Lunar Descent

by Allen Steele

  “There were about twenty students in front of the president’s office,” Drinkwater recalls. “This was right after the Duck River nuke outside Manchester had its near-meltdown, and these guys were protesting Vandy’s investment in Southern Nuclear Utilities, the plant’s owner. They were actually being pretty peaceful about it—carrying placards, chanting slogans, that sort of thing—but there were about a hundred or so frat boys standing around them. Throwing beer cans at ’em, yelling obscenities, making rude gestures at the girls. I was just standing there—watching, not participating either way—when all of a sudden the frat animals charged the demonstrators and began to beat the holy crap out of them. And because I just happened to be there, a couple of them decided to jump me, too.”

  Drinkwater laughs. “So there I am, with one of these neanderthals having me in a full nelson and the other tenderizing my stomach with his fists, and I look up to see [former Vanderbilt University President] Gilbert Gallagher standing in his office window, watching the whole thing and laughing his ass off. And right then I kind of decided it was time for a career change.”

  The next day, Drinkwater went to Vandy’s student-operated campus radio station, WRVU-FM, and applied for an unpaid position as an announcer. As luck would have it, the station’s general manager at the time was Kate Humphrey, who would later become the program director of WJBR-FM in Boston (and one of Drinkwater’s many bosses in his career).

  “Harry made no attempt to hide what he wanted to do on the air,” Humphrey says. “He wanted a soapbox for his views. But he knew his music, and I was angry about the breakup of the demonstration myself, so once we got him his license and he had been trained, we put him right on the air. The only ground rules I gave him were to say nothing which would break FCC rules or cause the university to shut us down.”

  As he would many more time in the future, Drinkwater ignored those ground rules. At almost every stop-set, Harry Drinkwater railed against Gallagher, the university’s board of directors, its regents and trustees, the frat system to which a majority of the underclassmen belonged, and anyone else whose stance rankled him. More than once, Vandy’s administration attempted to shut down WRVU, only to be stopped either by faculty members or liberal trustees who—despite the fact that they themselves were often categorically attacked by Drinkwater—believed in the student DJ’s right to express his opinions.

  Although Drinkwater was once attacked in WRVU’s studio by a gang of irate fraternity members, he also became a celebrity, both on and off campus. His play-list was his own selection; his choice of music included an eclectic mix of the best oldies as well as the prime cuts of cutting-edge new groups. In comparison to the bland, homogenized play-lists of Nashville’s commercial rock stations, Drinkwater’s alternative-AOR show was a welcome change. At the height of his career at WRVU, Drinkwater was easily one of the most popular radio announcers in Music City—no small feat for a college jock in a major radio market.

  Nonetheless, it was a short career, lasting less than ten months. The FCC suspended the station’s license (after Drinkwater called Gallagher “a Nazi motherfucker” on the air) and the former law student was expelled, for bad grades as well as bad attitude. But by then an article on Drinkwater had already appeared in CMJ, attracting the attention of Jules Fontana, the general manager of WXKQ-FM in Atlanta.

  “We were at the dead rock-bottom of the Arbitron and Birch books,” Fontana recalls. “We had just lost our morning-drive person, and the owner was threatening to fire everyone and switch our format to country. I sorta knew it was a risk to hire Drinkwater, but I figured, ‘Hey, what have I got to lose?’”

  Within two months of his expulsion from Vanderbilt, Harry Drinkwater became the new morning announcer at WXKQ. At six A.M. on December 1, 2003, Atlanta was rudely shaken out of bed by the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Nobody Weird Like Me,” followed by a tirade against Santa Claus as being a wholly-owned subsidiary of Coca-Cola. And this was only the beginning.

  “God, did I have fun in Atlanta!” Drinkwater cackles. “They’re still talking about me there.…” Considering some of his exploits, that’s not an idle boast. In his role as an activist-DJ, Drinkwater’s favorite gag was to call various Atlanta public officials—the mayor, the chairman of the city council, the chief of police, the superintendent of public works, and so on—at their homes at the earliest possible hour and ask them blunt on-air questions about their jobs. He took a remote-broadcast team to the executive offices of the McGuinness Corporation (the Atlanta-based owner of his old foe, Southern Nuclear Utilities) and camped out in the reception area of CEO Michael Edgerton’s office for twelve hours, giving half-hour updates to his audience about the upcoming unscheduled interview, until McGuinness’ security staff finally lost patience and threw them out of the building.

  He delivered coffee and doughnuts to skyscraper construction crews and did a remote broadcast from the Atlanta sewer system. His guest-shows were also memorable: He asked the sexagenarian former film star Warren Beatty if he was “getting any good ass lately” (“Sure, with your sister” was Beatty’s playful response), discussed comic books with Nobel laureate Harlan Ellison, told Ku Klux Klan leader Newt Cahill to “go suck on an exhaust pipe,” and allegedly had sex with Gina LaMotta in the record library during a long station break.

  During his nine-year tenure, WXKQ steadily rose in ratings and on-the-street listenership. By 2007, it had become the top station in Atlanta, and Harry Drinkwater had become a household name in the Deep South. Yet Drinkwater had simultaneously become a curse to the station’s management and ownership. “There’s an unwritten code in radio,” Jules Fontana explains, “and that is, ‘Never piss off your advertisers.’ Harry knew that code, and he did his best to break it every chance he got.”

  Drinkwater didn’t spare any company, local or national, that bought air-time on WXKQ. Car dealerships, fast-food chains, soft-drink makers (including the Atlanta-based Coca-Cola), the manufacturers of jeans and pimple cream and condoms, and the U.S. Army—all caught Drinkwater’s ire for real or imagined offenses. Until, one day, the ad agencies which represented all these clients collectively went to WXKQ’s management and issued a simple ultimatum: “He goes, or we go.” Guess who went?

  “Well, I was fed up with Atlanta anyway,” Drinkwater says unconvincingly.

  He was quickly snapped up by WJBR in Boston, hired by his old college friend, Kate Humphrey, over the misgivings of the station’s owners. Since WJBR’s evening format did not allow for on-air interviews, Humphrey thought it was safe to put Drink-water in the afternoon-drive slot. “I told Harry that anything he said was okay, as long as it didn’t concern our advertisers,” she says. “He kept his promise … but I forgot to mention sports.”

  Within a few weeks of coming on board with WJBR, Harry Drinkwater was regularly attacking a hallowed Boston institution, the Red Sox baseball team, which was currently experiencing one of its worst all-time losing streaks. It’s okay for a native Bostonian to dump on the Red Sox, but not for a newly arrived Southerner. After three bomb-threats and the torching of Humphrey’s car, Harry Drinkwater was out on the street again.

  Harry returned below the Mason-Dixon line, and over the next decade gradually began to work his way through the ranks of FM-rock radio stations. On the strength of his résumé, he was hired by WBNT in Louisville, WCCS in Macon, WDPW in Charlotte, WEUP in Memphis, WNEP in Jackson, WOQQ and WRLT in Bowling Green, and WSST in Shelbyville. In recent years, he has taken on a number of pseudonyms—Marvin Gardens in Memphis, Ben Dover in Jackson, I.P. Freely in Bowling Green. At all these stations, his style has remained consistent. And he has been fired from them all, always for opening his mouth. His average tenure has been twelve months, although in Charlotte he lasted three weeks, and in Memphis he lasted one day (he made fun of the local Elvis Presley tourist industry).

  At each station, he played music which fit the appropriate formats, kept the FCC-required logbooks in perfect order, showed up on time for his air-
shifts and never missed station meetings, never brought booze or drugs into the studio or invited groupies into the station. He has rarely even been known to argue directly with management or other staff members (“I just quietly disagree,” he says with a chuckle). Almost everyone who was interviewed for the article has described Harry Drinkwater, in terms of his off-the-air behavior, as “polite” or “friendly” or “gentlemanly.”

  “But I read the papers,” Harry admits, “and I keep my ear to the ground. I know what people in the community are saying at the lunch counters and the mass-transit stations. They want a voice. They need a voice, and not one that’s going to be silenced just because the owner of the local Pizza Trough gets pissed off. As a lawyer, I would have been mediocre …”

  He pauses and waves his hand around the air-studio of WBTV-FM, a small-market radio station in Cedar Key, Florida, where he is the current overnight jock (as Sugar Ray Monsoon). “But as a DJ,” he continues, “I can reach the ears of many more people than I could make speeches to in some dead courtroom. I can keep up the good fight. Sure, it always cost me, but I can change some minds.…”

  The Homeboys CD which was been playing in the CD rack begins to fade. Harry Drinkwater quickly excuses himself, swivels back to the console, clears his throat, and switches on his mike. The management at his current post has already become weary of his monologues about the hardships of the local shrimp-fishing industry; they may have him canned by the time this article sees print.

  Where will Harry Drinkwater go next? He’s beginning to use up all his medium-market stations in the South; he’s persona non grata throughout major-league Dixie radio. Yet it’s difficult to ignore a copy of the current issue of the R&R which lies open on the counter next to a stack of CD’s. It’s turned to the classifieds page in the back; a display ad, with a photo of the Moon, has been circled with red ink from Harry’s logbook pen.…

  13. Radio Free Luna

  Long before Harry Drinkwater said No—absolutely, positively, without exception no—Willard DeWitt knew that he was looking upon the face of a soulmate: a person who had hardwired reality his way.

  While DeWitt—that is, Jeremy Schneider, hopeful media broker and entrepreneur—recited his spiel about establishing Moondog McCloud as the host of a new syndicated alternative-AOR radio program called MoonTunes, he watched Drinkwater carefully. Moondog McCloud’s hands prowled restlessly across the mixing board, potting up one CD deck to segue in a new Flaming Carrots number while potting down “Lost in the Supermarket” by the Clash, shoving a PSA tape (Gina LaMotta on safe-sex habits) into the cart machine, then abruptly changing his mind and hastily replacing it with another PSA (Albert Crenshaw on watching your cholesterol); now nervously adjusting the big Electrovoice mike dangling in front of his face, then hunting through the box of CDs at his feet, apparently searching for something to match the Flaming Carrots, even though there was a stack of unused albums by everyone from the Who to the Yummy Nummins to Dagwood Bumstead right next to his elbow. All the while saying no … no … no … as if it were a mantra.

  Even as DeWitt talked, keeping on with the now-useless prattle about estimated audience penetration and possible Arbitron ratings escalation, he let his own eyes roam around the studio. LDSM had been established in a vacant office in Subcomp A, almost directly adjacent to the mess hall. The smallest available office, it was in fact little larger than a walk-in closest. The narrow room barely had enough space to contain a tiny wraparound console, a shelf of CD’s and tapes, a single chair, the transmitter rack behind the console, and the ceaselessly buzzing Associated Press line-printer. Scrolled paper was heaped on the floor around and behind the chair, with pertinent scraps of news piled high on the desktop in front of the six-channel soundboard, burying the FCC-required logbooks. The mooncrete walls were lined with sheets of pitted foam-rubber which DeWitt recognized as having come from the insides of cargo canisters: crude but effective acoustic baffles. On top of the foam were stapled promotional posters of a dozen throwaway one-album rock bands—Area 18, Veronica and the Bar Sluts, Cleveland, Wha???, Bathtub Slime, the Dinks—some of whom were never played on the station.

  Drinkwater was heavyset, with the build of a welterweight boxer past his prime. He had a mop of curly black hair and a greasy beard just beginning to turn gray at the jawline, framing the expressive mouth of a professional talker. His eyes, though, were what captured DeWitt’s attention the moment he walked into the studio. Drinkwater had the hooded eyes of a perpetually angry young man who was not going quietly into middle age. He was, Dewitt decided, a person much like himself. A rebel. Yet while DeWitt was exercising his own anger at the system by covertly robbing it blind, Harry Drinkwater was tilting at windmills. Maybe he had destroyed a few windmills in his time, too … but there were a lot of windmills, and some of them had awfully big vanes.

  “Be quiet a minute,” Drinkwater said. “I’ve gotta make an ID.” He switched on the mike, suddenly silencing the thud-and-blunder of the Flaming Carrots on the monitor speakers, and waited a few moments until the song began to fade out. “Yesirree bob!” he abruptly chortled as he potted up the mike. “The Flaming Carrots here on LDSM, the moon rock sound of the high frontier! We got some moldy goldy oldies by the Talking Heads and R.E.M. comin’ up in just a few seconds, right after this important, I mean urgent, public service announcement!”

  He stabbed the PLAY button on the cart machine, potted down the mike and switched it off, then turned down the volume on the PSA tape. “Christ almighty,” he grumbled as he shrugged off the headphones, “even if they won’t send me any new CD’s, you’d think the damn company would at least ship up some new PSA’s. Getting sick of hearing this cholesterol shit over and over.” He waited a half-minute until the PSA had stopped, then cleanly segued in R.E.M.’s “Stand.”

  As McCloud turned to grab a Talking Heads CD out of the stack on his desk, he added, “That’s some interesting idea you have about syndicating my show, Jeremy, but I’m afraid I’m not real keen on being a big-time jock. I’m just some guy who likes doing this on a small-scale level, if you know what I mean.”

  “Uh-huh,” DeWitt replied. He had already gotten the message. Yet, instinctively, he knew that it wasn’t for the reasons that Harry Drinkwater had cited. Not that DeWitt had ever seriously intended to market Moondog McCloud as a syndicated radio announcer; Drinkwater’s cooperation had only been necessary to add credibility to the scam he had been perpetrating.

  The idea was complex, but it had begun with a fairly simple observation. The paychecks issued every two weeks to Descartes Station personnel were direct-deposited into banks of their choice on Earth. But Skycorp also had a group-investment program in place; its employees were offered the opportunity to have money taken from their checks, before they were deposited, and put into stock investments handled by Skycorp’s primary broker, the multinational New York firm of Empire Securities.

  At least half of Descartes Station’s moondogs took advantage of the deal, in hopes of increasing their income by playing the stock market. Yet, DeWitt had noted, none of them paid the slightest bit of attention to exactly what their money was doing in the market. Empire Securities was investing their cash in everything from maglev-train projects in Germany to housing projects in Chicago to a chain of pool halls in London, buying and selling like maniacs on half-a-dozen exchanges worldwide. This was the way the stock market usually worked; no surprise there.

  DeWitt had studied the last six-month prospectus from Empire and had noticed these things; he had also noticed that the moondogs rarely glanced at their stock reports. More than half of the time, the prospectus each one received by fax went straight into the recycling bins. The rest of the time, they glanced at the reports in the rec room or in the mess hall, grunted without understanding the material, and tossed them into an unread pile of other reports in their niches. They didn’t care where the money was invested, as long as the balance sheets showed a positive result, even if it was measured only by pennies.<
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  All great scams begin with a simple notion. Willard’s began with a deceptively easy question: How can I get them to invest their money in something which belongs to me? Which led to the next question: What do I have which they will want to buy? Just by listening to the radio, he found the answer.

  First, he would get McCloud hooked on the idea of becoming a syndicated DJ, establishing him as the on-air talent for Radio Free Luna, billed as the “world’s first rock show from outer space.” Then DeWitt would establish Radio Free Luna as the first product of MoonTunes Ltd., a private commercial radio syndicate. On the surface, MoonTunes would be offering Radio Free Luna to radio stations back on Earth. This was calculated to stir up some excitement among the moondogs at the base, once the news was deliberately leaked. One of their own was about to make the big time. Hometown boy makes good and all that stuff.

  Once the excitement had built to a fever pitch, Jeremy Schneider would make his surprise announcement: Stock in MoonTunes Ltd. would be offered to prospective investors among the crew. In fact, they could purchase shares from a small yet established New York brokerage called Gamble, Hutton & Schwartzchilde, which was handling transactions for MoonTunes. And as it happened, Gamble, Hutton & Schwartzchilde was an associate brokerage of Empire Securities. Therefore, all the moondogs had to do was instruct Empire to invest part of their investment capital with Gamble, Hutton & Schwartzchilde; this was as simple as touching a couple of keys on the terminals in their niches when the biweekly pay notices were faxed by the company.

  All it took was a certain amount of hubris and sweet-talking by Jeremy Schneider. He had little doubt that he could convince people that MoonTunes was a viable investment. Moondog McCloud was beloved by the station’s crew; if they were sure that their own DJ would be a big hit with the folks back home, the Descartes Station investors were certain not only to get their money back, but also to turn a considerable profit on the deal. And since they needed only to invest a fraction of their hard-earned money from each pay period—DeWitt had learned how deceptively small “five percent” could sound—no one would feel that their stake in this venture put them at great risk.