up ball sacks, bellies hanging over their junk, saddle bags and pockmarked butt cheeks. It’s enough to scare you into never taking your clothes off again.

  Once you get through that nightmare, junior high school rolls around. The prospects of the communal shower confront you. Reputations are made in split seconds when you’re a teenager and walking into the shower for the first time. If you’re like me, and you’re a grower and not a show-er, the shower experience is a tough one. You certainly don’t want to get the reputation for having an inny, because then your lifelong prospects for pussy dwindle and you have to wait until you go to college to start with a fresh rap. Don’t ever believe that chicks don’t gossip. All it takes is one guy to tell his girlfriend that you have no dick, and before lunch the next day, you have no shot for a prom date unless you import her from Guam.

  You also do not want to get caught stroking the junk to make it grow, because then you will be labeled a pervert. While there’s nothing wrong with that, life ain’t like Glee, and it’s a tough existence at that age.

  Imagine having a full-on boner when you walk into a communal shower area. This is the first place any of us will be seen naked by our peers, unless of course you were caught selling home Skype movies to neighborhood moms. If you have a full-on erection, a risk from rubbing it too much pre-shower, you’ll be lucky not to get punched in the mouth.

  Here are the rules of the communal shower:

  Wrap yourself with a towel and pretend you have to pee before going to the shower. Slap that little soldier of yours back and forth a bit, just to get the blood flowing and start the semi process. The semi, for those of you who haven’t heard the term before, is when you’re in between a full-on erection and totally soft. It’s pleasurable, too, and as I mentioned, one that I first learned during elementary gym class while climbing the rope.

  As soon as you have a semi, get to the shower. Now when you take the shower, you’re going to look straight ahead at the wall at all times, but as you walk in and take the towe
l off, every other dude will size you up, just as you will do to them. You’ll look big, and that’s all they will remember, since cock size and bench-press ability are the two most important ways we compare ourselves at that age.

  When you return from the shower, I suggest putting your underwear on under the towel. Your excuse can be that in such close proximity, you don’t need to risk an awkward accidental touching of your junk against a buddy’s leg. So sit down on the locker room bench and put the underwear on, and then lose the towel.

  Oh, I almost forgot: the one thing you never want to do is play a game of rattail and snap your towel against another dude’s naked ass—ever, at any age, in any setting.

  But I digress. Back to the black-tie event when Roger ran into Dick Jacobs, the Indians’ owner. I doubt Roger ever listened to my show, but he was shocked by Jacobs complaining about me in front of the nose-in-the-air society of Cleveland. The next day he fired off a memo telling me to cease and desist from calling Jacobs “Arthur.” I had to call him “Mr. Jacobs” from now on. A few other names were listed there as well. I was not allowed to refer to the Indians owner as a “butthead” and “loser,” either.

  I did what any thoughtful radio host who had just taken his time slot from twelfth in the ratings to fourth in only six months would do. I read the memo on the air, and then I reread it. This was a turning point in my relationship with the audience: it was real, it was relatable, and the fan base loved it. I was one of them now, and I was “so important” that the owner of the Indians himself had reacted to what I was saying.

  Roger hated what I did, but again, rather than speak to me directly, he sent me yet another memo. What did he think I was going to do? This memo was threatening: “If you read this memo on the air, it will be construed as a disobeying a direct order from a superior, and as such may result in termination.”