Wizard of the Wind

by Don Keith

  "No, Jimmy. Don't say anything else. Not here."

  "Okay, maybe the end of next week we can hook up somewhere. Or the weekend."

  She smiled and it, too, was a smile he had never seen on her wonderful face before. Her voice was just as chilling.

  "I'll have my people call your people."

  And then she was gone.

  Jimmy Gill did not have time to think about what had just happened. No time to figure out what the hell had come over her. He checked again to make certain no one had seen what happened. Then it was time for him to leave the island too, to go with Richard Graffeo to take the heads of five large radio groups to a private dinner at a swank Nob Hill restaurant. Later, with no time at all scheduled for sleep, there was a breakfast meeting with a Hollywood studio president who wanted to pitch them some kind of radical idea.

  After that they had a contract-signing brunch at the Mark Hopkins with the guys from the fulfillment house who would handle the 800-number calls from direct response advertising. That had been Detroit's idea. Fill any unsold commercial positions on the networks with record offers or for merchandise that listeners could order by phone, plus generous shipping and handling to assure profit.

  They already had the flight plan filed to swing the new company Lear jet through Omaha on the way back to Nashville. There, they would tour the fulfillment company’s warehouses and telephone bank facilities and nod and grin a lot. The deal had been done already. The visit was window dressing.

  First, though, there was a luncheon meeting with the team who would be putting the staff together for the all-news channel. And then they would head back to the convention exhibit floor to finish out the show, count the signed agreements which were stacking up in the booth office, and shake hands one more time with anybody and everybody who extended one their way.

  Detroit tried to take him aside a time or two during the convention, but there certainly was no time for that. It was big-picture time. But if Dee had teamed up with Cleo and tried to make her an ally in his war with Jimmy, then they had even more to talk about than he had thought. They had been friends too long to let personal shit interfere with business.

  "Handle whatever it is the best you can, Dee," Jimmy told him by way of dismissal, not even trying to hide his growing irritation.

  "Jimmy, we need to talk about..."

  "Soon as we get back to Nashville. I promise." Someone was waving at him from behind Detroit. Someone important. "Jerry? Jerry Partain? How are things at the number one station in Cleveland these days?”

  Jimmy was off again. Dee had no choice but to watch him dance away.

  There would be time for Dee and his technical stuff later in the week. Time to head off whatever ambush he and Cleo were cooking up. Time for sleep then, too. No time for trivia or rest now. There were deals to cut. Contracts to sign. A tall-tower of an empire to build.

  By noon Sunday, thankfully the last day of the show, James Gill had completely lost his voice for the first time in his career. He had to squeak his instructions to the convention crew. Had to squawk a “well-done” to Richard and his staff. Had to whisper a quick “I love you” to Cleo when he finally made her answer her mobile telephone some time Sunday night.

  Jimmy was calling her from a pay phone in the airport lobby. Cleo was in the bus somewhere on a stretch of highway south of Bakersfield, far enough out that her telephone was barely making it back to a tower. Jimmy wanted to tell her that he loved her and to be careful, but she did not seem to want to hear it. Instead, she quickly picked up right in the middle of their conversation they had left hanging backstage at the party on Alcatraz Island.

  "Jimmy, I told you this doesn't need to be a telephone conversation with you in some booth somewhere and with me in the middle of nowhere. Dee and I have been talking...” she started to say, but a burst of static almost washed her voice away.

  "Yeah, honey. Dee says hello. He flew out a few minutes ago, I think."

  "...the way things are going, we're just worried..."

  There was a loud, screeching voice on the page speaker directly over Jimmy's head calling urgently for someone and Jimmy could not hear the rest of what she was saying.

  "Yeah, things are going great, honey. We nailed down a lot of business out here. I’ll give you an update when I get back to Nashville. Look, I've got to run..."

  After he hung up, Jimmy could not remember exactly what they had said to each other during the hurried one-minute conversation. He only recalled returning the phone to its hook and running fast to catch up with a wildly gesturing Richard Graffeo. He sprinted through the cool drizzle for the airplane as it waited impatiently on the tarmac to whisk them out over the bay and off into the busy skies. They had to get to some other place they had to reach as quickly as possible.

  Once in the air, as the sleek plane hurtled into the darkness, Jimmy stopped, caught his breath, struggling to recall exactly what their destination was. His mind was as muddled and dense as the Alcatraz fog had been, hovering out there above the cold water of the bay.

  It was funny, he thought just before he sank into a fitful sleep.

  He could easily remember where he had just been.

  But he had no idea where he was going.

  Thirty-four

  Detroit Simmons knocked gently, tentatively, on Jimmy Gill’s office door. He came on in at his wave as Jimmy finished up a call.

  Jimmy had forgotten about their aborted talks at the trade show. He figured now that Detroit was only there to bring him some purchase that needed approval or to get his okay for someone he wanted to hire. At first, he thought about simply sending him on his way, telling him to please, if he would, put it all down on paper instead, do a memo, and he would look at it when he got a chance.

  Tomorrow. The next day maybe. Next week at the latest. Promise.

  Jesus! He certainly did not have time to humor the man.

  For some reason, though, Jimmy did not dismiss Dee as he usually did. Maybe he felt guilty about turning him away at the show. Or maybe, on some level, he knew now was the time to have the conversation with him he had been planning.

  Gill motioned Dee to a chair and finished up his call. Yet another chat with the head man for the new religious channel they were building for the satellite network. Just at that moment though, he could not quite remember what the bastard’s name was. He called him "buddy" as he dropped him from the line and said his sincere goodbyes. Jimmy had learned he could usually get away with such familiarity if he only used enough of his residual Southern accent to soften it.

  Jimmy realized then that it had been at least a month since he had spoken more than a few broken sentences to Detroit Simmons.

  "Lord, Dee! I'm damn sorry. It seems like I'm in the middle of a cyclone most of the time nowadays."

  "You’re going to wear yourself to a nub, Jimmy. Some of us are worried that you are just going to keel over one day. Heck, that would even be bad for business. There has been a lot going on lately and we've seen the way you're pushing yourself."

  "We've all been working hard. We can slow down soon, though. You'll see."

  "Maybe so. But you ought to take it easy now. Start having some fun. Let some of these hard-ass guys you’ve brought in handle more of this stuff for you so you can enjoy what you've been building."

  "Aw, it'll all slow down when we get these new radio channels launched...another month, it looks like, at the outside for the hard rock channel, another three or four months for Newsdial, and I’ve just found out that God's gift to radio is only about five months away from lift-off. Hey, how's your grandmaw and Lulu and them doing? I haven't talked with them in ages."

  "Everybody's fine, Jimmy. Fine."

  And just like that, Detroit started talking, laying out some of the things in a hurry that were on his mind. It sounded as if he was afraid it might spoil if he talked too slowly. Or as if he expected Jimmy would stop him mid-sentence, slap him with a sudden discharge, and send him on his way as was his custom
lately.

  But he didn’t. Jimmy sat there and listened to every word.

  The phone rang once, twice, a third time. Jimmy made no move to pick it up except for an involuntarily flinch. He uncharacteristically let the new voice mail system get it. Detroit plowed on. Told him of his concerns for Jimmy's health. His sanity. How he was afraid the alliance with the Georges was going to come back and bite like a pair of cornered rattlesnakes. How Cleo was just as worried about him for all the same reasons. And how she was afraid she was losing him, that he was going to be swept away by the tornado that his life had become.

  When Dee stopped for a breath, Jimmy fired right back at him and the give and take between them was wonderful, as clean and honest and unpretentious as their boyhood chats along the creek bank and in the sage fields behind WROG. There were no titles. No incorporation papers between them.

  Jimmy avoided discussing the Georges, though. He was still chewing over that piece of gristle.

  Several times, they laughed wildly with each other when they coincidentally recalled a common memory or realized they had reached some beautiful common ground that had been there between them all along, hidden by work, passion, or stubbornness. Anyone passing Jimmy's closed office door would have thought two lunatics had taken charge of Wizard Broadcasting. But they both recognized that it was that old familiar laugh of joy that always came with every discovery they had ever made together.

  Detroit had that same old look in his dark brown eyes. The look that he had when he first put together Jimmy’s junkyard bicycle or when he patched together a car sound system for the George twins or wired up some kind of thingamajig box with blinking lights and a wailing siren in the back room at WROG. Patching up the rift that had grown between him and Jimmy Gill was clearly his latest project.

  Along the way, they actually stood and hugged awkwardly and both ducked to wipe away a tear or two without the other one seeing. The phone rang another couple of times but neither of them seemed to hear it. The sun was well below the lip of Jimmy's office window, but time had stopped for them quite a few minutes before. The hour did not matter. Neither did the blinking red light on the telephone or the stacks of paperwork on the desk. They had more talking to do.

  Jimmy admitted to Dee that he had not listened to more than a few seconds of the programming on any of their stations in months. That he had no idea how the cable radio programming sounded coming out of the speakers in the dashboard of a car. That he had heard no radio at all in so long.

  And that he missed it. Oh, God, how he missed it.

  "Everything's sounding great, Jimmy. You know I won’t lie to you like some of them. You’ve hired some good folks who love radio and they are doing it right, just like you would if you had the time. The new black music channel is right on target and the hard rock format is going to go great. I just reworked the audio chain in the Louisville station a few weeks ago and it's sizzling...louder than anything else on the dial, but clean and pure as it can be. And it’s totally legal, too. Those station managers up there are doing some serious head scratching, trying to figure out how I’m doing it. I’ve got the circuitry at the patent office now. We can make some money on it someday, I think. And we did a transmitter upgrade in Birmingham and that thing is causing cancer in five states now! I’ll show you some tricks I came up with when you have time. We can do it at all the FMs for next to nothing. Just a few parts and some fine tuning. And wait’ll I tell you about..."

  His eyes sparkled as he talked, his face bright, back in his element, talking sorcery and radio magic. Jimmy tried to hold his smile, to share the mood, but there was too much he was not saying. He did not have the heart to tell Dee that the stations in Louisville and Birmingham were going to a broker to start shopping them around, looking for a buyer, within a week. And that several of the others would follow in a few months. Wizard Broadcasting had put offers on the table for two stations each in Los Angeles and Chicago. They simply had to spin the smaller market stations to raise the acquisition capital to go big time. And with the FCC's station limits, they had to make room for the AM stations they would be forced to accept to make the deals work. Not to mention the money they had to raise to help with the staggering investments for the satellite channels.

  The conversation eventually lagged, dead air hanging between them finally. Detroit dropped his head as if exhausted while Jimmy pretended to study a spreadsheet in front of him. He knew Detroit Simmons well enough to know that he was changing moods again, probably from light back to dark if he gauged correctly. That some kind of deep observation or question would soon follow. He steeled himself. After a long moment's silence, Detroit spoke again, quietly, the joy and fun and abandonment of the last half hour disappearing like a fading radio signal.

  "Look, I know a lot more than you think I do. I know you're about to cut those two markets loose from the chain, Jimmy. Birmingham and Louisville. It’s hard to keep something like that quiet. We’ve already had tire kickers through both of the facilities and I know they aren't insurance people, like you told everybody they were."

  "Dee, we’ve got to grow. And to grow, we’ve got..."

  "I know, Jimmy. I’m not as dumb a nigger as you sometimes think I am. Maybe I'm not the figurehead president of Wizard anymore, but what I want to know is why you don't sell those little AMs in Miami and New Orleans instead. They’re not making a dime and you know it. They never will. There’s absolutely nothing we can do to upgrade them. Louisville and Birmingham are both sounding great. People fly in from all over the country to listen and tape them and go back and try to duplicate what you're doing with them. And they are making money like crazy. Besides that, there are lots of bright, dedicated folks in those stations who will get shot when they change ownership. Always happens without fail. You know that. And there’s something else about Birmingham that may not be practical and measureable. We started this long, strange trip there together! I can't believe you're about to throw that away just to go big-time."

  Jimmy spun around in his chair so he would not have to see Dee’s face anymore, stood, and walked quickly to the office window. He could survey a hundred square miles of middle Tennessee from this vantage point at the top of the steel and marble bank tower. And since the trip to Miami and to the San Francisco convention, he had done quite a bit more of that between urgent phone calls and demanding memos. It helped him avoid hyperventilating. Or losing what tad of breakfast he might have grabbed that morning on the way to work.

  He liked to look down there. The broadcasting company that Detroit and he had built from a crazy idea would, sooner or later, touch practically every one of those people who scurried around on the streets and highways below. All the people who lived in the houses and apartments stretching away into the distance. The millions and millions more that were beyond his eyesight but well within the reach of the electromagnetic waves that he, James Gill, had caused to be created, and that his best friend, Detroit Simmons, had conspired to push out into the ozone.

  Jimmy smiled at his own thin, sallow reflection grinning back at him from the darkly tinted window. Sometimes, he still had the almost overpowering urge to jump up and down in front of this floor-to-ceiling pane of glass, waving and screaming at all the people who scurried around down there. Do whatever it took to make them look up at him. Make them notice him. Listen to him.

  "I couldn't sell those damn pip-squeak stations in Miami and New Orleans. Not even if I wanted to, Dee."

  Simmons waited for Jimmy to go on. By then, he had stood up himself, had leaned forward, braced against the desk, his stance begging for more information, ready for whatever the story might be. Even if it was what he was afraid it would be. He finally spoke to Jimmy’s back.

  "Okay, I'll bite. Why not?"

  Jimmy slowly, reluctantly, turned away from the towering, seductive view and looked at his only friend. He walked back to his desk and quietly began to talk. Slowly, completely, he spun for him the whole sordid story. Of the Georges and their “l
egitimate” business venture. Of Garcia down in Miami and his grungy counterpart in New Orleans. Of DeWayne's threat to spill the beans about the seed money if anything ever happened to get in the way of their grand scheme.

  The intercom on his desk blared twice while he spoke. He ignored it. The telephone pealed another couple of times but he made no move to answer it. Not even a flinch this time. Sammie knocked on the door a couple of times and called his name, finally pushed it open and gave him a mean look, but he yelled at her as politely as he could to please shut the door and leave them be.

  Finally, Jimmy told Detroit about DeWayne's threat against Cleo, and about the look in the twin’s eye when he told Jimmy to tell her to be careful on the road. Detroit's face fell even farther when he heard that.

  Then the story was finished. Detroit was quiet as he sank back into the office chair and tried to think logically about all Jimmy had told him, as if tracing a circuit on a schematic print-out.

  He suddenly sat up, pounded the desk in anger with his balled-up fist, stood and stalked back and forth across the length of the massive office, marched in circles for a while until the rage had subsided enough for him to be able to talk again. He flopped heavily back into the chair, slumped, and stared up at the high ceiling and the dangling chandelier over Jimmy’s desk.

  "Jimmy, you know I love you. As much as I would have loved a brother if I had been blessed with one. And you know that I really do appreciate all you've done for me." Jimmy held up his hand to try to stop him, to give him his share of the credit, but Detroit marched on. "I'd probably be welding wrought iron furniture together like my granddaddy or doing some dirty work in the mills down in Birmingham if it wasn’t for you. If you hadn’t been so pigheaded about everything all along the way. You had the vision. Not me. And my aunt would most certainly still be cleaning up for folks, being a maid like she had always done. Same thing for the rest of them, too. All the ones you've brought along on this wild little ride and have made the better for it. You fooled a lot of folks, Jimmy Gill. The ones who thought that all you were was a high school dropout, a midnight-to-six disk jockey, and a plain old white trash redneck to boot."