I took a moment to survey the lobby. I knew better than to think that Susan Miller would be prominently seated and waiting to chat with me in the lobby of a fucking Hilton, but I felt unsure about what to do. Then a 40ish guy in a suit standing behind the check-in counter made eye contact with me and stepped around the desk with an envelope in his hand. He spoke in a quiet voice.
“Thank you for joining us, Mr. Powers. Mrs. Blake’s assistant has left you your key.”
Smooth. Her assistant huh? I wondered who else was in the loop. And, I had never even mentioned any name to this guy so he clearly knew to expect me.
“Thank you,” I responded, hoping he hadn’t taken note of my lack of luggage.
The open envelope had “505” written on it and one of those magnetic keys inside. I thanked him while trying to act like I was used to this level of service, then got on the elevator and pushed 5.
My chest was thumping as the elevator climbed, and then the doors opened and I walked along the corridor heading west. Whatever was about to unfold, it was going to go down in a beachfront room. Tucked inside my sport coat pocket was the purported audit, but I still had no idea of how I was going to raise the subject. I rehearsed a few lines in my mind as I put the key in the lock, but it didn’t matter. The room was empty.
It was a standard-sized unit with a king bed and balcony facing south and offering a partial view of the Gulf. The bed was made. There was no luggage, and no clothes hung in the closet. Instinctively, I reached for the minibar, delighted to find it unlocked. I poured a miniature bottle of Jack into a glass I found in the bathroom after removing its paper lid.
After about 10 minutes, there was a knock on the door. Nervously I walked over and peeked out of the keyhole. Seeing nothing, I nevertheless opened the door into an empty corridor. It took me another moment to realize that the sound had not come from the entranceway, but from the connecting door to an adjoining room. Fumbling with the bolt lock, I finally opened it, and there was Susan Miller.
I’d been afraid to study her features too intently when she’d accompanied her husband in-studio. And the light here was much better than it had been at Delrios. But now I could see her clearly, and she was no less attractive to me than she had once been while wearing a suede skirt and cowboy boots at Shooter’s. She stood before me wearing a white, tight blouse and an equally snug khaki skirt and matching pumps. We were two feet apart and I suddenly felt those green eyes seeing right through me. Envy was back.
Then she turned her back to me and walked a step or two into her room, which I interpreted as an invitation to follow. Hers was a one-bedroom suite better angled toward the water.
“Thirsty?” she asked.
She picked up a glass of white wine from a tabletop and motioned me toward the minibar. I helped myself to another mini Jack. We were in a small parlor which had a couch and love seat, and open French doors leading to a bedroom where I could see a king-size bed. As in my room, the bed hadn’t been touched and I saw no luggage. I sat down on the sofa and noticed that the TV was tuned to a cable news station with the sound down low. I saw some B-roll footage of Bob Tobias and Margaret Haskel and a couple of talking heads who were having it out. I turned to Susan. Small talk was never my strong suit. But there was an obvious question burning inside me.
“Does your husband know you are here?”
“Bob knows we are acquainted.”
That was a very interesting but incomplete response. Part of me was disappointed that he was in the loop, but an even more prominent part of me didn’t give a shit. That same part had always felt that it was inevitable that we’d cross paths again one day, no matter who she’d married, and was just damn happy to be here. I wondered how she’d explained me to him. Did she tell him that we’d been summer fuck buddies years ago? Or that we’d simply worked together? Women must have a language for this sort of thing, but I was clueless as to what it was. Anyway, Susan seemed more interested in politics than the past.
“Bob’s not angry with you so much as he is disappointed, Stan.”
I said nothing. It sounded like a guilt trip.
“He thought he had you figured out. He told me the night before our studio interview that he thought you were different than the rest of those guys. Since then you’ve proved him wrong. He never took you for a zealot.”
In our first reunion, it had been all Red State/Blue State analysis. But this time, Susan was making it personal. I bit my tongue and felt for the exterior of the breast pocket of my sport coat, seeking the assurance that the document was still in its place.
She was thinly smiling now, sitting opposite me on the sofa, and not exactly at the other end. She was leaning forward, clutching her drink, and staring right at me with those eyes.
“It was actually Bob’s idea that I come to your studio that day.”
I would spend a long time afterwards trying to unravel his motivation. How much did he know? I wanted to ask but she kept talking and I kept listening.
“You ought to be proud of what you’ve accomplished, Stan.”
“And you as well.”
“I just never took you for a Tea Party guy.”
“So you told me at Delrios.”
She was so close to me that once again, I was aware of her scent. It was the same as I’d remembered, sweet and clean and natural, and it was all I could do not to reach out and touch her. The situation was surreal. Here I was sitting in a beachfront hotel room with a woman for whom I’d pined for more than two decades. In the intervening time, I’d built a career for myself largely based on advice she’d given to me. And now, she was married to a presidential frontrunner.
It was enough to make me quote Don King’s Only in America. Instead I raised a glass and invoked another name.
“To Willy Blake and American exceptionalism.”
She reciprocated with that same trepidatious smile and continued on.
“Look, Stan. About the religion issue. Bob’s Florida detractors have been calling him an atheist for years. He shouldn’t be harmed politically just for understanding the Constitution better than his opponents. The easy thing would be for him to just spout out the same bullshit the others do, whether he meant it or not. But instead he’s remained intellectually honest.”
Damn she was good. No wonder she’d been a superstar lobbyist. But I spoke up.
“You didn’t need to run the risk of meeting me here or at Delrios just to tell me that.”
Susan sipped her wine before speaking.
“Perception matters more than reality in the political world, and if you persist with rumor and innuendo, you’re going to do greater harm than you could ever have imagined.”
I said nothing.
“He’s a good man, Stan, and I’m here to ask you to focus on something else. Call him a socialist. Crap all over his cancellation of the high-speed rail. Say he’s a philanderer, I don’t care. Do all those things that guys like you do. But the one thing I’m asking you not to do is challenge his faith. The country can handle the rest, but that will kill him, strange as it sounds.”
The part about “doing all those things that guys like you do” was a kick in the nuts. She was right, of course. But I didn’t like hearing it. That was something Debbie would say. Christ, they both saw me in the same light.
So I drained my Jack mini. Then I said something that seemed to suck the oxygen out of the room.
“I’m thinking there is more to all this than some esoteric debate about the Establishment Clause.”
Her expression changed, and her dismissiveness was suddenly replaced with a clenched palate that told me I’d struck a nerve. Those green eyes drilled down on me with an intensity that made me nervous, and I scratched my chest because I wanted to confirm again that I held the goods.
“You hinted at that on the phone,” she said. “Cut the crap, Stan. What is it that you think you’ve got?”
“Well, I don’t really give a shit about whether your husband repeats some senseless so
und byte about Judeo-Christian roots,” I began, temporarily stepping out of Stan Powers’ persona. “But if someone has made an intellectual investment in a belief system that is beyond fantastical—some might even say crazy—that would seem to reflect on their fitness for office, no?”
Susan did not immediately respond. But her body language told me that this was not the same confident, political gunslinger who’d sat across from me in Delrios. Instead I was increasingly convinced that the document inside my pocket was legitimate and that she knew her husband could never sustain its publication. America might have elected its first Catholic president and its first black president, but the election of a Scientologist was 95 million years away—coincidentally the same amount of time that the universe has existed according to L. Ron Hubbard. While Americans were willing to suspend disbelief when it came to their own faith or even other, conventional faiths, I could see no evidence that they were ready to entertain the precepts of Scientology. On the flight home from LA, I’d immersed myself in Janet Reitman’s Inside Scientology, which pieced together lots of stuff I’d heard over the years but never fully understood. I’m not sure I understand now. But the basic tenets of Scientology—in which humans are believed to be descended from an ancient alien race ruled over by a guy named Xenu—make a virgin birth and resurrection seem staid.
According to Hubbard, we should all forget Adam and Eve because the real story of life on Earth began 95,000,000 years ago when Xenu, the leader of the Galactic Confederation, had been forced to solve an overpopulation problem by mass implanting. He had his hands full with opponents, so he put them inside volcanoes on the prison planet of Teegeeack—what we now call Earth—and wiped them out with hydrogen bombs leaving only the thetans, or souls, of his captives behind. These thetans were badasses. When millions of years later life began again on Teegeeack, the thetans attached themselves to human bodies. Scientologists believe they are the root cause of human problems, and that the only way a man can be saved is by freeing himself from the implanted thetans.
Bob Tobias needed the support of blue collar, Reagan Democrats in places like Ohio and Western Pennsylvania to defeat Margaret Haskel. And there was no way these folks were ready for that kind of culture shock. I’m not sure that people who live in glass houses and believe in things like the parting of the Red Sea or turning water into wine should necessarily throw stones, but still. This would be the death knell for Tobias’ presidential hopes if word circulated to Duluth and Portsmouth.
Instead of addressing what I’d said, Susan’s demeanor changed. The self-assured political wife disappeared and she seemed more like the girl I’d known years ago. And suddenly, she was anxious to fill in a few blanks.
“You know, I thought of you when I went back to FSU. I knew you’d left Shooter’s because I called after you were already gone. They told me you’d gone to be a DJ and I was thrilled.”
She was speaking more softly now, and looking straight into my eyes.
“I knew you’d make it, I just never though that politics was your thing.”
I toyed with telling her the story of the format change from classic rock to talk, but decided not to interrupt her. This was the most forthcoming she’d ever been with me and I’d waited a long time for these doors to be unlocked.
“I lost track of you after a while. Then I found out about your success in Pittsburgh when I Googled your name a few years ago and found a mention in the News-Press. Only then did I understand that you were working under a shortened name.”
“It’s a rock thing,” I mumbled.
“Then I lost you again. I had no idea that you were doing talk as Stan Powers until the rise of the Tea Party when I saw you on TV. I’d actually heard about Stan Powers long before I realized he was you. All the politicos in Florida are familiar with Morning Power. You’ve really come a long way, Stan.”
“So what happened?”
“You mean back then?”
“Yeah.”
“I had some growing up to do. It really wasn’t about you. I don’t regret a minute of those nights at Shooter’s, but I am sorry for how I handled it at the end. You were a good guy. You were owed better than that.”
For years I had felt certain that she didn’t even remember, that the abrupt ending of our brief relationship had been something inconsequential for her.
“My one consolation is that I gave you the career advice. I just never thought you’d put your talents to work like this. Someday you’ll have to tell me how you went from making the pistol fire to picking presidents.”
The sudden, jarring ringing of her cell phone interrupted the discussion. She looked down, and the nervous expression on her face told me that I should let her handle this in private. Tobias? Maybe he wanted to know what was taking so long. Or what I knew. A media person? I wasn’t sure. But I walked back into my room without saying a word, and quietly closed the door. I sat on the one club chair and looked out at the Gulf, toward Sand Key in the distance. In my mind’s eye, I was back on Rt. 41, inside Shooter’s, pouring drafts and playing something like Pure Prairie League’s “Amie” while trying to track the movements of a younger, smoking hot Susan Miller. So lost in my thoughts was I that I didn’t hear the door opening and the footsteps behind me.
“Is it cold enough in here for you, Stan?”
Susan was behind me, buck naked, and apparently prepared to negotiate my silence.
CHAPTER 15
You’d think I’d have been elated to settle that decades-old score with the still gorgeous Susan Miller at the Clearwater Hilton. Actually, I was miserable in the weeks that followed. First, I’d betrayed Debbie. It was one thing to mind-fuck an old flame. It was quite another to actually do it. No, Debbie and I weren’t married, but she deserved better from me than that. She was smart. She was sexy. She had a great career. She came from a nice family. And as far as I knew, she’d never betrayed the trust I’d placed in her. I was proud to walk into any room with her and was always aware of the roving eyes of the many guys who’d immediately cast their gaze upon her. She wasn’t deficient in any demonstrable way. I was. I’d been walking around with a 20-plus-year hard-on that wasn’t worth it. Never is. And I’d allowed that and my obsessive desire to get syndicated to let me take her for granted and discount her advice, which I knew to be valid. Because even though Debbie wasn’t in the loop about most of my day-to-day decisions, everything she had warned me about was coming true.
She had long been telling me that I would not be able to maintain the Sybil-like existence between real life and radio.
“I don’t get it, Stan. You’re plenty engaging in real life. Why not let your audience see the real you?”
“Because this audience has no time for a slacker from Ft. Myers who likes to blow a few bones and thinks most politicians are full of shit, especially those who live on the fringe.”
“Great. That makes you like everyone else.”
“Everyone except those who listen to talk radio. The ‘everyone else’ you describe is too busy earning a living, raising their kids, and watching over their elderly parents to sit, fixated, listening to my brand of communication. You don’t fucking get it. I work as the caretaker at a clubhouse for conservatives. These are people who once had no place else to go and now have found a home. I might as well try peddling vegan burgers at a Mickey D’s. It won’t sell.”
We’d go round and round like that. Debbie’s perspective was always the exact opposite of whatever Phil Dean recommended and I was convinced hers was a professional death sentence. But now, with the nomination battles over and the summer slogging on, and the spotlight turned on me full bore, my misery escalated.
And the conventions were coming. The Democrats would have their Mardi Gras in New Orleans and the Republicans would follow the next week in Tampa. That left me with little time to sort out a lot of things. For starters, I’d logged a call to Jules to ask him to get the suits at MML&J off my back. The disciplinary action was still outstanding, and if I was
selling my soul for the sake of ratings, I wanted resolution. Despite their pleasure with my defense of the Ten Commandments on Real Time, not to mention my takedown of the wife swapper in the GOP field, they still hadn’t taken my reprimand out of their file. It was a total passive-aggressive thing that only made me distrust them more. It would not have surprised me to learn that Rod Chinkles had impressed upon his father the need for leverage to keep me ideologically in line until the election was over. After I waited two days, Jules finally called.
“I need you to come to New York in two days,” he said.
It was a Wednesday morning and I’d stayed too long at Delrios with Clay and Carl the night before. I tried desperately to clear the cobwebs from my head as he spoke. I knew immediately that this was important. I’d never even seen the inside of his office. Still, with all that was on my plate, I hesitated at the idea of making a trip just to get him to log a call.
“Jules, I really just need you to call MML&J about the complaint. I don’t think it warrants a trip to New York City,” I said.
“Stan, put that out of your head. You’re the hottest commodity in AM radio right now. You think those guys are going to fuck with you for saying fuck? Stop beating yourself up. The good book they care most about is the ledger! I need you up here in two days. We can talk about it then.”
“Can’t we do whatever you need to do by conference call?”
“Stan, are you fucking kidding me? It’s all happening. Chuck Schwartz will be in my office on Friday afternoon at 2 p.m. to meet you. Fly up here on Friday after you get off the air, or better yet, take the day off, you’ve earned it. Schwartz wants to eyeball you before we do a deal.”
Chuck Schwartz was a self-made guy who’d started with one station back in the days before syndication kicked in and the conglomerates gobbled up everything. He’d built a radio network one station at a time and was now the president of one of the three biggest radio syndicators in the country. There were more, but only three that mattered. And he was among the most influential in the entire talk business. He had a stable that included some of the best-known names, all of whom (of course) were very conservative and likely Phil protegés. Jules went on to say that Schwartz was deep with talent in all day-parts except mornings. That was by design. Radio stations across the nation tend to offer local news and traffic in the morning and then rely upon syndicated talent from mid-morning until afternoon drive. This was partly because, as with WRGT, the local advertisers who want that hometown product during morning drive are their bread and butter. Which has always made syndicating any morning program a challenge—but that seemed about to change.
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