by Ray Succre
A thirty-piece orchestra. Huzzah! That was twenty-seven professional players above and beyond what was expected. He had written a work of great description, but enlisted it for radio, and so the unique flavors of dialogue and theme had played into the concession of the form in a novel way. The piece was likeable. It called for a narrator and served its subject in a light of both notoriety and historical wonder. He had been asked to write a puffer, an hour outlining a particular small town of the target audience. Midwestern towns had been treated to this sort of loyalty-pandering in programming for some time, in the mode of public relations and listener-hugging, and it was now the time for Green Hills, Ohio, to have its people and charters and days chronicled and broadcast for them to hear.
That these towns existed was not enough for a show. Most had a single, supportive industry, some a major one, or even two, and each had the general antiquities of growth and founding dates, but anything beyond this, written and dramatized and set on the airwaves, was not the work of documentation, but tribute, a game not of representation, but subtle fabrication. Listeners were more loyal when you spoke to them, and most loyal when you spoke about them. For this, an on-air personality needed to use a grandiose tone. It was a well-rehearsed and coveted tone, and not every emcee had it. Having done some voice-work in college for radio, Emery had somewhat decided that he would narrate the special himself. He had been practicing with Beth in the living room.
No matter how eloquent or inspiring the voice, the material itself needed to be personal, dear, and capable of summoning a certain sort of pride. A midwestern sort of flavor. Emery had scripted a fifty-two minute odyssey that conjured a Green Hills as heartfelt and American as the Alamo. He needed only to convince Frank Gill to light the fuse, and the Emery’s hour special would eventually hit the air. Today was the day that would happen. Mr. Gill had been given the script and, several hours later, he wanted to see Emery.
The office of the program director was as usual. Untidy and arranged in a haphazard way, with a wide lane from desk to door in better allowing the passage of a fat man. Emery entered the office and nodded in cheer. Mr. Gill gave a pained look and patted his chest, as if the belch he had been expecting had gone left at the half-way point. The Green Hills script was laying face down on the desk. Emery could see his own hasty notes scrawled on the back. The submission looked to have been turned over in shame, a sort of punishment, a young boy sent to the corner.
“Hi-de-ho, Frank. What do you think?” Emery asked, annoyed a bit at the accidental rhyme.
“Antioch, we have a bit of a problem. So uh, let’s have us a talk.”
“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, Frank, but could you stop calling me that?”
“You don’t need to worry about sounding ungrateful; you are ungrateful. You can sound that way all you want. But you work hard and I do respect that. I’ll stop with the Antioch.”
He leaned back in his chair. The swivel mechanism gave a great whine at this bearing of weight and its movement. Mr. Gill looked Emery over in an uncertain way, as if a very old doctor figuring out how to explain to a shy and optimistic mother the presence of cancer in her child. Emery’s bad knee twitched and the nervous habit of clearing his throat was fought off. Mr. Gill sighed then, having found his velvet-gloves, having resigned himself to being kind in the approaching castigation. Emery could sense it, and a slight panic filled him.
“Asher, it’s this way: Your stuff’s too stilted.”
“Stilted?”
“Yeah, see there’s-”
“I don’t understand. I detailed the hell out of that piece. And it’s only the rough draft.”
“Don’t interrupt me.”
“It’s not stilted; it’s just rough, is all. I’m not finished with it yet. By the time I-”
“Hey now, pipe down. You gotta hear this, so just listen.”
“...fine. I’m listening.”
“You seem to be missing the common touch, as it’s called. You can’t write Jane Eyre for Melody Ranch, ya bunny. We’re lookin’ for grass roots. You understand that, right? We have to stay close to the people.”
“Yeah, like the people in Green Hills. They’d love this piece,” Emery defended.
“Well, now, that may be true, but I can’t break ranks for one tiny town. We make one town look that good, we’re pissing on the next town over, and that next town buys things, you see?”
“You mean the ads. This is about the sponsors, then?”
“Some folks might not buy some things if we play favorites, understand?”
“Oh, I understand. Too much puff in the puffer, right? Well why not? We just write the next town a good script, too. We distinguish ourselves from the other stations. Raise the quality a notch. Make some money, while we’re at it.”
“Thing is, Asher, we’re obliged to use the ‘folksy’ approach. We want our people to get their teeth into the soil.”
Emery knew in a concise way what Mr. Gill was referring to by this statement. The folksy approach was a twangy, hick emcee that boringly strummed his trusty Southern Jumbo and said “Ah shucks, here’s another one, friends” before twinkling into the next song. The approach was not orchestrated and did not savor theme, something all good writing was supposed to have mastered. Out with the tropes and any trace of a literary covenant, in with the grins and clichéd phrases. Simple writing for real folk, which was an overromanticized way of saying hackneyed, low-brow writing for morons. The audience did not consist of buffoons, however. They were merely treated as if buffoons. The approach that WKCR and many midwestern stations had was an informal one, in a Davy Crockett hat, and made of Silly Putty, not skill. That would be getting the teeth into the soil. That would make up those idealized grass roots the programming was supposed to portray. These scripts did not require a writer so much as a plough. He understood why this system existed, but had hoped with earnest to become an exception to it.
Biting his tongue, Emery nodded and agreed he would write a new piece for Green Hills. The look of uncertainty on Frank Gill suggested that the station manager had ideas on Emery’s state of mind, and maybe not good ones.
FADE OUT:
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FADE IN:
Maury was in a daze, hovering over his work in the Red Room and working his pen like a chisel. When Emery entered, he glanced up and then quickly returned to his work. Emery sat at his desk and interrupted.
“Let me ask you something, Maury.”
There was more than writing in the duties of a script man. The atoms that made up this particular sort of beast were fast and carried with them many responsibilities. Writing was only the home base in the staff-writer’s game. Also required was the rummaging up of ideas, of notions and styles one might use in various sorts of programs. This at times gave the illusion, or delusion, of being open to the intelligent imagination a writer might, on occasion, possess. These moments of sudden inspiration, in part removed from the drudgery of trimming and cutting the guts from a page, were what Emery craved most. He savored the abnormal, the unique, and the layered nature of good tales. He felt himself there, working conceits into a story and showing more than the usual slugger match of text he was to supply a broadcaster.
“So ask,” Maury said.
“You ever thought about doing free-lance?”
“I got a few pieces out there, sure.”
“No, I mean just that. Full-time. Trying to make do with just the one campaign.” Maury lifted his head at th
is and nibbled the inside of his cheek a moment. .
“Neh.”
“Never?”
“Ah, my parents didn’t raise a gambler, Em. Did yours?” Emery shook his head because he was expected to respond in the negative.
“I was just wondering if it ever crossed your mind.”
“I’d forget all about that, Asher. Free-lance on the side, sure. But as an occupation? That has not crossed my mind. That’s crossed out in my mind.”
The radio writer was a go-to font for amounts of fresh ink, or at least ink most recently spilled over from the source. Emery was counted on for a number of things, especially by Maury, who shared the job. It would be refreshing, perhaps excellent, to count only on oneself in the creation of a career. There was disaster looming, of course, but a chance for more. The Green Hills piece might go well at a station with a newer outlook, and these certainly existed. Emery was fatigued, however, with sending his side-stories to the various stations he kept note of and approached. He could potentially send the Green Hills piece to a program director anywhere, if he wanted to, while not having to work exclusively for the station that wanted it. Free-lance. Maury was right, however; it was a gamble no matter what prism someone choose to view it through.
The talk ended and Emery finished some revision on an adventure script Colgate had commissioned. When done, he fetched his coat and left the Red Room, the basement, the halls, and the station. It was a warmer day, but damp. The Sun felt useful, but he would not be out in it for long. He had been given, in addition to his varied scripts and day’s routine, the chore of supplying gimmicks for an afternoon ladies’ show recorded across the street. This had been going on for several weeks and it was time to check in with the show. As the afternoon stumbled above, he took a brief sojourn from the station, crossed the traffic, and made his way to the second station building. This structure contained the recording booths and live setups.
Emery had written a portion of a show that was on-air at that moment, and decided to take a few minutes to hear the end of it, get perspective on how things were happening between page, actor, and microphone. A few minutes were all he would need. This was a refresher experience he brought on himself every now and again, and it kept him fluent with the foibles of his text when brought to the air, and the always budding idiosyncrasies of the script format. He caught the end of the performance, having misjudged time by several minutes.
John Bellamy, the emcee of the show and a man Emery had met many times over the past months, was a mildly literate revivalist. They had found themselves moving down many conversations in the past months, and with each, Emery liked the man a little less. Bellamy was the sort one might have called a tent-preacher. Not so much anymore, however; this emcee had a long history of religious travel and occupation, back into his childhood. He had sold bibles at the start, traveling with his father, who did the preaching. The two of them had opened a small church in Oakland, Nebraska, but didn’t like the Swedish influence, and after a few years left their church behind. They traveled again, preaching the mid-west to its edges and back. In time the son usurped the position of evangelist, replacing his father, and at some point had set up in just about every town within a thousand miles of Cedar Rapids.
Bellamy had grown up using tents, private homes, churches, and even a few warehouses in spreading the word of God with his father. They started up wherever they could, giving the loud gospel, and scuttling, at times, into prophecy. Bellamy had come up from that and now spoke in a fetching, surefooted voice through a microphone, his ‘congregation’ as far reaching as Denver. His tent was now in all the towns at once. He was a radio-vangelist, as it were. The coyote had left the plains and now lulled to his rabbits in their very homes. Despite the particular substance he advocated on air, off the air he was cocky, sneaky, and always seemed up to something. Emery was no fan, but wrote some of the bits John gave for the sponsors.
Of more immediate fandom were the near-dozen women in the audience booth who had gathered to watch Bellamy perform, as was common. Though anyone hearing the broadcast would have no knowledge of it, the preacher had devastating good looks and a grin that could reach through the glass into the audience room and grab each woman at the knees. Most of those present returned each week to catch his show. Their fondness and the way slight gasps and chuckles left their mouths reminded Emery of a certain sort of girl he had noticed back in college, the captivated one that never said what she truly felt because what she felt inside, what she was inside, were a person to know the look of it, was heated, raddled with infatuation, and ever so numbingly hungry.
After sermon, the master of ceremonies closed his show with a three-minute affair of asking prayers and blessings from all the world for the spiritual benefit of various things within it. Bellamy seemed so sincere that one of the women began crying. Another woman, who appeared rigid in her small tricorne hat and practiced posture, seeing the weeper, looked to attempt the same. Perhaps this was in competition, to see who had been moved more by the damnation-uttering man. The second woman’s lip quivered beneath her tiny nose, but she was unsuccessful. She simply did not have any tears prepared.
Eyes half-closed in a sort of triumphant reverence, the emcee closed-out the performance and was cut off. He exited the recording booth at program’s end. The women crowded into the hall to meet him, as many of them did each day. Bellamy exuded a practiced cheer and performed various forms of smile as he opened the door and entered the hallway. He had donned that slouch fedora he always wore when outside of the broadcasting room. The hat looked good on him but gave him the look of a businessman on a camping trip who could not be bothered to go a day without a hat. Bellamy walked amidst the women, this group of admirers who parted in the narrow hallway, allowing his passage. He offered hellos and thank-yous, placing his loose hand against their upper arms or, occasionally, waists, bracing them with a smile and stronger greeting. His smiles neither faded nor decreased in charm for the duration of this greeting session. Several of them gave him a look of familiarity that, to Emery, seemed more intimate than was customary, even for the adoring fans of John Bellamy.
These women were not good at keeping back their sighs and fluttering eyelashes, though perhaps did not wish to, which bothered Emery. Their presence and mannerisms gave off a sense of worship, which in the basic meaning was not so troublesome, as the man for whom they were doting was a staunch preacher, a person for whom the presence of worship was somewhat elementary, a tool in use for the duties of his occupation. Behind this meaning, however, there was a sense that these women admirers held a form of worship for him. This made one wonder if the ladies present were attending these weekly sermons more for the specimen of the preacher than the subject of his evangelical extrapolations. Did they not realize the obviousness of their sexual want just then? The covetousness? Perhaps some of them did. One never knew.
Bellamy nodded to Emery and the two exited the hallway, leaving the women behind but for one who waited at the base of the approaching stairwell. As the two men passed, she spoke with a look of intrinsic respect across her eyes.
“A wonderful show,” she said, watching the two men as they made their way up the stairs. To Emery, there was a strange but humorous allusion in this, something about a man of God rising upward and leaving his faithful below.
“Thank you,” the evangelist responded over his shoulder. They reached the office on the upper landing. As soon as she and the others were out of sight, the reverent, soulful expression left the preacher’s perfect face entirely and he began unrolling his sleeves. He slouched a bit before sitting down in his chair with a groan and letting out his gut. Emery sat down, as well. They both lit cigarettes, settling an ashtray between them over small talk across Bellamy’s desk.
The writer then began rummaging for the gimmicks he had thought up earlier, for sponsorship during the evangelist’s show. Finding ways to advertise during a sermon was a tricky business, often offensive if not handled correctly. Emery had learne
d the hard way that this required a lot of planning and caution. Before he could begin to relate a new round of ideas, however, Bellamy gave Emery a wink, pointing at the stairwell they had ascended and indicating the woman they had met at the base of it.
“I wonder if she lays?” the preacher mused.
FADE OUT
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