Nothing Is Forgotten_A Novel

by Peter Golden

  “I don’t know how. And don’t you need a radio operator’s license?”

  “Not for this station. We’ll go over Monday at five. The job doesn’t pay, but you could learn, and something might come of it.”

  “Did Emma put you up to this?”

  “You don’t wanna make a liar outta me, do ya?”

  “No, sir.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  * * *

  WSOV-FM was in South Orange Village, on the second floor above Town Hall Deli, in a windowless room that had eggshell cartons glued to the walls—a futile attempt, I’d discover, at soundproofing. Against the back wall were the door for a bathroom and a beige couch, the torn leather cushions doctored with duct tape. The rest of the studio was taken up by four apple crates filled with stacks of 45s in their sleeves and a metal desk with a turntable cabinet on either side of it. On the desk was an RCA audio-control board, a microphone, a pair of headphones, an alarm clock, and a telephone.

  “Where do I start?” I asked.

  “The six big buttons in the middle of the board are the faders. They’re preset and got punch labels telling you what they control. Don’t touch the one on the far right. It’s the master volume for the board.”

  “You were a deejay?”

  Eddie O removed a pack of index cards from a pocket of his sport coat. “Nah, I had a guy write out directions, and I did my homework. Go on, sit.”

  I sat in the wooden swivel chair. “If I get stuck, could I ask him some questions?”

  “He’s not talking much. His jaw’s broken.”

  I didn’t want to hear that story, but Eddie O took a 45 from a crate and said, “Don’t sweat. The guy was a greedy SOB and owes a thousand plays. But he knows his onions, and it’s on these cards.” He handed me the record: “See You Later, Alligator,” by Bill Haley and His Comets.

  “Deejays had to be bribed to play Bill Haley?”

  “Can’t say. The crates of records are from a station that went bust. Now get those cans on your head, and I’ll read ya how to put on a song.”

  “Cans?”

  He held up an index card. “Headphones. It says here they’re called cans.”

  I clamped on the cans, and Eddie O read out the instructions. One of the switches above the faders was marked AUDITION, and after pressing it, I had to push a button labeled TT 1, which controlled the turntable on my left. I twisted the fader to the right, placed the 45 on the felt-covered turntable, and cued up the record. When I heard the music begin, I backed up the 45 and reset the fader to zero. Still holding on to the record, I hit the button labeled PROGRAM, which sent the music to the air, then fired up the turntable, cranked up the volume, let go of the 45, and heard Bill Haley singing, with the drums and sax going at it.

  I hollered, “How can you tell if the music’s coming through?”

  Eddie O shuffled through the index cards, then disappeared in the bathroom and closed the door. He came out as the song ended, and I took off the cans.

  “There’s a radio on the back of the toilet,” he said. “Music was coming in fine.”

  “Who can hear the station?”

  “Some of Essex County. The antenna’s somewhere up in the Watchung Mountains. Listen, we should practice more. I ordered us a Sloppy Joe.”

  The Sloppy Joe, Jersey style, was Town Hall Deli’s contribution to Western civilization: a triple-decker sandwich on thinly sliced rye, cut into eight sections, with roast beef, pastrami, Swiss cheese, coleslaw, and Russian dressing.

  “Take a gander at those 45s, and I’ll get the eats.”

  “Mr. O’Rourke?”

  “Eddie, I’m Eddie.”

  “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure. You’re a nice kid. And your grandma’s a helluva gal. Don’t be sore about her interfering. Nothing wrong with knowing there’s better than working in a candy store.”

  * * *

  During the week, I practiced alone in the studio with the smell of sour pickles rising up from the deli. I loved watching the records spin, monitoring the volume-unit meter on the board, and ratcheting down the fader if the needle flicked into the red. I left the bathroom door open when I spoke into the mike, and it was magical hearing my voice filtering out from the radio and imagining its trip through the ionosphere. I decided to do a three-hour show Sunday through Thursday beginning at ten P.M., so I could go out with Beryl on weekends. The hardest decision was who would I be? My favorites, Jocko Henderson and Dr. Jive, were black, and the white guys I’d listened to—Alan Freed, Murray the K, and Cousin Brucie—either talked as if they wanted to be black or blabbered like frat boys zooming on dexis.

  By Sunday afternoon, I hadn’t come up with anything original and sat in the studio doodling on a pad, drawing two pictures of myself, one in a cowboy hat and the other in a beret. Before going home for dinner, I sifted through the crates of 45s again and found a recording by Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen that I’d read about in Billboard. It was a redo of a Russian love song, which, according to the article, featured such a plaintive accordion that the writer was tempted to commit suicide in a snow fort. I stared at the 45 and knew who I was going to be.

  At ten on the dot, I put on the 45, and after thirty seconds of the swinging, brassy song, I lowered the volume and spoke over the music, keeping my voice soft and deep: “That’s Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen . . . ‘Midnight in Moscow,’ and you’re in lovely downtown South Orange with me, Mikhail Dainov, the Mad Russian, on WSOV-FM, 100.7 on your dial. Dóbryy vecher . . . Good evening.”

  The records in the crate were mainly doo-wop and early rock ’n’ roll, so I played oldies for three hours and jabbered away in English and Russian, throwing in sayings that I’d heard Emma use, everything from yaytsa kuritsu ne uchat—eggs don’t teach a hen—to nichto ne zabyto—nothing is forgotten. I ended the show with a toast to love—Za lyubov—and whispered into the mike, “Spasibo, schastlivaya puti. . . . Thank you, have a nice trip.”

  * * *

  For the next month, I enjoyed my shows yet felt like one of those drunks in a Bowery doorway talking to himself. Rollie, Birdman, and Beryl were tuning in, and a handful of students at school said that they’d heard me, but I estimated my audience to be in the single digits. That is until the night a Mrs. Hurling phoned the studio in tears. I asked her to hold on, put down the phone, and pressed a button on the board to transfer the call to the air.

  “Go ahead, ma’am. We’re listening.”

  “Our dog, a wirehaired pointer, ran away in Maplecrest Park. He’s wearing a navy sweater with snowflakes on it. My daughter knitted it for him for Christmas.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Einstein.”

  “Real smart, is he?”

  “Yes, yes, he is.”

  “Hear that, everyone? The bow-wow’s smart and his name’s Einstein, he’s got his Christmas sweater on, so let’s hit the streets, and if you see him, get the Mad Russian on the line at 555-WSOV.”

  I couldn’t believe it—inside a half hour, there were seventeen calls, and the pooch was located looking in the window of Schulte’s Pipe Shop. The next night a reporter from the News-Record showed up at the studio with a camera, and my picture, accompanied by a story, made the front page under the headline “The Disc Jockey Who Saved Einstein.”

  Emma framed the page and hung it behind the soda fountain, which I figured was the extent of my fame. Except the News-Record also covered local sports and political squabbles; ran obituaries, wedding and birth announcements, classifieds, and real estate listings; and named everyone the cops busted for assorted stupidities. Thus, most of the thirty thousand people in South Orange and Maplewood glanced at the paper every week, and I didn’t appreciate the impact of my publicity until I brought Nikita Khrushchev to WSOV.

  A couple of years back, the Soviet leader, a pissed-off bowling ball of a man with a habit of flinging his arms up when he spoke as if he were drowning, had made a fool of himself at the United Nations. When a delegate proc
laimed that the Soviet Union had no respect for freedom, Khrushchev countered the accusation by pounding on his desk with his shoe. I’d thought it was funny then, and on this evening, as “Midnight in Moscow” played, I was leafing through Time magazine and saw an article on the spy-plane pilot Francis Gary Powers, who had been captured by the Soviets and had just been swapped for a Soviet spy. That gave me the idea, and as the record ended, I said, “Mr. Khrushchev, what’s your opinion of WSOV?”

  I waited a beat. Then: “Oh, right, you don’t speak English.” I asked again in Russian and answered for him by taking off one of my Jack Purcell sneakers and hitting the mike with the sole.

  “Really? You want Mrs. Kennedy to lend you her pillbox hat?”

  I smacked the audio console three times with my sneaker.

  On and on I went in English and Russian, banging on the mike, and after I asked if any listeners had a question for the Soviet premier, the phone didn’t stop ringing until I signed off. I was so jazzed by the response that when someone inquired as to how Mr. Khrushchev disposed of his vodka bottles, I smashed an empty Coke bottle on the floor.

  5

  My Khrushchev routine became a fixture of my broadcast. Sometimes I had him accompanying songs with my sneaker and a kazoo, and I began getting callers from West Orange, Livingston, Short Hills, Millburn, Montclair, Glen Ridge, and Bloomfield. One of them said he’d heard about WSOV from a carhop at Don’s, which was centrally located way up on South Orange Avenue, past the wooded hills of the reservation. That my show was being talked up by carhops was a kick, but what happened next was unreal.

  One afternoon I was sharing a malted with Beryl at Gruning’s, a junior high and high school hangout in the village. A bunch of eighth-grade girls stopped by to ask for my autograph, and as I drew a quick squiggly self-portrait in their binders and wrote The Mad Russian underneath it, Mr. Gruning came over and asked how much it cost to advertise on my show.

  Stunned, I finally replied, “If I mention you once a night, twenty bucks a week.”

  He peeled four twenties from a wad. “I’ll take a month.”

  First thing I did was check with Eddie to find out if I could hang on to the dough.

  “It’s yours,” he said. “All you gotta do is play them records. You’re makin’ people happy, and there’s lots of guys without broken legs ’cause of you.”

  Before I knew it, businesses around South Orange were advertising: Village Records; Bellin’s Boys Town; and Ruth Satsky Jewelers. Town Hall Deli had me talking about their special after-school snack, buttered rye-bread ends for a dime; and Romoser’s Bakery was offering students a discount on glazed doughnuts, a nickel for a sugary taste of heaven.

  By May, when Emma went on her annual vacation to Europe, I was averaging four hundred bucks a month, incredible money for a kid. Birdman, Rollie, and Beryl were glad to help me run Sweets, because who cared about classes by spring of your senior year? I traded in the station wagon and bought a used Plymouth Fury convertible in fire-engine red. During the glittering summer that follows high school graduation, I was at the Shore every weekend. Birdman’s family had a huge house in Deal, Rollie’s had a bungalow in Seaside Heights, and we were allowed to stay at both places with our girlfriends if they slept in different rooms.

  On a rainy Saturday, Beryl and I had gone for lunch by ourselves at the Howard Johnson’s on the boardwalk, a glass-walled flying saucer of a building with a view of the deserted beach. We had finished our barbecued beef and were deciding which of the twenty-eight flavors of ice cream to choose when Beryl whispered, “Suppose I want to practice losing my virginity in Asbury Park?”

  She hadn’t noticed the gum-cracking waitress in the orange HoJo uniform standing beside our booth.

  “It’s as good a town as any,” the waitress said. “You want ice cream first?”

  Beryl and I got the giggles and forgot about dessert. In the warm, salty drizzle, we walked down Ocean Avenue to the Berkeley-Carteret Hotel, a redbrick relic of the 1920s with a doorman decked out like the Emperor of Candy Land.

  Upstairs, the bedding was mildewed, which I quit noticing as we undressed. Figuring it couldn’t hurt to be optimistic, I’d been storing two Trojans in my wallet since June, though I was having trouble moving past our usual kissing and touching, a hesitancy rooted more in ignorance than in fear. At last, with Beryl’s studying me as if I were conducting a science experiment, I rolled on the condom and then we were together, moving sort of in unison, and I tried to control myself by thinking about John Glenn blasting off into space back in February and silently ticking off the countdown: Six, five, four, three, two, one, zero, ignition, lift-off . . . .

  And then it was over.

  Beryl suggested we get ice cream. The rain had stopped, and we were more inventive at HoJo’s than we’d been at the Berkeley-Carteret. Beryl ordered a double-dip macaroon, and I had pecan brittle. We wanted to spend the night at the hotel, but we had tickets to see Ray Charles and officially we were sleeping at Birdman’s. His folks were strict about taking attendance, so we strolled down the boardwalk holding hands and met up with Rollie, Birdman, and their girlfriends at Convention Hall.

  * * *

  That year the summer didn’t linger. On Labor Day, the cold swept down from Canada, clearing the beaches along the Shore. Around Maplewood and South Orange, the leaves flamed up and fell, and on weekends fathers and sons raked them into yellowish-brown mounds and lit bonfires at the curb, and the smoke blew through the bare trees. In October, after President Kennedy announced that Soviet ballistic missiles had been uncovered in Cuba, I had to put my Khrushchev number on ice, and took phone calls for most of my shows during the crisis, my favorite being the one from Louie, a fourth grader at South Mountain Elementary, who asked me why he had to have a bedtime if America was going to get blown up. Earning the gratitude of his mother, who got in touch at midnight to thank me, I told him that Khrushchev was plotting to trade the missiles for Mrs. Kennedy’s Oleg Cassini inaugural gown, so Louie should get some shut-eye, all the while thinking that if warheads hit New Jersey, a huge payoff for me was that I’d stop missing Beryl.

  I had been in a daze since she’d gone to Chicago. We wrote each other twice a week, letters full of trivia and signed with love and “I can’t wait to see you.” Then one afternoon in November, Beryl buzzed me at the store. I was refilling the syrup dispensers, and Emma answered the wall phone behind the register and held up the receiver. I set down a can of chocolate syrup, and after I said hello, Beryl told me that she was going to Arizona for Thanksgiving.

  “I met someone,” she said.

  “A cowboy?”

  With a forced sunniness, she replied, “He does have a hat. Like the Cisco Kid.”

  I pictured a four-eyed bookworm in a sombrero. It was comforting. Momentarily.

  “Michael, I didn’t want to tell you in a letter.”

  “Oh, it’s a lot nicer on the phone.” Beryl didn’t deserve the sarcasm, but a queasy mix of anger and sadness was rolling through me.

  “I’ll be home for Christmas break. Maybe we can see each other.”

  “Sure.”

  When I hung up, Emma said, “You’re a good-looking boy. And there’s plenty of girls in the sea.”

  Normally, I was tickled by Emma’s fracturing clichés, but I wasn’t in the mood for it now. “Fish. There are plenty of fish in the sea.”

  “I’m not requesting the English lesson. I’m telling you: Next time, be smart. Don’t put your balls in one basket.”

  “Eggs. Eggs in one basket.”

  “In Yiddish, beitzim is the eggs. And the balls.” Emma smiled at me. “Life goes on, Mishka. Finish the syrup.”

  * * *

  Beryl cruised the Caribbean with her family over Christmas vacation, so I didn’t see her, and life went on. I visited Rollie in Miami and drove to Yale to hang out with Birdman, who turned me on to my first joint. The girls I met around town were in high school, and on occasion I asked one out, though after a
couple of dates they seemed too young. I earned some extra cash that summer at Tony Mart’s down the Shore, introducing acts and even meeting Del Shannon, who had a conga line of suntanned drunks dancing on the bar.

  One of the dancers was a divorcée from Indiana, a shapely, doe-eyed brunette in her thirties who was renting a house in Long Branch and decided I was a splendid candidate for a crash course in the erotic arts. She was a savvy judge of potential. It was an hour drive from her rental to South Orange, and I began sleeping over several nights a week. I never got specific with Emma about the arrangement, but now and again, with a sly smile, my grandmother observed that it was unusual to spend a summer at the beach and not get a tan.

  The divorcée returned to Bloomington in September, leaving me with a wealth of information and an indelible memory of peeling off her damp leopard-print bikini. The following Memorial Day she came back to Long Branch, called me at WSOV, and offered me a similar tutorial. I accepted, and after that summer I saw only her when I dreamed of curvy girls in skimpy bathing suits. For the rest of those two years, I was bored and sleepy. What with working at the store until dinner, then eating and taking a nap until my alarm rang, and transforming myself into the Mad Russian for three hours, some nights I was so beat after my show that I sacked out on the couch in the studio until I had to help Emma with the morning papers.

  The Friday afternoon that JFK was assassinated, Emma had me bring a portable TV from home and set it up behind the soda fountain. Eddie O was at the store almost round the clock, drinking straight from his flask and telling everyone, in a tone that discouraged disagreement, that the country never wanted a mick in the White House. I saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald, and the president’s funeral, and I was as numb as the day my parents died. I’d recently bought a cassette recorder, and on Thursday morning I walked across the street from my house to Underhill Field and interviewed fans during the Thanksgiving Day football game between Columbia and West Orange High, planning to run them that night. The flag was at half-mast, but even though people were less focused on the news than the score, I had the feeling that the game was a temporary distraction and reality as I understood it had had its ass kicked to the curb.